What 8 years in Rochdale taught us about Good Help
Public services across the UK are under unprecedented pressure, yet communities continue to demonstrate the relationships, resilience, and strengths needed to create lasting change.
Iswe launched The Rochdale Good Help Model on the 1st July, 2026, in an eight-year review of what happens when a local authority takes seriously an idea that sounds almost too simple to need saying: that how people are helped matters as much as whether they are helped at all.
The Good Help framework was first published in 2018. Rochdale was one of the first places to pick it up, and has stayed with it longer and gone further with it than anywhere else. This report is really an answer to a question Iswe CEO Rich Wilson, who hosted the launch, says he is asked constantly: does this actually work? Does it continue to work once the initial enthusiasm wears off and you're left with real budgets, real caseloads and real political pressure? Eight years on, Rochdale's answer is yes.
During the launch we heard from four speakers who have lived that answer.
Halima Khan (Chief Executive, Paul Hamlyn Foundation) has been there since the beginning, working on Good Help while at Nesta from 2018 - 2020. Most public service reform focuses on what she calls the outer domain: whether someone has stable housing, attends appointments, and complies with service requirements. Good Help is about the inner domain instead: whether people feel worthy of support, whether they have been heard, and whether they trust the person in front of them. Halima argues that the inner domain isn't an unmeasurable mystery. We know how to work with it, and that's what helps well-meant support land instead of bouncing off people who aren't yet ready to receive it. Every pound spent on public services depends on getting that right first.
Helen Davies, (Senior Public Health & Communities Manager, Rochdale Borough Council) has spent her career, and her whole life, in Rochdale and has seen firsthand the impacts of Good Help: A contact centre that no longer rushes people off the phone but helps them navigate to the right support. A volunteer who arrived as a refugee speaking little English and is now a community leader challenging the system she once depended on. Health outreach workers uncovering undiagnosed conditions in three out of ten people they meet, simply because someone finally took the time to listen. From Helen’s perspective, the standout point is cost. This isn't expensive. Rochdale has been doing this on a shoestring since the beginning, and is still doing it on a shoestring now. What it requires isn't budget, it is permission, validation, and a willingness to let frontline workers use judgement instead of following a script.
Emma Kernahan, (co-author of the The Rochdale Good Help Model), spent twenty years in housing and financial guidance and has a unique perspective of what happens when good help exists inside a bad help system. During the pandemic, she ran a programme with no attendance requirements that let people set their own goals and gave them cash directly, with no strings attached. Retention reached 85 percent among people the system usually struggles to engage at all. Every pound spent generated three pounds back in the pockets of some of the most vulnerable households in the country. And, as people gained greater stability and confidence, Emma noticed that many of them started gardening. It wasn't a metric anyone had asked Emma to track, but she saw it as the clearest sign of success: gardening requires imagining a future, and scarcity robs people of the ability to do so.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top, (Chair, Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods), drew on family history in the shipyards and mining communities of the North East, and decades in government and community work since. She was clear that these lessons are not new: Rochdale, and places like it, have had to relearn these lessons because the government too often fails to implement what works from one authority to the next. Her caution was equally clear. With Pride in Place funding now flowing to neighbourhoods across the country, Baroness Armstrong believes it would be better spent on the people and relationships that actually turn a neighbourhood around rather than on buildings. She called for the evidence behind Good Help to reach the people making spending decisions as the evidence is robust and well established, but remains far too poorly disseminated.
In closing, Rich Wilson reflected that Rochdale hasn't succeeded because it found extra money, or waited for a new government, or discovered some clever new technology. It succeeded because it took an evidence base most social psychologists would regard as settled science, and simply insisted on acting on it, consistently, for eight years, largely because a small number of people refused to let it be absorbed back into business as usual.
Good help is not a mystery. The Rochdale model shows it can outlast the people who started it, spread across an entire council, and survive a pandemic, austerity and constant political change. The report sets out how and what government, commissioners and local leaders would need to do to make it the norm rather than the exception.
Read the report and share it as widely as possible. The more places that can point to evidence like this, the harder it becomes to keep treating good help as optional.