Planning - the missing debate

By Kirby Swales

Whilst land use planning decisions often make local news, debates on planning policy rarely do, nor do those debates often make national headlines. This changed last weekend as the debate on the proposed presumption in favour of sustainable development came to the fore, and has intensified since. Greg Clark, George Osborne and Eric Pickles have all had to defend the policy in the face of opposition of National Trust, CPRE and others.

It is interesting to watch the terms of the debate – it is presented as housebuilders versus the protection of greenbelt land and about economic growth and meeting housing need. What seems to be missing from the debate are voices/organisations to represent cities and other urban areas, and discussions about quality.

The new simplified regime and presumption in favour of sustainable development could have equally large impacts on urban areas as on the countryside. Left to their own devices, developers and housebuilders could do great damage to the urban fabric in their pursuit of profit. In theory, the protections would remain through the adoption of local plans but in practice these could start to be whittled away without the back-up from other Planning Policy Statements. For example, a clear danger would be significant further employment land lost to residential schemes which in turn could hamper prospects for future economic growth (thereby defeating the proposed intentions of the changes). Equally, some Town Centre provision could be lost in an unmanaged way.

Neighbourhood planning may also be presented as a protection but this is still an uncertain area and they could take a long time to get adopted. Also, this is where higher level plans could present problems – what if a local neighbourhood decides it wants a different tenure balance to encourage a more mixed community? Most local plans in London contain blanket rule on requirements for affordable housing and, within that, the balance between social rent and shared ownership. Could neighbourhoods really override the density standards to get genuine family housing? The conformity requirements suggest not.

The other key issue is quality – national planning policy statements point to the need to deliver well designed buildings but it is left to local plans to provide the detail. Many do this but I wonder how successful the implementation is when many of the affordable housing developments in London seem to me to be poorly sited or poorly designed. This is in fact one of the dangers that Peter Hall warned about in his famous footnote of abstention in the Urban Task Force report

The other culprit is school building projects – often huge new investments and buildings not properly linked to their physical surroundings or effectively interacting with the local housing patterns.

CABE used to regularly assess new housing developments in the country and the majority were rated as average or poor. See here for a Northern example. The recent series Secret Life of Buildings was also a powerful argument in favour of raising the awareness and importance of design quality and putting users/residents at the heart of the planning and design process.

Others have written more eloquently about the current debate, such as Chris Brown and George Monbiot. The government has also issued a mythbuster to counteract some of the criticisms.

It is good to see more debate about the land use planning system, but what we really need is debate about what our cities and neighbourhoods should look like, and also how people can best be engaged in the process of creating them. I’d particularly like to hear more voices representing those who live and work in our urban neighbourhoods and social housing estates.

Why does it always seem to take a riot?

A friend of mine said to me on Wednesday night: ‘You work in regeneration, you must be so saddened by this’.

My first thought was: ‘I’m a human being, I must be so saddened by this’. But I took her point. And I realised that I hadn’t yet thought about it in those terms.

I live about 2 miles from Tottenham High Road. The primary school that I’m a governor of is in South Tottenham and about a mile from the High Road. I don’t claim to be a member of the Tottenham community - that sort of distance in London means that it’s a bit too far away to get involved in and know well. But I have friends in Tottenham and so my first reaction was one of shock, and then concern on Saturday night. I was kept awake by a combination of sirens, helicopters and scanning my twitter feed until about 4 on Sunday morning. The pictures of the old Co-op building were particularly powerful and saddening. A feeling of emptiness is the most thoughtful thing I can claim at that point.

That night was followed by a succession of other feelings and emotions as I watched events unfold in London and across the country. Shock, and more shock. Anger – lots of that. Surprise at the speed of it all. Frustration at people so quick to overlay their existing views onto events that were far too fluid to pin down, let alone analyse. If journalism is the first draft of history, I have no idea what to call some of those instant responses that I saw on social media and 24 hour news.

And also not a little pride and joy to see my adopted city respond in the way it did. From riot clean ups to the generosity of people towards those made homeless in Tottenham (information on how to donate here). I was constantly touched by the small and simple reactions. I have heard some critical responses to things such as the riot clean up – that it is only one group of society or that it may be an attempt to get back to a normality that benefitted them. But I hold no truck with people who reject our desire for community, safety and cooperation at times of uncertainty and fear.

And with comment of normality and community, I suppose we’re getting to how I have responded as somebody who works in regeneration. Well, for a start, I’ve stopped thinking of myself as somebody who works in regeneration. I suppose that is part of a broader debate for another day, but perhaps illustrates the challenges that a well intentioned sector got itself into. But I have a number of thoughts as somebody who works for a social enterprise that it about protecting, improving and empowering our most deprived neighbourhoods.

• Safety is the starting point. In EC1, South Islington, (admittedly with the great advantages of the New Deal for Communities funding), our success in improving that neighbourhood came from starting with safety in terms of housing, with estate security programmes, increased neighbourhood policing and increased support to local youth groups to run extended hours, detached youth work and positive youth work. This was then followed by improvements to the public realm which considered safety and the community, and also other activities that could only work when people felt safe in their area. The final years of the programme did not need to focus on safety in the same way as fear of crime was so much lower; but it took time to get to that point.
• ‘Normality isn’t good enough. Normality is the problem’. This quote came from comments in a blog by Toby Blume. I don’t mean that we should not try to return to a feeling of safety, as highlighted above, but it is clear that if there is no attempt to do anything about root causes, then we are walking into a recurrence of the same problems. Some of the answers will probably be uncomfortable for many of us, but the question of why this happened needs to be asked.
• Responsibility. Responsibility is a word that has been used a lot in the last few days. This needs to be applied to more than just parents and looters. What are the responsibilities of the state, of businesses, of individuals, of local and national government, of civil society of schools...? The phrase social contract is a good one – if somewhat burdened by a lot of history. It implies a level of reciprocity. I know from experience in interviewing individuals on a variety of research projects how quickly trust and respect breaks down when people do not feel that the contract is honoured. And I’m not talking about a welfare dependency in this instance, but a feeling that responsibility for many of our public, private or voluntary sector services can mean a responsibility to protect an institution rather than the aims of that institution. Whether it is a charity or a business, people spot that and feel let down. If you chase the profit motive alone, they lose respect and chase the product from you and not the transaction. If you protect the local council or the service alone, then they also lose that trust in you being there for their needs. So really, when I say responsibility, I mean a broader integrity.
• Regeneration came from the wrong place. My favourite, if that is the right word, diagram I have seen from the department for Communities and Local Government was one that highlighted the levels of support and the number of public interventions that were supporting ‘deprived neighbourhoods.’ I can’t find it online and am not sure it was ever published. The single most revealing thing about that diagram was that all arrows pointed from the support into the community. It looked like a target under attack. Not a single arrow came out, suggesting autonomy, determinism and power for that community. Things will only get better if we turn some of those arrows around in the way in which we help places. Not all of them, as there are places in this country which need support from the state so that they can get to a point where they might attract other forms of investment. But ‘doing to’ has been pushed as far as it can go.

These aren’t new ideas. Probably not very meaningful ones either. They are early thoughts based on a bit of experience and the collection of emotions I described at the start. They also don’t get into the broader debate about our values that has been broached in other places.

But as I write this I was reminded of a post I wrote in February 2010 about the future of regeneration. It contained the Philippe Starck quote – ‘You’ve got to keep the violence of the original idea’. That might seem inappropriate given recent events, but for me it gets a bit closer to understanding why people have become frustrated by our leaders (whether political or otherwise). We find ourselves as a society in a position that we, collectively, are not sure how we reached. It was nobody’s desire to get to the scenes of this week, yet here we are. For me, the initial desire for change and improvement has been lost along the way. And so we are left standing in the rubble of what has just burnt down, crying out for a new idea so that we can get on with the messy business of creating it. We need some inspiration.

Risk, reward and responsibility?

I went to the launch of a new pamphlet yesterday – Can Housing Work for Workers? It was published by the TUC as part of their Touchstone work, and written by James Gregory of the Fabian Society. You can read a piece about it here, if you can’t face the whole report.

The launch involved a discussion between James, Brendan Barber of the TUC, Caroline Flint MP (Shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary), and Andrew Sissons of the Work Foundation. It was a lively and interesting debate about the links between housing, employment and community.

I’ve been interested in James’ work for a while – particularly since he worked with Tim Horton on the publication of the Solidarity Society, which looked at the role of universal public services, and how it was their very universality that allowed for their success.

Something he said during the debate really struck a chord with me about how our public service landscape is changing to respond to changes to society, and that was about the transfer of risk around our society. The speed of societal change, and the impacts of those on our public services have been well described and considered by the Public Services 2020 Trust, but I haven’t thought about how those changes are impacting upon risk. Many of these societal changes have been with us for some time (deindustrialisation, for example), but they are really becoming felt in the public service environment. James talked about it in terms of employment, but I was left wondering how it applied to welfare too:

1. Employment risk. As our economy is becoming more and more structured around knowledge-based industries, the form of work is changing and flexibility is affecting how we consider employment, work and what we want work to look like. For many people that means that they don’t want a job for life, and so their careers look different and they are employed in different ways. This can be, and has been for many, a very positive change. Essentially though, risk is being transferred more from the employer to the employee: previously, the employer was more used to providing employee services (career development, social functions etc) in an environment where they could take people on for 30 years. This change works fine for those with higher skills and mobility, but our economy has not necessarily worked out how to look after those with low skills (and middle range skilled work is becoming less prevalent within the economy). Andrew Sissons from the Work Foundation talked about this with much more knowledge than I can, but that increased risk on employees means lower pay, reduced terms and conditions and very few of the benefits of the knowledge economy for those on the bottom rungs.
2. Debt risk. The changes to our public finances as a result of a whole range of factors over the last few years have seen some of the debt burden be transferred from the state to the household. This means that costs of services, such as education and pensions, are being pushed more explicitly onto individuals. This is driven by the demographics and the changing economy – the delivery of this, however, is obviously deeply political.
3. Welfare risk. Linked to the debt point and the cost, is also the role of the welfare state. The risks of providing welfare are being pushed away from government and the state to families, communities and companies. So through the DEL:AME switch and the Work Programme, the idea is that risk and reward for getting people into work lies with companies and not the state. The Big Society is about many things, but part of it is about civic society taking on more of a role and more of a responsibility. At Renaisi we’re seeing this changing model of risk and reward for the delivery of services in the partnerships we are trying to build, with the voluntary sector expected to do ‘more for less’.

As my colleague rightly points out to me, there are counter arguments to all of these being about better services and environments through increased flexibility. I’m not trying to argue that these changes are good or bad, but rather that they are happening and have implications.

What does this shift in risk mean? Essentially all of these risk movements have placed more on the individual and the family. When everything is going to plan in your life, you can manage this risk relatively easily and perhaps benefit from some of the freedoms and choices it gives you.

When something goes wrong, the risks can quite often spiral, combine and multiply. If you’re in a low paid job with few career prospects given the broader economic changes, the debt risks suddenly seem too much to consider. And so you don’t borrow for education, you don’t save for your pension and you don’t save to buy a house. You can’t afford to. This means you may well end up living in a more deprived neighbourhood, which may well not have the civic institutions, such as strong and active community groups, or local trusts to take on the welfare risks in your area – leading to problems around care, civic involvement and mutual support.

These are big, national and international changes that need to be responded to at that level.

At the community and neighbourhood level I think there are also responses to support these transfers of risk, and many councils and areas are starting to look at this. Resilience and wellbeing are talked about a lot, and are often quite nebulous phrases. The Young Foundation and CLES have both tried to address these in their work. What they demonstrate though, is that with changes to risk, come changes to responsibility and reward as well.

So resilience is often about building capacity to deal with these risks, but I also see this perhaps being about ‘time out’ and local rather than national safety nets. Some things that might need addressing include:

• A community investment fund to provide time out from having to pay your student loan, your pension and your rent all at the same time when you’ve just lost your job. This could be linked to having stronger credit unions in areas which provide responsible credit and savings. They should also have some kind of investment option within this for new businesses/ enterprises in an area.
• 'In-between’ and ‘connecting’ services that join the dots between both the services in an area, but also the social and community networks and links in an area. Public services often claim they do this, but very few do. This could be timebanking, or it could be neighbourhood or community organisers. It can also mean that other local roles, such as children’s centre managers or librarians have to spend more time on building and supporting local knowledge and connections. (See the Power Lines report from the RSA on the importance of these connections).
• A break from the caring roles that many people do for each other – and the need for this will increase, under the current system, if you care for somebody who doesn’t have a problem that might elicit a kind of ‘reward’ for companies trying to build a business model around the DEL:AME switch

Neighbourhood services, like the rest of society, are going to have to change to meet the risks and changes that our economy is creating for all of us. It’s partly about spreading the risk, and ensuring that those in the greatest need are not left holding all the negative implications of these shifts.

A big set of issues for the new, Big Local Trust to get to grips with?

Caring and optimism

A colleague and I have just finished two weeks of fieldwork for an evaluation that we’re working on for the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. We’re looking at how a whole family approach can improve outcomes for young carers in two pilot areas. This post is a quick description of some initial thoughts that have been coming back to me all week.

It is obviously too early to talk about results – although my head is full of thoughts and initial ideas about the project – but doing the work has really forced me to think hard about the caring role in our communities. Before this project we did another piece of work trying to understand how to support female carers back into work in a ward in Barking and Dagenham. A few weeks ago was national Carers Week. And this week saw the publication of the report of the Dilnot Commission. Now seems like a good time to be thinking about this.

Renaisi is an organisation that is interested first and foremost in the neighbourhood. This means we often do a broad range of things – from economic development to working with libraries, from getting people into work to supporting the need for parks and play – but what binds our work is that we look at it through the lens of the neighbourhood.

The reason why carers and caring are of great importance to deprived neighbourhoods is because the role of caring can often mean people leave the labour market – and therefore can only afford housing costs in cheaper areas. In other instances, the other issues that keep families out of the labour market, such as low skills or drug and alcohol abuse, can put added pressures on a family and increase the need for somebody within that family to take on a much greater supportive role.

I suppose the thing that has stayed with me over the fieldwork for both pieces of work is the paradox of how little confidence so many carers have in themselves, and how much so many of them do for their family. I'm in danger of sounding overly sentimental about the carers role (I've heard too many inspiring stories these last two weeks), but also of falling into the well warn blog post routine of talking about the hidden potential and capacity in neighbourhoods.

Instead, therefore, I want to consider what it means for services. So many times in our research on both projects, we have found that the soft bodies of carers and their families bash up against the hard edges of services that don’t really seem to work very well for them. What gets them through that sharp service landscape is often a single individual or project who helps them navigate the service world. They befriend them, build trust, and then walk with them and their families. This is often exactly what public servants are told not to do - don't get too involved, stay professional, provide the service. But when this other approach works, it seems to really work. I’ve seen staggering changes in attitude and confidence and outlook: people getting jobs, starting to volunteer or coming off drugs. They start engaging with their families and neighbours more. It's also not just caring that this matters for - Help on Your Doorstep is a brilliant charity in Islington that came out of the NDC programme that we ran there. It plays exactly that supportive and personal role for many people.

This matters greatly to the people that services are supposed to help, and I am optimistic that this way of working is changing how we think about public services. Agendas like personalisation and co-production appear in reality when excellent staff start to do it naturally, when we see public services that are closer to people, are built on bonds and understanding, and are delivering better outcomes. This approach, and our research would support that it is an approach that is valued greatly by service users, does not fit neatly into service management plans or traditional models of delivery. Services start to worry about the risk of getting too involved, and of not knowing when to stop working with families. These are risks, but they shouldn’t be risks which prevent a shift in service culture for families and carers that need it most. The job is to find new ways to manage and deliver this way of working, and not say that this way of working doesn't fit our current service structures

Does size matter? Which way for community assets?

Yesterday, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Institute for Voluntary Action Research released an excellent piece of new research on community assets. This was the first systematic attempt to map the whole sector, and explore key questions such as impact and support needs.

One of the most significant findings is that the biggest single group of asset owning organisations are volunteer-led organisations without any paid staff (think village and community hall committee with a part-time cleaner or care-taker). This is a contrast to the multi-purpose ‘community anchor’ that has perhaps become associated with the field. To distinguish the two categories, the researchers have come up with the labels ‘stewards’ for the former and ‘community developers/entrepeneurs’ for the latter. The research findings were launched at the impressive new Coin Street Community Centre on London’s Southbank – a perfect example of the second category.

For practitioners, this raises the question: What should an asset-building strategy be at local level? This reminds me of some of the discussions (and often debates) that were had during the delivery of the New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. For some NDCs, the focus was on the creation of large asset-owning organisations to become ‘successor vehicles’, whereas others had a more distributed model, with a range of voluntary groups owning or operating a range of smaller assets.

I am interested in the policy question of the relative advantages and disadvantages of each in terms of achieving community and social benefit.

Small is beautiful?

Sylvia Brown of ACRE made a case for the ‘small is beautiful’ approach – showing how many village halls are well used and run for under £9,000 a year, and can continue to do so with occasional advice and a means of funding cyclical maintenance costs. Assuming a typical ‘community developer’ costs £500,000 per year to run, you could fund 50 smaller, voluntary groups for the same money, which looks like a pretty good social return on the investment.

Big is best?

On the other hand, smaller asset-owning groups are unlikely to be able to produce major change in communities, nor provide a vehicle of capturing economic value from uplift (in the way that Coin Street has done so effectively). Large groups also have the resilience and capacity which many smaller groups do not, and the latter tend to become too dependent on the (over-) committed volunteer (though not always – as shown by the unfortunate fact that O’Regen in Waltham Forest has gone into administration, which I also found out yesterday).

A way forward?

Clearly, both types of asset-organisation can co-exist but practitioners and funders still face difficult choices on strategy. Perhaps one way forward is to apply the principles: ‘use’, ‘mutual support’ and ‘staged growth’ to these decisions.

The first and over-riding principle from a community point of view is whether an asset is well-used, not who owns or manages it. The aim should be to maximise the potential of assets - organisations should be challenged if they are not achieving that.

The second is that competition posed by a large organisation in a confined area could be unhealthy and damaging for smaller community organisations, but both could have their place if the larger can provide support for the smaller, for example by providing essential back office support.

Thirdly, ‘stewards’ can become ‘community developers’, but that growth should be organic and driven by the community. This was a key message of the seminar, with the most successful organisations developing in this way.

Everyone agreed for a consistent and ongoing evidence base in this area, including further surveys. That commitment, alongside more sharing and dissemination of knowledge, should help cast more light on these questions.

By Kirby Swales

Renaisi

1 July 2011

Is adult and community learning one of the bedrocks of neigbourhood improvement?

Many of the regeneration and renewal efforts over the last decade have struggled to significantly change the socio-economic prospects of residents despite major investment and attention from all levels of government.

In the EC1 New Deal for Communities programme, which Renaisi managed, we concluded that skills development was the missing link in tackling many of the remaining problems in the area.

I think one of our best achievements in EC1 was the location of a new Adult and Community Learning Centre in the area in a high-quality, bespoke building. In the first year, over 400 local residents attended courses such as ESOL, literacy and maths. Together with grants funding for individuals to buy higher level training, I believe we starting to create a skills ‘ hotspot’ in the area, as one manager put it. It was frustrating that it only opened in the last year of the programme, so we weren’t able to develop it further and see the impact.

The more we worked with the skills sector, the more I wondered why it was not more central to the official Neighbourhood Renewal strategy. Looking back, a Basic Skills strategy was of course part of the plan, as was the concept of neighbourhood learning and on-line centres.

However, it was one of a set of linear policy themes rather than seen as an essential early stage of a more complex cycle of neighbourhood and individual improvement. Where there was limited attention on skills, it tended to focus on the formal end of the spectrum, on accredited qualifications, the role of mainstream providers and basic skills.

‘Informal learning’ needs to go hand-in-glove with formal learning, and this is where neighbourhood based strategies could really work, by harnessing the role of community facilities and groups of all types. Informal Learning already makes up a lot of what is going on – think of community gardening groups, arts and crafts classes, cookery clubs, reading groups in libraries - they simply don’t give it that title, and it doesn’t tend to be co-ordinated or planned from an educational perspective.

With a small amount of steady funding and some strategic support, it could make a significant contribution to drawing more disadvantaged people into the formal skills system (ACL, FE, HE etc). It also has other impacts, for example there is a lot of overlap with the ‘Well-Being’ agenda, where one of the main delivery mechanisms is small scale informal learning activity. There is evidence that this type of activity has a positive impact on well-being. However, to be sustainable, I wonder if a stronger case probably needs to be made –about the most effective types of learning and how to create pathways to formal learning and, through that, to better employment prospects.

A new fund for informal learning has been launched recently which offers the opportunity of doing just that. This builds on a previous fund called the Transformation Fund – which has a very useful website of resources.

However, at £2.25m this represents roughly 10% of the previous fund and 1% of the mainstream Skills Funding Agency resources for Adult Learning. Unless there is a good deal more partnership working and political will, that level of resource is unlikely to realise the ambitions of the Moser report – “Unless community–based provision is enormously expanded, we will not be able to reach hundreds of thousands of people who have real needs but don’t want to go to a college.”

Work Programme – losing the neighbourhood element?

By Kirby Swales, Director of Research, Renaisi

As the Work Programme moves closer to reality, people are becoming increasingly interested in how it will work in practice. There are a growing number of research studies and commentary emerging, such as those by CLES, IPPR and IES.

The underlying question for me is whether the overall programme design will encourage providers to innovate in a way that produces the best results for clients. DWP and other commissioners are effectively delegating this task to providers, whereas previously they took the lead, either through JC+ delivery, contract specifications and/or their research and policy work. There is a risk that the system will be fragmented, and won’t create the necessary conditions for an effective worklessness ‘system’.

There are a whole range of issues for the new Work Programme, including: the nature of employer engagement and specialist support for those seeking work, links with local neighbourhoods and community groups; and the relationship with Local Authorities, Local Enterprise Partnerships and Training providers. I would like to examine one of these in a bit more detail: the role of the neighbourhood.

Over the last decade, there have been a number of programmes that have enabled employment services to be designed to work better at the neighbourhood level. This was partly based on an understanding that peoples journey to work is heavily affected by a range of non-employment issues, and that some people need extra encouragement and support to take up the help available. It was also because of the obvious concentrations of workless people in particular geographical places, and the need to join-up services more effectively.

Much of this innovation was funded by the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and New Deal for Communities programmes and pilot funding streams such as the City Strategy Pathfinders. This funding produced many examples of innovative practice, such as partnerships with social landlords, integrated skills and employment centres and organisations, provision for specific sectors or under-represented groups, small grants and bursaries, Time Banks, childcare solutions and community enterprise schemes, and so on.

A recent study of WNF found that it especially added value atparticular stages of the ‘customer journey’, notably in the early stages, including outreach and providing volunteering opportunities. A recent review of the NDC programme by Professor Paul Lawless of Sheffield Hallam University argued that worklessness services should remain a feature of neighbourhood delivery structures.

It is arguable that neighbourhood-level working can best help create supportive social networks, co-locate and integrate services in a way that makes sense locally, and is the best level to make effective partnerships with housing, childcare, education and other providers. There is also good evidence from the US that linking employment services with neighbour-to-neighbour support has positive effects.

Much of these interventions are likely to pay off in the longer-term and help prevent future problems. However, will it be possible to reconcile this approach with the financial and measurement framework of the Work Programme? If it is to happen, it will require a role for Local Authorities, and the providers and funders of training. As the Houghton Review argued, there is a need for flexibility at the local level, and it is not easy to reach out to the most disadvantaged people and neighbourhoods: “to engage them; raise aspirations; and to join up employment and skills provision with other support services to meet their needs. Maximum flexibility is required by local authorities and their partners to identify and spend funds in a way that will have the most impact.”

However, I would argue delivery and funding needs be organised at the sub-local authority level, in neighbourhoods or small clusters of neighbourhoods. Of course, these need to be within a framework of services operating on wider geographical scales, to provide economies of scale and the right specialist provision. It needs a very fine-grained understanding of a neighbourhood, and strong links between people and community organisations/ associations, to help tackle the isolation, depression and poor health that stop many people looking for work.

It is only by incorporating some of the best practice from previous neighbourhood and partnership working, that the Work Programme will truly succeed.