Foreword by Dr Billy Dasein
Following up on her excellent first post, which explored the role of social capital in neighbourhood reconstruction, Josie Moon continues her series of reflections from her unique vantage point as the People and Place Ambassador for East Marsh United.
Josie’s experiences—both navigating systems as a resident in a disadvantaged neighbourhood and engaging with vehicles of government power—have given her a personal, profound insight into the chasm between policy decision-making and lived reality.
In this second post, Josie introduces a concept she calls the ‘Dunbar Gap’: the structural error at the heart of national policy where solutions are designed for large, aggregated units of 10,000 people, fundamentally missing the human scale of 150, where genuine community stability is actually built. This article is a powerful contrast between the abstract wreckage of centralised policy and the ethical, human-sized stewardship we see taking root right now in places like the East Marsh. She challenges us to stop designing for bureaucracy and start designing for belonging.
I hope you find the ideas here stimulating and engaging. Over to Josie…
The Dunbar Gap: Why National Policy Can’t Fix Your Street
A neighbourhood is not just a cluster of postcodes, but a functional, fragile unit of human stability and social integrity; the place where trust is built, resilience is generated, lives lived and memories made. That such a fundamental social infrastructure is the first casualty of national policy is why the state of doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods feels like a profound betrayal.
Having navigated these systems both as a resident in a disadvantaged and ‘left behind’ neighbourhood, the East Marsh, and as an ambassador engaging with the vehicles of government power meant to fix the problem, the disconnect between policy and place is enormous; there is a chasm between lived experience and policy decision making.
The gap isn’t only about statistics; it’s about a failure of empathy; a failure that seems to grow wider the higher people climb on the social ladder of ‘success’. My own history of having lived in over forty different houses across towns, cities, seaside and rural places, isn’t just a quirky personal fact; it’s the source of a deeply inconvenient truth. My breadth of experience gives me a personal insight into how profoundly different neighbourhood dynamics are, and how the traps of poverty and inequality are never quite the same in two places.
This article isn’t just a critique; it’s a contrast between the structural wreckage of national policy and the slow, principled, human-sized solutions we’re seeing take root right now. We must stop designing for bureaucracy and start designing for belonging.
The Structural Error: Designing for people?
The core failure of centralised policy can be traced to a quantifiable design flaw: the Dunbar Gap.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar established the cognitive limit on the number of stable, meaningful social relationships a human can maintain, estimated at approximately 150 people. This is the scale of trust, of neighbourliness, and of genuine local knowledge. This is the human scale where accountability is personal and social integrity is built face-to-face.
Yet, the policy that is supposed to fix local decay is typically delivered at the scale of a local authority ward, which often includes around 10,000 people. This structural error occurs because the unit chosen for delivery is roughly 66 times larger than the maximum limit for human connection. It’s chosen because it’s convenient for civil servants and election cycles, not because it’s convenient for people.
When you design policy for 10,000, you are forced to focus only on aggregated metrics, for example, how many people are unemployed, what the area crime rate is, or the average school attendance.
Aggregated metrics turn a mountain of data into a simple number. They are simply numbers, not actual information. These are blunt tools designed to filter out the messy, unscalable details of life, reducing unique communities to disposable data points. They operate at a scale too big to see the human in the data.
Think of hospital waiting lists. The numbers are cited as a measure of success, yet they entirely obscure the reality of what it means for people to live in pain and anxiety for months on end. They offer a data-led picture of improvement while dismissing the human cost as necessary collateral damage.
The Consequences: Apathy and No Accountability
This metrics-led, oversized approach has two devastating consequences for the neighbourhood.
Firstly, it eliminates personal accountability. At local authority level, no individual officer can be held directly responsible for the plight and problems of anyone in a neighbourhood. They are distanced from a living, breathing person by walls and walls of policy and process. Furthermore, it is rare to find these officers living in the places they are meant to serve. This is a system designed to insulate bureaucracy, not to serve people.
Secondly, this lack of accountability diminishes the possibility of building genuine social capital: those networks of trust and reciprocity that make a neighbourhood resilient. Too often, I have heard people defer to ‘the council’ who ‘should’ be solving x, y and z. This is not laziness. This feeling of helplessness, the assumption that external forces will solve everything, is a direct consequence of years of communities being let down, ignored, and abandoned by centralised, bureaucratic process. However, the ‘authority’ of the local authority is now much diminished and they too are constrained by limited resources and bureaucratic processes often making them little more than bagmen
It is time to change this.
The Human Response: Ethical Neighbourhood Stewardship
Contrast the grand scale of local and national government failure with the micro, principled work of initiatives like East Marsh United (EMU) and countless other grassroots organisations.
We operate at the scale of the street, the neighbour, and the house; the Dunbar scale. EMU’s core mission is to secure 100 Houses for 100 Years. This is a commitment to patient, generational stewardship that puts integrity first. We understand that scaling beyond this very human and manageable level would risk all of the foundational work that is built on trust, relationships, and community wealth building.
This slow, principled work is where the true paradigm shift begins. We are actively rejecting the entropy that paralyses government and the apathy born in communities that have been let down. We are challenging the cynicism with a radical provocation:
What if, as a country, we decide to reconstruct our neighbourhoods ethically, sustainably, and beautifully?
This is the opposite of the current, cynical obsession with building 300,000 generic, high-carbon, unaffordable ‘Barratt Boxes’ that further centralise wealth and destroy local character. The paradigm shift we’re offering isn’t about building new estates; it’s about funding the integrity and time required to make existing houses stable for the next 100 years.
We are actively choosing to deploy non-economic human qualities; love, trust, respect, compassion, and deep, consistent neighbourhood understanding. These qualities are of immeasurable value, yet they cannot be measured or aggregated by national policy models. That’s why the policy world too often ignores them.
The Local Tragedy: Elite Capture in Grimsby
Though the work of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON) and the National Network for Neighbourhood Improvement (3ni) has been hopeful and meaningful, advocating for a shift to neighbourhood-led work, what we have in national and local government is deaf ears and a dogged commitment to the more conservative, measurement-led approach.
We see this tragedy playing out right now in Grimsby. The large funding injection, The Town Fund/Pride in Place money, is being controlled centrally by North East Lincolnshire Council, The Grimsby Town Board https://www.nelincs.gov.uk/business-and-investment/town-deal/greater-grimsby-board/ and Our Future https://www.our-future.io/
Despite the door being open to pivot to a grassroots-led approach, the focus has remained on ‘local leaders’, professionals and business leaders already in positions of power and influence. The opportunity to engage has not extended into the grassroots, into the lived experience in the communities crying out for investment. What we are seeing here is the usual suspects on the local power scene once again leading in a centralised, top-down way. The argument from these power cabals is that they know best and that they have the connections, knowledge and expertise to deliver change. But do they?
The slow, messy, unscalable work at neighbourhood level, the very work that policy typically filters out is the only kind that actually builds lasting community health and wealth and reverses structural inequalities. This is because communities are experts in their own problems and given the right support, equity of voice and resource, they can become the experts in finding the right solutions.
It is time to demand that policymakers make a step change, stop rewarding extraction (including those low-quality, expensive new builds, out of town on the green belt) and start investing the time it takes to build durable trust. This also means that the ‘usual suspects’ should step aside and have the grace to ensure that the least empowered finally have a say in what happens in their neighbourhoods and are enabled to play an active part in making meaningful, lasting change.
Trust the People.
