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Current moves to regenerate our towns and cities offer social services the ideal opportunity to make sure the needs of disadvantaged groups are met. Anthony Douglas looks at how social services can play their part.

The sole item on the final Cabinet agenda before the June general election was the future of regional government in England. Regional government offices are becoming more significant. The needs of each part of the UK are under the spotlight and each village is developing its own plan and showcasing its own identity.

Many towns are lobbying for city status, keen to be seen as modern ecological and ethical working systems rather than the industrial and semi-industrial towns and cities of the last century. Governance structures are also slowly being overhauled, with the election of the first mayors, and new power structures that set out to include alienated and disadvantaged groups.

Social services are ideally placed to play a central role in urban and rural regeneration. Reducing the vulnerability of individuals and groups and promoting their well-being figures high on the community leadership agenda common to all public sector agencies.

As Gurbux Singh, chief executive of the Commission for Racial Equality, said recently: "Those authorities that do not put race at the heart of modernisation are not actually modernising anything at all."

Modernisation includes taking practical steps to empower people and groups on the fringes of society. Shifting to a user-centred service cannot be done without breaking down several institutional barriers.

The needs of service users can be promoted through specific planning policies designed to maximise affordable and social housing. Where there are concentrations of people with specific social needs, facilities such as day care centres can be bargained for as part of planning agreements with developers of new housing schemes.

When disabled people are included in the detailed design and construction of new housing and facilities, they invariably produce an improved design because they can envisage what living in the development or using a facility will be like.

Service-user parliaments can be developed as a way of formally hearing and acting on the views of users about how their services are run and developed. Users can be involved in training frontline staff in how to relate more effectively to the people they assess and support. Direct-payment schemes can offer more power and choice to users to buy for themselves the services they need.

Social services can work positively with the leisure and culture communities:

- To identify the needs of older people for a mobile library service.

- To pump prime funding into community groups such as painting and photographic societies, most of whose members are aged over 65.

- For concessionary membership fees and prices for young people in the care system, families in need, and local carers, to use what the local public sector has to offer.

The needs of vulnerable people can also be built into statutory community strategies.

Often opposition to developments such as hostels and group homes for people with mental health problems comes from a lack of awareness local people have of the needs of people in their own community. Needs analysis can go a long way to spelling out what support services are needed at the local level, and to ensure that all plans and strategies produced take into account those needs.

Social care services need to play an active part in helping to shape the future of our towns, villages and cities. Strategies produced without this input can unwittingly promote social exclusion.