Cleaner streets, safer public spaces, better streetlights, and something for young people to do. Those are the basics residents of south Bridgwater in Somerset and Hartcliffe and Withywood in south Bristol say they want from £20m each arriving through the government’s Pride in Place programme. The question their neighbourhoods now face is one that matters to anyone who depends on public money being spent well: can investment of this kind genuinely change everyday life, and can it outlast the funding itself?
The programme covers 169 places in England, and these two West Country areas are among them. In south Bridgwater, the chosen area includes the largely residential Hamp estate and West Street. The ten-year local programme is led by Sam Smith, an insurance broker and volunteer football coach who grew up there. Standing outside the gates of his former secondary school, he explained his motivation simply. “This area did so much for me it’s about giving back and making sure other people can have a wonderful experience as well,” he said.
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His focus on young people is rooted in his own history. His father ran the local youth football team when Sam was growing up, and a chance conversation on a night out a couple of years ago underlined what that had meant to others. A local man told him: “Your dad saved my life - without football, I wouldn’t have got into sport, I’d be in jail no two ways about it.” Sam went on to revive Rhode Lane Wanderers, which now has more than 100 youngsters from the estate taking part. The lesson he wants to carry into his new role is about giving children direction. “It’s making sure all these children have got a focus - whether that’s football, something in the arts, something completely individual to them,” he said. “We want to make sure they’ve got a focus so they stay on the straight and narrow.”
So far he has been gathering ideas through a series of drop-in events. Youth provision has emerged as a main theme, along with security and safety and green spaces. “People want the basics. They want cleaner streets, potholes filled, better streetlights but there’s so much more you could do with this money,” he said. “We want people to think big.”
Residents themselves are weighing what the money can realistically achieve for their daily lives. Sharon Harry, who has lived on the Hamp estate for 20 years and would not want to live anywhere else, praised her friendly neighbours but sounded a note of caution. £20m sounds like a lot, she admitted, “but it won’t go as far as people imagine”. Her priority is durability. “I’d like to see the money spent in a way that when the money’s gone, things can continue anyway,” she said. “Otherwise, if you start something, people get used to it, and then it stops. That’s worse than if you didn’t do it in the first place.”
Another resident, Sue Devenish, believes the money should not cover work other organisations should already be funding. She would like to see improvements that make daily life more pleasant. “Everything’s quite a mess, there’s no pride in the front gardens. I walk into town and everything’s overgrown,” she said. She also reflected on why pride has faded: “I’ve seen lots of change in Hamp and I just think these days people kind of do lack the pride - but equally maybe they lack the skills to be able to make their lives nicer and maybe just need a little bit of a helping hand to move things forward.”
Thirty miles (48 km) north, Hartcliffe and Withywood in south Bristol face a similar test with a harder history. Paul Smith, no relation to Sam, is in charge of the area’s £20m budget. His patch is the 16th most-deprived place in the country and the most deprived in the south-west of England, he said, and government cash is not new there, yet many residents still face significant challenges. “We’ve had regeneration funding before but it obviously hasn’t changed the dial, partly because of how much it was - but partly because it’s not tackled the right things,” he said. “Maybe investing too much in providing new buildings and facilities rather than investing in people. What we need to do is make sure the effect of the regeneration is that more money goes into the pockets of the people who live here.”
Tongue-in-cheek, he suggested the best use of the funds would be giving every resident £1,000 in cash, though that is against the rules. His deeper concern is what happens to people when the funding ends. “I’ve seen regeneration schemes where there’s been lots of stuff going on. And it’s been great for, say, the five or 10 years that the money’s come in. Then the money’s stopped, and then everything else stops. And all the people who’ve been coming here running projects all disappear. And people are left a bit bereft,” he said. “What I really want to do is work on skills - training people locally to get them to a position where they move from minimum wage jobs to well-paid careers. And that’s how you make the difference.”
A former Labour city councillor, Paul does not want to spend the Pride in Place money on “things other people should spend money on”. So while the local primary school is being held up by scaffolding and the health centre really needs a “massive revamp”, he plans to lobby government departments to sort those issues out with additional funding, keeping the £20m for what he sees as lasting change. For both communities, the next ten years will show whether this investment, unlike those before it, leaves something behind for the people who live there when the money is gone.