Community partnership as the engine of local growth

Last week I was in Barking for an event the Growth and Reform Network (GRN) hosted with The Open University. It brought together council leadership, academics and policy professionals with community voices and local enterprise to assess the last decade of inclusive economic growth and regeneration in the borough. With political fragmentation expected in local elections in May, the discussion was unusually open and reflective and the message from both community and political leaders was clear – relationships matter. If the previous decade of policy had one fault, it was that it failed to integrate the perspective of residents and local communities, leaving them feeling that ‘regeneration’ was being done to them rather than by them. Many things had been out of the council’s power over the last decade but this was not one. Building trusting relationships between the people and organisations that make up Barking and Dagenham was the work of the next decade, work which had already begun in the form of BD Giving and the Galleon Arts Centre.  

The clarity of this message struck me, because it so directly reflects the findings from our research with The Health Foundation last year which indicates that place-based interventions achieve better health outcomes when they are shaped with local partners and communities rather than imposed from outside. Our structured evidence review of interventions across high-income countries found that interventions deliver more sustained economic, health and wellbeing improvements when they are context-sensitive, locally tailored, and informed by lived experience, with embedded learning loops to adapt policy over time.  

This is something that many of our network members know and are acting on. Earlier this month, Rachel Armstrong from the North East Combined Authority wrote for GRN about their Local Community Partnerships programme which they suggest could be a blueprint for offer a future investment in local social infrastructure.  

So why isn’t the co-design of policy already embedded in mainstream practice? Despite increasing recognition of co-design’s value, there are systemic reasons it has not been widely adopted.  

1. Firstly, co-design is resource-intensive: it takes time, sustained engagement and flexible funding that aligns with local cycles rather than financial year accounting. Funding programmes with narrow criteria can undercut the long-term relationship and trust building that co-design requires.  
2. Secondly, both central and local government remains organised around departmental siloes, with inflexible priorities that can make it hard to integrate community input meaningfully. A recent UK government evaluation of place-based pilots found that departments struggled to collaborate across organisational boundaries, and national priorities often left little room for local adaptation.  
3. Then there are the power dynamics. Traditional policy cultures privilege expert-led, centralised decision making. Many policymakers lack training in participatory methods, and there is institutional discomfort with sharing power and control over policy design. Evidence from participatory policy reviews shows that co-design is often treated as consultation rather than a core design method and this is something that we heard reflected at the event in Barking and Dagenham. Without clear frameworks and shared expectations, engagement can fail to translate community input into policy decisions, undermining trust on all sides. Academic reviews note that power imbalances and ill-defined roles between policymakers and community partners make sustained co-design difficult.  

Some of these constraints may be easier to overcome at local and regional level, and it is places like NECA and Leeds who are leading the way on this agenda. But all tiers of government, need to pay attention because, as the conversations in Barking last week reiterated, the effective co-design of public policy offers a route towards greater democratic legitimacy and engagement. The UK’s political institutions are beset by low and falling levels of public trust, which in turn are driving a widespread rise in the appeal of populist parties. Engaging more communities in the policy making processes offers a clear route to regaining public trust so we can move forward together.