For many years, the true impact of community-led regeneration has been difficult to quantify. While we know anecdotally that local people understand their own areas best, proving that neighbourhood-based initiatives (NBIs) create measurable change is a significant technical hurdle.
Our partners at Local Trust, 3ni, and Shared Intelligence required a robust evidence base to demonstrate that resident-led action, such as the Big Local programme, provides a genuine buffer against national decline. This work was designed to reassure local authorities and funders that investing in the resident-led regeneration is the right choice for tackling differences between areas. The central difficulty was looking at changes over time across a full decade to isolate the “Big Local effect” from the “background noise” of the UK economy.
The project began with an experimental pilot where we developed a methodology built on “counterfactuals”.
In this case, this means that we identified wards with active neighbourhood-based working and identified other areas that shared similar levels of deprivation but lacked recorded NBI activity.
This initial phase involved deep dives into local data, while partners at Shared Intelligence made evidence-gathering calls to council officers and community organisations to ensure our comparisons were accurate.
Building on this foundation, we scaled the research for the “Everybody needs good neighbourhoods 2” report, examining 29 deprived neighbourhoods over a full ten-year period. By looking at changes over time between 2014-2024 we looked to isolate the impact of the Big Local programme – the largest resident-led regeneration initiative in the UK. Here, we applied a “difference-in-differences” design, looking at both:
We integrated diverse data streams, from our own Community Needs Index to the Community Life Survey, to track performance across seven key indicators, exploring the difference between the two changes, rather than simply comparing the groups after the intervention.
The results were statistically significant. Our analysis revealed that:
This robust evidence base indicates that when residents have control over resources, they foster safer, more prosperous communities.
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Helping local services reflect the lived experience of children and young people...
Advisory support to build a robust understanding of Community Resilience in Essex.