Introduction

In 1997, a New Labour administration came to power. Its manifesto promised to ‘help build strong families and strong communities, and lay the foundations of a modern welfare state in pensions and community care’ (Labour Party, 1997, p 5), as well as cleaning up politics and decentralising power through the restoration of ‘good local government’ (1997, p 29). There was, after all, such a thing as society – not just families and individuals – and some of New Labour's aims for the revival of society were to be pursued through a neighbourhood connection.

For successive New Labour administrations the neighbourhood has appeared as a significant focus for policy making and public service delivery. The neighbourhood has been part of a number of policy initiatives that have been concerned with tackling disadvantage, improving service delivery, renewing democracy, engaging citizens, reinvigorating civil society and creating sustainable communities. By 2003, for some commentators at least, it was apparent that there were important changes underway in the substance and style of policy:

Under the third New Labour administration, in 2005/06, the involvement of the neighbourhood in such new forms of governance appeared set to increase. In the proposals under discussion for what was then called ‘double devolution’, power and influence were to flow from local government, but on condition that they continued to flow beyond it, to citizens and to neighbourhoods. These proposals have since been developed further in the Local Government White Paper published in October 2006 (CLG, 2006) in which the term double devolution does not appear. There appears to be some ambivalence about the place of the neighbourhood in its proposals and this will be discussed further. However, even if the specific focus on the neighbourhood that characterised the later years of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (for example, ODPM/HO, 2005) fades, the evidence of history suggests that it will recur.