Your Neighbourhood Matters

Your Neighbourhood Matters Programme aims to improve the quality of life for local people by bringing them together with service providers and allowing them to have a say in how services are developed and delivered.

The new scheme covers six areas of Coventry – Hillfields, Spon End and Lower Coundon, Bell Green, Edgwick and Paradise, Stoke Aldermoor and Willenhall and Willenhall Wood.

One of the aims of the project is to engage with local people who know what is wrong with the services delivered in their neighbourhood and often have good ideas about the ways in which they can be improved.

They are encouraged to work with partner organisations such as Coventry City Council, Whitefriars Housing Group, Groundwork, the Community Empowerment Network, Coventry Voluntary Services Council and West Midlands Police, to understand what services are being delivered in their neighbourhood and to have a greater say in how these are delivered in the future.

Other aims of Your Neighbourhood Matters include community safety, the environment and community involvement.

To view the achievements of the first year of the Your Neighbourhood Matters programme, view the Your Neighbourhood Matters Scrapbook of Achievement.

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
Voluntary Action Coventry

Community Empowerment Network
Coventry City Council: 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 76 834262.

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