Community rights stop at assets: no right to shape services or control investment

The We're Right Here campaign, backed by the Young Foundation, Power to Change, People's Health Trust and community leaders, sought three rights, and the 2026 Act delivered only the Community Right to Buy. No community right exists to shape public services through co-design or challenge, and none to control investment through community sign-off on neighbourhood regeneration spend. The Act's neighbourhood governance duty on councils leaves its parameters entirely to future regulations, and the Localism Act 2011's community right to challenge was little used and remains unreformed.

Pride in Place hands 379 neighbourhood boards up to £20m each while residents still have no enforceable standing over the services and investment decisions that dominate local outcomes. An incomplete rights framework points neighbourhood governance back towards the consultative, easily ignored structures that discredited earlier regeneration programmes.

Regulations under the 2026 Act, or a successor Community Power Act, specifying neighbourhood governance with force: a community right to co-design and trigger review of local public services, a participatory budgeting duty for defined local investment streams, and statutory standing for recognised neighbourhood bodies, as blueprinted in We're Right Here's January 2026 proposal.

// State-led: Instrument: regulations under the 2026 Devolution and Community Empowerment Act or a successor Community Power Act.

Completing the rights framework needs only regulations under the live 2026 Act, and advocacy is under-resourced with the governance duty's parameters still undefined.