Holding it together: Can the government deliver on community cohesion?

Housing secretary Steve Reed has framed it as a blueprint for a “more confident, cohesive and resilient United Kingdom”. It brings together commitments such as Pride in Place, tackling hate and extremism, integration and asylum reform into a more joined up agenda. While the plan is welcome, questions remain about whether or not it is sufficiently equipped to deliver. This blog examines how far these commitments are likely to result in meaningful change, and where key challenges lie. 

1. Pride in Place

Foregrounded in the action plan is the extension of the Pride in Place programme, which provides £20 million to selected communities over a 10-year period, with the first rounds of allocation based primarily on indices of deprivation. It aims to give power to local people to shape their neighbourhoods, bringing together residents, civic actors and MPs. The initiative is one that the government is holding in high esteem as a prime example of place-based policymaking done well. IPPR North’s latest report praises the programme for building civic capacity, but notes that a more hyperlocal agenda is needed for it to be a success.   

The 40 newly announced areas set to receive Pride in Place funding were selected using a revised allocation method, with funding now targeted according to measures of social cohesion. As a result, this new round of funding will be directed towards places identified as among the least cohesive in the country.  However, all the funding is allocated at a Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOA) level - a statistical area used to group neighbourhoods for data and planning purposes - and this raises an important tension. Cohesion-related issues rarely align neatly with such geographical boundaries. Protests, riots, or other expressions of division often involve people drawn from surrounding neighbourhoods (who may live only a few miles away but fall outside the designated MSOA). This place-based mismatch means that investment in regenerating one neighbourhood could struggle to address the wider, cross-boundary dynamics that are driving unrest. 

Moreover, despite featuring prominently in the action plan, Pride in Place is not solely a cohesion-focused strategy – it is a distinct, place-based programme with a wide set of objectives. Although cohesion is one of those objectives, it also carries broader goals around regeneration, improving social infrastructure, and creating thriving high streets. All of which can support community cohesion, but because of the breadth and its targeting of specific MSOAs, it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own as the main vehicle for addressing community tensions across the country.

2. Tackling hate & extremism

New crisis management methods for tackling hate and extremism are heavily emphasised in the action plan. One example is the cross-government Cohesion Support and Interventions Function (CSIF), which intends to support to councils and communities dealing with escalating tension or unrest by bringing together local leaders with a wider pool of regional and national based experts and practitioners to “disrupt radicalising or dangerous actors”. This is a welcome attempt to bring practitioner expertise into crisis response, but local leaders are often best placed to understand local dynamics. Those running the CSIF should ensure that locally grounded expertise is not sidelined but placed at the forefront of decision-making.  

Crisis management is important, especially if we are to prevent the riots seen in the summer of 2024 from reoccurring. However, it is reasonable to question whether the current balance between spending on extremism response and investment in longer term cohesion and prevention is right. IPPR’s scrutiny of government responses to the 2024 riots pointed out that preventing extremism is not just about investing in enforcement. More investment is needed in longer term solutions that stop prejudicial attitudes from developing in the first place, such as programmes that create regular, meaningful contact between different groups. As the plan develops, it will be important to ensure that sufficient practical weight is given to prevention, alongside the short-term responses needed once tensions have already emerged.

This imbalance is illustrated by the Common Ground Resilience Fund, established to support local authorities and grassroots organisations in running practical interventions that bring people from different neighbourhoods and backgrounds together – exactly the kind of initiatives that challenge prejudice and promote understanding over time. Yet the fund is worth up to £5 million for 2026/27: a welcome increase on previous rounds, but still relatively modest in the context of the plan as a whole. This may make it harder to sustain the efforts of local authorities and grassroot organisations, and could make it more challenging for the plan to realise its long-term social cohesion ambitions.

3. The missing piece: asylum & immigration reform

The plan explicitly acknowledges the role that asylum accommodation can play as a “lightning rod for community tensions”. This signals a growing recognition that cohesion, integration and policies on immigration and asylum are interconnected, and should be managed as such. Having said that, no matter how effectively the plan is implemented, a serious inconsistency remains - specifically when looked at alongside recent Home Office policies.  

Just a few days before the plan’s release, the home secretary announced that the baseline for settlement in the UK will increase from five to 10 years and refugee status will become temporary – moves that are likely to make it much harder for hundreds of thousands of people to build a life in the UK. It’s hard to balance that with the assertion that “millions of families will feel a stronger sense of community, unity and national pride”.   

What’s more, millions of pounds per day is still spent on asylum accommodation which is unfit for purpose. Despite risk and cost concerns from the NAO over the move away from hotels towards large-scale contingency accommodation, the government has continued to rely on this model and has renewed the use of military sites including in Pride in Place funded areas like Bournemouth and Medway. Large-scale military sites flare tensions and are highly contested by locals, which risks derailing Pride in Place’s core aims of building stronger communities.

The drive for social cohesion among communities must be tied in with immigration and asylum reform. Although ending the use of asylum hotels is mentioned as a whole-government aim within the plan for money-saving purposes, IPPR recommends bolder steps to boost cohesion. This should include decentralising asylum accommodation and moving towards a community-based model, in which regional and local authorities have a meaningful stake and decisions are made closer to the communities they affect.

On top of this, we recommend reinstating the Migration Impact Fund. First introduced in 2009, it was designed to assist local communities manage the pressures of rapid population change linked to migration, for example by increasing service capacity, expanding ESOL provision and supporting local integration activity. Reintroducing this fund would give local areas the money they need to invest in services and community initiatives that they need, with dedicated cohesion programmes such as the Common Ground Resilience Fund and wider neighbourhood renewal schemes like Pride in Place then playing a more targeted and complementary role.  

The government's cohesion action plan is a strong and welcome starting point. Yet changes to the asylum and immigration system will undermine a lot of its efforts.  If the home secretary’s reforms are carried through, people coming here will continue to struggle to create a stable and fulfilling life in the UK.  To deliver the confident communities that Steve Reed is striving for, Protecting What Matters must be implemented in tandem with an immigration policy which upholds dignity and supports integration.