Memorandum by Ven Bob Langley (GRI 05)
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 I have been involved in urban regeneration
for the last 14 years. Initially this was as the person responsible
in the Church of England Diocese of Newcastle for following up
the report "Faith in the City". This work had two major
dimensions; first, to encourage church communities in economically
deprived areas to work with others in the renewal of their communities,
and to engage with some of the powerful initiatives which were
being taken at that time by secular agencies, notably Development
Corporations; second, to help parishes to develop community projects
of various kinds, using the resource of the Church Urban Fund.
This second aspect of the work was often a support to the first,
showing that the church could be a credible partner with resources,
and that by putting in some resource, more could be levered in
from elsewhere. A key driving force behind this work was the conviction,
drawn from the Faith in the City report, that people should be
as involved as possible in determining the future of their communities.
1.2 In 1994 I began work with others to
establish a development trust for the Lower Ouseburn Valley in
East Newcastle. Less than a mile from the City Centre the Valley
provides an attractive environment, a steep sided valley on either
side of a water course spanned dramatically by three bridges.
The Valley can claim to have been at the centre of the industrial
revolution in the north-east, glass, lead, flax works, warehousing
for the livestock trade, coal staithes on the Tyne linked by a
two-and-a-half mile tunnel to a colliery in north Newcastle. While
the last twenty years had seen a gradual revival, small business
workshops, a city farm, and the conversion of a large warehouse
into workshops for artists and craft workers, the vast majority
lay derelict.
1.3 In contrast to the Development Corporation's
approach on the adjacent Newcastle Quayside, the aim was to enable
the regeneration of the Valley in a way which involved as far
as possible those who lived and worked in the Valley or the adjacent
areas in shaping its future, and which built on the existing mixture
of small businesses, enhanced the environment, honoured the industrial
heritage, brought more people back to live in the Valley, expanded
the leisure use through the city farm and its linked riding stables
and a water sports association at the mouth of the burn.
1.4 Together with eighteen other partners
the Trust led a successful Single Regeneration Budget bid in Round
3. The Ouseburn Partnership completed its five-year programme
in March 2002. There have been many visible benefits to the area
and its communities, conversion of a warehouse for social housing
with two housing associations, establishment of a heritage programme
for adults and children (winner of the Interpret Britain award),
further development of 36 Lime Street, already home to forty small
cultural businesses, to include exhibition and performance space
and café/bar, enhancement of the environment, development
of a major indoor riding facility for the community-based riding
project with a major Sport England grant, as well as an annual
week long Festival involving a wide range of local groups.
1.5 Alongside these more visible outcomes
of the programme, perhaps the major achievement has been the raising
of the profile of the Valley as a place for investment in such
a way as to retain its uniqueness. The result is seen in the location
in the Valley of the National Centre for the Children's Book,
three major sites being the subject of a development competition,
and the recognition of the role the Valley can play, as containing
a cluster of cultural industries, in the bid being made by Newcastle
Gateshead to become the European City of Culture 2008.
1.6 A strategy for the Valley has been drawn
up with and agreed by the City Council which expresses the principles
of mixed development set out above. The delivery of the strategy
is overseen by the Ouseburn Advisory Committee, of which I am
Chair, made up of equal numbers of nominees of the Trust and Council
Members.
1.7 I was also for four years one of the
Vice-Chairs of the East End Partnership (SRB2 Scheme) and am currently
a member of the City's Local Strategic Partnership and Chair of
the Preparing for Change Board, a sub group of the LSP responsible
for overseeing the City-wide SRB6 programme, and the Neighbourhood
Renewal Fund projects.
2. FACTORS AFFECTING
THE EFFECTIVENESS
OF GOVERNMENT
REGENERATION INITIATIVES
2.1 The involvement of local communities
is crucial in any sustainable regeneration. This point has been
made many times in evaluations of regeneration programmes (see
Evaluation of City Challenge in the West End of Newcastle). Yet
working with people takes time. It also requires a different way
of working than that involved in the delivery of commercial or
directly practical objectives.
2.2 There is often a great deal of past
harm to undo—particularly where there has been a bad experience
of relationships with those in authority whether that be the local
council or other government agencies. There have been usually
two sources of this, disillusionment with consultation where people
have felt that they have not been listened to, and promises made,
grand schemes proposed, which fail to improve their quality of
life. They have seen the refurbishment of housing estates at huge
expense one year, only for them to be demolished two years later.
Expressed desires are not for grand schemes but simply for an
improvement in their basic services and a clean environment to
live in.
2.3 There is a need for a holistic approach,
which pays attention to the environment and community safety,
housing and the provision of family support, good schools, and
access to training, above all leading to real employment, and
the development of the local economy through jobs and structures
which encourage money earned locally to be circulated locally.
Most important of all is to set that approach in a context of
the development of community and of the capacity of people to
participate in the decisions about their future, and feel some
ownership of the decisions made.
2.4 Area based schemes have not always been
sufficiently related to identifiable or coherent areas community
wise. They have often been areas identified by local authority
officers, usually in relation to statistics of deprivation, and
sometimes seeing the opportunity to gain funding for a project
which has been on the stocks for some time, rather than working
with people from below to identify what the people's perceived
needs are and starting from there. An added complication can be
brought in by powerful local Council members or powerful voluntary
or public sector groups, national charities, police, universities,
introducing their favoured projects, which inevitably skews any
logical approach the local authority officers might have wished
to take.
2.5 In the Ouseburn we have had to stress
that in addition to the residential communities, on the edges
of the Valley and increasingly in the Valley itself, there are
a range of communities of interest; the community of small businesses,
the community of artists and craft workers which occupies 36 Lime
Street, the community of heritage enthusiasts, the community around
the City Farm and the Stepney Bank Stables, the communities around
small interest groups such as the Newcastle Motor Boat Club and
the Homing Society, and the community of visitors. Inevitably
the level of involvement by stakeholders varies. Motivation is
higher if they can see themselves benefiting, or particularly
if there is some threat to their present position. But efforts
need to be made to include all in the process of regeneration.
2.6 There has been clear evidence of a progression
from Development Corporations, through City Challenge and Single
Regeneration Budget to New Deal For Communities, in favour of
the greater involvement of communities. Unfortunately the theory
has not always been borne out in practice. Evaluation after evaluation
has made the point that involvement of communities at an early
point is key, yet time and again that recommendation seems to
be ignored. In the case of the NDFC in Newcastle West End, the
time scale which was allowed for the development of the programme,
even with the innovative approach of money and space for a development
period, was insufficient to allow for a proper developmental approach,
particularly in an area which was historically divided and contained
several diverse communities. These tight deadlines can then have
further consequences which do not help to build the necessary
relationships of trust between the various parties. Because of
the time constraints, the local authority officers had to make
choices about the areas which should form the basis of a bid,
because their political masters quite properly did not wish Newcastle
to lose out on this opportunity. They then had to try to make
it happen against a background in that area of lack of community
cohesiveness and a history of distrust of government or local
authority initiatives.
2.7 In the progression from the era of Development
Corporations a similar shift has taken place towards the greater
involvement of the public, private and voluntary sectors, particularly
through SRB Partnerships. While this has been a commendable development,
it has raised issues about the nature of the partnership into
which the partners are being drawn. The local authority is often
the most powerful partner. It does after all have responsibility
for the development of its area and the delivery of services,
and it has full-time staff. In contrast, the voluntary and especially
the community sector is usually in a much less powerful position,
unable to deploy the same scale of resources, and dependent on
people giving up a great deal of time voluntarily. The private
sector is in a different position still, its motivation for involvement
a mixture of a principled belief about the social responsibility
of business, but also quite properly, an eye to the future advancement
of their business. On the positive side the variety of experience,
skills and power, makes for rich contributions to the debate,
but there is a need for constant awareness of these underlying
issues and reflection on how things are working.
2.8 Taking further steps in the same direction,
the LSPs have been a brave attempt to build on the success of
partnership working in SRB Schemes. I suspect that where they
are most successful has been because they have succeeded in harnessing
the capacity for partnership working in voluntary, community and
private sector gained through involvement in local area based
schemes, the networks developed and trust built. The points made
about partnership in the previous paragraph continue to be relevant.
In addition questions of the authority of the LSP over against
that of the local authority and its elected representatives are
also raised. My experience in Newcastle has been that whilst these
issues are now being worked at very constructively, they were
not sufficiently recognised at the outset. The danger is that
unless they are thought through and acknowledged, some partners,
especially in the private sector who could have much to contribute,
may dismiss the LSP as a talking shop, unless there is clarity
about the respective roles and responsibilities of LSP and City
Council, and the kind of influence they can have in decisions.
2.9 There is absolutely no doubt in my experience
of the value of partnership working. This has been borne out time
and again in the success of the Ouseburn Partnership, and now
again the Preparing for Change Board. The breadth of experience
in a group drawn from the voluntary sector including faith communities,
from the Chamber of Commerce, from activists in communities, from
housing associations as well as local council members, enriches
the decisions taken, but also gives a wider sense of understanding
and ownership of those decisions way beyond the group as they
network in their various organisations. The Council members have
a particular role. They must be confident in arguing the case
for the decisions made in the wider arena of the Council, and
the other members of the Partnership Board must respect their
responsibilities in this regard. A great deal depends on trust
between members and the shared belief that this is an effective
way of working.
2.10 There is a need here for a fresh understanding
of democratic accountability. Council members must be prepared
to work with local people, seeing their democratic accountability
in terms of enabling local people to express their interests,
concerns and hopes and to see those in the wider context, so that
the decisions they take as elected members are as widely informed
as possible by people's well-informed views.
2.11 The need to do much more work on the
nature of "consultation" has emerged time and again.
There needs to be an understanding of a range of meanings, from
consultation as primarily informing people of decisions already
made, at one end of the spectrum, to consultation designed to
engage people in shaping the decisions about their future, at
the other. For most people consultation of a kind which is not
towards the latter end of the spectrum ends in disillusionment.
People see little point in participating. That in turn can lead
to a judgement by the authorities that people have been over consulted
and then less opportunity is given in the future. More education
needs to take place in two related areas; first, in helping members
of local communities to see what it is within their expertise
to control or make decisions about, and where they need to trust
others with relevant skills; second, in helping those in local
areas to understand some of the tensions between the local authority's
responsibility to city as a whole, building an image of their
city with prestige projects necessary to attract inward investment,
raising the level of the economy, creating jobs and providing
attractive housing, and taking local people's views seriously.
2.12 The thinking behind LSPs must be right
in its attempt to take a longer term and more strategic view,
the lack of which has been one of the weaknesses of area based
schemes. But there are inevitably tensions between the localness
needed for effective participation and the LSP as it fulfils its
task of providing a coherent strategy across a local authority
area, and tensions again between the LSP and the sub-regional
partnerships as they take a wider strategic view. This second
set of tensions comes particularly to the fore in relation to
finance, for it is at the sub-regional partnership that most of
the new Single Programme money is allocated. Not only LSPs can
feel frustrated because the projects they put forward from their
local authority area have been rejected, but also local groups
now have to go through the LSP to the sub-regional partnership
with project ideas where once they could have gone direct to the
local area SRB Board.
2.13 The LSP also offers the opportunity
to influence mainstream policies and funding in a way that area
based SRB Schemes found it difficult to do, provided that some
of the issues concerning the roles and responsibilities of partnerships
referred to above have been resolved. In SRB Schemes the task
of delivering a programme within a specific timescale inevitably
created a sense of separation from the wider context. Where succession
strategies were worked at sufficiently early this difficulty has
to some extent been overcome, though still often suffers from
being piecemeal.
2.14 Tensions are also experienced within
the local authority between the need to take the local community
seriously, the desire to pursue principles relating to such matters
as design, sustainability, conservation, building community, and
the need to build an image of "their" city with prestige
projects necessary to attract inward investment, raise the level
of the local economy and create jobs, which often demand bowing
to the demands of the market.
2.15 There is concern that with the move
from SRB to Single Programme, not only has accessibility to funding
become more difficult for local communities, but that, exacerbated
by the shift of responsibility to the DTI from the old DETR, the
emphasis is increasingly on economic factors and less and less
on community development and social inclusion, and because decisions
are made by the sub-regional partnership, they are more likely
to be biased in favour of projects with a sub-regional significance.
3. POINTS TO
AFFIRM
— the increasing encouragement of private,
voluntary and community sectors to work together and the recognition
of the richness brought by the different perspectives both in
terms of the decisions made and the sense of ownership gained.
— the attempts being made to establish
a longer term, strategic, more holistic and joined-up approach.
— the various measures which have sought
to empower people to participate in the processes of regeneration
eg Community Empowerment Fund.
— the development of funding mechanisms
which enable people to develop their own ideas, eg Lottery and
Community Chests.
— recognition of the role of faith
communities in regeneration, eg Inner Cities Religious Council.
4. MORE WORK
REQUIRED
— more support for people, especially
those most on the edge, to engage in the processes of regeneration.
— greater recognition of the importance
of process, eg in the setting up of partnerships.
— greater acknowledgement that projects
take time to develop, especially in the voluntary and community
sectors, and therefore finding ways of avoiding the announcement
of initiatives which demand a response on an impossibly tight
deadline.
— the development of funding mechanisms
which give more control to people in a locality or interest group
to work on ideas and which have built in support in developing
them and making funding applications, eg delegated amounts to
local partnerships, simpler application forms.
— further work with both council members
and officers on the nature of partnership working, and their particular
roles within it.
— more work on the variety of approaches
to "consultation".
— making better connections between
the aspirations of such documents as the Urban White Paper, and
the various requirements of Planning Guidance on such things as
design and sustainability, and how regeneration happens on the
ground.
— further work on the relationship
between local area partnerships, LSPs and sub-regional partnerships,
and how information, ideas and funding can flow more effectively
between them.
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