After Southport, the government has a plan to rebuild cohesion. But repair cannot start and end with communities already worn thin by poverty, weak services and threadbare support.
The government’s Protecting What Matters plan, and millions in funding, lands after the riots that followed the Southport killings. In response to violence, anti-immigration rhetoric and concern about local division, it turns to social cohesion as both diagnosis and remedy: “confident, cohesive and resilient” communities.
The plan names some pressures that shape local life: weak income growth, austerity, deindustrialisation, public service decline and the loss of shared spaces. But naming pressure is not the same as making it the centre of repair. Poverty is largely absent from the strategy, even as deprivation, low trust and weakened community life remain closely linked.
After unrest, policy can reach quickly for relationships, values, integration, resilience and extremism. These things may matter. But if hardship and social infrastructure sit behind them, cohesion risks managing the signs of fracture rather than repairing the conditions that produced it.
A cautionary tale
We have seen this before. The community cohesion emerged as a policy paradigm in Britain began after the 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, when government tried to explain why neighbouring communities had turned against each other.
Those towns were shaped by long economic decline, poor housing, racism and limited opportunity. But the response focused heavily on separation between poor white communities and South Asian communities. “Parallel lives” became the shorthand for what had gone wrong.
The repair followed the diagnosis. If the problem was communities living apart, the answer became more contact. If the problem was poor integration, the answer became English language, citizenship and belonging. The focus moved towards how communities related to each other, and away from the conditions shaping those relationships.
Peter Ratcliffe, a sociologist writing after the 2001 riots, argued that this over-ethnicised social division. It helped lay the ground for a culturalist agenda: one that explained tension through culture, values and separation, while class and material inequality moved to the margins.
The same risk runs through today’s agenda. Protecting What Matters is broader than the post-2001 response. It talks more openly about austerity, deindustrialisation and public service decline. But it still leans on familiar tools of repair: cohesion, resilience, integration, shared values, national identity and extremism.
The missing piece
Adam Coutts, writing in The Conversation, points to the gap. The plan acknowledges the “visible deterioration of public services”, but poverty itself is not named. His point is blunt: “deprivation, not diversity, erodes trust, participation and neighbourliness.”
The 2024 evidence points the same way. Guardian analysis found that well over half of those charged with offences (violent disorder) came from the most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods. Power to Change found that 23 of the 27 places affected by disorder had below-median social fabric scores. Poverty matters. So does the local fabric that helps places absorb pressure.
The UCL Policy Lab, Citizens UK and More in Common’s This Place Matters project was set up after the 2024 riots to look at the social dynamics behind unrest and what good cohesion policy should learn from them. Its focus is not simply who rioted, but what makes some places feel more disconnected, less trusting and more exposed to division. Its findings point away from a simple story about immigration or diversity. Financial insecurity is strongly linked to social disconnection, while immigration levels alone do not explain whether people feel connected to those around them.
The question is not whether to make places less poor or more cohesive, as though these are separate tasks. It is what allows a place under pressure to hold together.
Adam Coutts describes community resilience as the ability of neighbourhoods to absorb shocks, resist divisive narratives and recover from crisis. That depends on what exists before the shock arrives: money, services, relationships, trusted institutions and places where people can meet.
Social infrastructure is one test of whether repair is real. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation describes it as the community assets, groups and services that form a foundation of everyday support. It is the youth worker who hears what is being said before it becomes a flashpoint. The advice service that sees families reaching breaking point. The community hub where people ask for help without feeling judged. The library, school, tenants’ hall, sports club or local charity where people meet before they become strangers.
False stories land harder where trust is thin. Better communications help. They cannot replace trusted people and places embedded in local life.
This is the double meaning of the site of repair. Communities are where repair has to happen. But they can also become the thing policy tries to repair, as if the main problem is local trust rather than the pressures that have worn it down. That is why the funding map matters.
The real test
Protecting What Matters includes Pride in Place, the government’s long-term funding programme for places facing deprivation, weak social infrastructure and low local pride. It commits up to £5.8bn across almost 300 places, including up to £800m over ten years for 40 areas where social cohesion is under pressure.
But JRF’s analysis of Pride in Place funding identifies 430 “doubly disadvantaged” neighbourhoods in England that remain unfunded, despite facing both high deprivation and weak social infrastructure. These are places where hardship comes with fewer community assets, weaker networks and less local support.
That is a test of whether policy has learned the lesson of community cohesion. If funding reaches places where cohesion is already visibly under pressure, but misses places where hardship and weak infrastructure overlap, the strategy risks arriving after the fracture.
Even critics acknowledge cohesion is not the wrong aim, but it becomes too thin when separated from the conditions that make relationships possible. If communities are the site of repair, repair cannot mean asking them to hold together while the pressures pulling them apart remain in place.
Project Reconnect
On 7 July, Clean Slate will host Project Reconnect, a national webinar on why people feel cut off from support, and what it takes to rebuild trust, connection and control.
For 20 years, Clean Slate has helped people regain control over their money, their options and their future. As we mark that anniversary, we are asking a bigger question: could a new UK mission be about reconnection?
Image: Boys in Bristol Photography/Pexels