Community Cohesion

Roz Savage Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I thank the hon. Member for Rugby (John Slinger) for bringing forward this important debate on a subject that is dear to my heart.

Community cohesion is not just a nice to have; it is the foundation of our democratic infrastructure. When people feel connected, valued and heard, democracy is strong, but when they feel ignored, divided or left behind, that creates an opening for something far darker to take root. Over the last few decades across the country, we have seen rising mistrust, loneliness and anger. When community cohesion weakens, it creates fertile ground for extremism, scapegoating and racism. That is not just abstract; history shows us, time and again, that it leads to the downfall of countries and civilisations.

Cohesion is prevention, resilience and the national security that starts at street level. We are now seeing the limitations of an individualistic and fragmented society, and I think that, over the coming years, we will see a swing back towards community as the real unit of organisation. I am already seeing that in my constituency, as I will come back to later.

Cohesion grows when people know their neighbours. We got a brief glimpse of what is possible during the covid lockdowns: people who were working from home or on furlough noticed that they had neighbours, and that maybe those neighbours needed something from them. Then the pandemic ended and that sense of cohesion dissipated again, but it was a promising glimpse of what is still there, waiting to be fanned back into flame. We saw people working together on shared challenges.

People need to feel that local decisions are made with them, not to them. They need shared spaces where they can gather together, such as pubs, village halls and churches. That is one reason why I am concerned about the current challenges facing the hospitality trade. In many small villages in my constituency, once the pub goes, there really is nowhere else for people to meet in an informal setting.

Cohesion is eroded when infrastructure fails and development accelerates. I have seen a number of housing developments bolted on to existing towns and villages, which creates real division and sometimes, in the worst-case scenario, even resentment—especially when existing infrastructure is already struggling to cope with the population.

Cohesion is also eroded when public services such as rural bus routes disappear and when environmental injustice goes unaddressed. It is eroded when people feel powerless, as came up last night in the debate on the Representation of the People Bill. Our current first-past-the-post voting system makes too many people feel powerless, and proportional representation would go a long way towards giving people their voice back in our democracy.

In rural constituencies such as the South Cotswolds, the closure of bus routes, pressure on GP surgeries, pollution in our rivers and unmanaged growth all chip away at trust in Government and the systems that underpin the life of our country. When trust is eroded, narratives of blame rush in to fill the vacuum. Too often, people are tempted to blame a demographic that they can clearly identify rather than the invisible systems that they cannot.

In my constituency, we are attempting an experiment. I am not aware of anything exactly like it that is going on anywhere else. We are calling it Stronger South Cotswolds, and it is based on my belief that over the coming years we are going to see more disruption, whether it is political, economic, technological or climate-related. When things go awry, we fall back on our neighbours and our sense of place. Stronger South Cotswolds is built around four pillars: food and farming, health and wellbeing, flood resilience and water issues, and community energy and nature conservation. At its heart, it is really about connection.

We keep being told by the Government that there is so little money, and so increasingly local government has no money, but I have seen at first hand how a little money can go a very long way when put in the hands of people at the pointy end who know how it can be used. It delivers a fantastic return on investment.

I am going to get into real trouble if I start listing some of the local legends, as we call them, who we are incorporating into Stronger South Cotswolds—perhaps I will save that for this afternoon’s Westminster Hall debate on small charities—but I will share the general concept that there is already so much good stuff going on in my constituency. On our website, we are recognising those people and groups already doing incredible work and highlighting them in the hope that other people can adopt and adapt those brilliant ideas elsewhere. My constituency straddles two counties, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, so that presents real opportunities for cross-county border transference of inspiration.

These fantastic local initiatives do more than deliver services to people who are struggling with physical, mental or economic poor health, with dementia or with Parkinson’s. I have seen many people really flourishing through these organisations as they create relationships across age, class and socioeconomic background. That really is cohesion in practice.

What I am seeing is that when communities feel strong, difference can be not alienating but enriching, but when communities feel fragile, difference is weaponised. If people believe that the system works only for the powerful, they are more susceptible to voices offering simplistic answers and easy targets. We need to be honest about that and recognise that cohesion is the antidote to division, but it does not happen automatically; it must be cultivated. That is where we as MPs, as the hon. Member for Rugby mentioned, have a real role to play.

We may not have a budget, and we may only have small teams, but we do have that magical power to convene. When we bring people together, the magic can happen. That is what we are trying to do with Stronger South Cotswolds—bring people together with the aspiration that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. That cannot be manufactured by Government in Westminster. Belonging, by definition, happens at that nexus of place, nature and neighbourhood.

I call on the Government to properly fund local groups and make those pots of money available, knowing that they will deliver a fantastic ROI. I ask the Government to please support community ownership of energy, land and community assets; invest in youth services and intergenerational spaces; ensure that planning decisions genuinely involve community voices; and restore trust in environmental regulation. Above all, I ask them to please choose to devolve power rather than concentrate it here in London.

If things are going to get rocky over the next few years, we need to be building community cohesion now. Something I learned from expedition planning is that you have to do your preparation when it is calm, because when the storms hit, you just do not have time. Community cohesion is the same: if we invest now in connection, fairness and shared purpose, we can weather those storms together. If we neglect it, we should not be surprised when division grows. The question for the House is whether national policy will strengthen the work of initiatives like Stronger South Cotswolds or make it harder. I ask the Government to please put the power and resources into the hands of local communities, where they really can make a difference.

[Several hon. Members rose—]