Foreword by Dr Billy Dasein
As part of Josie Moon’s role as People and Place Ambassador for East Marsh United, she has been a member of the Lived Experience group working with The Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON) chaired by Dame Hilary Armstrong. The role of the Lived Experience group has been to contribute evidence about the challenges that face the country’s most deprived and abandoned neighbourhoods. Additionally, their role helps shape the writing of policy proposals to make the case to government that brave and bold initiatives are needed to prevent further decline and ignite positive change in disadvantaged communities. You can read about the work of ICON here.
Josie is writing a series of blog posts for us about the challenges facing neighbourhoods like the East Marsh and the pitfalls affecting grass roots community engagement work. This is the first of a series of three and it focuses on the role that ‘social capital’ can play in neighbourhood reconstruction. I hope you find the ideas here stimulating and engaging. Over to Josie…
The Role of Social Capital
In my discussion here of social capital I want to make clear that I do not see social capital as an answer to neighbourhood reconstruction in and of itself. Any argument that is made for social capital to be ‘the answer’ is deeply dishonest. Remember David Cameron and his ’Big Society’? While George Osborne was closing libraries and eviscerating public services, Cameron was talking about a revolution in volunteering, in social networks and charity stepping in to essentially replace government funded public services. The outcome of Cameron and Osborne’s assault on public life has been the extreme inequality we now have in the UK, the proliferation of food banks, the breakdown in social fabric and the decimation of the poorest communities in the country. Alongside this we have seen the rise and rise of a tiny number of deadly rich individuals concentrating power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
Given the toxicity of contemporary capitalism and the harm being inflicted by a small number of obscenely rich individuals who hold a stranglehold on Western governments, including our own, the word ‘capital’ becomes problematic when discussing the assets, networks, relationships and ideas that abandoned and impoverished communities need to genuinely reconstruct themselves.
The word “capital” comes from the Latin word caput, meaning head.This root was used to form the Latin adjective capitalis (of the head), which led to the English word’s meanings of “chief,” “principal,” and even the sense of deadly (involving the loss of one’s head). The modern meaning of “wealth” was derived from caput in Medieval Latin (capitale). So, the etymology suggests wealth can be deadly and cause you to lose your head—a fair assessment, perhaps, of how the elite operate. However, for the sake of this article, I will use the established term social capital.
What Social Capital Means for the East Marsh
This year, I’ve attended several key events focused on social capital and its role in neighbourhood renewal. Most recently, I was at the 3ni Social Capital North East Summit in Gateshead—a truly excellent day where the direction of travel for the case for social capital took a crucial pivot for the better. You can read about the work that 3ni (The National network for neighbourhood improvement) are doing here: https://3ni.co.uk/
So, what is social capital? Here is what I hope is a helpful summary that explains in simple language what is meant by social capital as a term.
Social capital is basically the value you get from your relationships and social networks. Think of it like a bank of favours, trust, and connections that you can draw upon. Having good social capital means you have friends, family, neighbours, and colleagues willing to help you out, share information, or give you a leg up. This could be anything from getting a job through a friend’s recommendation, borrowing a tool, or getting trusted advice. It’s not about money; it’s about who you know and how you know them.
Social capital is often broken down into three connections:
- Bonding: The strong, close ties with people like family and best mates. This helps you get by day-to-day.
- Bridging: The wider ties to different groups, like people in a sports club or neighbourhood action group. This helps you get ahead through new information and opportunities.
- Linking: Your connections to people in power or institutions, like local councillors or employers. This helps you access resources and influence at a higher level.
This all sounds positive and simple, but this summary pays no attention to context, and in the case of social capital, context is everything.
The Bleak Context of Inequality
We live in a country riven by inequality. In post-industrial, abandoned places such as the East Marsh, we see a destructive constellation of inequalities: unemployment and the immiseration of wages, loneliness, poor physical and mental health outcomes, poor housing, and low educational attainment. The Marmot Review and other related studies on health inequalities in England, have consistently found that men in the most deprived areas in England live nearly 10 years fewer in terms of life expectancy and have a gap of nearly 20 years in healthy life expectancy compared to those in the least deprived areas. The East Marsh falls into this category of extreme deprivation.
The worst effects of this growing inequality are experienced, unsurprisingly, in our poorest communities. The loss of single-industry work in the 70s and 80s has been compounded by social and economic shock after shock: the erosion of working-class solidarity through the closure of trade and social clubs; the 2008 financial crisis; the onset of austerity in 2010 which, as already stated, hollowed out community assets; the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted the poorest most deeply; and now a cost of living crisis—a crisis in truth of greed, exemplified by the rising profits of energy companies and supermarkets while energy and food prices continue to rise causing poorer families to often have to choose between food or energy. Yet another example of how elites benefit at the expense of the poorest in our society. On top of this, welfare benefits have been cut repeatedly, driven by a narrative that those claiming are somehow morally inferior. Poverty is not a lack of character; it is simply a lack of cash. The poor are punished for their poverty by being forced to endure more poverty.
The UK is now ranked as one of the most unequal developed countries in the world. How? The gap between the richest and poorest is huge. A small group at the top controls a massive share of the nation’s total wealth (homes, savings, pensions), while the bottom half owns very little; a much wider disparity than in many wealthy European countries. Your chances in life are heavily determined by where you were born and your parents’ background. The deep divide between the wealthy South East and other regions makes it incredibly hard for people from poorer areas to escape poverty. Essentially, the UK is an extremely rich country that does a terrible job of sharing its wealth and opportunity.
Social Capital is Not an Alternative to Cash
Given this bleak situation, what role can social capital play in helping communities like the East Marsh move beyond surviving and into thriving, healthy places to live and work?
The short answer is that places like the East Marsh already possess strong social capital networks—they’re just not called that. The community is already rich in hidden social power. While people lack financial capital, they have strong friendships, family support, and neighbourly trust. This local network acts as a survival shield, helping people “get by” for example with childcare swaps, borrowing favours, and looking out for one another. This is powerful and essential, but on its own, it lacks the power to effect sustainable social change or create greater equality.
Groups like East Marsh United recognise and build on this asset base to create change. For example, we buy houses and refurbish them to a high standard. Our tenants are treated with respect and dignity, and we use our status as an ethical landlord to advocate for better standards in the rented sector. We manage projects, clean up streets, and create joyful activity, from our community choir to bulb planting in the park.
The challenge isn’t a lack of trust; it’s that those strong local connections do not often reach the powerful people (like big employers or the council) who can bring in the major resources and opportunities needed to truly “get ahead.”
Social capital is all well and good, but it is not an alternative to strong neighbourhood infrastructure, decent housing, educational and work opportunities, and places to meet, talk, and organise. Without resources, which means a lot of money invested over a long time, social capital can only remain informal and precarious.
A Call for Reconstruction
I felt a pivot at the conference: a change in the nature of the discussion. The overwhelming message was that neighbourhoods need money and resources right now, with residents at the centre of decision-making. This is not for renewal or revival, but for RECONSTRUCTION. There was a deep acknowledgement that the crisis is so serious and volatile that fiddling around the edges with short-term thinking, small grants, and time-limited initiatives will no longer do.
It is time for bold action. Government initiatives and funding streams; the Town Fund, Pride in Place, and potentially 16 other neighbourhood schemes are coming down the line. This is well and good, but there is a big risk of failure:
- If the government fails to trust residents with resources to make the best decisions for where they live, any initiative will fail.
- If external consultants are paid to sweep in, make decisions, ‘do to’ neighbourhoods, and sweep out again, any initiative will fail.
- If funding is narrowly prescribed, given short-term outcomes, and allocated without neighbourhood-led practice on the ground, any initiative will fail.
It is time to trust people who live in neighbourhoods to make decisions about the places in which they live. People are experts in their own lives and know what they want and need. If the government is serious about reconstruction and tackling the polycrises at the neighbourhood level, they must step away, hand over the resources that will ignite change, and get well out of the way of the people who truly know what they want.
And what people want is simple: a nice home, nice neighbours, a pleasant street, a place to meet, a decent local school, decent jobs, and healthcare when they’re poorly.
Conclusion: From Survival to Reconstruction
The core argument is clear: while communities like the East Marsh possess powerful, existing social capital networks, the “survival shield” of strong local ties, these assets are fundamentally insufficient to overcome the bleak context of extreme inequality and systemic abandonment.
Social capital is not an alternative to cash; it is an asset that is currently informal and precarious. The failed “Big Society” experiment proved that expecting social networks to replace eviscerated public services only deepens inequality.
To move from merely surviving to genuinely flourishing neighbourhoods require RECONSTRUCTION. This demands brave and bold action from the government, which means a significant, long-term infusion of money and resources. Crucially, this funding must be handed over with trust, putting residents, the true experts in their own lives, at the centre of decision-making.
To ignite sustainable, resident-led change that provides what everyone wants; a decent life, the time for short-term, top-down initiatives is over. We must transfer the resources, get out of the way, and ultimately: Trust the People.
Josie Moon, 2025
