The Cooperative Party have published a new report, Holding on to HOPE: Lessons from Community Britain, in partnership with anti-racist campaigning organisation Hope Not Hate.

Based on polling, it explores how people across Britain feel about their country nationally and their communities – and the results show a marked contrast.

When people look at the national picture, the mood is bleak. The most common word people now associate with Britain is “declining”. Some 70% of people say they feel ignored by politicians. For those in the greatest financial need, worried about how they’ll afford the next bill, that figure increases.

The causes of decline vary according to people’s voting intentions. Predictably, immigration is high on the list of Reform UK voters, but as earlier research has shown, for left wing voters, it hardly registers – Brexit and climate change are far more salient.

In contrast with this downbeat national outlook, at the local level people still believe in their communities – and in each other. Nearly two-thirds of Labour supporters were proud of their local area – as were a clear majority of all respondents.

Additionally:

• 60% say their neighbourhood is peaceful and friendly
• Two-thirds say the path to rebuilding trust is better public services
• 65% support giving more power to local government and local people.

“Asked what makes a good community, people know what they want,” says the report. “Access to high-quality local services ranks highly: reliable public transport, good local schools, accessible healthcare and safe streets all form the backbone of what is seen as a functioning neighbourhood. But people also place a strong emphasis on the social fabric that binds a community together.”

The sombre picture nationally means that “a plan for change can only be impactful if people believe that change via politics is possible,” say the authors. “But if political trust is to be rebuilt, it must happen from the ground up. There is also a clear desire for more power, both for local Government and for local decision-making more generally. Communities are not passive recipients of policy, they are active networks of people with the knowledge, motivation, and lived experience to shape the future of their places. What they need is the tools, resources and decision making power to do so.”

Previous research also suggests that the most effective way to push back against the rising influence of the far right is delivering change at local level. That requires not only more devolution of power but the financial resources to make real improvements possible.

Immediate, argues the report, the Government should:

• Publish a comprehensive communities strategy with input from across Government, and ensure effective implementation of the strategy at a local level.

• Invest in communities, continuing the positive steps set out in the Government’s recent £1.5bn Plan for Neighbourhoods, which allows groups of local people to themselves direct local funding.

• Continue to devolve real power to communities, including implementing the Community Right to Buy and taking further steps to support communities wishing to save local assets through community ownership.

• Develop clear definitions of social connectedness and community cohesion with metrics for measuring cohesion at local and national levels to provide a framework for progress.

• Encourage community ownership of key social infrastructure like community centres, libraries, parks and pubs, to help put an end to the decade-long trend which has seen these spaces disappear from too many communities.

• Actively support the development of participatory models like co-operatives and community enterprises, which give local people a route to genuine decision-making, power and control.

• Include the role of communities in Government’s national resilience plans, including the ongoing Cabinet Office review, reflecting the proven role of communities in responding to crises from pandemics to riots.

• Focus on social as well as physical infrastructure, reflecting the findings in this report around the aspects of community valued by people, which include access to shared spaces and community identity.