Untitled Document

TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE SOCIETY

Challenges and Opportunities in Neighbourhood Renewal

12 November 1999

ATUL PATEL Deputy Director Designate Social Exclusion Unit Cabinet Office

Introduction

It is an enormous pleasure and honour to be asked to speak to you today on an occasion which is a tribute to the memory of a remarkable man, Walter Moore. His insight into the problems faced by the deprived and dispossessed - and his own experiences of hardship, poverty and joblessness - strike a huge cord with us and our work in the Social Exclusion Unit. My thanks to Rod Beadles and Rob Taylor for this opportunity.

I know that there is a foundation of faith to the work of Adullam Homes and many of those involved in its work. Some of you may know that the Hindu community has been celebrating Diwali this week. It traditionally marks the victory of good over evil, and also the end of one year and the beginning of the next. So may I take this occasion to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2056!

Much of our work in Social Exclusion fits in not only with the Government's wider objectives to tackle poverty and improve social cohesion; but also the work of people like yourselves on the ground. So I thought it would be fitting tonight to talk about how our thinking is developing, and our ambitions for providing opportunities for a fairer society through the renewal of our neighbourhoods - particularly the most deprived.

The Background

Our experiences tell us of the problems of deprived areas, and of their concentration. Some, rather clinical, evidence begins to paint the picture: 44 local authority districts have the highest concentrations of deprivation. Compared with the rest of England they have:

nearly two thirds more unemployment
almost one and a half times the proportion of lone parent households
one and a half times the underage pregnancy rate
over a third of children growing up in families on income support (against less than a quarter in the rest of England)
37 per cent of 16 year olds without a single GCSE at grades A-C, against 30 per cent for the rest of England
more than twice as many nursery/primary and more than five times as many secondary schools on special measures roughly a quarter more adults with poor literacy or numeracy
mortality ratios 30 per cent higher, adjusting for age and sex
levels of vacant housing one and a half times elsewhere
two to three times the levels of poor housing, vandalism and dereliction; and
more young people, with child densities a fifth higher
nearly four times the proportion of ethnic minority residents.

What is more telling are the views, feelings and life experiences of the people themselves:

"It's disgusting. It's dirty, there are needles and rubbish and joints everywhere. There are kids everywhere, horrible kids, walking around, smoking and drinking, running on the roof. They say there are 8,000 rats under our flats."

"Gangs of kids harassing you on the street outside shops. Seven and eight year olds, sleeping out all night with cans of lager is common. They light a fire under the bridge and sniff gas. There is loads of glue sniffing round here. It's getting to the stage that more are doing it than not. The police just haven't got time for people like us."

"The drug dealers live on the corner. The noise of the vehicles as they speed at 3am is a real nuisance. I keep myself to myself - if I report anything, my kids will get picked on."

"It seems like the council has put all the trouble makers in one spot and they gang up together. My area is like the headquarters and all the other estates around are branches spreading out from here."

"People are frightened to help each other or get involved with an unsafe situation for fear of reprisals. I want to be invisible because that feels safer than challenging people."

"The only things for most of the kids to do are shag loads of guys or girls, get drunk, stand on the corners smoking, sell drugs, smash up people's homes, be rude, be stuck up, be facey unnecessarily."

"Sometimes I feel sorry for them, like when I see one of them carrying his mum home from the pub. His Dad's still in the pub. The parents should be looking after them, not the other way round - it's out of order. You see a little boy of four out at 9pm shouting by himself."

"A few years back there was a big uproar because employers were getting applications from the estate and throwing them straight in the bin. The job centre was doing it too - they would send you the low paid jobs if you were from here."

"People feel much more secure when they're on Income Support. If they go to work, they have to find money for so many things - council tax, rent, dental, electric, prescriptions, school uniform, school meals. I can understand not working…what's the point of slaving your guts out to bring in £10 more than you are getting on benefit."

"My partner is only £25 a week better off by working for a 40 hour week, but she feels much better in herself for working."

"Yes - I'm guilty! We're all on the fiddle - it's disgusting! But everyone does it. It's common. Everyone fiddles. My Mum gets the dole but she works in a pub."

"We need to teach parental skills because children who have behavioural problems not caused through a medical problem can have parents who lack the skills - the child's behaviour is a symptom of the parent's problems. It is hard to be a good parent, yet we receive no training."

"Yes, as a single parent I do feel affected. My children cannot join a lot of the clubs they would love to. The only reason for this is that my income is so low I can't give them the money they need. I know my children need to go out places to learn social skills."

"More than anything we need to make our schools as good as yours".

"Everyone who was in my class has babies. I'm the only one who hasn't. I feel very left out. Only one is in a stable relationship and none are married."

"There is a group near me who by isolation are in a stressful situation over the number of elderly who lack transport to go shopping or go out at nights. Yes, it affects me and my elderly parent who has no money, not very mobile, their sheltered scheme too far out of the main centre, afraid to go out after dark."

"In some places people refuse to deliver, even the local free paper which has local events free and charged, local jobs, local voluntary services are also advertised in it. This does not reach the people who need them the most."

"I know it's bad. But I still want to live here. I don't want to move away because all my friends and everything are here. A posh house with a swimming pool would be good, but I don't think I'd have as many friends because I'm not posh."

"I want to leave here because I want to be able to say to my friends, 'Why don't you come to my house?' I can't because I don't have a garden fence, I don't have a full set of windows, I don't have nice pavements. I can't invite people to my house because if they leave at 10pm, I might not see them again. I can't take all of that 24 hours a day. What I like about other people's lives is that they don't live here."

What a graphic travesty of our society! I recently had the ironic pleasure of representing the UK's approaches to poverty reduction to a group of top Indian Civil Servants at my old alma mater. They did not believe me when I told them all this!

Launching our report last year, the Prime Minister highlighted "…the problems of our poorest neighbourhoods - decaying housing, unemployment, street crime and drugs. People who can, move out. Nightmare neighbours move in. Shops, banks and other vital services close.

"Over the last two decades the gap between these "worst estates" and the rest of the country has grown. It has left us with a situation that no civilised society should tolerate. It is simply not acceptable that so many children go to school hungry, or not at all, that so many teenagers grow up with no real prospect of a job and that so many pensioners are afraid to go out of their homes. It shames us as a nation, it wastes lives and we all have to pay the costs of dependency and social division."

For too long governments have simply ignored the needs of many communities. When they have acted the policies haven't worked. Too much has been spent on picking up the pieces, rather than building successful communities or preventing problems from arising in the first place. Often huge sums 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.

Too much has been imposed from above, when experience shows that success depends on communities themselves having the power and taking the responsibility to make things better. And although there are good examples of rundown neighbourhoods turning themselves around, the lessons haven't been learned properly.

What is our goal?

A new approach is long overdue. It has to be comprehensive, long-term and founded on what works. For a Government to admit all this is quite something. But it is only the start.

Some foundations have been laid with new national policies, like the New Deal, and action on schools and crime. More targeted programmes in the areas of greatest need will help: for example the Sure Start programme to ensure that all children arrive at school ready to learn. Employment Zones, and Education and Health Action Zones too are being focused on areas of acute deprivation. The New Deal for Communities experiment will give some of our worst-off local communities the resources to tackle their problems in an intensive and co-ordinated way, with someone clearly in charge on the ground.

But to make a difference in all of our poor neighbourhoods a great many national policies will also have to improve. Too often they have not been fitted for the needs of the poorer inner-city neighbourhoods and outlying estates. People living in these places have had to put up with substandard schools, inadequate policing and vandalised public spaces.

Government is now galvanised as never before to deliver policies that actually work for poor neighbourhoods. In the biggest cross Government exercise ever, eighteen policy action teams are bringing together not only Whitehall Departments, but also outside experts, community organisations and business, to work quickly and intensively on joined up answers to the problems I have highlighted - problems as wide ranging from anti-social behaviour to lack of access to shops, banks and IT. There are plenty of good ideas to work up, some - perhaps many - are not new, but either have been forgotten, unfunded or not practised widely enough.

The results of all of this work will be brought together in an ambitious national strategy for neighbourhood renewal next year. This will set out a ten to twenty year plan to turn round poor neighbourhoods, to reduce dependency, and empower local communities to shape a better future for themselves.

Its goal is simple: it is to bridge the gap between the poorest neighbourhoods and the rest of Britain. Bridging that gap will not be easy. It will require imagination, persistence, and commitment. But we believe that it can be done. Indeed, if we are to bring Britain back together, it has to be done.

Towards a Neighbourhood Renewal strategy

Policy Action Teams have been busy, and their reports are being published: 5 so far, a further 4 before Christmas, and the rest early in the new year. We will be playing a strong supporting role in ensuring their recommendations are implemented; and in ensuring that where more money is required, this is factored in to the spending review process.

These reports will have a big influence on the national neighbourhood renewal strategy, but that will not be the only input. We will be embarking on a major dialogue and consultation next spring with a range of organisations and people. We will also be working with Government Departments to consider how they can further focus mainstream policies and programmes on deprived neighbourhoods.

What will the national strategy look like?

Our thinking is still developing, but we have to start from somewhere. To begin with, the strategy will need to explain,

what the problems are
why they matter
why we haven't sorted them
Much of this was covered in last year's report, for example,
mainstream policies not helping, or making things worse;
"initiative-itis";
too many rules;
too little investment in people;
strategies not joined-up;
poor links beyond the neighbourhood;
community commitment not harnessed;
what works neglected; and
insufficient attention to prevention.

Moving beyond problem analysis, the more important are questions are 'what do we do about it?' and 'how do we get there?'

The national strategy is not just about the Government. It will need to be owned and implemented by all stakeholders - local authorities, housing associations, community and voluntary groups, including faith communities, and so on. But the Government clearly has a key role to play. I want today to focus on this.

The Government's contribution can perhaps be summed up in the form of some principles about what needs to be done:

someone should be in charge at every level to ensure renewal happens;
tasks will vary, but common to all levels are joining-up and monitoring renewal activity.
mainstream public services could be the "big guns" of renewal;

The intense problems of deprived neighbourhoods (e.g. crime, jobs) are best addressed by the public services whose job it is to tackle those problems everywhere. The reason for this is straightforward: it is their job. Formal responsibility for public services in deprived areas lies with main public service providers.

But in many ways, public services are not equipped to deliver the same outcomes in deprived areas as elsewhere, given the special difficulties in those areas. We will need to address this.

target help to enable communities to join-up and add value to local services;

The main tasks of targeted programmes should be to:

help join-up local public services;
help to customise local public services to local needs; and
provide a way for local people and other sectors to help lead renewal. …that is, not to make up for deficiencies in main programmes.
ensure that Government action makes things better, not worse;

As I am sure many of you will appreciate, it is not the case that more Government activity will automatically help deprived areas. What it should do is:

not intervene too much. Activism by the state, for its own sake, can stifle beneficial activity, particularly the private sector investment and community energy that these areas need.
not intervene in the wrong way. "Government failure" can often be at the root of the problems of deprived areas.
not do things that other sectors could do better. Community and voluntary sectors have led some of the most successful regeneration projects. Where they are best placed to lead renewal, they should be enabled to do so.
gather accurate intelligence on the impact of Government intervention in deprived areas.
maximise community, voluntary and private sector involvement and leadership.

We know that the involvement of community, voluntary and private sectors is a precondition of effective renewal. The Policy Action Team 9 report on community self-help says that "new policies and programmes will not be enough … [a successful strategy] will also need to provide the poorest neighbourhoods with the capacity, the opportunity and the tools to help themselves." And the evaluation of the City Challenge programme emphasises "the role self-help can play in promoting sustainability" and that "creating permanent jobs for local people is critical and in most cases depends on private sector activity."

But we also know that the Government can help or hinder involvement from these sectors. In order to enable their involvement and leadership, we need to:

make Government finance rules sympathetic to the needs of other sectors. This means making Government programmes user-friendly for non-public bodies in deprived areas, and
allow for flexibility in the delivery of programmes.This particularly applies to targeted programmes. This is demonstrated with current regeneration projects, some of which are not public-sector led. But it also applies to main programmes.

This is just the start, and much more needs to be done. But if we stick to these principles we have a good chance of getting there. As I said earlier, we want to mount a major programme of dialogue and consultation with many people and organisations on the way to developing the national neighbourhood renewal strategy. So you will be hearing more in the months to come and, I hope, will be actively participating in helping us get it right.

I hope I have left you with the impression that the Government is committed to tackling the deep-rooted problem of social exclusion. By any measure, we live in a society which has become more unequal and more divided. Our report published last year, made sober reading. It set out just how big the problem had become in those areas, with the poorest areas becoming more cut off from the rest of society - more run down, more prone to crime and more divorced from the labour market.

We must make life better for those living in our most deprived neighbourhoods. Next year, we will publish our draft national strategy setting out how we intend to do this. It must ensure joined up, not patched up, solutions. I'm sure you will help us in this task.

References

Bringing Britain Together: A national strategy for neighbourhood renewal, 1998, Cm 4045

Report of the Policy Action Team on Community Self Help, 1999, Home Office.