Neighbourhood working: Turning policy ambition into practical delivery

16 March 2026

James Arrowsmith and Rebecca Hainsworth

Neighbourhoods are fast becoming one of the most important organising principles in public service reform.

From the rollout of neighbourhood health centres in the 10 Year Health Plan to family hubs in children’s services, adult social care, neighbourhood policing and the UK Government’s Plan for Neighbourhoods, working at neighbourhood level is now central to how national and local government engage with people and communities. The forthcoming Devolution and Community Power Bill will go further, requiring local authorities to introduce neighbourhood governance arrangements.

Across policy and practice, neighbourhoods are being recognised as:

A core building block of integrated care.
A focal point for prevention and early intervention.
A platform for community engagement and participation.
A site of shared leadership and accountability.
A way of organising services around people rather than institutions.

Why neighbourhoods matter

With neighbourhoods being increasingly understood as the most meaningful level at which public services connect with people’s everyday lives, recognised benefits include:

Joined-up services.
Better citizen experiences.
Stronger prevention and early intervention.
Better responses to place-based inequality.
Better equity and inclusion across social mobility and health inequality.

Government policy is also positioning neighbourhoods as a site of service delivery and governance, spanning local government, the NHS, social care, policing, skills and employment.

Alongside this, councils and health systems are navigating:

Severe financial pressures.
Integrated care system reforms.
Local government reorganisation.
Workforce challenges.
Rising demand and complexity.

The challenge is not whether to work at neighbourhood level, but how to do it well, safely and sustainably, both in terms of long-term financial stability, including multi-year funding commitments that endure beyond political cycles, and environmental and social responsibility.

Examples of formal neighbourhood planning

Thame neighbourhood plan, Oxfordshire: The first in England to allocate specific development sites through a community-led plan and set out detailed policies on housing, connectivity, green space and design.
The Arches (Chatham) neighbourhood plan, Kent: Covering several urban neighbourhoods in Chatham with a vision to make the area greener, more prosperous and community-focused.
Highgate neighbourhood plan, London: Aimed at protecting local green space, preserving historic character, and embedding sustainable development guidance.

Our focus: Operationalising neighbourhood working

Our work concentrates on the ‘missing middle’, the practical, organisational and legal foundations that allow neighbourhood working to flourish.

Rather than revisiting the case for change, we focus on how organisations embed neighbourhood approaches across the whole system, including:

Governance and decision-making.
Resource allocation and financial frameworks.
Workforce models and organisational change.
Data, insight and evaluation.
Partnerships across councils, NHS bodies and wider public services.
Legal structures that enable collaboration while managing risk.

We are particularly focused on health and local government, where neighbourhood models must bring together local authorities, integrated care boards, NHS providers and VCSE partners, often within complex regulatory environments.

Our aim is to help create repeatable, scalable approaches that make neighbourhood working easier to deliver in practice, with emphasis on relationship-focused methods rather than purely structural reforms.

How we are supporting neighbourhood working

The ‘how’ of neighbourhood working (with LGIU)

Through our strategic partnership with the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU), we are leading a major research programme exploring what it really takes for councils to embed neighbourhood working as an organisational approach, covering areas such as:

Leadership and organisational design.
Resource planning and decision-making.
Workforce development.
Public engagement.
Data and impact.
Strategic partnerships.

The research draws directly on the experiences of local authorities and system partners, focusing on practical tools, delivery models and organisational enablers. Findings will be published in an accessible public report, alongside events and sector engagement throughout 2026.

Neighbourhood health and collaborative care (with NHS Transformation Unit)

In parallel, we are working closely with NHS Transformation Unit on neighbourhood health and collaborative care models, building on national learning around provider collaboration and place-based delivery.

This includes exploring how health systems can create value from scale while strengthening neighbourhood-level services, helping organisations navigate governance, accountability and integration across complex provider landscapes.

How we support organisations

Our multidisciplinary teams support public bodies across the full neighbourhood journey, including:

Legal frameworks: Enabling integration and collaboration while managing risk, including frameworks developed with partners such as New Local, integrated care boards, and local authorities.
Governance: Supporting with decision-making and accountability models.
Provider collaboration and alliance contracting: Facilitating partnerships across councils, NHS bodies and wider public services.
Organisation: Supporting with workforce models and organisational change.
Infrastructure: Including estates, regeneration and place-based development.
Data: Advising on sharing, information governance, insight and evaluation.
Commercial and procurement strategies: Guidance on resource allocation and financial frameworks.

We work with councils, NHS organisations, integrated care boards and system partners to design solutions that are legally robust, operationally practical and grounded in local context.

Our 50-50 split between private and public sector clients, means we are well-positioned to support organisations to embed neighbourhood working as a standard way of operating, and enabling multiple agencies to collaborate with confidence, clarity and pace.

The Elliot Foundation: Schools at the heart of communities

From providing weekly food and hygiene boxes for vulnerable families to creating dedicated spaces where third-party organisations can offer vital services for free, the Elliot Foundation is building stronger communities. We are proud to support the foundation, providing legal advice to roll out its community hub model nationally.

Positive Purpose - The Elliot Foundation

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No organisation exists in isolation and indeed, many thousands of us get up every morning facing the same challenge. How are we going to make a genuine difference to the communities that we serve?

The Elliot Foundation is a charitable schools trust with 36 primary schools in the West Midlands, London and East Anglia serving approximately 15,000 children. But we've learned that our responsibility to those children and their families doesn't stop at the school gate.

So we have approximately 40 different nationalities represented here at Highlees Primary School in Peterborough. Very culturally diverse part of the UK. We just really want to be able to support them where we can financially or in any other way. Education. However, we can help them.

One morning when I was unlocking the gates, I noticed that we had a year six boy here quite early. I got to speak to him. Found out from him that he’d travelled to school by two buses. It was cold. So I brought him inside, got him in the warmth.

But after chatting to him, I found out that he was diabetic, but he hadn't had any medical attention. So I got him sorted and then I reported it to safeguard in the school so the school could look after him.

It was after Matt's initial conversation with the family when that was reported that the investigations took place and relationships were built with the family. We soon discovered that Mum was quite hesitant, reluctant to seek support. She thought there would be a cost. She was worried about what would happen next. She didn't understand the systems. Through the trust that Matt built with the family, that meant she got the support she needed in the end.

So that one interaction sparked something much bigger. We started our Community Box Programme, which is weekly boxes of food hygiene products, cleaning products, ect. that's for our most vulnerable families.
That now operates in 23 of our schools, has given out over 150,000 boxes since the scheme began. That's approximately 5 million pounds worth of benefit-in-kind.

Parents will sometimes just come past. Give me a hug and off they’ll go again because they know they can come here. They know they can come. They can have a coffee.

They can ask us for a food bank to be picked up on a different day, not in front of everybody else. If they feel a bit anxious about that.

They come in here as strangers and they leave here as like a family. It is really nice. We all help each other. Like if they want a quick coffee, five minute coffee it’s not easy sometimes being a parent.

I absolutely despise anything healthy. I do not like vegetables, but I still say it's important for you. I do not really know how the human body works, but I think it's, it like improves your immune system and that apparently protects your body from getting sick. If health didn't exist, I would eat chocolate and donuts all day.

The Elliot Foundation proves that schools don’t just educate. They anchor communities together.
The creation of these local spaces where people feel comfortable asking for support are vital for creating real, lasting change.

With many children having English as an additional language, we work together to support the children with developing those literacy skills, but also their wider families as well.

We provide approximately 50 boxes, foodbank boxes a week to our families here at Highlees.

So Rackets Cubed and Fareshare do a delivery here. Every Monday we have a refrigerated van that will appear. We don't know what time, so it’s a bit of a surprise for us. And they’ll send me a list of what is on that.

We also do approximately 7 or 8 collections now a week in conjunction with Neighbourly. So local supermarkets, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Lidl provide surplus food for us and we’ll go and collect it. But this is for everybody. This is not just for Highlees families, this is for the wider community. So anybody who’s passing, anyone who needs it, we advertise it out on social media.

Well, we’re actively seeking partners who can help us positively impact communities.

It doesn't matter which sector you’re in, finance, technology, IT. If you share our values and commitment to making society a little bit better. Please get in touch.

So we’re rolling out community hubs nationally. These are dedicated spaces within schools that we let for free and that allows third party organisations to provide services to their local communities, whether that’s to tackle poverty, health issues, loneliness or any other social ill.

When a school like Highlees becomes a true community hub, it doesn’t just educate its children, it strengthens and rebuilds the community that surrounds it.

It demonstrates what you can achieve if you just believe in people, and that when we bring people together, we can do so much more than we can on our own.