A total of £180,425,000 Big Local funding was allocated to 150 communities across England called Big Local areas. Each area initially received £1 million of non-prescriptive funding to use as they see fit to make their community a better place to live. Due to Local Trust’s investment of its overall endowment, it was able to provide a further £150,000 of funding to each area over the course of the programme. Alongside this, the areas also had access to additional funds in the early years of Big Local to support them to bring the community together, as well as periodic pots of money throughout the programme to enable them to access specific support around, for example, social investment or community assets.
As mentioned above, the Big Local funding was non-prescriptive. This meant that Big Local partnerships were able to decide what they wanted to spend the money on, and reporting expectations to Local Trust were light-touch. This included the specific budget headings Big Local areas used to indicate how they had spent the funding. Due to the variety of budget headings used over a 10–15 year period by 150 Big Local areas, the findings in this article are based on budget headings recoded into themes by Local Trust’s research team.
Big Local partnerships were not required to report to Local Trust on their final block of spending, only to their Locally Trusted Organisations. This was typically for balances between £75,000 and £150,000. Most, but not all, partnerships still informally reported how they planned to use the last of their funding to Local Trust. This means that the coding of approximately 10% of how areas spent their Big Local funding was based on forecasted, rather than actual, spend.
Local Trust is exploring the approach to closing Big Local in an upcoming article.
It’s also important to note that the coding is based solely on the information provided, so may not capture the full picture of Big Local spending on the ground. For example, a budget heading titled ‘Young people projects’ would be coded under the theme Children and young people, even if in practice this work also involved projects that improved young people’s health and wellbeing or helped them develop new skills.
A Big Local partnership was a group made up of at least eight people that guided the overall direction of delivery in a Big Local area.
Bearing in mind that these themes reflect different approaches to budget planning in 150 Big Local areas, Chart 1 shows the top 10 ways money was spent by theme on the Big Local programme. This amounts to £159 million of funding spent by 150 Big Local areas.
Chart 1 shows Big Local delivery costs to be where Big Local partnerships spent the most money. At £52 million, this is 2.5 times greater than the next largest theme (community engagement). All 150 Big Local areas invested some funding on Big Local delivery costs, and more than half spent the largest proportion of their funding within this theme.
‘Big Local delivery costs’ covers a range of different types of spending that ultimately supported the delivery of Big Local on the ground. This could include funding to set up a new organisation in the community, buy supplies such as stationary or IT equipment, training for the Big Local partnership to skill up, or commissioning evaluations of key projects. However, a substantial portion of this theme is made up of funding that went towards paid support for the Big Local project in the form of staffing costs. This kind of funding makes up at least 41 per cent of the Big Local delivery costs theme, around £21 million. When Big Local partnerships chose to fund paid worker roles, this was usually with an explicit aim of boosting capacity across a range of activity to support the delivery of Big Local in the community, and their day-to-day tasks may have involved work across many of the themes listed in Table 1 below. This highlights the important role of paid capacity to support a volunteer-led programme.
The role of paid workers in the Big Local programme is being explored in another article, that will be uploaded to this website soon.
Many Big Local partnerships funded workers to support the delivery of Big Local. They were paid individuals, as opposed to those who volunteered their time. They were different from Big Local reps and advisors, who were appointed and paid by Local Trust.
The next largest theme is community engagement. Given the focus on community development within the Big Local programme, it makes sense that over £20 million would have been spent across all 150 Big Local areas to bring their communities together. Big Local partnerships were also required by Local Trust to consult with their wider community on their plans to make changes in their area, and so part of this theme includes an additional £50,000 of grants for each area in the early years of Big Local that partnerships could access from Local Trust to get the community involved and engaged in their work. However, even deducting that additional funding leaves over £17 million that Big Local areas have dedicated to engaging their community across the 10–15 years of programme delivery. This includes running events, setting up newsletters, and growing their local volunteer networks.
Over £17 million was spent by 100 Big Local areas on community spaces. This includes purchasing, redeveloping, or even building from scratch new community spaces, such as community cafes, sports hubs and heritage centres. While the average amount spent on this theme per Big Local area has been around £170,000, we know that some areas spent upwards of £700,000 on building or redeveloping new community spaces in their community. This highlights the value of physical spaces in which residents can come together, try new things, access key services, or make decisions as a group.
Local Trust has explored why investing in physical assets was so important for many Big Local areas in another article.
A key priority for many Big Local areas was providing things to do or improving opportunities for children and young people, and at least £10 million was spent on this theme by 117 areas. Community consultations undertaken by Big Local areas often highlighted resident’s interest in using Big Local funding for the benefit of young people. This led to funding a wide range of activity such as play parks, literacy projects, youth clubs and opportunities to keep young people entertained during school holidays.
More detail about how Big Local partnerships invested funding to support young people is explored in another article.
A common way that Big Local areas were able to identify community needs and distribute funding in their local area was through small grants, or community chest, schemes. At least 115 areas spent around £7 million through small grants, but many partnerships categorised their budgets thematically, even if they distributed funding using this approach. Indeed, other Local Trust research identified 140 of 150 Big Local areas had some kind of small grant scheme (Local Trust, 2022). These schemes provided an important way for individuals or groups to pilot and try new things to support their local area, leading to the generation of established organisations across many Big Local areas. The average amount of funding spent within this theme has been around £60,000 per area, and previous Local Trust research found that some Big Local areas were distributing grants of £1,000 or less (Local Trust, 2022). This highlights an important role Big Local partnerships played in providing small yet meaningful amounts of funding to enable the development and growth of local organisations, groups, or social enterprises.
Further insights on small grants within the Big Local programme and the impact they had on their local community is being explored in another article, that will be uploaded to this website soon.
Similar amounts of funding were spent on the remaining five themes in the top 10 (each between £5.6 and £6.5 million). This demonstrates that the Big Local model worked as intended in terms of enabling partnerships to allocate funding based on community need, and adapt accordingly. This has often looked quite different depending on the specific context of a Big Local area. For example, some partnerships focused on improving existing assets in their community, such as through the themes of environment or open spaces and parks. Others altered their plans to meet urgent needs, such as through the health and wellbeing theme, in which the amount of funding spent by partnerships increased during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. More details on how Big Local areas responded to the Covid-19 pandemic can be found in a series of reports.
Table 1 below reveals how the Big Local funding was spent across all 19 themes, including how many Big Local areas spent money within each theme, and the proportion of the overall funding this equates to.
| Theme | Total | Proportion of overall funding to date (£135m) | # of Big Local areas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Big Local delivery costs | £51,853,000 | 32% | 150 |
| Community engagement | £20,881,000 | 13% | 150 |
| Place – Community spaces | £17,817,000 | 11% | 105 |
| People – Children and young people | £10,835,000 | 7% | 117 |
| Small grants | £6,987,000 | 4% | 115 |
| Place — Environment | £6,492,000 | 4% | 105 |
| Health and wellbeing | £6,369,000 | 4% | 104 |
| Wealth – Skills development, training and employment | £5,643,000 | 4% | 92 |
| Place — Open spaces and parks | £5,613,000 | 4% | 51 |
| Activities and things to do | £5,586,000 | 3% | 93 |
| Working together and capacity building | £4,596,000 | 3% | 58 |
| Other | £3,946,000 | 2% | 50 |
| Wealth – Reducing poverty | £3,594,000 | 2% | 75 |
| Wealth — Social investment and enterprise | £3,565,000 | 2% | 68 |
| Housing | £2,042,000 | 1% | 12 |
| Wealth – Local economy | £1,449,000 | 1% | 26 |
| Community safety and crime | £1,030,000 | 1% | 26 |
| People – Older people | £878,000 | 1% | 38 |
| Transport | £578,000 | 0% | 24 |
Within the remaining nine themes that fall outside of the top ten largest themes, many highlight key needs or existing assets that may not apply to all Big Local areas. For example, areas with existing high streets had the opportunity to make change in their area on the theme of local economy, while Big Local areas without physical commercial or economic assets may instead have chosen to fund new or existing social enterprises to develop in their community through the theme of social investment and enterprise.
Local Trust has explored the ways in which Big Local areas improved their local economy through an article series.
In some cases, these themes involved more complex and ambitious projects to meet community needs. Big Local areas wanting to improve local transport found that work within the transport theme required not just financial input, but the necessary capacity to build strong relationships with key stakeholders to lobby for change. Similarly, projects involving housing in Big Local areas had to consider additional governance requirements, alongside any planning permission, construction, or renovation costs. With projects included in these themes totalling just over £2.6 million combined, and fewer than a quarter of Big Local areas choosing to invest their funding on these kinds of projects, it may be that many Big Local areas had planned or begun work of that nature, but had not continued or progressed as far as originally hoped. This could be due to wider community context, and the large proportion of Big Local funding that such projects might have required.
The often cross-cutting nature of work that takes place at a community level may also be responsible for some themes being less represented in our dataset than others. For example, the development of a new community space in a Big Local area would often provide a site for a range of opportunities; not only could it be a focal point for engaging the wider community, it could also host a foodbank, debt advice service, or knit-and-natter sessions that support older residents to reduce their social isolation. In many cases, these projects may even be partly or wholly funded outside of the Big Local programme, but it was the original Big Local funding for that community space that unlocked the potential for these to happen. While this can make it challenging to categorise how the money was spent into any one theme, it demonstrates the role that resident-led decision-making can play in allocating funding in ways that can lead to multiple positive outcomes in communities.
Local Trust (2022) ‘The role of small grants in Big Local: scoping paper’. Available on Learning from Big Local (Accessed 11 November 2024)
