It is now 40 years since the first area-based initiative (ABI) was launched in England. New Deal for Communities (NDC), announced in 1998, is one of the most ambitious of English ABIs in that it aims, over a period of 10 years, to reduce the gaps between 39 deprived areas and national standards in five outcome areas: crime, education, health, worklessness, and housing and the physical environment. Change data from the 2001-05 national evaluation are used to explore three considerations: change across the programme; drivers of mobility; and change at the partnership level. Barriers operating at the neighbourhood, city-wide and national levels have impacted on the implementation of the programme.

The New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme is an ambitious English area-based initiative which aims, over 10 years, to transform 39 deprived neighbourhoods in relation to six outcomes: crime, education, health, worklessness, housing and the community. Data indicate modest programme-wide change against benchmarks. Evidence is used to examine the validity of the programme’s four design parameters: a 10-year horizon is necessary to achieve change; holistic regeneration can help to achieve cross-outcome change; working with other agencies and having other overlapping ABIs helps change; and, having the community at the heart of the initiative enhances outcomes. Findings in relation to these design features have wider applicability across area regeneration policy.

New Deal for Communities: the regeneration context It is now thirty-five years since area-based initiatives (ABIs) were launched in England. The history of ABIs has been subject to considerable debate (Department of the Environment, 1994; Gripaios, 2002; Shaw and Robinson, 1998). Three major themes emerge from this material:`community engagement'; the central role ascribed to partnership working and interagency cooperation; and the proliferation and growing complexity of ABIs. First, ABIs have increasingly emphasised the role which`the community' should play in devising and implementing neighbourhood renewal. This message has emerged from government (SEU, 2001a), national lobbying organisations (Community Development Foundation, 1999), and independent commentators (Hall and Mason, 1999). This move to place local communities at the heart of regeneration is based on a number of assumptions: residents appear best placed to identify opportunities in the area; community engagement can help sustain activity; and ABI initiatives can provide jobs for locals. This drive towards community engagement has also gained credence through the impact of other policy agendas, notably community cohesion (Home Office, 2002), and the role of nonmarket organisations in delivery (HM Treasury, 2002a). However, the realities of community involvement on the ground can prove complex. The role and remit of community groups are not always clear (Forrest and Kearns, 1999). There may be a limited platform from which to launch community involvement (Taylor, 1995). Formidable time demands can be placed on a small number of willing local community`reps', leading to burnout, rapid turnover, and disillusionment (Alcock et al, 1998). Recent work on communities and ABIs has also cast doubts on the links between`neighbourhood and community' (Talen, 1999) and suggested that engagement can be frozen in time, unable to respond to changes occurring as a result of ABI designation (Raco and Flint, 2001). Commentators also argue that ABIs have proved willing to promote`responsible' but not`challenging' community involvement (Raco, 2000). Second, notions of partnership and interagency cooperation have come to the fore.

The New Deal for Communities (NDC) is an ambitious English area-based initiative (ABI) designed to transform 39 deprived areas in relation to five outcomes: crime, education, health, worklessness, and housing and the physical environment. Change data are now available for 2002–08. NDC areas continue to see positive change, but show only modest improvements against other benchmarks, notably similarly deprived comparator areas. Regeneration has been complex because of a range of ‘barrier sets’ of which the most insistent has been the relationship between NDC Partnerships and central government. This relationship informs wider debates surrounding interpretations of the programme.

The New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme was one of the most intensive area-based initiatives (ABIs) ever launched in England. Between 1998 and 2010, 39 NDC partnerships were charged with implementing 10-year, locally informed strategies designed to improve conditions within deprived neighbourhoods each accommodating around 9,800 people. More than any other previous English ABI, the NDC programme placed a strong emphasis on informing and engaging the 39 local communities in all aspects of the regeneration process. The programme can be seen as a laboratory within which to assess relationships between community involvement in regeneration and any associated outcomes. Change data indicates that at the area-level there is nothing to suggest NDC areas saw more change than other deprived localities, or that NDCs doing more in relation to the community dimension saw greater change than those doing less. Data showing change for individuals, however, reveals that those involved in NDC activities saw more gains than those who were not involved. This positive individual-level change is not reflected in area-level data because absolute levels of involvement remained essentially low. This was for a number of reasons, some of which relate to the evolving NDC narrative: greater control from central government, diminishing community interest in the initiative, and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of local residents as to what the programme could ever achieve.