Building on solid ground: The risk manager's role in the neighbourhood revolution

A neighbourhood based future

The case for neighbourhood working has been made, and there is a widely shared consensus that a neighbourhood-based model should be the future of many key services. Three key shifts are driving neighbourhood-based programmes:

• More integration and collaboration across services and organisation.
• Co-production with citizens and communities.
• Sharing and delegation of decisions and power.

All three shifts require sophisticated understanding of risk and risk management to guide organisations through the change and support realisation of the improved outcomes neighbourhood working can deliver.   

Why neighbourhood?

From decades of regeneration programmes to the LGA's 2025 Trusting Place report, which draws on the views of senior public service leaders from across local government, there is a great deal of evidence that points firmly in one direction: services delivered collaboratively at neighbourhood level produce better outcomes for citizens and make better use of public resources.

The LGA report is clear that neighbourhood working is not a programme or initiative but a fundamentally different way of operating, one that requires culture change across all parts of the system.

Local Trust's Everybody Needs Good Neighbourhoods 2 study (2025) compared areas in the Big Local programme – a National Lottery-backed, community-led funding initiative to support 150 disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England – with 29 matched comparators over 15 years. It found these schemes drove crime down by 19.1 offences per 1,000 people (against 10.5 in comparable areas), grew local business activity by 41% (compared with 22% in benchmark areas), and meaningfully slowed the rise of child poverty.

The evidence is compelling. As the prominence of the neighbourhood rises in public policy, so too does the importance of one question that is too often an afterthought: what is the risk?

The insight that risk managers bring

For many colleagues across public services, risk still reads primarily as something to be minimised – a register to be populated, a barrier to be navigated. Risk managers know better.

They understand that risk in its fullest sense encompasses the opportunity risk of positive change and the very real cost of standing still while the evidence for doing things differently is so powerful. Helping colleagues arrive at that same understanding, and make decisions accordingly, is one of the most valuable contributions that risk managers can make to the neighbourhood agenda.

This was brought into sharp relief at a recent panel discussion I took part in, bringing together economists, commissioning specialists and others to explore how different approaches to commissioning can fundamentally change neighbourhood wealth outcomes and public value.

The message was clear that neighbourhood working offers far more benefit than risk. The work of Preston City Council, studied in a Lancet-published analysis funded by the National Institute for Health Research, demonstrated that redirecting anchor institution procurement locally was associated with a 9% improvement in life satisfaction, 11% rise in median wages and 2% reduction in depression, relative to other areas.

Decisions of that scale and consequence require the sophisticated understanding of risk that risk managers are positioned to provide – but only if they are in the room early enough to shape the conversation.

Risk managers are also well placed to challenge the comfortable assumption that inaction is the safe option. Organisations can become acclimatised to existing risks, the cost of poor outcomes, inefficiency of siloed services and erosion of community trust. Making that invisible risk visible is a key contribution that risk managers can offer.

ALARM's recently published The principles of risk appetite provides an excellent foundation for exactly these conversations – helping organisations articulate where they are willing to accept more risk in pursuit of greater benefit, and ensuring those decisions are made consciously and with proper governance, rather than by default. The LGA's Trusting Place recommendations reinforce this, explicitly calling for regulators and oversight bodies to take ‘a more balanced approach to risk’ as place-based working becomes mainstream.

The specific risks of neighbourhood working

Equipping colleagues to embrace opportunity risk does not mean ignoring the real challenges that neighbourhood models introduce. Four deserve particular attention:

• Variation and the limits of control. Greater local decision-making is central to the neighbourhood vision. The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods' findings and Local Trust's research both confirm that local autonomy, backed by long-term flexible funding, produces better outcomes than centrally directed programmes. But it also means more variation and less uniformity of oversight. The challenge will be to help organisations design frameworks that permit healthy local variation without creating gaps in accountability.
• Blurred boundaries and critical responsibilities. Multidisciplinary teams working across organisational boundaries achieve more for service users. But where professional roles overlap, responsibilities can become diffuse. The LGA's Care Where We Live campaign (2025) is explicit that prevention and community-based approaches – however beneficial – must be matched by clear commissioning, accountability and governance arrangements.
• ADASS's position statement on adult social care's contribution to the neighbourhood health service. This sets out that neighbourhood working must be underpinned by agreed governance for delegated activities across organisational boundaries. Safeguarding and information governance, to take two examples, cannot be assumed to sit with someone else: they need to be explicitly assigned and actively managed within any collaborative model.
• Staff risk and staff benefit. Dispersed working in community hubs introduces genuine challenges. Staff working more autonomously are harder to monitor for emerging concerns, including lone working risks and early indicators of stress or burnout. ADASS's Spring Survey 2025 notes rising complexity of demand and safeguarding concerns even before factoring in new ways of working. The positive side of that same coin is significant. There is consistent evidence from neighbourhood working programmes that staff engaged in community-facing, collaborative roles report stronger sense of purpose – with potential net benefits for retention and performance. Both sides belong in a balanced risk assessment.

An outcomes-led transition

The potential for better outcomes for citizens and communities through neighbourhood working are well evidenced. The appetite for change to achieve them exists in many local authorities and service areas. The challenge will lie in achieving the organisational and cultural changes to embed neighbourhood working. Risk managers will be essential to supporting their organisations throughout the transition.