Memorandum by Birmingham City Council
(UWP 26)
THE PROPOSED URBAN WHITE PAPER
INTRODUCTION
Despite the enormous expenditure of goodwill
and resources over the last 30 years, the health of many urban
areas has deteriorated further, and their ability to compete in
Europe and internationally has declined. This, we believe, is
due to a historic focus upon symptoms not causes, and a tendency
to pursue incremental change. The Government should be bold, break
with the past, and seek fundamental changes which address core
problems and opportunities.
Our submission covers:
1. the development of stronger planning
at the city-region level;
2. the establishment of a new relationship
between central government and local partners;
3. the renewal of regional policy;
4. our priorities for the implementation
of the Urban Task Force report; and
5. a more strategic approach to social exclusion.
Whilst we have illustrated our broad ideas with
more practical detail, this short submission primarily sets out
our agenda for further dialogue. Such a dialogue could examine
case studies and develop pilots to build further detail around
the basic ideas put forward in the paper.
1. Planning at the City-Region Level
Traditionally, urban policy has been based upon
small areas or the local authority area. More recently, the regional
dimension has been strengthened. Yet many of the key problems
and opportunities occur at the level of the city-region. By this
we mean a functionally integrated area normally comprising a core
city, contiguous urban areas, and free standing towns and villages.
It is at this level that the housing market, labour market, transportation
system and leisure and cultural systems operate, and it is these
systems that create many of the principal problems and opportunities.
The city-region is therefore a critical level for strategic planning
and intervention. The city-region model also provides the flexibility
to deal with the spatial expansion (and sometimes contraction)
of the city-region over time. Whilst the model may not be universally
applicable across the country, we believe that it is appropriate
to strategic planning in many urban areas and should be piloted.
Each city-region should have a long term (10-15
years) strategy. The strategy should have an international dimension,
identifying a viable role for the city-region within Europe and
globally. This role might be as a recreation and tourist area,
as a manufacturing centre, as a financial or retailing centre,
as a centre of business services, or as a combination of these
roles. Similarly, the central city, other urban areas, suburbs
and villages will all have different roles to play in the overall
development of the city-region. The strategy should explicitly
identify and nurture these distinctive roles. Whilst we recognise
the importance to the city-region of all of its component parts,
we would also stress that a sustainable, viable core city is crucial
to the health of the city-region as a whole.
The strategy should integrate economic, social,
physical, environmental and cultural policies. It should be explicit
about the key linkages between these, to form a basis for effective
intervention. For example, the combined effects of the city-region
housing and labour markets are to increase spatial polarisation
and concentration of disadvantage. Key policies in the strategy
would concern creating greater balance of housing tenure across
the city-region and in local areas, good public transport access
from high unemployment areas to new employment developments, the
creation of European quality integrated public/private transport
infrastructure and the spatial distribution of major cultural
and leisure facilities.
The Arts, culture and sport should play a central
role in city-regional strategies. They are an economic and employment
growth sector, create positive international images, offer lifestyle
choices for residents, and support cultural diversity. National
policy should be to create more major facilities and ensure that
they are distributed across the country so as to support city-regional
strategies. Whilst recognising that all major facilities need
not be located at the core of the city-region, we would argue
that a high degree of concentration in the core is important to
achieving a sustainable core for the benefit of the city-region
as a whole.
The strategy should clearly spell out the spatial
level at which policy and intervention needs to operate. For some
issues, this may be at the European level. Other issues may need
to be addressed at the national level. Yet others will best be
dealt with at the local authority or local area level. However,
an important set of issues will need to be tackled at the city-regional
level.
The strategy should include an action plan which
sets out, in broad terms, the role and contribution to be made
by each partner. This action plan should be broad enough to permit
each partner an appropriate degree of flexibility, but tight enough
for the partnership to monitor whether each partner is fulfilling
its role and commitments. Partners should provide three year statements,
again in broad terms, of resources that they would aim to commit
to the strategy.
In preparing the city-region strategy, there
would need to be a Government review of its various zone and area
initiatives, with a view to rationalising them and integrating
them into the city-region strategy. Government should require
RDAs and Government departments to focus explicitly upon city-regions,
and the major city-regions in particular. To reflect the complexity
and long term nature of genuine community participation, local
area strategies should include a medium term plan for community
involvement and capacity building. This would identify sustainable
participation processes and explicitly earmark the necessary resources.
There would be scope to create a more integrated
approach to monitoring and evaluation, combining elements currently
undertaken by external audit, the Regional Office, external inspection
and local authorities. There should be a shift away from statistical
monitoring of inputs and outputs towards qualitative monitoring
of strategic outcomes through socio-economic indicators of the
overall social, economic and environmental health of the city-region,
using both the UK and Europe as comparisons. There should be explicit
monitoring of the quality of the strategic partnership, and of
the contributions made in practice by the different partners.
Local area initiatives should explicitly monitor the quality of
community involvement and the progress made in community capacity
building and democratic renewal.
To prepare and implement the city-region strategy,
there would need to be new administrative arrangements. We have
in mind the Communaute Urbaine system in metropolitan France,
where a city-region level agency exists, controlled by local authorities,
with the responsibility to undertake strategic planning and to
make recommendations to public agencies on the spatial distribution
of major investment, facilities and infrastructure. In the UK,
such a system may need to be based, at least initially, upon more
informal structures and processes than those existing in France.
Birmingham is actively working with surrounding authorities, but
we recognise the need to take this further. City Pride may be
one model for achieving this. Further dialogue between Government
and local authorities would consider how we could move to such
a system from our current arrangements, including identifying
the roles of the RDA, Regional Chamber, etc.
2. A New Central/Local Partnership
National and local objectives are interdependent.
Neither can succeed in isolation. This interdependence needs to
be reflected in stronger, more self conscious and explicit joint
working between government and partners within the city-region.
There needs to be a "contract" between the Government
and the city-region, with streams of Government funding directly
related to the agreed strategy. Government support for New Commitment
for Regeneration, and the thinking around public service agreements,
is a welcome step in this direction, and we believe our proposals
take the debate further forward.
The Government is a key provider of mainstream
services, particularly those able to address the crucial social
and community aspects of urban renaissance and prevent its being
a primarily physical led process. It is the main funder of many
local services. National policy, for example concerning the economy,
can often have more impact locally than any local programmes.
The Government can play a crucial role in helping to overcome
obstacles to partnership working. For all of these reasons, Central
Government departments, as well as the Regional Office, must become
direct partners in developing and implementing the city-region
strategies.
The model set out here assumes that significant
new public revenue resources will not become available. The key
"additional" revenue resources to support the strategy
would mainly come from bending mainstream Government and local
public programmes, more effective partnership working, and the
additional private resources that such an approach could be expected
to lever in. Our model also aims to replace competition between
local areas by a more collaborative approach nationally and regionally.
We therefore assume that there will be limits to the redistribution,
within or between city-regions, of existing revenue resources.
Nevertheless, we strongly believe that, to enhance international
competitiveness, there is an urgent need to increase dramatically
the levels of capital investment in city-regions, and that some
at least of this investment must come from the public sector,
recognising as well that some revenue resources would be needed
to maintain over time those capital investments.
Our model presents greater opportunities to
achieve flexibility in regenerating city-regions through local
funding allocations and through stronger links between funding
from different sources. This would allow the implementation of
appropriate solutions for each local area, but within a strong
city-regional framework, led by policies not funding. Together
with the model of regionalism set out below, the approach would
also generate private sector confidence in strong regional leadership,
backed by a national policy framework, which will deliver sustainable
regeneration of the regions.
3. The Renewal of Regional Policy
The national agenda for renewal cannot be achieved
whilst one-third of the country experiences chronic overheating
whilst the remainder experiences a chronic underemployment of
resources. National prosperity and competitiveness depends upon
building the competitiveness of the UK's city-regions. And if
the country is to be successful, it must first be successful in
the major cities.
We have argued above that this dual achievement
of national and local agendas depends upon strong, cohesive government
in the regions, particularly at the city-region level. Powerful
strategies across the regions can create a greater sense of overall
direction, common purpose and a sense of identity. Explicit support
to the regions through national strategies and programmes, which
recognise the long term value of the regions, would add value
to city-region strategies.
A strong regional policy, linking national strategies
directly to planning at the city-region level, must be a crucial
component of national support for city-regions. The beginnings
of such an approach already exist in London and the South East,
where national policies recognise, support and nurture the national
and international importance of this area. This linkage between
national strategy and city-region strategy is at the heart of
our proposals, and the same approach should be replicated for
all parts of the country. This would create the balance required
to give real choice to investors, and would create positive competition
between the regions, boosting less buoyant regions and reducing
overheating in the South East.
Government support through regional policy should
recognise the need to address the more limited skills and assets
base, and greater dependence on local markets, of many city-regions
compared to the South East. It must also recognise that urban
areas, and urban problems and opportunities, are not homogenous—different
city-regions will need support tailored to their particular needs.
Government support should have four components:
— National economic policies that strike
appropriate balances in terms of their impact upon different parts
of the country.
— Greater involvement of Government
in developing strategies for individual city-regions.
— A more proactive regional policy
to encourage a more balanced distribution of economic activity,
combining selective regional assistance and restrictive planning
policies.
— A national strategy for the distribution
of public R&D, national cultural and leisure facilities, centres
of excellence, rail and airport infrastructure, etc, designed
to support all city-regions.
4. Implementation of the Urban Task Force
Report
The key issue must be to ensure that the greater
emphasis upon encouraging urban development is reinforced by measures
to reduce land allocated for development in the city-region hinterland.
To achieve an urban renaissance, people must
want to live in towns and cities. Quality urban design is, therefore,
essential. Urban Design must move away from standardisation and
encourage developments which are appropriate to their context
in order to create places not just estates—including a mix
of housing types and tenure, closely linked to local facilities,
fronting onto a network of safe streets and public places, with
secure private spaces to the rear. They will also need to recognise
environmental concerns and be sustainable and adaptable.
We must also recognise that physical measures
alone do not make areas attractive—people's concerns about
community safety, the quality of local schools, etc., must also
be addressed. More generally, we must acknowledge that people
want to live in certain ways, and that it is difficult to control
those aspirations through physical policies. The latter must be
complemented by a longer term agenda aimed at changing mind frames
and values concerning urban living.
Our priorities for implementation of the Rogers
recommendations include:
— Stregthening the New Commitment to
Regeneration programme by combining Government departments' spending
powers and by the Government's signing up to local strategies;
— The establishment of Urban Regeneration
Companies/Housing Regeneration Companies;
— Rogers' proposals for strengthening
Regional Planning Guidance;
— A review of planning gain, planning
briefs and discounted equity stakes as a means of securing more
mixed income housing development and more affordable social housing;
— The range of proposals to speed up
the reuse of vacant land and buildings, including Rogers' recommendations
concerning stronger CPO powers for local authorities.
5. A More Strategic Approach to Social Exclusion
In the longer term, we must move away from the
current approach to joined up working, which is built upon individual
Departmental responses to the symptoms of social exclusion. Whilst
this approach can have short-term and managerial advantages, it
can also create barriers to the resolution of the real causes
of social exclusion. The current approach of area-based bids for
funding creates conflict between disadvantaged areas vying to
be selected as a bid area, whilst the time scales permit only
superficial community participation and capacity building. Problems
occur due to the short life nature of initiatives and funding,
the inadequate resources to address the scale of the issues fully
and, more importantly, the lack of developmental work with the
community in the early years. Recent initiatives like New Deal
for Communities are seeking to address these shortcomings in their
development. However, the opportunity for cities to roll this
model out across all areas of need is unrealistic given the resources
required.
More fundamentally, the area based approach
often addresses symptoms rather than causes, and therefore attempts
to intervene at the wrong spatial level. Whilst social exclusion
typically exhibits itself through local areas of concentrated
disadvantage, some of the most powerful causes of these concentrations
are to be found in national processes and in the way that the
housing and labour markets work at the city-region level.
We therefore suggest that area based initiatives
should be rationalised and integrated into the city-region strategies
advocated in this submission.
Other aspects of social exclusion can only be
dealt with at national level. Labour market disadvantage caused
by discrimination and lack of access is exacerbated in many parts
of the country by a deficient overall demand for labour. We recognise
that training and work experience programmes such as New Deal
are crucial in creating sustainable solutions to social exclusion
by increasing access to the jobs that do exist in the local labour
market. We also recognise that they begin to deal with the problem
of deficient demand for labour: work experience programmes have
the effect of creating additional demand, and in the longer term
skill development programmes may also increase the demand for
labour by attracting new investment and jobs to an area because
it is perceived to possess a high skills base.
Nevertheless, we believe that further measures
may be needed to stimulate the demand for labour in many areas
if the welfare to work approach is to achieve maximum sustainable
impact on social exclusion. First, we have argued that the Government
and local partners should work in partnership around proactive
strategies to increase the competitiveness of the major city-regions
within Europe and globally. Second, we have argued for a more
explicit regional policy. Third, we have argued that there is
an urgent need to increase significantly the levels of capital
investment in city-regions, including public capital investment.
There is also a case both for extending the
length of work placements under New Deal, and for increasing the
scope for public and not for profit agencies to provide such placements.
Extending the length to two or even three years would enable participants
to acquire work discipline, build an attractive CV, and climb
out of debt. Extending the role of public and not for profit agencies
would increase demand for lower skilled labour in local areas
where private sector demand is insufficient to provide the required
number of quality placements.
The above proposals would, we believe, all help
to increase the demand for labour in those areas where it is weakest,
and support strategies to tackle issues of discrimination and
access to jobs.
Birmingham supports the Government's aim to
build personal independence as a route out of social exclusion.
Nevertheless, there will always be substantial numbers of households
dependent upon Benefits. Often, this will be for non-employment
related reasons such as disability or old age. For those households,
and particularly those permanently on Benefits, Benefit levels
will be the crucial determinant of whether they remain socially
excluded or not. Benefits reviews tend to be incremental, based
upon adjustments to past Benefit rates, and over time Benefit
levels can move out of line with the real cost of living for low
income households. Greater emphasis should also be placed on changing
the effects of Benefit entitlement. For example, the current model
of Housing Benefit generates a market amongst housing providers,
and does not address the need of individuals or encourage them
to become more independent of government support. Other Benefits
demonstrate similar limitations. We therefore believe that there
is a strong case for an independent review of the models and levels
of Benefit available.
CONCLUSIONS
We do not believe that the Urban White Paper
must seek to answer all the questions. Any attempt to do so will
result in more of the incremental change that has achieved such
mixed results in the past. The White Paper should provide an initial
framework of principles and broad expectations of each key actor—central
and local government, private, community and voluntary sectors,
etc. This should then be followed by central/local partnership
working across the country to explore detail, develop pilots,
etc.
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