© The Policy Press, 2000 • ISSN 0305 5736
Policy & Politics
Policy & vol
Politics
28 no
vol4 28
479–91
no 4
A new deal for the community? Public participation in
regeneration and local service delivery
Paul Foley and Steve Martin
English
In the UK regeneration strategies and patterns of local service provision have usually been imposed
from the top down. Most communities have had little influence over plans to revitalise their areas or
the design and delivery of services.The ‘New Labour’ government has emphasised its commitment to
involving local people in a wide range of policy decisions relating to employment, health, crime reduction,
education, local government services and regeneration. According to ministers an enhanced role for
local people will increase local accountability and improve service standards. Previous experience of
community-focused initiatives suggests however that there are significant obstacles to increasing
public participation. Moreover, the present government’s commitment to ‘bottom-up’ initiatives and
local experimentation may be at odds with its strong centralising instinct and continuing insistence
on ‘zero tolerance of failure’.
Français
En Royaume-Uni, les stratégies de régénération et les prestations locales de services sont habituellement
imposées depuis le sommet. La plupart des communautés ont très peu d’influence sur les plans de
revitalisation de leurs quartiers ou sur la planification des prestations de services locaux. Le Nouveau
gouvernement Travailliste a mis l’accent sur son engagement pour impliquer les personnes locales
dans une grande diversité de décisions à prendre concernant l’emploi, la santé, la réduction du crime,
l’éducation, les services du gouvernement local et la régénération. Selon les ministres, un rôle accru
des habitants augmentera les responsabilités locales et améliorera le niveau des prestations. Il faut
noter cependant que l’expérience passée d’initiatives orientées vers la communauté semble indiquer
qu’il existe des obstacles importants à l’augmentation de la participation publique. Qui plus est,
l’engagement actuel du gouvernement aux initiatives accordées à la base et à l’expérimentation locale
ne concorde pas avec son instinct très poussé de centralisation et à l’insistance incessante du «zéro
tolérance de l’échec».
Español
En el Reino Unido, la autoridad ha impuesto normalmente las estrategias de regeneración y los
modelos de suministro de los servicios locales. La mayoría de las comunidades han tenido poca
influencia sobre los planes para mejorar o diseñar sus areas o para suministrar los servicios locales.
El Nuevo gobierno Laborista ha recalcado su compromiso en incluir a la gente local en una amplia
gama de decisiones políticas relacionadas con el empleo, la salud, la reducción del crimen, la educación,
los servicios del gobierno local y la regeneración. Según los ministros, una mayor participación por
parte de la gente local aumentará la responsabilidad local y el mejoramiento de los servicios locales.
Sin embargo, experiencias anteriores relacionadas con las iniciativas centradas en la comunidad, sugieren
que hay serios obstáculos en aumentar la participación pública. Además, el actual compromiso del
gobierno para ponderar iniciativas y experimentación local puede chocar con su fuerte instinto
centralista y su continua insistencia en “no tolerar fracaso alguno”.
Key words: community involvement • regeneration • Best Value • participation
479 • Acceptance 16 May 2000
Final submission 05 April 2000
Paul Foley and Steve Martin: A new deal for the community?
Introduction
cal involvement in area-based regeneration initiatives. The projects were set up to empower
inner city communities suffering from multiple
deprivation to press for improved services and
to organise self-help schemes. Over time these
action-research projects increasingly challenged
assumptions about the causes of deprivation, arguing that poverty was inextricably linked to
deep-seated changes in the political economy of
inner city areas – in particular the large-scale
withdrawal of private capital associated with the
decline of manufacturing industries (CDP, 1977).
However, the CDPs had relatively little impact
on mainstream programmes and in 1978 the Inner Urban Areas Act established the Urban
Programme as the primary channel for central
government funds for future inner city regeneration schemes.
At first the Urban Programme seemed to offer
genuine support for community-based projects
(Haughton, 1998). However, unlike the CDPs, it
“remained firmly under the control of civil servants in Whitehall, the government ministers who
chaired the partnership committees, and town hall
officials” (Bailey et al, 1995: 45). Strategies were
formulated largely by local and central government with community invol vement being
restricted to what was often rather superficial
consultation about individual schemes. Moreover, successive Conservative gove rnments
reduced Urban Programme funding in real terms
and directed an increasing proportion of the
budget that remained towards economic and
property-based schemes and away from social
and community-based projects. The entire Urban Programme was eventually wound up in the
early 1990s (Pearce, 1993).
In the wake of continued decline in traditional manufacturing industries and the ever-present
threat of social unrest in the inner cities, urban
regeneration continued to be seen as a priority.
Indeed, it was turned into a key issue during the
1987 general election by the Conservatives and,
having been returned to power, the newly reelected Thatcher government produced the first
interdepartmental strategy for urban regeneration
(the Action for cities White Paper) in 1988. The
approach outlined in this document emphasised
a business-led agenda which paid scant regard
to community needs (Healey et al, 1992; Deakin
and Edwards, 1993). During the late 1980s, min-
The history of economic regeneration initiatives
and local service provision in the UK is littered
with ‘top-down’ initiatives. While ‘community
involvement’ has been important to some experimental programmes, mainstream policies have
been driven primarily by bureaucrats and, more
recently, business people. The rhetoric of the
‘New Labour’ government suggests that it wants
to create conditions in which communities have
a far stronger role in developing regeneration
strategies and monitoring local services in a wide
range of areas including employment, housing,
health, crime prevention and education. This
paper examines the prospects for this approach
in the light of previous community-based initiatives and the early results of two of the most
important pilot initiatives introduced by the
present government – the ‘New Deal for Communities’ pilot initiative and the ‘Best Value’
regime. It gives a brief overview of the history
of community involvement in regeneration initiatives over the last three decades. It then
examines the role that the ‘community’ is intended to play in New Deal for Communities and
Best Value. The paper suggests that there are a
number of potentially important policy and political pay-offs associated with increasing public
participation and clear signs that the present government is committed both in principle and
practice to giving communities greater influence
over policy making. It concludes however that
current policies will need to address a number
of important obstacles to community involvement highlighted by previous initiatives and find
ways of reconciling New Labour’s desire to give
local people greater influence with its increasing intolerance of variations in local service
standards.
Community (non)involvement
in urban regeneration
The last forty years have witnessed strong ebbs
and flows in the level of support from central
government for community-led initiatives. The
twelve Community Development Projects
(CDPs) established between 1969 and 1972, and
eventually wound up in the late 1970s, are still
regarded by many as the high water mark of lo-
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isters with a deep distrust of Labour-controlled
local authorities increasingly stressed the role of
public–private partnership in the Enterprise Zone
Experiment, the Urban Development Grant programme and the Urban Developm ent
Corporations (UDCs). Private sector involvement became a prerequisite for almost all
regeneration projects. The level of private sector investment ‘levered’ into schemes was
considered to be the key performance indicator,
and public funding was increasingly funnelled
through local appointed bodies (particularly the
newly created training and enterprise councils
and their Scottish counterparts – the Local Enterprise Companies). Regeneration schemes
focused on physical and economic outcomes –
the reclamation of derelict land, the provision of
new infrastructure and wealth creation. Social
deprivation would, it was claimed, be solved indirectly as the benefits of new economic activity
‘trickled down’ to the unskilled, low paid and
unemployed.
However, increasing concerns about the uneven distributional effects of these policies (see
for example House of Commons Employment
Select Committee, 1988) gradually led to a renewed concern with social exclusion. The second
and third generation UDCs gave more attention
to community-based schemes; some established
‘community forums’ to enable them to liaise with
local people, and even the London Docklands
Corporation began to devote some funding to
community-oriented projects. The City Challenge, Rural Challenge and Single Regeneration
Budget Challenge Funds launched in the early
and mid-1990s appeared to build upon this,
stressing the need for tripartite partnership between the public, private and community sectors.
However, the most important and controversial
feature of these challenge funds was the distribution of resources according to competitive
bidding processes rather than indices of socioecon omic depriva tion . This reflected the
increasing reliance on market-like and contractual mechanisms across a range of policy areas
(Boyne, 1998) and, not surprisingly, attracted
strong criticism from inner city areas that believed they were losing resources to relatively
prosperous rural areas and freestanding towns
(Stewart, 1994). Local authorities were reinstated as key players in local rege neration
programmes and, combined with the creation of
Government Offices in English regions, the SRB
represented a long overdue, though ultimately
not very successful, attempt to integrate the various funding regimes sponsored by different
Whitehall departments (Mawson and Spencer,
1997).
Some commentators (cf Barber, 1984; Smyth,
1997) believe that community involvement was
boosted by challenge approaches. City Challenge
and SRB schemes were on the whole less property-oriented and more ‘people’-oriented than
their immediate predecessors such as the Urban
Development and City Grant programmes. Unlike the UDCs, most of the areas which received
City Challenge funding were densely populated
and central government emphasised the need to
draw together the energies and enthusiasm of
local authorities, local communities, voluntary
organisations and the private sector (Mabbutt,
1993). As a result ‘community representatives’
sat alongside local councillors and business people on the boards of City Challenge and SRB
partnerships and there were attempts to inform
local people about the plans for their areas. This
trend was reinforced by the increasing importance of community economic development
within some of the EU’s structural fund programmes, particularly the URBAN initiative and
the Objective 1 programme on Merseyside (Geddes and Martin, 1997). There is however little
evidence that challenge programmes had any
discernible impact on the levels of alienation felt
by communities in the most deprived urban areas (Burton and O’Toole, 1993; Cochrane, 1993;
Colenutt, 1993; Mingione, 1993; Robson et al,
1994; Tilson et al, 1997; Hutchinson et al, 1999).
While the voluntary and community sectors were
equal partners in formal terms (numbers of seats
on partnership boards and so forth) they usually
lacked the resources and the power and influence enjoyed by businesses, local authorities and
other public agencies. The result was that they
often played little or no role in ‘setting the agenda’ and tended to be consulted at a relatively late
stage about a narrow range of options which had
already been formulated by other ‘partners’. As
Cameron and Davoudi (1998: 250) observe, often the community was therefore “given a mere
presence rather than a voice”. Moreover, the
mechanisms for consultation were usually fairly
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Paul Foley and Steve Martin: A new deal for the community?
crude (typically consisting of public meetings
and residents’ surveys) and the numbers of local
people who became actively involved were often small, with the same ‘representatives’ sitting
on a range of different ‘partnerships bodies’.
Crucially, as far the Treasury was concerned,
challenge initiatives remained firmly rooted in
the ‘more for less paradigm’. Its Challenge handbook therefore emphasises the benefits of
public-private partnership and the need to “improve the value for money gained from public
expenditure through greater efficiency and in
many cases increased private sector leverage
achieved by competition” but scarcely mentions
community involvement (HM Treasury, 1996).
Community concerns and issues of equity therefore continued to take second place to cost and
efficiency yardsticks (Malpass, 1994).
The ‘challenge approach’ did however become
hugely influential, spreading rapidly through
Whitehall. By 1998 more than £3,250 million
was distributed by twelve different central government de partments adm inis tering forty
separate funds (including the Housing Investment Progra mme, City Challenge, Estates
Renewal, Single Regeneration Budget (SRB)
Challenge Fund and Rural Challenge) (Foley,
1999). The SRB Challenge Fund in particular
foreshadowed the current government’s emphasis on ‘contracting for outcomes’ as it sought to
move away from a narrow focus upon inputs towards more output-oriented systems of control.
It can also be seen as marking a rediscovery of
planned approaches to regeneration that had been
almost totally abandoned in favour of ad hoc,
market-led initiatives during the mid and late
1980s (cf Thornley, 1993).
Labour’s concern with social exclusion led to a
renewed emphasis on area-based programmes
targeted on the most deprived areas. This was
combined with a strong push for more effective
interorganisational collaboration in order to address so-called ‘cross-cutting’ issues such as
employment, environmental sustainability, health
and community safety (Clarke et al, 1999). The
result has been a plethora of new initiatives (Employment Zones, Health and Education Action
Zones, the Best Value pilot programme, the New
Deal for Communities, the Better Government
for Older People programme and Crime and Disorder Audits) designed to instil a culture of more
collaborative working between local service providers. Almost all of these pilots and pathfinders
stress what Duffy and Hutchinson (1997) have
labelled a “turn to the community”, emphasising the need for statutory agencies and for the
private and voluntary sectors to work with communities to address local priorities.
What Clarence and Painter (1998) have called
the ‘collaborative discourse’ can be seen as marking a shift away from both the input-drive n
systems, which characterised the post-war welfare state, and the market-oriented approaches
that came to the fore during the 1970s and 1980s
as governments strove to control public expenditure (University of Birmingham School of Public
Policy, 1999). There is a much stronger focus on
‘joined-up working’, ‘cross-cutting issues’ and
‘citizen-centred services’ under New Labour.
Moreover, while statements about the need for
partnership between the public, private and voluntary/community sectors are not new, there is a
growing sense that, as a senior Whitehall official put it recently, “Whilst we’ve said for years
that the community must be involved, this time
we really do mean it”. The work of the Social
Exclusion Unit (SEU) has become increasingly
influential, and the time and resources committed to it are in themselves seen as representing a
very considerable investment in understanding
and developing new community-based approaches to the problems facing the most deprived
neighbourhoods and communities. In particular
the SEU has been critical of top-down, provider-led approaches (cf SEU, 1998), and its national
strategy for neighbourhood renewal (SEU, 1998)
advocates much greater community involvement
New Labour and community
involvement
The election in 1997 of a New Labour government marked a further series of potentially
important shifts in regeneration policies. The first
comprehensive spending review led to an increase in the overall funding of regeneration
programmes. A new regional framework was put
in place through devolution in Scotland and
Wales and the creation of Regional Development
Agencies in the English regions and of a strategic authority in London. At the local level New
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in and neighbourhood management of public
services.
The present government’s determination to
encourage greater community involvement can
also be seen in the reorientation of a number of
existing regeneration programmes. The guidelines for SRB have for example been revised and
updated several times since May 1997 to give
much greater importance to the role of communities. The guidelines for the SRB Round 4
(published in January 1998) stated that it was
important that the scheme “encourages local people, business and other organisations to come
together as partners” (chapter 1: para 3.1). SRB
Round 5 guidelines (published eight months later) indicated a much stronger role for community
involvement, stressing the need for more effective consultation with communities. Bids had to
demonstrate that they had the ‘wholehearted support of the local community’ (para 3.3) and to
show “how local communities have been involved in the development of the bid (and) how
the partnership will ensure the local community
have a say in decisions” (para 3.8). The Round 6
guidelines (issued on 17 December 1999) went
further still. They exhorted potential bidders to
embrace community involvement at the highest
level identified on the Community Development
Foundation’s five-fold classification (beneficiaries, consult ing, participating, managing
projects, controlling programmes), stating that
it should not “be assumed that a public sector
body should necessarily lead the partnership.
Consideration should be given to building the
capacity of other partners, particularly those from
voluntary and community sectors, to enable them
to do so” (para 1.3.2). The allocation of funds
under the SRB since 1997 suggests that this is
far from being empty rhetoric. The first round of
SRB is thought to have included just two community-led SRB schemes and there were only
five such schemes funded under Rounds 2 and 3
(Foley and Jayawardhena, 1998). By contrast
there were 22 successful community and voluntary sector-led bids in Round 5 which between
them accounted for 13% of successful bids and
£43 million of the funding allocated.
New policies and programmes have also emphasised the need for more effective community
involvement. A ‘national compact’ has been
agreed between central government and the vol-
untary and community sectors (Craig et al, 1999)
and is being mirrored at local level in agreements
between local councils and voluntary sector organisations. The New Deal for Communities and
Best Value programmes also provide strong evidence of a ne w determina tion to place
communities at the heart of regeneration policies and the design and delivery of local public
services.
Under the New Deal for Communities central
government plans to allocate £800m funding
between 1999 and 2008 to 17 New Deal for Community ‘Pathfinder areas’. These resources are
intended to address the needs of communities
containing up to 4,000 households (DETR,
1998a, 1998b). The aim is to take a “radical longterm approach to tackling the problems of the
poorest neighbourhoods” (DETR, 1998c: para
3.1). Previous initiatives have been criticised for
the way in which competition for funding and
the tight deadlines for submission of bids have
militated against genuine community involvement. Statutory agencies have often taken the
lead in preparing bids, with communities being
brought in at a much later stage to help implement plans over which they have little or no
influence. Under the New Deal for Communities the competitive element has been eliminated
and the chances of genuine community involvement from the outset have been increased by
allowing longer lead-in times in which to develop bids and by the provision of funding to support
the development of proposals. Moreover, unlike
previous policies, outputs can be specified at
different stages over a maximum of ten years
rather than having to be defined at the outset.
Partnerships have to be able to demonstrate that
communities have been involved in both the selection of target areas and the development of
programmes, and ministers have referred back
several bids that were seen as lacking sufficient
local input. The insistence that “many of the pathfinders will be run by bodies who have not
traditionally led regeneration program mes”
(SEU, 1998: 54) does seem to be having an impact locally. Phase 2 of the New Deal for
Communities has involved unprecedented levels of consultation through outreach workers,
public meetings and household surveys. Some
delivery plans include proposals for communitybased research and much greater formative eval-
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Paul Foley and Steve Martin: A new deal for the community?
uation than in the past. There have also been
greater opportunities for networking between
activists in the different target areas and a widespread feeling on the ground that “there is
permission to do things differently” (Taylor,
forthcoming: 2001).
The Best Value regime forms the centrepiece
of New Labour’s attempts to ‘modernise’ local
government. It too seeks to increase greatly the
role of service users and communities. The intention is to enable local people to hold councils
to account for improving the responsiveness,
quality and cost-effectiveness of local services
(Blair, 1998; DETR, 1998d) by forcing a “fundamental shift in power influence towards local
people”, giving them “a bigger say and a better
deal” (DETR, 1998e). To this end the 1999 Local Government Act imposes on local councils,
police and fire authorities and a range of other
local service providers a new legal duty to consult widely about all aspects of their activities
with service users, taxpayers and businesses
(House of Commons, 1999: 3.1). ‘Best value authorities’ have to involve users, citizens and
communities in reviewing current service provision and setting future performance targets. They
are also required to publish annual Best Value
Performance Plans giving details of recent performance (using national and locally developed
indicators), specifying targets for year-on-year
improvements in cost-effectiveness and service
quality and outlining the authority’s plans for
achieving them. Performance plans have to be
distributed widely to the public and the secretary of state has powers to intervene directly in
the running of local services where councils are
deemed to have failed to consult adequately.
Central government has also imposed on local
authorities ‘indicators of user satisfaction’ relating to councils’ overall ‘organisational health’
and seven key services – housing, benefit administration, waste collection, litter, planning,
transport and cultural services. In order to ensure that these performance indicators provide
‘robust and comparable data’ central government
is insisting that councils ask residents a standard
set of questions, use the same survey methodology and send the results on diskette to the DETR
for further analysis (DETR, 1999a).
The Best Value regime therefore imposes important new legal requirements on local service
providers to consult both more widely and in
much greater depth than they have in the past.
This reflects “the importance the Government
attaches to the place of the citizen – as user and
taxpayer” (DETR, 1999b: para 31) and is already
having a significant impact at local level (Martin and Boaz, 2000). The local authorities that
have piloted the Best Value regime have found
that it forces them to adopt a more systematic
approach to consulting with service users. It has
also encouraged councils to engage with a much
broader range of people than in the past. In particular many Best Value pilots have consulted to
a much greater degree with those who do not
use services, and many have made particular efforts to engage with communities that have
previously been labelled as ‘hard to reach’. The
pilots have also become much more concerned
with consulting about future patterns of service
provision rather than simply obtaining feedback
on current or past performance. This has meant
that some have for example involved future service users as well as existing customers and clients
in discussions about service design. Many authorities have found that the Best Value regime
also requires them to develop organisation-wide
consultation strategies that integrate the activities of different services and departments in order
to be able to fund the much greater level of consultation now required of them and to guard
against so-called consultation fatigue. Around a
quarter of the pilots have sought to move beyond
consultation by developing community-focused
approaches which enable local people to work
with frontline staff in coproducing or jointly designing environ mental, hous ing and other
services (Martin, 2000).
It is of course still relatively early days and
judgements about the impacts of community involve ment on the qu ality of regeneration
outcomes and local services would be premature.
New Labour ’s statements of support for increased community involvement are, however,
clearly being backed up by strong policies designed to make this a reality at local level.
Ministers really do seem ‘to mean it’. But the
theoretical underpinnings of their commitment
to community involvement remain somewhat
ambiguous. Many of the current government’s
favourite policy gurus stress the importance of
combining individual rights and personal respon-
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Policy & Politics vol 28 no 4
sibility with notions of local community, social
cohesion and social justice. Le Grand (1998), for
example, has highlighted what he regards as the
links between ‘community’ and notions of respo nsibility, equa lity of op po rtunity and
accountability, and Giddens (1998) has identified partnership between state and civil society
closely with the ‘third way’. Pimlott (1997), Sites
(1998) and Freeden (1999) all document the influence of communitarianism on the Prime
Minister. They see strong echoes in recent policy initiatives of the view that rootlessness,
individualism and a disregard of communal obligations have weakened communities and there
is therefore a need to ‘recreate’ a sense of belonging and association (cf Elshtain, 1995;
Etzioni, 1995).
Ministerial enthusiasm for public participation
certainly stems in part from the view that there
is a need to ‘rebuild’ the relationship between
government and the electorate. The public is seen
as having lost confidence in politics and policy
makers (Carnevale, 1995; Herzlinger, 1996).
Providing higher quality services at ‘a price people are willing to pay’ is seen as the key to
winning back their trust. The minister for local
government responsible for the introduction of
the Best Value regime has therefore repeatedly
stressed that “at its heart Best Value is designed
to reshape the relationship between local people
and local government”. This quasi-consumerist
approach is central not only to the Best Value
regime but also to the 1999 White Paper Modernising government (Cabinet Office, 1999)
which argues for a ‘drive to modernise’ a wide
range of public services including health, education, social services and the criminal justice
system. The emphasis is on the need for rapid,
‘transformational’ change leading to more
‘joined-up’ and flexible service delivery. Increased use of information and communications
technology is seen as an important means of shifting power away from producer interests in favour
of service users and taxpayers. “Users’ views of
local services are an essential resource to inform
service planning … and a measure of success in
service delivery” (DETR, 1999a: 75). By virtue
of their ‘closeness to the community’, user
groups, citizens’ panels and area/neighbourhood
forums, are seen by ministers as an important
means of exerting pressure for service improve-
ments on public sector managers, professionals
and frontline staff.
As Kling and Posner (1991) point out, for a
government committed to tight fiscal policies,
community action may be a convenient alternative to increased intervention by the state and
associated increases in public spending. In extreme cases the community may be viewed
simply as a source of cheap or unpaid labour.
However, it seems clear that the present government’s approach values communities primarily
for the ‘tacit’ local knowledge that representatives may bring to polic y debates and the
enhanced ‘legitimacy’ associated with a wider
sense of ownership. A number of studies lend
support to this approach. Research by Cairns
(1996) and McArthur et al (1996) suggests that
a strong community voice may result in better
decision making and programme outcom es
which are more attuned to local needs. Moreover, in the case of experimental or
‘pump-priming’ initiatives such as the New Deal
for Communities, the long-term success of government intervention depends crucially on
releasing social capital so that local people are
able to develop and express their capacity for
self-help and mutual aid (Thomas, 1999) .
McArthur (1993) for example points to increased
participation as a means of generating a sense of
local ownership and stewardship, which in turn
increases the likelihood of communities taking
a role in maintaining their neighbourhoods and
coproducing services.
The limits to community
involvement
While community involvement is therefore seen
as an important means of delivering on many of
the present government’s key manifesto commitments, the experience of previous regeneration
initiatives, and of attempts to decentralise local
services, suggests the need for caution. In particular, there is strong evidence of constraints on
the capacity both of the community and of local
service providers to respond in the way envisaged by ministers and their advisers. A key
problem has been the lack of real power and influence of the voluntary and community sectors.
The literature on policy implementation provides
numerous examples of an absence of serious
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Paul Foley and Steve Martin: A new deal for the community?
commitment to bottom-up policy making (Marsh
and Rhodes, 1992; McConnell, 1993). The success of present initiatives will therefore depend
on the willingness of local councils to cede power
and control of resources, decision making and
implementation processes to communities. Private and voluntary sector service providers will
also have to embrace more participative and responsive approaches to contracting and service
delivery than most currently employ. Equally,
communities themselves will have to become
much more prepared to engage with local service providers than recent studies suggest they
currently are. Martin et al (1999) for example
report that only a fifth of residents living in Best
Value pilot areas stated that they would like to
have more of a say in the ways local services
were run. Moreover, most of those who wanted
to be more involved favoured passive forms of
consultation such as postal surveys as opposed
to more interactive approaches such as public
meetings and citizens’ juries.
Over time it may be possible to increase the
level of interest by providing more information
and engaging with people about the issues which
matter most to them (typically fear of crime,
clean streets and keeping disaffected youths ‘out
of trouble’). However, it seems clear that many
communities, and in particular some of those at
greatest risk of social exclusion, will continue
to be reluctant to work with local authorities and
other service providers because they believe that
there is no benefit to them in ‘collaborating’.
Moreover, community aspirations are nowhere
near as homogeneous as government pronouncements
frequently
imply.
Previous
community-based initiatives have repeatedly
demonstrated that local people rarely speak with
one voice and their influence is not unambiguously positive. Communities can be deeply
fragmented and many local people support policies which would exacerbate rather than combat
social exclusion. Moreover, ‘community representatives’ are often atypical precisely because,
unlike most local people, they are willing to become involved. For this reason they may be seen
as having been captured by the local state (Saunders, 1983) and unable to challenge other
‘partners’ because they are overawed, intimidated or simply bored by formal meetings (Walzer,
1993; Sites, 1998). Local ‘partnerships’ are there-
fore inevitably somewhat uneasy alliances between competing agencies in which different
sections of the community are unlikely to be
equally represented (Gittell et al, 1998; Atkinson, 1999). Communitarians are accused of
playing down these deep-seated conflicts and
inequalities between local people (Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985) and the current government’s
policies may well need to take much more account of them.
Area-based initiatives reflected in the New
Deal for Communities and neighbourhood-based
approaches to implementing Best Value have a
number of attractions. Wilmott (1989) suggests
that most people identify with communities of
up to 5,000 people, and the target areas of the
New Deal for Communities which are designed
to contain between 1,000 and 4,000 households
may therefore represent more meaningful communities of place than those covered by previous
programmes. Moreover, small area programmes
which use community development approaches
(such as community needs analysis and community profiling techniques of the kind that have
been developed by some Best Value pilots) can
help to reach groups which have been bypassed
by traditional, mainstream programmes (Fordham, 1993). However, the experience of previous
regeneration initiatives also highlights a number
of disadvantages. There is a danger that they focus on palliative measures rather than underlying
structural causes of deprivation. Community priorities can be very parochial and it is often
unrealistic to expect small-scale community action to have any discernible impact on underlying
causes of exclusion such as the investment decisions of large businesses (CDP, 1974). The focus
on localities may be a relatively blunt policy instrument compared to targeting spe cific
individuals and families at highest risk of social
exclusion. Moreover, the logic of area-based programmes may be at odds with the breakdown of
traditional communities of place and the increasing importance which many citizens attach to
networks based on communities of identity and
interest which, in an information age, are becoming less and less tied to geography. Customising
services to the needs of particular neighbourhoods may also be very expensive and can raise
difficult issues of equity, especially where other
communities are experiencing similar difficul-
486
Policy & Politics vol 28 no 4
ties to the target areas and area-based schemes
are suspected of simply displacing problems to
adjacent wards and estates.
In addition to these familiar problems, there
are a number of new tensions within New Labour thinki ng which are likely to become
increasingly apparent and will not be easy to resolve as policies such as the New Deal for
Communities and the Best Value regime unfold.
In particular, ministerial demands for rapid and
demonstrable improvements in service standards
seem at odds with the abundant evidence from
previous initiatives that it can take years to
achieve meaningful and sustainable community
involvement. Key ministerial advisers report that
there is already “mounting frustration at the centre” in the gove rnment with variations in
standards across the country. This highlights a
deep-seated tension between national prescription and local flexibility, and the present
government’s increasing insistence on minimum
national standards clearly raises important questions abou t the kinds of discretion and
involvement that are in fact on offer to local communities. The New Deal for Communities
appears to offer scope for local variation and
officials seem keen to encourage more flexible
delivery mechanisms. Some elements of the Best
Value regime are, however, being more tightly
controlled and the encouragement of innovation
and experimentation may well be set on a collision course with the strong centralising instinct
that lies at the heart of New Labour (Geddes and
Martin, 2000). Certainly increased local discretion is not easily reconciled with ‘zero tolerance
of failure’ and the government’s enthusiasm for
‘naming and shaming’ agencies that are deemed
to be underperforming against national performance standards.
The emphasis on direct public participation
also seems to be at odds with traditional notions
of representative local democracy. The ‘modernisers’ in and around New Labour claim that
increased participation and new forms of accountability will reinvigorate local democracy,
leading to a greater awareness of and interest in
local policy making and increasing turnout in
local elections. Sweeping changes in the political management of local councils, including the
introduction of ‘cabinet’-style local government,
directly elected mayors and a legal requirement
for authorities to take steps to increase electoral
participation, are therefore being introduced
alongside the new Best Value regime (DETR,
1999c). However, the effects of concentrating
executive power in the hands of a much smaller
core of councillors are unclear, and many local
politicians fear that initiatives such as the New
Deal for Communities and the Best Value regime
will simply shift power and influence to selfappointed community ‘representatives’ and
opinion pollsters.
Finally, the present government’s emphasis on
‘holistic services’ seems to be at odds with the
strongly departmentalised structure of central
government and the Treasury’s enthusiasm for
contracting for specific outcomes with individual spending departments. The lack of a central
coordinating structure within Whitehall is manifested in the way in which departments have
designed and implemented their own pilot initiatives largely without reference to those of other
ministries. Many local agencies complain that
this has led to ‘initiative overload’ and difficulties working across the overlapping geographical
boundarie s assigned to the different ‘action
zones’, pilots and pathfinders. Some of the Policy Action Teams set up by ministers, particularly
those considering neighbourhood management
and approaches to integrating services at the local level, have identified ways of reducing
duplication associated with overlapping areabased initiatives. An ongoing study is also
exploring ways of developing better coordination at local and national levels (Stewart et al,
1999). However, it is clear that at present central gov ernment lacks the coo rdina ting
mechanisms that are needed to resolve these
problems. Even the substantial resources devoted to the New Deal for Communities initiatives
are dwarfed by mainstream budgets and there is
a risk that partnership will therefore remain on
the fringes of many Whitehall departments. On
the whole departmental cultures and performance
systems, as well as individual career paths, continue to be based largely around service ‘silos’
(Martin, 1999) and most budgets too are still
functionally organised (Leat, 2000; Performance
and Innovation Unit, 2000). The result is what 6
et al (1999) have labelled ‘fragmented holism’
with local partnerships finding it difficult to ‘join
up’ their activities and Whitehall departments
487
Paul Foley and Steve Martin: A new deal for the community?
swapping territorial disputes over functional
services for new turf wars over ‘their’ pilot programmes.
central government to address cross-cutting issues effectively.
Burton (1997: 425) has argued that ‘progress
in urban policy has been a myth’. Residents of
many target areas have not perceived any improvement and there is scant evidence of tangible
impacts on the needs of those experiencing the
most severe forms of multiple deprivation. There
is a danger that if New Labour does not learn
from and seek to address the difficult issues highlighted by previous attempts to enh ance
community involvement, it will simply repeat the
mistakes of the past. Ministers and officials will
then conclude that, though a laudable objective,
community involvement does not deliver the
anticipated benefits and since ‘what matters is
what works’ the policy pendulum will swing back
once again towards the imposition of ‘top-down’
programmes. The New Deal for Communities
and Best Value initiatives seek to address many
of the design problems that afflicted previous
initiatives. They will therefore repay detailed
monitoring and evaluation in order to determine
which approaches to community involvement are
effective in different contexts and whether these
latest attempts to engage citizens more actively
in local policy making can fare any better than
their predecessors.
Conclusions
On the face of it there is much to celebrate in
New Labour’s approach to local service delivery and urban regeneration. Its attempt to
promote integrated solutions to ‘cross-cutting’
problems, the decision to target resources on
communities that are experiencing the highest
levels of social exclusion and the apparent support for ‘bottom-up’ approaches are all to be
welcomed, as is the commitment to pilot a variety of approaches in order to discover which are
the most effective. However, the real test will be
the degree to which national government is willing to trust communities and local service
providers with policy space, resources and greater autonomy, and whether it is possible to achieve
the rapid improvements in public services to
which ministers are committed. Much will depend upon whether the agencies charged with
implementing new initiatives embrace community perspectives and concerns and the extent to
which local people, armed with national performance indicators and inspection reports, will
demand and be able to contribute to more effective regeneration strategies and better services.
By seeking to encourage greater local flexibility, ministers have been able to pass to local
policy makers much of the responsibility for resolving the paradoxes within the new regimes,
including the tensions between representative
and participative democracy and between the emphasis of ‘bottom-up’ initiatives and the strong
centralising effect of national indicators and targets. It will be important to reconcile the
differences that exist within communities. Local partners roo ted in the very different
approaches associated with the public, private,
voluntary and community sectors will all need
to embrace ‘community involvement’ if it is to
have any real impact on mainstream policy making. There are also fundamental questions about
the degree to which partners can collaborate
while also competing with each other for the right
to deliver services in the way required by the
Best Value regime, and about the capacity of
Acknowledgements
This article draws on research on the New Deal
for Communities supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and on Best Value commissioned
by the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions and the National Assembly
for Wales. The views expressed are however our
own and do not necessarily reflect those of the
funders.
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