Prime Minister Tony Blair has shifted the focus of neighbourhood renewal from the top down approach and towards local communities in deprived neighbourhoods taking responsibility for changing their area. He announced that 45 million pounds will be available over three years for neighbourhood management to help communities focus services on their priorities, or to run local services themselves. 

Measuring the performance of public services is moving from the dark age of crude arithmetic and into a new era of readily accessible information. The new sophisticated approach is being pioneered in the police and health service services.A major weakness of performance measurement is the difficulty of making comparative judgements between organisations, because other factors influence the outcome.