This week our CEO Clare Wightman was invited to speak on a panel about Pride in Place, hosted by the Future Governance Forum and Local Trust. Here Clare shares her thoughts as we approach the start of the programme’s first delivery phase in April.
“There is a lot to be excited about in the government’s Pride in Place programme. At up to £5.8 billion over ten years — reaching 284 neighbourhoods with up to £20 million each — this is one of the largest investments in communities experiencing deprivation for a generation.
“The programme commits to putting local people in the driving seat: neighbourhood boards will bring together residents, local organisations, businesses and politicians to decide how the money is spent. And the ten-year timeframe acknowledges something short-term regeneration funding has consistently got wrong — that meaningful change in places with decades of deprivation takes sustained commitment.
“These are promising foundations. In this week’s webinar hosted by the Future Governance Forum, a group of us explored what it would take to fully realise that potential.
“The FGF framework argues that if neighbourhoods define outcomes, if communities are supported not just to have power but to use it, and if local democracy is made responsive, the conditions exist for a virtuous circle: participation deepens because people see it is serious, which enriches the conversation about what transformation means and who drives it. The ingredients for something different are there. But realising it depends on how the programme navigates a set of real and difficult tensions.”
Five tensions Pride in Place must navigate
1. Who sets the agenda?
“Not who chooses between options someone else has designed, but who decides what the question is in the first place.
“The Pride in Place prospectus includes a pre-approved menu of interventions. When we supported resident led action in Willenhall in Coventry — a neighbourhood now set to receive Pride in Place funding — the process didn’t start with a list of things the community could act on. It started with something much messier and more organic — a stormy public meeting, hundreds of one-to-one conversations, resident-led focus groups, and local people knocking on almost 900 doors to find out what their neighbours actually wanted.
“The priority that emerged was restoring Brookstray Park as a shared space for children and families. That came through the community’s own process of listening and deliberation — not ours, and not government’s. A pre-approved intervention list is precisely the sort of mechanism that could have blocked it.
“For Pride in Place to be a genuine transfer of power, it needs to trust communities with the latitude to name priorities government hasn’t anticipated.”
2. Capacity building and pace
“At Grapevine, we’ve lived with this question for decades. Capacity building can’t be bolted on to a funding stream — it has to be woven into how money reaches communities and how it’s held locally. What happened in Willenhall came through people being supported to take on issues that mattered to them, with coaching, organising techniques, and sustained relationships over time. It is slow, relational, human work that starts from what people have and care about.
“Evaluation in 2024 found that as a result of our community organising people felt more connected, community leadership had grown, and people were more confident in understanding how power moves. And crucially, they felt three times more able to shape local decisions than the national and regional average.
“Pride in Place needs to fund that kind of presence – the skilled building of agency that’s going to make the difference.”
“Government will find this uncomfortable. Budget cycles create pressure for quick, visible outputs. But as Alex Boys reflected from his experience of the Big Local programme, many areas spent a long time working through conflicts before arriving at proposals that were genuinely owned by the community. Jumping in too quickly risks decisions people don’t feel are theirs. And once that happens, trust is burned — and trust, in communities that have seen programmes come and go for decades, is already in short supply.
3. Who participates and on what terms?
“Participation processes tend to favour those with the most resources — time, confidence, cultural and social capital. But the solution isn’t simply to make existing processes more accessible. It’s to start from people’s actual lives, their priorities and networks, to centre caring relationships as the foundation, and to make the act of participation itself something that enhances people’s lives — not just a means to an institutional end.
“At Grapevine, 90 per cent of those we organise with are marginalised through poverty, sexual orientation, gender, geography, ethnicity, religion, displacement, or disability and mental health. That’s not an accident of our geography — it’s the result of deliberate design.
“Pride in Place should be asking itself: what is the offer for the local person off the street in these communities? If the real answer is “not much, but we’d like your views,” people will see through it quickly. If the honest answer is “you get to work with others on something that genuinely matters to you, with real support to make it possible, and it might actually change things” — that’s a different proposition entirely.
“Tokenistic participation is actually worse than none, because it burns the trust that future genuine participation will need.”
4. Accountability
“The instinct is to build compliance frameworks first, then invite communities to decide within them. Our experience, echoed by Big Local’s, is that this gets it the wrong way around. When residents were given real control over money, they were often more anxious about each spend than local authorities. The accountability ran sideways — to neighbours, to each other — not upward to government.
“The Brookstray Park campaign looks on the surface like a community group that built a plan and helped direct £300,000 of investment. The engine underneath was mutual accountability between neighbours. The point isn’t just the improvement — it’s the agency and shared decision-making people experience and the relationships formed. That builds the muscle for the next community-led change.
5. What the money is actually for
“Pride in Place is structured as 63 per cent capital, 37 per cent revenue. The risk is revenue funding directed towards meeting need.
“We are pouring twenty million pounds of water onto parched ground. Local authorities have been starved of funds for over a decade, and there is enormous pressure to plug gaps and deliver visible change quickly. But if the revenue spend doesn’t prioritise civic capacity building, we will have missed the point.”
“The best outcome of Pride in Place nationally, if it works, isn’t buildings or services. It’s more powerful communities that can identify its own priorities, listen to itself, take action, advocate for itself, and work with others. That is the regenerative way to work — one that will solve problems into the future and beyond the edges of any defined programme or even government tenure.
What we’d ask government to consider
“At Grapevine, we’ve developed five tests for any community power initiative, and we think they’re useful tests for Pride in Place:
- Are the most disadvantaged people actually in the room?
- Is involvement itself enhancing people’s lives — not just extracting their input?
- Can people determine their own priorities, not just respond to government’s agenda?
- Is responsibility for action with the right actors — or are we creating DIY welfare?
- And who is actually benefiting — are we reducing or increasing inequalities?
“The communities we work with have seen promises before — and yet there is real hope in what Pride in Place could become. The scale of investment, the ten-year commitment, and the emphasis on community-led decision making are genuinely encouraging foundations.
“What will determine whether this programme lives up to its promise is whether it backs that ambition with the patience, flexibility and trust that genuine community power requires. For us, the measure of success will be whether, years from now, the people we work alongside are more powerful than they were before the programme started — more connected, more confident in shaping decisions, more able to rise to meet their own challenges.
“We want to help make that happen, and we believe it can.”
If Clare’s blog has sparked your interest and you’d like to continue the conversation, you can email her at cwightman@grapevinecovandwarks.org.
Thanks for reading!