No official statistics on social infrastructure and associational life

The UK has no official, regular, neighbourhood-level measure of social infrastructure stock or associational membership. The Community Life Survey is England-only and cannot resolve below regional level, NCVO's Almanac lags three to four years with publication slipped to 2026, and the Bible Society's withdrawal of its Quiet Revival findings in March 2026 over faulty YouGov data showed how weak religious-participation data is. Onward's Social Fabric Index, last fully updated in 2023, and OCSI and Local Trust's Community Needs Index are one-off or proprietary. The British Academy and Bennett Institute measurement project is foundational research rather than an operational statistical product, and the Community Wealth Fund had to commission bespoke analysis just to find doubly disadvantaged areas.

Billions in neighbourhood funding are now allocated using ad hoc, non-official indices that cannot be scrutinised or updated. Without baseline statistics, none of these ten-year programmes can credibly demonstrate whether Britain's civic fabric is recovering or fraying.

ONS-badged annual social infrastructure and civic health statistics at neighbourhood level: a maintained open register of community spaces and associations plus participation measures, co-developed with the Bennett Institute and British Academy programme, OCSI and Onward, and mandated as the evaluation baseline for government neighbourhood programmes.

// Build together: Counterparty: ONS for badging and mandate; OCSI/Bennett-style open-data prototype can precede the official series.

Billions in neighbourhood funding are allocated on ad hoc, non-official indices, and the fix is a standard statistical product with no dated trigger, progressable opportunistically.