In 2023–24, Collaborate worked alongside IPPR North to support Wigan Council to review The Deal and explore what a “new era” could look like for the borough. This work led to the creation of Progress with Unity, Wigan’s new ten-year strategy focused on addressing inequalities and supporting thriving neighbourhoods.

In February 2025, we published a report capturing Wigan’s journey and learning to date. Key priorities for Progress with Unity included taking a more joined-up, collaborative approach across the borough, building more trusting and enabling relationships with residents and the VCFSE and shifting to more hyperlocal neighbourhood working.

One year on, we spoke with Claire Burnham, Assistant Director for Neighbourhood Reform and Skills at Wigan Council, to reflect on how neighbourhood working has evolved, what it looks like in practice, and what other councils and places can learn from Wigan’s experience so far.

What does neighbourhood working look like in Wigan Borough – and how has it changed?

Neighbourhood working in Wigan today looks very different to how it did a few years ago. It’s no longer about a model, a structure or a named team – it’s about a way of working.

In the past, we worked across large geographical areas with multidisciplinary locality teams. That was right for the time, but it could feel quite heroic: services coming into neighbourhoods to fix problems. This was often with good intentions, but in a way that was quite paternalistic – doing things to communities rather than with them.

Through the co-design of Progress with Unity, we shifted our focus. Now we work at a hyperlocal level – neighbourhoods of around 3,000 to 5,000 people – and we start with deep listening. We build from the strengths that already exist, rather than leading with deficits. We focus on mobilising all assets in a place, fostering social cohesion, and promoting participation, rather than only delivering services.

That means there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Each neighbourhood has different strengths, so the services and partners involved will look different too. What we’re creating is a different culture: one that challenges power dynamics, recognises the power we hold as organisations, and deliberately steps back to build trust. And that takes time – this work happens at the pace of trust, not on a six-month timeline.

How do you ensure you’re engaging with residents who face the greatest barriers?

For us, this is about equity, not equality. People don’t start from the same place, so a universal approach won’t reach everyone.

Trusted relationships are absolutely key. Residents who’ve had poor experiences with public services are far more likely to engage through people and organisations they already know and trust – particularly in the VCFSE sector.

A good example is our work on economic inactivity. Instead of setting up a council-led service, we worked alongside our infrastructure organisation, Wigan Borough Community First, and they led a grant funding process to get the money out to 11 local VCFSE providers to lead delivery. If you’re furthest from the labour market, you’re much more likely to walk into a community organisation than a council building. Our role as a council is to step in when the time’s right and help connect people to opportunities.

That’s why the VCFSE sector is so important. If residents are at the heart, then trusted community organisations are the bridge as part of our early intervention approach. Beyond that are specialist services when needed – which we need to make work together seamlessly.

How are you working with other local partners, including health, to ensure a joined-up approach to neighbourhood working and prevention?

We’re fortunate in Wigan because Progress with Unity is a borough-wide movement, not just a council programme. Health is fully part of that, with strong relationships across the ICB and providers.

When new opportunities come in, we don’t treat them as separate initiatives. We connect them back to neighbourhood working. For example, rather than dropping health clinics into communities based purely on data, we’re starting with conversations with trusted local organisations to understand what will actually work.

That means different neighbourhoods will end up with very different health offers – and that’s exactly the point.

How have you pooled resources to date, and what might an increased emphasis on place-based budgets help unlock?

At a strategic level, devolution and the move towards a single settlement through Greater Manchester is really important. At the moment, funding is fragmented into lots of programmes with different reporting requirements. We’re trying to shift towards an outcomes-focused approach that’s about people’s journeys, not counting outputs.

If we can align funding around shared outcomes, we’re much better placed to invest in what our borough actually needs – whether that’s supporting people furthest from work, helping people progress into better jobs, or strengthening community resilience. We don’t treat initiatives like Live Well or Pride in Place as separate programmes. We see all of this as Progress with Unity – different funding streams feeding into one shared approach. We also start from what is strong, what strengths do people have and how can we build from them.

At a more local level, some of our VCFSE providers are exploring participatory budgeting – getting resources directly into the hands of residents and trusting them to shape solutions. That shift in power is fundamental to neighbourhood working done properly.

Where does your neighbourhood work go from here?

We don’t want to lift and shift this model elsewhere. What we lift are the ingredients: deep listening, trusted relationships, and system change driven by lived experience.

We’re starting our journey by focusing in 14 hyperlocal areas where long-standing, intergenerational inequalities persist, while still maintaining universal and specialist offers across the whole borough. This isn’t a pilot and it’s not about withdrawing services elsewhere — it’s about being honest that despite a lot of well-intentioned effort over the last decade, there are places where outcomes haven’t shifted.

A big part of this next stage is changing how we understand place. Historically, our neighbourhood profiles were data-heavy and deficit-focused. You’d read them and think, “Why would anyone live here?” We’re changing that. New neighbourhood profiles will start with residents telling us what it’s like to live there – what’s strong, what they value, what makes the place work. We’ll still include data, but as part of a broader story, not the starting point. We are also really interested in understanding social capital in our neighbourhoods and we are doing some exploratory work alongside 3Ni to help us to capture this. 

Running alongside this is our work with the new VCFSE infrastructure organisation, which is a key partner in how this develops. We know different neighbourhoods are at very different stages and need different types of support – from supporting well-established community organisations to nurturing grassroots development where it’s needed. Overall, we’re bringing together data, deep listening and trusted relationships to make neighbourhood working more responsive, more locally led, and more likely to shift inequalities over the long term.

What are your top tips for other councils starting this journey?

First: be humble and really listen. Leave your agenda, and cape, at the door. This work will surface things that are hard to hear about services that you care about. You can’t be defensive – people’s experiences are their truth.

Second: give it time. If you’re looking for a quick fix, a model or a structure, you’re probably doing it wrong. This work happens at the pace of trust. Trust takes years to build and moments to lose.

What would you like to learn from other councils or places?

One of our biggest challenges is how this work fits with national inspection and performance frameworks. We’re doing deep, relational, preventative work, but the system doesn’t always measure or value that well.

I’d love to learn from other places grappling with the same tension: how they’re connecting neighbourhood working into inspection, accountability and assurance without losing what makes it meaningful.

We’re very open to sharing and learning with others. None of us have all the answers – we’re building this as we go.

We’d love to chat if you’re interested in how collaboration can help create the conditions for meaningful transformation in local places. Get in touch with Dawn Plimmer.