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The Communities and Local Government Parliamentary Committee Inquiry into Planning Skills
Memorandum by RENEW Northwest 27th February 2008
1. Brief Background to RENEW Northwest RENEW Northwest was established by the Northwest Regional Development Agency in 2004 following ODPM's request that they should do so. This was as a result of the Urban White Paper (2000) commitment to establish regional Regeneration Centres of Excellence. Both the Rogers Task Force and the Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Teams had identified the skills gaps around inter-disciplinary working for successfully delivering urban renaissance on the one hand and neighbourhood renewal on the other. The Egan Task Force report on Skills for Sustainable Communities further analysed the issue and highlighted the need for the development of generic skills, behaviours and competencies to promote successful partnership learning and improve the implementation of sustainable communities. We very much welcome this opportunity to provide evidence and would be pleased to elaborate further.
2. RENEW Northwest is currently an internal project within the Northwest Regional Development Agency with its own Advisory Board and small staff team of five plus four co-located project staff from a partner organisation, working towards being a more embedded organisation with regional and local partners from mid 2008 onwards. We lead on two Northwest Regional Economic Strategy objectives: 107 develop the skills of regeneration professionals and leaders to support sustainable communities;
120 understand the economic case for and promote good design, ensuring project developers and managers provide strong client leadership.
3. Summaries of our achievements to date and what we do currently are annexed to this memorandum, but in summary 10,000 regeneration leaders and practitioners have participated in regeneration learning events, training or reviews. These have been drawn approximately 40% from local authorities, 10% other public bodies, 30% private sector and 20% from the voluntary and community sectors.
4. A external evaluation in November 2007 by SQW consultancy for the Northwest Regional Development Agency highlighted how, as a regional regeneration centre of excellence, RENEW Northwest achieves its impacts through strategic added value, namely by: 4.1. bringing regeneration practitioners together in formal and informal working environments, 4.2. bringing organizations together to develop partnership working and develop synergy, 4.3. building capacity through effective joint working, networking and acting as a hub for regeneration, 4.4. acting as a broker which brings together and co-ordinates trainers, and 4.5. organising masterclasses to raise skills and awareness with strong support for good practice identification and dissemination.
Pan-Professional, Multi-Sector 5. We would emphasise that regeneration, neighbourhood renewal and the work towards sustainable communities necessarily requires an effective pan-professional and a multi-sector way of working to deliver a vision of change. There are some particular recruitment and retention difficulties in some parts of the country - for local government in attracting planners, especially in competition with the private sector - but no single profession or sector is the key to achieving sustainable communities. Indeed, we find from our learning events that they are most effective when people are deliberately drawn from different backgrounds and have to work together (action learning groups) to deliver an optimal outcome.
6. These 'generic' skills are vital in a complex policy and delivery environment where individual leaders and professionals are required to move seamlessly between conventional, professionally and hierarchically driven activities and the challenging and complicated world of partnership working. And these requirements are growing, whether it is through the CLG inspired Local Strategic Partnership/ Local Area Agreement world of local service improvement and place shaping or the world of physical regeneration where Calcutt has helpfully highlighted the need for much improved partnerships between local authorities, public bodies and the private sector.
7. RENEW Northwest's experience is that the need for these generic skills is recognised by those at the 'front line' of regeneration and renewal where demand for our good practice and learning offer has been strong across the sectors, but less so by organisational leaders who are often driven by the need to deliver their own targets and outcomes and perhaps see less of the practical difficulties associated with multi-agency, multi-sector planning and delivery.
8. Places Don't Go Away Place shaping is a central theme of the Sub National Review of Economic Development and Regeneration (our emphasis) and the importance of local authorities' role in working with partners to deliver high quality services, effective governance and successfully engaging citizens at the most local level will be a significant challenge going forward. But this is a challenge which has been around for at least 30 years.
9. The work to support practitioners' skills development in this area has been taken forward in the North West by RENEW Northwest, working alongside the national Academy for Sustainable Communities, GONW, the Northwest Improvement Network (NWIN) and others. The new Homes and Communities Agency will see this as a key agenda and it is important to have the regional structures in place to link in with national policy changes. Indeed one of the difficulties for practice is the pace of change of public policy in this area, with new language, institutions and performance measures coming and going with bewildering rapidity. This is also a barrier to working with communities and with the private sector, both of whom have a longer horizon than the public sector in this regard.
10. The fate of neighbourhood renewal is just one, albeit major, example. Several years in development and with a major evidence gathering and consultative genesis, the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal and CLG Unit were launched in 2002 as a 10 - 20 year programme, with new programmes, targets and approaches. By 2007 all that was gone, with the focus moving on to worklessness, place shaping and housing. The challenge for local leaders and professionals is massive - there is no continuity of central policy, but an all too high level of continuity for deprived communities and their residents and businesses. These challenges apply equally to elected members.
11. As new challenges emerge, such as those which are the subject of the Select Committee Review such as Carbon Reduction, Housing Affordability, Community Empowerment, Neighbourhood Management and local Economic Development, we would urge an approach that builds on existing support infrastructure and does not create a raft of new, and often in practice time-limited, organisations as has been the pattern to date. We return to this in paragraph 15 below.
Teams as well as individuals 12. There are a number of studies recently reported or still underway on skill shortages within regeneration professionals, for example the work done by Arup for the Academy for Sustainable Communities on regional supply and demand projections and similar work on skills to deliver new developments on brownfield sites. A common point we have made to these studies is that it is important to consider the availability of well-functioning multi-disciplinary teams as well as the supply, for example, of graduates by profession. In particular, such teams cannot be nurtured into high performance as quickly as they can be disbanded, and therefore it is important that some thought is given to the continuity and longevity of teams across all priority areas rather than the perception of deploying skilled staff in an atomised manner. Nor is there a coherent career progression structure for professionals in the field, with personal advancement largely by 'job-hopping' with consequent losses in knowledge and experience to the authorities concerned. Loss of middle managers from local authorities to the private sector is a particular issue.
13. We are aware of examples of good practice in this area, for example Cheshire County Councils apprentice scheme for planners, English Partnerships' Professional Apprenticeships and Manchester City Council's emerging leadership and development programmes which span public sector employers within neighbourhoods.
14. A particular concern is the lack of penetration into regeneration employment by the residents of the areas being regenerated. The RENEW Northwest Innovation Task Force Report was published last year highlighting this issue and identifying good practice,[1] including the NEW East Manchester Regeneration Apprentices Scheme and the Oxfam ReGender programme.
An Opportunity to Build Support 15. We welcome the efforts made by CLG to support capacity building and skills development within local authorities and their local partners. We believe that it has been subject to the same lack of continuity, however, as wider regeneration and place based policy. It takes time to build the trust and relationships necessary to deliver credible capacity building support and this is best done regionally and sub-regionally. After a slow start, NWIN has had significant success in building the infrastructure for effective peer support in the region, and we hope that current attempts to ensure that it survives the current CLG move to Regional Improvement & Efficiency Partnerships will succeed.
16. RENEW Northwest has had some significant successes in this area and, with the active support of CABE, ASC, GONW and others, has put in place development programmes (Regeneration Common Purpose, Raising Our Game, Learning Laboratories), good practice networks (Housing Northwest, Pan-Professional CPD, Places Matter Education) and improvement mechanisms (Regional Design Review, Places Matter).
17. There is a real opportunity following from the creation of the Homes & Communities Agency which we would urge CLG to maximise. By definition H&CA will be required to link physical regeneration with neighbourhood services and empowerment. With its very substantial financial leverage, H&CA will be well placed to ensure a constantly available but flexibly applied support infrastructure for all professionals (not just built environment and mindful of the needs of residents as well as of the housing stock) and sectors involved in regeneration. Already incorporating the good practice teams from the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships, acquiring the ASC and other CLG resources such as Renewal.net, H&CA should be expected to provide a national infrastructure for evidence gathering, identification of good practice and accreditation of learning. Through its regional structures it should then build on existing regional infrastructure to deliver networked learning support and networking to key local authority officers and members, the private sector, consultancies and other public and not for profit organisations.
18. We would encourage the Communities and Local Government Parliamentary Committee to promote this possibility in order to ensure that the necessary generic and other skills are developed amongst all those charged with the planning and regeneration in England over the next period.
"How do we know that this new approach to regeneration will work? We don't and won't for another 15 or 20 years. But what we do know is that what we have done before does not work and that we need new, joined up skills and approaches. Quality and new ways of working will be critical." Managing Director of a major Northwest Property Developer, 2007
MEMORANDUM Annex 1 RENEW Northwest - What We Do Enabling Regeneration Excellence
Summary: RENEW Northwest champions the improvement of regeneration practice in the Northwest.
We help regeneration professionals, and the communities they serve, to deliver better results by enabling them to develop the essential skills, knowledge and capacity.
We do this through the development of bespoke learning opportunities, including training, short courses, events, project support, networking and publications.
Impact: Our work: · Improves the quality of life for people in communities; · Enables public sector partners to make more effective use of public funds, resulting in better value for money; · Equips the private sector to reduce the risk involved in the regeneration process, in addition to achieving better returns on investment; · Creates capacity for local communities to play an active part in the regeneration of their local areas; · Connects the economic and quality of life benefits associated with areas of prosperity with adjoining disadvantaged communities.
Background: Established at the request of Government by the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) in 2005, RENEW Northwest was tasked with raising the quality of regeneration practice by plugging identified skills gaps in the regeneration profession by facilitating the transfer of good practice, innovation and leadership skills.
In 2006, RENEW Northwest were given lead responsibility for two Regional Economic Strategy objectives focussed on improving the skills of regeneration professionals and the quality of the built environment.
Clients: RENEW
Northwest works with all those with a role to play in the regeneration of
England's Northwest, including:
Programmes: With an established reputation for high quality programme development and delivery, RENEW Northwest works with a number of local, regional and national partners to offer a range of innovative programmes catering for our various client groups, including:
Places Matter! Places Matter! is an innovative programme of built environment activities to drive up the quality of development in the region, including: a Design Review Panel service for early stage development proposals; information on good practice in the design, delivery and management of public realm schemes, evidence-based research into the economic value of good quality design, skills development for local authorities; and a built environment education programme working with teachers and community groups. Partners: Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).
Housing Northwest Housing Northwest is a regional learning network for housing professionals. The network facilitates the transfer of skills and knowledge to enable delivery of the region's complex housing agenda. Partners: Regional Housing Board, National Housing Federation North West
Fusion Learning Labs The Fusion Learning Labs are a series of sub-regionally based learning programmes. Based in Cheshire, Cumbria and Lancashire, the learning programmes tackle issues of local importance, for example, collaborative working and community engagement. Partners: North West Improvement Network (NWIN), Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC), relevant sub-regional organisations.
Pan-Professional CPD We are working with the built environment professional institutes in the region to coordinate delivery of their individual Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes, maximising the offer to members and facilitating the transfer of skills and knowledge across professions. Partners: Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), plus twelve other professional institutes.
Learning Programmes We provide individual learning programmes suitable for all client groups, including short courses, action learning, mentoring and leadership development. Programmes to date have included a bespoke regeneration Common Purpose for emerging regeneration leaders, and a mentoring scheme for under and recent graduates interested in pursuing a career in regeneration. Partners: Various, including the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) and Government Office for the North West (GONW).
Good Practice We offer an innovative and extensive good practice programme, showcasing emerging good practice from within the region and beyond, through a programme of events, publications, and our web-based learning hub. Partners: Various, including NWDA, Natural England, CABE, Mersey Basin Campaign and English Heritage
Future: Currently majority funded and hosted by the Northwest Regional Development Agency, the organisation is looking to move to independence during 2008.
Further Information: For further information visit www.RENEW.co.uk or telephone 0151 703 0135. MEMORANDUM Annex 2
RENEW Northwest - Our Achievements Enabling Regeneration Excellence
Facts and Figures From a standing start, in our first 3 years we have achieved -
a) 10,000 participants in our regeneration learning events, b) website unique visitors rising to an average of 23,800 a month, c) 108 events, currently at 49 events a year, d) 20 publications produced, currently at 6 publications a year, e) 25 short courses, currently at 9 short courses a year, f) 669 children from 3 to 16 years old learning
about the built environment, with 27 teachers, 18 artists and architects, 75
student teachers, 9 public exhibitions and 5 training films produced, g) Genuine regional coverage, with people attending our events from: · Cheshire 10% · Cumbria 13% · Greater Manchester 37% · Lancashire 14% · Merseyside 17% · Regional 6% · National 3%
h) 92% of people at our events would recommend RENEW Northwest to a colleague, i) 44% of people at our events had their expectations fully met or surpassed, rising to 75% of people at our events who had their expectations mostly met, fully met or surpassed.
Achievements Improving the Skills of Regeneration Professionals j) Leadership Development programmes which were focussed on the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders within the region, k) Delivered a Regeneration Common Purpose programme tailored to a regional theme for regeneration professionals, with the impact of an increase from 53% to over 90% amongst participants' influencing skills and confidence, l) 16 Professional Institutes and universities publicly signed up to the delivery of joint Regeneration CPD - Continuous Professional Development, m) Mentoring for students and young professionals in sustainability and regeneration, in partnership with Envirolink Northwest, with over 180 young people assisted in their careers, n) Published the findings of our Innovation Task Force on new practices which have improved regeneration programmes by better involving residents in their governance and operations, launched at the House of Commons, o) Piloted the Raising Our Game Level 7 programme in Leading Sustainable Communities course to improve the competences of regeneration professionals in running high-quality organisations, p) Piloted a learning programme for community development workers on how best to develop sustainable communities in collaboration with other professions, q) Trail blazed the Fusion Learning Laboratory, first in Pennine Lancashire, then across Cumbria, all Lancashire and Cheshire, based on a robust analysis of the key skills gaps (creative thinking, partnership working, community engagement) and delivered in disadvantaged areas of greatest organisational complexity within the region and with a wide range of stakeholders.
Improving the Quality of the Built Environment r) Design Review panel completed reviews of 24 schemes across 14 local authorities in 6 months (with a further 49 schemes seeking a review), s) Provided Design Advice for Chester, Blackpool, Preston, Liverpool and Pennine Lancashire, and with input to the NWDA Tourism Team, t) Published and disseminated 3000 copies of the regional Public Realm Guide, u) Published the Economic Value of Urban Design guide with a national profile, and dissemination events to date with 312 practitioners and leaders, v) Delivered 3 Building in Context events supporting design excellence in historic or sensitive locations, with the support of CABE and English Heritage, w) Worked with local communities on design and regeneration initiatives as experienced in their neighbourhoods, including an extensive Places Matter! Education project working with Sure Start staff, primary and secondary school teachers.
Outcomes - Strategic Added Value "In our view RENEW Northwest achieves its impacts through Strategic Added Value: 1) Bringing regeneration practitioners together in formal and informal working environments, 2) Bringing organizations together to develop partnership working and develop synergy, 3) Building capacity through effective joint working, networking and acting as a hub for regeneration, 4) Acting as a broker which brings together and co-ordinates trainers and masterclass-deliverers to raise skills and awareness, 5) Strong support for good practice identification and dissemination, high quality training and masterclass events for practitioners across the region, playing a key role in improving the knowledge base and communication skills of practitioners." source: SQW Evaluation commissioned by NWDA, November 2007.
[1] RENEW Northwest (2007): http://www.renew.co.uk/FileUploads/ITF_Full_Report_FINAL.pdf and Summary: http://www.renew.co.uk/FileUploads/RENEW_Ladders.pdf
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