“The antidote to alienation is participation.”

It’s a good line from Andy Burnham. It’s a politician’s line. The question is how to make it real.

In their recent essay, Rich Bell and Ed Wallis make a case we think is right: that Burnham is a communitarian at heart, and that what’s being called Manchesterism is not a loose bundle of civic instincts but could become a coherent politics with a theory of power inside it.

That theory of power is the part most easily missed, because when we talk about place we so often reach instead for romance. It is a comfortable habit, and an old one. It would be very easy to read this moment as a gentle story about community, that what we need is a little investment in the new development, a bit of engagement, some warm words about neighbourhoods and belonging. Bell and Wallis are arguing something considerably harder-edged. Their case is about power and control: control over the local economy through the ownership of assets; control over public services through communities having the capacity to shape and to run them; and a genuinely more participatory democracy.

They know this because of who they work with. The theory of change here isn’t an academic one; it is one you hear from development trusts, community asset developers and other local leaders. It goes something like: if a more disadvantaged community gets hold of physical assets, it has something real to build governance around, something nobody can take back, and something it can use to build more power still. Locality’s members and the We’re Right Here campaigners do this daily. It is a far more radical proposition than the language of “community” sometimes carries.

Thick we, thin we

Here is the distinction that makes their case strong, and worth defending. It has to do with what we mean when we say ‘we’.

There is a thin we: belonging, cohesion, trust, the felt sense of connection between people. And there is a thick we: owning the building, holding the asset, running the service, keeping the value inside the place, having a hand on the local economy. Both matter. But they are not the same. The thin we is a feeling about our sense of something; it can be nurtured and it can evaporate, sometimes in the same season. That is the source of both its power and its fragility. The thick we is a deed and a set of keys, an economic and political fact about who owns what, who decides what, which doesn’t depend on how anyone feels next year.

They connect, of course, but Bell and Wallis are arguing more for the thick we. That is what makes their essay worth taking seriously. One thing to say early, because we come back to it at the end: the thick we is necessary and not sufficient. A set of keys is not an industrial strategy. That is a reason to hold on to the hard part while the rest is worked out, not a reason to trade it for the easy one. And it is the part most likely to have its edge taken off as these ideas travel.

Why the edge comes off

The evidence base for place-based work is lopsided: lots of evidence of things happening in places, less about how places themselves work to drive change. That asymmetry is what makes ideas about community so easy to blunt. The structural claim is expensive and confrontational, with no immediate ‘outcome’: transferring assets, shifting who holds contracts, changing who decides. The relational claim is cheaper and pleasant: encouraging people to connect. When an argument containing both moves into the policy world, there is a reliable gravitational pull towards the second. Nobody has to lose anything.

The relational claim is not an easy sell either. Taking the evidence on social connection as seriously as it deserves cuts against an ingrained assumption, reinforced by Treasury thinking, that economic conditions shape social ones and that economic levers are the means through which serious policymakers take serious action. What makes the relational claim travel is not that it is uncontested, but that it can be funded without anyone giving anything up.

You can watch the pull happen. The Behavioural Insights Team have just published Fractured, not broken, a separate contribution to the same “What is Burnhamism” debate. It is not a reply to Bell and Wallis and does not engage their essay; we set it beside theirs because it is the relational case at full strength, argued by people who believe it. Its argument, in brief, is that Britain’s problem is not collapsing trust but fractured connection: people of different incomes and backgrounds living close together and barely mixing. The remedy, it argues, is to design places, institutions and programmes that generate contact. Two offers now sit side by side, both with real value for places: one costs power and a significant shift of money; the other can be turned into a programme (a spending line, a delivery body, measurable outputs, and an end date) that requires neither. The edge does not need to be taken off. One of the two is simply easier to buy.

The BIT paper is strong in parts, and its diagnosis is more hopeful than the doom that usually frames these arguments. Its data showing interpersonal trust in Britain rising across two decades rather than collapsing is worth having. On the mechanics of contact, it is worth reading. But the evidence is a good deal more mixed than the pitch built on it allows, and the headline finding does less work than it appears to. That high and low earners living a couple of hundred metres apart at MediaCityUK barely mix is not much of a surprise. And the pattern in one regenerated waterfront is not the pattern in Greater Manchester. The unit of analysis is doing a lot of the work here, which is the first hint that what is really at stake in this argument is scale.

But look at what it is a theory of. Places appear in it as venues for contact. Programmes appear as ways of generating mixing. Power appears, but arrives as collective efficacy, a community’s sense of its own capacity, rather than the question of who owns and who decides. It is a whole account of the social fabric with the thick we removed.

Following the £100 billion

Take its economic centrepiece: that lifting trust to Nordic levels would add more than £100 billion a year to UK growth. We are not waving this away. Trust really does have economic value. Higher trust lowers the cost of doing business; more open networks help people hear about work through people they know. These effects are real and reasonably well evidenced.

But consider what they are: they travel with a person, not a place. They are the returns to being connected, realised largely by connecting people outward into wider labour markets, a story more about individual mobility than about lifting the economy of a place that has been left behind. Even the paper’s strongest economic finding, that low-income children in more connected neighbourhoods go on to earn more, is a fact about those children’s later mobility, not about the neighbourhoods.

The £100 billion itself is worth following, because its journey is the whole argument in miniature. The figure is not new: it is lifted, almost word for word, from a 2025 Demos essay written by David Halpern with Andy Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England. That essay rests the number on cross-country correlations between national trust and national growth, and it says in plain terms that the evidence on actual interventions, on whether doing something to build trust produces growth, is thin. It distinguishes the useful kind of social capital from the exclusionary kind, the old-boys’ network that serves a few at everyone else’s expense.

By the time that same number reaches the 2026 policy pitch, the caveats are gone. The cross-national confounding, the thin causal evidence, the dark side, the careful “associated with” are all sanded away, leaving a clean £100 billion bolted to a £5 billion programme for the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country. This is the edge coming off, and it is not bad faith: the Haldane and Halpern essay is a serious piece of work. It is that the serious version does not survive the journey into the sell.

The i-frame, one storey up

There is a good name now for what the sanding-off achieves, and it comes from inside behavioural science itself. In It’s on You, Nick Chater and George Loewenstein diagnose the i-frame: the habit of recasting a structural problem as a matter of individual behaviour. Their point isn’t that the individual level is unimportant; it is that proposing the individual fix is convenient: cheap, non-confrontational, a way of appearing to act while the change that would actually cost someone something goes unmade. Stripping the edges off the £100 billion is exactly what makes the relational fix look that clean. There is an irony in finding the pattern in a paper from the team that made nudge a household word, and it sharpens given that Chater and Loewenstein’s other charge — that a great deal of behavioural economics simply does not replicate — has never really been answered by the field now offering to design contact at national scale.

Though strictly this isn’t the i-frame; it is one storey up in the we-frame. The lever has moved from the individual to the community, which feels like progress and in one sense is. But the logic is identical: the cause is located inside the community’s own social capacity, and the fix becomes something the community can be helped to do for itself. Cheaper than assets. Cheaper than contracts. Cheaper than changing who decides.

Two kinds of participation

Participation is where this gets hardest, because it is the claim that can most easily be imitated cheaply. It is also the element of Bell and Wallis’s case that travels most easily, and so the one a relational reading reaches for first: participation sounds like something you can convene without transferring anything. But participation is only one part of their essay; it sits alongside asset ownership and control over services. Still, the question underneath is worth getting right.

Three things can be true of a place. In some places the networks of participation are simply latent: present, unconvened, waiting. Convene them and something real happens. But some places are constrained: the institutions are structured to keep substantive challenge out, and inviting people into a process that cannot deliver teaches them, one more time, that challenge is futile. And some are captured: the organisations and the assets exist but serve someone other than the community, and an invitation to take part becomes a legitimation ceremony — we consulted the community — for whoever is holding the thing.

The resolution is not that participation is good here and bad there; it is that we need more nuance in designing how we support places. The state of a place doesn’t tell you whether to build participation; it tells you which kind. Offer the invited kind where the organised kind is needed, and you have done worse than nothing: you have spent the community’s belief that acting is worthwhile.

The material ceiling

Above all of it, though, sits what makes the relational substitution untenable. Thirty years of British regeneration evaluation (the New Deal for Communities, the Neighbourhood Management Pathfinders) tell one stubbornly consistent story: when we invest in neighbourhoods the physical fabric improves, the measurable outcomes for people lag, and the gains often fade once the money stops. Four national audit bodies looking at neighbourhood regeneration, across four nations, have converged on the same conclusion: material and economic damage is not repairable by social programmes. Beatty and Fothergill measured what de-industrialisation did to specific places, and no quantity of community activity has reversed it. It is the material ceiling that keeps showing up wherever social programmes are asked to do economic work, and thirty years of good intentions have not raised it. It is real, and cohesion does not lift it.

This is exactly why the thick we matters, and why the edge must not come off. Asset ownership touches the material. Running a service touches the material. Trust, on its own, does not. We should be honest that this makes the thick we a better bet rather than a proven one, the evidence that community ownership lifts the ceiling is far from perfect. But we think that investing in a place is a weave of practices, not a single thread. Some patterns of practice focus on the thin we, some on the thick, and some engage with structures and systems more explicitly. They all have value for places, but one alone tends to shift very little, and so reducing investment in places to one is a huge risk, and likely a huge waste.

The limit we haven’t solved

None of us has finished articulating what comes next. What do you do when the keys are in your hand and the economy around the building has already gone?

This is the limit we flagged at the start. Even the thick we runs into one. Owning the community centre is real power, and it does not rewrite the economy that hollowed the place around it. Above everything here sits what Chater and Loewenstein call the s-frame, changing the rules rather than redistributing control within them, and neither Bell and Wallis’s essay nor our own framework has a settled account of how you get there from a single neighbourhood. We’ll say plainly that this is the frontier of our collective thinking rather than something we have solved. We’d also resist the tidy ending in which “and therefore, structural economics” becomes one more universal answer. A former coalfield, a coastal town, a superdiverse inner-city ward and a thinned-out rural county are hitting different ceilings for different reasons, and the structural work has to be as place-differentiated as everything beneath it.

But let’s look at what the practitioners are already doing about it. We’re Right Here campaigns nationally for a Community Power Act, because you cannot own your way out of some things, one place at a time. Locality members federate. They have been enacting the answer to a question nobody has yet written down properly: the place-based we, scaled up, running into a foundation it can campaign against but cannot, alone, rewrite. They have been investing in the conditions of places at a national scale. That is not a hole in the politics. It is a sentence that has been started and needs finishing.

The edge is the whole of it

Whichever lever you reach for, one more thing has to change, and it is the thing the MediaCity finding was pointing at: scale. Almost everything tried over the last thirty years has been a project: bounded, evaluable, small, and ending. Evidence-based programmes, what works centres, behavioural economics, social finance: none of it yet shown to move safety, health or financial security at the scale of a place, let alone a country. The moments when the relationship between the state and civil society did move those things were not projects. They were bets: universal, structural, expensive, and aimed at the rules rather than at behaviour inside them. A contact programme for the most deprived neighbourhoods is the wrong size of answer to the question the essay is actually asking.

Read the essay. Rich Bell and Ed Wallis have put a theory of power at the centre of an argument that could easily have been a warm story about community, and they have done it because the people they work with have been proving it for decades, that a community holding an asset holds something nobody can take away.

The danger was never disagreement. It is dilution, and it is takeover once there is real political interest: the version that arrives eighteen months from now with the assets quietly removed and the mixing left in, that costs less and changes less, that is nationally contracted out and that can still be called community power. We’ve just watched a single number make that journey. In investing seriously in places, the edge is the whole of it: the deed, the keys, the hand on the thing that decides.

So the question we would put to Burnham, to Bell and Wallis, and to ourselves is not whether communitarianism is right. We think it is. It is whether what comes next meets the size of the problem.

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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.

We start with the how

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.

The power of people in place

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.

Talk about failing places doesn’t help

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.

Evidence for change in place

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.

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Yesterday, the Chancellor gave a speech which included clear reference to fiscal devolution. That came on the same day that the specific Total Place pilots were announced at the New Local event.

These two announcements are significant steps along a journey that has had many ups and downs over the years, and it is clearly in the same ballpark of conversations as the English Devolution Bill, local government reorganisation and all things devolution.

Three ways to see place

That group of conversations is, in our view, one of three ways in which this government is advancing an agenda around place – place as governance and devolution.

Place as governance and devolution. It goes all the way from the Treasury view of fiscal devolution, through to what does neighbourhood governance look like in my neighbourhood when the implications of the Devolution bill wash through.

The second way that this government is engaging with place is through one of targeted investment: place as a way to think about need, investment and targeting. This is what drives all of the significant announcements around Pride in Place, and it is connected hugely to what the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods has been advocating for. It is a view that frequently relies on measures, indices and justifications for targeting this place, not that place; or this scale, not that scale. The recent analysis by JRF highlights the opportunities but also the real challenges of this sort of targeting.

The third way that this government is engaging in place is through the variety of bills, policies and agendas that are connected to different departments. This includes neighbourhood health, and Best start family hubs, but there are also local elements and questions in work on financial resilience, homelessness, mental health and youth policy. This is place as mediator of outcomes, from health to crime to child development.

All of these are valuable and each have many elements to them, with different departments, organisations and groups engaging with them and advancing them.

Two problems for places

This three-way split makes sense for government, and I’d rather they were doing it than not. But it creates two problems for places:

1. Language. The social sector in its broadest sense is bad with language, and this three-way split often use the same words to mean slightly different things. Sometimes that difference doesn’t matter, but sometimes it really does. It makes it very hard to think about how these agendas connect and where they can clash if they’re all using the word ‘place’, and it makes it very hard to think critically about how to understand their impacts in places that experience them together.

2. Bandwidth. How many hubs does a place need? Does it need separate governance for Pride in Place and how does that connect to neighbourhood governance models from the Devolution Bill? Should the Director of Social Care engage with the neighbourhood health work, or one of the other local agendas that are working with five of the neighbourhoods in her patch? Does the Pride in Place money need to be spent quickly, and does that fit with some of the structural changes of local government reorganisation? What skills does an individual who has been working with vulnerable adults need now, as the landscape has become suddenly about local partnerships and collaboration? Does a place have enough bandwidth for this – and what’s going to get dropped, or rushed, when the answer is invariably no?

Place is having a moment in this country, and we are delighted about that. But we are also worried about not making the most of this moment, because we’ve not found a way to hold all of this without dropping the ball.

One field to unite practice

We think there is a way to do it that can unite these agendas, and it’s about seeing place-based work as a field of practice, and less about seeing scale or targeting as the crucial elements of understanding place. Each area agenda will always have their own views on priorities and what needs to be targeted, and this will never be ‘solved’.

If it’s a field of practice, then you can look at how different categories of place-based work are relevant to what you (as a government department or a charity or combined authority) want to achieved in a place, and you can see how change is possible if you work with the infrastructure of that place: whether the social, state or market infrastructure. You can see how each of those categories are interconnected and build on how places naturally change all the time through the people who live and work in them.

In our taxonomy of place based change, we identified five categories to make sense of the field. Our categories were: i) continuous local social change, ii) civil society organisation led-change, iii) state and civil society relations, iv) market interventions, and v) rebalancing civil society, state and market infrastructure.

We know that if you are interested in the possibility of collaborating in category three to achieve some policy goals, then that work is completely reliant on the organisations that make category two work, and that those are reliant on the continuous local social change of people in places. These aren’t neatly nested, but they are interconnected, and intervening in one bit of ‘place’ is reliant on the others and can cause damage to them if misunderstood.

We can clearly see how these three agendas could be connecting to evidence informed ways of working. Right now, we’re building out that evidence base for the next phase of our work, and we think that there’s something really important to hold about the relationship between these categories, encouraging government and funders to go more with the grain of approaches to change that already exist, and which can be developed collaboratively. These agendas are not just an opportunity to invest in places; they are an opportunity for us all to work very differently in places.

We are talking to some organisations about how they are shifting their practice to meet the opportunities of neighbourhood health of place-based programmes. If you’d be interested in thinking about how you navigate that well, we’d love to chat.

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If an organisation in a field of practice, let’s say social work, wants to influence policy, then we know how to do it.

There is a professional body, there is clear understanding of the policy framework and funding mechanisms. There are years of experience and practice. There is an evidence base that is understood and situated both within academia, but also government, trade unions, and think tanks. There are representatives of staff, there are patients’ groups, there is a connection to providers, there are the NHS structures. It is understood who needs to be spoken to, and what is likely to influence them and constrain their ability to effect change.

Knowing how to do it, doesn’t make it easy. And sometimes the more established the field is, the more rigid collective inertia can be. But it is legible.

What do you then do if you want to influence policy around an emergent field of practice?

It is not clear who to talk to, there’s no ministerial structure, no understood evidence community, no professional body, and no structured way to consider funding and financial flows, because it often comes from a mishmash of places.

I think loneliness experienced this in the period before and after the creation of the Minister for Loneliness position in 2018. There were some significant wins in the policy agenda, but also a difficulty in holding it together. I reflect now as to whether loneliness was the right label for the interconnected issues of isolation, loneliness, connection, cohesion, belonging, wellbeing and many more that swirled around that conversation.

Cementing place as a field of practice in the UK

We’re interested in the supply and demand of high-quality place-based practice. We know that there are a variety of actors who are interested in that too, and that the field is disparate, disorganised and under pressure. There is infrastructure in Place Matters, there is policy interest in government, and there is investment. But there is also a muddied confluence of conversations and funding streams around place, local systems, relationships, neighbourhoods, learning, community power, and several more.

There is movement though, and whilst nobody wants to unify something that is, by definition, locally driven, a greater appreciate of the shape, size, function and value of the field of practice could have myriad benefits.

• We think that defining the field a little more clearly is an essential first step, and we have secured funding to do further research into the taxonomy of place-based mechanisms that we published last year.

• We know that we need to build out a clearer evidentiary community, and through partners like the Stewardship Group of Place Matters, interested individuals in the network of groups like ChEW, and conversations being held by colleagues at places like Dartington, Renaisi and Collaborate are all vibrant and important. We don’t think we need a What Works centre for place, but we perhaps need some of the functions of such models to hold this together.

• We can see that Place Matters is developing learning practices and working with practitioners on the ground, sharing tools and approaches and building a sense of collective endeavour. Others in the evidentiary community are also exploring learning practices alongside that work too.

• We have written about the relationship between place and local/ regional government and know that many organisations including New Local and Collaborate are working on this around LGR with local government across the country. Combined Authorities need to be part of this too.

• We know that funders are interested in this and are starting to talk to each other about how to fund place-based approaches well, but that can often be opaque for those not in the conversations.

• Finally, there are several groups that work specifically on issues such as community power, i.e. the We’re Right Here Campaign, that think about place and policy from that perspective. The members of that campaign, and those who have been part of the work of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, have worked on influence around policy from a community and neighbourhood perspective.

What we cannot see, and are interested in exploring, is a group of individuals and organisations who are wanting to work on the policy questions and practices of influence for place-based work, in relation to other agendas.

If you’re working on homelessness or child poverty, education or financial resilience, do you just influence on what government ‘should’ do in your agenda, or are you also interested in working with others on how government designs and funds to collectively solve challenges? Could collective narrative and support around policy practices and tools help us build the mutually reinforcing agendas that we know we need on so many policy questions? Would working with peers on some of these questions that currently seem slippery and difficult to present to civil servants or ministers, help build a shared sense of what can be done collaboratively across issues within places?

We’re talking to a few organisations about this and would love to hear from more who might be interested in thinking this through together. If this might be you, then please get in touch with us at john@storiesofchange.co.uk and anna@storiesofchange.co.uk

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