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NEIGHBOURHOOD MANAGEMENT: LINKING ‘NEIGHBOURHOOD RENEWAL’ AND ‘URBAN RENAISSANCE’
Stuart Cameron:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.Paper to Conference: Area-based initiatives in contemporary urban policy
The urban regeneration policies of the UK Labour Government of Tony Blair which came to power in 1997 were essentially defined by two key documents and the subsequent policy processes and statements to which they gave rise. These policy statements are the report of the Urban Task Force, chaired by the architect Lord Richard Rogers, entitled Towards an Urban Renaissance (Rogers 1999), and the report of the Social Exclusion Unit, which had been established within the Cabinet Office by the Labour Government soon after its election, entitled Bringing Britain Together: A national strategy for neighbourhood renewal (Social Exclusion Unit 1998)
These two reports effectively defined two separate and distinctive strands to urban regeneration policy in England, each with its own focus and its own purpose. The terms which will be used in this paper for these two strands are ‘Urban Renaissance’ and ‘Neighbourhood Renewal’.
It will be argued below that there is some merit in recognising and differentiating these two different aspects of urban regeneration. At the same time, there are some significant points of overlap and linkage between them. In particular, the concept of neighbourhood management can be seen as one of the key ‘linchpins’ connecting the two sets of policies. Neighbourhood management, together with associated concepts, policies and policy objectives and such as neighbourhood wardens and mixed communities, will be explored in some detail below. Its diverse origins, and its potential and limitations in the UK context will be discussed.
Urban Renaissance and Neighbourhood Renewal
Urban Renaissance: The purpose of urban renaissance is to make cities better and more attractive locations for the population as a whole. The focus is likewise the city as a whole. The essence of this approach is the improvement of the quality and capacity of the physical fabric of the city.
The Mission Statement for Lord Roger’s Urban Task Force was as follows:
The Urban Task Force will identify causes of urban decline in England and recommend practical solutions to bring people back into our cities, towns and neighbourhoods. It will establish a new vision for urban regeneration founded on the principles of design excellence, social well-being and environmental responsibility within a viable economic and legislative framework.
One of the most important issues which provided a background to the Report is the Greenfield/Brownfield debate. A main impetus to this debate was the publication in 1995 of household growth forecasts for the UK suggesting the need to accommodate 4.4 million additional households in the period 1991-2016.
The implications of this scale of growth of household numbers, and the requirement for additional housing and land to accommodate them, became a major issue. In particular, the possibility that this higher level of demand for housing would lead to increased house-building on undeveloped ‘greenfield’ land in the countryside was a concern. This added to the call to increase the extent to which housing in particular, and urban development in general, be accommodated on re-used ‘brownfield’ sites within urban areas. Both the outgoing Conservative government and the incoming Labour government identified a target of 60% of new housing development on brownfield land. An important element of the role of the Urban Task Force was to develop policy measures to achieve this objective. Their own assessment which they examined over the period 1996-2116 with a net rise of 3.8 million households for England (DETR 1999) estimated that current policies would produce a brownfield contribution of 55%, falling short of the 60% target.
The greenfield/brownfield debate had previously concerned itself mainly with the issue of land availability and discussions of ‘technical’ solutions to increase the supply of brownfield land, through the recyling of derelict and contaminated urban land and so on.
However, the essence of the argument of the Urban Task Force is that such an approach is not sufficient. A successful strategy must also address the issue of the dissatisfaction of many with city life and the desire of those with choice to move out of cities to more rural locations – it must reverse the trend towards counter-urbanisation. Policies must not only find more capacity to accommodate people in urban areas, but also make them more attractive so that people will choose to live within cities.
The main emphasis of the Urban Task Force report is, therefore, on a broader agenda of making the urban environment more attractive and improving the quality of urban life.
Towards an Urban Renaissance is dominated by the vision of a European model of the city. There are, for example, close parallels between the preferred model of the city in Towards an Urban Renaissance and that in the report produced by the European Commission in 1990 called The Green Paper on the Urban Environment. The city of Barcelona is explicitly identified as a role model (a former mayor of the city provides a foreword to the report), and in his own foreword Rogers states that:
In the quality of our urban design and strategic planning we are probably 20 years behind places like Amsterdam and Barcelona.
A major element is the concept of the ‘compact city’, with an emphasis on higher density urban development (especially housing development) and an integrated public transport system. There is also an emphasis on the close mixing of both land-uses and activities, and social and ethnic groups, within the city. A further focus, again strongly reflecting a European model, is the importance of the quality of public space and the public realm to the quality of urban life. This is seen as ‘regaining an urban tradition’ in Britain which has been retained in European cities, and which, implicitly at least, is contrasted with the low density, car-based, single-use zoned, socially-divided and privatised US-style city.
The key concept of Towards an Urban Renaissance is the idea of design-led regeneration. It emphasises the role of architecture and urban design:
Successful urban regeneration is design-led. Promoting sustainable life styles and social inclusion in our towns and cities depends on the design of the physical environment
Area-based initiatives do play a part in the proposals of the Urban Task Force. For example, it is proposed that Urban Priority Areas be designated in some localities. These proposals reflect the emphasis on design and physical regeneration, with the preparation of spatial master-plans, higher planning and building performance requirements, fiscal incentives and priority for public investment for regeneration and the retention of some local taxation for management and maintenance. A further policy proposal is for the establishment of Urban Regeneration Companies- arms-length companies set up by local authorities to undertake regeneration. They would be area or town-based and would include local authorities, housing associations, private developers, local community representatives and the Regional Development Agencies. Three pilot Urban Regeneration Companies have now been established in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield.
Also, the main emphasis of the proposals is not on area-based action or special zones but on improving the quality of the town or city as a whole. It is suggested, for example, that a condition of funding for regeneration will be the preparation by local authorities of a spatial master-plan – a three-dimensional framework for the whole area identifying a network of public spaces, setting new development in its context, and specifying height and massing of buildings to achieve ‘urban’ quality.
Awareness and education are given a strong emphasis. This includes improving the quality of design through the production of design briefs, design competitions, and the creation of Regional Resource Centre for Urban Development to improve the training of built environment professionals and to bridge across traditional professional boundaries. Public awareness of design is to be encouraged through the creation of Local Architecture Centres for public education,
Neighbourhood Renewal: The remit to the Social Exclusion Unit for the report Bringing Britain Together: A national strategy for neighbourhood renewal was to:
develop an integrated and sustainable approaches to the problems of the worst housing estates, including crime, drugs, unemployment, community breakdown, and bad schools etc.
The focus of Neighbourhood Renewal is, therefore, on the problems of people in the most deprived neighbourhoods. The use of the term 'estates' above suggested an identification primarily with local authority housing estates, though in practice the neighbourhood Renewal programme does cover other kinds of neighbourhood.
A first step in the development of a strategy was to examine the lessons and the failures of past urban regeneration programmes and initiatives. A number of key lessons from past programmes emerged:
The emphasis on ‘bricks-and-mortar’ in past programmes, with investment mainly in spending on buildings and environmental improvements, was criticised:
‘Often huge sums of money have been spent on repairing buildings and giving estates a new coat of paint, but without matching investment in skills, education and opportunities for the people who live there.’ (Social Exclusion Unit 1998, op cit, Foreword by the Prime Minister)
In practice this implied mainly a reduction in spending on housing renewal. Instead, attention was to shift to ‘people-focused’ measures, especially related to issues of education, training for employment and health.
The other main criticism of past initiatives was that special funding, area-based initiatives had been ‘parachuted’ into localities without sufficient participation by local communities and without sufficient ‘joined-up thinking’ linking projects to each other and to mainstream public services.
Ironically, although the switch from bricks and mortar to people-focused action was carried through, it was largely achieved through a further proliferation of special zones and funding programmes. This included a new general purpose, integrated area—based programme called New Deal for Communities – heavily funded but concentrated on a few very small areas – but also a wide range of special-pupose zones, developed largely independently of each other as different government ministries launched their own area-based programmes. Examples of these included:
Sure Start: childcare, early learning and family support for young children in deprived neighbourhoods),
Employment Zones: Employment mentoring for long-term unemployed over 25.
Health Action Zones: Local partnerships to develop and implement local health strategies.
Education Action Zones: Typically covering 2/3 secondary schools and their feeder primaries in areas of under-achievement or disadvantage.
New Start: Aimed at ‘re-engaging’ 14-17 year olds who have dropped out of education.
The Neighbourhood Renewal strand in English urban regeneration was from the beginning clearly focused on the most deprived and disadvantaged localities. An important aspect of policy development was the construction of a new statistical index of deprivation (Noble et al 2000), applied at the level of the local authority electoral ward and used to identify the ‘worst’ wards and the local authorities with the greatest concentration of the worst wards, and to target funding on those local authorities.
The Process of Policy Development
One of the most interesting features of the Neighbourhood Renewal strand in particular is the extent to which the emphasis of policy has rapidly changed over a period of little more than two years. An extensive and explicit process of policy development was, in fact, built into the Neighbourhood Renewal strategy from the beginning, and announced in the Bring Britain Together report.
In order to explore key policy issues, and to encourage the development of joined-up thinking in relation to neighbourhood renewal, 18 Policy Action Teams were identified which cross-cut 10 government departments (and involve outside advisers). These were intended to 'fill in some of the missing bits of the jigsaw and build up a comprehensive national strategy by December 1999'. A further consultation phase on the Neighbourhood Renewal strategy took place in 2000, following the publication of the 18 PAT reports. This led in January 2001 to the publication of the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy Action Plan: A New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal: National Strategy Action Plan (Social Exclusion Unit: 2001).
The Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy Action Plan clearly reflects the change of emphasis in the focus of the Strategy. While there is still an important element of area-based special funding initiatives in the Strategy, this aspect is given much less emphasis. Instead, there is more emphasis on mainstream public services delivering targets for improvement in the most disadvantaged neighbourhood, on the development of Local Strategic Partnerships, and on the development of neighbourhood management.
Public Service Agreements (PSAs) now lie at the core of the Strategy. These have established targets to which government departments have committed themselves in return for Treasury funding and ‘neighbourhood renewal has been placed at the very heart of the agenda for each department’, with targets and funding to address the problems of deprived areas. This is looked at in key five areas: employment and economies; crime; education and skills:; health; and poor housing and physical environment.
A new funding programme has been introduced, with £800 million for the period 2001-2004 for a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF). This is not, though, intended as the basis for another area-based special project funding programme. The resources are available to ‘help local authorities in the most deprived areas focus their main programme expenditures in order to deliver better outcomes for their most deprived communities’. Funding will be available to the 88 most deprived districts in England, identified on the basis of the Indices of Deprivation 2000. Resources are allocated on the basis of needs indices rather than through competitive bidding, but must be agreed by the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP).
Local Strategic Partnerships are the other main innovation, and are now seen as central to the development of the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy. They are to be established in all areas and will usually, though not always, comprise a local authority district (in some areas districts may combine). They will bring together local stakeholders from public, voluntary and private sectors, and will provide a vision and strategy for the development and regeneration of their area and a framework within which other programmes and partnerships will operate at the more local scale. They are not only concerned with the most deprived neighbourhoods, they are really part of the broad Modernising Local Government agenda. However, one of their functions will be to prepare a local Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy for deprived neighbourhood and to co-ordinate area-based regeneration initiatives.
One important feature of this change of approach is a move not only from area-based projects and initiatives towards mainstream programmes, but also from the ‘challenge funding’ approach in which local areas competed for funding – extensively used in the area-based programmes of the Conservative Government – towards a ‘contract’ approach, seen, for example, in the development of Public Service Agreements at both national and local levels. The French Contrat de Ville programme has been an influence on this (S Hall & J Mawson: Challenge Funding, Contracts and Area Regeneration Polity Press 1999, JRF Findings 359)
In the case of the Urban Renaissance strand, the process was less one of explicit policy development and more of simple delay. The ideas of the Urban Task Force were to be implemented through an Urban White Paper, but it was two years before the its final appearance in November 2000 (DETR 2000). In that time it became something of a cliché to describe the Urban White Paper as ‘long-awaited’.
When it appeared, the Urban White Paper did present many of the ideas of Towards an Urban Renaissance, though in somewhat diluted form. There were proposals for tax incentives to increase investment in the reuse of urban land and building, and proposals for new Town Improvement Zones and Urban Regeneration Companies. The powerful message of a design-led approach to regeneration, and the ideal of the European city, was, perhaps, less evident. What the Urban White Paper did do was to place the Urban Renaissance strategy within a wider context. In particular, it echoed the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy Action Plan in emphasising the importance of central government mainstream spending programmes and the development of mechanisms such as Public Service Agreements. It also discussed the Neighbourhood Renewal theme, though without really adding any further proposals to those included in the Action Plan.
Urban Renaissance and Neighbourhood Renewal:
Divergence and ConvergenceThe making of a clear distinction between these two aspects of urban regeneration is, in many ways, something to be welcomed. Too often in the past there has been a confusion of expectations about the various instruments of urban policy in the UK. The Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) of the 1980s and 1990s provide an excellent example. These were essentially a means of achieving physical renewal through commercial property development of areas of underused and derelict urban land, usually the sites of obsolete former industrial or port activities. However, they were often presented as a response to an ‘inner city problem’ which involved the concentration of economically and socially deprived and excluded populations in the inner urban areas of cities. However, they did little to directly address the of excluded neighbourhoods, and had little impact on their problems. UDCs were widely criticised for failing to achieve more for the disadvantaged residents of cities, but in a sense this reflected entirely unrealistic expectations of the policy. What was required was a more honest appreciation that what they sought to achieve was the physical renewal of inner urban areas, but that this was largely irrelevant to the deprived communities and their residents. The current pattern of policies in England allows this more explicit recognition of the different aims of ‘regeneration’.
In a sense the Urban Task Force report can be seen as continuing the approach to urban regeneration of Urban Development Corporations, in that its aim is the physical regeneration of urban areas. However, there are important elements which do stand in contrast to the UDC approach. Perhaps most obviously is an emphasis in Towards an Urban Renaissance on the ‘public’ dimension. This has two elements. Firstly, although there is discussion about ways of increasing private sector investment in urban regeneration, the approach involves a strong element of public-sector intervention, and especially a powerful role for local authorities in taking on the leadership in urban renaissance. This strongly contrasts with the private-sector focus of UDCs. Secondly, there is an emphasis on the public realm which is distinct from the tendency within the UDC approach to development to produce private enclaves relatively isolated and disconnected from the surrounding urban environment.
The Urban Task Force recognised a social dimension and talkd of prioritising social well-being and social integration. However, in effect these aspects are subordinate to issues of design and sustainability. The focus is on the improvement of the quality of city life for the population as a whole rather than on addressing issues of social exclusion and deprivation. The need for the policies in Towards an Urban Renaissance to work alongside policies with a more social focus is recognised in Rogers’s foreword:
…regeneration has to be design led. But to be sustainable regeneration also has to take place within its economic and social context. There are essential issues – education, health, welfare and security - which fall outside the remit of this report. It is important that through the forthcoming Urban White Paper and into the future, government departments and institutions combine policies, powers and resources to achieve an integrated approach in meeting the needs of urban communities.
The recognition of the divergence and complementarity of the objectives of the Urban Renaissance and Neighbourhood Renewal strands does potentially provide a valuable clarity within the development of urban regeneration in the England. Clearly, though, there are also important points of convergence.
In part, this relates to shared objectives. One important aim of both of the strategies is to foster more socially-mixed communities. The Neighbourhood Renewal strategy views the creation of socially-mixed communities, and especially the introduction of more affluent and economically-active residents to neighbourhoods with a concentration of the deprived and socially excluded, as an aspect of addressing the problems of these neighbourhoods. The introduction in to social housing in England of experiments in the application of the Delft model of more open, ‘market’ style housing allocation system (Brown, Hunt and Yates, 2000) is, for example, seen as one potential means of addressing this objective (PAT7 1999).
The issue of mixed communities is also raised in Towards an Urban Renaissance, though again with more emphasis on its implications for the quality of life in the city as a whole. Firstly, an urban fabric which includes a close mix of land-uses and activities, and of social and ethnic groups, is seen as contributing to the vibrancy and life of the city. Secondly, the social exclusion and polarisation and their concentration in specific urban neighbourhoods is seen as a threat to the quality of life of the city as whole, and as one of the factors driving the exodus from cities.
As well as having some common objectives – albeit with a somewhat different emphasis, there is also an element of convergence between the two strands in their proposals for the development and use of policy instruments. As suggested in the introduction, one key aspect of this is the idea of neighbourhood management.
Neighbourhood Management
It is difficult to provide a single definition and description of neighbourhood management. As with any concept which is contemporary and emergent, there are many different interpretations and the term is given different meanings and emphases as it is taken up within a range of policy agenda.
One way of understanding Neighbourhood Management is to see it as part of a hierarchy of change which forms the ‘Modernising Government’ policies of the Labour Government.(HM Government 1999) These changes involve the promotion of joined-up thinking, an emphasis on co-ordination and bending mainstream programmes, the movement to a contract approach and, especially at local level, the engagement of stakeholders and community participation in decision-making.
At central government level this is expressed most clearly in the introduction of Public Service Agreements. At regional level an enhanced role for the Regional Offices of Government is envisaged in joining-up policies. At the level of the local authority district there are changes in the operation of local councils – especially through the development of Community Planning, Best Value and Local Public Service Agreements, and also through the introduction of Local Strategic Partnerships. At the local level there is neighbourhood management.
Neighbourhood management is essentially about the control and co-ordination of services at the local community or neighbourhood level. There are, though, a range of possibilities within this broad concept. There is, for example, a question about the balance between issues of service delivery and governance. The emphasis might be on the quality of the package of services, or on the extent of community engagement and control in the decision-making process. This might also be reflected in the question of how neighbourhood management is delivered – whether through a professional ‘urban manager’ or neighbourhood management team, or through a local community organisation or stakeholder partnership (though these are not necessarily mutually exclusive).
Taylor (2000) identified three models for the development of neighbourhood management:
– Starting with services: service development. This involves building out from a specific service to play a wider role within the local community. The most common model is Housing Plus (Housing Corporation 1997), based on expanding the role of a social housing agency into wider community support and regeneration.– Starting with services: area co-ordination. This is a local-authority led approach in which the management and delivery of local public services are decentralised and co-ordinated at a more local level.
– Starting from communities. This might involve any of a wide range of community-led organisations, such as Community Development Trusts. The essence is the degree of devolution of power from local politicians and professionals to members of local communities.
Clearly, an important influence on the development of the concept of neighbourhood management has been the range of experiments in decentralisation of the management of local authorities, and the role of neighbourhood management as the neighbourhood dimension of the Modernising Government agenda (Burgess at al 2001).
There are, through, two other – quite different - developments might be seen to underlie the notion of urban management and urban managers in the UK. One is the growing popularity of Town Centre Managers, and the other is the process of decentralisation of the management of social housing to an estate or neighbourhood level.
Over the past 10 years or so, many towns and cities in the UK have appointed Town Centre Managers. One of main motives for this has been the competition faced by traditional central areas from large out-of-town shopping centres. Out-of-town centres and shopping malls offer a comprehensively managed and controlled shopping environment. Town Centre Management is a response to this challenge, seeking to create a shopping environment more akin to that of the shopping mall. The appointment of a Town Centre Manager provides a structure of overall management of the traditional shopping centre, which may be combined with physical improvement – pedestrianisation, the improvement to public space within the central area – and often in the UK the installation of security systems such as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). The City Centre Manager can organise collective action for individual businesses – marketing and promotion, special events etc – but it is the management of the public realm of the shopping centre which is perhaps of central importance.
Neighbourhood or estate-based management of social housing has been a feature of housing management for at least 20 years in the UK. It is most often used by larger local authorities with large housing stocks, concentrated in large estates. The impetus for the development of neighbourhood management of housing arose from the social and management problems associated with these estates, over a period when the concentration of the deprived and socially-excluded in some local authority estates was becoming increasingly evident. One of the most important influences arguing, from the late 1970s, for the development of decentralised, estate and neighbourhood management was the Priority Estates Project and the work with it of Ann Power (Power 1987). Neighbourhood management was seen as a way of providing a more responsive and effective style of management, and one in which residents themselves could participate, replacing the old centralised, bureaucratic, paternalistic styles of social housing management.
Many local authorities have now decentralised the management of all of their housing to neighbourhood level, so that it is not now necessarily a policy associated only with the most deprived and problematic estates, there is still a significant link with disadvantage, and neighbourhood management of social housing is still viewed as an important tool in addressing these issues of social, for example in the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy Policy Action Team 5 report on Housing Management (PAT 5 1999). Here it is associated with a range of related measure. These include more localised forms of management, such as the use of concierge and neighbourhood wardens (see below), again the installation and use of CCTV, and the operation of a range of new legal powers which have been made available to social landlords to ‘police’ their tenants in addressing problems of antisocial behaviour.
These rather different antecedents to the concept of Neighbourhood Management can to an extent be linked to the rather different emphases of the use of the concept in the Urban Renaissance and the Neighbourhood Renewal strands.
Neighbourhood Management and Urban Renaissance: Within the Urban Task Force report there is a strong emphasis on the importance of the management of the urban environment. It recognises that improvement to the design of the urban fabric and the quality of its buildings and spaces are unlikely to succeed without equal attention being paid to the on-going care and management of that environment.
A process of urban management is an important priority within Urban Renaissance. The Rogers report suggests this would involve a powerful role for local government and the calls for increased resources for environmental management and maintenance and more powers to require owners to maintain properties etc. It also suggests the statutory designation of Town Improvement Zones where public and private sectors share improvement costs. It calls for experimentation with the application of neighbourhood managers and management within two mains contexts: town centres and housing neighbourhoods.
The Town Centre Management concept has been discussed above; what is more novel is the idea of extending an equivalent approach to other types of area within the city, and particularly to residential neighbourhoods – not just social housing neighbourhoods but all residential areas, including the majority which are in private ownership. In England, most housing neighbourhoods have traditionally minimise collective space and the public realm, in the classic English suburb of semi-detached house in garden space is essentially divided into private, individual. However, the aim of a more compact, connected, vibrant city implies the need for a more comprehensively-managed residential environment. The more collective organisation of space implied by higher housing densities, the greater emphasis given to the quality of public space and the public realm, the management of mixed-use activities, all requires that attention is given to the management of all residential neighbourhoods as a key element in maintaining and improving the quality of the urban environment and the quality of urban life.
Again, the joining-up of services at the local level, as well as an element of ‘policing’ of the environment, as well as an element of community participation and control, would be central to this application of neighbourhood management, but with again the emphasis on improving the quality of the experience of the city for all its residents.
Neighbourhood Management and Neighbourhood Renewal: At the most local level of the individual neighbourhood and community, the move away from the ‘bricks and mortar’ approach and area-based funding is signalled most strongly within the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy by the development of the concepts of Neighbourhood Management. One of the Policy Action Teams looked specifically at this issue, and the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy Action Plan includes discussion of this idea. The nature of neighbourhood management is not significantly different:
‘Neighbourhood Management works by placing a single person, team or organisation in charge – someone who local people can turn to if they face a problem Neighbourhood managers can help focus services on resident’s priorities and customer needs by making service level agreements; running local services; managing a devolved budget; and/or putting pressure on higher tiers of Government (Social Exclusion Unit 2001 op cit, p51)
A related proposal, again examined by one of the Policy Action Teams, is the development of Neighbourhood Wardens (PAT4 2000). Neighbourhood wardens will provide a ‘super-caretaker’ role for small neighbourhoods, focusing mainly on crime and antisocial behaviour, but also on environmental maintenance.
Neighbourhood Management – All neighbourhoods, or just the deprived?
The results of a study of a sample of local authorities suggested that: There was a lack of unanimity among local authorities about whether neighbourhood management should be seen as primarily applicable to deprived areas…, or as part of a broader approach to localised working, service delivery and governance. (Burgess et al 2001). This is perhaps the key point of divergence between the approach to neighbourhood management of the neighbourhood Renewal and the Urban Renaissance strands.
It could be said that, in current Government policy in England, it is the Neighbourhood Renewal strand which has ‘captured’ the neighbourhood management concept, in the sense that plans for implementation of the concept are currently limited to areas of deprivation. There is to be a Neighbourhood Management pilot scheme with £45 million available from 2001-2004.
Applications have been invited to bid to be pathfinders in this scheme, but only from the 88 local authorities who are eligible for the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund on the basis of their high scores on the Indices of Deprivation. Similarly, £13.5 million is available to fund Neighbourhood Warden pilot schemes. All local authorities can apply, but schemes must be in areas of ‘demonstrable’ deprivation.
It might appear that, in the interests of equity this emphasis is appropriate. However, the question is whether action at the local neighbourhood level can really be an appropriate and effective response to issues of deprivation and social exclusion. The author would suggest it cannot.
There is an interesting historic parallel here. In the late 1960s and 1970s, what were then referred to as ‘Inner City Policies’ in the England went through a remarkably similar sequence of policy development. These began in the late 1960s with action zones in small neighbourhoods, with an emphasis on education and community development. Specific measures from the 1960s such as Educational Priority Areas were very similar in objectives and operation to, in this case, the recent Education Action Zones. In the mid 1970s there was a switch of focus to urban management, corporate planning of local government services and the bending of mainstream spending programmes, seen in initiatives such as the Comprehensive Community Programme and later in the Urban Programme. Again, there are close parallels with the most recent direction of policy in the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy.
However, underlying this evolution of policy, there was a powerful voice, reflected most clearly in the work of the Community Development Projects (CDPs) affirming that the problems urban deprivation were created in the structure of the wider economy and could not be effectively addressed by action within a local neighbourhood.
The kind of structural economic issues underlying urban deprivation identified by the CDPs still exist. Turok and Edge (1999), for example, suggest that since 1981 Britain’s 20 major cities have lost 500,000 jobs while the rest of the country has gained 1.7 million jobs. They suggest that ‘hidden’ unemployment in cities is very high, and that the problem is mis-diagnosed by government as lack of skills etc when the basic issue is lack of jobs.
Even more fundamental, perhaps, is the failure to reverse the trend of greater income inequality which began under the Conservative government 20 years ago. Recent evidence (Lakin 2000) suggests that this trend has continued under the Labour Government of Tony Blair, with the Gini Coefficient – expressing the degree of income inequalty – reaching a score of 40 in 1999-2000,higher than throughout the period of the Conservative government.
The point that action in local areas is relatively insignificant compared to the impact of broader economic and social policies is well made in a report published in association with the Urban White Paper (Robson, Parkinson, Boddy and Maclennan 2000):
Britain has more experience of addressing social exclusion on an areal basis than have other European countries. It could be argued that it has had more success in implementing such policies. There have been clear improvements in, and benefits from, the targeted programmes of the 1990s. However, many other public policies also influence the nature and level of social exclusion. The Dutch and the Danes may lag behind Britain in terms of designing and delivering area-based programmes, but their more regulated labour markets and traditionally greater support for welfare state services through social housing, welfare benefits, health and education systems have arguably limited the severity of social exclusion in the first instance. Inequality had not grown during the 1990s in those two countries. By contrast, the deregulation of labour markets and reductions in the nature and level of support for welfare state services arguably contributed to the growth of inequality in Britain during the same period. Area-based approaches are clearly valuable ways of addressing the problem of social exclusion. But the European experience emphasises that mainstream programmes are the more important factor. The wider comparative lesson is that prevention, rather than cure, may be the more intelligent strategy. (p44)
It is clear that the emphasis of current Government policy is on the use of neighbourhood management as a tool to address the problems of the most deprived and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The author would suggest that this is not the appropriate emphasis, at least not if it is part of a Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy which continues to emphasise action at the local level. Rather, it is the objectives of the Urban Renaissance strand which, realistically, are more likely to be achieved through Neighbourhood Management. The application of Neighbourhood Management is more likely to succeed in improving the quality of life in the central areas, the public spaces and the ‘ordinary’ residential neighbourhoods of English cities than it is in addressing issues of poverty and social exclusion.
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Robson B, Parkinson M, Boddy M and Maclennan D (2000): The State of English Cities London: Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions
Rogers R (1999): Towards an Urban Renaissance: The report of the Urban Task Force London: E & FN Spon
Social Exclusion Unit (1998): Bringing Britain Together: A new strategy for neighbourhood renewal Command Paper 4045, London: Cabinet Office
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Turok I and Edge N (1999) The job gap in Britain’s cities: Employment loss and labour market consequences London: Polity Press
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Workshop 2 |