The Government’s upcoming £5bn Pride in Place funding is a welcome and much needed initiative in places up and down the country.  Its focus on helping places to thrive, and doing so with the active involvement of communities is something we at Centre for Thriving Places have been doing for many decades and so an approach we fully support being adopted more widely.

It offers a wealth of opportunities for far wider impact – and also a number of potential pitfalls to avoid. Luckily we and our partners – (ECF, Place Partnership and the architects Jann Kattein) – are here to support places every step of the way.

We established the core principles of what it takes to drive a ‘thriving place’, more than 15 years ago so we are delighted to see the language of ‘Thriving Places’, used throughout the Pride in Place documentation. Yet – potential ‘first hurdle’ warning – there is very little guidance so far to support places on what exactly that means – what the measures of success are for a thriving place, nor how to start thinking about a theory of change. Centre for Thriving Places has all of this ready for places to explore, adapt and use to strengthen their work.

Our Thriving Places Framework is backed by the very best evidence and data on what the drivers are to make a place thrive. It is embedded in the running of places ranging from Essex, to South Yorkshire, to the West Midlands, placing the wellbeing of people front and centre in decision making. We have tried and tested processes to help leaders and communities meaningfully engage in using this to come together around shared goals and design the interventions and solutions to target the investment wisely.

The Pride in Place approach also talks a lot about community engagement and what it needs to deliver. Potential hurdle number two – is the need for more detail on the practice and methodologies to set community engagement up for success and the key steps to make it happen – not just in the communities themselves, but in the wider system to make citizen-led design and delivery the norm.

Carefully facilitated spaces are needed to build trust, joined up ways for people to come together to work out what they want to achieve and figure out what interventions would deliver that. The development of the skills and support to assess viability, and develop the right institutional forms to run those things… all this is needed before one can ‘make a plan and engage the community’. Again we at Centre for Thriving Places are used to providing that support in organisations and communities, large and small alike.

It is critical that the Pride in Place funding is designed, spent and built in ways that truly leverage the ability of those communities to access the whole wider economy in a different, more powerful way.

The big risk is that it simply buys some activities and programmes and maybe does up some buildings or provides a few more community spaces and makes a place look nicer – without in any way changing that community’s voice and influence to direct their futures, or their access to local transport, better wages, better education experience, better health.

Pride in Place funding is not of the scale needed to plug the gap in actual service provision and the colossal loss of community assets in recent years. So how to use it as leverage for other money, other power and long term changes depends on how those communities and their children in 30 years time experience the wider system – that will be the real win.

We are keen to work with all places embarking on this journey and are offering a free webinar on 27 January 2026 to explore some of the approaches available to tackle questions around how the Pride in Place funding can work best to:

• Build on existing work and infrastructure
• Empower communities to co-design and co-deliver programmes
• Join up with wider initiatives across the area
• Leverage and lock in longer term and deeper system change

We can work with local authorities to offer joined-up support for each step of the journey from community engagement and research through to final delivery.

If you would like to find out more about us and how we can support your plans, or sign up for the free webinar in January, please email hello@centreforthrivingplaces.org.