In December HM Treasury published a paper called Support for parents: the best start for children.
It's mostly a review of government provision since 1997 but deceptively I think it may represent a key policy statement, worth noting if only because of the source and its signposting of policy in the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review next year.
There's a chapter called 'Stronger neighbourhoods and communities' - it doesn't say anything very significant but I was struck by one point in particular: as part of the 2007 CSR, it says, the government will consider how it
"can best support the development of community networks and local engagement alongside investment in improving the physical environment in deprived areas..."
It's great to have a government that acknowledges these themes as significant, but we shouldn't get too excited about such pronouncements just yet. My take on the government record, FWIW, is that hugely encouraging insights into various needs under the broad theme of social capital tend to have spawned cautious policy that is very much oriented to formal measures. Hence what I regard as a heavy over-emphasis on formal volunteering and on democratic participation, for instance, perhaps at the expense of putting effort into all sorts of possible ways of stimulating networks of informal connections among neighbours, that in themselves might provide such outcomes, along with many others.
Also, I'm helping in a very modest way to clarify the policy context for Jacqueline Barnes's Families and Neighbourhoods (FANS) Study, and it will be interesting to see how her findings, as they emerge, might contribute to this policy agenda. If you want to find out more about Jacqueline's insights into informal social control, check back to here and join us at LSE in London on 18 January.
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