A single funding announcement, a new neighbourhood board, a resident consultation gone well or badly: for council comms and engagement teams, social cohesion isn’t an abstract policy area. It’s built or eroded in the everyday work of listening, responding and communicating with residents.

In April 2026, the government published Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive, and resilient United Kingdom, its national action plan for social cohesion, led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). It sets out why cohesion is straining across the UK and the steps the government is taking in response, built around three pillars: confident communities, cohesive communities, and resilient communities.

Much of the plan is genuinely national in scope, covering areas like immigration policy and counter-extremism law that sit above the comms function. But a substantial part of it lands directly on local government and the teams responsible for community engagement. Here’s what the plan actually asks of councils, and where Orlo fits into delivering it.

The plan responds to a body of evidence showing trust in institutions declining and tensions between communities increasing, citing pressures from economic strain, the shift of social life online, demographic change, and extremism. It replaces an earlier version presented to Parliament in March 2026 and sits alongside the government’s wider Pride in Place Strategy.

Three pillars structure the plan:

• Confident communities: restoring pride in place through local investment, culture and shared identity.
• Cohesive communities: strengthening integration, tackling hate and discrimination, and managing the pace of change.
• Resilient communities: protecting institutions from extremism and securing online spaces.

A new Social Cohesion Taskforce will oversee delivery from the centre of government, with an annual progress update promised for public accountability.

For council comms teams, the two pillars with the most direct, week-to-week relevance are confident communities (resident-facing investment and engagement) and the community resilience infrastructure sitting inside cohesive communities (tension-spotting, funding, and shared guidance). That’s where the rest of this piece focuses.

Pride in Place and Neighbourhood Boards

The plan builds on the existing Pride in Place Programme, expanding funding to a further 40 areas where cohesion is under pressure, worth £800 million over ten years. Neighbourhood Boards, already running in 75 places, bring residents together to shape a plan for their area and decide how funding is spent.

This is a direct communications job. Every board needs residents engaged, informed, and given a genuine route to influence decisions, then kept updated as commitments are delivered.

Community Right to Buy and local powers

The plan introduces a Community Right to Buy, letting residents take ownership of valued local assets such as community centres, pubs and parks, alongside new duties on councils to establish effective neighbourhood governance. Communicating what these powers mean, and helping residents actually use them, will fall largely to local government comms and engagement teams.

High streets, local media and visible services

The plan also commits to a High Streets Strategy backed by a £150 million innovation fund, and a forthcoming Local Media Strategy aimed at supporting local journalism. Both point to a wider theme running through the plan: residents’ sense of cohesion is closely tied to whether they can see investment and services working in their area, and whether they trust the sources telling them about it.

Several of the plan’s cohesion mechanisms are aimed squarely at councils rather than central government, and this is the section worth reading closely if you work in local government comms.

The Common Ground Resilience Fund

Up to £5 million is available in 2026/27 for local authorities and grassroots organisations to run practical cohesion initiatives: community events, interfaith programmes, school projects addressing prejudice, media literacy and misinformation training, and work to reduce isolation among vulnerable groups.

The Cohesion Support and Interventions Function (CSIF)

A new cross-government function will give council leaders facing serious local tensions rapid access to experienced practitioners, including senior council leaders, police chiefs and national security experts, along with tailored briefings on emerging threats and immediate access to Resilience Fund money where unrest occurs.

The LGA and Belong’s Common Ground guidance

The plan formally commits the government to working with Belong and the Local Government Association to embed shared guidance on social cohesion, published in January 2026 as Common Ground: Building Cohesive Communities, which gives local authorities practical tools, including on statutory duties and good practice.

A Social Cohesion Measurement Framework and local risk assessment tool

Responding to long-standing calls for consistent metrics, the government will develop a framework to help local areas measure cohesion in a robust, comparable way, alongside a new local cohesion risk assessment tool designed to help councils spot emerging tensions earlier and share that information with central government and partners such as Prevent.

This is the clearest signal in the whole plan that the government expects councils to have structured, evidenced insight into local sentiment, not just anecdotal awareness.

Tackling hate, discrimination and antisemitism

The plan also sets out substantial work on hate crime reporting, protective security funding for faith communities, and specific measures addressing antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility, including new definitions and dedicated funding. This work sits mostly with community safety and equalities teams rather than comms, but where councils communicate local responses to hate incidents, tone and speed matter: transparent, prompt, non-defensive communication is consistently what builds resident trust back up after a tension event.

RESIST, the GCS framework for tackling misinformation (you can read our full RESIST guide here), gives comms teams the operational playbook for responding when false or misleading claims threaten to inflame a local situation. Protecting What Matters sits a level above that: it’s the policy and funding architecture that determines what support, guidance and resource is available to councils before, during and after those moments.

Used together, RESIST is how you respond when something is already spreading, and Protecting What Matters is what determines whether you have the funding, guidance and escalation route to respond well.

• Protecting What Matters is the government’s national cohesion action plan, built on confident, cohesive and resilient communities.
• For council comms and engagement teams, the most immediately relevant parts are Pride in Place and Neighbourhood Boards, the Common Ground Resilience Fund, the Cohesion Support and Interventions Function, and the new local cohesion risk assessment tool.
• The government explicitly expects councils to use the LGA and Belong’s Common Ground guidance alongside this plan.
• A new Social Cohesion Measurement Framework signals a shift towards evidenced, structured local insight rather than anecdotal awareness of resident sentiment.

Much of what this plan asks of councils, structured resident engagement, early visibility of local tension, and an evidenced record of what’s been heard and acted on, is exactly what Orlo’s Community Engagement Platform is built for.

• Spotting tension early. Social listening and media monitoring surface shifts in local sentiment and emerging concerns across news, forums and social channels, before they reach the point of needing a CSIF-level intervention.
• Structured resident engagement for Neighbourhood Boards. Surveys and Voice of the Community tools give boards a repeatable way to gather priorities and report back on delivery, rather than a single consultation exercise nobody can easily reference again.
• An evidenced record. Every conversation and piece of feedback managed through Orlo is logged in one place, giving councils a clear, timestamped account of what residents raised and how it was addressed, useful both for local accountability and for any future cohesion measurement framework reporting.
• A single view across departments. Cohesion work touches community safety, housing, equalities and comms teams alike. Orlo’s unified inbox keeps that work joined up rather than scattered across separate systems.

Over 400 public sector organisations use Orlo to manage exactly this kind of risk, including local government and central government, NHS trusts, housing associations, police forces, and fire and rescue services.

If you want to see how Orlo supports the ongoing side of reputation management, take a look at our public sector reputation management solutions, or a demo is the fastest way to see it in your context.