Helping people to help themselves: Policy lessons from a study of deprivedurban neighbourhoods in Southampton

The aim of this paper is draw out some policy lessons from a study of self- help activity amongst 200 households in deprived urban neighbourhoods of So uthampton. Commencing with a critique of the popular prejudice that promoti ng self-help should be opposed in case it leads to a demise of formal welfa re provision, the paper then interrogates the empirical evidence to underst and and explain the nature and extent of such work in deprived neighbourhoo ds. Finding that self-help is a crucial component of household coping pract ices, but that no-earner households are unable to benefit from this work. t o the same extent as employed households, the paper proposes both bottom-up and top-down solutions to tackle the barriers to participation in self-hel p amongst unemployed households. In particular, it calls for a modification to Working Families Tax Credit and the creation of Community Enterprise so as to recognise and value much of the self-help activity that currently ta kes place but remains unrecognised and unvalued.