This document sets out the Government's five year plan to create sustainable inclusive communities across England, focusing on its strategy to improve provision of neighbourbood services. It includes: proposals to increase public involvement in the way their communities (both rural and urban) are run, including a Neighbourhoods Charter; a wide-ranging strategy to improve safety and cleanliness of streets, parks and open spaces; improving responsiveness of local services, including schools, health and police services; establishing clearer roles for councillors, with increased opportunities for mayors where there is demand; 'local area agreements' pilots for service delivery; £2.5 billion investment each year to tackle social exclusion in deprived communities; and greater co-ordination of service funding and planning system requirements at the regional level. An accompanying paper which sets out the Government's housing policy has been published as Cm. 6424 ('Sustainable communities: homes for all', ISBN 0101642423).

While the nation's GDP has doubled in the last thirty years, significant increases in family income have been restricted to a small subset of the American population. This disjunct between national economic growth and stagnating incomes in all but the very top tier of the population corresponds with increasing economic inequality and a lack of social and economic mobility. As a consequence, neighborhoods and metropolitan areas have become more polarized. Stark geographic differences in levels of poverty, income, health outcomes, job opportunities, lifetime earning potential, and educational attainment highlight the degree to which place matters in terms of social and economic opportunity. Shared Prosperity in America's Communities examines this place-based disparity of opportunity and suggests what can be done to ensure that the benefits of economic growth are widely shared. Contributors' essays explore social and economic mobility throughout the country to illuminate the changing geography of inequality, offer a portfolio of strategies to address the challenges of place-based inequality, and show how communities across the nation are implementing change and building a future of shared prosperity. Approaching the problem from the vantage point of economics, sociology, and public policy, Shared Prosperity in America's Communities offers a timely analysis of the country's growing socioeconomic and geographic division and shows how communities can respond to the challenge of economic inequality to build a nation of opportunity for all. Contributors: J. Cameron Anglum, Timothy J. Bartik, Chris Benner, Angela Glover Blackwell, Anthony P. Carnevale, Raj Chetty, Rebecca Diamond, Lei Ding, Paul A. Jargowsky, David N. Karp, Elizabeth Kneebone, Douglas S. Massey, Jeremy Nowak, Manuel Pastor, Victor Rubin, Chris Schildt, Nicole Smith, Margery Austin Turner, Susan M. Wachter, Zachary D. Wood.

The government proposes to give local authorities more freedom and powers to meet the needs of their citizens and communities. Local authorities will be encouraged to develop neighbourhood charters setting out local standards and priorities; to manage services at the level of the neighbourhood; to work more closely with neighbourhood policing teams. Local people will receive more information about services and standards, and will be able to question and get a response from local councilors through a new service, Community Call for Action. Executive power will be invested in the leader of the council, and there will be three choices of leadership model: a directly elected mayor, a directly elected executive of councillors, or a leader elected by fellow councillors with a four year mandate. New training opportunities will be provided for councillors. The making of byelaws will be fully devolved to local authorities. The authorities will be encouraged to bring together local partners to help improve services, and to develop a delivery plan - the Local Area Agreement - setting out a single set of priorities for local partners, for the Sustainable Community Strategy that they are already required to prepare. The performance framework for local government will be simplified: there will be about 35 priorities for each area, with a set of some 200 outcome based indicators replacing the many hundreds of indicators currently required by central government. Ambitious efficiency gains will be required as part of the 2007 comprehensive spending review. The second volume shows how these proposals will apply to major local public service areas and cross-cutting issues: community safety; health and well-being; vulnerable people; children and families; climate change; and economic development, housing and planning.

Dated May 2007