About Big Local

As a funding model, Big Local was radical and distinct because there were no centrally determined milestones or top-down targets, whilst areas did not compete for funding. Decisions about how the money was spent were made by residents, rather than the funder. From the beginning, this intentionally resident-led approach held the potential for meaningful change and neighbourhood renewal for both places and people.

This website brings together an overview of research, learning and stories from across the Big Local programme. Curated to inform future community-led work, it acts as a resource to ensure insights can be built on by future policy makers, funders, researchers and community development practitioners. 

You will find a summary of each Big Local area, highlighting their approach and achievements, alongside a series of articles that answer key questions and a collection of research and policy reports exploring learning across the programme. These are accompanied by stories from residents. 

Read about how each area used their funding by browsing by area. Find answers to questions about Big Local in the Q&A articles that bring together the findings from research reports and experiences of Local Trust staff. 

Hear directly from residents by reading their stories, gathered throughout the lifetime of Big Local. You can also deep dive into research and policy by browsing the reports or read guidance on developing community-led projects. More guidance will be produced in 2026. All these resources can be filtered by themes too. Learn more about the Big Local programme and Local Trust, including some of the key milestones along the way by visiting our timeline page.

Big Local aimed to improve the skills, capacity, control, and choice of residents by putting them in charge. The 10–15-year time frame of the programme made these long-term goals achievable.

The intended outcomes of Big Local were deliberately broad. They were: 

• Communities will be better able to identify local needs and take action in response to them
• People will have increased skills and confidence, so that they continue to identify and respond to needs in the future
• The community will make a difference to the needs it prioritises
• People will feel that their area is an even better place to live.

Big Local was an example of a place-based approach to funding and community development. The 150 areas chosen for the programme were small (sometimes referred to as ​‘hyperlocal’) places, with an average population of 7,878 (as of 2021 census). 

Areas were chosen by the Big Lottery, which later became the National Lottery Communities Fund (TNLCF), using a range of criteria, including being generally more disadvantaged than average, and having previously been overlooked for National Lottery funding. 

The small population sizes were important, as this made achieving community engagement in each area realistic. Area ​‘types’ were also a key consideration and meant that the final 150 areas included a mix of coastal, rural, inner-city, and ex-mining communities. 

The boundaries set by TNLCF at the start of the programme influenced the success of delivery in each area. As the programme developed, communities could request that Local Trust adjust or expand their area boundaries (though they could not narrow them).

Local Trust was set up in 2012 to deliver the Big Local programme. Alongside a large team focused on supporting residents, Local Trust established research, policy and communications functions to support their delivery of Big Local. 

The communications team was set up early in the programme and focused primarily on collecting stories from communities and the residents within them. 

The research team was expanded in 2017 and led on commissioning and doing research and evaluation and, later, creating the area summaries and Q&A articles for this website. This included working with a team at Sheffield Hallam University to deliver Our Bigger Story, a longitudinal study with 15 Big Local areas, and supporting the Communities in Control study. Read more about this work in Local Trust’s approach to research and learning article.

Local Trust established a policy team in 2018 to disseminate learning from Big Local and use it to influence the policy and practice of those with an interest. Over time, they built political support for putting power, resources and decision-making into the hands of local people. They did this by demonstrating the importance of social infrastructure as the foundation for economic regeneration in the most deprived areas, with a focus on neighbourhood regeneration through community leadership. 

Alongside Big Local, between 2018–2022 Local Trust also ran the Creative Civic Change programme, an experimental funding programme that supported 15 communities across England to shape, lead and commission arts and creative interventions to make positive social change where they lived. Some Big Local areas were involved, alongside other areas.

Towards the end of the Big Local programme, Local Trust contributed funding and support to set up the national network for neighbourhood improvement (3ni) and the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON). 3ni was incubated by Local Trust in 2024 to become a learning network for local government and the wider public sector, supporting policy and practice towards neighbourhood working and community-led regeneration.

ICON was established in September 2024 as an independent organisation with funding from Local Trust. With an intentionally short lifetime, ICON was set up to rapidly review the state of neighbourhoods across England, exploring the case for neighbourhood focused regeneration as a contribution to wider social and economic objectives. This work included a report on the impact of Big Local.

Local Trust also provided funding and support towards the development of the Centre for Collaboration in Community Connectedness (C4), with the aim of transforming policy and practice and developing connected communities across the UK. Once Local Trust closes, C4 will continue to build on Local Trust’s research and policy work.

Certain structures were essential to achieving resident-led change within the Big Local model. Each Big Local partnership decided how the funding was spent based on the local community’s identified priorities. 

A ​‘partnership’ was a group of people located within each Big Local area. It had to be made up of at least eight people, and over half of these had to be residents of the area. There was no further representation criteria applied to residents; the only requirement was that they were there to speak as residents, not represent any other person or organisation’s views. 

At the outset, partnerships were tasked with creating ​‘Big Local plans’ for their funding – both for the medium-term (over two to three years), as well as a longer-term vision for how the money would benefit their area. 

The parameters of Big Local plans were intended to be broad enough to respond to local needs as they emerged and allowed partnerships to use the funds they allocated to their priorities flexibly. 

Partnership members were volunteers and were the driving force of the programme; those who were paid for their work on Big Local could not act as voting members of the partnership. The involvement of figures such as councillors and local business owners varied from place to place, depending on the needs and makeup of each area.

Decision-making was not limited to the partnership, who were required to base their plans on the priorities of their area’s population. How exactly partnerships established the local community’s priorities varied, but it was generally based on direct consultation with residents.

Resident-led change doesn’t happen by itself; it needs to be supported. Big Local was supported by Local Trust through in-area support, peer support, specialist advice, community development, coaching, and more. 

Locally trusted organisations (LTOs), each chosen by the areas themselves, allowed partnerships to stay focused on their vision and plans without getting bogged down in financial administration. Within each area, an LTO played a key role in managing the Big Local funds. In practice, this meant administering and distributing funding in-line with the area’s plan, keeping sufficient records, and reporting on spending both to Local Trust and the partnership. 

In many cases, the LTO’s role extended beyond this to include employing workers, commissioning and delivering activities, taking on leases of buildings, and more.

LTOs received a fee of five per cent of the area’s total spend from Local Trust (not taken out of the £1 million). Learn more in our article about LTOs.

From the beginning, Local Trust provided in-area community development support to partnerships. Known originally as ​‘reps’, they were later known as ​‘area advisors’ as the role focused more on specific area needs. 

Individuals providing this support typically covered three or four Big Local areas. Their role was to offer help, advice, constructive challenge, and guidance to partnerships and their locally trusted organisations (LTOs). They were also responsible for reporting on progress, as well as any challenges or issues, to Local Trust. 

Local Trust’s role as the funder included support oversight, grant management, and monitoring and evaluation of the overall programme. Although monitoring was intended to be experienced as light-touch by the partnerships themselves, processes were in place for Local Trust to keep up to date with each partnership’s work and ensure that Big Local plans were meeting the programme criteria.

This included receiving information and updates from area advisors and LTOs, rather than directly from the partnership. Partnerships themselves were responsible for periodically reflecting on the progress of their plan, including how they’d represented the community’s needs within their work.

Throughout, Local Trust evaluated the programme through different methods and research studies, all designed to be minimally burdensome to partnership members.

The programme was also designed in such a way that the support offered by Local Trust could evolve over time – whether in response to areas’ needs, the broader progress of the programme, or major contextual changes such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Support during the Big Local Programme is explored in detail in an article.