The UK government has launched one of the most ambitious community regeneration programmes in a generation. The Pride in Place Programme promises up to £5 billion over 10 years to support 244 neighbourhoods across Great Britain, putting local residents firmly in control of their area’s future.
This isn’t just another funding initiative. It represents a fundamental shift in how communities shape their neighbourhoods, with decision-making power transferred directly to local people through newly established Neighbourhood Boards.
What is Pride in Place?
Pride in Place is the government’s flagship communities programme, designed to empower local people to drive change in areas experiencing high deprivation and weak social infrastructure. Each of the 244 selected neighbourhoods will receive up to £20 million in funding and support over a decade.
The programme operates in two phases. The first phase includes 75 areas that began earlier, whilst phase 2 adds 169 new neighbourhoods, focusing on smaller geographies of around 10,000 people. These areas have been identified as ‘doubly disadvantaged’, experiencing both high deprivation and limited community infrastructure.
Three core objectives
The programme centres on three overarching aims. First, building stronger communities by rebuilding relationships and restoring a collective sense of belonging. According to the government’s recent research 81% of Britons believe society is divided, and 68% feel it’s more divided than a decade ago. Pride in Place aims to tackle these divisions by bringing people together and fostering local pride.
Second, creating thriving places by transforming neglected high streets and estates into spaces that reflect community needs. This includes improving how residential areas look, creating new community spaces, and ensuring public services are accessible and responsive to local requirements.
Third, taking back control by empowering residents to shape their neighbourhood’s future. This means giving people genuine influence over decisions that affect their lives, from skills development to local planning.
How the programme works
At the heart of Pride in Place are Neighbourhood Boards, resident-led bodies that will decide how funding is spent. Each Board includes local residents, community leaders, businesses, faith groups, and representatives from local authorities and MPs.
These Boards must co-create a Pride in Place Plan with their wider community, outlining their vision for change over the next decade. Critically, the government requires evidence of extensive community engagement before approving these plans.
The guidance is explicit: everyone should have a say in their area’s future, particularly those who have previously felt left out of decision-making. This means avoiding one-off consultations and instead carrying out deep, broad, and sustained engagement with all sections of the community.
The community engagement challenge
This is where the programme becomes both ambitious and complex. Neighbourhood Boards face several significant challenges.
They must reach diverse voices, engaging groups who are often marginalised or whose voices are less frequently heard. This includes people experiencing homelessness, those without internet access, non-English speakers, and elderly residents. The guidance warns against engagement being dominated by those most vocal or well-connected. True community-led decision-making requires hearing from everyone.
This isn’t a one-off consultation either. Boards need to maintain ongoing dialogue throughout the 10-year programme, as community needs and priorities evolve. They must also demonstrate legitimacy to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), providing evidence that engagement has been meaningful and that community feedback has genuinely shaped plans.
Finally, communities must be able to hold Boards to account, understanding how their input has influenced decisions and tracking progress on priorities.
How Citizen Space can support pride in place
This is where Citizen Space becomes invaluable. As a purpose-built consultation and engagement tool used by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including MHCLG itself, Citizen Space is designed precisely for the type of comprehensive, ongoing community engagement that Pride in Place demands.
End-to-end community engagement
Citizen Space supports the full journey from initial community conversations through to reporting on outcomes. Neighbourhood Boards can use the platform to run multiple types of engagement activities in one place, from formal consultations on draft Pride in Place Plans to surveys understanding community priorities, event registrations for community workshops, quick polls for rapid feedback, and project pages to keep the community informed about progress.
Making engagement accessible and inclusive
The platform is built to government accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 compliant), ensuring more people can participate. Its clean, user-friendly design is consistently reported as one of the easiest platforms to use by both users and respondents.
We have been investing heavily in features that make participation even more inclusive and accessible for everyone. We’ve recently added online and offline events as activity types, allowing Boards to manage both digital and in-person engagement in one place.
Throughout 2026, we’re launching additional inclusive features including speech-to-text functionality, image answer components that help visualise options for those with literacy challenges or when dealing with design preferences, and quick polls for rapid feedback that increase engagement rates. These tools recognise that not everyone finds traditional text-heavy consultations easy to navigate, and they’re essential for reaching the diverse audiences that Pride in Place demands.
Crucially, Citizen Space allows Boards to meet people where they are. The platform supports multiple engagement formats to suit different preferences, rich media embeds to make information clear and engaging, customisable question types and structures, and integrated geospatial mapping that’s perfect for place-based discussions where residents can drop pins, draw shapes, and comment on specific locations.
Deep analysis and transparency
One of Pride in Place’s key requirements is demonstrating how community input has shaped decisions. Citizen Space’s built-in analysis tools make this straightforward, with fast reporting to quickly summarise feedback, tagging and filtering to identify themes and cross-reference responses, response publishing features to show the community exactly what people said, and what is being done in response.
For larger consultations, our First Pass Analysis service uses AI to help busy analysts rapidly understand sentiment, themes, and key issues across thousands of responses, whilst maintaining full transparency about how conclusions are reached.
Sustained engagement over time
Because Pride in Place runs for a decade, Boards need a system that supports ongoing dialogue, not just one-off consultations. Citizen Space allows Boards to create a central hub for all community engagement activities, build different hub pages for specific schemes, track engagement over time and demonstrate how priorities evolve, and publish updates directly on the platform, creating a complete record of the community’s journey.
Early success: Castle Point’s approach
Some areas are already demonstrating how effective digital engagement can support Pride in Place. Castle Point Borough Council, working with their Neighbourhood Board for Canvey Island, provides an excellent early example.
Canvey Island was selected in March 2024 as one of the phase 1 recipients of £20 million funding over 10 years. The Neighbourhood Board moved quickly to establish community engagement as central to their approach, recognising that the Regeneration Plan must genuinely reflect local priorities.
Using Citizen Space, Castle Point ran a targeted consultation with local businesses in October 2025, one stream of their broader community engagement efforts. This business survey was designed to gain insight into how best to meet local priorities with the intervention options available under the three strategic objectives: Thriving Places, Stronger Communities, and Taking Back Control.
This is exactly the kind of targeted, well-structured engagement that the Pride in Place guidance calls for. Rather than a one-size-fits-all consultation, Castle Point recognised that different stakeholder groups (residents, businesses, community organisations) may need different approaches, whilst all feeding into the same overarching Regeneration Plan.
The use of Citizen Space allowed Castle Point to demonstrate best practice in several ways. The consultation clearly explained the Pride in Place programme, the Board’s role, and how business input would inform the Regeneration Plan. By running a specific business survey alongside other engagement activities, the Board showed they understood that different groups have different perspectives and constraints on their time.
Castle Point’s approach shows how Neighbourhood Boards can use digital tools to deliver the kind of deep, broad, sustained engagement that Pride in Place requires, whilst maintaining professional standards and clear accountability to their communities.
Bringing it all together
The Pride in Place Programme represents a genuine opportunity to shift power back to communities. But realising this ambition depends on Neighbourhood Boards’ ability to conduct meaningful, inclusive engagement at scale.
Citizen Space provides the infrastructure to make this possible. It’s not about digitising for digitisation’s sake. It’s about giving Boards practical tools to reach more people, hear diverse voices, analyse feedback efficiently, and demonstrate accountability to both their communities and central government.
From the initial community conversations about priorities through to reporting on progress years into the programme, Citizen Space can support the entire journey. And because it’s built specifically for government engagement, it includes the workflows, templates, and features that public sector teams need.
The Pride in Place Programme is ambitious. The community engagement requirements are substantial. But with the right tools and approach, Neighbourhood Boards can meet this challenge and truly put local people in control of their area’s future.