Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
OFFICE OF
THE DEPUTY
PRIME MINISTER,
GROUNDWORK AND
CABE
24 APRIL 2006
Q60 Greg Clark: Do you know how much
green space has been lost in private gardens in the last year?
Mr Housden: I do not have a figure
for that, I am sorry.
Q61 Greg Clark: Do you know whether you
collect figures on it?
Mr Housden: I do not, but I am
happy to have a look at that and to let you know.[4]
Q62 Greg Clark: I am interested in
both. You are going to write to me with figures for the loss of
park land and it would be interesting to know what area each year
is being lost from gardens. We know across the country, and this
affects all areas, that actually even planning officers in councils
do not regard themselves as having sufficient powers to protect
gardens. They feel that they are, through case law, expected to
approve planning applications that involve the development of
residential gardens, which means that, for reasons that you say,
it is unlikely that we would lose vast amounts of green space
in the public domain, yet I suspect, and indeed I have some evidence,
that we are losing far more environmentally important green space
which happens to be behind houses rather than in public parks.
Would you be able to write and just update us on what figures
are available?
Mr Housden: Certainly.
Q63 Greg Clark: Would you agree that
actually, if you find that it is the case that back gardens are
considered to be brownfield sites, that seems to be an anomalous
definition?
Mr Housden: Always in planning
matters you seek to strike a balance between the type of developments
that are likely to have a significant impact on the community
and those that are not. The judgment about what householders should
be able to do within the curtilage of their own property would
be the subject of different views. You accurately described, to
my knowledge, the current state of affairs.
Q64 Helen Goodman: Obviously one
of the groups for whom the quality of urban green spaces is most
important is our children.
Mr Housden: Yes.
Q65 Helen Goodman: I wonder whether
you are aware of the fact that in 1970 the average eight-year-old
was allowed by his or her parents to go 800 yards from home, whereas
today it is only 100 yards. I have here the results of a survey
which was done on children's attitudes to public spaces and their
enjoyment of playing in public spaces and I am going to ask you
whether you think these things might be connected: fears for their
safety and of bullying, traffic, dirty, boring, run-down, lack
of choice, lack of access and, for children with disabilities,
inaccessible and poor transport. Does that sound familiar?
Mr Housden: Yes.
Q66 Helen Goodman: Turning to page
66, in figure 58 there is an analysis, which was done by Sheffield
University, of the strategies that local authorities have made.
You can see in this that 66% of the strategies made no provision
for children and teenagers, 83% have no links with early years'
strategy and 44% have no links with their play strategy. What
are you going to do about that?
Mr Housden: First of all agree
with you that those are very striking figures and that they reflect
real needs and real issues. They go to the question about how
local authorities view, manage and develop their green spaces.
If they had a children's eyes-on to do that, they would do all
of the things that so many authorities have been recorded as not
doing here. We were in Mile End Park the week before last where
huge efforts have been made to make an urban green space responsive
to children, both those who are able to play independently, those
who are interested in adventure games, right down to small children
who will be having supervised play in a nursery sort of environment,
lots of care about safety, a very strong ethos about diversity
and paying people respect. This can be got right in spectacular
fashion, but the reason it is probably not, I would venture, is
because parks are seen in too many authorities as a narrow issue
about mowing grass and keeping dogs in the right places and not
about providing for all of their needs. My last point would be
that if under planning policy guidance note 17 you undertook an
assessment of need, you would properly get to the issues about
children and how you might plan for them going forward.
Q67 Helen Goodman: I shall come back
to PPG17 in a minute. First I want to ask Ms Thrift about figure
12 on page 23. It says that one of the key things is that we need
to achieve " . . . a better understanding of how we measure
and evaluate risk in designing our spaces, particularly in respect
of children's play" because it has now become fashionable
to make play spaces which do not have enough risk for children
to find them enjoyable and challenging. What are you going to
do about that?
Ms Thrift: Particularly in terms
of children's usage of green space, we know from a lot of research
that both children and their parents want there to be a recognisable
member of staff in a park; whether it is the person running the
cafe« or a ranger or a park manager, there is a lot of support
for having more staff in parks. A year ago we launched a campaign
called Park Force, which was aimed at raising the profile of those
people who work in parks and the very good jobs that they do to
support children, adults and all who want to enjoy themselves
in a park. We have had a lot of support for that campaign and
so far 110 local authorities have signed up to make more effort
to get more staff into parks and to give them more support. We
are continuing that campaign over the next year.
Q68 Helen Goodman: That is obviously
connected with the discussion of skills on pages 40 and 42. I
wonder whether you have anything to say to us about whether or
not, in upskilling people working in parks, you are going to address
whether they have play skills and skills relevant to children.
Ms Thrift: That is a very important
issue and this comes back to my previous point to the last questioner.
For a long time within the green space sector the focus on skills
was all about improving horticultural skills and we are working
very hard to raise awareness that actually people who work in
parks departments need to have a whole range of skills and working
with children and providing play opportunity are some of the skills
that need to be provided. Over the next year we are going to be
working with the Children's Play Council to help them take forward
a lottery funded project to improve play strategies. We are working
with them to ensure that that work links in with our work to improve
green space strategies and that links are made between those two
strategies.
Q69 Helen Goodman: That sounds excellent.
On Easter Saturday I opened a new play area in my constituency,
in a place called Copley, and this was a partnership including
Groundwork, the county council and Living Spaces and so on and
so forth. As they said to me, the end result is a fantastic and
unique play area and it is. However, I just want to ask you whether
you think this is satisfactory. It took four years to pull together
the partnership and pull together all the different funding streams.
I do not know which of you is responsible for that, but I should
like you to comment on that please.
Mr Hawkhead: I should be very
surprised if Living Spaces had caused the problem there, because
we have just had our interim evaluation of Living Spaces and one
of the things which most strikes one, reading that evaluation,
is the ease with which people have been able to access money to
get things done quickly and the simplicity of the application
and the simplicity of the funding regime; indeed that was one
of the things we set out to do with ODPM from the very start.
It is sometimes very difficult, because Groundwork does a lot
of this, to get effective partnerships together to take on projects
that transform space. That is not for bad reasons: it is often
because people fear the responsibility of taking things on like
that. One of the things we have really learned from the Living
Spaces scheme, and I am sorry to have this word coming up again,
is that we used what we call "enablers", people who
would actually work alongside the community group and help them
develop the skills they needed, not only to apply for the money,
but also to run the scheme afterwards. It is incredibly important.
All the evidence we have now for 25 years of Groundwork work is
that if you get communities that kind of support, they can take
a huge amount of the responsibility themselves.
Q70 Helen Goodman: I know that is
true, but if you look on page 46 at figure 36, you will see the
long list of programmes and the long list of different funding
sources and I wonder whether there is any thought about rationalising
these long lists.
Mr Housden: I mentioned before
that the stream of government support for this broad area of policy
is being rationalised under the local area agreements' funding
scheme; similarly our schemes are going into it in that way. However,
there is a tension in drawing a number of potential funders to
the table. The more people who want to support and sponsor improvement
of green space the merrier and we need to find sensible ways to
enable them to bring that to the table. It is particularly important
and the work of Living Spaces on liveability has been very important
here, to enable the smaller groups, the very small community groups,
to access this funding in a quick, inexpensive, non-bureaucratic
way. From the evaluation evidence, that is actually being borne
out. Yes, consolidation where that is appropriate, but not at
the price of actually dissuading potential additional funders
because we are seeing a number of people wanting to bring their
money to the table or, if it just becomes a sort of leviathan
that puts off the small community group, then our best interest
would not be served.
Q71 Helen Goodman: No, clearly there
is a tension there between democratic accountability and community
participation, I can see that. Back to PPG17. In the consultation
document which was issued by ODPM on financing infrastructure
through the planning system, there is some information about planning
obligations under a development site environment approach, which
sounds as though it is about planning in the most environmentally
friendly way. Could you explain to me why, in that, it is not
going to be obligatory in future to require a particular proportion
of land to be reserved for green spaces and children's play?
Mr Housden: The approach that
PPG17 takes towards this is to leave it to local determination,
on the basis of an audit of provision and an assessment of need,
what the best balance for that community is. Alongside that it
provides protection for the development of green spaces. So it
is a range of criteria and restrictions, including particularly
on playing fields. That is the planning approach that has been
taken here.
Q72 Mr Curry: Leaving aside my sense
of bewilderment that this is something the Government think they
should be involved in at all, may I resume that line of questioning
about the funding sources? If you look at the back of this document,
you will find that 154 local authorities are described as urban.
They include—you learn something every day—the Isle
of Wight. I shall not divert into the urban characteristics of
the Isle of Wight. You then look at these funding sources and
there are 29 funding sources listed on page 46, some of them dispensing
the magisterial amount of £200,000, £500,000, £300,000.
Now, spread over even whatever proportion of those local authorities
are submitting schemes in any one year, that is absolutely a mass
of piddling little sources of money, is it not?
Mr Housden: Some of them are very
small, you are right.
Q73 Mr Curry: Seriously, if you are
a local government manager and you have your cabinet member in
place, as the National Audit Office wants, and you say "Come
on Fred, we need you to do something about this. Let's work up
a scheme" and he says "Are you aware, as a member of
the cabinet, just how much management time is going to go in to
try to tap these piddling little amounts of funding, how much
work we are going to have to do?" do you not think it would
be much better to put it into the community programmes, which
after all are under huge pressure from the financial restraints
on the rate support grant?
Mr Housden: That is a very accurate
representation. In a past life I was a local authority chief executive,
1994 to 2001, and the circumstances that we faced were exactly
as you described. Government, and that of course spanned a period
of Conservative as well as Labour control, favoured a lot of specific
grant regimes that each had their own information and accountability
requirements and it was expensive and tiresome, in the way you
described, to respond to those. It did not produce much flexibility.
From the mid-1990s onwards that tide was turned and progressively,
some would argue not sufficiently rapidly, funding from central
government has certainly become more generic and more flexible.
Q74 Mr Curry: I do not wish to argue
with you, but I do not think the tide was turned at that point.
It was only about a year ago that the Government said in their
local rate support grant settlement that they had to reduce the
proportion of specific grants. The tide carried on rising significantly
into this Government. I applaud the fact that it is being turned,
if it really is going to be turned, but it is still at a much
higher benchmark than it was before.
Mr Housden: I was thinking particularly,
for example, of the single regeneration budget in the mid-1990s
which brought together a bewildering number of streams into something
you could actually plan against. So the argument was being conducted.
The local area agreement framework,[5]
where nine government departments have pooled funding in the environmental
protection and cultural services block and targeted local authorities
who have particular cases of need so they then have flexibility
in how they deploy it, is a step forward. We have 88 or 89 this
year and shall cover all of the principal local authorities next
year.
Q75 Mr Curry: On the whole I would subscribe
to that, but would you not say that the schemes which seem to
work best are those where a significant level of local funding
is raised? Is not the best form of community engagement in fund
raising? I know from my own constituents, if you want to get people
involved in raising money for a scanner—a scanner appeal
for the local hospital—the level of community involvement
you get when there is a specific target, and often it is a fund-raising
target, does seem to be much more effective than some rather nebulous
consultation of community representatives, all of whom curiously
tend to be the same people.
Mr Housden: Yes, that can be very
powerful. What you want is a circumstance where the local authority
has got funding that is proportionate to its need; so the areas
that serve areas of high deprivation are likely to benefit from
the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, the New Deal for Communities or
to be targeted under a local area agreement. You then have the
capacity to go to the private sector to seek to match funds, to
say "We have this amount of public money, are you interested
in coming in to do this?" and to encourage community groups
to say that their bit extra will make a difference. That is the
powerful proposition.
Q76 Mr Curry: As far as I can see
there is one case cited here as a particularly good one which
is Sheffield Botanical Gardens. There is a major chunk of lottery
funding there—and that was before they gave it to Manchester
United—there is a significant amount of money put in by
the City Council itself, but then a huge amount of local effort
as well has gone into raising the funds and would you not say
that is the best sort of template there is, if circumstances permit?
Mr Housden: That is excellent
and Groundwork have an important role and track record of success
in enabling community groups to engage in that way. I guess the
point would be though that communities will have differential
capacities to raise money and that bedrock of funding that I have
described is important, but you are quite right to say there are
some excellent examples of where communities have done that and
that sense of ownership is critical for green space where people
feel it belongs to them.
Q77 Mr Curry: The biggest source
of funding from the private sector down here is planning gain
contributions, but you will know there are huge pressures and
demands upon planning gains and that planning gain is, I think
I am right in saying, the major source of housing funding in the
United Kingdom. Not many houses are being built, but many of those
that are, are being built with the aid of planning gain. That
is a very variable amount of money, is it not? The amount of money
you can eke out of planning gain one year, leaving aside the movement
to tariffs and the changes in the planning system which are envisaged
or being implemented, you cannot really rely on that one can you?
You have to have somebody coming along wanting to do something
and then you have to be able to beg, borrow or steal from them
or brow-beat them into putting in your little project.
Mr Housden: The Report interestingly
talks about how creatively section 106 agreements, which you are
referring to there, have actually been used to support not only
very specific developments on a particular site but more broadly.
One of the important issues for ministers in considering the role
of a planning gain supplement as a future means of raising revenue
will be to provide greater flexibility for communities to be able
to draw, for the public good, a share of the increasing value
that planning consents confer on land and to use it for good purposes.
Q78 Mr Curry: We are straying here
into the Barker Review and I do hope that such a dotty policy
will not come into existence quite frankly; and I should be amazed
if it did. There are lots of better ways of delivering. The famous
106 agreements funnily enough may turn out to have much more charm
that people imagined in terms of their flexibility, but let us
leave that particular bit of politics aside. As well as the multifarious
sources of funding, there is an awful lot of funders as well,
is there not? Even in something like central government support
for community involvement, which I see on page 29, there are still
six people involved in that. There is a real surfeit of councils
here, is there not? It must be wonderfully, remarkably joined
up or else an awful lot of people are doing the same thing.
Mr Housden: There is a key issue.
The upside of that is that the wider recognition of the importance
of green space is encouraging potential funders from each potential
sector to come forward. That is good. The downside of it is that
it can actually create the sort of additional cost and confusion
and difficulty at local level and one of our tasks in the further
period is to make sure that the green spaces conversation across
government is a coherent one. There are some good examples in
the report about the way in which, with Defra and other departments,
that is being carried out. We have further to go on all of that
and the core funding route of local area agreements for local
authorities is important. Just to dwell slightly on your point
about section 106, that is one example of the way in which councils
are thinking broadly about how they can use the range of their
powers to improve green spaces. All the evidence suggests that
where you get a council that does have a broad view and is creative
and even entrepreneurial about the way it does things, that actually
produces good green spaces.
Q79 Mr Curry: Could I draw your attention
to some green space which nobody has mentioned and is not mentioned
here? I represent a northern constituency. If you go round some
of the great cities and the edges of cities in the North, the
green space which is of course the nightmare is the green space
between tower blocks. You get the tower blocks and you get absolutely
oceans between them of abandoned drug kits and needles and dog
dirt and this, that and the other and nobody dares cross them
even. That is there, that is present; we need to do something
about that. What do you think could be done to enhance that sort
of thing, not least to introduce some sort of security into it?
Mr Housden: This is a very important
point. Fundamentally, those are questions of design and the work
that CABE are doing more broadly is very important here in terms
of ensuring, where new developments are made or where the significant
refurbishments are being undertaken, that green space requirements
are taken to the fore. So if you take our housing market renewal
programme, for example, in areas of low demand, then there is
a CABE adviser working with each of those areas to make sure that
green space is thought through very carefully. The other aspect
of that, which can impact upon spaces which are not being redeveloped
in that significant way, is that there is a pilot project going
on at the moment where two of the leading housing associations,
the Peabody Trust and the Notting Hill Housing Association, are
working with the Housing Corporation to see what registered social
landlords can do in their management of properties they are responsible
for to get more effective use of green space. Here again you see
that it is not simply an issue about space per se, it is
about the whole security, the environment and all the considerations
that you talked about. These are fundamentally questions of design:
you can address them sensibly where you are doing large-scale
developments, but we are exploring, the Housing Corporation are
exploring, ways in which in the day-to-day management, registered
social landlords, local authorities, whoever they might be, can
actually address those spaces more positively.
4 Ev 16 Back
5
Note by witness: Local area agreement (LAA) framework
pools funds from over 100 Government funding lines from across
5 Departments. This funding is additional to the revenue support
grant delivered through the Environmental, Protective and Cultural
Services. For example the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund,
which is pooled within the Safer, Stronger Communities Block (one
of the four blocks making up LAAs), delivers funding to those
local authorities based on deprivation levels, performance in
delivering local environmental services etc. 86 LAAs were agreed
in the first and second phases, and the remaining 63 will be adopted
in the third phase in 2007/08. Back
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