Neighbourhood Renewal
Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme: Annual Findings 2003/04
This summary presents the key findings from the National Evaluation Team's detailed review of the 20 Round 1 Pathfinders. It draws on research from the first two years of the Programme in order to: assess progress in partnership building and programme delivery; assess the nature and extent of early results; and identify lessons that will be of value to other neighbourhood management initiatives.
Title: Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Programme: Annual Findings 2003/04
Author: SQW Ltd
Date published: December 2004
Number of pages: 16
Availability: Download full report 
PDF 340 Kb
Improving services: Results and impacts
The most responsive service providers – those actually changing the way that they deliver some of their services – were the police, local authority environment and housing services and Primary Care Trusts.
Liveability services relating to community safety, crime and the environment have seen the most changes.
Pathfinders have generally 'added value' most effectively through:
improving the networking of local service providers and flows of informal information between them
communicating local resident priorities back to providers
mainstream service providers using pilot projects to improve the local environment.
The most significant changes to services tended to involve service provider pilot projects, with the Pathfinder using its own infrastructure and capacity to facilitate the pilot.
Limitations
The positive changes being made to services are relatively modest in scale. Making progress beyond the 'liveability 'services has also proved more difficult.
Pathfinders were not as successful at joining up services between providers, as they were in working with individual providers.
Progress in building Pathfinder capacity
The process of establishing credible neighbourhood partnerships has taken longer than expected, but has now largely been achieved.
The overall structure of partnership is largely the same for all 20 pathfinders. The average size of the neighbourhood management teams was 6.5 members of staff.
The overall level of engagement with both local communities and service providers is good in most Pathfinders.
Most Pathfinders had close relationships with their local authorities as their accountable bodies but weaker links with their Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs).
The evaluation has also identified a number of issues for the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit and Pathfinders to address:
improving accountability to the local community by deepening and broadening resident engagement
developing the capacity and the role of the boards especially growing their leadership role
ensuring that staff teams are of an appropriate size for the task in hand
improving engagement with Black Minority Ethnic groups
Progress in delivering programmes
The Pathfinders both extended and deepened their relationships with many service providers by engaging some new providers and working more intensively with specific key providers (e.g. the police, council environmental, housing and leisure services, schools and Primary Care Trusts).
Most programmes tended to focus on 'liveability' issues of community safety, environment and housing, and local health. Some Pathfinders proved to be very good at focusing on just one or two key priority areas to good effect.
Pathfinders found one-to-one relationships, topical working groups or service provider networks to be the best method of working with service providers.
The evaluation identified the following delivery issues to be addressed:
the need for strong relationships with local authorities.
resources are limited and need to focus on priority issues and key providers.
relationships with service providers need to be improved to increase the scale and scope of service improvements.
residents need more help to hold service providers accountable for services more easily.
local data (service performance) and evidence (what works) needs to be better used in decision-making procedures.
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Last update: Friday, August 01, 2008