Empowered Community

Our community is at the heart of our vision for Luton 2040. Our vision is for a town that is built on fairness and social justice, with a strong voluntary and community sector that supports the resilience of our most vulnerable residents. Within this priority, we also want to ensure that our residents continue to have a strong sense of civic pride, social responsibility and a powerful voice to shape the future of our town. Luton benefits from having an incredibly strong and cohesive community, including a super-diverse range of people and cultures, a highly dedicated collection of voluntary sector organisations and community groups delivering vital services, and a passionate society with thousands of residents that play their part in making Luton a better place every day. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, all parts of our community came together to support one another, delivering food and emergency supplies to the most vulnerable, supporting the rollout of vaccines and playing their part in Luton’s recovery. The strength of our informal communities is demonstrated by our latest residents’ perception survey, in which 84% of residents said that their neighbourhoods were good places to live. This priority will continue to build on our innovative Fairness Taskforce model, which brings together representatives from across our community to tackle inequality and structural barriers to achieve more equitable outcomes for everyone in our town. This approach is also working to address financial insecurity faced by our most vulnerable and deprived residents and those most impacted by the cost of living crisis.