For more than half a century, Britain has tried to fix its poorest neighbourhoods. Billions have been spent. Programmes have been launched, rebranded, abandoned, and revived. High streets and town centres have been rebuilt and refurbished. Yet decade after decade, the same places remain stubbornly resistant to renewal.
The government's, Pride in Place, is the latest in a long line of place-based initiatives. With a recent expansion, the £5 billion programme aims to revive ‘around' 380 neighbourhoods that have fallen into decline. But many of these areas selected for funding have already been "helped" before — through the New Deal for Communities, Neighbourhood Renewal, the Single Regeneration Budget, Levelling Up, and a host of other interventions.
Successive governments have placed enormous faith in community involvement. Residents have been invited to attend meetings, sit on boards, and help co-design services. These processes have value. They can build trust, improve services, and strengthen civic life. But the evidence suggests they rarely make communities more prosperous on their own.
The uncomfortable truth is that decades of regeneration and renewal have failed to deliver lasting change for our poorest communities. While deprivation has fallen in absolute terms, it has become increasingly concentrated in specific areas, where health inequalities are widening and poverty is deepening. Too often, place-based policy has improved the temporary appearance of neighbourhoods without improving the prospects of the people who live there.
The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON) recently published its ‘final' report, urging policymakers to abandon short-term, project-driven approaches in favour of lasting commitments that recognise renewal as an enduring process. ICON makes a strong case for long-term funding, institutional stability and neighbourhood-level capacity – including the importance of social infrastructure. But it largely accepts the existing economic settlement within which regeneration takes place.
Successive governments have placed enormous faith in community involvement. Residents have been invited to attend meetings, sit on boards, and help co-design services. These processes have value. They can build trust, improve services, and strengthen civic life. But the evidence suggests they rarely make communities more prosperous on their own.
National evaluations of previous programmes have found modest gains in crime reduction and environmental quality, but little impact on jobs, incomes or health. Kensington in Liverpool — recipient of £60 million New Deal for Communities programme during the 90s — emerged worse off by many measures, with collapsing home ownership, entrenched poverty and deteriorating life expectancy. Engagement matters, but without economic power it rarely shifts outcomes.
Not everything has failed. Physical regeneration has transformed our city centres marking an urban renaissance in city living. Programmes like Sure Start, delivered lasting health and education benefits for disadvantaged children. Places can, and do, change. Some for the better. But the record of place-based policy in the UK is not one of lasting transformation. While some neighbourhoods do improve, the benefits are often uneven. The process of gentrification can displace existing residents, pricing them out of their community. Too often the experience of regeneration is managed decline.
What, then, is missing? Area-based initiatives must pursue a different settlement—one that gives residents a genuine stake in their neighbourhoods. This means not only improving living standards through higher incomes but enabling people to build asset wealth by sharing in the ownership of property, land and productive assets. The foundations of renewal must rest on the wider distribution of homes, land and small businesses, rather than repeated cycles of grant funding and cosmetic public-realm improvements.
This is no small task. It requires policies that actively tilt markets away from concentration and speculation, alongside a new institutional approach to investing in localities via whole area Public Private Finance schemes. The aim is not to redistribute a diminishing stock of social housing, but to build the capacity of communities to create new homes and assets of their own - using the combined weight of public investment, private finance, mutuals, cooperatives and community land trusts.
At heart, this represents a shift in how property is understood: not as a speculative commodity or a luxury, but as a foundation of freedom and self-reliance. A renewal strategy built on this principle would move beyond managing decline, embedding economic power locally and reducing dependency on both markets and the state. It is a demanding agenda—but no more demanding than decades of place-based intervention that have failed to deliver lasting change. If renewal is to endure, people must be able to own where they live, not merely participate in its management.
The question is not whether neighbourhoods should be improved, but who benefits when they are. Achieving self-sustaining, prosperous places requires a change in direction: from short-term fixes to a long-term commitment to building ownership, agency and economic resilience. Renewal is slow, political and structural—and without a broader redistribution of property, Britain's poorest places will continue to fall behind, however tidy their streets become.
Restoring neighbourhoods and civic pride demands more than community engagement or better stewardship of the public realm. It requires matching renewal with ownership, and self-governance with investment - giving people the keys, literally and figuratively, to their own economic futures
Mark Morrin is a research associate at ResPublica and author of a new ResPublica essay – ‘A Modest Proposal for the Restoration of Neighbourhoods'.
