The Neighbourhood Manager

Balsall Heath's first Neighbourhood Manager was seconded from the police, the second was seconded from an R4R & the current one, Pat Wing is a retired Chief Superintendent of police.

The Principle behind having a Neighbourhood Manger is simple. A commercial business has a chief Executive; a school has a head as voluntary Organisation. So, why shouldn't a Neighbourhood also have a head manager who sees it as their personal responsibility to coordinate the services going into it and ensure that they are of the highest, tailor made quality.

In addition to a responsible manager, Balsall Heath operates with a Neighbourhood Strategic Partnership (NSP). Around one table sits the manager and an identified champion from each statutory service who together from the NSP along with resident.

In addition to a Manager and an NSP, Balsall Heath has a Neighbourhood Development Plan which focuses and inter-relates the aims and activities of all service providers and ensures they work to an agenda and objectives set by residents.

The Bottom up, Forum led, activities described on these pages are only half of the story of the recovery of Balsall Heath. For, they can’t succeed unless they are joined in partnership by their statutory partners - the council and its services, housing, environmental and so on, the police, health trust, fire service, housing associations and so on. 

Hitherto, however, Balsall Heath has been a neighbourhood where people live. But, it has not been an administrative entity. The services which people have received have been one-size -fits–all and delivered by top-down providers over large administratively defined areas.

Balsall Heath now has a neighbourhood manager whose task it is to work with public service providers and help them re-fit their services to the specific needs of the neighbourhood and get them to feel pleased or sad if the outcomes are good or bad.

As well as a neighbourhood manager, therefore, there is a Neighbourhood Strategic Partnership  (N.S.P) which focuses on Balsall Heath, liaises with the residents and gets all concerned to work together. The NSP works with a series of theme pillars- safety, health, housing etc.

The Strategic Partnership prepares a Neighbourhood Development Plan which focuses attention and which is reviewed every year or two. (The latest one follows this section.) In addition, there is a Neighbourhood Budget which is slowly emerging from the previously remote budgets of the partners.

Because there was no manager, set of partners, Development Plan or Budget, Public assets were scattered throughout the area, some not used, some under-used, none made to work hard to pay real dividends for the people who live and work in the area. These assets range from the public housing and include parks, libraries, other buildings and so on. But, none were managed with an entrepreneurial eye as if Balsall Heath were a business which swam or sank in terms of its profitalsility or marketability. So, residents and the strategic partners are working with private sector experts to use and manage these assets very differently and to enable them to work for and drive recovery rather than being a drain upon it.

The reader will be interested in the Neighbourhood Development Plan which follows, and the paper, Vibrant Villages, which appears in a later section.

Contact Pat Wing on 0121 446 6182, or email patrickwing(at)yahoo.co.uk