Long-awaited plan to cost £69 a home

The government's long-awaited national strategy on social exclusion will be built around "ambitious, quality" people working at a local level, a key insider has revealed.

Jon Bright, head of the New Deal for Communities Unit and formerly deputy head of the Social Exclusion Unit, said the new managers would have more clout than people working at a similar level in the past.

Previewing the work of the Social Exclusion Unit's policy action team on neighbourhood management, which is due to report next month, Bright said the new managers would report to a local board.

Community support officers would work alongside them to increase community involvement.

"Up to now we have put people in neighbourhood positions but haven't really given them the authority, power and resources to get things done. It's inevitable that they have ended up banging their heads on brick walls."

Costs, including staffing and administration, of the new system for an estate of 4,500 households would be around £300,000 a year - or £69 per household.

Bright said the system could help the majority of deprived neighbourhoods, in contrast to the New Deal for Communities, which was confined to 39 areas.

He said: "This is a big agenda. It is going to be a big part of the national strategy."

He said for the system to be a success, there would need to be support from above and the willingness to change traditional ways of doing things.

And he hoped the role would attract ambitious, quality people from across the public sector who saw it as a career-enhancing job to take.

Speaking at the same session at the National Housing Federation's chief executives' conference, Joanna Simons, housing director at the London borough of Greenwich warned of "initiativitis". She called for more coherence between the boundaries of different regeneration initiatives and action zones.