Towards a Communities Agenda 2.0

Since coming to power, Labour has begun to give communities and neighbourhoods renewed attention, with Pride in Place marking an important shift towards longer-term investment and greater citizen involvement in some of the country’s most deprived places. Andy Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street creates an opportunity to go much further than we’ve seen up to now: to make his promise of “good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart” the foundation of a lasting and ambitious communities agenda. The government’s Rewiring the State statement reinforces that ambition, with an unequivocal call for decisions to be made closer to local communities, for people to be involved in shaping them, and for elected officials to be held to account.  

Delivering on these promises will require devolution to be more than a transfer of power between institutions. It must be heard and felt on every doorstep – giving people greater influence over their communities and helping to rebuild trust between communities and the state – be that national, regional or local government. Done well, this could help realise Burnham’s first words on entering Number 10 – a call for “a new national sense of unity, of common purpose and positivity”. The question now is what this more ambitious communities agenda should look like in practice.  

A crisis of trust

Our politics are increasingly defined by a crisis of trust. Confidence in democratic institutions and politicians themselves is shaped not only by events in Westminster, piped into our homes through screens and social media, but by what people see, feel and experience when they step outside their front door. Whether they can influence local decisions, whether public services are accessible and shared spaces maintained, and whether the place they call home appears to have a meaningful future all affect how people judge government itself. As trust has declined, democratic participation has weakened and populist politics has gained ground. Rebuilding it must therefore be at the heart of a revived communities agenda.

Local experiences can generate distrust in three interconnected ways:  

1. Democratic powerlessness

First, too many people feel they have little influence over the decisions affecting their area. Polling for We’re Right Here found that almost four in five people felt they had “not much control” or “no control” over decisions affecting their local community. The government’s community life survey tells a similar story. In 2024/25 only 24 per cent of adults felt they could personally influence decisions affecting their local area (a figure that has stayed reliably low over the past decade).  

At the same time, there appears to be declining trust in councils and councillors to act in local people’s interests (though councils remain more trusted than central government). Last year, trust in local councillors fell to 30 per cent in the Ipsos Veracity Index, the lowest level since councillors were added to the index in 2006.  

This must be seen hand in hand with the weakening of local government itself. More than a decade of austerity, shrinking budgets and rising demand for essential services have left many councils overstretched and struggling to deliver, with these pressures felt particularly acutely in parts of the North. The result is a damaging combination in which local institutions lack the resources to act, while residents have limited influence over what they do. In places that already feel distant from centres of power, that can reinforce the belief that politics is something done to people, rather than with or by them.

2. Visible economic decline  

Second, economic decline – not just that which is felt in the household purse, but seen out on the streets in shuttered shops, potholes and neglected parks – can also drive distrust in politics. Deindustrialisation, shrinking employment opportunities, outward migration and long-term underinvestment have helped create what scholars have dubbed a “geography of discontent”: places where residents think they have little future and are neglected by political elites. That sense of decline is increasingly visible in how people view their own neighbourhoods. In the latest Community Life Survey, 30 per cent of adults said their local area had become a worse place to live over the previous two years. The trend shows that the proportion of people feeling this way has increased steadily over the last decade (aside from a blip during the pandemic).

This sense of neglect is not simply economic; it is also cultural and psychological - involving a loss of dignity, identity, and belonging. High streets can make this especially visible. Empty shops and deteriorating town centres become tangible evidence that government is absent or ineffective, while research has linked high street decline with growing support for anti-establishment and populist parties.  

3. Weakened social infrastructure  

Finally, trust depends on the social fabric of our communities. Through social infrastructure - the places in which we can come together – we can build a sense of belonging and encounter people who are different from ourselves.  

However, such spaces are in decline. In many communities, deindustrialisation has removed not only secure employment but also many of the social institutions connected to workplaces, such as welfare clubs and community facilities. More recently, austerity has led to the closure of vital libraries, youth clubs, Sure Start centres, leisure facilities, pubs, and other shared spaces that once fostered everyday interactions.  In London alone, around 30 per cent of youth clubs closed between 2010 and 2019, while the north of England suffered the largest losses of libraries between 2010 and 2024.  

As these places disappear, many people have become increasingly isolated and more reliant on online spaces, where misinformation, grievance and extremist narratives can circulate with less friction. The consequences of this are particularly acute when communities face rapid or poorly managed change. For instance, our research on asylum accommodation showed how, in places where communication is weak and trust is already low, unverified claims can spread online - heightening fear, shaping the tone of local debate and helping to turn online anger into protest and unrest.   

Is Pride in Place the answer?  

Under Keir Starmer, the Labour government placed much of its communities agenda in the Pride in Place basket. There is much to welcome in its focus on some of the most disadvantaged places, its emphasis on co-development through neighbourhood boards, and its investment in social infrastructure. But it cannot carry the weight of renewing communities up and down the country on its own. Its reach is uneven, it is limited to selected neighbourhoods, and questions remain about the extent to which power will genuinely sit with communities themselves.

The next phase needs to go further. Community power must become the norm rather than the exception, investment needs to be sustained over the long term, and social infrastructure must become a lasting part of how places are supported. That means moving beyond individual programmes towards a clearer set of principles for communities policy.  

The foundations of a stronger communities agenda

Addressing these three forces – democratic powerlessness, economic decline and weakened social infrastructure – cannot be done in isolation. Instead, it requires a communities policy built around three interconnected and mutually reinforcing foundations:  

• Power: giving people meaningful influence over the decisions that shape their neighbourhood.  
• Investment: directing sustained resources towards the places, services and institutions that matter for communities.  
• Connection: strengthening the shared spaces, local organisations and relationships that allow people to act together, care for one another and build a sense of belonging.  

Our view is that the test of a successful communities agenda will be whether power, investment and connection become guiding principles for government. Pursuing any one of them in isolation will fall short. Without resources, power will feel hollow. Investment without influence can feel imposed – and may miss the mark of what people actually want. And without connection, grounded in the relationships and spaces that hold us together, neither will endure. 

What might a Communities Agenda 2.0 look like?  

We’ll be setting out our full recommendations with a report in early 2027. In the meantime, these are some initial ideas we want to test and build on with local government, mayors, communities and policymakers.  

First, there is a golden opportunity to join up devolution and communities policy. So far, devolution has largely focussed on shifting powers from Whitehall to regional and local institutions. That is important, but it does not automatically bring decisions closer to neighbourhoods and communities – indeed, it can sometimes pull power upwards to the regional tier. Our own polling in Greater Manchester showed that – despite the real gains of devolution there – many residents still feel that politics happens to them rather than with them.  

The next phase of devolution should therefore put much greater emphasis on community power.  That means stronger neighbourhood-level decision making, more power for communities over local assets and services, and participatory approaches embedded in how mayoral strategic authorities make decisions. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act provides some of the building blocks for this, including through a new community right to buy. As others have set out, Greater Manchester’s Live Well programme and Participation Playbook offer a useful example from the prime minister’s old stomping ground of how this could work in practice. Live Well seeks to shift public services towards earlier, neighbourhood-based support developed with communities, while the Participation Playbook offers practical ways to involve people in decisions and service design, including participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies and community reporting.  

Second, we want to revitalise our high streets. Local shops, cafes and pubs so often provide the glue which hold communities together. A new levy on online sales could be used to reduce business rates in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors. This could help to level the playing field between online and physical retailers and support many of the high street businesses which function as vital community spaces for local neighbourhoods.

Third, an effective response to the challenges communities face must engage with the sharper end of cohesion. Recent IPPR work has argued for a clearer role for mayoral strategic authorities, including convening local cohesion leads, providing visible leadership on belonging and integration, and coordinating responses across council boundaries. That matters because tensions do not fit neatly within administrative borders, and cohesion cannot be left until crisis hits. This should sit alongside a move away from large asylum hotels towards smaller, community-based accommodation, backed by a visible community dividend for places that have hosted asylum hotels. There is also a strong case for bringing back the migration impact fund, giving places experiencing rapid population change dedicated resources to expand services, support integration and invest in community cohesion.

Pride in Place has laid important foundations for supporting communities. The task now is to build on them - with these and other ideas - through an agenda that is broader in scope, bolder in ambition and built to last. This is not a peripheral policy challenge. It goes to the heart of whether people feel they have a stake in their communities, or instead become further disenchanted and detached from the institutions and politics that shape their lives. A stronger communities agenda can help reverse that trend, making power, investment and connection felt in everyday life, and in turn rebuilding the trust, belonging and common purpose on which thriving communities depend.