Kate Hainsworth, YU Associate
Kate Hainsworth considers what neighbourhoods mean for Yorkshire and Humber and how higher education institutions in the region could support local communities and places.
In her Mais lecture at Bayes Business School, on 17 March, Chancellor Rachel Reeves began by stating that…
“I know that this is an anxious moment. People aren’t asking for the world. Just the chance to build a good life; to choose how and where they wish to live, in a place where they can feel safe and proud of their neighbourhood.”
Neighbourhoods have been a buzz word for some time and that is partly because determined, uphill, advocacy work is beginning to be recognised. For several years, the charities I am involved with have been calling for greater attention to be paid to neighbourhoods and to recognise their worth. Most people live in some kind of neighbourhood. If you’re lucky, yours is leafy, with accessible physical and social infrastructure which signal life-chances and opportunities. For many, that is not the case. It is that difference, and the fact that this divide has been growing ever wider for decades, that is at the root cause of much anger, disunity, and disillusionment.
Changes in the NHS, and the wider health and care system, are encouraging local and regional institutions and stakeholders to ‘lean into neighbourhoods’. That is certainly what NHS England is seeking to do, as illustrated by their Neighbourhood Health Framework, which was published on the same day as the Chancellor made her Mais speech.
Neighbourhoods, whether ‘doubly disadvantaged’ or ‘left behind’ have been the focus of the Pride in Place programme. And a glance at the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON) back catalogue shows how much effort has gone into advocating, along with other independent commissions like that on Community & Cohesion (ICCC), or 3NI, to bring neighbourhoods to sufficient civic and political notice (with money attached) to make a real difference to how things are done. Neighbourhoods are rightly now seen as key to civic change. It is widely recognised that ‘doing to’ people experiencing disadvantage (poverty, insecure accommodation, racism, and other minoritising behaviours) rarely results in anything other than resentment, and, at best, a continuation of the status quo. Doing ‘by’ that community is the only effective way to build their confidence and achieve co-produced solutions that truly address a community or neighbourhood’s needs. It takes a long time and consistent patient work.
Local Authorities, health and other public services know and value the importance of working closely with Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations to help broker better relationships and results within neighbourhoods. The very many pilots, tests and initiatives I have witnessed across my career now seem to be pushing in the same direction and are starting to coalesce. Having all parts of Yorkshire served by strategic mayoralties provides a new institutional framework, and a collective regional opportunity, to think about and serve neighbourhoods better. It also demonstrates how national government can depend on regions to do their own neighbourhood delegation/co-design best.
This is the moment when HEIs can step forward and demonstrate how they can help with the civic and neighbourhood agenda – and many are doing just that. YU convenes 12 HEIs of varying size, type and focus across one of the largest regions in England, with over 5 million population to convince of the value of higher education. On the back of its partnerships, YU leveraged UKRI funds into the region to pilot and evaluate new ways of working between HEIs and public sector around policy (Y–PERN/YPIP). All YU members participate in some form of civic interaction with their locality, and through joint working, all are exploring ways to make a bigger impact collectively.
Universities received quite a lot of coverage in the Mais speech: leading the AI revolution for good, partnering across Europe to build on Erasmus, and supporting economic (including regional) growth. HEIs are up for that in Yorkshire, as they are elsewhere. Further details have been published about the Northern Growth Corridor and how it complements the Oxford/Cambridge Corridor. Within this, universities are understood as key centres of research, innovation, learning and enterprise, working together with public and private sectors and local communities to drive opportunity and prosperity.
While change will be needed to navigate technological expansion, and it is only right to focus on ‘just transition’ to an AI future as much as to a greener one, James Plunkett, author of End State, has talked about ‘building a civic statecraft’ and how being in the spotlight can lead to ‘community washing’ rather than anything resilient. He highlights ‘spreading’ over ‘scaling’, traction over speed, and ‘holding space’ for others to participate. I hope that care will be taken to involve neighbourhoods directly in the design and implementation phases.
HEIs have had a lot on their plate for years and the agenda is not diminishing. Just balancing the books is a challenge under the current funding model, while public discourse around student loans and fees continues to become more visible. At the same time, there are growing expectations around civic responsibility, reciprocity and contributions to economic growth, all of which tend to steer universities to rely on familiar ground or play into existing structural formations.
Many of these structures are not necessarily designed to support engagement with neighbourhoods. It is important that HEIs become more familiar with the time scales, the methodologies, and the language needed to build trust and sustain trust relationships with neighbourhoods that have repeatedly experienced limited external interest. Encouragingly, initiatives, such as Y-PERN and YPIP, or the Centre for Collaboration in Community Connectedness (C4), are exploring how genuine partnership between HEIs and communities in Yorkshire can evolve and the results will be enlightening when they report in due course. These projects, alongside the work of charities like The Young Foundation and Local Trust, demonstrate meaningful progress, but are only the beginning of the broader change required.
It is an opportune moment to try to bring together the neighbourhood threads into sturdy strings that may have been twisted and unrecognised or tangled for decades but seem now to have the chance to cluster into a stronger rope of hopes. If we are successful then the rewards for places in regions, such as Yorkshire, will be transformational.
