Examination of Witnesses (Questions 94-99)
HASTINGS BOROUGH
COUNCIL AND
TEN SIXTY
SIX ENTERPRISE
29 JUNE 2009
Q94 CHAIRMAN:
Welcome to you all, and thank you for taking an interest in our
work and for coming to give evidence to us. Would you like to
introduce yourselves?
PETER
PRAGNELL: Good
morning. I am Councillor Peter Pragnell, Leader of Hastings Borough
Council.
SIMON
HUBBARD: I am
Simon Hubbard, Director of Regeneration and Planning with Hastings
Borough Council.
GRAHAM
MARLEY: I am
Graham Marley, Chief Executive of Ten Sixty Six Enterprise.
CHAIRMAN: While
you are answering questions, you will hear me saying your name
from time to time, but that is for the people who are taking a
note.
Q95 DAVID LEPPER:
Welcome to my constituency. Hastings has been quite a focus for
SEEDA's attention over the years. I address this to all of you:
what has changed for the better in Hastings over the years of
SEEDA's intervention?
PETER
PRAGNELL: How
long have you got? A lot has changed, and SEEDA has played its
part in that. I have only been leader for the past three years,
but SEEDA's part started two or three years prior to that under
the previous administration. SEEDA has played a big part in what
has been happening, particularly with infrastructure work—the
visible things, such as the new buildings, the innovation centres
and the media centre. The actual regeneration company was set
up under the auspices of SEEDA, but Hastings Borough Council,
the county council, Rother District Council, English Partnerships
and various other organisations are all part of it. That is a
sort of overall view. Simon can give you a huge amount of detail
about it.
SIMON
HUBBARD: I think
that a lot of things in Hastings are now moving in the right direction,
but there clearly is a long way for us to go, and we have some
concerns for the future. At the moment, our submission lists some
very significant things that have happened. The university college
is being established, and we have a new arts and technology college.
There are very significant links between those academic institutions
and support facilities for business. Two things have worked for
us in Hastings. First, the partnership that was set up around
the Hastings and Bexhill Task Force has meant that partners have
come forward with other action, so action has not been taken simply
by SEEDA. The other partners—for instance, the county council
in looking at educational performance and academy issues, and
the borough council with issues relating to the Jerwood Gallery
and the cultural agenda—have had opportunities to start
to bring together those areas that work. The other thing is the
decision that was taken at the beginning of the work to concentrate—not
exclusively, but substantially—on the regeneration of the
town centre and the location of resources and action in the town
centre. If you visit Hastings, you can see the physical change,
which we strongly believe is shortly to be followed by economic
change, which is already taking place there. Without wishing to
eulogise, because, as our submission says, we have concerns, we
think that SEEDA has engaged in these processes with local partners
extremely well.
PETER
PRAGNELL: Can
I add that at the very beginning of the process, it played a very
key part in bringing all the strategic partners together. It played
that role at the beginning, and has played a full part since.
GRAHAM
MARLEY: I would
agree with everything that Peter Pragnell and Simon Hubbard have
said. From a business perspective, what SEEDA has brought to the
party in recent years is the unlocking of commercial floor space—Hastings
suffered a severe lack of that for a fairly significant period
of time because it was not commercially viable to build commercial
property developments—particularly new floor space in the
town centre, and the innovation centre to the north of the town.
That has been a really important factor. The media centres and
innovation centres are fairly full, which is very positive and
shows that there is demand in Hastings. The next level is to bring
some bigger businesses into the town centre to create new employment
and to take Hastings forward significantly. The other point I
would like to make is that some of this was beginning to happen
anyway. Through a single regeneration budget, which it received
in devolved funding, the borough council was already planning
to make improvements in Hastings. The advent of Sea Space acted
as a catalyst to make further things happen. We should make the
point that the borough council was progressing well on trying
to turn Hastings around.
Q96 CHAIRMAN:
Taking up that point, is it your collective view that those developments
might not have progressed as far as they have done without SEEDA?
From what all three of you have said, I assume that that is your
view, regardless of what the borough council had already been
doing and might have gone on to do, and whatever a regeneration
agency might have been able to do.
SIMON
HUBBARD: Yes,
I think that is true. I think that the taskforce that was set
up brought in expertise that the council did not have, particularly
on the academic agenda. By its very nature, the council did not
have those skills. It also brought in capital project management
on a larger scale than the local partners had. It also brought
a sense of purpose, as was demonstrated with the planned link
road around the town, which we hope will now be delivered and
which would deliver a lot of opportunities to the town. It also
brought together a range of players in the partnership that enabled
the continuous process of lobbying and following up that goes
with such a scheme. It strengthened work in all those structures.
Q97 DAVID LEPPER:
So it is bringing together partners and the ability to invest
money directly, and perhaps indirectly, in the area. Has it given
Hastings a stronger voice in national decision making, particularly
where funding is concerned?
PETER
PRAGNELL: I
think that we have got a stronger voice. Quite a bit of that goes
to the fact that we have worked quite closely with a lot of partners,
not just SEEDA. We worked more closely with Rother District Council
and the county council, and we have quite good relations with
our MPs of every political hue. We have a partnership down the
A21. That is not specifically to do with regeneration—it
is to do with transport communications—but it has contributed
to us learning to be much better at working with partners in the
private sector, public sector and third sector.
SIMON
HUBBARD: SEEDA's
approach has really strengthened where we are in terms of the
infrastructure that we talked about and those sorts of links.
The regional approach offers slightly less in that sense in the
inclusion agenda. Like in many other coastal areas in the region,
the disadvantages in Hastings are long-standing. The recent Centre
for Cities report revealed the high structural levels of youth
unemployment that exist in the town. Those problems are not easily
addressed by that kind of investment. The bringing together of
regional resources around that capital and investment is very
strong, but this approach has been less strong in addressing built-in
disadvantage and exclusion.
Q98 DAVID LEPPER:
Could you give us an estimate of how much public money has been
invested in Hastings by SEEDA and other partners since the taskforce
was set up seven years ago.
SIMON
HUBBARD: It
is very hard. If you would welcome it, I would be perfectly happy
to go away and tally it up on a piece of paper for you.
DAVID LEPPER:
That would be helpful.
SIMON
HUBBARD: I will
list a few. In terms of public sector investment, at least £38
million is going through the taskforce budgets, but the multiplier
around that has been very large. The new college is worth around
£90 million. I do not know what the university college is
valued at but it would be similar. The figures are high but significant
parts of that money are not SEEDA's. It is money that has been
brought by other arms of government.
Q99 DAVID LEPPER:
Is it good value for money?
SIMON
HUBBARD: I guess
you would have to say that the judgment on that will be four or
five years down the line, in terms of the impact of those things
happening and depending on other things remaining constant. One
of the successes we have had as a partnership is on reducing crime.
That will need to be held down to deliver a sustainable town centre
and a working college. It is important whether, for instance,
schools can be improved during the next period so that people
can take advantage of these opportunities. Like so much of regeneration,
you can judge it on one level: "Is it good? Yes, it seems
to be." However, the long-term impact is similar to the decline
that got us where we are, and that long-term impact needs to be
assessed in the future.
PETER
PRAGNELL: From
a historical perspective, there are disagreements over whether
it has taken 50 or 60 years—or longer—to decline to
the state that we got to. There are also questions about what
caused it—cheap package holidays or all sorts of different
things. We are only six or seven years into the regeneration programme
and it will take a while before we can tell what its long-term
impact will be.
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