What do we know about “place-based” working?

Everywhere I go at the moment people are talking about the importance of “place-based” working. Taking a place based approach means tailoring interventions to the unique needs and opportunities of specific areas. The goal is to address the challenges and leverage the strengths of each community effectively.

If this sounds sensible, how do we get there? By empowering and resourcing local leaders: those organisations with a clear mandate and incentive to work in a place-based way. This means local government, whose primary responsibility is the stewardship of places and providing for the people who live in them. It can also mean partnerships that are close to the problem and well placed to deliver on the ground.

Place-based working requires both big-picture thinking and localized action. Holistic strategic planning for place is not a statutory requirement, meaning that when resources are scarce it is sacrificed or outsourced. This is a huge lost opportunity that combined with the much-lambasted move towards small competitive funding pots creates a landscape of programmes and interventions that fail to be more than the sum of their parts and the particularly perverse outcome of funding being allocated but not able to be spent.

There are no silver bullets in urban policy, but there is a great deal of research and evidence about what works. Much of it points to the importance of empowering those closer to the problems to be solved to be involved in both setting and delivering agendas.

One of the most successful place-based interventions in the UK in recent years, the New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme, drove considerable positive change in 39 areas over ten years. The independent academic evaluation of the programme, while 14 years old, is rich in insight and should be essential reading for anyone aspiring to work in a place-based way today. The evaluation notes that a distinguishing characteristic of NDC was the autonomy given to the independent partnerships set up to deliver the programmes, which were then able to deliver “locally-specific strategies to meet the particular requirements of these neighbourhoods.”

This type of genuinely strategic, agenda-setting empowerment of local actors is unusual in the UK, which is an outlier when it comes to extent of central government’s involvement in local affairs. The UK remains one of the most centralised countries in the OECD, which many argue forms a structural barrier to reducing disparities within and between places. The UK’s approach to devolution has been marked by frequent shifts. Since 1965 the governance of most of England’s largest cities has been restructured at least three or four times.

Centrally led place-based initiatives have challenges to overcome. The final report summarising findings from a two-year Treasury Shared Outcome Fund programme, Partnerships for People and Place ****describes multiple well-intentioned organisations and individuals tripping over each other as they implement overlapping, uncoordinated interventions. It is not unusual in central government to be part of a team set up to address an issue, only to come across one or more other teams with the exact same mandate - often in the same department.

The solution is often the creation of an industry of meetings, papers, briefings and monitoring reports in the name of “joining up”. I genuinely believe in the importance of bureaucracy; it provides an essential check on the allocation of public resources and the value for money gained from them. However bureaucracies grow weak when their demands for oversight, reporting and monitoring suck up a disproportionate volume of public resources, leaving those responsible for delivery scrambling to patch together funding. Committed local actors will always find a way, but the never ending search for resources takes a toll.

Empowering places brings many benefits. When given the time and resources be to think through and articulate their priorities, local governments and partnerships can fit opportunities that arise into their agendas, rather than vice versa. Having a clear proposition for a place not only helps coordinate central government interventions, it is a baseline requirement for attracting private investment.

Trust in government has faltered in recent years, but people trust local government more than central, and local community groups more than both. Trust is built by fulfilling commitments, and those closest to delivery should be involved in agenda setting and follow-through.