Drug-related deaths in England and Wales have doubled since 2012 and have risen every year since. That is not a statistic that treatment services alone can reverse. Recovery depends on what happens after treatment — on the strength of the community someone returns to, the relationships they can rebuild, and whether the place they live in has the conditions to support a life beyond addiction. That is the problem Inclusive Recovery Cities are designed to solve. A new learning report, produced as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Recovery Connections and Leeds Trinity University, draws on research across seven IRC sites in England to set out what the model is, what it is achieving, and what it requires of the places that take it on.
The findings are clear. An Inclusive Recovery City is not a new service or an additional layer of bureaucracy — it is a civic framework that brings lived experience leaders, local authorities, commissioners, employers, and civic partners into coordinated relationship around a shared commitment to make recovery visible, valued, and sustainable. The research identifies four features that consistently distinguish the cities making the greatest progress:
lived experience leadership at the centre of governance;
cross-sector coordination across partners who have rarely converged around recovery before;
active public visibility to shift the civic conversation from problem to contribution;
and genuine civic ownership of recovery as a shared responsibility rather than a specialist concern.
The impact of this approach reaches further than the recovery sector. The report demonstrates that outcomes operate at three reinforcing levels — individual, institutional, and civic. People rebuild identity and move into employment and leadership. Fragmented services begin to function as a coordinated system. And sustained public visibility shifts the culture into which the next person in recovery emerges. Lived experience workforces have grown from 2 to over 20 staff in a single IRC area. Recovery Ally training is reshaping workplace culture. In one city, IRC principles have been formally embedded within local authority Marmot principles work. These are not isolated successes — they are evidence of a model that, where the conditions are right, reaches into the wider civic fabric of a place.
The IRC movement is growing. The first UK Inclusive Recovery City was Middlesbrough in May 2023. All 12 local authority areas across the North-East have now committed to building the first Inclusive Recovery Region in the UK, with 30 Inclusive Recovery Cities projected nationally by the end of 2026. Gateshead is the latest community to make that commitment.
The full report — Inclusive Recovery Cities: A Civic Framework for Community Recovery — is available to download below and is offered to local authorities, commissioners, lived experience organisations, and civic leaders considering whether the conditions are in place in their area to lead this work.
