Social capital is what makes a community thrive. The notification on the street WhatsApp when a neighbour needs a hand. The laughter at the stay-and-play. The ukulele band on a Tuesday night, the conversation over coffee at the local repair café or at the school gates. These small, everyday moments add up to something with real weight.
In 2025, 3ni teamed up with Demos and Local Trust on a series of papers exploring how strong social capital improves social and economic outcomes at neighbourhood level. The evidence is now substantial. Higher social capital improves health and educational attainment, prevents crime, and supports economic development (Haldane and Halpern, 2025; Coutts et al, 2025). The papers also showed what happens when social capital is left to erode: the neighbourhoods where it is weakest carry worse outcomes across almost every social and economic measure that matters.
Yet until now, there has been no agreed way to measure it. Existing data sits at regional or local authority level. It hides the differences between nearby neighbourhoods and misses the places at the sharp end of a weakened social fabric.
Travelling up and down the country supporting local authorities leading the shift to neighbourhood working, the 3ni team kept hitting the same problem: you cannot target what you cannot see. Understanding social capital at the right scale is the first step in helping councils and their public sector partners rebuild the networks that let neighbourhoods get on, get ahead, and get things done.
The challenge was practical. How do you take the data we already have on social relationships, networks, and associations and turn it into a tool that points local authorities at the neighbourhoods that need them most?
Today we publish the answer: the Social Capital Score (SCS). Built by 3ni in close collaboration with Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI), the SCS maps social capital where it matters — at the neighbourhood level, across every LSOA in England.
The SCS combines the three dimensions of social capital identified in 3ni’s 2025 series:
- Bonding: the close ties between people that help them get on well together.
- Bridging: the connections across households and backgrounds that help people get on in life.
- Linking: the connections to institutions and influence that help communities get things done.
We have also built heat maps that show where connections are strong, where they are weaker, and where investment will make the biggest difference.
The SCS is already at work. In Wigan, 3ni used it to map social capital and community need across the borough, identifying “social capital coldspots” — neighbourhoods where local networks, community participation and infrastructure are thinnest. The council then targeted support and neighbourhood initiatives at the communities that stood to gain the most, backing delivery of its Progress with Unity strategy to deepen the relationships between residents, partners and the council. Now we want to share this work further. The SCS gives policymakers a clear, objective view of social capital across England’s neighbourhoods. It is the kind of evidence base that turns place-based ambition into targeted, deliverable action.
Stephen Aldridge, Director for Analysis and Data, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, said:
“Under the Pride in Place programme, the Government will be making a long-term investment of £5.8 billion in 284 deprived communities across the country. 3ni’s previous research has demonstrated the importance of strong social capital for improved outcomes in wellbeing, education, crime and health, something the Pride in Place programme recognises. The Social Capital Score represents a useful development in how we approach mapping and exploring social capital and its manifestation at the hyper-local level, and will be a practical tool for policy makers and decision-takers to draw on in allocating funding and helping to make the best use of resources in those neighbourhoods that need them most.”
Alison Mckenzie-Folan OBE, Chief Executive of Wigan Council, said:
“In Wigan, our whole approach is rooted in the belief that strong relationships are the foundation of strong communities. The Social Capital Score has given us a powerful new way to see where those relationships are thriving and where they need strengthening at a neighbourhood level.
The Social Capital Score has been so useful in helping us target investment and resources on building social capital through our neighbourhood model. This is about data enabling us to deepen our community-led approach to tackle inequalities and invest in the places and people where it will make the greatest difference.”
Dan Crowe, Director of 3ni, said:
“Social capital is not an abstract theory. It is the fabric of our communities — the trust, the networks, the sense of belonging that make places thrive. From 3ni’s work in communities across the country, we know how much it matters for local resilience. In a more volatile world, investment in the social bonds that hold communities together has to land in the neighbourhoods that need it most. The SCS gives policymakers the data to do that.”
Daniel P. Aldrich, author of Building Resilience and Beyond Common Ground, Dean’s Professor of Resilience at Northeastern University, Massachusetts, said:
“3ni and OCSI’s Social Capital Score is an ambitious and welcome effort to move social capital measurement from the abstract to the actionable. By operationalising bonding, bridging, and linking capital at neighbourhood level across England, this framework gives policymakers something long missing: a systematic, place-based tool for identifying where the connective tissue of community life is thinnest. The methodological pipeline reflects serious technical care and the direction of travel is exactly right: treating social capital not as a soft concept but as a measurable, mappable resource that communities and funders can act on.”
The SCS arrives at the right moment. Faced with growing economic and environmental uncertainty, national government and local authorities are now treating the growth of community resilience as a shared priority, and Pride in Place is making the biggest investment local communities in a generation.
3ni is launching the full SCS tool at the LGA conference in July. It will give the latest data on social capital hot and coldspots, with the 3ni team on hand to show how it works in practice. In the meantime, you can take a deeper look at the methodology, the policy implications that flow from it, and the FAQ here.
If you’d like to talk to us about what social capital looks like across your community, and how we can help support its growth and nurture, please get in touch with [email protected].