Community engagement
To improve the quality of people’s lives, it is important that people are involved in the development and running of the places where they live and work and have pride and a sense of ownership in their locality. This applies to both new developments and to regenerated neighbourhoods.
Community engagement policy
Our community engagement policy sets a framework of how we will work with local authorities and their partners from the public, private and voluntary sectors through our core business process – the Single Conversation. This will empower local people to become involved in decisions about their housing and the regeneration of their communities.
The policy sets out:
- Our requirements, aims and framework for delivery
- Ten guiding principles for community engagement to provide a clear baseline and guide our approach and those of our partners
- The key tasks we as an organisation will undertake to implement our approach to community engagement
Download our policy here:
For People and Places - Our approach to Community Engagement - PDF (838 KB)
Community Engagement Executive Summary - PDF (69 KB)
The role of our partners
We recognise that as a national housing and regeneration agency we are not likely to directly undertake engagement activities ourselves. It is local authorities and their partners who will be responsible for ensuring that all housing and regeneration decisions are informed by their effective community engagement strategies. Our aim is to support and encourage those we work with to ensure that community engagement is integral to our whole business and is threaded into our own working practices and those of our partners.
10 guiding principles of community engagement
To provide a clear baseline and guide our approach and those of our partners, we have set out 10 guiding principles of community engagement which we expect to adhere to. For local people and community groups these 10 guiding principles can be a model against which our actions, the actions of local authorities and their partners can be viewed.
However, whilst we see these principles as fundamental to effective engagement, we take a flexible approach to how they are delivered, adjusting the methods to suit the needs and opportunities of the local area and people.
Our 10 guiding principles for effective engagement are:
1. Make community engagement integral and a permanent thread which runs through all of the processes involved in delivering housing and regeneration schemes from planning, development, regeneration to maintenance, service delivery and governance.
2. Get started early to get the best results, setting out the scope of the engagement including the options for long-term management and agreeing the responsibility of each agency and who is to take the overall lead role to manage the process.
3. Be clear about the aims and objectives, including recognition of whether any community engagement has already taken place in the area, and what capacity the community has to get involved.
4. Develop a profile of local people and communities and make a positive effort to develop ‘market intelligence’ on their needs and aspirations where investment is being considered. Where there will be a new community, agree who will be engaged on their behalf. Have a clear communications strategy for all concerned.
5. Set effective and clear ground rules with the community and partners, including defining boundaries and agreeing contacts for strands of activity. Seek to agree how community engagement will genuinely capture the views of different groups of people and communities.
6. Agree timescales, costs and delivery plans - assess the cost of community engagement and allocate adequate funding for effective engagement making sure that a robust, agreed delivery plan with realistic timescales and effective risk management is in place.
7. Use different models and techniques of community engagement to allow people to be involved on their terms, learning from experience elsewhere and depending on the capacity of the local group.
8. Be flexible about the succession strategies in helping to create a sustainable community.
9. Ensure agreements and strategies are implemented.
10. Measure success, assess impact and learn from this for future projects.
Contact details
Harriet Baldwin
Policy Manager
Tel: 0300 1234 500
For media enquiries, contact Helen Stoddart in the corporate press office on 020 7881 1615.
Last updated: 29 April 2010