Over the past 20 years, Bradford has pioneered community action schemes that could serve as a template for the community empowerment idea central to Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society.

Under various rubrics – City Challenge, Single Regeneration Budget, New Deal For Communities – these schemes at Holme Wood, Delph Hill, Woodside and Buttershaw, and the Marshfields area of Great Horton were a mixture of competitive bidding and central government allocation in consultation with the local authority.

More than £150m of public money resourced these regeneration projects. The £70m City Challenge scheme at Holme Wood, which involved demolition and environmental and home improvements, ran for five years.

The £51m Bradford Trident New Deal For Communities scheme, due to end this year, consists of more than 200 projects including environmental and home improvements, most visibly to the tower blocks off Manchester Road.

The £31m Royds Single Regeneration Budget scheme is still going after 15 years, although the public funding element ended in 2002.

Up to present, some 3,000 properties have been improved and another 2,000 new homes built – along with two community centres at Woodside and Delph Hill and a health centre at Buttershaw.

Raj Panesar, deputy chief executive of Royds Community Association, came to Royds from the Holme Wood scheme and sees an important difference between the two.

“The Government thought that pouring money in for five years would solve all the estate’s problems; but it’s nearly back to what it was before. The difference between City Challenge and what happened at Royds was that the local community got the cheque book to make sure the legacy of Royds continues,” he said.

“Our two community centres took years to build, it was very frustrating; but that was all about public consultation. People need to understand that regeneration is not about bricks and mortar, it’s about people.”

Tony Dylak, chief executive of Royds said: “We got funding for seven years. The question that residents kept asking was: what happens in year eight? That was the key that made Royds different. We had no template to follow. We pretty well made it up as we went along. Now there are hundreds of organisations like ours all over the country.”

They were speaking in the conference room of Royds Enterprise Park, a 70,000sq ft development on what was a refuse dump for burned-out cars that would not have looked out of place in the 1986 movie Rita, Sue And Bob Too, written by the late Buttershaw playwright Andrea Dunbar.

The park consists of 48 business units, meeting rooms and a 24-hour direct nursing centre. Income from this and other Royds enterprises totals about £1.2m a year, and it is this money which sustains the whole development across three estates.

Mr Panesar said: “That’s how we keep Royds going. We have to operate as a business, we have to compete for contracts. David Cameron should recognise the good work that social enterprises like Royds are doing by giving residents support and continuity.”

To work effectively long-term, community empowerment needs continuity, as Mr Dylak explained.

“The great thing Cameron could do is get rid of this innovation thing – limited-life funding for new projects. Successful public sector schemes get repeat funding; in the private sector this isn’t the case. Where a service has a good track record of delivery, core funding should be directed towards it,” he said.

“Volunteers need support – not masses of money, just a little bit of resourcing plus encouragement and advice.”

Both men have in mind the power of big conglomerates to get contracts for employment, health and education schemes. They believe that well-established local community groups such as Royds should be considered first.

“That’s the big message to Cameron. That would soon turn negatives into positives, and Bradford needs positives,” Mr Panesar added.

Royds is a bottom-up organisation. All its developments, most notably the enterprise park, evolved out of consultation. How was this done?

Mr Dylak said: “It’s difficult, there is no easy solution. It is critical that you start off where local residents are – not preach at them.

“Literacy was a problem. We didn’t send out a bus to sign people up to literacy courses. We approached it through unemployment. People had a problem writing letters and filling in forms because they had trouble with reading and writing, so we helped them with that.”

Community empowerment is about accepting that people have different life experiences and then finding ways of bringing them together with shared experiences – cookery courses, football matches, education schemes.

It is not about making Big Brother declarations: Don’t do that, this must stop, you will do the other.