Advance notice of lecture

The Future of Planning: beyond growth dependence will be launched at UCL on Thursday 24th October at a reception following a public lecture by Yvonne Rydin. More details will be announced shortly but please keep the date in your diary if you can. 

This blog is now on holiday until 23rd September 2013.

Community pubs again

Community pubs are in the news once again as some 100 have been reported as achieving community asset status under the Localism Act. This sounds very positive. It gives local communities the right to delay any sale of the community asset for up to 6 months and gives them the opportunity then to raise funds to buy the asset and to do so as current use value, excluding any development gain from a change of use, say to residential. There is the prospects of the pub building be used not just as a hostelry but for a variety of local needs. But the sting in the tail is that funding for the purchase and subsequent running of the building still has to be raised. Only the wealthier communities will find it easy to find such funds. Elsewhere this potential will depend on much creativity and innovation in finding resources to make the building a true community asset. Where might such resources be found? Sweat equity is always a possibility, particularly for refurbishment. Community time banks might help with ongoing running of the asset. Crowd-funding and peer-to-peer lending  are two options that are making innovative use of the internet to provide small businesses and social enterprises with low cost loans. There are possibilities here but communities are going to need some basic business planning and financial advice to understand how to access them. A future of community-owned and managed assets is possible but it will require a clever and imaginative mix of expertise and ideas to become a reality.

Empty shops: is deregulation the answer?

Last week proposals were aired to loosen planning regulation so that empty shops can be converted into homes: see the Guardian article here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/aug/04/councils-powers-high-street-planning. Well, there is a pressing need for more homes. And my last post pointed to the changes in our high streets with many blank shopfronts. But is this the answer? It leaves all the decision-making to the market. So what kind of homes will result? Upmarket or for those in the most urgent need? Bought by owner-occupiers or a buy-to-let landlord? Domestic or overseas buyers? Who can tell? In a property market place, these decisions are left to myriad individual decision backed by purchasing power. And any conversion back from residential to another use would work the same way. If and when demand for retail activities goes back up, who is to say that the (old) high street is where the most profitable sites will be found. So this small shift in deregulation could lead to considerable change in our local areas. That does not mean it is a bad idea if you think that market decisions will lead to the outcomes that people need. My view is that they will and they will not. Some people's needs, demands and wants will be met; others will not. But the more interesting question is what is the alternative? In  a market economy, all those atomised decision-makers don't really need to cooperate beyond working out how to hand over the money. Any alternative will put greater demands on our ability and desire to cooperate. This lies behind the calls for greater community involvement - it assumes more cooperation within communities. The real problem to address is how to foster this without coercion. How can people in a locality be brought together to decide on the future of, say, their high street in a real and concrete way, not just consultation on a plan. How can they be encouraged to feel sufficient ownership of their area, an area full of privately-owned properties, to want to cooperate on the future of any individual property, on that empty shop? These are a tricky questions and deregulation can seem a much easier answer. But that does not make it the right answer.

The High Street

Those walking the (currently) sunny streets of our town centres will be aware of the increasing number of vacant shop fronts. It is therefore timely to note that a review of the Portas initiative has just been published:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/211536/Future_of_High_Street_-_Progress_Since_the_Portas_Review_-revised.pdf. For those who don't know about the Portas Review, it was an attempt by shopping guru Mary Portas to rethink what was needed to revitalise UK high streets. A mix of town management, financial measures and campaigns were proposed. In the event, the government established Portas Pilots in 27 towns with funding of up to £100,000, together with a mix of other funding pots for other areas. They also argued that their general deregulation strategy (for business and planning) would help. But the evidence of shop closures suggest that this is not working well. Is this just the current economic climate to too severe for such pump-priming of small retail businesses to work? Is the deregulation agenda an ill-conceived way to handle the nuanced needs of high streets? Or, perhaps, as a recent Local Government Information Unit briefing (by Majeed Neky, 18th July) suggests shopping streets are in the midst of a much more profound period of change. This is not a temporary down-turn but a sea-change in what such streets are for. In this case a broader debate is needed on what uses these premises can house and how they can meet local needs. As ever with this government, there is a tension between its localist rhetoric and its dependence on promoting market-led economic growth, with the latter usually winning out. Perhaps it is time to take the localist rhetoric more seriously to consider how the public spaces of the high street and the community assets of local retailing and services could be maintained in the absence of growth. This would require new and detailed attention to the mix of taxation and regulation that owners and occupiers of these properties face, with a view to thinking seriously about how to facilitate community-led activity.

From the Dublin conference

Last week planning academics from across the world met at the joint congress organised by UCD in a very sunny Dublin  for the European and North American associations of planning schools: http://aesop-acspdublin2013.com/. Around a thousand people attended so difficult to summarise the discussions or even the main themes! There was plenty of continuing evidence that market-led development often failed to deliver for local communities and, further, that it was running into problems as a strategy in current economic climates. But there were also a couple of interesting papers that linked very directly to the arguments and proposals in The Future of Planning.
A fascinating paper by David Adams, of Glasgow University, discussed urban land reform in Scotland - where he is advising the Scottish Government - and proposed a Community Right to Sell. This would be a measure whereby a community could force a plot of vacant or derelict land in their area to go to auction and be sold. The idea is that the auction process would result in the land being sold for a beneficial use even if this was a price below that desired by the current landowner. David's view is that often this lower price would enable communities to buy the land; even if they were outbid, land would be brought into use rather than being blocked by landowners.
Another interesting analysis was put forward by Peter Phibbs of the University of Sydney. His paper outlined the ACT Land Rent Scheme under which households are able to rent land and then buy a building to put on it, purchasing the land at a later stage to unify the two elements. There is an annual land rent fixed at 2% of the land value for lower income households and 4% for others. This seems an innovative idea which Peter describes as a government CLT and as having some significant success. He also points though to the opposition that it faced at the outset, a reminder of the need to build wide coalitions of support to challenge the existing growth-dependent paradigm.
Two ideas to watch....

Energy efficiency and house prices

One of the issues I explore in the forthcoming book 'The Future of Planning' is whether it is possible to improve properties and areas without triggering gentrification and the associated increase in property values. The key idea is that the stock of low priced housing and the local environment of low priced neighbourhoods often needs upgrading to improve the quality of life of residents; but the tendency for the market place to capture these new benefits in higher property values, while benefiting property owners, can often be disadvantageous for tenants and existing SMEs, who may face competition from people and businesses with deeper pockets. So the question is what kind of improvements enhance local people's quality of life without leading to upward property price moves and the wholesale shift in local communities (business and residential) associated with gentrification? It did seem that energy efficiency improvements were one answer to this question. Investment in such efficiency measures reduces energy bills and combats fuel poverty and, so it seemed, did not lead to much in the way of price movements. Recent research conducted for DECC suggests this may be changing:
www.gov.uk/government/publications/an-investigation-of-the-effect-of-epc-ratings-on-house-prices.
On average there seems to be an impact of £16,000 additional value from raising the EPC rating by two 'levels'; this equates to an average increase of 14% but the impact is much higher in low priced areas. The study has been done by real experts in this kind of analysis (McAllister, Fuerst, Nands and Wyatt) but as ever there are caveats: the analysis could not control of the condition of the properties or home improvements between sales. But taking the general finding as sounds, this raises important questions. This is good news for home owners and should encourage retrofitting. What how will this impact on tenants? Is there a differential take-up on efficiency measures that means that lower income households, includng home owners, are not getting the benefit of this price shift? An analysis of the social distribution of these price impacts and the take-up of public subsidies for retrofit would be very timely.

Social Impact Bonds

In my last post, I suggested that resources would be needed to support community action and that thought needed to be given to innovative ways of doing this. Social Impact Bonds are an interesting idea here. They are a means of raising investment finance for a new initiative, which could be promoted by community groups. Investors get a return from the government as the initiative produces certain desired outcomes. The idea is that these outcomes in some way save the government money and so they can use the money save to pay for the return on the initial investment (which may be from the public or private sectors). The Social Outcomes Fund currently contains £20 million for this purpose. So how might this work in a way that delivers just sustainability on the ground? First a community initiative that  benefits a lower income or otherwise disadvantaged group of households and contributes to social and environmental sustainability needs to be identified. Then a clear argument needs to be made about the costs that will not be incurred in the future by public services because of these benefits. Hopefully the future financial savings will then be sufficient to provide the desired return on the initial investment in the initiative. Food gardens promoting better nutrition and physical activity, childcare facilities providing 'green play', training activities in environmental services, community-based flood prevention landscaping would all seem potentially to be possible areas for SIBs. Whether they would fall foul of current 'rules and regulations' remains to be seen. At present the commissioning process looks quite onerous and would require support. But in principle this could be a way of resourcing community action that contributes to sustainability and benefits key social groups because - at the same time - it avoids future government bills.