Homepride - How can we create Pride in Place?

To Hastings last Thursday for Sir Kier to make further announcements over the Pride in Place programme where a further £800m will be pumped into 40 new areas of England to invest in their neighbourhoods.

In his speech Kier pointed out that It is the same story in towns across the country. Youth clubs that have been abandoned, shops boarded up and high streets decimated.

And he’s right. Things are looking bleak out there. But why?

Things on Hastings High Street might not be so bad with a vacancy rate of around 7%. I was there in the summer last year, the old town in Hastings is delightful with a great mix of independent shops and cafes. However things outside the south east get much much worse. If you were to go to somewhere like, oh I don’t know, Hartlepool (no idea why that came into my head?!) the vacancy rate is significantly higher at 20% with one in five shops standing empty.

So is the Pride in Place programme just another rebranded version of the things we have heard before. Towards an Urban Renaissance?, Pathfinder Scheme?, Portas Pilots? Levelling Up? It seems we have been here before. Several Times.

But don't worry it's not just the government that is investing, its AI to the rescue in Barnsley which will become the UK's first 'Tech Town'. Am I being a Luddite, or does the prospect of Microsoft, Cisco and Adobe being given a run on public services in return for investment all sound a little sinister?

And what the government giveth with one hand they taketh away with another in the form of rates which will increase by 19% in April this year in England. But this isn’t just about high streets, Sir Kier was talking about the decline in communities in general and said he wants to give power, agency and control to the very people who want to improve their community – those who have skin in the game.

“Skin in the game”? That’s an odd concept. Because I think that one of the significant drivers for the decline in many communities is the amount of people without skin in the game and therefore no real desire to see it improved. Let me try and explain.

It’s pretty Ironic that Starmer made his speech in Hastings, a borough which scored just 28% in the last Housing Delivery Test, a result which was the lowest in the entire country. Just 348 homes delivered in the 3 years up to 2023 against a target of 1,235. We don’t know what the more up to date picture looks like as the government have delayed that. Alongside that, a 1.65 year housing land supply (again amongst the worst in the county), which equates to a shortfall of 2,800 homes over the next five years.

The current Local Plan in Hastings was adopted in 2014 (that’s pretty geriatric in local plan years). The replacement plan is still some way off with consultation restarting in the next month or so. Meaning? Well that housing shortfall isn’t getting addressed any time soon.  

It gets worse. With around 1,400 registered homeless in the borough (including 665 children – which makes me beyond angry), it has the 21^st highest rate of homelessness in England. A high amount of people living in homeless accommodation with the council spending £7.6m on this in 2024/25 alone. That’s just what they know about. The big problem with homeless figures are those who are ‘hidden’ through sofa surfing, part of other households, or just not picked up by authority monitoring.

Hastings is by no means unique, and this picture is replicated across the country with only very few authorities meeting housing need, supplying affordable housing and without a problem of homelessness or those in temporary accommodation. These are the people who need are in desperate need of some ‘skin in the game’ and £20m over 5 years in those communities is going to achieve F.A.

Pride in Place can only happen when residents shift from being just passive users to active owners or stewards. In my opinion it is totally unrealistic to expect Price in Place to succeed where Levelling Up failed if the root cause is not addressed.  

Look, I’m not saying that a new youth club, community project, high street improvements are not a good thing but they really are just a sticking plaster for small pockets of wider communities which have been badly let down by lack of strategic planning, chronic under investment, and poor decision making to address the critical issues facing a much larger chunk of those societies. Until we crack that, this is just another initiative to add to the long list of ones that have come before that didn’t work.