Pride in Place is a flagship government regeneration programme pledging to invest £20 million in 284 UK localities. Selected for having fewest jobs, lowest levels of income and least access to health services and social spaces, these are places impoverished by economic extraction and austerity.
Although publicised as having ‘community power’ at its heart, Pride in Place offers no way to bypass local government or give financial or decision-making control to communities. Draining fights are playing out in efforts to ensure existing power holders can’t commit money to projects with little or no benefit to local people. The risk is that the money will flow straight into business profits for developers and consultants rather than addressing the unmet needs and priorities of local people.
In taking this approach, the government is failing to engage with the scale and range of these communities’ needs. Economic policy of the last 40 years has resulted in high levels of delinquent landlordism, related to both homes and commercial buildings. The disappearance of public housing, public services and community spaces, and the new costs that arise from private business stepping in to meet these need for a financial return, have been equally devastating
Pride in Place risks pouring £20 million into each area while upholding the economic, social, democratic and political orthodoxies which caused their problems in the first place. Rather than regeneration benefitting the community, its long-term legacy may be further impoverishment and disillusionment.
Speaking out
As founders of Municipal Enquiry, a community development research and advocacy organisation, we research community development. We have found, for example, that the design of the £7.5 million Participatory City project in Barking and Dagenham, East London, was poorly conceived and overly top-down, and had zero input from local people or plan for a relevant material legacy for the community. Pride in Place could exemplify the same counter-productive and even extractive approach, neither addressing the underlying causes of poverty nor operating in a directly democratic way.
Significant disquiet about Pride in Place is already emerging. Many grassroots activists are unwilling to go on record, often because of the potential threat of funds being withdrawn. An exception is Shane Owen, Chief Officer of long-established grassroots community group Brighter Futures in Rhyl in Wales, one of Pride in Place’s 14 target areas.
Shane told us: ‘When it comes to Pride of Place, there’s friction between the local authority and the community. The council has seen this as easy money to fund what they want to do, whereas we want decision-making to be more community-led.’
Regeneration risks becoming a surface-level intervention within an extractive system
When Shane began asking local councillors how the residents he works with in Rhyl could get involved in Pride in Place and how decisions would be made, his questions were dodged and he was excluded from key decision-making forums. ‘What we were effectively hearing,’ Shane told us, ‘was “you’re just a community group – who are you to question us?”’
When Shane and other allied local groups obtained copies of key documents via Freedom of Information requests and didn’t like what they saw, they were forced to look at legal action: ‘That was when we issued our Notice of Intention for a Judicial Review. We also raised objections to what was happening with the Ministry of Housing Community and Local Government,’ Shane explained.
As a result of these and other actions, Shane reports that the situation started to improve – slightly. ‘Most recently’ he told us ‘we have put together our own set of demands’ including reform of the Neighbourhood Board, the oversight body that initially makes key decisions, and greater accountability and ‘democratic control’ over the £20 million. ‘We’ll keep applying what pressure we can,’ Shane said.
Participation without self-organisation
These Neighbourhood Boards are effectively governance bodies for these ten-year projects – ostensibly the spaces where residents make key decisions alongside businesses, local charities and political representatives. Many of the arguments and compromises playing out across Pride in Place areas are the result, our sources tell us, of more powerful institutional figures, charities and business groups, which usually have closer relationships with existing power-holders and gain access to key roles and decision-making processes.
While framed as community-led, these boards are ultimately state-designed arenas where pre-existing relations of power can be reproduced. In many areas, elected and unelected officials are now already in place and working within pre-defined and familiar ‘limits’ to ‘engage’ the community.
In contrast, more equitable approaches to community development prioritise community self-organisation: people coming together on their own terms, to identify their own priorities and build collective power independent of the state. Invited participation can coexist with self-organisation – but when energy is channelled into managed processes, the space for autonomous organising can shrink.
Beyond regeneration
Like earlier regeneration programmes, Pride in Place focuses heavily on visible improvements, like repairs or upgrades to public spaces, high streets and local amenities. This can overlook a more fundamental problem: who owns and controls the local economy, including the key social infrastructure vital to any local area.
Without addressing this question, regeneration risks becoming a surface-level intervention within an extractive system. Wealth can continue to flow out of communities through rents, supply chains, and corporate ownership, even as places are superficially ‘improved’.
More equitable approaches to community development centre community-driven alternatives to capitalist extractivism and privatisation. These include cooperative ownership, community land and asset control, localised economic circuits that retain wealth, democratic governance of resources and local community-led decision-making.
Many grassroots activists are unwilling to go on record because of the threat of funds being withdrawn
Largely absent, or marginalised, within state-led programmes like Pride in Place, these approaches drive community-led projects like Cwmni Bro, Wards Corner and Middleton Cooperating. Such projects are already working to secure collective empowerment and community-based self-determination beyond the limits of the state and the associated economic, social and democratic status quo. Being community-led is not an add-on, but the basis for effective self-organisation and long-term locally powered transformation.
Despite its language of empowerment, Pride in Place is embedded in a familiar model: state-led regeneration with limited ambitions for democratic local ownership and community-based decision-making. The programme offers improvements to place, without a transformation in relationships of wealth and power.
The question, then, is not how communities can fit into Pride in Place, but how might regeneration programmes like it be reshaped, renegotiated, or even resisted or transformed to support the deeper work of community self-organisation and self-determination.
Grasping the opportunity
Currently, no existing network connects the more equitable community development projects like that in Rhyl with other groups speaking out about Pride in Place across the country. So as well as offering a time-limited opportunity for groups to build solidarity around calls for changes to Pride in Place, there is an opportunity to build a contemporary network of like-minded community development practitioners committed to equity based approaches. Such a network could help broaden interest and involvement in this important but often under-appreciated form of grassroots political work.
‘Let the people of Rhyl lead!’ Shane Owen declares. ‘Let us co-create a town that not only looks better, but feels better, functions better, and belongs to its people.’
With £5.8 billion of local regeneration resources at stake, shifting investment from managed regeneration – which reproduces the dominant undemocratic and increasingly inequitable neoliberal model – towards greater support for community self-organisation, geared to the collective development of more democratic and locally grounded alternatives, is an opportunity that should not be missed.
What happens next with the Pride and Place programme will be a test of the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s much-vaunted commitment to devolving power and empowering communities. The future trajectory and implementation of this regeneration policy will impact the economic, social, democratic and political futures of hundreds of thousands of people and localities across Britain for years to come.
