By Geoff Green, Mike Grimsley and Bernard Stafford. Relying on a combination of the market and welfare support to deal with declining neighbourhoods is costly and inequitable. The authors looked at the sustainability of eight former coal-mining neighbourhoods in three South Yorkshire local authorities. They found that the social assets of trust, safety and reciprocity are key factors in regeneration. They came ahead of the quality of the housing stock. This article describes how social assets inter relate to the other factors in creating sustainability.

A new resource centre is to be established to promote best practice in involving patients in the improvement of National health Services. It will build on the recent commitment to make Patient and Public Involvement – PPI part of everyday practice in the NHS.The centre will research existing and ongoing best practice and innovation in this field and communicate it widely through exemples, advice, guidance and information. At the same time it will identify gaps in learning and skills and support initiatives that will address them and offer signposting, linkages and networks.

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The Home Office has given the go-ahead to the ‘Governance Hub’, one of six national hubs of expertise that make up part of the Government’s ChangeUp programme. The Hub, which is a partnership of eight voluntary and community sector infrastructure organisations, has already begun recruiting staff and a chair.It is designed to lead on and facilitate initiatives to improve the governance of voluntary and community organisations in England at national, regional and local level. It will help enhance the skills and knowledge of the sector’s 750,000 trustees and hundreds of thousands of committee members and increase the governance capacity of organisations. It also aims to encourage more people from across diverse communities and those outside the sector to become trustees by promoting the role as a valuable part of active citizenship.

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