No Short Cuts – so, what kind of recovery? 

Just Neighbourhoods? research team  

February 2026 

The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON) recently published its final report: No Short Cuts: Towards a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Recovery. It highlights how disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England have been left without sustained, coordinated, long-term support. The persistence of deprivation is not inevitable; it reflects a failure of national strategy.  

ICON calls for three things: 

• Targets — a clear pipeline for neighbourhood recovery 

• Strategy — a “Staircase Model” beginning with social infrastructure 

• System — institutional pillars capable of delivering long-term change  

The data presented in the report are stark: Mission Critical neighbourhoods face higher crime rates, poorer health, lower employment and significantly lower gross value added per person than the national average. The case for action is overwhelming. 

The turn to Social Infrastructure 

One of ICON’s most important contributions is its insistence that social infrastructure and social capital are foundational. 

The report distinguishes between social infrastructure, the physical and community facilities that bring people together, and social capital, the relationships and networks that enable collective action. 

It argues convincingly that neighbourhoods lacking pubs, cafés, community centres, sports clubs and informal gathering spaces struggle to build bridging and linking capital. The “Staircase Model” suggests recovery must begin by rebuilding these foundations before attempting sustained economic transformation. In this, ICON resonates strongly with what the Just Neighbourhoods research has observed. 

Across more deprived neighbourhoods undertaking neighbourhood planning, we repeatedly encountered communities trying to protect and restore exactly these forms of social infrastructure: 

• a threatened library hosting more than books, including a community museum, social hub and charity shop 

• an alleyway transformed into a shared garden, 

• a community-owned bakery and land trust rebuilding local pride, 

• volunteers holding together local services long after formal institutions withdrew. 

Justice, in these places, was rarely articulated in abstract policy language. It was expressed through stewardship, dignity and belonging. This signals how social capital matters.  

Recovery is also about power 

Where Just Neighbourhoods adds something further is in its attention to power. 

ICON’s pipeline model, 424 MSOAs supported over a decade, backed by £2–2.5bn annually,  is bold. It recognises the need for concentration of resources rather than spreading funding thinly. Yet the question that emerged repeatedly in our research is not simply whether neighbourhoods receive investment. It is whether they are trusted to make decisions and  how the spend is planned. Communities in more deprived areas often feel that: 

• growth strategies are designed elsewhere, 

• viability logic determines what is “possible,” 

• participation is invited but decisions are pre-shaped. 

Neighbourhood scale planning groups spoke about exhaustion and years of engagement without structural shifts in how decisions are made. ICON acknowledges the need for community-led approaches and warns against “doing onto” places. This  is an issue that has been known for decades, yet here we are again. Recovery cannot simply be delivered to neighbourhoods. It must be co-produced. 

The economic question 

ICON is candid that neighbourhood interventions cannot succeed without a broader economic strategy. It recognises that many disadvantaged areas were shaped by national shifts away from industry and production.  

This echoes a core insight from Just Neighbourhoods:
local planning can only do so much if structural economic forces run counter to community aspirations. 

We saw neighbourhood plans striving for: 

• affordable housing that is genuinely affordable, 

• protection of valued landscapes and heritage, 

• accessible local services, 

• small-scale economic opportunity. 

Yet these plans operate within national frameworks where: 

• housing targets dominate, 

• land value capture is constrained by viability, 

• industrial strategies favour sectors absent in the most disadvantaged areas  

The result can be regeneration without redistribution. 

ICON’s Staircase Model rightly argues that economic growth must follow foundational reform. But growth alone will not guarantee justice unless distributional outcomes are explicitly monitored. So, alongside fiscal metrics other key questions need to be addressed: 

• Who benefits? 

• Who gains access to new jobs? 

• Who is displaced? 

 

No Short Cuts — and no short memories 

One of the strengths of the ICON report is its refusal of quick wins. It is explicit, neighbourhood recovery is a decades-long project. Just Neighbourhoods has encountered the long memory of policy cycles involving:

• New Deal for Communities 
• Housing Market Renewal 
• Big Local 
• Levelling Up 
• Towns Fund

and now Pride in Place.

Communities remember when funding arrived, and most importantly when it left. They remember promises. Recovery requires patience and consistency. 

What would a ‘just’ recovery look like? 

Taken together, ICON and Just Neighbourhoods point toward a deeper proposition; that neighbourhood recovery is not only about infrastructure and services. It is about restoring agency. 

In the most powerful examples we observed in the JN work, change occurred when: 

• local leaders were trusted 

• institutions were rooted in place 

• external actors acted as enablers rather than directors 

• planning processes recognised lived experience as evidence  

• And political processes allowed for community voices to influence decisions. 

The future of neighbourhood recovery may depend less on inventing new programmes and more on embedding justice as an explicit objective. 

That means: 

• measuring distribution and changes in quality of life, not just output; 

• designing economic strategies that connect to neighbourhood labour markets; 

• aligning neighbourhood planning with recovery investment; 

• building relational capacity, not only capital assets. 

The next step is ensuring that recovery is not merely national strategy imposed locally, but a reshaping of how the planning, governance and economic systems recognise neighbourhood-scale power.