Place-Based Delivery and National Oversight: Holding the Two Together

In our latest blog Kevin Davis DL, Non-Executive Director of the Oversight Trust and Link Director for Access – The Foundation for Social Investment, gives his take on place-based investment.

Place is not simply where a national programme is delivered. Place is part of how change happens.

I have learned that over nearly three decades of building organisations in the Black Country, from co-founding schools and a multi-academy trust to work across health, housing, community development and social investment.

When you are trying to make something happen locally, you do not experience "the system" as an organisational chart. You experience it through whether funding is available, how quickly decisions are made, whether someone understands the problem, and whether anyone listens when circumstances change.

Some years ago, I led a team turning a 24-place provision for excluded young people into something more ambitious. Conventional banks were not interested in backing the capital we needed. Social investors were. That finance helped secure the building and create the platform from which Walsall Studio School followed. It taught me that access to capital can determine whether local ambition becomes an institution or remains an idea.

I have now sat on both sides of the table: securing money, permissions and partnerships to build locally, and exercising governance and oversight nationally. We must ask whether money is used well and for its intended purpose, but also what is actually changing for people and communities. A perfectly governed programme that cannot reach the people it was created for has not succeeded.

That is why proportionality matters. In a small organisation, the person completing a monitoring return may also be the chief executive, the fundraiser and part of the delivery team. Standards should not be lowered, but assurance should be proportionate, and credible local evidence should be interpreted intelligently.

As devolution deepens and more power and funding move to regional authorities led by elected mayors, that relationship between national oversight and place matters more. National averages can hide very different experiences between communities. Hearing a plurality of voices early enough to shape decisions is essential, because there is no single "community voice".

National oversight needs both altitude and proximity: the helicopter view of systems and trends, with a clear sightline to the people affected.

At the Oversight Trust, holding Board activity outside London and hearing directly from organisations helps test our assumptions against frontline reality. The same principle guides my role as Link Director for Access, one of the Trust's four operating companies, which helps charities and social enterprises reach the finance they need. The role is about relationship, understanding and appropriate challenge, not day-to-day management.

For me, access to capital is never abstract. It is about who can reach it, on what terms, and whether the system works for communities historically excluded from finance. Dormant assets funding shows what becomes possible when that capital is protected for social purpose and independently overseen with the long term in mind.

The best oversight protects public purpose while recognising that lasting change is built in places, by the people who know them. Every line on a national dashboard eventually lands somewhere.