National Evaluation Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme

Below, we provide information about:

Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme
The National Evaluation Team
Evaluation Aims & Objectives

Aims and origins of neighbourhood management
Neighbourhood management is a relatively new approach to improving public services. At its simplest, neighbourhood management is a process which brings the local community and local service providers together, at a neighbourhood level, to tackle local problems and improve local services.

Neighbourhood management is a process run by a professional manager who has responsibility for viewing the neighbourhood in its totality as a ‘place’ rather than simply being concerned with specific services, and who seeks to develop a systematic, planned approach to improving the quality of life in that neighbourhood. The approach is usually based on influencing mainstream public service providers in how they deliver services and make resource decisions. Some initiatives go further and actually provide some services at a neighbourhood level, although this is relatively unusual. The manager is primarily accountable to the local community through a multi-sector board, which helps to maintain a focus on tackling problems from the local residents’ perspective. The process therefore brings together an ‘alliance’ of three forces – representatives of the local community (including councillors), representatives of local service providers and a small professional team led by the Neighbourhood Manager to facilitate change.

Although the constituent elements of neighbourhood management are not new – community involvement, neighbourhood level working, managing places – ‘neighbourhood management’ as a recognisable approach only came to national prominence in 2000 as part of the Social Exclusion Unit’s (SEU) review of approaches to renewing deprived areas in the preparation of a national strategy for neighbourhood renewal. The SEU’s fourth Policy Action Team (PAT) report recommended that neighbourhood management should be piloted to establish how it might work in practice and what it could achieve. The Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme was established in 2001 to test the approach proposed by the SEU.

Establishing the Pathfinder Programme

The stated purpose of the Pathfinder Programme was to “enable deprived communities and local services to improve local outcomes, by improving and joining up local services, and making them more responsive to local needs”. It was specifically targeted on deprived areas, to test the potential role of neighbourhood management in promoting neighbourhood renewal and ‘narrowing the gap’ between deprived neighbourhoods and the rest.

The aim of the Pathfinder Programme was to test neighbourhood management, broadly based on the model set out in the SEU’s fourth Policy Action Team report. The Programme was established by the former Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (NRU) in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) and has been operating since 2001, with 20 Round 1 Pathfinders set up in 2001/02 and 15 Round 2 Pathfinders launched in 2003/04.

The first round of Pathfinders was selected by the NRU from 72 competitive bids from local authorities who had been invited to express interest. Invitations were focused on local authority areas that had more than one ward in the 10% most deprived in England, but excluded any areas with a New Deal for Communities (NDC) Partnership. Each of the 20 Round 1 authorities then prepared an initial Delivery Plan for February 2002, before all were finally given approval in April 2002.

The second round of Pathfinders was intentionally established with a different mix of characteristics, with more based in rural areas and some with Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) as accountable bodies, rather than local authorities.

Each Pathfinder was asked to develop a seven year programme. Round 1 Pathfinders were awarded funding of £3.5 million each, over seven years from 2002/03 to 2008/09, which is an average of £500,000 per year, to cover core management and running costs and also a project/leverage fund. Round 2 Pathfinders were awarded a smaller amount of £2.45m over seven years, which is £350,000 per year from 2005/06 to 2011/12, reflecting a desire to test neighbourhood management with a smaller available ‘project’ fund.

From April 2005, funding from the NRU for the Pathfinders was pooled within the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund (SSCF) for each participating local authority, along with other ODPM and Home Office funding streams. From April 2006, funding for Pathfinders was either delivered through the SSCF or was delivered through their local authority’s Local Area Agreement (LAA), if one had been developed, with the Local Strategic Partnership having the discretion over how these funds were to be allocated. From April 2007, all Pathfinder funding was delivered through LAAs. The Pathfinder Programme was therefore no longer a centrally driven and directed ‘programme’, with all funding decisions now being taken locally by individual Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs).

The Pathfinder model in practice

The nature of the neighbourhoods in which the Pathfinders are operating varies widely. They are distributed through every region of England from Basildon in Essex to Blyth Valley in Northumberland. Some are inner city, others are residential estates on the edge of towns, some are in coastal towns. The majority are urban, whether located in large cities or metropolitan areas, or boroughs or towns. A handful of Pathfinders are rural.

Despite this variation the basic model was a simple one, and was followed by all Pathfinders, it comprised:

A small professional team led by a Neighbourhood Manager, usually including community outreach, policy and administrative officers, all based in an accessible office within the target area;
Team members were usually employed by, and financial and legal matters dealt with through, an Accountable Body – in most cases the local authority. This body provided a degree of oversight and professional support and also accountability for resources;
A multi-sector partnership, including public, private and community and voluntary sector representatives, dedicated to the target area and to whom the Neighbourhood Manager was accountable. This was led by a Board, but the partnership usually had a wider range of thematic working groups and forums to involve a wider range of local stakeholders. The partnership was a voluntary association, not a legal entity; and
Development of a programme set out in a Delivery Plan each year, signed off by the Board. The Plan set out the partnership’s aims and priorities and the range of activities it intended to pursue, usually including a mix of community development activities, work to influence local service providers and some direct project delivery.

Please note that this site does not duplicate the information and resources available on the CLG's own site. Full details of the Programme and the guidance that has been issued by CLG can be found at www.neighbourhood.gov.uk.

The evaluation team has delivered the evaluation in two contractual phases, from 2002-2004 and 2005-2008. The team has been led by SQW Consulting with partners including:

The Project Director was Geoff White and the Project Manager was Tim Thorlby, of SQW Consulting.

We know that neighbourhoods matter. We know that neighbourhood management can deliver benefits to deprived communities. Therefore the research question was not simply 'does neighbourhood management work?', but rather a more sophisticated set of questions: 'How do neighbourhood management approaches differ?'; 'what impacts are they delivering?'; and 'what can we learn about how to improve services in different areas through different approaches?'. The Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Evaluation was therefore an integral part in attempting to provide answers to these more complex questions.

The approach of the evaluation focused closely on learning about what works, for whom, in what circumstances and why. The key principles of the approach can be summed up as:

Evidence - generating robust evidence on processes, outcomes and impacts, to evaluate the programme's progress and learn lessons;
Learning- improving our learning from Pathfinders and the transfer of knowledge between Pathfinders and others, through a collaborative approach; and
Action- identifying key issues to address, and providing practical support to Pathfinders in improving their effectiveness

The overall project objective is:

To assess the extent to which the Neighbourhood Management Pathfinders are meeting their objectives of helping deprived communities and local service providers work together at neighbourhood level to improve and join up local services. The evaluation should advise on good practice in implementing and developing the neighbourhood management approach

The more detailed objectives were:

To provide evaluation of the processes within neighbourhood management partnerships, and between partnerships, local communities and local service providers; and assessment of the process outcomes achieved by the programme
To determine which changes are leading to improved impact outcomes against local priorities and key floor targets; and to assess these impacts
To provide action learning and programme support for partnerships, through working with individual neighbourhood management initiatives, local communities and service providers, and other local and regional stakeholders, based on needs identified through the evaluation
To produce and disseminate tools and guidance for neighbourhood management initiatives, and actively support the use of these by partnerships, the NM Programme Team in DCLG, GOs and others as appropriate
To respond to partnership and programme needs flexibly over the duration of the contract

The main features of the team’s work have comprised:

Annual reviews of all 35 Pathfinders, based on both desk research and face to face fieldwork, together with national annual review reports;
Case studies and reports on specific themes, such as community safety, environmental services, economic development, community cohesion and social capital;
Two waves of household surveys undertaken by GfK NOP and Ipsos MORI in all Pathfinder areas;
Provision of action learning sets, facilitated workshops, events, dissemination and other active support for Pathfinders;
Publication of a toolkit to collate local service data (developed by CEA) and a range of other good practice notes; and
A survey of 135 local authorities in England that were most likely to be engaged in neighbourhood management, and detailed case studies of 17 neighbourhood management initiatives that were developed outside of the Pathfinder programme.