A same but different place

Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom today, the sixth since Theresa May a decade ago this month. He is leader of a party elected on the basis of a manifesto, a core part of which was place-based change. The new Prime Minister is promising to do the same, but differently. What might this mean for those of us working on place?

Over the last year, we have been examining the literature on place from around the world and talking to people leading change across the United Kingdom. Just in case Andy Burnham has a spare moment, here is what we have learned so far about doing this work differently.

At its most effective, this kind of work uses change in place to bring about better health and well-being in people. It changes the context around people. As Nick Chater and George Loewenstein put it in their recent book It’s On You, this work changes the rules of the game, not the players. Too much place-based change continues to try and fix people one case at a time. That could be different.

Fresh thinking is required before reform gets underway. Places are changing with or without place-based change, and not always in ways or directions that we imagine. Traditional industries in Liverpool have been decimated, but tourism has doubled in the City Region to 57 million visitors per year during this century. The long story of any place is a story of flow as well as ebb, and the flow has too often been discounted in the minds of reformers.

Even the most economically deprived communities have negotiated their way through the economic crash of 2008, a six to eight per cent reduction in income post-Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2021/22 cost of living crisis. Few people will welcome well-remunerated outsiders telling them what to do in the guise of co-production. Different means channelling and building on existing community power. It means investing in what exists.

Every place carries its own social ecology: the habits, relationships and reciprocities that hold when institutions falter. It was this, more than any single programme, that carried communities through two decades of shocks. Positive change tends to come when change makers recognise and work with the rich and evolving context in their places. The work can fail to deliver when efforts underestimate the power of places; treating them as blank pages on which programmes or grand projects are drawn.

Through our work we have seen the ways people in place adapt and evolve to keep up with the changing needs of their communities. In this conversation, Andy Jackson, who has lived and worked in Heeley, Sheffield for over 25 years, describes his activism to save and develop a local park graduating into securing community ownership of multiple income-generating assets that circulate wealth back into his community. The community had Andy’s back. Together they made change happen. Similarly, Atara Fridler told us her work on homelessness in Brent began by taking over a community garden. It morphed into neighbourhood planning, seeding community land trusts and, eventually, housing first approaches. In these examples, community power is built, nurtured, respected and used.

Better to recognise and learn from government failings; to respond equitably to the radical change in the national economy since the 1970s, to continually extend democracy and protect the integrity of state institutions, and perhaps most importantly, to maintain social and physical infrastructure. The new administration could do no worse than reexamine the Bennett School of Public Policy concept of Universal Basic Infrastructure, and Dieter Helm’s idea of that, at the very least, each generation should pass onto the next the infrastructure it inherited.

Our work is about encouraging place-based funders and practitioners to learn from and use evidence about effective practice from around the world. We are particularly interested in what we can learn about how change happens -the mechanism- and from common and effective patterns of working, like collective impact and community organising.

As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham was a pioneer in place-based change, building on a quarter of a century of toil by Richard Leese, Howard Bernstein and other civic leaders in the Combined Authority. Between 1998 and 2023, GDP per capita in Greater Manchester grew faster and more than any other region in England. We will report on this extraordinary story in the coming months. It reveals a readiness to employ several change mechanisms in unison -agglomeration around a revitalised centre to build the economy; investment in physical and social infrastructure to extend civil society and spread growth; building alliances between state and civil society; and much more.

Another feature of Greater Manchester is the breadth of ambition and the multiple layers of place-based change, reflecting people’s ability to see themselves as part of many places at once. Our new Prime Minister led the work across the combined authority. There was also multiple radical reform in the constituent ten local authorities, not least the Wigan Deal. The Live Well programme has sponsored innovation in neighbourhoods, often in collaboration with the NHS.

All of this could happen because of strong, cross party-political leadership, and that could only happen because Leese and Bernstein negotiated the greatest amount of devolution of power of any English region. Decisions about Manchester were made in Manchester, not Westminster.

Freedom from Westminster might encourage improvement in learning and evaluation of place-based change. We live at a moment of almost unimaginable change in availability, analysis and authority over data; change that is particularly apt for understanding the relationships at the heart of place. But when we trawl through the available evidence base for the United Kingdom or look at how funders are thinking about evaluating future initiatives, we find approaches stuck in the linear world of programme evaluation.

The prize is not tidier reports. We write about place and evidence to unlock investment in better work. To understand a place is to understand its relationships, and relationships are seldom linear. We care not only about whether an intervention works, but also knowing how it builds on the inherent power of place, which connections carry the change forward, and under what conditions change takes root. We are hoping our new Prime Minister will set a context that gives public system leaders the permission, the patience, and the strength to break free of old logics and enable investment and learning that builds on the vitality and strength in place.