In his first hours as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham stood on the steps of Downing Street and made ending rough sleeping his opening act — £340 million from day one, 1,200 homes, intensive support for at least 3,000 people, and a promise to “bring back hope.” By day two he had turned to the cost of living, cutting VAT on energy bills and appointing John Healey as Chancellor.
Look closely at that first announcement and you can see the whole theory of his government in miniature. The money is national; the delivery is not. Local leaders will lead the programme, building on approaches proven in communities — the same logic as Everyone In, Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s pandemic scheme offering housing and wraparound support to rough sleepers, which he cites as proof that “impossible” problems yield to political will. And it is framed as prevention: £1,426 to stop someone reaching the street, against £20,128 a year once they are on it. Invest in success rather than pay for failure.
That is place-first economics, and it will only work if we get devolution right — which means more than shifting power from Whitehall to city hall. As Andy Haldane has argued, the real rewiring runs from “city hall to city square.” The last mile of devolution — from the mayor’s office to the high street — is where good growth is won or lost, and it is the mile the rough sleeping drive will have to travel too: the homes acquired, the support delivered, the trust rebuilt street by street. The question for the new Chancellor is whether the rest of the growth agenda follows the same pattern. For growth to stick, and for money to circulate locally, the public and private sectors will need to work with communities to define and build together what good growth looks and feels like in their place.
And yet this last mile is the part of the settlement no one has designed. Making devolution stick at street level requires a rethink of the rights, capital and capacity of local actors — from councils to community businesses.
Rights that reach the street
The journey from city hall to city square dies at two points unless someone writes the detail.
The first area to strengthen is community ownership, and Greater Manchester has already built most of the machinery. Its £1 billion Good Growth Fund comes with a Good Growth Contract: apprenticeships, good employment, local suppliers, environmental standards. That is already an instrument of conditionality, directing public investment towards wider social impact. But it is one clause away from something more powerful: an ownership test.
Such a test would require a defined share of the value created by public investment is held locally, in community hands. With the ownership test, “good growth in every postcode” stops being a promise about who benefits from growth and becomes a rule about who owns it. Without it, public money too often works against itself. In Birkenhead, a publicly funded shopfront improvement scheme became the justification for landlords to raise the rent. The place looked better. The public owned no more of it than before.
The second lever to address is community governance. On paper, the recent English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill is a win for community ownership and governance, and it’s something we’ve long asked for, together with our partners at We’re Right Here. Alongside introducing a Community Right to Buy, it requires every council to make “appropriate arrangements” for neighbourhood governance, and it leaves the interpretation of what is “appropriate” to regulations that have not yet been written.
That blank page is the most consequential piece of unwritten policy in local government. Filled in with ambition, it transfers real power. Filled in lazily, it produces several thousand new committees, where communities still lack a meaningful voice. We’ve called for neighbourhood governance arrangement to be explicitly community-led, something Power to Change has piloted through a Community Covenant model. The £5 billion committed over the next decade to a Pride in Place programme is our opportunity to put this into practice at scale, and rewire community and neighbourhood governance for longer term sustainability.
Unlocking capital that already exists
Powers to increase ownership and access to power for communities only go so far without the funding to act and move at pace against private sector actors.
At a top level, if public investment is appraised on headline productivity alone, community-led development loses every business case before it is written. But we know community businesses bring money into their communities and keep it circulating locally. When assets are in community hands, 56p of every pound spent stays in the local economy, compared to 40p for large private sector firms.
Our partners at Kindred in Liverpool City Region are proving this works at a regional level. Since 2021, its £3 million of investments have leveraged a further £19.4 million. It is now scaling to a £50 million Social Investment Pathfinder, using blended capital to tackle the barriers community businesses face in owning assets.
Kindred is the blueprint for proposals to top-slice the public financial institutions — more than £100 billion already committed already committed across Homes England, the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank — to endow every mayoral authority with £1 billion for good growth. Deployed correctly, that could transform the investment landscape. Our ask: ringfence a share of each endowment for community asset development and add the social economy to the deployment mandates of the National Wealth Fund and British Business Bank.
Then there are the untapped streams of social value capital, a market worth more than £30 billion that currently buys activity rather than assets. Under today’s social value regime governing public procurement, a supplier can score full marks and leave a place owning nothing. Commitments are written at bid stage, discharged as volunteering hours, valued in proxy pounds nobody audits, and gone when the contract ends. It generates reports, not renewal.
It is the one part of procurement policy that is nationally standardised and locally meaningless. Potential reforms could mandate that those obligations be discharged as capital — patient debt, equity, first-loss investment into a community asset vehicle — rather than only as spend. That converts a fragmented compliance cost into a standing capital pipeline for neighbourhood renewal, using money that is already changing hands.
We are not making this argument alone A wider movement is forming to make public money work differently for places. The Impact Economy Collective, of which Power to Change is a founding member, estimates the impact economy already contributes around £428 billion in gross value added, close to 15% of GDP. Government must try a different approach to unlock capital, by blending private, philanthropic and public money behind measurable social outcomes.
Financing community ownership
We work with community businesses across the country and see firsthand what ownership makes possible. Public value is built, not just bought. But we also know that a Community Right to Buy without the finance to back it won’t work. Two ideas could fix it.
First, a National Community Ownership Strategy, anchored by £200 million at the Autumn Budget and built towards £1 billion over five years alongside philanthropy and social investment.
Secondly, we need a reworked High Street Buyout Fund – something we’ve long called for – that enables communities to utilise the Community Right to Buy and goes beyond just the high street. In practice, this would create a lean, independent buyer that moves at the speed of private capital, acquires the buildings communities want before the market takes them, and transfers them into community hands over time. We have modelled it: £100 million of government grant could leverage £250 million more for community ownership.
Increasing local capacity, where the last mile breaks down
Councils already hold powers to act on empty buildings through rental auctions, compulsory purchase, planning enforcement. And yet, they largely do not use them. Not from indifference, but because the capacity is thin, the legal risk feels high, and nobody in the building has done it before. In Birkenhead, a community business spent a year trying to get new rental auction powers used on its own high street. The power existed. The capability did not.
Haldane has proposed large-scale secondments into the mayoral authorities, funded from the same top-slice. Our recommendation is more specific: civic innovation squads. Small, time-limited teams that a community organisation, neighbourhood board or council can call in. Invited, not deployed; that distinction is the whole design. A secondee from MHCLG or the Treasury. An officer from a council that has already done the thing. Someone who understands property finance. And the ingredient no consultancy and no delivery unit can supply, a community business practitioner who has personally taken a building out of the market and put it into community hands. They do not do the work; they unblock it: one power used, one dataset assembled, one deal closed, one officer trained, a pipeline left behind. Then they leave.
Rethinking who devolution is for
Much work needs to be done to build the power, capabilities, and capital to make deeper and wider devolution stick. But much of the infrastructure already exists and there is no shortage of ideas and innovation being built from the ground up.
If Burnham wants good growth in every postcode, then the final destination of devolution cannot be city hall. It has to be the city square, the community-owned building, the neighbourhood board, the local enterprise and the high street. The places that truly thrive in the next decade will not be those where growth happens to people. It will be the places that have the power, ownership and confidence to shape it for themselves.
