Time To Change The Relationship Between People And The State

On January 5^th, 2023, my former football manager, Keir Starmer, now the Prime Minister of the UK, gave a speech about how communities want more control of their lives. That sparked a programme of work that culminated yesterday in a report that I co-authored with my long-time collaborator, Oliver Smith, as well as Grace Wyld and Hamida Ali of the Future Governance Forum (FGF). 

You won’t be surprised to know that my interest was in sharing what I have learnt about community power. But working with Oliver, Grace and Hamida taught me that community power is not remotely enough for communities to have control. There also needs to be agreement that communities can focus on the outcomes that matter to them, not what a government thinks matters, and for there to be participatory approaches to democratic decision making.

Grace and Oliver drafted the post below for the FGF website (here). FGF have kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. It summarises the three-part framework proposed in the report – outcomes, community power and participatory processes – and explains why this essentially changes the relationship between people and the state. While the framework is universal, the post is for the UK policy context so I have added some footnotes to help non-UK readers. 

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Time To Change The Relationship Between People And The State

Grace Wyld & Oliver Smith, October 9, 2025

The call for a decade of national renewal¹ is galvanising to many, but can be met with cynicism in communities which have experienced anything but renewal for decades. Their experience has been more of an unravelling. Unravelling of their local economy, their public services and built environment, and even their social fabric. 

This unravelling is most acute in what are termed ‘doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods’, places in the bottom 10% of measures of deprivation and social infrastructure. Over 2 million people live in 1,315 neighbourhoods which fall into this bracket. It is therefore understandable there’s a widespread feeling that “nothing works anymore”.

Since coming to power the government has launched an array of measures to support doubly disadvantaged communities, culminating in the Pride in Place Strategy. At the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week, it was clear politicians and ministers are really committed to new investment at the hyperlocal level. Overall the government will invest over £5bn in doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods over the next decade.

But the approach risks being piecemeal and disconnected. Community leaders are frustrated by having to shoehorn their local ideas into a one-size-fits-all policy framework designed hundreds of miles away.² So we need to see a shift away from neighbourhoods as the receiving end of a panoply of policies coordinated centrally, to one where neighbourhoods are able to coordinate the policies that affect them.

This requires a fundamentally new relationship between the citizen and the state. One that goes back to the roots of our democracy. Speaking at the launch of the Growth and Reform Network last month, Josh Simons MP, Minister in the Cabinet Office,³ told the audience that sovereignty starts with people, people who care about their identity in place, and it is time that central government reflects those changes in the country. 

Our report published today, ‘Mission Critical 04: Building a new relationship between people and the state’, introduces a framework for creating a new relationship between people and the state. It involves taking the government’s mission playbook⁴ – setting audacious goals, devolving power to where it can be best used, and governing in partnership – to a neighbourhood level. It describes a model of mission-driven government where:

• Neighbourhoods are at the heart of government efforts to improve outcomes
• Neighbourhoods can effectively wield power, enabled by an ecosystem of support 
• People participate more in democratic processes.

Importantly, each of these elements connects and reinforces the others. People will participate in efforts for national renewal if they have the power to make changes they care about – in terms which are meaningful to them – and the support to effectively use that power.

A new relationship between the citizen and the state will be a process of renewal, not revolution. To implement our new framework, we recommend the government builds on its new £5bn ‘Pride in Place’ programme and other neighbourhood policies by: 

• Putting neighbourhoods at the heart of missions by enhancing the powers and duties of Local Growth Plans to ensure economic growth is felt in the UK’s 1,315 doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods
• Strengthening neighbourhood power by making it easier to establish Parish Councils⁵ and bolstering the capacity to effectively wield power, for example by offering unrestricted small grants for resident-led change in the UK’s doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods
• Encourage greater participation by making participatory processes a requirement of all funds invested in social infrastructure, such as the 25 Trailblazer neighbourhoods⁶

The opportunities described above may sound incremental to many already interested in community power and participation, but we don’t underestimate just how ‘new’ this changed relationship would be for many in government. There will always be reasons to delay or weaken such innovations: to avoid wasteful duplication when the fiscal position is tight; to ensure that ‘best practice’ is followed; or because it is better to wait until a neighbourhood has had the time to build its capacity. It’s like believing that being allowed into the gym to view the equipment will be enough to build muscles.

Orthodox models will not lead to national renewal, but to continued unravelling. A new mindset is required, founded on a new relationship between people and the state. ‘Mission Critical 04: Building a new relationship between people and the state’, is published today by The Future Governance Forum and Local Trust.

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This is the first time I have done ‘policy work’. I have to admit that I really struggled so I am eternally grateful to Oliver, Grace and Hamida for dragging me through it. The most valuable lesson for me was — as I say in my LinkedIn post about the report — when it really comes down to it, community power is not remotely enough.

I hope you enjoy the report. 

Pritpal S Tamber 

Footnotes 

1. Keir Starmer’s government is promising “a decade of national renewal”
2. A perennial complaint in UK politics is that policies are formed in London by people who rarely leave the city and so understand little about the rest of the country 
3. The Cabinet Office is a department of the UK government responsible for supporting the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, the senior decision-making body of the government
4. At the start of the government’s term they laid out five core missions for the country: to kickstart economic growth; to make Britain a clean energy superpower; to build a health service fit for the future; to make Britain’s streets safer; and to break down barriers to opportunity
5. Parish Councils are the lowest tier of local government in England but they do not exist everywhere, which is a problem for hyperlocal governance 
6. Trailblazer neighbourhoods is a recently announced initiative for 25 neighbourhoods in the UK to get £20 million over the next decade for communities to drive forward the changes they want to see