Memorandum by the Regeneration and Community
Partnership—London Borough of Camden (UWP 42)
URBAN WHITE PAPER
We support the thematic ideas in the draft terms
of reference but we believe the scope needs to be widened to include
an additional theme. This we suggest would look at the problems
of regeneration in high wealth/high deprivation urban areas such
as inner London, of which the London Borough of Camden forms part.
We believe the combination of high wealth and land values, together
with intense social deprivation and exclusion, create particular
challenges for urban regeneration, which should be considered
in the White Paper.
Some examples of the contradictions we have
to deal with are as follows:
— The average price of a house in Camden
is £350,000 and yet we are the 17th most deprived borough.
Seven of our 26 wards are amongst the most deprived 25 per cent
of wards in London but eight are in 28 per cent least deprived
in London.
— The borough has in the region of
280,000 jobs located here (more than the resident population of
the borough) and yet we have unemployment rate of 8.1 per cent
compared to a greater London average of 5.6 per cent. However,
here again the variations across the borough are huge with five
wards having a rate of less than 5 per cent but eight wards having
more than 11 per cent.
— We are one of the best performing
Local Education Authorities in London. However, a survey of the
unemployed and low skilled commissioned by the borough (a sample
size of 1,200), highlighted some alarming facts about that section
of the workforce, given the trend in London for jobs to be increasingly
high skilled and specialised, with very limited opportunities
for semi or unskilled labour.
(1) 41 per cent of the employed in the sample
earned less than £8,000 a year, with 20 per cent earning
less than £6,500.
(2) Half the total sample had no education qualifications
of any kind, with 39 per cent having no vocational or educational
qualification of any kind.
(3) More than 40 per cent of the sample had never
used a computer.
— A severe shortage of development
sites for new housing, which make regeneration of social housing
very difficult, with extremely limited opportunities for density
reduction and large scale decanting. Most importantly it makes
it extremely difficult to achieve cross subsidised schemes with
private developments being the basis for major estate regeneration.
— Extremely high commercial values
even in our wards with high deprivation. As an example recent
commercial rents in Regents Park Ward, one of our top deprived
wards, were £32.50 a square ft. These high values encourage
a shift to very high skill/high value uses, and works against
small traditional businesses who might make greater use of semi
skilled labour. It also makes self enterprise start ups extremely
difficult. The high land values makes approaches to tackling unemployment,
which are used in most other locations, very difficult to pursue
here.
This is obviously a brief snapshot of the complexities
of regeneration in inner London but we think it creates, in particular,
challenges for delivering effective regeneration. We believe it
would be useful for the Urban White paper to explore these and
to assess how regeneration should be delivered in high wealth/high
deprivation areas. Part of this should be assessing the extent
to which the criteria of regeneration funding should be more heavily
tailored to reflect local circumstances.
We have already been undertaking a major study
of deprivation in the borough which we are using to inform the
development of a new regeneration strategy and a section of this
is included to demonstrate the intensity of problems that we experience
in what most would perceive as a wealthy borough at the heart
of the capital.
If you did adopt this as a theme we would be
looking to assist you in every way possible and would welcome
the use of Camden as a case study if that was the form the final
document took. If there are any questions or further information
needed I would be happy to oblige.
David Hennings
Head of Regeneration and Community Partnership
14 January 2000
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