Ministers have announced a further £4.3m funding package to extend the Neighbourhood Community Budget Pilots to a further 100 areas.

Under the ‘Our Place’ programme, Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) officials hope to build on the success of the 12 pilots, which were smaller scale than the major four ‘whole place’ schemes, and based around bottom-up, grassroots community action.

The cash pot sits alongside a £350,000 financial boost to the existing pilots to speed up and improve the implementation of their programmes.

Sir Merrick Cockell has welcomed the extra funding.

The dozen existing schemes are taking place in One Haverhill (Suffolk CC ), White City (Hammersmith and Fulham LBH), One Ilfracombe (Devon CC), Poplar (Tower Hamlets LBC), Sherwood Family Partnership (Tunbridge Wells), Kenton (Newcastle city Council), Balsall Heath, Castle Vale and Shard End (Birmingham Cit Council), Queens Park (Westminster City Council), Little Horton (Bradford MBC), Norbiton (Kingston-Upon-Thames RLBC).

In addition the Our Place! Programme will also establish a network of champions drawn from the neighbourhood budget pilot areas and other sectors, to give peer to peer support and advice.

Communities minister, Don Foster said: ‘This further investment will help build a popular movement towards of a new way of working.

‘Handing control of local public services over to local communities who know their areas best can deliver more and better for less help create more resilient and involved communities and build neighbourhoods that are better places to live,’ Mr Foster added.

‘Neighbourhood Community Budgets are an important part of the drive to take power out of Whitehall and place in in the hands of people and communities,’ said Sir Merrick Cockell, chairman of the Local Government Association.

‘A cornerstone of this process must be ensuring that new structures are still subjected to appropriate democratic oversight and accountability at a local level. This process of rewiring services around the people who use them should be emulated across the whole of the public sector,’ Sir Merrick added.