Examination of Witnesses (Questions 348
- 359)
WEDNESDAY 15 MARCH 2000
MR T BEATTIE
AND MR
D SHELTON
Chairman
348. May I welcome you to the third session
this morning and ask you to identify yourselves for the record?
(Mr Beattie) I am Trevor Beattie, Corporate Strategy
and Communications Director for English Partnerships.
(Mr Shelton) I am David Shelton, English Partnerships'
Development Director.
349. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction
or are you happy for us to go straight to questions?
(Mr Beattie) No, thank you. We have set out what we
wanted to say in our memorandum. We should like to leave as much
time as possible for questions.
Dr Ladyman
350. You are very much the experts in urban
regeneration. What are the key lessons we should be looking at?
(Mr Beattie) The key lessons which we have learned
from the Urban Task Force report and which we have learned over
the last seven years are that most of the main building blocks
of an urban renaissance are actually already in place, they are
there: for example the RDAs and powerful new urban regeneration
companies are in place. What the White Paper should be looking
to do is to provide a coherent, simple, clearly understood well-described
framework within which these building blocks can operate, a clear
division of responsibilities, a strong emphasis on quality and
design quality in particular and some stability so that all those
involved at every level, neighbourhood, local, regional, national,
can plan ahead with confidence for the long term benefit of our
urban areas. That is the way we shall get maximum private sector
investment. There is a lot that English Partnerships can do to
assist that and much of that is set out in our memorandum.
(Mr Shelton) May I add two points in
the way of personal observations? One is that it is important
to recognise that the way that mainstream funding flows into areas
does not help regeneration. A lot of the mainstream funding programmes
are predicated on residential populations for absolutely understandable
reasons. If an area begins to decline and its population starts
going down, automatically the system begins to take money away
from schools, it takes money away from roads, it takes money away
from public services and it is very easy then to get into a spiral
of decline where the mainstream programmes are in fact encouraging
that decline to happen. That is a fairly important issue which
needs to be recognised and dealt with effectively in the Urban
White Paper. I suppose a second personal observation about regeneration
is that although the problems of any particular area do tend to
be unique, they are specific to that area, a lot of the ways of
tackling them, the themes which emerge, are in fact common. It
is vitally important that we do not continually go through the
process of reinventing the wheel.
351. You have mentioned in your evidence and
in the statements the two of you have just made key words like
"design", "quality", "strategic view".
How necessary are those? You said that the tools are more or less
there for urban regeneration, so why are those sorts of strategies
needed to kickstart the process? Are they not just going to get
in the way of developers putting schemes together and make it
more complicated?
(Mr Beattie) No, the aim should be to make it simpler
for them. The tools are already there, but there is a lot of overlap.
There is quite a bit of confusion. Some of the old tools are running
alongside the new tools. There is obviously a strong role for
Government here to coordinate all of this. Recommendations such
as the Urban Task Force's Urban Policy Board for instance are
a way of getting to the coordination which is necessary. It is
simplification and coordination, not any more complexity.
352. Let us talk about the Urban Policy Board
for a moment and I am going to be cruel to you now because you
have not put enough money into my constituency so you have only
yourselves to blame. English Partnerships in the past has always
been the body of last resort for funding. You provided gap funding.
We now know that the European Commission have more or less said
that gap funding is not possible any more. I do not actually see
what purpose there is in English Partnerships and is that one
of the reasons why you are so fond of the Urban Policy Board and
the idea that you should be supporting it? Is it because you have
nothing else to do now?
(Mr Beattie) We have plenty to do now. There are five
or six things which we could do to support an Urban Policy Board.
For instance, to pick that one up particularly, firstly we can
provide a body such as that with the ability to develop help with
projects on the ground and any such board will need pilot projects.
For instance, we are delivering the Deputy Prime Minister's pilot
Millennium Communities Competitions in Greenwich and Allerton-Bywater.
So first of all, helping put projects actually into practice;
we are working on the ground. Secondly of course I mentioned design
and quality issues. We can help with advice and guidance, consistent
advice and guidance based on our practical experience. Thirdly,
we can help with the provision of information. We possess information
on a national consistent basis, particularly through our national
land use database and our strategic sites database which could
inform that whole process, not just nationally but at every other
level through the RDAs and down to the crucial local neighbourhood
level. Fourthly and finally there is a strong role in terms of
provision of services, consistent services, advice, guidance,
best practice, research and so on.
353. Is gap funding still going to be a part
of the package which you see the White Paper having to find a
way of providing and English Partnerships having a role in that?
(Mr Shelton) There certainly will need to be a replacement
for PIP. One of the issues which has perhaps dogged—
Chairman
354. "There will need to be a replacement".
How?
(Mr Shelton) May I just amplify the point. In many
regeneration areas when you talk to developers about undertaking
a refurbishment of a building or developing a scheme, the first
question you are asked is how much public sector money is available
to support that project. In my view that is the wrong question.
It seems to me that in regeneration we have to get ourselves into
a virtuous circle where we create the circumstances, where developers
actually want to develop without any public sector investment.
355. Are you saying we do not need that?
(Mr Shelton) No, I am not saying that. Circumstances
will arise where gap funding is necessary, but there are many
things which the public sector can do to minimise the requirement
for gap funding and also to limit the period of time, the transitional
gap funding, that the public sector has to intervene to make it
happen.
356. So we do not need a lot of gap funding
but how do we get any?
(Mr Shelton) May I focus on the gap funding issue
for a few moments? The old regime, in my judgement, having been
involved in discussions with the European Commission, pending
a sea change in the political environment you were talking about
earlier with Mr Brown from the RICS, will not come back in its
previous form. Officials in the Competition Directorate, DG-IV
are absolutely committed to the abolition of the partnership investment
programme in its previous form. It seems to me therefore that
the options are, firstly—
Mrs Dunwoody
357. What are their real reasons? What possible
justification can there be?
(Mr Shelton) The reasons they put forward for abolishing
PIP is that they believe that the operation of the partnership
investment programme distorts the market, that by giving a developer
gap funding, we are enabling a scheme to happen which would not
otherwise happen, therefore that developer is earning a profit
which he would not otherwise achieve and therefore that is a distortion
of the market.
358. So some builder in Mannheim has been done
out of his profit.
(Mr Shelton) Exactly; yes. There is no intellectual
basis for that argument.
359. No, I think that is clear. Thank you; I
think we had reached that conclusion ourselves.
(Mr Shelton) But that is the basis of their argument.
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