Public opinion: Your blogs

Victoria: One year on from Black Saturday

Last weekend, thousands of people around the Australian state of Victoria gathered for memorial services to mark the first anniversary of the Victorian Bushfires, in which 173 people lost their lives. While a Royal Commission into the causes of the Black Saturday tragedy continues, efforts to rebuild the communities devastated by the fire are well underway through the $193 million Rebuilding Together strategy.

Several communities have embraced the opportunity to rebuild, but some within these communities have been hesitant.  According to figures compiled by the Victorian Bush Fire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority, 60% of people affected by the fires will go back to their former homes and rebuild. Others are undecided or have chosen to start again elsewhere, after the events of Black Saturday made them reassess their love of the bush and the risks involved living there.

According to The Australian, this uncertainty is reflected in the appearance of the townships including Kinglake, where 38 people died, which is 'a jumble of new construction, vacant lots and "for sale" signs'. And in places like this, there is little employment aside from construction and more job options are needed for the community to be sustainable. The paper also noted that each community is recovering at a different pace with recovery in towns like Flowerdale at a more advanced staged, while Strathewen, which lost 27 people, has virtually ceased to exist.

Those who chose to return have rebuilt and have moved in or are due to move back into new homes. There is plenty of help for those who want to rebuild such as this self-build guide. But inevitably, the communities residents return to will differ from what was there previously as advice about prevention strategies, including fire resistant building and vegetation clearance, filters through to residents.

However, the slow pace of reconstruction may help to avoid the mistakes of the past when Noojee in eastern Victoria was devastated in 1939, just 13 years after its reconstruction following a previous bushfire.

Austerity in rural England…. any glimmers in the darkness?

There has been so much speculation and projection about the scale and impacts of future public austerity measures. It’s mostly pretty depressing stuff. Let me add to this! The literature on this subject has largely been silent on the possible impacts on rural people and places.

So, we in the Commission for Rural Communities have published a discussion paper, ‘The potential impacts on rural communities of future public austerity’. We prepared this following a literature review and a roundtable discussion last month chaired by Ben Lucas, Director of the 2020 Public Services Trust.

We want to help those who represent and serve our rural communities with ideas on how future austerity measures might affect rural people and places. And what they could do about it. Now is the short window of opportunity for rural representatives to consider these challenges and to act on them where possible.

Where decisions are taken locally, using the practices and tools of Rural Proofing, the more likely it is that the right decisions in the circumstances will be taken. The Total Place approach should have the potential to deliver joined up spending reductions that still maintain good service access.



New Start readers will be pleased to hear roundtable participants also focussed on questions about rural people and communities and their resilience. It was felt that government, at all levels, needed to protect, maintain and sustain the capacity of local communities to help themselves, through community development and other support.



Other highlighted areas included throwing a spotlight on a hardy perennial, trying to achieve fairer resource allocations between different local authority and other areas. And within them.

We felt there was room for delivering further efficiencies in the rural public sector, including unitary authorities and virtual unitary authorities and improving boundary coterminosities. This would demand strong leadership and collaboration.

On the basis that you shouldn’t waste a crisis we also felt now was a good time to look at more radical innovation. Maybe constructing shire mayoral/gubernatorial systems to deliver Total Place ambitions; releasing further potential from the work of parish and town councils; and also insistently taking up best practice from Beacon Councils and (Audit Commission) Green Flag exemplar projects and elsewhere.

The challenge for rural representatives, as well as public servants, is to see the glimmers and occasional opportunities through the prevailing grimness of austerity.

And that’s about as cheerful as it gets.

 

If not now, then when? If not us, then who?

How serious are we about asking the difficult questions about our futures and grappling with the issues they raise? I thought last week's Regeneration Momentum conference might offer some pointers. What it offered was in insight into how far we have to go - and a realisation that if those of us who are starting to understand this don't act, perhaps nobody will.

First, a positive. There are some heavyweight institutions, including the three northern regional development agencies, who are prepared to invest significant time and resources in looking at the future for the north of England, and the impact the recession is having. The research documents launched at the event are testimony to that.

Now some negatives. First, the limited vision. For me this was summed up by Terry Hodgkinson, chair of Yorkshire Forward, who praised city-regional governance structures because they would 'bring trickle-down benefits to towns and cities'. I'm sorry, Terry, but people have been waiting for benefits to trickle down for decades. Reshuffling institutional structures won't make a jot of difference. I want to see benefits surging up from people who are empowered to take action for themselves.

Second, the threat. I mentioned the suggestion that Michael Heseltine is going to set an incoming Conservative government's agenda in my last post, and Simon Cooke, as a Tory councillor, has made some telling points on his blog. But that's not all. Few picked up the significance of Conservative peer Lord Michael Bates's comment on the northern economy: 'Given the north has a higher share of the public sector economy, shouldn't it bear its share of the pain?'

In other words, the public sector cuts to come will hit the north hardest, and when they do, northerners should just remember what a good deal they'd had in the past. If this thinking takes hold in a new Cabinet, expect to see northern cities hit as badly by the public spending cuts of 2010-11 as they were by deindustrialisation in the 1980s.

Third, the missed opportunity.

The star of the show was Michael Parkinson, director of the European Institute for Urban Affairs at Liverpool John Moores University. His weighty report - The credit crunch, recession and regeneration in the North - was launched at Friday's conference.

Again, there were some positives. Professor Parkinson was right to criticise the political 'race to the bottom' in terms of public investment, spotlight the likely impact of the 'public sector recession', and explain how the current downturn is hitting manufacturing areas far harder than the south of England (the banks have survived, but by cutting adrift the rest of us).

The missed opportunity was to examine carefully and honestly what needs to change and how. While he and others talked about the 'model' of regeneration being broken, this was coupled with a hope that if only we could focus on economic development and keep the investment flowing we can patch it up and all will be well. To me, that's wishful thinking.

Look at what's missing from the report. Inequality gets not one mention in 100 pages of text. Poverty is mentioned once, in a description of the 'hidden social consequences of the downturn'. A document that purports to describe 'what's next' for regeneration without addressing poverty and inequality, I'd suggest, is on the fast lane to failure.

The same goes for climate change. The single mention is a passing reference to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. There's a little more on 'low carbon' - as in 'the low carbon sustainability agenda', a set of weasel words if there ever was one if you're not going to make an effort to explain how it is to be put into practice, which this report doesn't.

Search the report for concepts like 'flourishing' and 'thriving' and you won't find them. Of the three uses of the word 'green', two refer to the 'green belt'. On the other hand, the word sustainable is used a lot - without ever being precise about what it means or how it is to be achieved.

I recounted the professor's response to questions about this in my previous post: 'It goes without saying, so I didn't say it.' But when all's said and done, what isn't said is usually not done.

So what do we do?

There are three overriding and urgent challenges for public policy: how to live within environmental limits, how to create meaningful work and life chances for a generation that won't have their predecessors' access to cheap credit or affordable housing, and how to manage under a much harsher public spending regime. The task can be summed up as creating resilience: economic, environmental and social.

Think about what that might mean for a new graduate. The job you do - whatever it is - must reduce its environmental impact with increasing rapidity to meet our existing commitments and legislation on climate change. If it's in the public sector, you can expect your earning power to reduce in real terms as salaries are squeezed. If it's in the private sector, you will still have less access to ready money through loans and mortgages than those born in the 1980s, and repayment terms are likely to be more stringent. And whoever you are, you might find the safety net offered by the state (central or local) looks somewhat threadbare. So you need new ways of coping.

If we are to enjoy our lives and create great places to live in for years to come, we have to investigate and model different ways of doing things.

Not every speaker at Friday's conference was wedded to doing more of the same. Richard Brett, co-leader of Leeds Council, spoke passionately of the need for long term support for poorer communities and the importance of recognising the impact of climate change. Tony Reeves, chief executive of Bradford Council, pointed out that a low carbon society would require a complete rethinking of spatial planning and an alternative to the current commuter economy. Ed Cox, director of ippr north, revealed how community groups in Croxteth, Liverpool, had proved resilient despite the lack of investment in the past, creating social enterprises and community organisations - in contrast to neighbourhoods like Speke that had received huge amounts of investment.

Where do we go from here?

Over recent weeks I've been hugely encouraged by conversations that I've had with people who, from varying perspectives, understand both the gravity of the challenges and the need to be brave and creative in facing them. I have met people who are open to new ideas, willing to explore, and have the foresight to see beyond patching up the policies of the last decade.

I'm interested in engaging with thinkers and doers to create a new dynamic for regeneration and sustainable communities in the UK. Some of those conversations will happen via New Start magazine and the series of features I'm writing on these issues this year; others through organisations like the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. Some might happen through social media like Twitter; others in pubs and cafés. The important thing is to start drawing this thinking together and using it to create a new narrative for our communities and the places we live in.

If you're interested in being part of this, and don't just want to push your own commercial, political, ideological or organisational agendas, please let me know so we can all share what we're doing. This is about linking people with each other, not sucking them into an institution. You can contact me via Twitter or comment below, or via New Start.

Why Heseltine is wrong man to lead on regeneration

Why, given the failure of all Michael Heseltine’s prior efforts at regeneration, are we bringing him back to advise the Conservative Party on a ‘green paper’?

‘Failure’, I hear you exclaim, ‘but surely Hezza’s a regeneration superstar?’ Followed I guess by talking about intervening every verse end, clearing vast swathes of industrial land in northern cities and cutting through the ‘red tape’ by handing planning powers to development corporations. Plus Docklands of course.

Well I don’t know where to start with the reasons why Michael Heseltine is the wrong man to lead on regeneration, but here are a few good reasons:

Regeneration isn’t about buildings, land, property development or big business. It’s about people and the barriers to people succeeding in life – remove those barriers and there’s a chance of regeneration. Keep them there and all the land deals in the world won’t make things any better.

Regeneration isn’t about being ‘business-led’. Especially when the businessmen doing the leading are those with the vested interests in using the public money poured into regeneration to generate profits.

Regeneration isn’t about big, grand, landmark schemes. You can spit from the wonders of the Victoria Dock development in Newham onto the depressing sadness that is Silvertown and North Woolwich. Those grand schemes haven’t transformed those communities – worse than that, they have made them more isolated

Regeneration isn’t about knocking down the stuff you don’t like and handing over the cleared remnants to developers. Sometimes that’s right but mostly it destroys neighbourhoods and merely relocates the community’s problems

Above all regeneration is about people. Not people with nice cars, good suits and expensive haircuts. Not men who think the way to regenerate is to push out all the poor people. Regeneration is about transforming the lives of people who live in poor places – places where the schools are crap, where the only available careers appear to be drug dealer, prostitute or benefits cheat and where having a job is the exception not the rule. All the planning rules, red lines, area-based initiatives, urban development corporations, property forums and assorted paraphernalia of regeneration amount to nothing if we ignore the basics – education, skills, housing and, first and foremost, the aspiration and confidence of people in poor communities.

I don’t doubt Michael Heseltine’s business acumen. I’m sure there are good tactical reasons for the party involving him in developing policy. But regeneration needs new thinking. Thinking that focuses on the people who live in the places being regenerated. People whose aspirations are low, who see little prospect of opportunity and who get the raw deal when it comes to many services.

Rounding up a few businessmen to sit on some grand board so as to hand out some cash didn’t solve the problem in the 1970s. Or the 1980s. Or the 1990s. Or from 2000 to today. Perhaps we’ll learn now and put money and effort into regenerating the people rather than in trying to hide them under shiny new buildings.

US citizens lead charge towards better banking

A few months ago I wrote about what we can learn from the US banking system (albeit a system that caused the global credit crunch and subsequent recession). Last week President Obama announced a new "financial crisis responsibility fee" to claw back some of the public funds that US banks have received – generating up to £72bn in tax. These banks are now in sufficiently rude health to be planning to pay bonuses totally billions of dollars. There are number of things about Obama’s approach that are interesting.

The language President Obama used in announcing what is effectively a tax on banks, is pretty strong stuff. He said: ‘we want our money back and we’re going to get it’. Fairly unambiguous language. Hugely populist stuff, though hardly surprising for a president swept to power just a year ago on a platform of change. But Obama seems unconcerned with upsetting the banks and damaging a still fragile US economy. This is in stark contract with our own politicians, who seem nervous of a mass exodus of financial services to more favourable locations overseas.

The tax only applies to banks with assets over $50bn, directly targeting the ‘big boys’ but not penalising the smaller community banks (of which there are many in the States). In the US the $700bn or so spent bailing out ailing institutions went not only to the banks, but to insurance companies (most notably AIG) and the car industry. The banks have in fact paid back far more of the money they received than the other sectors, but it is the banks that are directing the public’s anger and the banks that Obama have chosen to target.

Interesting stuff and something for our timid politicians to think about as we go into the general election.

The other thing I became aware of just last week was a citizen-led response to the financial crisis. The ‘Move Your Money’ campaign  was established in response to the greed and excessive risk taking of banks that has resulted in suffering for communities in the US. It suggests that if people are dissatisfied by these banks, then they should move their money (or mortgage) to somewhere else more ethical. A simple message and a logical action to take. The campaign is attracting significant media attention and increasing numbers of people are now switching their accounts to institutions that are not paying obscene bonuses to their employees or acting in ways that harm society.

Like any great campaign, it’s so simple in conception that it makes you wonder ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ There seems to me to be huge potential for a similar campaign in the UK. Why wouldn’t people unhappy with the way banks are acting not move their accounts to better institutions? I would.

Of course we need to think some things through…like where to move our money too. And how to make it as easy as possible for people to move accounts – cut through some of the inevitable bureaucracy and research needed. But these are surely things we can accomplish if we give it some thought.

Interested in the idea of ‘move your money’?, then I’d love to hear from you. Meanwhile, watch this space.