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sustainable placemaking forum 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP tel. 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 |
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seminar proceedings |
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A seminar series organised by HTA Architects Ltd Report of a seminar on 'a
new commitment to neighbourhood renewal: a ‘real’ commitment'
Main conclusions
This seminar series is now organised by HTA Architects Ltd for the Sustainable Placemaking network. A new commitment to neighbourhood renewal: a ‘real’ commitment Introduction - Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects Ltd Over the past two years our seminars have become a series of discussions which have developed a life and direction of their own. The deliberations are posted on a web site. What has come out is that placemaking is not just about buildings, not just about urban design and not just about housing. It has occurred to us in this series that it is about the things you need to do to create quality of place. It is about understanding what people do with places, how they interact with each other and their environment. So it is a complex set of social and economic issues as well as all those things that we architects have to deal with. We are extremely interested and concerned about policy direction and about the way that grant flows from central government in this area. We are impressed at the way that Government has embraced the idea of joined-up thinking and the holistic understanding of urban renewal. It has moved away from a bricks and mortar approach to an understanding that placemaking is about people, meeting their aspirations and needs, and improving their lot in new ways. We think that is entirely right and proper. A new commitment to neighbourhoods Atul Patel has for the past few years worked on secondment from the Housing Corporation within government in the Cabinet Office and the DETR on neighbourhood renewal strategy. This summer, he has become Chief Executive of ASRA HA. Architecture runs in my family. My father is a retired architect - and from that point of view I try to think that I have some appreciation of space and how people tend to use it. I want to share some insights into how things came to be and some hopes and concerns - and risks - of the future. As Ben said, one feature of neighbourhood renewal is that it isn't purely about physical fabric but about people. But that presents huge challenges. One thing I have learned through working in central government is that we all like to have our cake and eat it. We, as the electorate, expect the government to promise us lots of good things and we want to make sure that they actually stick to them. There is a notion that governments are all powerful, a notion which is not true from my experience, but a notion which ministers tend to play up to, particularly when interrogated by television presenters. But as an immigrant of a mere 35 years I notice that government has pretty crude levers in terms of what it can do to affect changes on the ground. One big crude lever is to throw money at the problem - and we are fortunate that for the next three years or so there is a lot more of it around. Another is to pass laws, rules and regulations – but, of course, we don't want too much of it. (Though when a young child is killed by her parents because proper care is not taken, the world descends like a ton of bricks on the regulatory systems that governs hard pressed social workers, and you end up with rather more regulation. It’s something you can't really argue against because none of us wants to see people die.) In trying to fashion the neighbourhood renewal strategy we had these constraints. Power is widely distributed in advanced societies like ours. Each one of you has a deal of power - ministers happen to have slightly more. How much depends on your circumstances. If you are a housing officer interviewing potential applicants you have immense power over whether they get the right kind of place to thrive in or not. The power increases, whether we are bureaucrats within the civil service or administrators within the Housing Corporation, or regulators or whatever. That is something we all need to bear in mind - we have the power to help or the power to obstruct. Each of us has a great deal of influence on people and what happens to their futures. So what are we going to do about it? We have got extra money, we have got a government that is not going to tell us what to do on every occasion, that has tried to lay off a bit. That is because if you try and create a policy from the centre which caters for every eventuality, you end up with something so large, intricate and complicated that no-one understands it, and no-one does anything about it - but it caters for every interest and every possible criticism! Or you can go to the other extreme - laissez faire - where government says it is only responsible for the money: if it all fails, we will say you failed. But they know that that is not going to get them back into power at the next election. Or you go for something in the middle, with a broadbrush approach, creating a supportive programme where you have policy that is loose at the margins. The 88 neighbourhood fund renewal areas are less than the number of areas we want to see change in, but we have to start somewhere. Is rural deprivation and poverty and social exclusion covered by the neighbourhood strategy? I expect not but it is also a fact that most deprivation in this country is concentrated in urban areas. So we have gone from this middle road - rather more Buddhist than Blairite - which creates a framework with additional money, switching regeneration impacts from special initiatives to mainstream funding. The question is: will it work? Will that money actually get to the kind of sustainable places we want to create, and to the right people? There's a lot of bureaucracy to cope with. We want to make sure departments tweak their formulas for distributing money to ensure that in health, schools and the police the money actually gets down to the areas that need it. But as I said it is also a loose fit. We have this idea of local strategic partnerships (LSPs). This country has a very centralised civil service and government, elected on lots of promises. They have to deliver to a range of organisations. Not least of these are local authorities, another set of democratically-elected people. What if they don’t want to go along with central government - which is elected on a larger mandate? There has been a long-running battle between central and local government which I don't think we have completely resolved, though things have got better. Local authorities are clearly part of the future but so are chief constables, so are health authorities. One answer may be to put all these bodies under the democratic umbrella of local government - or what we have chosen to do for the time being, to try and put them all under a local strategic partnership: 'the mother of all partnerships'. The point is that we have seen so many examples of joined-up solutions for joined-up problems at a local and community level - why can't they be replicated at a much wider level? To give you some examples:
The challenge is how to make such examples common practice. The main ingredient for that, I suspect, is human nature. As I said, we all have a bit of power - we all have the ability to make things better to a certain degree. But the tendency - which I have observed both from the Housing Corporation and Whitehall - is to say: ‘we could do so much more if you let us do this’, or ‘it is not our problem, it’s someone else’, or ‘we want to do this but someone else is getting in the way’. Don’t tell me we can't sort that out, at least at the margins. It just takes a bit of will to bend the rules a bit - though I appreciate that you fear the nearest regulator will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you are too creative in what you do. But at the end of the day it is people that matter, and whom we have to get to. So what of LSPs and other partnerships? Forgive the cliché but 'it's not what they can do you, it's what you can do for them'. It would be very nice if we could come back here in a year's time, and say and 'I have done x, y and z. I have let go of my sovereignty a little bit and have taken a bit of a risk in a managed kind of way with my inspector or regulator, and given some power to the community’. Or ‘I've trusted my colleagues in the health authority but it's a leap of faith. Let's see how that goes, maybe we can work together’. If we don't do this kind of thing, I don't think we can rely on ministers, on policies, targets, and performance indicators, to make changes. These are merely signposts along the way. Some of them are good and right at a particular time, to change the culture of public services, some of them are probably past their sell-by date. What I come back to time and time again is a very early experience at the Cabinet Office. I had the opportunity to address a group of Indian Civil Servants at the University of Sussex. They wanted to know about the UK approaches to poverty reduction. I explained the problems with policies not being joined up, the battle between the centre and local government, communities not empowered enough and so on. They just scratched their heads and pointed out that they have a democracy of one billion people which is the size of Europe. Some of their local authorities have to deal with three hundred languages and some localities with dozens. That kind of context makes me think we have got it good at the moment: extra money and a climate of policy which is something that we always wanted. And yes, delivery is all, and yes, it will be difficult, but what is it we can do for each other to make a difference for people on the ground? If you can't say you've done, one, two or three things, you will have failed. Discussion So it's all about delivery. What do we need to do? Ben Derbyshire I can understand you are speaking at a very strategic level, but at regional and local level there is very little joined-up thinking. We are not able to get as far as we would like to, in terms of delivery and outputs. There is a lack of clarity in terms of output and what we are trying to achieve. We are drifting somewhat. Housing association This relates to what I meant by loose fits. We are doing our best to lean on government offices. We know people need to be skilled up. Many of you work in environments which are very performance-oriented, but if you are a civil servant you never get sacked. The kind of changes needed in those areas will take time. And there is a bit of impatience from the politicians. By the same token I think we probably need a bit of stability for the next year or two with no new initiatives, so that we can create the conditions for these issues about joined-up working to develop. And we need to get the message across to many, many levels of organisations and individuals - that is a huge job. Atul Patel We have - collectively - been more successful than we give ourselves credit for in the work we have done in towns and city centres, but in some ways less successful in neighbourhoods. My concern is that our colleagues in the regional development agencies, though they speak the same language, have a different agenda than that of Tony Blair which is very people-centred. I think they are a long way apart. It manifests itself in that the RDAs make it clear that the driver for renewal is economics-based - it is not socially-based. Funding follows economic outputs. It also manifests itself in the lack of understanding of the role of quality design and quality environment. I think those who say good design is no more expensive design are not correct. The market dictates whether you can have quality design. Local authority I think this is why we have got to make LSPs work - they should be part and parcel of that. I don't think it is wrong to give someone the job of paying attention to economic development in a way that hasn't been done before. But people must be part of the whole picture. If they are not players in LSPs, then I think there is a problem. It is a way you can get round some of the social issues. The bidding culture I fear will be with us for a while longer - I can't see it going away though I can see it withering in some areas. We have tried to do that in some areas by allocating funds directly rather than getting people to bid for it. I think some people are quite upset at losing the Single Regeneration Budget funding role. They are all going to get a single budget next year (probably), but although they will be able to use that for some social outputs, they will be directed to focus much more on economic outputs. It is because economic decline has been at the root of social decline. Atul Patel We have been trying to achieve joined-up service delivery for some years. I am really hopeful we are at the start of real change. Often in the past there has been a lack of will and lack of direction. With the framework of change we have a fundamentally new way of working. I think that many of the building blocks are in place. But initiative-itis is almost an impediment because there are so many different things going on in different directions. Local authority Initiative-itis is an interesting subject. I suspect that ASRA would not have got going except for an initiative by the Housing Corporation some years ago, which led to increased funding for the black and minority ethnic sector. The range of initiatives is very complicated. Take Sandwell which has going just about every zone, initiative or whatever. It has about 10 partnerships with about 30 people each. Try and simplify that into a single over-arching strategic partnership. You can't have 300 people on that LSP. But what are the others going to do if you restrict it to, say, 50 people? These are practical issues. I think we must examine very carefully what it means for each of us to say 'this or that is something we can do without'. I suspect that there will be things like that on the table. There are two issues we haven't managed to crack. Firstly, the notion of risk management in British politics. Ministers can't say on the media 'we have taken a bit of a risk, a bit of a punt; we're trusting local authorities - don't know whether they will do it or not' - even though it might work! We all know from our professional experience that there are ways to manage risk. I think we need to find a way - and I am not quite sure how - to bring that out into the open. We need to try our best to get on with what the Government wants us to do and meet the needs of people, but there are certain things government will have to let us take into our hands on faith and on trust. Linked to that is use of the media. We need to see where all types of media can, in an entertaining way, support the work we need to do. I'm thinking about DIY-type programmes on changing neighbourhoods; or 'Big Brother' where you lock people away and let the community vote them out if they are not doing their best for the neighbourhood! Fun aside, there is a role to try and weave in some very serious messages about what we are trying to do to improve things. We have got to work on all fronts. The big risk with the strategy is that so many bodies and organisations have roles. So many other initiatives are involved and so many other things have to be done through other people. If one particular partner doesn't play their role properly for whatever reason, the efforts of the many and the community could be brought to nought. We've got to bring that kind of thing out, so we can examine it more publicly and apply accountability in that arena. Atul Patel In a piece of work that we did recently in North Kent, there were five different organisations with variations of the words ‘North Kent’, ‘Thames’ and ‘Gateway’ in their titles and they all overlapped. It can be very difficult. I think what so far eludes the discussion are those actual ways in which we can get people working side by side and facing in the same direction at a neighbourhood level. It must be strategic and enable things to happen. In the work we are doing at least on the ground there is widespread recognition of the proposition that you need to involve the police and the health authority as well as the housing agencies. In terms of the delivery, a strategic authority worth its name needs time to develop the relationships which are necessary to make effective change happen on the scale and timeframes we are talking about. Time and again when we are looking at these projects, we sit down to sort out some multidimensional problem in some entrenched area of deprivation in some heartland or wherever. We find ourselves sitting opposite people we have never met before - never mind having been involved with in a strategic partnership - never mind sharing objectives and ideology. That is a serious problem. Policymaking for me is a black art and I take my hat off to anybody who job it is to turn policymaking to action. But you did say there are three things we might do over the next year. What sorts of things might those be? Ben Derbyshire There are a range of candidates. Can we get some rationalisation of partnerships? If there are too many initiatives can we switch any of them off? Has anybody ever switched off an initiative in their own organisation - there may be lessons to be learned out of that. Can we pool budgets? Often it takes somebody with wisdom to sort it out. Most of the time people are looking at each other and saying they will not put up until someone else puts something on the table – but somebody has got to be first. Within the housing association sector, people always say how difficult the regulator is. But there are examples where chief constables have said they will put constables on an estate at their own cost to help housing officers. We don't like to have central imposition and there is a danger that government will dictate how things should be. But if that is not to be the case, then the ball does fall into our court, for us to say we'll be the first to make an offer. Atul Patel I know that Acton has been wrestling with strategic partnerships for a long time. How does that relate to the way that government is now structuring policy, and funding and streamlining it? I think I would be right in saying that South Acton would fit the bill of an area of intractable problems and entrenched poverty. The effects of policy have driven it in the wrong direction, with a very high proportion of refugees and very high rates of everything adding to the problems. Has there been any success? Ben Derbyshire I have very mixed views. I understand the philosophy, that on the face of it getting everyone together should work. The problem is time. South Acton covers a big area. We became involved in the partnership four years ago and it took three years to produce a strategy. All the organisations you expect to see are there. But the people have changed. It appears to suffer a curse: if you join the partnership you seem certain to be sacked! I am the only surviving person, the only one who was there at the beginning. The partnership has done some good work but very much at the margins. Now it has been changed into a strategic partnership for the whole borough. But I wonder whether it will have real impact and how long it will take. The background is serious inequality - which is getting worse day-by-day. But we are talking about the Government wanting change in five years. I worry that in three years time we will still be trying to agree the strategy. Housing association I think there must be a proposition around the word 'manageable'. We need the concept of local strategic partnership with manageable objectives and outputs and manageable relationships in terms of numbers of people involved. Ben Derbyshire I am anxious about the disappearance of conflict. Far too frequently things have built up - and I think LSP is an example of this - on the assumption that all we have to do is get people of goodwill round the table and that will be enough. Even the most cursory analysis of what public choices are about, reveals that they are concerned with the way to deal with conflict of interest. And in a city, those conflicts are very intense because of the sheer density of people living cheek-by-jowl. I don’t think the LSP, as designed at the moment will work except in small communities. For Birmingham, it is a question about how you represent all the interests. We are trying to build a model with one city-wide strategic partnership and a very wide range of local partnerships. With city LSPs, there is a real danger we will end up with a group of executives representing service delivery models. Obviously I can’t predict, but I think we are not very far down the road where they will find their legitimacy is going to be fundamentally challenged – they are not elected and many don't even live in the City. Thus there are some real questions about the LSP model: it is entirely workable in a small autonomous community that has identity, but becomes severely tested when you move either into a very large setting or one where the identity is less clear, such as rural areas. There are at least three issues I would raise about the current structure:
Local authority You asked if anybody closed down an initiative. Yes, I was there when the inner city partnership programme was closed down. It was very difficult. It had been built up over some years and created expectations of continuing funding. Closing it produced a very negative response which is still with us as an organisation - our last Lord Mayor remembers what it was like to stop helping somebody. Secondly, working with communities. Yes, I understand the attitude about a new way of working - it was interesting that you put it in the context of 'let's give it a try' - because if you look at Supporting People it is not about giving it a try it is 'go and do this'. It is not something that can be geared up over one or two years: my experience over 25 years is that it takes years and years to be able to relate to a community and requires continuity of interest by people particularly, so that trust can be built up where it doesn't exist at the start. Echoing previous points, I see lots of additional resources and lots of repackaging of resources. The issue for a lot of local authorities will be about revenue resources - to deliver the new kinds of working - and whether we have the skills to achieve the things we are being asked to do now. Local authority People want to feel that the members of these bodies represent their interests. I suggest we need to have annual elections to LSPs so they are not separated from the democratic process. Local authority My thought is that there has always been a vacuum in local governance and particularly in areas where want to see improvements. As a former chair of a primary school board, the absorbing battle of my entire term was simply to get a board of governors which would adequately represent the interests of the school. However, for those of us who operate on the ground, if we could move to the point where we had a genuinely strategic partnership between the key players who are already funded and already have legitimate and well understood roles in neighbourhood renewal, it would make a difference. HTA is involved in three of the New Deal for Communities programmes in London where experience is one of conflict, though everyone's agenda - in principle - ought to be same. I have to say those conflicts are largely for what appear to be parochial, ‘small p’ political reasons, all of which I would have thought were capable of resolution using 'manageable' processes, over a long enough term and adequately focussed. I don't see it as extending strategic partnership to include everyone, only to discover later that some don't have legitimate constituencies to be there. Rather I see it as getting people who already have a legitimate interest to work together effectively. In one particular case - in a local authority which was rudderless for a number of reasons - we requested a meeting of the local education, health, housing and police authorities. When we did meet it involved four senior individuals who said they had wanted such a meeting for many years. Ironically, it was only a competition with the promise of £30m New Deal funding that gave us the impetus to do so. Obviously that was the wrong way round. There are probably practical things that will make LSPs work but I detect some scepticism and worry about the newness of the initiative and yet another change. But isn't there a focus here that can resolve this? Ben Derbyshire This stage of policy-making is done and dusted and I think we have a huge opportunity. The Government wants delivery, and as I have said it is not really in a strong position to deliver itself. Having given the money and the framework, the boot is now on the other foot. And the Government has also said as a carrot - and an incentive over and above money - it’s about capital and revenue. It is about sophistication, and some freedom and flexibility as between capital, revenue, defining ‘communities’ and so on, with time as a backdrop. Of course ministers want immediate delivery but it does take time, and there are issues like that which have yet to be sorted out. But new ministers may take a very different view. For instance, they may decide some of the money can be used to provide administrative backing for LSPs. Another area of flexibility might be that Birmingham could go without a single overarching LSP if that is what it wants. The Chancellor has recently made a statement about an enterprising society, requiring three or four different departments providing joined-up leadership at a political level with delivery at a local level. Maybe he can put some kind of simplification on the capital/revenue issue at the margins - margins which are quite major at a local level. One other thing I believe in is neighbourhood statistics. A dry subject but if you are going to have a focus on sustainable places you need good quality data about small areas. Atul Patel We are working at Elephant and Castle but the whole thing has been stalled because the local authority is unable to deliver the revenue implications for a major capital investment. The total size of the investment is £1.5 billion over ten years: the revenue approval the Borough wants but can't get is just £15 million. I am sure that Nicholas Taylor of Southwark Land Regeneration would be very pleased to hear that there may be flexibility around. Ben Derbyshire We are involved in both public-private partnerships and private schemes of our own. There is a lot of talk about the private sector in health, transport and education. I would be interested in your views on the private sector's involvement in neighbourhood renewal, and how that is sustainable through a long period of time with changing markets. Developer Again the boot is on your foot. I think ministers would find it helpful if you can find a way of promoting devices to get round the problem of capitalising revenue and vice versa. If we want to take a business-oriented approach and encourage entrepreneurship we need to adapt standard devices, rather than concentrate on the private versus public debate which tends to polarise things. In neighbourhoods it will vary from such simple things as encouraging a small business – a family firm such as a newsagent – to stay, right up to big PFI projects and working in a private-public partnership. I think there many examples out there. Atul Patel But we perceive that there is no joined-up thinking. The planning rules are financially detrimental to developers. Often we will sit down with a local authority which says it wants to embrace us as a partner and for us to come and risk our capital up front. But the next day we sit down with the same people to talk about planning applications and they point out that under new planning policy, they want a whole list of extras – how do we bridge that gap? Developer I think in some areas there is certainly room for more policy development. This is one area where the Chancellor has already said that in terms of creating an enterprise economy, planning law needs to be reformed. So there will be proposals in that area. And there will be opportunities to work at the margins. I am sure ministers realise that there is a loose fit here and there is a bit of work to be done over the next couple of years – and the need to give people time to try and fix a few things. Atul Patel Focussing on London, we face totally different policies from central Government, the Greater London Authority and the boroughs on the ground. Developer In Sheffield, there is a reverse position. The local authority sees private housing investment as the focus for neighbourhood renewal, and private sector developers as the lead regeneration people, while housing associations follow along. This is very good thinking in the sense that you are trying to make an area attractive so that people will be prepared to risk their own money buying houses there – it also provides a good indicator for housing associations. For seven or eight years now we have not gone into areas alone – we have always gone in with private sector partners. Physical regeneration is the easy part of this whole debate. The discussion about a whole raft of new initiatives does worry me, because it is a top down view from government. To me it is a very simple issue – a neighbourhood is sustainable if people want to stay there. We should start from that and work upwards. A missing issue is about getting education involved – if you don’t do that you are regenerating for one generation only. Education has a huge role to play over 40 or 50 years to change outlooks and attitudes. If not the regeneration agenda will fail. Housing association My organisation operates nationally and I see a great range of strategic partnerships. Regeneration is far more than simple physical regeneration and way beyond housing. I think we need to look at the people and skills we need to achieve sustainable communities. There is a major skills shortage. Because this new kind of person does not exist, one of my priorities is to find the people and probably train them up in the organisation. I also believe linkages with education are vital as well. Atul has said a couple of times that it is now up to us to take the lead. Over three decades I have been involved with a whole range of initiatives – general improvement areas, City Challenge and so on. Generally there has been someone who has been quite single-minded, creating the vision and who has then led the project. I think that leadership in the cities and regions is what makes things work. But I don’t think neighbourhood regeneration will succeed until the regional economies and centres themselves have grasped the vision and got the leadership to move. I think we need more leaders around the country to deliver the goods. Housing association I think there are gaps in skills levels but I can’t believe they are that big. We have seen in the past how leaders have emerged - and maybe some have been trained. But I don’t think you can always train leaders. Sometimes we just need to throw people in and see what happens. Also if we try and solve everything, we won’t do it. In some areas communities won’t come out where there is fear of crime and anti-social behaviour. What you have to do is get action from the public service responsible for that – to clear the rubbish and graffiti, repair lights and so on, to create the conditions where people will want to engage. There are quick wins and fixes like that around which can help create the right environment. Atul Patel What I am concerned about is not so much technical skills but a feeling of powerlessness. I think we have been through a period when people in the public sector have had the stuffing knocked out of them. We also have an incredibly shallow model of performance management in this country – it amounts to shouting at people to work harder often in increasingly complex situations. We know it doesn’t work but we go on doing it! This is something that has to come down from the Prime Minister's office – something that actually values people who take risks (and those who are at risk) and recognises the difficulties involved. This would be the single most important thing in terms of transforming the ability and willingness of people to engage more actively. Local authority This seminar series operates on a 'Chatham House rules' basis. However, many of the participants have already expressed their willingness to have their contributions credited to them. In the other cases, speakers have not yet given clearance - no inference should be drawn from this. Anyone wishing to quote the speakers should speak to them direct for their permission. For further information, contact Chris Bazlinton, Editor on 01279 771468. HTA Architects Limited 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP telephone 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 email hta@hta-arch.co.uk ISDN 0207267 0061
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