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. There will also be 36 million pounds to help communities get involved in local decision making and 50 million pounds for “community chests” to support small community projects with grants they can get locally with minimum bureaucracy.The Neighbourhood Renewal Fund will be conditional on genuine joint working and community involvement. More resources through neighbourhood management for communities are only on offer to communities that are prepared to take more responsibility. The Prime Minister stressed that this is a deal, not a hand out.
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. To overcome this problem Channel 4 commissioned Leeds University to analyse the crime figures produced by the Home Office, taking into account the level of deprivation in the respective police areas. From the analysis a national performance league table was produced. The TV documentary programme revealed how the league leaders had achieved their outstanding performances and showed the bottom of the league forces relying on more traditional approaches to policing.