Written evidence submitted by Nigel Mellor
COMMUNITIES AND
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
SELECT COMMITTEE
ENQUIRY INTO
REGENERATION
This evidence is based on over 40 years experience
as:
— a Local
Authority Officer employed in a major northern City (32 years);
— membership
and chairing several community and voluntary sector organisations
providing housing, alternative education opportunities, and community
architectural advice and services along with a wider range of
other work with the non statutory sector (30 years); and
— Chairing
an Area Probation Board (six years).
1. Have there been examples of successful
regeneration in your area? What do you think contributed to the
success?
Few examples of successful regeneration can be cited
with any confidence. Most have serious limitations and demonstrate
that it is much more straightforward to achieve physical improvements
to buildings and open spaces than to make a significant and lasting
impact on the problems of multiple deprivation as they are found
concentrated in the major inner urban areas across the UK. The
fact that physical regeneration can be achieved through building
new or renovating older properties, for example, within a fairly
readily identifiable time frame using capital resources is obviously
cheaper and less demanding to Governments (Central and Local)
than having to allocate significant revenue funds to create and
provide better education, health, training and employment opportunities
over the longer term. The challenges involved in making a significant
and sustained impact on the intractable and entrenched dimensions
of multiple deprivation are clearly very great but efforts are
not helped by short-termism, the desire for quick wins, and the
reluctance to commit sufficient resources to tackle the scale
of problems involved. A further regular failure of regeneration
programs has been the inability to integrate successfully with
mainstream activities.
Against this background of serious limitations, there
are signs that some of the area based programmes as for example
the then Home Office Community Development Programme (1969-75)
and the Inner City Partnership Programme (1975-80+) did make some
impact on the physical, but perhaps more importantly, the socio-economic
characteristics in the areas where they took place. Key factors
here could well have been the degree to which those involved (Central
and Local Government, Members and Officials working alongside
local residents and others) were able to exercise real influence
on the way in which resources were allocated and that the objectives
of the programmes included addressing both physical and
socio-economic determinants of disadvantage. So whilst
the actual impact on the physical appearance of the areas concerned
during the period of the particular programme may well have been
limited, the effects of work to improve the educational opportunities,
life experiences and self confidence of the residents had much
wider and enduring impact for years to come. These often called
"soft outcomes" are still are omitted from project objectives
and ignored in the project evaluation process.
2. How do you think regeneration in your area
could be done better in the future?
Clearly better recognition of the problems caused
by multiple deprivation is needed. The Government has spent significant
resources to develop the Index of Multiple Deprivation which illustrates
in quite graphically the different dimensions of social and economic
problems experienced by communities across the country. Yet there
is little, if any, evidence that such information is used to allocate
significant resources towards activities which could begin to
make a real impact on the areas at greatest disadvantage! Neither
do the other agencies of Government adopt a more effective approach.
The reliance on tendering by public agencies has
the patina of fairness and is used to suggest that for example
social enterprises have an opportunity to compete fairly to provide
different services in their locality. If the difficulties with
tendering that I am aware of are replicated across the country,
then there must be a major issue with this approach to programme
delivery.
Tender processes have used criteria which have effectively
prevented the only accredited local supplier from being eligible
to bid, yet the Authority concerned stated in the same report
that they wanted to grow the local supplier market over the coming
years! When challenged about this clearly indirectly discriminatory
action, the Authority tried to justify it by claiming it was more
convenient, cheaper and quicker this way!
Other agencies have changed tender evaluation criteria
during the evaluation process. Recently publicity was given to
an Oxfordshire based charity which has registered a grievance
about maladministration in an adult carers tender process. A legitimate
and potentially very useful line of enquiry for the Select Committee
would be to investigate the numbers of complaints about tendering
processes lodged against Local Authorities and other Governmental
agencies by social enterprises to see what lessons can be learned
from the information revealed. This work should be supplemented
by other work to gather views from social enterprises about their
general experience of tendering processes across the country,
since much dissatisfaction does not get expressed as a formal
complaint for a variety of reasons.
Another experience drawn from the area of community
mental health, illustrates how an organisation which need larger
and better premises from which to provide its valuable services
to black people with mental health needs fought for several years
to try to persuade the Duchy of Lancaster not to sell a property
which it owned by auction, since this would have effectively prevented
the voluntary organisation from being able to acquire the building.
After three years of repeated efforts the organisation managed
to get the Duchy to offer deferred terms for the acquisition of
the premises, only to find that at the very last minute the Duchy
had proceeded to sell the property to a private developer.
A further problem exists in the area of Asset Transfer
which the Government seems to believe holds great potential for
devolving power and opportunities to local communities. Local
Authorities are not likely to readily and willingly seek to divest
themselves of their best properties or those in good condition.
No recognition seems to be given to the need for independent technical
advice to enable local community groups or agencies who may be
considering an asset transfer possibility or offer from their
local Council. There is a grave danger that groups in such a situation
are encouraged to rely on survey reports or other information
prepared by the Authority's own officers rather than that of experienced
community technical aid services. Asset transfer arrangements
therefore might well proceed apace in areas of least disadvantage,
where groups can find the advice and resources (including the
confidence to embark on the process in the first place), whilst
groups in areas of greatest need will not come forward or are
in danger of being naively striving to acquire buildings the Authority
is only too pleased to off load without their structural weaknesses
or high running costs liabilities being properly revealed. The
availability of independent technical advice, properly funded
as part of this Asset Transfer process, is absolutely crucial
if this process is to be at all fair and effective in devolving
service provision and in making a useful contribution to community
empowerment.
Another factor affecting the voluntary/community
sector's ability to use the resources which it has at its disposal
is the continuation of charges placed on premises which were renovated
with funds from the Governments previous Urban Programme. The
Urban Programme was a major source of funding for voluntary sector
projects for a decade or so from the early 1970s. It provided
support to enable many thousands of community buildings to be
built and/or renovated. One of the provisions of the Urban Programme
was that community/voluntary groups should not be able to sell
or use the premises at any stage in the future for any other purpose
than that for which the grant had been sought, and in order to
achieve this, The DoE required that Local Authorities ensured
that a charge was placed on the title of the building. Many groups
which own community buildings which benefited from Urban Programme
funding are unable to utilise the full equity in their building
due to the imposition of this charge. It would seem timely for
the Department for Communities and Local Government to instruct
all Local Authorities that this charge can now be lifted immediately.
Insufficient attention is given to linking capital
investment with training and employment opportunities for the
local community. During the late 70s and 80s much more priority
was given to negotiating with contractors to ensure that recruitment
for vacancies created on building contracts for example would
be opened up to local people with the requisite skills and in
addition training programmes were put in place to improve the
skills of those unable to compete on a equal basis. Positive Action
Training programmes were established to address the specific needs
of the black community who were experiencing higher levels of
unemployment due to discrimination in the education and employment
services. Although Officers do recognise the critical need to
link job opportunities with disadvantaged communities, it appears
that we have learned little from the experience of 20 years ago
and still less of that experience has been embedded in current
practice.
3. Tell us about the opportunities you've
had to influence regeneration in your local area
Clearly having the length and variety of experience
of working in a major urban area, I have been involved in many
regeneration programmes during this time. It is sad to note that
despite all the effort and level of expenditure which has been
involved, little impact has been made on the extent and severity
of multiple deprivation—generally the same areas still experience
the same degrees of low educational achievement, poor health,
poor skill levels, higher unemployment etc as they did say 30
years ago. This is a severe indictment of successive Governments
and must be cause for serious concern. One problem evidenced today
is the fact that few Officials demonstrate any awareness of what
it is like to be involved in community or voluntary sector activity.
Too much attention and resources have been allocated to the well
organised voluntary organisations to the exclusion of attention
being given to the role and needs of local community organisations.
Substantial resources have been allocated to CVSs
and other similar organisations which purport to act as capacity
building organisations for smaller community groups. Emphasis
seems to have been placed on developing Hubs and strategic level
organisations in the belief that they will nurture support and
develop the grass roots organisations. Funding advice and other
support has rarely produced positive results.
As a result of significant reductions in funding,
loan finance has become a much more prevalent feature in funding
the non statutory sector. This approach again effectively excludes
many community sector activities since they are not likely to
be able to generate income to meet loan repayments, members of
community groups are often (understandably) reluctant to take
on debt liabilities and may even be expected to provide personal
guarantees which they are unable/unwilling to give.
The combined effects of supporting capacity building
organisations in the voluntary sector and the increasing prevalence
of loan finance benefits the more successful voluntary sector
groups which have services or products which have a value in the
market place (as for example care of young children, the elderly,
or those with mental health needs or the provision of transport
services) to the exclusion of local community groups who work
to represent the needs of those in their area and who seek to
provide often small scale but valuable activities for their residents.
Funding criteria increasingly ignore the needs of such groups
whilst their contribution to the social capital in the area becomes
ever more necessary as other structures are eroded or lose their
former significance.
4. Do you think enough is done to engage local
people in regeneration projects? What can be done differently?
Clearly not enough is being done to engage local
people in regeneration projects. However the question must be
raised as to whether the emphasis should continue to be on projects
rather than on ensuring that service provision properly
meets the needs of those it is intended to serve. Surely it should
not be impossible to design services and processes for delivering
them that recognise that people are different and that some services
will need to be framed and delivered to recognise these differences?
The concept of "Barriers to Access" can be helpful in
this context, whereby Officials have to identify, at every stage
of the service planning process, how someone gets to know about
a service, how they gain access to it, use it and how well it
meet their varied needs etc. As part of this analytical approach,
again at every stage, attention is given to identifying the barriers
that can prevent different people with varied and changing needs
from gaining access to the services for a very wide variety of
reasons. Once identified these barriers can then be dealt with
appropriately to remove them and ensure full effective service
delivery.
If higher priority was given to making best use and
most effective use of the resources available to main programme
services, then perhaps there would be need less focus on remedial
projects with all their weaknesses in terms of often being short
term, additional and special?
An Exchange Programme should be established to enable
Officials of Central and Local Government to work in relevant
positions in community and voluntary sector organisations to allow
them to experience at first hand the products of their own policies,
practices and decisions. The acceptability of loan finance, the
precarious nature of other funding arrangements, the costs involved
in (often abortive and wasteful) tendering processes, the tedium
of repeated consultation procedures which change very little,
the arrogance of the assertions that community groups need capacity
building when in actual fact it is more likely that it's the staff
and others involved in or responsible for Government that need
to be able to relate and understand better how to respond sensitively
to the varied changing needs of residents in their area—would
all be seen in a different light, if Officials had to experience
them directly for themselves on a daily basis within the context
of severely limited resources (staff, premises, equipment and
finance). It is also possible that some of these inappropriate
arrangements would be quickly abandoned!
June 2011
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