Ask ten council officers what “social cohesion” means in practice and you’ll likely get ten different answers, which is exactly the problem Common Ground: Building Cohesive Communities was written to solve.

Published in January 2026 and authored by the Belong Network with cross-party endorsement from the Local Government Association (LGA), Common Ground supersedes the LGA’s 2019 guidance and gives councils a practical framework for building and sustaining cohesion at a local level. It’s also the guidance that government’s own Protecting What Matters cohesion plan explicitly commits to embedding nationally (you can read our explainer on that plan here).

Unlike a single acronym-led framework, Common Ground is a genuinely comprehensive piece of guidance, running across six sections covering strategy development, partnerships, service areas, and evaluation. Rather than working through all of it, this piece focuses on what matters most for comms and engagement teams: how cohesion is defined, what data and engagement work is expected of you, and where Orlo fits into delivering it.

Common Ground was commissioned to give local authorities a shared, practical understanding of social cohesion, something that has never had an official government definition despite decades of policy attention stretching back to the 2001 Cantle report. It draws on the Belong Network’s research and consolidates learning from independent reviews including the Casey Review (2016) and the Khan Review (2024).

Crucially, the guidance is deliberately non-prescriptive. It doesn’t tell every council to define cohesion the same way or run the same programme. Instead, it gives a shared model to work from, sets out the legal duties that already touch cohesion work, and offers a repeatable process for building a local strategy.

At the centre of the guidance is the Belong Model, five interrelated conditions that make communities strong, connected and resilient. This is the closest thing Common Ground has to a framework, and it’s the part most directly useful for comms and engagement planning.

Participation: The opportunities people have to engage in local life and decision-making. When residents feel involved, it builds trust and a sense of ownership.

Belonging: The feeling of inclusion and attachment to both local community and nation, underpinned by shared values, tolerance and mutual respect.

Democracy: The strength and adaptability of local democratic systems, and residents’ confidence that their voice is heard by councillors and institutions.

Trust: The quality of relationships between different groups in a place, built through everyday contact and reciprocity across lines of difference.

Safety

How safe people feel in their communities, both physically and psychologically, and their capacity to adapt to shocks without division escalating into conflict.

The guidance is clear that these conditions are shaped by everyday council services, not just dedicated cohesion programmes, and that mis- and disinformation, and how a council communicates, sits squarely within the “communications and understanding” factor that can either strengthen or undermine all five.

This is where Common Ground becomes most relevant to comms and engagement teams directly, and where the guidance is most specific.

A robust evidence base, from multiple sources

The guidance recommends drawing on quantitative sources (Census data, Indices of Multiple Deprivation, hate crime statistics, local resident surveys) alongside qualitative sources, explicitly including social media analysis, sentiment of engagement with the council, and what issues spark the most resident engagement.

Mixed-method community engagement

Councils are encouraged to run a mixed-method engagement plan, combining individual conversations, focus groups, community dialogue events, pop-up democracy, and resident surveys, prioritising methods that can be repeated (for example annually) to build a baseline over time.

Reaching “hard-to-reach” groups

The guidance is candid that “hard-to-reach” is often really a case of the wrong method being used, and recommends working through trusted intermediaries, local media and social channels rather than only formal consultation routes.

Closing the feedback loop

Common Ground is explicit that engagement without visible follow-through undermines trust rather than building it. Councils are expected to commit to “playing back what you hear” and to communicate clearly, in plain English, when and how that will happen.

Common Ground and Protecting What Matters were designed to work together, not separately. Protecting What Matters is the national policy and funding architecture (Pride in Place, the Common Ground Resilience Fund, the Cohesion Support and Interventions Function), while Common Ground is the practical, council-level guidance for how to actually build a cohesion strategy, gather evidence, and engage residents on the ground.

If you’re building a local cohesion strategy, Common Ground is where you’ll spend most of your time; Protecting What Matters is where you’ll look for what funding and central support is available to back it up. Read together with our RESIST framework guide, the three pieces cover the full picture: national policy, local strategy, and day-to-day misinformation response.

• Common Ground is the LGA and Belong’s practical guidance for building cohesive communities, published January 2026, superseding the LGA’s 2019 guidance.
• The Belong Model’s five conditions (participation, belonging, democracy, trust, safety) give councils a shared, practical framework for cohesion work.
• Existing statutory duties, including the Public Sector Equality Duty, community safety duty and Prevent Duty, already require councils to consider cohesion.
• Councils are expected to build an evidence base combining quantitative data with qualitative sources, explicitly including social media sentiment analysis.
• Mixed-method, repeatable engagement, and clearly communicating what happens with resident feedback, are treated as essential to building trust, not optional extras.

Much of what Common Ground asks of councils, structured resident engagement, evidenced sentiment tracking, and a clear record of what’s been heard and acted on, is exactly what Orlo’s Community Engagement Platform is built for.

• Building the qualitative evidence base. Social listening and media monitoring surface sentiment and emerging concerns across news, forums and social channels, giving you the kind of ongoing qualitative evidence Common Ground recommends sitting alongside quantitative data.
• Repeatable, mixed-method engagement. Surveys and Voice of the Community tools support the kind of comparable, repeatable engagement the guidance recommends for building a genuine baseline over time.
• Closing the feedback loop. A single, timestamped record of resident conversations and outcomes makes it easier to show residents what changed as a result of their input, not just that it was collected.
• A joined-up view across services. Cohesion touches community safety, housing, equalities and comms alike. Orlo’s unified inbox keeps that work visible in one place rather than scattered across teams.

Over 400 public sector organisations use Orlo to manage community engagement at scale, including local government, housing associations, policing and central government.

If you want to see how Orlo can support your council’s cohesion strategy, take a look at our local government solutions, or a demo is the fastest way to see it in your context.