We hope the police speak to neighbourhood managers before embarking on neighbourhood agreements

Today’s Policing White Paper announces support for at least ten ‘neighbourhood agreement’ pathfinders focused on community safety, justice and anti-social behaviour. These rights-and-responsibility ‘deals’ will be agreed between local public services and local groups of active citizens.

Neighbourhood agreements are accepted as an important tool in public service reform, and the localisation of services. But agency silos mean that in many parts of the country neighbourhood management teams and their neighbourhood policing colleagues do not have the chance to collaborate and learn from one another. We hope the Home Office takes steps to neighbourhood agreements don’t fall foul of this, and would be happy to assist local practitioners from all agencies in building on existing learning not re-inventing it.

The National Association for Neighbourhood Management is highly supportive of this new commitment – but equally is concerned that detailed work by its own members risks being re-invented because of organisational silos at the local level.

The National Association for Neighbourhood Management (NANM) has been working with local authorities and housing associations on a similar pathfinder programme of neighbourhood agreements since 2006 in a dozen communities across England. That programme was instigated by the department for Communities and Local Government as part of the drive to support community empowerment. Locally the work has been led by multi-agency neighbourhood management teams such as the neighbourhood team in Hathershaw and Fitton Hill, in Oldham – as quoted in today’s White Paper. This work followed on from previous work by the Young Foundation think tank. There is now strong evidence these agreements have brought real improvements to public services at the neighbourhood level. The most likely factors being greater accountability, better intelligence about the needs which agreements bring, and local people and ward councillors being supported to get involved in priority-setting.

But while we welcome today’s announcement, we are genuinely concerned that because of organisational silos at the local level, local police teams may end up starting from scratch in developing neighbourhood agreements – and will not look to (or indeed have the chance to find out about) what has already been learned from colleagues in multi-agency neighbourhoods teams.