Is your neighbourhood the sort of place residents love?  Do local people think they can influence decisions affecting it?  The answers to those questions – asked as part of the Places Survey – give an insight into whether neighbourhoods are thriving or failing; improving or in decline.

Chamberlain Forum has looked at responses to the two questions from different Birmingham neighbourhoods.  They are both  part of the National Indicator set used by local strategic partnerships in England to plan and report on progress made in achieving their Community Strategies and Local Area Agreements:

NI4 – the percentage of people who feel they can influence local decisions

NI5 – the percentage of people who believe that their neighbourhood is a good place to live.

Birmingham’s local strategic partnership – BeBirmingham – selected the measures and has included them in the city’s Local Area Agreement.  The LAA also identifies 26 priority neighbourhoods in the city.  These are the parts of the city with the highest levels of multiple deprivation.  Birmingham City Council surveyed NI4 and NI5 levels earlier this year.  The results are shown below:

The top right hand quadrant shows those places with a higher than city average NI4 and NI5.  The bottom left quadrant contains those priority neighbourhoods with a lower than city average NI4 and NI5.  As expected, more of the priority neighbourhoods are in the left and lower quadrants – they are after all the most deprived and poorly served neighbourhoods in the city.  What’s interesting, however, are the exceptions.  What are places like Balsall Heath and Attwood Green getting right?

Balsall Heath has a high level of grassroots community group activity including the Balsall Heath Forum and experience of citizen-mobilisation around the Streetwatch campaign.  Attwood Green is the inner city estate which used to be known as Lee Bank.  It’s where tenants campaigned long and hard to opt out from Council housing.  They won that campaign and set up the Optima Community Association which is the community-owned landlord for the area.  It isn’t just that money has been spent on the areas which have high NI4/NI5 scores.  Balsall Heath has had relatively little regeneration investment – and the priority neighbourhoods include two – Aston and Kings Norton – which have had £50m New Dea; for Communities money a piece. It seems to have more to do with the level of social capital in the neighbourhoods.

Chamberlain Forum has proposed labelling the four quadrants:

• top right – thriving: neighbourhoods where communities are influential and having an effect on the quality of services
• bottom right – striving: where grassroots involvement is strong but the neighbourhood has a way to go
• top left – dependent: public services are performing well – but low levels of involvement mean that standards are at risk in the long term
• bottom left – failing: neighbourhoods at risk of further serious decline.

What do you think? And where would you place your neighbourhood on the chart above?   Get in touch: leave us a comment or email Chamberlain Forum.