National strategies

Improving quality of residential issues is a cross-government issue. In this section we have included a brief summary of a number of national strategies that are designed to help improve residential areas.

The Cleaner Safer Greener programme brings together central departments with policy responsibilities that have an impact, directly or indirectly, on public space. Priorities for the programme are:

Creating attractive and welcoming parks, play areas and public spaces
Improving the physical fabric and infrastructure of places
Making places cleaner and maintaining them better
Making places safer and tackling anti-social behaviour
Involving and empowering local people and communities
Catering for children and young people, and tackling inequalities

Public Service Agreements (PSAs)

PSAs set out the key improvements the public can expect from Government expenditure. Each PSA describes a department's main aim, objectives and performance targets which help it focus its activities.
Communities and Local Government’s performance targets for the 2005 to 2008 spending review period include PSA 8:

"To lead the delivery of cleaner, safer, greener public spaces and improve the quality of the built environment in deprived areas and across the country with measurable improvements by 2008" - [Communities and Local Government]

In October 2006, Communities and Local Government published Strong and Prosperous Communities –The Local Government White Paper. The paper sets out proposals to give a stronger role for councils to lead their communities, shape neighbourhoods and bring local public services together. It includes a new framework for local authorities to work with other public service providers and new duties for them to work together to meet local needs and drive up service standards

Neighbourhood renewal

In January 2005, ODPM (now Communities and Local Government) and the Strategy Unit published their joint report on improving the prospects of people living in areas of multiple deprivation in England. This restated the aim of the government’s national strategy,
Making it Happen: A New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal, which is to ensure that, by 2021, no-one is at a serious disadvantage because of where they live.

Neighbourhood renewal uses the power of partnership, harnessed through Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs), which unite an area's major players from the public, private, community and voluntary sectors.