Pride in Place: How Councils Can Hand Power To Communities And Remain Accountable

By Nicola Murphy-Evans and Tanushree Agarwal

The UK government’s Pride in Place strategy seeks to go beyond standard funding or improved engagement between councils, communities and place. It aims to fundamentally redesign relationships. In so doing, it poses a big question for councils - how to remain accountable for public money while ensuring that local people play a critical role in defining priorities and shaping change?

In programmes like Pride in Place, communities are not just participants in delivery. They are a core part of the outcome, strengthening the system’s capacity beyond any single project. Designing the right processes and cultures for this shared stewardship requires councils to recognise key tensions and the actions that can address them.

The first tension is around legitimacy: Who decides what the right priorities are for a place? Councils bring evidence, strategy and delivery experience. Communities bring lived experience and an immediate understanding of local reality. Pride in Place only works if both are treated as meaningful sources of insight, and if the process for reconciling them is designed deliberately rather than left to chance. 

The second tension relates to capability. Community leadership does not appear automatically once power is invited into the room. If neighbourhoods are expected to shape plans, steward funding and make decisions with long term consequences, they need support. This includes governance, technical advice, mentoring and delivery planning, alongside appropriate recognition of their time and contribution, and space for voices that might otherwise go unheard. 

The third tension is accountability. Local authorities remain the accountable body in this programme, even as delivery is expected to shift toward community organisations from year three. What that shift means in practice, and how much decision-making really moves, will vary from place to place. The challenge is how councils continue to provide assurance without defaulting to control. If risks prompt centralised decision making, community leadership is only symbolic. If councils step too far back, delivery may not emerge. 

Pride in Place should thus be understood as more than a one-way transfer of power over time but a transfer to joint decision-making.  Councils therefore need to focus on the following key actions to make this happen:

Make enabling a mode. To create the conditions for credible community leadership, councils must enable clear governance, shared data to support joint decision making, support for neighbourhood boards and practical delivery infrastructure. They must enable investment in relationships, building trust between groups that have not worked together before, and developing a shared language. They must enable humility in decision-making and continually judge where their involvement is needed and where it is time to give way. 

Sharing comes next. This is where collective power between councils and communities becomes tangible. Evidence is interpreted together, assumptions are made explicit, and priorities are tested jointly, with trade-offs understood rather than hidden. As confidence, capability and legitimacy grow, communities should lead more directly, while councils step back and provide assurance, support and access to technical capacity where needed. 

Ultimately, the key action - and goal - is to sustain. Not just to produce a plan or spend an allocation, but to leave behind something more durable: stronger local leadership, more effective neighbourhood governance, greater confidence to act collectively, and a more mutually supportive relationship between council and community. 

If Pride in Place is going to deliver, local authorities have to prepare for a journey shaped by iterative learning. For us at ICC, this is a very practical challenge, sitting at the intersection of governance, relational working, place leadership, capacity building and delivery. In practice, councils will need support that goes beyond engagement alone and includes co-designing governance between council and neighbourhood boards, building a shared evidence base, strengthening capability, translating ambition into delivery plans, and putting in place the assurance needed for long term stewardship. 

Pride in Place has the potential to do more than fund local improvements. At its best, it could help councils and communities develop neighbourhood change rooted in shared stewardship rather than consultation or control. That can only happen if we take seriously the tensions at the heart of the programme, and design deliberately for the relationships and capability this requires.