Just Neighbourhoods? Policy Symposium:

Planning, Power and Justice at the Neighbourhood Scale

February 2026 

The Just Neighbourhoods? research team recently welcomed participants to the near project-end policy symposium to reflect on neighbourhood-scale planning in more deprived areas across the UK and Northern Ireland. 

The event marked an important moment in a 2.5-year research journey, see:  https://research.reading.ac.uk/justclp/  examining how place-based planning activity is undertaken in areas often described as “left behind”. The central question has remained consistent throughout the project: 

When communities plan, how is justice being advanced — and how? 

Across ten case study areas spread over the UK, the research has explored how neighbourhood planning and other forms of community-led planning operate in contexts of deprivation. 

Several themes have emerged: 

• Communities in more deprived areas are deeply attached to place and highly motivated to improve it. 

• Discussions of rather abstract “equality, diversity and inclusion” are often absent from plans; instead, communities focus on tangible, lived concerns — affordable housing, access to services, protecting valued landscapes, local pride. 

• There is a persistent tension between national planning policy frameworks and the everyday justice priorities articulated by residents. 

• Planning systems often struggle to recognise and support the relational capacity within communities — the ability to hold difficult conversations, manage difference, and build shared visions. 

Rather than a lack of aspiration, the research reveals a lack of alignment between formal planning structures and the forms of justice communities are actually seeking. 

The Symposium conversations 

The day featured presentations from the research team outlining the analytical framework used to review community-led plans across the four nations, followed by a panel discussion chaired by Prof Sarah Pearson. The panel explored what it means to talk about justice in planning, not only as a philosophical concept, but as something embedded (or absent) in policy tools, governance structures and funding regimes. 

Participants reflected on: 

• Whether neighbourhood planning in more deprived areas is set up to succeed. 

• How trust flows, or fails to flow, between communities and decision-makers. 

• The risk of participation fatigue where communities repeatedly engage but see limited structural change. 

• The difference between planning for communities and planning with communities. 

Breakout sessions invited attendees to grapple with a practical challenge:
How do we ensure planning genuinely shapes decisions and actions in ways that are thought through, relational and just?  

Conversations moved beyond procedural participation toward deeper questions about power. Who defines what counts as “evidence”? Who sets the boundaries of viability? Who decides which futures are realistic? 

Beyond Growth: reframing the purpose of planning 

A recurring theme throughout the day was the need to reconsider what planning is for in neighbourhoods facing structural disadvantage. 

Is it primarily a vehicle for growth and housing delivery? Or, perhaps fundamentally, a tool for improving the quality of life of those already living there? 

Participants noted the irony that in several case study areas, local plans emphasise protecting assets for future development while communities struggle to protect what they already value — sightlines, green space, social infrastructure, memory. 

If justice at neighbourhood scale is about dignity, stewardship and belonging, then planning must be attentive not only to outputs (housing numbers, economic uplift) but to lived experience. 

The research suggests that neighbourhood planning in more deprived areas is not failing because communities lack ambition. It falters where systems fail to: 

• Provide sustained support, 

• Recognise structural inequality, 

• Embed poverty reduction explicitly within planning objectives, 

• Or trust communities to lead. 

The future of neighbourhood planning may depend less on new tools and more on renewed clarity about purpose. 

If planning is to be part of a just transition, it must move beyond consultation toward co-production. It must examine distributional outcomes, not just procedural compliance. And it must be brave enough to ask difficult questions about power. 

As this work concludes, perhaps the deeper invitation is this: 

• What would it mean to treat neighbourhood planning not as a technical exercise, but as a democratic practice rooted in care? 

• What would change if poverty reduction were an explicit planning objective again? 

• How might neighbourhood planning look if it began not with growth targets, but with the lived realities of those already there? 

A longer write-up is on the project website as Working Paper #5. 

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.