About this briefing
I am Dr Dan Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Thought at the Open University. These days I teach and research politics for the UK’s largest university, but some years ago I was a disability support worker on the Becontree Estate, and it’s been my pleasure to have worked on and off in Barking and Dagenham over the last 15 years. As most will know, there have been major and fast-paced developments in regeneration and housing development in the borough, as any view of the cranes surrounding Barking Abbey or Riverside will attest, but what has been the impact of this on local residents and communities?
Around three years ago, I set out to find out. Over that time, I’ve had hundreds of informal conversations about what matters to LBBD residents and what they’d like to see out of ‘inclusive growth’. From those, I recorded 34 interviews and 6 focus groups with local residents (15), members of the community and voluntary sector (15), and local councillors and council officers (4). The briefing also draws on analysis of council strategy documents, cabinet papers, and independent reviews spanning the full decade, and on a purpose-built data workbook assembling public indicators – earnings, child poverty, housing, employment – from ONS, ASHE, DLUHC and other official sources, benchmarked against London and peer boroughs.
My approach has been careful and methodical, and my research in LBBD continues, with a resident community research network being developed over 2026, and a funded PhD partnership with the Growth and Reform Network until 2029. My learnings from LBBD will form part of a wider book I am writing examining politics, place and democratic renewal across England. It has been a privilege to gain the trust of residents and the borough’s deeply committed public servants, and I have learned a great deal from them.
This briefing note sets out some of my core findings. The aim is a sober and clear-sighted reckoning with a decade of local authority-led ambition and vision that collided with unprecedented funding constraints and once-in-a-generation crises like Covid, Brexit and the impact of the war in Ukraine on inflation. The keywords are choice and constraint: what was possible, what was not, what choices were made or not made, what constraints (local, national) did the local authority work under, and what was the response. Ultimately, the purpose is not to apportion praise or blame but to examine, practically and with an open mind, what the lessons are so far from ten years of work on inclusive growth in LBBD, both for the borough and for local government more broadly.
The findings were discussed at an invitation-only roundtable on 11 March 2026 at Barking ThreeSixty, convened with the Growth and Reform Network and attended by approximately forty participants including the council leader, council officers, developers, community and voluntary sector leaders, local residents, academics, and representatives of local authorities nationally. Our discussion was held under the Chatham House Rule and came just under two months before local elections across England that were predicted to be difficult for the council, a long-term Labour stronghold. The discussion broadly confirmed the analysis while sharpening two points in particular: the importance and difficulty of building genuine trust and partnership between institutions with very different kinds of power, and the gap between the language of consultation and the experience of residents who feel (often with reason) that decisions have already been made. Contributors also identified the development of civic infrastructure by the voluntary and community sector as a dimension this briefing does not fully assess.
A final word about the framing of this briefing. Partnership is a word that recurs throughout: in the Growth Commission’s original vision, in the council’s current strategy, and in the testimony of residents and community leaders. But partnership between institutions with very different resources, incentives and accountability structures is inherently difficult. Goodwill is not sufficient, by itself. It requires candour about constraint, mutual respect between people who hold different kinds of power, and a willingness to be honest about what is and isn’t working. That discipline of honest partnership is, in many ways, what the decade tested most severely. National and international shocks were not in the power of anyone in the borough, but attitudes and dispositions to relationships, partnership working and collaboration most certainly are.
