Local authorities’ responsibilities in areas like local arts provision on a statutory footing. Councils have a crucial role to play as anchors and convenors of place, and are best positioned to understand what policy mix is most likely to enhance feelings of civic pride in their area.
When the Government published its Levelling Up White Paper in February this year, one of the twelve key missions it set out was to enhance ‘pride in place’ which is described as restoring “a sense of community, local pride and belonging, especially in those places where they have been lost”.
Our brand-new report at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy - Townscapes: Pride in Place - explores the implications and feasibility of this goal. It draws upon a wide-ranging body of research, asking how shared feelings of civic pride are created in different communities and explores the relationships between economic growth and people’s feelings of place-based identity. It also considers some of the different policy levers that might be used to boost civic pride.
The report includes three overarching main findings.
First, boosting pride in place requires more than cosmetic, quick-fix interventions. It necessitates a step change in the way in which local authorities relate to the communities they serve. There is no silver bullet when it comes to generating positive feelings towards a place and its prospects, and a mix of different policy levers are likely to be required. Improving high streets and tackling anti-social behaviour matter are key, but so too are improving the quality and quantity of cultural amenities, green spaces and places for community interaction – what some people call the ‘social infrastructure’ on which communities depend. Interventions and investments that celebrate communities’ histories and give local people agency – for instance in local heritage assets or through restoring iconic buildings – score highly on this front.
Second, the positive impacts which interventions of this kind can provide should be seen as complementary to a growth-focused policy agenda, not as extraneous or rival to it. Improving the liveability of areas, boosting the social capital flowing through poorer cities, towns and beyond, and making places more attractive to newcomers (particularly in an era when hybrid working patterns mean that more people are prepared to live further from places of work) will all create more conducive conditions for economic growth.
Research suggests that people who live in areas with better facilities feel more positive towards their local area. One study showed that the residents of Pittsburgh, in the US, were more willing to support investment in sporting facilities that made locals feel proud of their city, even if they themselves did not actually attend or make use of them. That is why central government should set out a ‘minimum standard guarantee’ for communities, detailing the basic set of amenities and facilities which people in different communities should be able to access.
Third, there is a key misconception about trends in civic pride within the Levelling Up White Paper, and this needs to be corrected so that it does not skew the policy debate in this area. It is suggested that ‘left-behind’ places – traditionally understood to be post-industrial cities and towns in the north and coastal communities in the south – typically suffer from a declining stock of pride, compared to wealthier places.
In fact, our analysis of relevant polling evidence suggests that feelings of pride, and related values like ‘belonging,’ are not automatically linked to how affluent or deprived an area is. Many poorer places exhibit high levels of local pride, as do many more affluent ones. Given the paucity of community-level data on this subject, policymakers should avoid neat assumptions about trends in relation to civic pride and how people in different communities feel about their areas. And given that central government has committed to the objective of boosting this value, and of measuring the efficacy of its own interventions and investments in relation to it, there is an imperative to generate better, more granular data. The data held by local government will be important in that respect, as will robust local evaluation.
The White Paper is particularly poignant for policymakers, local and national, because of the attention it pays to the ‘social fabric’ of poorer places, and to questions of local culture and place-based identity, which have typically been seen as separate to current debates on economic growth. But the key responsibilities in relation to the goals it promotes will fall upon local authorities and the communities within their boundaries. Such is the importance and potential impact of this aspect of the levelling up agenda that the £150 million Community Ownership Fund should be significantly uplifted exponentially to match the scale of the challenges facing left-behind areas. The equivalent fund in the US, the Community Revitalisation Fund, sits at $10 billion.
Our report also argues that government should put local authorities’ responsibilities in areas like local arts provision on a statutory footing. Councils have a crucial role to play as anchors and convenors of place, and are best positioned to understand what policy mix is most likely to enhance feelings of civic pride in their area. This means supporting and helping foster a sense of shared purpose as well as brokering relationships between the many different communities and institutions within the geography councils manage.
Councils should consider what they need to do to build capacity in local communities, and they should be supported in developing a much better understanding of the assets and amenities that exist in their communities. At the Bennett Institute we have called for a Community Assets Register to be established and managed by every local authority.
Protecting community assets when they are threatened and repurposing iconic local buildings can be crucial elements in strategies that will boost local morale and also create the potential for new spaces and meeting-places to be established. Edwardian bath-house Bramley Baths in Leeds is a case in point. Handed over to the local community a decade ago when the council could no longer afford to run it, it now teaches over 1,000 young people to swim each week and delivers training programmes and local employment opportunities.
Professor Michael Kenny is Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy and a member of the Local Government Association’s Levelling Up Locally enquiry. Jack Shaw is an Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute.