Pride in Place
Engagement tells you what residents want. A baseline tells you whether anything changed. Accountable bodies need both and only one of them can still be created after the money starts moving.
£20m
per neighbourhood, over ten years, with spending decided by a resident-majority board.
284
neighbourhoods across the UK, each producing a ten-year plan and reporting on it.
10 yrs
of outcomes to demonstrate, measured against a starting point that has to exist first.
The gap
Most boards have done engagement well. Door-knocking, drop-ins, online surveys and community meetings. That work is genuinely valuable and it tells you what people want the money spent on.
It does not tell you what the neighbourhood is like right now, in a form you can measure again in 2031 and 2036.
The people who come to a drop-in or fill in an online form are the people already engaged. They are not a representative picture of the neighbourhood and a comparison against them in five years would not stand up to scrutiny. Different people, different method, different answer.
The same neighbourhood, two methods
Monitoring returns record what was delivered. Projects, spend, outputs, forecast. That is the right thing to collect for assurance and it is not the same as knowing whether the neighbourhood changed.
The question at year five will not be what the money was spent on. It will be whether anything got better.
What we do
Independent, properly sampled and designed from the start to be repeatable.
A representative face-to-face survey of the neighbourhood, not a self-selecting one. Pride in the area, perceived safety, use of local facilities, high street and public realm, social connection and whether people feel they have any say. Sampled so it can be repeated identically.
The baseline written up as something a board and an accountable body can both use. What residents prioritise, where views differ across the neighbourhood and which groups the engagement so far has not reached. Delivered in a form that supports the plan rather than sitting alongside it.
The same survey, same method and same sampling, on an agreed cycle. Each wave shows movement against the starting point. By year five the board has a trend rather than an anecdote, plus something a future funding conversation can rest on.
Timing
This is the part that cannot be fixed later. Once delivery starts, the pre-investment condition of the neighbourhood is unrecoverable. Nobody can go back and ask residents in 2026 how they felt about their high street before the work began.
Places that measure now will be able to show what a decade of investment achieved. Places that do not will be left describing what they spent it on.
How we work
Neighbourhood research fails when it is done to a community rather than with one. That reads like a platitude until you watch a survey get refused on a doorstep because the person asking has never set foot in the area before.
We are small and independent. The people who design the research are the people who go out and do it. Twenty-five years of face-to-face fieldwork has taught us how to reach the residents who never fill in an online form.
For accountable bodies and Neighbourhood Boards
If you are the accountable body for a Pride in Place neighbourhood, that question lands with you long before it lands with the board. It is worth a conversation now rather than in year three. We will tell you honestly whether you need us and what you could do yourselves.
Start a conversation