Big Local is ending. Over fifteen years, 150 neighbourhoods in England each decided how to spend £1 million of National Lottery funding, at a scale and over a timescale nothing else in this country has matched. As Pride in Place and the Community Wealth Fund are designed, the West Midlands Funders Network brought funders together across three sessions this year with the residents, advisers and infrastructure organisations who did that work. Their account of what it takes, and what it costs, is set out here.

Two major programmes are now being designed on the principle that communities should have real influence over money spent in their areas. Pride in Place, the government's neighbourhood Health plans, and the Community Wealth Fund, which will use dormant assets to put long-term funding in the hands of residents in disadvantaged areas, both rest on that idea. Neither has yet had to test it at scale.

Big Local has. Since 2010, 150 neighbourhoods across England have each received £1 million of National Lottery funding, distributed through Local Trust, with local residents deciding how it should be spent. The programme was designed to run for ten years and ran for fifteen. It is now ending, which makes this the moment to look at what the experience actually shows about devolved decision-making, rather than what we assume it shows.

Three sessions of the West Midlands Funders Network's Big Local Legacy and Learning Programme have brought funders, public bodies and voluntary organisations together with people who have spent those years doing this work.

In June, Alex Boys of Local Trust and Alison Thompson of Warwickshire Community and Voluntary Action (WCAVA), the voluntary and community sector infrastructure organisation for Warwickshire, drew on two Big Local areas in the county, Hill Top and Caldwell in Nuneaton and Arley and Ansley, to examine support infrastructure and the realities of devolving power. In September, two further sessions looked at equity, inclusion and representation through the Pimlico Million in Westminster, and at impact and outcomes through Firs and Bromford Neighbours Together in Birmingham.

What came through all three is that handing a community a budget is not the same as handing it power. The difference between the two is made up of things that rarely appear in a funding agreement.

How the money was held

Big Local separated two jobs that funders usually combine. In each area, a partnership of local people, at least half of them residents, decided what the money was for. A locally trusted organisation, normally an established charity, held the funds, employed any staff and carried the legal and financial liability. In Pimlico that organisation was Quaker Social Action. In Firs and Bromford it was Open Door Community Foundation.

The arrangement allows residents to hold genuine decision-making power without also asking volunteers to take on responsibility for employment law, audit and charity regulation. It is also, as the sessions made clear, where much of the friction ends up.

A third organisation matters and is rarely named in funding decisions. Contributors to the June session described local infrastructure bodies as the hidden wiring of community-led work: the organisations that convene people, develop leadership, hold relationships together and step in when something goes wrong. That work is largely invisible when it is going well, which is part of why it so often goes unfunded.

Both partnerships have results to show for the model. In Pimlico, nine residents backed 140 projects over ten years, awarded more than £420,000 in grants and ran over 77 community events, reaching more than 10,000 residents and 145 local organisations. In Firs and Bromford, 85 per cent of participants reported feeling more connected to their neighbours and 79 per cent said they were coping better with the pressures in their lives.

Time is the first cost

Paul Wright, Director of Strategy and Engagement at Open Door Community Foundation, told us that trust and momentum in Firs and Bromford took between three and five years to build. That timescale can often be uncomfortable for funders working to three-year cycles. It was felt that work assessed at the end of year three can be recorded as a failure at precisely the point when the conditions for change are forming.

Big Local had patience that most programmes do not. Support was deliberately light touch and sat alongside residents rather than above them. Firs and Bromford used that time to move people from attending activities to running them and describes the result as a “we can” culture, meaning a shared local confidence that problems can be tackled by residents themselves rather than waited out.

The June session approached the same question through governance. Resident leadership develops over years, and the arrangements that support it have to change as it does. Structures agreed at the start of a programme rarely fit the same area five years later, when different people are involved and the decisions have become harder.

A seat is not the same as a voice

Lucy Thurley of Local Trust told the session in September that a quarter of those who joined Big Local partnerships had never volunteered before, and that 58 per cent went on to take up other civic or community roles. The model reached people who were not already involved in local decision-making.

Getting them into the room, however, is not the same as making the room work for them. Formal committee practice and governance structures favour those who are comfortable with agendas, technical language and institutional process. Nawal Lakhdar, the Pimlico Million's community engagement manager, described how the partnership kept asking who was not present, and then acted on the answer. It funded a hot chocolate stall on the Churchill Gardens estate, which gave young people a reason to spend time with their neighbours, and coffee mornings run in English, Arabic and Bangla, which brought into the programme women who were new to the area or isolated within it. Both created relationships first, and only then led to invitations into the formal structure.

Yarah Al Silawi joined the Pimlico partnership as a member before she turned 18. Staff met her beforehand, explained how decisions were made and arranged for her to observe a meeting before she committed to joining. In the meetings themselves, technical language was explained, silences were noticed and quieter members were asked directly for their view. Facilitators pressed people on what had led them to a position rather than simply whether they agreed with it, which is the difference between a member who attends and a member who decides.

“Being a partner at Pimlico Million has helped me grow in so many ways. My confidence, knowledge and awareness have all grown due to the meetings and discussions I have engaged in.” - Yarah Al Silawi, Partnership member, the Pimlico Million

Conflict is predictable, so resource it

All three sessions were candid about what goes wrong.

In Pimlico, a serious racist incident took around six months to resolve and held up grants to grassroots groups while it was dealt with. Leadership tensions persisted despite the partnership having both a chair and a vice chair and eased only when the chairing role began to rotate between members.

The Pimlico partnership's own closing account is equally direct, recording that the project dealt with difficult relationships and had its own turbulences, including periods of stagnation, across a decade that also included a global pandemic.

Gill Hutchinson, an independent adviser working with several Big Local areas, described a pattern she has seen repeatedly. Residents employed locally can find themselves holding three roles at once, as neighbour, employee and decision-maker. The organisation holding the money does not always share the partnership's view of who has authority over what. Left unaddressed, these tensions stall programmes and drive people out, and residents continue to live with the consequences long after the professionals involved have moved on.

The Warwickshire areas raised a further risk. Asking a small group of volunteers to manage competing expectations within their own community, year after year, leads to burnout that no monitoring return records.

Independent chairs, mediation, transparent conflict-of-interest processes and specialist responses to discrimination all helped areas recover. Each works better when it is established before it is needed. Conflict in community-led work is not evidence that the model has failed. It is what follows from giving people decisions that genuinely matter to them.

Who decides what success looks like

In Firs and Bromford, residents helped define the indicators the programme measured itself against. Rather than counting attendances alone, participants were asked whether they now knew more of their neighbours by name, whether they had more people they could turn to when life became difficult, and whether they felt able to share their own skills and interests with others.

“Being able to have somewhere local that I feel safe and heard. People listen to me and that helps a lot.”- Resident, Firs and Bromford

Quantitative results still mattered, and the programme reports them. Alongside them sit stories, recorded conversations and what community connectors, the local people employed to build relationships across the neighbourhood, heard from residents who would never complete a survey. Evaluation was treated as a loop feeding back into local decisions rather than as information extracted for a distant funder. Asking someone whether they know more neighbours than they did a year ago is both a way of measuring change and a way of helping them notice it.

What this asks of funders

Budget for the conditions, not only for the activity. Induction, accessible meetings, facilitation, governance support, conflict resolution and specialist equity advice are the infrastructure that makes resident control workable, and all of it costs money. So does the local infrastructure organisation that does the convening. Flexibility matters too. One Big Local area lost around eighteen months after appointing an accountant without the relevant charity expertise, because specialist advice was beyond what it could afford.

Allow three to five years before drawing conclusions about progress. Be cautious about investment models that fix the proportion of funding to be spent on capital projects before residents have determined what their area needs. Keep outcomes frameworks to a small number of indicators that residents recognise and accept qualitative evidence alongside quantitative.

Finally, plan for legacy from the start rather than in the closing year, when the options have narrowed and the people who could have acted on them have often moved on. The measure of a programme's legacy is what remains once the funding ends: who in the neighbourhood can lead, who can convene, which relationships hold, and whether residents have more confidence to shape what happens next than they had at the beginning.

Resources from the sessions

Each of the three online sessions came with materials from the people who presented. They are shared here in full so you can read, use and adapt them in your own work. Between them they cover how support and funding structures were designed, how power was shared with residents, and how Big Local partnerships evidenced what changed.

Discover more about the programme

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