‘Pride in Place’£214m new funding for Welsh communities to improve neighbourhoods and restore pride – GOV.UK is a rare opportunity to rebuild local civic and economic infrastructure with long-term financial support. Successful delivery of the programme’s ambitions will depend as much on how things are done as on what gets delivered.
Starting point:To avoid displacing and replacing local community initiatives we urge ‘Pride in Place’ needs three things:
- Inclusive community “co-design” working in the open
- A stimulus for fresh ideas and new possibilities
- Dialogue between decision makers and micro communities must be involved
Co-operative education programmes will be essential to provide residents and future co-operators with the practical skills, knowledge, and confidence required to genuinely manage the substantial funding for the long term. It will also explicitly support the programme’s aims. These questions have been sent to the nine local MPs crucially driving the Phase 2 process.
Here: we provide two short papers: Policy Paper 02/2026 Pride in Place (PiP) – the vital role of Co-operative & Community Education Policy Paper 02:2026 , and Discussion Paper 02/2026 “Pride in Place” (Phase 2) Wales Operational Challenges: The Impracticality of the 3-Month Startup Period Discussion Paper 02:26 Pride in Place – critque 3 months
Please get in touch if you wish to learn more, or if can contribute to how PiP is evolving in these nine areas.
A word of caution: England’s most deprived areas to get worse by next election, report for No 10 finds:
The “government’s flagship Pride in Place scheme, under which nearly 250 areas will get £20m over 10 years for local regeneration, would not be enough to undo the damage being done to disadvantaged neighbourhoods. “The Pride in Place programme gets us to the starting line to change disadvantaged communities, but as these forecasts show, we are going to need be much bolder if we are to reverse a decade of austerity, deep structural decline, and decaying high streets,”
