The UK Government’s today announced its Plan for Neighbourhoods. This plan represents a significant step towards addressing long-standing issues of deprivation, social inequality, and community decline. With a commitment of £1.5 billion over the next decade, this initiative is designed to empower seventy-five of the most deprived neighbourhoods by creating Neighbourhood Boards, bringing together local residents, businesses, and service providers to develop and implement tailored Regeneration Plans.
This approach—long-term, place-based, and community-led—rightly acknowledges that the most effective solutions to local challenges come from within communities themselves. However, while the plan outlines an ambitious vision for local engagement, there is a noticeable gap: the role of community media is absent from this framework.
The Plan for Neighbourhoods – A Systemic Approach to Renewal
At its core, the Plan for Neighbourhoods operates on principles of localism, participation, and accountability. Each selected area will establish a Neighbourhood Board, responsible for identifying the priorities of their community and shaping the Regeneration Plan. Unlike previous top-down regeneration schemes, this model hands power to communities, allowing them to decide how best to use government investment to improve housing, employment opportunities, local services, and social infrastructure.
Importantly, this is a long-term commitment. With funding allocated over a ten-year period, the plan seeks to embed sustainable change rather than short-lived interventions. By supporting local leadership and collaborative decision-making, it aims to foster a renewed sense of civic pride and social resilience.
Yet, for this approach to succeed, effective communication, accountability, and public participation are crucial—and this is where community media has a fundamental role to play.
The Missing Element – Community Media as a Tool for Engagement and Accountability
Community media—whether in the form of local radio, podcasts, digital storytelling platforms, or independent journalism—has long been an essential mechanism for informing, engaging, and empowering communities. It provides a vital space for discussion, storytelling, and democratic participation, particularly for those who are often underrepresented in mainstream media. By integrating community media into the Plan for Neighbourhoods, the government and local Neighbourhood Boards can enhance their engagement strategies in several key ways:
Ensuring Transparency and Accountability
Neighbourhood Boards will be responsible for making major decisions about regeneration priorities, resource allocation, and programme implementation. Community media can act as an independent monitor, reporting on Board decisions, scrutinising progress, and ensuring that local voices remain at the heart of the process.
Amplifying Local Voices and Stories
The plan rightly focuses on community participation, but meaningful involvement requires accessible and inclusive platforms where people can share their experiences, express concerns, and contribute ideas. Community media can provide these platforms, using formats such as call-in radio shows, interviews, podcasts, and digital storytelling projects.
Bridging Information Gaps
Many of the areas targeted by the plan are communities where trust in institutions has eroded. Traditional top-down communication strategies often fail to reach or resonate with local populations. Community media, by contrast, is rooted in trust and familiarity, making it an ideal vehicle for explaining policy changes, highlighting local opportunities, and fostering civic engagement.
Encouraging Active Participation
Participation does not begin and end with attending Neighbourhood Board meetings. Community media can help maintain ongoing engagement by keeping residents informed about upcoming decisions, facilitating debates, and encouraging people to take part in shaping their local area.
Providing Media Training and Capacity Building
The Plan for Neighbourhoods aims to improve local skills and employment prospects. Investing in community media training can provide young people and adults with valuable communication, digital literacy, and media production skills—helping to build community capacity while creating a more informed and engaged public.
Moving Forward – Integrating Community Media into the Regeneration Process
For the Plan for Neighbourhoods to realise its full potential, community media should be formally recognised as a key component of local engagement strategies. This could be achieved through:
- Dedicated funding to support local media initiatives that report on Neighbourhood Board activities and promote civic dialogue.
- Partnerships between Neighbourhood Boards and community media organisations, ensuring that information about regeneration efforts reaches a broad audience.
- Incorporating media training programmes into local skills development initiatives, helping communities develop their own storytelling and reporting platforms.
If the government truly wants to foster sustainable, locally-driven change, it must recognise that independent, accountable, and community-focussed media is a fundamental part of the solution. Without this, there is a risk that the Plan for Neighbourhoods will struggle to engage and mobilise the very communities it seeks to empower.
A Call for Community Media Inclusion
The Plan for Neighbourhoods offers an important opportunity to rebuild local pride, social cohesion, and economic resilience. But for this vision to be realised, the programme must embrace a truly holistic approach to engagement—one that includes independent and community-driven media as a pillar of transparency, participation, and local democracy.
At Decentered Media, we believe that community media is not an afterthought—it is an essential part of strengthening local identity and resilience. We urge policymakers and Neighbourhood Boards to seize this opportunity and embed community media as a core tool for empowering people, strengthening accountability, and sustaining meaningful civic engagement.
If you are involved in community media or a local neighbourhood initiative and want to explore ways to collaborate, get in touch, and support this work by subscribing to Patreon. Decentered Media is self-funded, and every contribution helps our work. Let’s ensure that the voices of communities are not just heard, but actively shape the future of our neighbourhoods.