Or is it a revamped Levelling Up Towns Fund? Either way, ministers and senior civil servants must prevent excessive payments to consultants which might otherwise undermine the confidence that local residents have in the projects
Image – one of the evaluation reports from the NDC Programme 2000-2010
£1.5 billion to restore pride in Britain’s neighbourhoods
…declares the press release. A further written statement to Parliament was also tabled by the Minister for Local Growth and Building Safety, the Parliamentary Undersecretary Alex Norris MP. (This is the same minister that called in the Beehive redevelopment application)
TL/DR? This sounds like John Prescott’s New Deal for Communities Programme 2000-2010, one that distributed nearly £2billion of funding over that decade, and also had a substantial research programme funded by the Government. Which is why the results of that research programme have suddenly become important again – and you can read the work by Sheffield Hallam University here.
“How do you remember this stuff?”
My final posting in my civil service years was in the team responsible for closing the NDC programme and reconciling the paperwork – including hundreds of audit reports, to account for the huge amount of money that had been spent.
Such was the fun and games that I had with that, that I wrote a short briefing paper titled: “The public administration lessons learnt from the NDC Programme”, and archived it just in case a similar programme sometime in the distant future was reconstituted. So if you know anyone in the MHCLG who is working on that policy area, please ensure they have read that paper!
“Did the New Deal for Communities deliver on its aims?”
Don’t you want to know what the NDC was?
The New Deal for Communities programme was: “…the flagship component to the Government’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal and is designed to help close the gaps between these 39 areas and the rest of the country.”
Above – from Sheffield Hallam University’s NDC Research pages
So we are talking about what were in the late 1990s some of the most economically-deprived areas in England. It involved awarding up to £50million funding over a ten year period to each area to deal with the symptoms and causes of poverty and multiple deprivation.
Key findings from the NDC evaluation
- See phase 1 summarised here, and the full reports from the early-mid 2000s here
- See phase 2 reports from 2010 here, including the nine-page executive summary.
- See also Prof Paul Lawless’s academic briefing note here on the lessons learnt, and what David Cameron’s Big Society needed to be aware of.
The Public Accounts Committee also had a look at the NDC programme, cross-examining witnesses and taking written evidence. Their report was published in June 2004 here, not long after I joined the civil service (although not working on this project)
“What did the Public Accounts Committee say?”
They referred to this NAO Report from February 2004
You can read the executive summary from p3, and the recommendations from p22 here
The National Audit Office Report is essential reading for anyone working on the new Government’s programme announced today.
To ensure this happens, you can email your MP via https://www.writetothem.com/ and, referring to the Sheffield Hallam Uni research, the Public Accounts Committee’s report, and the NAO Report above, ask your MP to email the Deputy Prime Minister to confirm:
- that she has instructed her policy staff, and locally-based officers working on her new programmes to read these three reports, and
- to ask her what assessment she has made regarding incorporating the lessons learnt from the NDC programme into her new programme, including but not limited to policy risk assessments and risk management systems.
“How do the lists compare with the Tories’ towns fund?”
Good question.
You can see the Towns Fund list here
You can see the Plan for Neighbourhoods from Labour here – scroll to the end.
Furthermore:
- The Public Accounts Committee under the last Parliament (so Conservative MPs made up the majority) was scathing of how the towns were selected – see their report here from 11 November 2020. (See also the official Government response to each recommendation here)
- The House of Commons Library published a briefing note in October 2024 summarising the different local growth funds.
New Deal for Communities Neighbourhoods
One of the most memorable projects I became aware of was in Oldham, where community development officer Maxine Moar (who I stayed in touch with ever since) invited me up to the North West to see for myself the challenges that they faced – something that few London-based civil servants get to see. The personal tour of the area – plots of land cleared for redevelopment, and the areas still to be cleared, were sobering to see. Because I had never seen anything like it. It was that experience that reinforced my sense of why it was ever so important for civil servants to get out of the office – and for future civil servants, especially those from affluent backgrounds coming from the top universities, to get those life experiences early in their career.
As I said to one group of Cambridge University students in the mid-2010s after I had left the civil service, working in a policy environment means trying to whichever problems of society your minister has instructed you to work on. If you are coming into the civil service with a very limited knowledge and awareness of those issues because all you’ve experienced are well-resourced private schools and top universities, how are you going to be able to help solve the problems you’ve been instructed to work on? Which in part explains why Cambridge Student Community Action has been running for over half a century.
Yet one of the many things Maxine Moar taught me very early on was about how toxic the ‘middle class saviour’ stereotype was – and that if I even displayed a hint of it her community would have me for breakfast. Which looking back on it was actually a much bigger risk for me than perhaps I appreciated at the time – hence why I was grateful she nipped that problem in the bud. Furthermore, she was insistent that the best community development officers were the ones that understood that their role was time-limited, and that the ultimate success criteria was to make their own role and job redundant. Because by that time the community concerned becomes self-sustaining and doesn’t need the specialist outside support to underpin specific projects. The skills by that time have been transferred and locals can do things for themselves. (Which is one of the reasons why the austerity years that followed were so utterly devastating for so many places).
The project that really stood out for me were the Neighbourhood Agreements – and this is a template that I think should be offered to every town in the new programme. (It should be up to them if they want to make use of it – it doesn’t need to be imposed top-down).
Neighbourhood Agreements – where the process is just as important as the final document
“A Neighbourhood Agreement is a voluntary agreement between local service providers and residents which sets out the standards that local services will provide to the public (what they will do, who will do it, and by when) and, in return, what the public are responsible for doing. The overall aim of the Agreement is to improve local neighbourhoods and increase public satisfaction with local services”.
Above – Neighbourhood Agreements Pathfinder Programme (2012) Home Office, p2
A bit like GCSE Citizenship Studies where for those not looking to go to a top university where every exam needs to have a top mark attached to it, the practical work of getting in touch with a local councillor or going on a site visit and familiarising themselves with the processes that they will find themselves using in real life later on, is more important than the grade. And the processes of police, councillors, local residents, and local businesses sitting down to agree to a set of mutual activities, turned out to be just as important as the final agreement below.
Above – one of the five agreements (this was the first, and goes onto six pages), on reducing crime and anti-social behaviour
Speaking to a senior police officer at the time, he told me that residential feedback praised Greater Manchester Police for putting more bobbies on the beat – even though I was told that no additional funding or officers had been provided. It’s just that the police had worked with residents to redesign neighbourhood patrols so officers were around in potential trouble-spots before things got out of hand, while at the same time new youth projects started, and new facilities and amenities were opened so that it wasn’t just a single law-and-order lever that was pulled to solve a problem.
When I got back to London, I tipped off a colleague in the Home Office and said that he might want to have a look at this.
The result was that Maxine Moar was seconded to the Home Office to work on extending her work to other parts of the country.
“For many service providers, the final Agreement was an extension or formalisation of how they already engaged communities in setting local priorities. However, for some, involving residents in shaping their service delivery was a new approach. Consequently, for these service providers the process has provided valuable learning about the needs of the local community and informed service reshaping to a greater extent.”
It’s a shame that the Coalition did not progress any further with this – it’s hard to do anything innovative in any local area when faced with austerity and a workforce facing redundancy.
Fortunately there has been enough academic research and evaluation of the NDC programme that the current generation of ministers and civil servants don’t need to re-invent the wheel. There are a host of templates and resources that were created from projects that emerged in part from NDC funding – such as Involve UK’s methods database here. Yes, many of them will need refreshing after what we’ve been through collectively over the past 15 years, but a huge amount of time and money could be saved simply by taking enough time at the start to do lots of reading and planning. There is no need to get the money out of the door – because the haste to spend (as we found out with CV19) means essential checks and balances are brushed aside, resulting in money being wasted. We cannot afford to do that as it is, and even less so with the most economically-deprived communities in the country.
Oh – and one other thing: The funding for this new round does not need to be on standalone projects.
One local project in Oldham that I dug my heels in on was for a new neighbourhood centre that the local NHS said they needed a significant contribution from the NDC funds for it to go ahead. There was a risk that it wouldn’t because with the Banking Crisis there was inevitably re-evaluations of a whole host of spending. Given that this was to provide a new library, GP surgery and neighbourhood health centre in one of the most economically-deprived White working class wards in the area (mindful of the history of the race riots less than a decade earlier), I was acutely aware of what the negative impact could be if the project collapsed, as well as being aware of the positive impact on health and education that having such facilities would have if it went ahead.
I was more than relieved when we got the clearance, the new facilities opening in 2012.
So…the learning reports are there. It’s essential that they are brought back out again.
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Below – new events are coming up from the Trials of Democracy project in 2025
The Cambridge Town Owl 