Hands up, who wants to take responsibility for co-delivery?
I've been reading a recent, welcome but slightly underwhelming paper on co-production from ippr, Capable communities. It includes this statistic: eighty-two per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the following statement:
'Individuals and communities should do more to help the police cut anti-social behaviour and crime.'
I can't be expected to resist making a comment about the wording of the survey question, because it reflects the language used throughout the report: what can it mean, 'communities should do more to help the police'? This is new Labour reification of 'community,' implying incontestable agency to batches of local people who may have no grounds whatsoever for reaching consensus on local issues. I was quoting the excellent Jeremy Brent on this just a few weeks ago.
It is when you see such uses of the C word to imply policy knowledge put forward by a think-tank that you realise how ineffectual the community development field has been in challenging shallow communitarian rhetoric.
Anyway, I was struck by the question because in presentations for several years I've been referring to policing as an early example of the co-production (or co-delivery) principle - an example which probably dates back to the 1980s in the UK. Someone somewhere pointed out that the police do not have sole responsibility for producing safety on our streets; and that single insight probably gave rise to a significant transformation in the delivery of local policing. The fact that the process required public investment in several new branches in 'the family of policing' - community support officers, neighbourhood wardens and so on - is often conveniently overlooked.
So successfully have the police and media combined in building up this theme that while the police are more heavily funded than ever before, 82% of us agree that we should all be playing more of a role in reducing anti-social behaviour and crime. I'm surprised at the figure, with only 3% disagreeing.
A couple of concluding thoughts -
(i) Until people in policy-land stop implying that there are things called communities which can be called on to voice an opinion and take uncontested collective action that will be acceptable to the state, we're going to see neither genuine empowerment nor meaningful co-delivery.
(ii) The survey asked four questions about attitudes to responsibility for services. As the paper acknowledges, a substantial proportion of people responded 'neither agree nor disagree' or 'don't know' (between 14% and 39%). This suggests that many people may not have thought about any model of delivery of public services other than the one they currently pay for, if that. And yet still we have an education system from which many people emerge with no idea how public services are funded or on what basis they are provided. Policy wonks either can't grasp this, or they're comfortable with it as a form of systematised disempowerment from the processes of democracy.
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It is my sad duty to report the closure of the West Rhyl Community Company (WRCC) due to financial difficulties and lack of funding.
WRCC has, for the past eight years, worked very positively for the community of Wales’s most deprived ward, providing the local community with a voice, a voice that may otherwise have gone unheard. The company has taken on all issues of concern ranging from livability issues to environmental concerns. The work they have done has been outstanding.
In a ward where child poverty is currently 80% it has provided a children’s activity project, a parent and toddler project and activities for children during the school holidays. It has provided computer access to all members of the community at their premises. Its neighbourhood workers project, that has been active for the past three years, has provided the community with a link to the authorities as well as other local and national organisations and during this time carried out an in depth survey of the needs and desires of the local community.
Indeed, the project appeared on the Channel 4 programme The Secret Millionaire and its neighbourhood workers were honoured as community champions by the prime minister at 10 Downing Street in 2009.
Having been employed by WRCC for almost four years as a neighbourhood worker, I would like to say a big thank you to my partner in crime Tony Cheetham, our company secretary Julie Simmonds and a very special thank you to Lynne Hudson our managing director. Lynne has put in hundreds of unpaid volunteer hours and has been the mainstay of the company from day one. I sincerely hope she will continue to be involved in community work. We cannot afford to lose her expertise.
Self-sustainability has always been a major problem for third sector organisations and much larger ones than WRCC have failed due to lack of funding.
Rhyl has seen a great many changes during its relatively brief lifetime. From the halcyon days as a Victorian seaside resort to the ‘cheap and cheerful’ boom in domestic holidays during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Sadly, the current situation of poor quality accommodation, a high proportion of Houses in Multiple Occupation, absent landlords, poor facilities and high levels of poverty all add to a bleak landscape with poor street lighting and litter strewn alleys.
A once thriving area, it now defines perfectly the term Dickensian. Housing, accommodation and the visual appearance of the neighbourhood now make us a poor relation to other seaside resorts along the North Wales coast.
However, all is not lost. The Welsh Assembly Government is injecting millions of pounds into its Strategic Regeneration Area and Rhyl is a priority. Poor housing is being bought up and either demolished or retro fitted and new green spaces developed. At the same time a new community company called West Rhyl First is being formed, of which I am proud to be one of the founders.
I look forward to writing about the rebirth of a seaside town and I hope you will follow the story as it unfolds.
The March issue of New Start magazine reported on Rhyl in its feature Revisiting the poorest.
I’ve been involved in the replication of social enterprises and co-operatives since 1998: as a member of a worker co-op that was licensed from another successful original worker co-op (which led to my being asked by some to comment on the failure of the Whole food Planet franchise that was based loosely on it earlier this year); as a manager of one of the regions of the ill-fated Aspire: the first attempt at creating a formal franchised social enterprise in every region of the country; involvement in the national social franchising programmes that ran in the early 00’s; and in supporting groups to evaluate social franchise offers as well as developing their own.
In all these instances I’ve been struck by the baggage associated with the phrase 'franchise' – people seem to think that the only way to replicate a successful model is to do a McDonalds on it, but actually there are lots of ways that such enterprises can be replicated and duplicated elsewhere.
I recently participated in a 2-day residential on social enterprise replication run by Unltd Advantage – a welcome opportunity to reflect on my own knowledge and experience built up from firsthand experience and self-directed learning (especially as I’m currently writing a 5,000 word essay that will be critiquing current theories, models and tools for social franchising).
And while the formal content may not have offered much new that I hadn’t already educated myself in, including how we identify and recreate the ‘magic dust’ that makes our enterprises successful, the opportunity to spend some time exclusively immersed in the subject matter, and to share stories and ideas amongst the other participants did make me realise something.
Despite there being a multitude of models through which successful models of social enterprise can increase their impact in ways that they could never do if they remained as a single entity, the biggest threat to this being achieved is our egos.
People can be extremely precious about the enterprise model they’ve developed and aren’t always happy about the chance that in offering it ‘out there’ in some way for replication in ways other than in very formal command and control ways on their part, perhaps there’s a fear that they’ll lose control of it, that maybe others may be able to improve on it, and that it will mean less reward and kudos for them personally and individually.
But if, as social entrepreneurs, we’re motivated primarily by the needs we see in society, shouldn’t we welcome any and all opportunities to increase the impact in addressing those, even if that means copying someone else’s model or accepting that our own approaches can be improved on?
Measuring community cohesion is never going to be a straightforward task. People and their intricate circumstances are difficult to place into tidy tick boxes.
It is widely recognised among regeneration organisations and local authorities that there is a nervousness about sharing findings about cohesion. It seems that unless research results are wholly positive with crystal clear recommendations, we are reluctant to promote them and open ourselves up for attack or expose our neighbourhoods as anything less than harmonious.
But this cloak and dagger approach to cohesion could mean that valuable lessons are being lost and that shared issues that could give warning signs about vulnerable communities are going under the radar.
At the housing market renewal pathfinder in Oldham and Rochdale we’ve taken up the challenge to change the culture on the complex conundrum that is community cohesion.
Transparency is the name of the game. With matched funding from the Tenant Services Authority’s innovation and good practice fund, with contributions from our two local authorities, we commissioned seven different cohesions projects which will be independently researched and evaluated. The findings will be revealed at a special conference in Manchester this month where we will launch a best practice website. The aim is for other organisations to use the website to share their findings and start a peer community where we can openly discuss what works and importantly what doesn’t.
We don’t expect this to be a quick fix to the challenge of creating cohesive communities. It’s a start towards getting a better understanding of some of the issues that can make a difference whether it be around the design of a housing development, mediating a dispute within a community or a philosophy project that builds bridges between the young and old.
We know that there are risks. Some of the findings will no doubt confirm that certain projects have not worked as expected and may expose some harsh realities and others may show some positive surprises. If we knew the answers from the outset, we wouldn’t be scrutinising them.
Striving to find and share best practice is even more relevant in a time of falling public sector resources. And now that all local authorities are expected to measure the impact of their activity for the new comprehensive area assessments (CAA), we think the conference and website will be extremely informative for anyone working in this field. We are mirroring the questions used in the national Place Survey, so that we can clearly demonstrate if perceptions have improved around those issues such as sense of belonging and satisfaction with a local area as a place to live.
The timing couldn’t be more crucial. It is widely assumed that the fall-out from the recession will strike the hearts of poorer communities and it’s likely that from next year a lot of public sector support for these areas could also be withdrawn. There is a serious concern that this increased polarisation could have detrimental effects on cohesion, creating tensions between communities as the allocation of resources comes into sharper focus. The best practice learned from organisations around the country will hopefully help us all to get smarter about how we invest in and tackle those tensions.
To find out more about the Cohesion Counts conference on 25 March visit www.cih.org/events/conferences/CohesionCounts10.
I know participatory budgeting is, to many, a rather artificial, over-engineered and fashionable an approach to community development.
To a ruralist, like me, it might also appear to be exotically urban with its case studies and heritage from Porto Allegre, Berlin, Seville and closer to home in London, Newcastle and Southampton.
But last month I spent a few hours hearing how participatory budgeting is beginning to flourish in the perhaps unlikely hot house environment of parish and town councils.
In a small seminar hosted by the National Association of Local Councils and the Participatory Budgeting Unit I heard how parish councils in Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Cheshire and Herefordshire are exploring participatory budgeting. The results are leading to more interest and engagement from previously apathetic local residents. It is resulting in the novel situation (for some places) of local people actually talking to each other about local issues. Sometimes it is also bringing together the principal local authorities and the parish and town councils, together with their respective councillors, in more supportive relationships than before.
County Associations of Local Councils are finding participatory budgeting a great way of energising their member councils. And the more I hear of their experience, the more it makes sense. Parish and town councils are often the right scale to deploy participatory budgeting. They usually cover distinct geographical communities and their councillors know many local people and are able to mobilise them into participating, into deciding how public money should be spent locally. Whether this is local people’s own money (the parish precept added on to their Council Tax bills) or else some external pot of money.
Yes, there are still challenges aplenty. From suspicious councillors to dyed in the old wool parish clerks. But the results are starting to confound sceptics. In particular, participatory budgeting, when done well, leads to plenty of enthusiasm for projects and those projects being far more rooted in and owned by their local communities than would have been the case if they had been decided by public officials and by ‘the council’.
Some of us at the seminar began to explore whether this same approach to direct democracy could in future be applied to the Total Place initiative we keep hearing so much about. For example, using the structures of parish and town councils to pull local people together to help decide how public budgets should be spent locally. And ‘locally’ in this context should mean a defined geographical community such as a village or a town rather than a more distant local authority level.
Could directly involving local people in budget and allocation decisions, particularly during these tough times for public expenditure, be part of the answer to the democratic deficit evident in local representative democracy?
Further information on how participatory budgeting can and is working in rural England can be found in the recent report from the Commission for Rural Communities, ‘The experience of Participatory Budgeting in rural England’. This is downloadable from: http://www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk/events/participatorybudgeting
Lies, damn lies and statistics – the famous phrase popularised by Mark Twain popped into my head during a recent conference.
Not, I hasten to add, because I thought anyone involved was lying.
It was, in fact, as a result of the way one of the speakers at the Economist’s third annual sustainability conference used some statistics that, on first glance, looked really impressive, before going on to reveal the bigger picture.
Unilever chief executive Paul Polman told delegates how the super-brand, and home of everything from tea bags to toothpaste, had cut its direct environmental impacts. Since 1995, he said, Unilever had slashed CO2 emissions from energy by more than 40%, waste by nearly three quarters and water by 65%.
Pretty impressive figures. But put them in context, as he went on to do, and the rest of the story is revealed.
The company’s direct environmental impacts make up just 3% of Unilever’s total carbon footprint.
Around a quarter comes from Unilever’s raw materials and the supply chain. But the main chunk, some 70%, is generated by consumers using Unilever products to cook, wash their clothes and clean their homes – and then disposing of them.
That’s a big figure. And here’s an even bigger one - on Unilever’s website it states that ‘160 million times a day, someone, somewhere chooses a Unilever product.’
Hundreds of millions of products plus 70% of total carbon footprint is quite an alarming equation.
Mr Polman’s point was clear. They may have made inroads into cutting the carbon contribution of their facilities but it’s not just the environmental cost of sourcing, making and distributing these products – it’s we, the punters, using the detergent or heating and eating the soup and what we do with the packaging afterwards.
‘We know that consumers will not compromise on price, quality or convenience for “greenness,”’ Mr Polman claimed. ‘Sustainability has to be built in to the design of the product.’
So how do you do that? Both Mr Polman and fellow speaker, Julian Walker-Palin of fellow brand behemoth Asda/Wal-Mart, talked about ‘choice editing’ whereby companies or governments make the climate change choice for consumers, such as Australia phasing out the standard light bulb from the market in favour of energy efficient alternatives.
If an entire continent switches to energy-saving measures and 160 million people opt for the detergent with a third less packaging, therefore taking a third of trucks off the road, then those choices start to add up.
Or to put it another way, Mr Polman suggested a slightly more upbeat equation:
Consumer products X Small everyday actions X Billions of people = A big difference.
Which is the kind of ‘math’ we should all like.
More people and agencies in the field of regeneration are either recent converts to, or are now honing in on poverty and inequality more. Furthermore, as sluggish economic performance continues and public sector cuts loom, we are all beginning to fret about what this may mean for people, places and regeneration more generally. A cruel irony is developing. Just when demand for regeneration is going to increase and there is more concern - there is going to be less money to do anything!
However, I do really get irritated with some of the more recent converts to tackling inequality. Excuse me - but where were you when you had significant resources, power and policy influence in the good times? It’s a bit rich that you now are saying we must now do something. Come on! I think all of us in regeneration need to start having a good look at ourselves, get some real values, be more direct, and make some bold and distinct policy choices.
However, before I explore these choices, lets get a few things straight. Successive regeneration programmes such as City Challenge, SRB, Neighbourhood Renewal, New Deal for Communities etc did do a job. Also tax credits, and other national policy programmes, including the Future Jobs Fund continue to do good work. Without these interventions there is no doubt that things would be a lot worse.
However, these measures were mostly tackling the symptoms of inequality; policy pygmies working in the land of giant behemoths. Huge iniquities as regards the social and geographical aspects of economic growth (in terms of wealth creation and accumulation, as well as significant cultural, family and community issues) dwarfed these well intentioned policies.
Of course, many of these recent regeneration converts to poverty and inequality were working with policies which they genuinely thought were and would work. However, at the same time, many others were arguing with passion and had a value set which held true to the notion that more needed to be done. These others identified with the despair within a culture of unemployment, ill-health, family breakdown, and crime. They witnessed wealth generation for the few, passing many communities by. They recognised that renewal was often fleeting and short lived. They heard about empowerment but did not see any power shift. They hoped for the trickle down but found a drip.
They included local people, community groups, voluntary groups, businesses, enlightened consultancies, think tanks, academics, campaigners and many public officials. They had values fuelled by an anger and frustration with inequality, the culture of poverty and an abiding passion to do something about it.
These recent converts to tackling inequality need to get the right values, to match their conversion. They need a set of values, which drive what they do. Values which keep them focussed on the tackling inequality in the hard times ahead. This is not about following convention, the rules, or formula. Bankers followed the rules, as did MP’s with their expenses, but they both had an absence of values or proper principles with which to gauge right or wrong.
For those involved in tackling inequality we have a choice and there are sides to take. It’s a choice between on the one hand, a conventional detached approach which is imbued with managerialism, process, formulaic ways of doing things and limp compassion. On the other, its a choice of creating a new activism, with bespoke approaches which are direct and driven by a value set which identifies with inequality and the culture of poverty and is angry enough to keep on doing something about it, with enduring effect.
Which side are you on?
The start of 2010 brought with it the popular mantra of ‘business as usual’, with the very institutions responsible for the downturn leading the rallying cry.
In reality I don’t think it’s that easy, as consumers and citizens are sceptical about a quick return to the business status quo and are now looking for something different. They are demanding a new balance that puts community ownership, accountability and consideration of the wider social and environmental impacts of business choices ahead of profits generated at all costs.
This is as relevant in the ‘public service’ where, because of anticipated cuts in expenditure, there is already increased pressure on authorities to improve value for money through greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness, as well as by finding new and better ways of meeting local needs.
Difficult times in the past have often led to unplanned kneejerk responses by public bodies, slashing budgets and cutting levels of service. However, in my experience, social enterprise provides us with a great alternative to deliver these services. It gives the people who lead and work in them a way of bringing about positive change through enterprise. They offer democratic control and equitable ownership and enable beneficiaries to shape the way those products are delivered. They often empower local people to use their knowledge, experience and judgement to create new solutions to long-standing problems.
Social enterprises could be the key to the transformation of public services because of their focus on providing effective, tailored services within a managed cost base. One example is Halo Leisure, a charitable ‘leisure trust’, with a social enterprise structure. It was established in 2002 as a solution for sustainable, inclusive, high quality sports and leisure services at a time when Herefordshire Council was no longer able to prioritise funding for this area.
Eight years on and Halo is providing excellent services, generating cost efficiencies, operating sustainably, while running a community and customer-led business.
It has over 1.6 million customer visits each year, manages nine leisure centres for the council, boasts a turnover of £6.7m and employs almost 200 full time staff. All profits are used to improve provision with around £3.7m reinvested to date.
But a major barrier to extending this approach is public sector commissioning practice. This tends to favour large scale contracts and contractors, often covering extensive geographical areas. The logic is that larger contracts achieve greater economies of scale and cost less to manage than a multitude of smaller value contracts. But this misses the value of having services delivered by businesses that are close to communities. It also forfeits a major opportunity for the public sector to multiply the local economic impact of its spending.
Many public bodies continue to award contracts on the basis of unit cost calculations alone, ignoring the added value social enterprise providers can bring. The way forward must be for public bodies to award contracts against a wider set of criteria to include price, quality and community benefit.
I believe if we utilise the still considerable resources within the public sector to invest in and drive forward social enterprise, we can positively address the negative impact of the economic climate over the last two years.
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With a general election on the way, all parties are talking a great deal about public service reform. We all know that such reform is important, particularly in the current economic climate when the biggest challenge to public finances is to do more with less while continuing to provide high quality services. Whatever the outcome of the election, a new government will have to rise to this challenge.
London’s boroughs have long been making the case for devolution, and last month, London Councils launched its Manifesto for Londoners, setting out radical but practical steps on how to help local authorities deliver even more for their residents.
The manifesto calls for greater devolution of powers and some budgets from central government and quangos to local authorities across a number of different areas including housing, transport and policing.
Joining up public services in a local area can provide a multitude of benefits - not just in terms of better services tailored to the individual needs of local people but also, as importantly, delivering them at a lower cost. And nowhere is this principle more evident than in the fields of housing and climate change through retrofitting homes with energy efficient measures.
Climate change is a subject that has not been far from the political and social agenda of recent months. The climate change rhetoric has become more prevalent in parliament and in the media and has been transferred into the minds of local people.
Londoners are becoming much more engaged about ways in which they can help. Playing their part in reducing their own carbon footprint by using public transport or recycling more can have positive impacts on life in both the long and short term. Through this, ways of making homes more energy efficient and reducing emissions from residential buildings have also become more viable. Through retrofitting energy efficiency measures into homes, savings can be made both for the planet (in terms of carbon emissions) and people’s pockets (in terms of savings on energy bills).
Energy efficiency retrofitting is the process of reducing emissions and cutting energy bills through measures such as better insulation. It is also the biggest single way councils can work with residents to cut carbon emissions and reduce fuel bills. As well as improving insulation the process also includes installing radiator reflector panels, draft stoppers or energy efficient light bulbs.
The way in which national energy schemes have been implemented has often meant that London has not received its fair share of funding for efficiency programmes. It is more important than ever that through the manifesto - and working with the mayor of London - we have begun to develop a London-wide programme.
London boroughs and the mayor are working in partnership to create an integrated programme to carry out retrofitting across the capital. The system has been tested in three trial areas and is now being introduced into nine boroughs to find the best way to operate such an ambitious programme. In all, 10,000 homes will be improved prior to a wider roll out across the rest of the capital.
But we want to go even further. As proposed in our manifesto, we believe that London’s boroughs, working in partnership with the mayor, can deliver retrofitting to 1.8 million homes by 2015.
However, this can only be achieved if government devolves London’s regional share of relevant funding pots, along with its share of utility obligations, to local government in the capital.
We also propose that boroughs should be given an efficiency incentive by being allowed to keep a share of the savings that retrofitting homes would produce. This would mean that there are cyclical benefits to this scheme – with money being put back into a local area.
Energy efficiency retrofit programmes are just one of a number of ways that London is working to address the issue of climate change. What the Manifesto for Londoners shows is that every aspect of life, be it housing or health, is linked. Through making small changes to their home or to their lifestyle Londoners will begin working towards a greener future.
Working effectively, efficiently and most importantly collaboratively the picture across London can stand as an example to the rest of the country to show how devolution can improve the lives of all residents.
Ahead of last week’s Region of Sanctuary conference, Radio Leeds devoted a news slot to the City of Sanctuary movement, which aims to create a culture of hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees.
In a later phone-in show on the radio station, a man pretending to be Craig Barnett, one of the City of Sanctuary founders, called in. The imposter told listeners that the movement was about flinging open the borders of Britain to all.
The incident highlights just what City of Sanctuary is up against. Media coverage of asylum issues is dominated by lies and misinformation, creating a culture of vitriol and venom towards those seeking refuge in this country.
Indeed there is so little information about current policy that most people believe asylum seekers are taking the jobs of local people, when in fact their right to work in this country was removed in 2002.
City of Sanctuary is, co-founder Inderjit Bhogal said, a movement of culture change, to ‘challenge hostile attitudes and provide another language in the asylum debate’. The notion of providing sanctuary to those whose lives are in danger is thousands of years old, he told an audience of delegates in Bradford.
Throughout the day’s conference, speakers returned again and again to the subject of rising destitution; 48% of asylum seekers, refused asylum seekers and refugees in this country were found to be destitute in a survey last year. Cuts to the allowance of asylum seekers and their inability to seek work are exacerbating the problem.
During a workshop about tackling destitution levels within our cities, a delegate from a local government office sounded off about the ‘political’ nature of the debate, warning delegates to steer clear of such talk if the movement wants to continue to receive support from local and regional government.
City of Sanctuary is a non-campaigning, non-political movement which has gained local support precisely because it steers clear of the political hot potato that is asylum and migration policy.
It is hoping that by appealing to people’s basic humanity it will create a cultural mind-shift in the treatment of those fleeing persecution.
As last week’s conference showed however, it is not easy to avoid being political in the face of government policy that has driven asylum seekers into destitution and a media in which few dare challenge the myths the issue has generated.
Sanctuary, as Mr Bhogal says, is a simple and ancient idea. In this country however it is now more associated with donkeys, while the simple act of helping those in need of refuge has turned into a complex political issue that few outside of the third sector are prepared to touch, let alone tackle.
As anticipated the Tory planning green paper is fundamentally an anti-development document, based on the premise that its power base in the rural areas and small town does not want housing growth.
It has no practical proposals for positive planning. To satisfy the nimbies it removes powers from the centre and places them in local communities. This sounds okay but in fact it is partisan.
There is no statement that more housing is urgently needed, nor any serious strategy or mechanisms to enable it to happen. The abolition of the regional planning tier makes this transparent. The financial incentive for local authorities to permit development is just too small to overcome the scale of local opposition in the countryside.
Some measures are welcomed such as the presumption in favour of sustainable development (if defined in a comprehensive way), reinstating the needs test for out of town retail, and abolishing the Infrastructure Planning Commission.
None of these measures will please the property lobby, but will they apply in the inner cities? The scenario the Tories were clearly thinking of is the Tory shires in the south east, not the homeless or the needs of Labour-controlled inner cities.
For example, one strongly suspects the third party right of appeal will not be encouraged in central and inner cities where the big commercial developers and landowners operate and where local people are often opposed to high value development gentrifying their neighbourhoods.
The Tories want to have it both ways on the third party right of appeal. If local authorities give in to financial incentives local people can still put the block on development. This might be regarded as a progressive measure if it not the for the fact that the Tories probably anticipate losing much of their local authority base over the next years and this gives their nimby allies a lever to block development.
What we really need is a positive approach based upon new models of housing delivery including wider use of community trusts and housing associations, and strong partnerships between local/regional and national government to meet housing and employment need in a sustainable and locally involved way.
Government budget cuts threaten the nine life-saving emergency refuge places for the 100,000 children under 16 who run away each year in the UK. 30,000 are 12 or younger.
Jobs must go hand in hand with houses if we are to avoid new sink estates developing.
That is the message Business Voice WM, the united voice of business in the west midlands, has been seeking to get across to government. Indeed it is the major theme of a recent submission we made to our regional select committee of MPs currently conducting an inquiry into Planning for the Future.
But equally it would apply across the country. Where unemployment and a lack of hope take hold you end up with a fractured society – the grim inner-city estates and soulless tower blocks we know so well.
The lessons of the past – when land for housing seemed to take very little cognisance of the need for land for local jobs – meant these new housing areas became economically unsustainable in the medium to long term. This led to ‘negative life chances’ for people living on these estates – a euphemism for unemployment, vandalism, criminality, drug abuse and poverty.
The estates and the people in them became a drag on the economy, holding back greater prosperity for all. The residents – including a significant number of single parents, feral children and Neet teenagers – have to be supported via benefits; public agencies spend a disproportionate amount of money on support and intervention.
The estates themselves become run down, a sorry panorama of boarded-up homes and abandoned shops, and end up being demolished long before their time. Each is its own tragedy – a sad failure and an indictment of poor planning and poor policy delivery.
Today we are building far fewer homes than we need and there is a growing desperation to do something about it. And in some quarters there seems an equal desperation to throw up housing schemes just about anywhere with no real thought put into them, to skimp on good planning, standards and design. That would be a recipe for disaster.
What we need is to create communities and that means providing work for people living there. It also means a pleasant environment, leisure opportunities… everything that the ordinary person in the street aspires to. But mainly it means jobs. Because without jobs there is no mortar to keep the bricks together.
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Channel 4’s Tower Block of Commons saw four cross-party MPs swap high profile politics and expenses for low incomes and benefits.
From the ‘ivory towers’ of Westminster to the tower blocks of some of the country’s most run-down areas, it was classic fish out of water stuff, with the added schadenfreude of a political spin.
Moving to Hull, Birmingham and London, Labour veteran Austin Mitchell, Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten and Conservatives Tim Loughton and Nadine Dorries (who replaced Iain Duncan Smith after his wife became ill) may have felt they were more inmates than housemates after handing over their mobile phones, Blackberries and cash.
But then as one resident tells her political lodger of her home: 'You don't have to be in prison to be incarcerated.’ Candy, a resident of the much-maligned Goresbrook estate in Barking echoed the sentiment, saying of her flat: ‘It isn’t my castle. It isn’t my boudoir. It’s my prison.’
For the MPs, this was a flying visit – Loughton later describes it as being ‘parachuted in’ – but apparently not temporary enough for Mitchell, who only agreed to participate if he could live in an unoccupied flat with his wife, and even escapes to dine with friends one evening.
Loughton was perhaps most interesting when, Donal MacIntyre-style, he interviewed gang members in Birmingham’s New Town estate, admitting he could understand drug lords defending their turf but the logic of postcode wars baffled him.
His answer was arguably to be found in Oaten's temporary home back in Barking where violence had erupted in the hallways and the police called. The MP comforted a crying child who told him she was scared, prompting the question - when children are alienated and frightened by their home environment, is it really such a stretch to the concept, right or wrong, that gangs represent a modern day self-preservation society?
‘They were amazed I could load a dishwasher, eat baked beans and watch Big Brother,’ Oaten says, in his testimonial on Channel 4’s website. ‘They thought I would have a butler and never cook for myself.’
But if indeed his new ‘housemates’ did have lofty preconceptions, Oaten admitted in the first programme to some equally entrenched stereotypes, predicting he would probably be ‘eating a lot of McDonald’s and watching Coronation Street’. Which sounds quite cosy compared with the reality of mould in the bathroom and youths throwing homophobic abuse at him on day one.
But he did manage to get residents to set up a community group to discover the fate of their damp-ravaged building which resulted in them shouting a literal rallying cry outside Number 10 in protest against central government taking money from social housing rents which, the council argued, could be better spent on maintaining and renovating its flats.
In South Acton, Dorries had emphatically dismissed her initial notion that the council estates of today are the same as the ones she grew up on as a child, by the final show.
She spent her last night in an over-crowded shared flat with five young lads, including cannabis user Jonathan, obviously bright and articulate but unable to hold down a job since being expelled from - and emotionally scarred by his experiences of – school.
She clearly took to him, and went on to take him to the House of Commons to meet Tory leader David Cameron. According to the closing credits, she was also arranging to take him to rehab.
Meanwhile, Mitchell drummed up publicity to highlight the cause of the Chill Out youth centre which had shut due to lack of funding. It remained closed according to the final credits, prompting me to hope that one of the Secret Millionaires being trailed afterwards might look favourably upon it come a future series…
In a final meeting, filmed just last month, the four were joined by housing minister John Healey who pledged a ‘dismantling of the system’ and said an outline deal was in the pipeline that would see more than 200 councils, including Barking and Dagenham, able to keep 100% of their rents.
A final glance at those final credits revealed no firm date has yet been set…
We know we're in the middle of seismic shifts in the way the world operates. We don't know where they'll end up, or where any of us will be when the dust settles, if it ever does. Will we have a job? A pension? A home? Someone to care for us in old age?
We do know, though, that we'll need to be more resilient, more adaptable, and more responsible to face the future. My particular concern is to join with those who are helping to grow fairer and more civilised communities and better places in which community can develop.
Part of that process is a series of conversations with others who are trying, in different ways, to do the same. On Friday I was in London at a discussion organised by the regeneration agency Renaisi on 'new approaches to regeneration'.
Casting its shadow over the discussion was the state of the economy. That morning The Independent reported the first effects of the second wave of recession: 20,000 local authority workers about to lose their jobs. There will almost certainly be many more as the next government seeks to cut the public deficit.
One particular comment, out of many insightful and heartfelt observations, struck me. One of the participants had grown up in Africa. We don't know how well-resourced we are in the UK, she pointed out - even if you cut all our wealth and budgets by 20%, it's still far more than the majority of the world has.
Over the last decade the political axiom has been that to gain competitive advantage in a globalised economy, the UK must increase its knowledge and skills. The knowledge economy - popularised by Charles Leadbeater's Living on Thin Air and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class - was one in which creative and digital industries would thrive, new technologies and business opportunities would flow from our world-class research institutions, and we would think our way to success. Implicit in that view was that the dirty work of making things would be outsourced to those lesser souls in China and Malaysia and Turkey and anywhere else without our advantages. The Western political hegemony may have peaked, but long live the Western intellectual hegemony.
And so it came to pass - almost. Except that China and India and the rest turned out not just to be good at making things cheaply, but just as good as us at thinking and research and creating things. And that will continue. Meanwhile, the increasing costs of fuel extraction, transport and rising aspirations in manufacturing countries will have a knock-on effect on the cost of stuff we no longer produce ourselves.
With limited capacity to make things and no obvious reason why our thinking should be considered superior to others', the knowledge economy suddenly looks less like Shangri-La and more like a cul-de-sac.
Governments and public agencies will take a while to wake up to this. They're still pursuing the same old strategies, with documents like Building Britain's Future and Digital Britain. The rest of us need to be smarter, and wiser.
Increasingly, the conversations I'm having about the future of regeneration home in on values: not just what do we want to have, but what do we think is worth having?
This is where the wisdom economy comes in.
The knowledge economy always wants more. The wisdom economy understands the concept of 'enough'. Wisdom asks what profit there is in gaining the world and losing our soul. It understands that a person's life doesn't consist in an abundance of possessions. Wisdom understands prosperity as a state of sufficiency; knowledge strains for the next big idea and tramples what stands in the way.
The knowledge economy demands qualifications. The wisdom economy insists on qualities. Qualifications can be excellent, but they do not make you a better worker or even a better thinker. From 2012 every nurse in England will have to have a degree. That will recognise their training and hard work, but won't create empathy with their patients. I have interviewed people with postgraduate qualifications who cannot spell and have poor people skills. A wisdom economy will recruit for attitude as well as aptitude.
The knowledge economy is technological. The wisdom economy is human. The knowledge economy is quick to see technical fixes and tends to assume we're only one invention away from the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The wisdom economy sees technology as a tool and is more interested in how it is deployed. It seeks to test technology for its contribution to human wellbeing, rather than taking it as a given that technology will add to human wellbeing.
The knowledge economy is competitive. The wisdom economy is collaborative. The knowledge economy assumes that if we can know that bit more than others, we will get what they have or keep them from getting what we have. It believes in dog eat dog. The wisdom economy says dogs do better when they hunt in packs. It sees knowledge as something to be shared and built collaboratively. It is highly suspicious of the intellectual property industry and the crowd of litigators and branding experts who hang on its coat-tails. Where the knowledge economy is amoral - your disadvantage is of no concern as long as I am succeeding - the wisdom economy accepts at a profound level that your disadvantage is my problem.
The knowledge economy is political. It is a Big Idea that governments can wave around in the hope that they've captured a zeitgeist. It is sexy and attracts 'thought leaders' and corporate egotists who want to wield power and influence. The wisdom economy is personal. It begins with an understanding of self and of others: that I do not succeed by gaining your envy, but by winning your respect.