Funding community action

Reports in the Sunday newspapers today - http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jun/30/big-society-network-grant - raise a question mark over the way that funds are being distributed to projects under the Government's Big Society agenda. The article raises issues concerning the selection of project, their effectiveness and business links with the key organisation, the Big Society Network and its charitable foundation. Such concerns clearly warrant investigation and discussion but it would be shame if this was used as an excuse for not funding and supporting community action. The problem is that community action is difficult, time-consuming and resource intensive. People involved are often doing projects for the first time and have no prior experience to fall back on. Business-style advice on 'how to get it done' does not neccessarily work in the different context of local neighbourhood relationship. There will be mistakes made. The key point is how community groups can learn from these mistakes and how such groups can learn from each other. Also vital is the input of resources and support to build community relationships and sustain these over time. This can look just 'too expensive' and the outputs may be small and take time to accumulate. But would this not be a better investment in the long run than, say, some major investment projects (HS2 to menetion no names!).

Resourcing community planning

One thing is becoming clear within the Localism Agenda - it costs to empower local communities to develop plans that are in line with their own desires for their locality. The Supporting Communities in Neighbourhood Planning programme announced in May this year that £9.5m was available but in relatively small units of up to £7,000 per neighbourhood: http://locality.org.uk/news/launch-neighbourhood-planning-fund/. This is just to pump-prime the neighbourhood planning. But getting the desired development to happen will cost more than that. The process of creating a Community Right to Build order that grants planning permission for community-planning development is more significant as the proposals are more detailed and there is the requirement for another referendum of the local residents. In early June, one parish council in Mid Sussex was granted £54,000 to prepare two such orders, one for 76 homes and the other for a community centre. But this is all resourcing going on the planning process itself - plan making and planning regulation. Yet the funding of the development requires resources and - without any other pots to tap - this will be reliant on private sector interest. In the Sussex case the idea was that 38 affordable homes and 17 self-build plots would be supported by the remaining market housing. Thus is seems that the new planning resources are being directed to communities where there is some market demand to support planning that facilitates new development. It would be interesting to find ways of channelling such funding to support other forms of community planning where the activities are less focussed on market-led development.

Politics of Markets

Last week I attended an excellent day conference organised by the University of Westminster under the title 'The Politics of Markets'; full details are available from http://www.westminster.ac.uk/csd/events/the-politics-of-markets-shaping-steering-and-evaluation. What was interesting was the mix of papers. On the one hand there was a real attempt to revisit some of the debates about politics and markets from before New Labour's Third Way muddied the waters and to develop a rigorous alternative to the neo-liberalism that seems to have been the Third Way's legacies. On the other hand, there were reviews of the very specific forms that new market construction was taking, particularly in relation to public services. The new quasi-markets for personal care and in the NHS more generally were subject to much discussion. Of particular note was the discussion of the role that third-sector, non-governmental and community groups can play. I was very taken with the account of how such groups were managing the supply chain with regard to agricultural products, presented by Liz Cooper of Edinburgh University: http://lizcooper.info/working-on-fair-trade-at-the-university-of-edinburgh/. Liz's talk really showed that markets are socially constructed and that small-scale actions by individuals and groups can shape what people get out of market transactions. The planning system can similarly construct land and property markets, opening up and closing down opportunities for urban development. The problem at the moment is that the focus seems to be almost entirely on opportunities for private sector development by major corporate actors. The question to address is how the planning system can be changed to offer more opportunities for community-based development as well.

Empty Homes

Just come back from an excellent BRE day event on empty homes. The BRE are linking up with the Greg Clarke campaign (following on from his C4 programme) to refurbish 100,000 empty homes and put them back into use. As well as the burning enthusiasm for achieving much needed change in low value urban areas, the event was notable for the different models of refurbishment that it put forward. One example was the bringing together of semi-retired building professionals with local young people, struggling with lack of qualifications and employment opportunities, to refurbish empty homes. This provided the young people with new skills - a form of apprenticeship - with a viable way of improving a property to a lettable standard. Another was the sale of council-owned empty properties for £1 to local people provided they were willing to do the homes up and live in them for 5 years. Yet another model involved financial institutions, such as life or pension funds, putting up the funds for improving a portfolio of properties for rent, based on the long term retention of the freehold or leasehold and a business case that was able to show a financial return over 30 years, say. All these examples show the potential for beyond the current dominant paradigm of market-led development supported by subsidy and regulated more-or-less weakly by the planning system. It suggests that there are other ways of achieving desired urban change. Empty properties - domestic and commercial - are explicitly discussed in the book, as you will be able to see in the autumn.

Does new development support local economies?

One of the claims of growth-dependent planning is that it supports growth in local economies - it works with local planning to deliver new built stock that meets economic demands and planning can shape that development to help build a robust local economy. Proponents of the green growth approach further see the potential for such development to foster a local market for green construction technology and development skills if the buildings and development sites are pushed and pulled into more environmentally-friendly directions. The issue here is the extent to which such new development produces benefits for the locality or whether they seep outside to the broader national or even international market. The New Economics Foundation has long been arguing for the importance of local economic development that produces a local multiplier effect because the money generated - say, here by the actual development activities - stays and circulates within the local area. In this context, it is interesting to see the contractor for new development at Birmingham City University's campus promising to spend £28 million of its £46 million contract on local firms within 20 miles radius of the project site. This is an promising approach and one that extends the commitments to sustainable, environmentally-certified and even fair trade product and services that are increasingly bound into contacts. Without such strong linkages between the development process and local business, particularly SMEs, and populations the claims of development projects to foster local economies can often sound rather hollow.

Community Infrastructure Levy

One of the key arguments for growth-dependent planning is that part of the wealth generated by market-led development can be siphoned off and used for social and/or environmental benefits. This has long been the claim made for extracting 'planning gain' (although that rather makes it sound like a bad tooth). However, governments - Conservation, Labour and Coalition - have also argued that too much planning gain can delay developments through lengthy negotiations, add costs through complexity and even deter development through excessive demans for such benefits. The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) was intended to overcome some of these problems. Local authorities would decide on their infrastructure needs alongside the scale of development that they intended to permit over a given timescale. Divide the cost of this infrastructure alongside the amount of development and you have a tarrif to charge developers to fund it. Non-infrastructure social and environmental benefits would still be met through negotiating planning gain and Section 106 agreements as before. Yet the CIL system is already under reform before it is fully implemented. The tension between maximising the profit from private sector development and meeting locally identified social and environment needs does not go away. The point at which the scale of these benefits threatens the viability of such development remains ambiguous for many planning authorities; open books for the development are, not surprisingly, not the norm. The tariffs themselves seem a rather blunt instrument, a means of raising funds but not necessarily shaping the locality in the desired direction. But, above all, such planning gain - whether achieved through CIL or Section 106 agreements - only works at all where there is profitably private sector development. This restricts the ability of planners to plan for community benefits to specific sites and locations. A limited tool indeed.