With the turn of the year, thoughts in those areas selected by the Government for the new ‘Pride in Place’ programme will be turning in earnest to preparing for the programme to go live from April 2026. 

As colleagues have pointed out in the Municipal Journal, it is vital that as areas prepare, we bear in mind the (sometimes hard learned) lessons from previous area-based regeneration initiatives, particularly the New Deal for Communities.

I qualified as a solicitor in 2000, the same year that the NDC programme began, and spent the majority of my time for the first 11 years of my career supporting NDC partnerships. The programme began with a huge sense of optimism; here was something genuinely different, a regeneration initiative for the long term, based on the aspirations of local people for their own neighbourhoods, planned and led by them. A genuinely ‘new’ deal.

The reality was that this was partly true, but the pressure of targets, local and national expectations, and the need to demonstrate results quickly all took their toll. Sometimes (and ironically) the issue was partly the money - the need to get spending out of the door created its own pressure, and sometimes NDCs fell back on the ‘tried and tested’ - and of course if traditional approaches had worked, then those neighbourhoods might not have been struggling in the first place.

Sign up for our ‘Making Neighbourhood Change a Reality’ webinar

With all this in mind, we are delighted to be bringing together a collective fount of knowledge on area-based regeneration in general and the NDC programme in particular in our forthcoming webinar, ‘Making Neighbourhood Change a Reality’. 

And I don't mean me; we are privileged to have with us Afzal Hussain, CEO of Witton Lodge Community Association and former Coventry NDC CEO; Sam Tarff, former CEO of Nottingham NDC; Alex Hearn, director of economy of place, Bristol City Council, and the equally formidable Sarah Patrice, of Anthony Collins (who also worked for NDCs throughout the programme). 

We will have a free-flowing and informal conversation about what we have learned, what went well, and what the key lessons might be for Pride in Place neighbourhoods going forward. 

I'm genuinely excited to see where the conversation goes. 

This is a must-attend event for anyone involved in making neighbourhood change real. 

We look forward to seeing you there.