At MTVH (Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing) in Nottingham and the East Midlands, there’s an awareness of how all the teams that make the organisation need to work together with tenants that’s being rolled out across the new tenant engagement platform.  It’s called Customer Voice and I think it’s come at a time where it’s part of a wider social recognition that […]

Featured image and images in the article from David Whitfield’s Evening Post article on social housing in Nottingham 08:00, 13 JAN 2019 UPDATED 08:31, 17 AUG 2020 4.4 million people rent social housing: individual, group, company, voluntary and charitable landlords have 5.5 million names on private rented contracts: Generation Rent calculate that when family members […]

The health of a neighbourhood can be measured in the way people enjoy visiting it, the way they’re received and the variety of activities, events and opportunities it fosters for the wider community around it. If this is missing it’s because there are people who haven’t been included.  The sale of council houses in the […]

We need to understand that the democratic deficit has been a long time reaching this state and it’s time to create new kinds of employment, training and skills that fit in with the need of working class and ethnic minority communities across the lifespan. These new kinds of jobs will reconnect the country and they’ve […]

The New Deal Labour consultancy in the early 2000’s instead of furthering participatory democracy failed because it gave the money of the New Deal, the opportunities, to the professional middle class and did nothing to change gig and gang labour and agency work for working class communities.  During the New Deal it wouldn’t have been […]

We need to write the neighbourhood in the same way that we write the bid for big projects: thinking about the constituencies there, the culture, the history, the connections, networks, links, locally, regionally, nationally, internationally.  There’s a history of democracy that we should have been tracing as we grew our economy following and bringing to […]

When we think about regenerating neighbourhoods we need to let the sun in not consultants, British experts who for example, visited US projects from the late 80’s and 1990’s then presided over the closure of great working class schools, bussing working class children into new areas without capacity to meet their educational needs. If there […]

When we talk about regeneration, productivity and prosperity the smartest, most modern thing we can do is include everyone across neighbourhoods, create a full work economy and wipe out debt. Changing a culture of exclusion and false elites that have developed over longer than seventy years into a more balanced, just, prosperous and peaceful economy […]

As a people we probably all know the answers: we’ve come across them in the past.Look at the wall of the Walworth Clinic (below)  How then to begin to resolve the democratic deficit in the right way? We have the most brilliant system potentially but it’s hidden from view, we’re denied access to make the system represent more people, more of the time. Consecutive governments […]

People like Barbara Neale know Nottingham like the back of their hand. Now living in West Bridgford and loving it (well….marriage and two grown sons, daughter in law, four grand daughters, a great great granddaughter, a great great grandson in Sunderland, as well as caring for a very long lived dad (93) who sadly died […]