‘Do you want to shape the future of your area?’ This is what a poster on a local busstop poster states, as part of a new national marketing campaign to get people involved in neighbourhood planning. It has been a long time since such a concerted effort has been made to increase levels of community involvement, certainly since the heady days of Big Society and, before that, various New Labour programmes.
At the local level, of course, there are pockets of interesting activity, probably most notable in Lambeth (through the Co-operative Council programme) and through targeted programmes such as the Lottery Funded Big Local programme. One recent blog also talked about creating a new ‘participatory city’.
But, what do we know about the likely success of this and similar initiatives? How do they fit with what else is going on in terms of civic participation?
At NatCen, we have been looking at what a major national household panel survey can tell us, as part of a wider programme of work on social capital, organised by the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.
According to the available data, we found that, on average, 3% of British adults considered them to be active in some kind of neighbourhood group. This is not insignificant but much less than the big hitters in terms of other membership organisations (17% for sports clubs, 11% for religious organisations, 6% for wider voluntary services groups and 5% for parent school associations).
Perhaps more encouragingly, the survey also asks about peoples’ attitudes to their neighbourhood. On this measure, about 14% of people ‘strongly agree’ that they are willing to improve their neighbourhood. The data also show that while older age groups who are much more likely to be active in neighbourhood groups, younger groups are equally if not more likely to say they are willing to improve their area.
While it is not possible to track change in these measures very well, a separate survey does track levels of ‘civic activism’ – which could be taken as a proxy measure. This shows, that about 9-10% of adults are active in some way but there has been no marked change in the last 10 years.
So, active community involvement in British society is pretty marginal activity. It is likely that neighbourhood planning will hit many of the same buffers that other initiatives failed to tackle – indeed, the latest evidence shows that, unsurprisingly, neighbourhood plans are much more common in advantaged areas where there are pre-existing high levels of social capital.
However, there are grounds for optimism, given there is some latent demand. One of the principles of good community development is ‘go to where people are at’ rather than expect them to come to you. This suggests a better approach may be to build on existing patterns of activity rather than trying to create new ones.
Finally, a challenge for the sector: it is laudable to want to increase community involvement but, until this is informed by evidence and tracking, there will be a lack of fundamental progress. Hopefully, these national surveys can offer a hint of what could be achieved.