Local government’s missing layer: Neighbourhood governance

This blog is part of a series written by organisations championing community power. As new neighbourhood governance arrangements are introduced across England through the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, each blog explores how neighbourhood governance can enable local people to have real influence over their places. The series accompanies A Blueprint for Community-Powered Neighbourhood Governance, written by We’re Right Here, with input from Local Trust, Hope Not Hate, Locality, and Power to Change.

The government’s plans to reorganise local government – merging district and county councils into new unitary authorities – can deliver capacity and coherence, but unless it empowers communities through neighbourhood governance, it risks producing larger councils with weaker democratic legitimacy.  

Local government reorganisation (LGR) is a once-in-a-generation window in which governance norms are renegotiated. Whatever is deferred or left vague during transition tends to become entrenched in a long-term settlement, often via secondary legislation, guidance, regulations, and the path-dependencies of implementation. That’s why being proactive now matters. 

Neighbourhood governance, as has been established, means the institutions and routines that give a recognisable hyperlocal area an ongoing say and real leverage over the decisions shaping everyday life.  

That matters now because the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill places an explicit duty, through Clause 58 (as currently drafted), on principal local authorities to secure “effective neighbourhood governance” through appropriate arrangements and structures for defined neighbourhood areas. In practice, ‘effective’ should be read as more than consultation; it implies continuous input, delegated influence (ideally delegated decision-making), and visible accountability between elections. 

Sector evidence, submitted to government, has already cautioned that Clause 58 risks creating new structures without the capability and resourcing needed to make them effective in practice.

The link to LGR is therefore intrinsic. The Bill that enables reorganisation is the very same Bill that requires neighbourhood governance. Furthermore, LGR will consolidate local institutions and representation, so power will feel more remote; standardise service offers, so the emergence of one-size-fits-all offers lacking local nuance becomes a notable risk; and it will merge organisations across a wider population, so the democratic culture and place-based legitimacy of newly reorganised councils risks being weak from the outset. All of which makes it all the more important to get neighbourhood governance right. 

We’re Right Here’s Blueprint for Community-Powered Neighbourhood Governance offers a clear, admirable test for what ‘good’ looks like in this moment. That is neighbourhood structures that are designed to empower, not just add a new layer of box-ticking, so that communities can become genuine decision-makers, not just continuous consultees. Read alongside the wider devolution agenda, the blueprint underlines a modest but critical point: if binding routes for community power are not hard-wired alongside LGR, England risks simply redrawing centralisation into a new network of local Whitehalls. 

As such, neighbourhood governance won’t work if it’s treated as an add-on – bolted on after boundaries, hierarchies and harmonisation plans are settled. The lesson from decades of communities having decision-making done to them, rather than with them, is that if reorganisation is implemented without neighbourhood power designed in from the outset, newly reorganised councils will inherit a pervasive sense of powerlessness and lack of trust from day one.  

LGR may change the map of new authorities, but it is neighbourhood governance that must change their democratic and service interface. 

What can make neighbourhood governance work as part of local government reorganisation?

• Clarity: Develop a simple ‘power map’ for the neighbourhood tier of governance: what can they decide, what can they shape, and what can they scrutinise—so that participation isn’t just reduced to meaningless theatre. 

• Capability: Resource a system that can make this neighbourhood voice meaningful. This includes officer time, facilitation, publicly accessible data, and routes for community organisations to be brought into the fold of governance and build confidence and competence. Otherwise, the same ‘done to, not with’ dynamics will simply reappear at an ever-larger scale. 

• Continuity: Design for years, not just pilots. This means establishing standing arrangements, repeatable cycles (for example, annual priority-setting and participatory budgeting), clear response timelines, and routes to redress where appropriate—so that neighbourhood governance doesn’t collapse into a few beacon examples or overwrought consultation fatigue. 

As a pragmatic illustration, Somerset Council has 18 Local Community Networks—an attempt as part of a new unitary to engage and formalise neighbourhood partnership working and keep local priorities legible as governance scales up.  

The point isn’t that this specific model is universally transferable, it is that it signals a promising direction of travel. When councils consolidate, they will need a defined neighbourhood layer to convene partners, surface priorities early, and keep decision-making close enough to be trusted; issues that Somerset Council sought to pre-empt. 

Two concerns tend to surface quickly when putting forward these matters.  

Isn’t this duplication and more bureaucracy? It can be, if it’s bolted on; but done well and proactively, it can reduce failures by catching misfit service designs early and building democratic consent for the inevitable trade-offs of LGR and broader local governance.  

Won’t louder voices of those with the most time on their hands dominate? That risk is real, which is why neighbourhood governance must be designed to broaden truly representative participation, likely through innovative means, not merely formalising pre-existing arrangements involving whoever already has the time, confidence and connections. 

Existing domestic and international practice—from participatory budgeting to neighbourhood councils and citizens’ assemblies—shows that it is entirely possible to have meaningful, representative and effective community power at the neighbourhood level and LGR (more specifically, Clause 58) is a golden opportunity for England to do so.  

But the potential of neighbourhood governance will only be unlocked if this new layer of decision-making is intentionally designed into LGR settlements and devolution deals and continuously enabled thereafter. Otherwise, the risk is that the opportunity passes, and neighbourhood governance becomes destined for perpetual pilot schemes or simply forgotten about entirely.  

Read A Blueprint for Community-Powered Neighbourhood Governance

Image credit: ‘Warwickshire Hall and County Court’ by Marcolazz, CC BY-SA 4.0