Thriving Places — Glasgow's Ten-Year Area-Based Initiative in Nine Deprived Communities

Thriving Places is a ten-year area-based initiative run by Glasgow's Community Planning Partnership in nine areas with persistently high deprivation, grouped as North West (Ruchill/Possilpark, Drumchapel, Lambhill/Milton), North East (Parkhead/Dalmarnock, Easterhouse, Springboig) and South (Priesthill/Househillwood, Greater Gorbals, Greater Govan). It aims to join up public services and communities around local priorities rather than run a single new service.
Evaluation design: in 2017 What Works Scotland (Brunner, Craig and Watson) ran an evaluability assessment with partner officers, producing a shared theory of change and options for evaluation. The authors note that area-based initiatives are very complex to evaluate and showing change has often been difficult to evidence, and describe change as incremental rather than transformational.
Outcome data: since 2015 the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde adult health and wellbeing survey has boosted sampling in four Thriving Places (2,376 home interviews). A later health-partnership presentation compares these residents with those in the most deprived 15% of areas elsewhere in Glasgow: smoking 23% vs 29% and loneliness in the past two weeks 24% vs 32%, with 16 statistically significant favourable differences and 6 unfavourable ones, and larger improvement between 2015 and 2018 than afterwards. Some hoped-for gains, such as greater control over and influence on local decisions, were not found.
Cautions: the comparison covers only four of nine areas, comes from a slide deck rather than a full peer-reviewed evaluation, and cannot isolate the programme's effect. The 2024–34 Glasgow Community Plan adopts a refreshed place-based approach using the Place Standard Tool.

Read the full analysis: https://whatworksscotland.ac.uk/publications/evaluability-assessment-of-thriving-places-a-report-for-glasgow-community-planning-partnership/