Building community wealth into Pride in Place

Exploring the opportunity of a community wealth building approach to Pride in Place.

Across the country, a large-scale recruitment process is under way to select independent community chairs for the 380 neighbourhood boards who will oversee the allocation of the UK government’s landmark £5bn Pride in Place programme.

Each neighbourhood board has until November 2026 to put in place an investment plan to show how they will use this new regeneration funding. Each area can receive up to £20mn over a decade to improve neighbourhoods, strengthen communities and restore pride in place.

That creates a significant opportunity. It also raises an important challenge.

The key opportunity for neighbourhood boards is how to use this funding, not just to deliver some decent projects in the short term, but to create systemic change to local places which enables people to live better lives. Lives in which they feel they have greater control and security, whether through work, housing, or access to public services.

Too often, our experience of doing regeneration has been overly focused on a property development model which prioritises what places look like, rather than how local economies actually function. New paving, refurbished buildings, and physical improvements can all bring real benefits; but communities know from experience that cosmetic change alone rarely transforms living standards.

Many places have already lived through decades of regeneration programmes that delivered visible development without fundamentally shifting poverty, insecurity or inequality. New developments arrived, but wealth still flowed out. Jobs were created, but they were often insecure or poorly paid. Assets improved, but ownership and control remained elsewhere.

This is not a new challenge. In work with partners across Edinburgh and South-East Scotland, CLES argued that public investment should be understood not simply as funding, but as a source of financial power. The way money is spent – who receives contracts, who owns assets, whether local businesses participate and whether residents benefit from good work – helps shape the long-term direction of local economies. 

The deeper issue is that many communities today are not simply experiencing a shortage of investment. They are also experiencing a shortage of economic power. 

At CLES, we describe this challenge through the lens of community wealth building: the idea that local economies should be organised so that wealth generated in a place is retained and recirculated for the benefit of local people, rather than extracted elsewhere. 

This is where Pride in Place becomes about more than regeneration. Seen this way, Pride in Place funding is not just a regeneration budget. It is an opportunity to deliberately shape how wealth flows through neighbourhoods and communities.

The key question is therefore: how can can boards use this financial power in the most economically, socially and environmentally beneficial way possible?

Using financial power differently

One of the most important implications of the Pride in Place model is that boards are being asked to act as stewards of public investment rather than simply identifying local priorities. Public money always shapes local economies, whether intentionally or not. 

Every funding decision influences: 

• which businesses grow; 
• who accesses jobs and opportunity; 
• whether assets remain locally controlled; and 
• whether wealth circulates within communities. 

For decades, local economic development has often focused heavily on attracting external investment and maximising growth, with less attention paid to how wealth is distributed or retained locally.

Community wealth building starts from a different premise. It argues that public investment should be used intentionally to build stronger local economic systems – systems that create broader public value, support local enterprise, improve living standards and strengthen democratic participation. This is particularly relevant for Pride in Place because the programme’s structure already recognises that local people understand their neighbourhoods better than distant institutions do. 

The challenge now is ensuring that local decision-making is matched by a long-term economic strategy that allows communities to retain more of the value generated through regeneration.

One of the core lessons from CLES’s work on community wealth building is that local economies often become stronger when places focus not only on attracting external growth, but on growing and retaining the wealth they already have.

For neighbourhood boards, this does not require becoming economic specialists overnight, but it does mean thinking carefully about the wider economic effects of local investment decisions. In practice, that might mean asking:

• Can local projects create opportunities for local SMEs, social enterprises and community businesses?
• Could investment help communities acquire or steward important local assets?
• Can projects support secure employment, apprenticeships and pathways into work for local residents?
• Could regeneration reduce everyday costs around energy, transport or housing?
• Will the assets created through investment continue to generate long-term local benefit? 

Ultimately, local people judge regeneration not by announcements or ribbon cuttings, but by whether life actually becomes more secure, affordable and hopeful. 

A different kind of regeneration

For years, local economic development in the UK has often operated on the assumption that if growth happens, benefits will eventually trickle down. However, there is overwhelming evidence that this does not happen.

Neighbourhood boards therefore have the potential to do something important: not simply to deliver projects, but to help create neighbourhood economies that are more rooted locally, more democratic and more resilient.

Ultimately, that is the difference between regeneration that improves a neighbourhood – and regeneration that helps communities build lasting wealth, power and resilience.