DEVOLUTION beyond councils to neighbourhoods and communities has the potential to make a real difference to people’s quality of life.

Take just two examples: devolving responsibility for expenditure on care for older people to the neighbourhood level is probably the only way to guarantee a sustained shift in resources from acute care to preventative support; and the neighbourhood also presents the best chance of marshalling community efforts to tackle the reality and perception of antisocial behaviour and low-level crime and disorder.

The challenge is how to realise devolution and to create functional, mutually beneficial relationships between the various spheres of government — national, local and neighbourhood.

We should not pretend that this is virgin territory. We have plenty of experience of trying to make neighbourhood-level governance work from which there is much to be learnt.

Enormous effort has gone into the New Deal for Communities (NDC) partnerships and the Neighbourhood Renewal pathfinders. Both are the subject of evaluation exercises which have produced interim reports.

Too many evaluations commissioned by government have little or no impact on policy. There is much in the emerging conclusions from this work which should inform the neighbourhood strand of the Local Government White Paper which ministers are committed to publishing before the summer. This could be a rare example of genuine, evidence-based policymaking. The overall lesson is a simple one: securing effective engagement with residents at a neighbourhood level is difficult; and using that engagement to drive improved outcomes in the things that matter to those residents — the qualifications their children obtain, the quality of the local environment and reducing low-level crime — is even more difficult. The final bullet point in the executive summary of the NDC evaluation says it all: “Be realistic and persistent.”

Yet the approach taken by the Minister of Communities and Local Government, David Miliband, is to offer local councils a deal. He talks about “double devolution”; Whitehall will devolve more to councils if they in turn devolve more to neighbourhoods.

Ministers have been promising more devolution to councils since 2001 when they began to acknowledge the limits of the centralism of new Labour’s first term of office. That this has involved more talk than action is not because those ministers are duplicitous. It is because in our political culture devolution is difficult.

There is also something about governance in this country that makes inter-organisational relationships messy. The poor relations in many areas between county and district councils are a stark example of this. Can we be confident that similar dynamics will not surface and sour relations between councils and neighbourhoods? The chances of making progress on both elements of Mr Miliband’s double devolution would be enhanced if it was presented as a joint endeavour rather than a deal. Government at national and local level finds devolution difficult. They should agree to learn from each other as they grapple with the challenges.

Developing a mechanism to enable them to do so would involve cultural change on both sides. In fact, it could be just what it takes to unblock the process of devolution as a whole.

Phil Swann is director of the Tavistock Institute

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