Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
26 JANUARY 2004
MR CHRIS
OLDERSHAW, MR
MIKE BURCHNALL,
MS FRAN
TOMS AND
MR PETER
BABB
Chairman: Good Afternoon and welcome
to this first session of the Sub-Committee's inquiry into the
role of historic buildings in urban regeneration. We have had
an opportunity to look at the written evidence you have submitted.
Do you feel the need to make any preliminary statements or would
you be happy to go straight to questions? We can go straight to
questions.
Q1 Christine Russell: This is a very
easy question to all of your. All your cities, Newcastle, Liverpool
and Manchester, suffered quite badly from industrial decline but
I think all of them, over the last few years, have managed to
achieve really successful regeneration schemes. Therefore the
question is: what role have historic buildings played in those
successful regeneration schemes in your three cities?
Mr Oldershaw: I think in many
ways heritage and historic buildings have a crucial role to play
in regeneration. They help to define the identity of cities and
they also, certainly for Grainger Town, give economic and competitive
advantages as well. Back in 1997, we had about one million square
feet of open floor space; something like 47% of our 240 listed
buildings were at risk. We decided that we needed to protect the
legacy of Richard Grainger and to concentrate on quality in terms
of our urban regeneration. One of the biggest problems we faced
was changing the negative perceptions of a lot of developers and
property owners. It took a period of probably three to five years
to change their perceptions. One of the greatest things in many
ways that we did to change those perceptions was to look at international
best practice, particularly through the work of (URBANE) to concentrate
on quality, but also to look at a series of demonstration projects
in the area. We looked at a high profile mixed-use scheme and
concentrated on high quality, public role improvements. We worked
through a series of partnerships within the area to ensure
comprehensive regeneration within the six years of the project.
Mr Burchnall: I will keep this
short so as not to repeat what has been said already. My aspect
is really to think about what creates good urban regeneration
and that is about creating an environment which meets the needs
of local people, stakeholders and businesses. If you do that and
then think about historic buildings, to most people, historic
buildings do define the community, and therefore they are a vital
element in terms of good regeneration. I would not pretend that
is easy. Like Newcastle, we have a huge heritage of listed buildings
and conservation areas. Some have been easier to deal with than
others. In terms of major listed buildings and major schemes,
those have been the catalyst in areas where there has not been
funding and priority. Certainly historic buildings have been important
but they have been much harder to deal with. Presumably we will
get into that later.
Q2 Christine Russell: Before we move
to Manchester, could I ask Mike Burchnall a further question?
What role do you think Liverpool's historic fabric, if you like,
played in helping you to win the City of Culture designation?
How much did you play on it, in other words?
Mr Burchnall: The historic environment
played an enormous part but in a subsidiary capacity in one sense.
In terms of the criteria that any bidder had to meet in terms
of Capital of Culture, both the European criteria and government
criteria, heritage did not figure very highly because that is
about place, the quality of the experience of a place and the
culture of a place. If you then turn it round and look at Liverpool
and ask about the quality of the experience in Liverpool, you
cannot disassociate that from the heritage and therefore, in terms
of the bid documentation, having that on the cover meant that
we had a head-start over many other people who were actually bidding.
A lot of the key projects within the bid itself, which we need
to deliver by 2008, are linked to heritage.
Mr Babb: If you look at Manchester
city centre, there is a large number of listed buildings and conservations
areas. There are something like 450 listed buildings. If you think
of the total proportion of buildings within the city centre, it
is inevitable that the historic environment for listed buildings
needs to bring those buildings back into use to play a fundamental
role in regeneration. Take, for example, the cotton warehouses
that were redeveloped for residential use, that kick-started a
growing population in Manchester to what it is today with about
6,000 people living in the city centre as of the 2001 census.
That is probably an underestimate. That kick-started new build
in the city centre and added to the regeneration of the city centre
by providing new uses. That gives a propensity for other listed
buildings to be brought back into use and to care for the historic
environment. Now, for example, when we are looking at master planning
for parts of the city centre, we place a specific emphasis in
terms of how we can look after the historic environment with new-build
schemes as part of the master planning process. Outside the city
centre, there is a growing recognition of the value of the historic
environment and buildings to the extent that in East Manchester
the regeneration framework actually identified the Ashton Canal
Corridor as a place where buildings could be brought back into
active use so that they would contribute to the heritage of the
area. In North Manchester the regeneration framework has been
delivered and as part of that we have just recently declared three
conservation areas. In fact that was last week. I think you can
see the value of regeneration. That is in the Crumpsall area.
That puts the value of conservation to the forefront in terms
of looking at the sustainability of local communities because
the imperative for looking at our historic environment is coming
not just from the public sector but from the people themselves,
who are part of the regeneration schemes and participation in
that.
Q3 Christine Russell: In your heritage-led
regeneration schemes, how effective did you find the statutory
powers that you already had? Would you like stronger ones? What
is missing?
Mr Babb: If I were to take the
example of a heritage-led regeneration scheme, I would have to
talk about Ancoats, an area which is part of a potential World
Heritage Site for the future. It was declared a conservation area
back in 1986. There were big problems about how to go about securing
that area for the future. There were various arson attacks on
buildings; buildings had to be subject to statutory powers to
try to make sure that they did not fall into further disrepair.
It is a long convoluted process going through the powers that
we have to bring about stability to those buildings, serving of
notices and so forth and then through the inevitable CPO process.
Fortunately for Ancoats, the North-West Development Agency actually
became involved and used its powers to secure a huge area of Ancoats
and that will pave the way for the critical mass that is necessary.
Q4 Christine Russell: Are you saying
that the powers that you have as a local authority are not strong
enough and effective enough and that they are far too complex?
Mr Babb: They are complex. As
for the value of the powers of the development agency, it does
not really have to go through a fully worked-up scheme for prosecuting
the CPO. In fact, if we went through CPO processes elsewhere,
basically there would have to be a fully worked-up scheme and
the back-to-back arrangement with a developer to take over the
site or the building.
Mr Burchnall: I think that is
right in relation to that. One of the issues is that the NWDA
powers of compulsory purchase are much easier to use and you do
not have to go through all those processes. In terms of dealing
with conservation areas and listed buildings, again, that is deemed
not to be an appropriate tool in certain cases. We have been trying
to use those powers in that area of Liverpool and, because of
lack of support funding and because it is not as comprehensive
an approach as Ancoats, we cannot use those powers; we are left
with the planning powers, which I would agree are very difficult
and convoluted to use.
Q5 Christine Russell: Will the measures
outlined in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill help you
at all when you are talking about historic buildings?
Mr Burchnall: In all honesty,
they will not. My own view, and I think it is a view shared by
a number of people in Liverpool, is that owning a listed building
or owning a building in a conservation area is a very important
attribute. If local authorities are to be serious about conservation,
then local authorities need to be given greater powers to acquire
those buildings and to do that much more simply and easily.
Mr Oldershaw: There is a general
point in relation to listed building consent, planning consent
and COP powers. The issue for us has not been the actual process
but the timescale in terms of making sure that we get those decisions
through quickly, whether it is through the planning inspectorate
or whether we get high priority with a local authority in terms
of process and planning applications or with English Heritage.
The timing is critical with time-limited regeneration projects
like Grainger Town.
Mr Babb: In looking at CPO activity,
there is a basic difficulty of the compensation being linked up
with, if you like, the principle of a scheme and being heard at
a public inquiry. In fact, a lot of people want to earn some reward
for the land that has been taken from them. It is about compensation
and not necessarily about the principle of the scheme, and yet
the inquiry tends to focus on the principle of the scheme and
the compensation is sorted out elsewhere. That really is a grey
area that needs to be addressed.
Q6 Mr Cummings: When dealing with listed
buildings and conservation areas, local planning authorities generally
require full and detailed information as to what is proposed.
Are your staff generally aware of the level of professional fees
required to produce detailed information in support of the applications,
and what flexibility can you offer to help reduce developer risk?
Mr Burchnall: In terms of colleagues
knowing the costs involved, yes, I think people are very much
aware of those costs. Dealing with the historic heritage of the
city is vitally important. It is important that developers recognise
that they need to invest up-front in relation to doing work on
historic buildings. Having said that, there are mechanisms that
we can use for reducing the risk and the cost to developers. A
major city centre scheme which Liverpool is pursuing at the moment
with Grosvenor, which I think are appearing as a witness later
on, involves historic parts of the city and major new development.
We have dealt with a process there which delivers detailed permission
on certain parts of the site and outline permissions on the remainder
but gives the Council and the Secretary of State the certainty
needed in relation to those historic areas. We are very much aware
of the risk that developers are involved in. We are looking at
mechanisms to try and reduce those.
Q7 Mr Cummings: What flexibility can
you offer to reduce developer risk?
Mr Burchnall: Developers look
for certainty and through our development plans process and the
lining up of funding to secure and aid development, we can reduce
risk in those areas. One of the issues we have at the moment is
that funding regeneration, funding the re-use of listed buildings,
is very complex and there can be a cocktail of funding. A developer
wants to have all that funding in place so that he reduces his
risk at the outset. I am not sure that we have actually achieved
that as yet because we look to put a cocktail of funding together.
If one person who is providing funding falls out of that, then
the scheme is at risk and the developer is at risk. If we can
have more secure means of funding on a long-term, sustainable
basis, that will certainly reduce the risk for developers.
Q8 Mr Cummings: Are you saying you can
offer flexibility or that you cannot?
Mr Burchnall: I am saying that,
as a local planning authority, we can. Heritage is a very complicated
issue and involves many agencies. The local planning authority
is not the funder of last resort normally in relation to regeneration
schemes. In Liverpool, we rely on English Heritage and Heritage
Lottery funding.
Q9 Mr Cummings: Can you or can you not
offer flexibility to the developer?
Mr Burchnall: We can offer flexibility
in terms of negotiating the scheme. I am trying to link that to
the second part of your question, which was about reducing risk.
We can encourage flexibility; reducing risk is the difficult part.
Mr Oldershaw: I have a general
comment with regard to gap funding, which is the main source of
funding we used Grainger Town. We would generally make a higher
fee level for listed buildings, typically 2.5% higher than for
an unlisted building, when we are carrying out the development
appraisal. In terms of trying to reduce abortive development costs,
there is an imperative on behalf of the developer to come to an
early meeting. We have a project executive and have discussions
with heritage officers to make sure that they are designing a
scheme which is likely to get planning permission. That is where
much of the costs and the wastage of fees come in, by delaying
until far too late in the day decisions being made. If there had
been an early meeting with the planning authority and with the
executive, as in Grainger Town, that would have avoided some of
those extra costs.
Q10 Chairman: Are you confident that
you have the resources and people available to make initial contact?
Mr Oldershaw: During the lifetime
of the project, we had a dedicated heritage officer and the developers
generally would come in without even appointments to see us on
a regular basis. We would basically act as a one-stop shop and
we would call in appropriate professionals to guide them through
the process. That worked incredibly well.
Mr Babb: In terms of the development
control process that we have operated in Manchester over a significant
period of time, if we had not been flexible in dealing with the
private sector developers, I do not think we would have the development
on the ground that we have now. Most of this I think goes down
to how we negotiate schemes, particularly with the involvement
of English Heritage. It is incumbent on all the parties to give
consistent and straight-forward advice of what might be acceptable
and what might not. That clarity of view is important. That is
why in Manchester we have built up a good network of architects
and developers and we understand where each other is coming from.
We find it easier to find a way forward with what are often very
challenging schemes.
Q11 Mr Cummings: I address this question
to Liverpool City Council. Obviously the City Council, in conjunction
with DCMS, is strongly supporting a bid for World Heritage Status,
a designation focusing on the historic city centre. By its nature—and
we have been informed of this—the World Heritage Site status
imposes greater regulation on the historic environment. Are you
not then concerned that, if successful, you will actually discourage
potential developers and other private-sector partners, who will
fear more complicated procedures and a less flexible attitude
on the part of your officers?
Mr Burchnall: Certainly, if we
are successful in being a World Heritage Site, that is a material
consideration in relation to planning applications. What we have
sought to do, through the World Heritage Management Plan, which
the Deputy Prime Minister has recently supported, is to put in
an arrangement whereby it is very clear that because of the type
of World Heritage Site we are, that site will change over time.
You said that is in the city centre; it is the docklands area,
the city area and the artistic area around William Brown Street.
That is an area where development is taking place at the moment
and will continue to take place. That will make sure that we get
the highest quality development in there. We are very careful
about the development that goes into the World Heritage Site.
I am a little more relaxed in one sense because, in terms of Liverpool,
developers want to be in Liverpool. With World Heritage and the
Capital of Culture designation for 2008, again development is
being encouraged in Liverpool. Therefore, that should not act
as a disincentive. I hope it will act as an incentive, that people
will want to develop in the city.
Q12 Mr Cummings: Can you perhaps tell
the Committee how you have involved local people in your heritage-led
regeneration?
Mr Burchnall: In terms of the
community strategy Liverpool First, which was one of the
pathfinders for the community strategy, that again used heritage
as a main element of it. If I were critical of it, I would say
that perhaps we have not developed it as much as we should in
terms of community targets for heritage issues within the community
strategy, but certainly the community was involved in that. In
terms of developing major schemes, and the major scheme in the
city centre, that has had a large amount of public consultation
and direction. One of the things I would pick out is that a lot
of the heritage we think about automatically is city centre based.
As Chris Oldershaw said earlier, a lot of it committed outside
the city centre in areas that are much harder to deal with and
areas where heritage is important to local people and it defines
the local community. As we move into a major area for the city,
which is about housing market renewal, we need to try to retain
those areas of heritage which are important and which the people,
through the partnerships, are telling us are important and focus
redevelopment on those areas that are clearly of lower quality.
We are involving the community from the strategic sense, the scheme
development sense, and into the local area.
Ms Toms: I would like to add that,
just as in Liverpool, community regeneration is becoming more
and more important within Manchester. The story of regeneration
in our city centres has been well told and is well documented.
The particular reasons why that has been successful have also
been well documented. Our challenge in Manchester now, with many
of our wards having the lowest deprivation status in the country,
is to take the models of best practice within city centres to
make sure that that benefit can be carried out within regeneration
areas in the wider community. There is a number of ways in which
that is now taking place in Manchester. One of the themes, picking
up from what colleagues have said earlier, is partnership and
regularly working together as agencies because that has made the
difference. When you have a regeneration strategy which is area-focused
and focused on a particular community, you tend to come to the
best solutions for that area. By listening to local people, which
we do more and more, we have noticed recently that the trend is
towards a real understanding and sympathy for the historic environment,
and in Manchester particularly not just the built environment.
A project such as the Victoria Baths project clearly was based
on an historic building but the number of people who voted for
that project reinforced the message that the historic environment
is very important but people's social history is too. Heritage
and social history are closely aligned. Like Liverpool, that is
embedded in both our community strategy and our cultural strategy.
That is why Manchester is represented here by both cultural strategy
and planning.
Q13 Mr Cummings: May I address the next
question to the Grainger Town Partnership? Your evidence stresses
the need for partnerships with the commercial sector. Can you
tell the Committee how willing commercial partners are and their
professional advisers to engage with the community and what mechanisms
did you put in place to ensure that appropriate levels of engagement
were achieved?
Mr Oldershaw: We have gone for
a formal structure within Grainger Town. We set up a company limited
by guarantee with 20 directors, including six from the private
sector. We set up a business forum and a residents' forum to support
that as well. Those met on a monthly basis and were able to go
through all the board papers and to comment through the chairs
of those meetings, who are also board directors, on strategy and
also on implementation. We regularly had about 16 businesses meetings
together going through the board papers. Those were representatives
of all the various sectors within the Grainger Town community.
We have also invested heavily in the skills base within both the
business and the residents' forum. We have taken both of those
groups to see examples of best practice in places like Liverpool
and Manchester and also to Glasgow and Edinburgh. We even went
over to Temple Bar. It is only by taking them to places like that
where you can see examples of best practice that you raise their
aspirations and start to develop a feeling of what is possible
in terms of regeneration. That takes time. We built up a lot of
confidence, commitment and trust in the area. Certainly, in the
first couple of years it was very difficult to get people on board.
That has held together very well over the six years of the project.
Q14 Christine Russell: May I perhaps
follow on the same theme? One of the main criticisms of heritage
regeneration is that it can lead to gentrification, spiralling
house prices and booming commercial rents and, as a result, the
indigenous community, if I can call them that, are displaced and
small businesses are forced out. Do you feel that is a valid criticism?
I know, for instance, that in the centres of Liverpool and Manchester
you are now looking at one- and two-bed-roomed apartments that
are selling for well over £140,000, way beyond the reach
of most people in need of affordable housing. How do you counter
those criticisms that what you are really doing is just putting
the prices up and gentrifying the area?
Mr Oldershaw: The crucial point
in many ways is to start out with a coherent strategy. We decided
right from day one that we wanted a lot of choice in Grainger
Town in terms of tenure and price within the area. Some of the
early housing schemes were carried out by housing associations
providing accommodation at market rents. That helped to create
investment confidence in Grainger Town and, after about two years,
we started to get some of the bigger private developers coming
in and creating owner-occupied accommodation. We are now able
to offer choice both in terms of tenure and price. The price range
typically to buy is from £80,000 to £500,000 within
Grainger Town. Rental levels start at about £60 to £80
per week. These are very accessible to the general public.
Mr Burchnall: If I use Liverpool
as an example, in terms of one area, which is the Canning area,
the Georgian area of Liverpool that in 1981 was in a very poor
condition with many vacant properties, housing associations were
instrumental in turning that area around with the support of English
Heritage and the City Council. The housing associations themselves
have faced problems in those areas and the private sector is now
beginning to help out there. The city centre is a driver for economic
activity. Without what is happening in the city centre at the
moment, Liverpool would not be beginning to be as prosperous as
it now is. I tend to think that, rather than offering opportunities
within the city centre, the City Council needs to use the economic
activity, the driver, to reinvest in the peripheral areas and
make the opportunities available in those peripheral areas. Those
are the areas where we have real housing problems at the moment.
Q15 Christine Russell: That is not really
a mixed community, is it, if you have the rich living in the city
centre and the poor in the outskirts?
Mr Oldershaw: In terms of the
closeness of our areas, they are actually very close. The inner
areas are very close to the areas which have the biggest house
prices at the moment. To try and mix the two would be quite difficult
and might cause problems in terms of those areas which are regenerating
at the moment. My feeling is that we should use the economic driver
there to reinvest in those other areas, build back those communities,
put in good schools, housing, shopping et cetera. A housing mix
within the city centre is a difficult thing to achieve.
Mr Babb: In terms of the housing
market within the city centre, that is rather different from the
housing markets around. It is not really gentrification because
people have not been living in the city centre for quite some
time. It is basically people who have come in into converted cotton
mills and new build schemes and so forth. In the Northern Quarter
area of the city centre, housing associations have been acting
for many years and continue to do so. That is a grassroots type
approach to regeneration, we are not looking for massive change—that
will continue into the future. What we would like is for some
of those activities to spill out into the suburbs where we have
housing markets that are not in balance and have too much poor
housing. We need to look at a better mix of housing. That is why
we are a pathfinder for housing market renewal. Not a short distance
from the city centre you can find houses at very affordable prices,
some would say too affordable prices, and people do not want those.
It is a question of trying to get the balance right.
Chairman: Christine Russell will take
us straight on to local authority officer expertise and resources.
Q16 Christine Russell: One of the memoranda
that we received was from Grosvenor Estates. I am very familiar
with them as they operate in Chester, but they are also busily
engaged in Liverpool I believe. In their memorandum, and I will
quote it to you, they state: "inexperience/lack of resource
of local authority planners leads to delays, lack of decision
making and lack of imagination". How do you answer that?
Mr Burchnall: Is that Chester
or Liverpool?
Q17 Christine Russell: I do not think
they specify?
Mr Burchnall: I think generally
they may have an issue with local authorities. Clearly a lot of
local authorities are not geared up to the major development pressures
which we are currently having, particularly in the north-west
of England. I think we have struggled. We have redirected resources
so that we have concentrated key individuals on major schemes.
That is particularly true with Grosvenor. We increasingly rely
on real partnerships. Our partnership with English Heritage has
been vastly important to the city, where we have not had the resources
or the skills in-house to push World Heritage to work on buildings
at risk. We jointly funded posts with English Heritage to bring
in that expertise. We are under considerable pressure as a planning
authority. We have used the planning delivery grants to supplement
those resources and to partner with the private sector to bring
in those resources that we do not have. It is an issue and one
that we are addressing. It is not an easy issue, and particularly
in terms of the local authorities competing with the private sector,
that can be difficult.
Q18 Christine Russell: May I ask you
about your conservation officers, because those are the people
who usually seem to be on the receiving end of the stick. The
developers say that these guys, and the odd woman who is a conservation
officer, have no idea about the local economy and the need to
regenerate. Do you think there is a problem with the professional
local authority conservation officer?
Mr Burchnall: I do not think there
is. This depends on the way that you use conservation officers,
and we use them as a partnership with development control officers
so that the totality of the scheme, the economic importance, can
be balanced against the conservation issues involved. As long
as you use that partnership, then it is not a problem. You do
need the expertise and the drive that comes from professional
conservation officers, sometimes tempered with the reality of
a department control officer.
Mr Oldershaw: I would like to
make a general comment. Certainly from our experience in Grainger
Town, we have experienced the City Council that is very positive
in the sense that it has excellent conservation skills and also
English Heritage. The area perhaps of weakness in many ways is
the property professional side. Ideally both the City Council
and also English Heritage ought to have access to property surveyors
so that they can advise the local planning authority on the commercial
realism because that inevitably is a process of negotiation between
the local authorities and the developer. The local authorities
would be assisted if they had professionals advising them on the
commercial realism and economic viability of schemes, what is
possible working with the grain of the listed buildings. There
is certainly a gap there at the moment.
Q19 Christine Russell: And that is a
gap that you have within the local authorities, is that what you
are saying?
Mr Oldershaw: In Grainger Town
we are very fortunate because we had a Conservation Heritage Officer
with the executive team but also property professionals as well.
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