The UK Government has announced six neighbourhood health trailblazer sites across England to benefit from an innovative neighbourhood health investment partnership with Macmillan Cancer Support, with the aim of bringing health and care services closer to home and tackling health inequalities. 

The six selected sites — spanning Bristol, Lewisham and Greenwich, North East Lincolnshire, 19 London boroughs, North Nottinghamshire, and the North Yorkshire coast — will each develop and test new neighbourhood health models that bring together the NHS, local authorities and community organisations to support people with complex needs, frailty and long-term conditions outside of hospital settings.

The £1.5m initiative supports the three shifts set out in the 10-Year Health Plan – from sickness to prevention, hospital to community and analogue to digital.

Rebecca Hainsworth, Partner in commercial healthcare at UK and Ireland law firm Browne Jacobson, said: “This announcement is a genuinely encouraging step forward in how the NHS views its relationship with the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) sector. 

“For too long, VCFSE organisations have been treated as add-ons to system design rather than genuine partners at the table. The explicit inclusion of community organisations alongside NHS services and local authorities in each of the six models signals a meaningful shift in that approach.

“However, the success of these trailblazers will depend heavily on putting in place robust governance arrangements from the outset – ones that give VCFSE partners genuine decision-making power, clear accountability structures and the kind of contractual certainty they need to commit resources. Partnership working that is meaningful in practice, rather than just in principle, requires those foundations to be right.”

James Arrowsmith, Partner specialising in social care at Browne Jacobson, added: “There is a well-recognised gap between running a genuinely successful pilot and embedding it as a sustainable part of how a system operates – and the neighbourhood health trailblazers will be no different. Translating innovative local models into enduring organisational change requires significant legal, financial and governance work that is often underestimated at the outset.

“We have seen this challenge play out in real time with Regional Care Co-operatives (RCCs), another government trailblazer programme with very recent parallels. The independent evaluation of the two RCC pathfinders, Greater Manchester and the South East, published in November 2025 found that interviewees consistently raised challenges around short timescales, capacity pressures, and the significant relationship-building work required even before any delivery could begin. 

“The evaluators explicitly recommended that government create structured opportunities for new RCCs to share experiences and learning from the pathfinders, recognising that this learning does not flow through automatically.

“The question is whether the same lesson will be applied here. The neighbourhood health trailblazers are being launched with real ambition – but ambition is not the same as a road map. Government and NHS England will need to be intentional about how learning from these six sites is captured, published and made practically useful for the areas that follow, rather than leaving each new wave to rediscover the same structural and legal hurdles for themselves.”

Browne Jacobson has partnered with the Local Government Information Unit and NHS Transformation Unit to develop repeatable, scalable approaches that make neighbourhood working easier to deliver in practice. For more information on this programme, click here.