This is a programme which has been set up using Safer Stronger
Communities Funding called the Neighbourhood Element.
The primary outcome is: "to improve the quality of life for people in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and ensure service providers are more responsive to neighbourhood needs and improve their delivery."
Coventry has a secondary outcome to be delivered through the YNM programme, to: ‘increase the capacity of local communities so that people are empowered to participate in local decision-making and are able to fully engage in service delivery and delivering value for money and efficiency improvements within local neighbourhood service provision.’
Central to the Government’s proposals for more neighbourhood engagement, set out in Citizen Engagement and Public Services: Why Neighbourhoods matter issued in January 2005, is the desire to develop responsive and customer-focused public services with opportunities for communities to influence and improve the delivery of public services. It sets out the Government’s enthusiasm to extend neighbourhood management, recognising that the form arrangements take must be appropriate to local circumstances, flexible to change and responsive to the needs and diversity of the community and its organisations.
Evidence and experience now indicates that there are certain key building blocks that should be put in place quickly to stabilise deprived neighbourhoods and lay the foundations in which other interventions have a better prospect of success. This includes taking practical measures to:
a) Improve liveability, encompassing crime; fear of crime; anti-social behaviour; physical environmental quality; housing management; basic leisure provision for young people;
b) Tackle poor public services to reduce educational underachievement,
worklessness, poor health, teenage conceptions and offending;
c) Empower local people, which is important in enabling local people to get
involved and have a say in local decisions, and foster community cohesion;
We are doing this in partnership with
organisations across sectors who are all involved in delivering
Safer Stronger Communities projects at a neighbourhood level.
The organisations involved are:
Coventry Partnership
Groundwork Coventry & Warwickshire
Neighbourhood Management
West Midlands Police
CVSC
Community Empowerment Network
City Services
Whitefriars Housing Group
The programme will be running over the next four years in particular areas of the city.
These are:
Spon end and Lower Coundon
Hillfields
East Bell Green
Willenhall and Willenhall Wood
Stoke Aldermoor
Edgwick and Paradise
For more information please contact Neighbourhood Management at Coventry City Council on 024 7683 3333.