Just what IS regeneration? James Morris, a member of the House of Commons communities and local government select committee, posed the question yesterday that experts have struggled to answer over many decades.
I was one of the witnesses called to give evidence at the first hearing of the committee’s current inquiry into regeneration yesterday. Numerous organisations have submitted written evidence – mine can be found here or on the UK Parliament’s website here, along with others’.
With me were the chairs of two of the housing market renewal pathfinder programmes, and the chief executive of the National Housing Federation. Earlier in the afternoon we’d heard from the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and IPPR North.
There was a consistent message: current government proposals are vacuous, disjointed, and fail to learn from the past. They don’t define the problem, explain why or how it needs to be addressed, or offer a coherent approach – as David Orr of the National Housing Federation pointed out, the word ‘regeneration’ doesn’t occur at all in last October’s comprehensive spending review, which is the document that really dictates national policy.
But as members of the committee pointed out, it’s all very well to say what’s wrong, but do we know how to get it right – and what is ‘it’?
Regeneration tends to be obscured with jargon and technical language – by the time you’ve gone through gap funding, local asset-backed vehicles, ‘mixed communities’, labour market analysis, indices of deprivation and more, most sensible folk have nodded off. But in the most hard-pressed areas it comes down to a very simple question: is this a place I want my kids and grandchildren to grow up in?
If it isn’t, what do you do? The sign of an area that needs regenerating is that those who can leave do so, and those without choices, income or resources remain. At its worst, you see the scale of blight experienced in the West End of Newcastle in the 1990s, where homes were famously sold for 50 pence; or the experience of the Brackenhall estate in Huddersfield, where 200 out of 1000 council homes were boarded up and new tenants would frequently be robbed on the day they moved in. You see the need for regeneration in empty town centres, boarded up shops and closed businesses.
So regeneration is about enabling such communities to recover and preventing such decline where there is a significant risk. And it’s difficult because you have to mesh together the macro and the micro – the strategic decisions about investing in housing, economic activity and infrastructure, and the very personal support that families and individuals in distressed circumstances need. As I put it last year in an article for New Start magazine, regeneration is the action of citizens and those who work with them to recreate home for new times, especially where there is poverty or disadvantage. It sounds simple, but it takes coordinated effort and resources.
So starting with the big picture, at a national and regional level we have to begin with sustainability: investing in areas that have plentiful environmental resources and the scope for developing new industries in renewable energy, food production and environmental technologies, and taking the pressure off overheated areas where resources are already under severe strain (as spelled out by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution). And at the same time we have to start with people – with long term personal development to build skills and social networks, creating opportunities and building resilience (as recommended, for example, by David Robinson). These are not alternatives – both need to happen together.
Bringing them together is investment in economic activity, both at a national and regional level to develop low carbon industries, construction and services, and at a very local level, rebuilding the economies of the most disadvantaged areas from the ground up. That process of economic rebuilding needs to be patient and painstaking and demands long term commitment by local government and public agencies. Again, both the macro and micro need to happen – both the inspiring, locally created ‘hand made’ projects and the strategic investment in skills and industries.
These things don’t happen without a clear sense of direction, both at a national and a local level. The sense of frustration that runs through much of the written evidence to the inquiry is that such a sense of direction is almost entirely lacking – in the name of localism, central government appears to have adopted a kind of corporate rudderlessness.
Such a sense of direction needs to be underpinned by an ethic of regeneration. Unless we subscribe to a Darwinian view that distressed places and the people within them should be cast adrift, then there is a moral imperative to look after those who have been failed (visibly and obviously) by the markets and let down (sometimes less visibly, but no less miserably) by public policy.
Without such an ethic driving our priorities and action, we’re left with the kind of stop-start, half-hearted programmes we’ve seen so often over the last 20 years, and with the vain hope, in the face of all the evidence, that tinkering with regional growth funds and tax increment financing and enterprise zones and all the other sweeteners for businesses and developers will eventually trickle down to make a difference where it most matters. If it hasn’t in the last quarter of a century, there’s no reason to believe it will in the next.
It reminds me of why regeneration became so in the late 1990s – looking at the legacy of all those disjointed policies and programmes (such as EZs) without enough attempt to join them up to local communities.
The problem was that in the 1980s and 1990s things like shopping malls were getting built on EZs, and locals weren’t getting a look in on jobs, let alone the unemployed. And this was in towns and localities which needed these jobs the most. i.e. large dollops of money weren’t benefiting communities nearly enough. Lets not forget this.
Regeneration/ED was becoming a profession. There is good and bad in this. Mostly good, on balance. Why this couldn’t have been a smoother transition to new policy imperatives, priorities or structures (incl localism), I don’t know. Now its all been thrown away by the coalition it seems – as all the funds have gone. The impact on the trade press (New Start and Regeneration and Renewal) is all the evidence needed in this respect.
Who really believes that the market is the only answer? of course ethics, and cooperation and second best solutions that benefit the majority rather than the minority are more important.
In the end it comes down to what kind of country to we want to live in? one that is progressive, inclusive, for all, with visibly healthy neighbourhoods and world class infrastructure and built environments? or a tired, shabby excuse for a country that has just discovered its economy is much weaker than most other major OECD nations, and that its quality of life, infrastructure and built environment are distinctly below average?