Why Pickles Has Suspended Welsh Streets Demolition

The Mayor and Liverpool City councillors are cursing Eric Pickles for suspending their decision to demolish the Welsh Streets. Pickles won’t care about their curses of course, the fact that this is the third time ministers have directly intervened in this decade long saga might say something about ministers commitment to localism, but it also says a lot about the way this case has been handled by the council too.

The council like to paint opposition to the Welsh Streets demolition as outside interference by heritage zealots, but they understate the case. No housing scheme in England has proved more controversial or more divisive, and few can have been as eye wateringly expensive. Whatever you might say about Pickles he is no heritage zealot. The truth is he has plenty of other reasons for questioning the decisions made in this case:

He may well feel that the scheme fails to meet housing need. Demolishing 439 houses and building perhaps as few as 153 is a huge loss of the city's housing capacity. A city with a growing population shouldn't be settling for less. Less housing means fewer homes for people. With household sizes in Liverpool getting smaller and housing association rents rising, demand for larger houses is in decline, small houses are what the city needs. Old terraces may be unfashionable but they provide good homes for people on modest incomes. Without them more people, unable to buy homes, become reliant on social housing.

Pickles may think the scheme fails to promote economic growth. A drop in housing capacity means local services and shops struggle, and people have to drive elsewhere to get the services they need. In a city that should be striving for growth this scheme is the opposite - managed decline.

He may wonder what the scheme has done to the community. Over the last ten years 1200 residents have been lured or driven away. The council may claim community support for demolition now, but the truth is after a decade of attrition there is hardly anybody left to oppose it now. 
He no doubt thinks the scheme is incredibly inefficient. When you add up all the public subsidy this scheme has absorbed over the last ten years it totals £35million. A sum of money that could have easily have paid outright for building twice as many new houses on some of the city’s many vacant plots of land, or a programme of refurbishing 1,000 of its empty homes.

Perhaps he will also pause for thought over what caused the problem this scheme seeks to fix. The Welsh Streets were never a wealthy part of the city, but they were home to a functioning community that was far from being in decline. The Welsh Street's demise was artificial, calculated and imposed from above. The last government's ruinous pathfinder programme paid councils vast amounts of money to buy up and demolish old houses.

Nowhere greeted this policy with more eagerness than Liverpool council. Even the minister in charge at the time, John Prescott thought the council's enthusiasm for demolition was obsessive. "They knocked the whole bloody lot down so you had bomb sites everywhere" he said. The huge scale of Liverpool's demolition programme was far beyond its capacity to deliver and the Welsh Streets are a victim and a legacy of that excess.

Much has changed in the decade since this scheme was first imposed on the Welsh Streets, but the scheme itself has remained rigidly unaltered. To the council’s credit it has, in recent months, sought some more imaginative solutions for dealing with empty homes, but it refused to consider them here.
Its unwillingness to compromise has left a scheme that, if unaltered, would manage the decline of a large community into a small social housing estate. With Pickles picking up the tab, there can be little wonder as to why he is questioning it. Liverpool Council and Plus Dane Housing Association should use this opportunity to fix this flawed scheme, not in order to placate Pickles, but because the people of Liverpool deserve no less. 

This artile was first published in the Liverpool Daily Post

Demolishing the Welsh Streets

Liverpool council’s planning committee decision to demolish most of the Welsh Streets and replace it with a far smaller number of larger suburban housing association homes is the latest chapter in the managed decline of one of Britain’s great cities

In its favour at least it is a decison. After virtually a decade of blight and systematic winding down there is now some clarity about how the council wants the empty Welsh Streets dealt with. It’s a relief that the council has been induced into retaining and repairing some of the houses including the well maintained occupied houses in Kelvin Grove and Ringo Starr’s birthplace in Madryn Street. Quite how the council even contemplated destroying this part of its heritage is beyond belief.
But the council approved plan is still controversial and divisive and the long process has strained the community.

Although some action is better than none, the plans are very far from ideal. Whilst new housing, particularly affordable housing should be welcomed, it has come at the expense of a big net loss of housing capacity to the city. A city with a growing population shouldn’t be settling for less. Less housing means fewer homes for people. It means local services and shops struggle to function, and people will have to drive elsewhere to get the services they need.

With household sizes in Liverpool getting smaller and housing association rents rising, demand for larger houses is in decline, small houses are what the city needs. Old terraces may be unfashionable but they provide good homes for people on modest incomes. Without them more people, unable to buy homes, become reliant on social housing

The vision of this scheme is suburbia in the city with car culture replacing local services, Mono-tenure Housing association ownership replacing diverse ownership.

Of course many people do want new homes, but why the council couldn’t have commissioned Plus Dane (the housing association who stand to develop the houses here) to build them on one of the city’s many vacant sites, instead of making them dependent on demolition is unclear.
The effect of this is to give the few remaining residents the false choice of supporting demolition and getting a new house or stay living in a ghost town.

To its credit, the council has in recent months sought some more imaginative solutions for dealing with empty homes, but it refused to consider them here. If the sad story of the Welsh Streets is destined to be a chapter in the ideology of managed decline, let’s hope it’s the last one.
 

Where are they now? The abandoned backdrops to 80's videos

Empty buildings seemed to be a common backdrop for music videos in the 1980s. So I thought it would be interesting to look at a few and see what's happened to the buildings now.

The video for the Human League's Fascination was filmed on the empty streets of Plaistow in East London in 1983. The area was then under the control of the Docklands Development Corporation  a QUANGO tasked with regenerating London’s Docklands. The Victorian houses had been emptied out by the corporation prior to demolition.  As the video starts we see a map of the area with an orange blob indicating “You are Here” As the camera moves in it turns into an ariel view, and it becomes apparent that area covered by the blob really had been painted orange. In fact to make the video, a whole house (No.1 First Avenue), the immediate area of the streets, and an old Austin 1800 car parked outside really were covered in orange paint. The house along with the rest of the houses in the street were demolished a couple of weeks later. Some rather anonymous 1980s semis were built in their place and stand there today. Unfortunately the identikit semis couldn't fit in the triangular shape of the corner plot and so the site of No.1 remains vacant to this day.



Is there a better one than this? The Smiths (or rather Morrissey and a group of lookalikes) cycling through the New Barracks Estate in Salford in 1985. The estate is one of the earliest council estates in the country, built with private patronage in the early twentieth century. Even in its rather forlorn state in the 1980s you can see the quality of the architecture and the layout. The Salford Lads club which appears about half way through is still going strong, and the big houses in the magnificent Regent Square which we see towards the end of the video were renovated, some of the other boarded up houses were demolished and new houses are standing there now. OK I think this video was actually made for "Stop Me if You Think You've Heard this Before" But this song is even more sublime.



Not from the 1980s, but Coldplay's Every Teardrop is a Waterfall, was filmed in the vast abandoned Millennium mills building in West Silvertown in East London. This incredible 10 storey art-deco mill was once Splillers' biggest flour mill, but with the closure of the Royal Docks the mill closed in 1981. It has remained empty ever since. In the 1990s it was briefly considered as a site for a huge aquarium for the Zoological Society of London. As recently as 2009 it was going to be converted into 400 flats under an interesting Terry Farrell scheme. As far as I'm aware there are no current proposals on the table. The mills were also the location for the video for the Arctic Monkeys excellent single "Fluorescent Adult", which regrettably, I deem a bit violent for this blog.

5,000 demolitions make no sense

Does this make sense to you?  Over 5,000 houses are set to be demolished under a programme that was supposed to be for re-housing people.

The programme is the Housing Market Renewal(HMR)Transition Fund. The guidance for the fund (down load avaialble here) said “ It is intended to fund acquisition of homes/ relocation of individuals (with some funding for linked costs eg. relocation expenses) and at the margins some site security or clearance costs.”

Launching the fund, and commenting on the predecessor HMR programme that he had wound up Housing Minister Grant Shapps said “There was widespread public controversy over anobsession with demolition over refurbishment, the lack of transparency of thePathfinder quangos, large profits by developers, the demolition of our nation’sVictorian heritage and perverse incentives being given to run downneighbourhoods.

He added that councils "should not be pursuing large-scale demolition"

And yet that is exactly what councils are doing. Information obtained by Empty Homes under the Freedom of Information Act shows that councils have been awarded funding for demolishing 5,125 homes and renovating just 113.

In our view this is in itself a scandalous waste. Many of these homes could be brought back into use, and the £70m of public funding that is being poured into this exercise could have paid for renovation instead.

What on earth is going on?  Despite the guidance, and despite what ministers have said, councils seem to have got a completely different idea. A source at Hull City Council told Inside Housing “It could not have been made any clearer: this(transition fund) was intended for demolitions.”

Made clearer by whom? According to Inside Housing "Grant Shapps is understood to be concerned by the move, and has ordered a review of how the funding is being spent."

Pathfinder - and you thought it was over

Housing minsiter Grant Shapps has made his views on Housing Market Renewal very clear. He didn’t like it. In fact he disliked it so much that he brought the whole programme to an early end last year.... Or so we thought.

Housing Market Renewal or Pathfinder as it was more commonly known was a large government programme that aimed to regenerate the housing market in nine of the poorest areas of the North and Midlands of England. Between its inception in 2003 and its end last year it spent £2.3bn on demolishing 30,000 houses and causing 15,000 to be built.

Quoting SAVE Britain’s Heritage Shapps said “From the start, pathfinder showed an appetite for destruction....The classic English terraced house was demonised as “obsolete”. Whole neighbourhoods were declared surplus at the keystroke of a consultant’s laptop. Bureaucratic arrogance reduced communities to inmates of a “Zoo”—Zone of Opportunity—for house builders. Statisticians assumed compulsory purchase and eviction for demolition were acceptable measures for householders in a property-owning democracy. Quite predictably, the cure turned out worse than the disease.”

The decision to end Pathfinder was one we supported, although public investment in some of the poorest communities in England should be welcome, the use much of it got put to was in our view counterproductive. The programme that was originally intended to regenerate communities ended up demolishing them. It was also ineffective in reducing the levels of empty homes, despite that being one its major aims.  There are still about 40,000 empty homes in pathfinder areas, about the same as when the programme began.

But stopping Pathfinder has not proved as easy as it sounds. Local authorities had a pipeline of properties lined up for demolition. First an area was “red-lined”, many residents moved out voluntarily, owners were then bought –out , the reluctant ones subjected to compulsory purchase. This land assembly process took years, and so to stop it any point left thousands of people and homes part way through the process.

After strong lobbying from pathfinder councils, the government eventually agreed that simply turning the funding tap off was not enough. They agreed a transition fund that it announced would allow an orderly wind-down and allow people stuck in the middle of it to be re-housed. The fund originally £30m (later topped up to £35m) was agreed for the five worst affected areas: East Lancashire, Hull, Merseyside Stoke, and Teesside. Applications were approved late last year. 

Announcing the funding Grant Shapps was again strident in his criticism of the pathfinder programme:“Under the previous controversial scheme, local communities in some of the most deprived areas of the country were told they would see a transformation of their areas. But in reality, this amounted to bulldozing buildings and knocking down neighbourhoods, pitting neighbour against neighbour, demolishing our Victorian heritage and leaving families trapped in abandoned streets. This programme was a failure and an abject lesson to policy makers."

Given the language and the tone that surrounded this fund, you might very well expect that it would be made available for reversing the pathfinder policy. But to most people’s astonishment the government’s funds are to pay for more of the same. Charles Clover writing in yesterdays’ Sunday Times said   "The bid for Merseyside, which Shapps approved, goes far beyond rescuing isolated households. Under this “exit strategy”, councils on Merseyside will demolish another 2,369 homes by 2018, on top of the 4,489 destroyed already. There are no proposals for refurbishment.”

The approved Teeside bid sets out its ambitions clearly “the individual local authority forward strategies for the majority of these areas in the short-medium term is demolition followed by grassing over until market conditions improve.”

 Pathfinder it seems is far from over.

Why are councils knocking down council houses when there is a shortage of affordable housng?

Sounds barmy doesn't it.  But Nottingham city council have identified nearly 1000, and Birmingham over 1200 homes that they have lined up for demolition. If all councils demolish at the same rate it will mean 60,000 affordable homes are to be demolished across England, with only vague plans that some of them will ever be replaced.
Perhaps even more scandalously it turns out that most of these homes are occupied. The tenants will be evicted and presumabaly put into temporary accommodation.

What could possibly justify this huge upheaval of people and such a big loss of affordable homes? The shocking answer is -  accounting reasons!

The government has decided to allocate it's own housing debt  to councils as part of the scrapping of the HRA subsidy system. Essentially all councils with council homes take a pro-rata share of the government's £23billion housing debt in exchange for keeping rental income on their housing stock. The driver for this was partly councils'  unhappiness with the current system, but surely also a desire from Treasury to remove a huge debt off the public deficit.
The unintended consequence is that councils are seeking to avoid the debt by demolishing houses. Each council house they own will attract around £12,000 of debt.Get rid of a 1000 houses and you avoid £12m debt.

Housing minister Grant Shapps was on You and Yours on Radio 4 with me yesterday sounding reassuring. Although he didn't deny that councils will demolish homes to avoid debt, he said that there was unlikely to be an overall increase in demolitions from this measure.   Hmmm... I'm not convinced. This looks like the policy people missed the consequence of thier policy. I don't like Nottingham and Birmingham's oppurtunism and cynicism, but have no doubt who is really repsonsible for this disastrous policy. Treasury.

Councillor Richard Kemp and Why Houses Must Go.

Grant Shapps has again stepped in to delay the demolition of the Welsh Streets in Liverpool.  This saga has been dragging on now for seven  years. So long in fact that you would be forgiven if you'd forgotten what the point of the demolition was in the first place. So here is Councillor Richard Kemp to explain. Councillor Kemp is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in local government and vice chair of the LGA, a councillor on Liverpool City council and vice chair of a housing association. He is by all accounts a highly respected figure in local government and housing circles. But he has, as one Liverpool resident put it to me last week, “got blood on his hands.” This is of course metaphorical blood. But the polarisation of opinion on housing in Liverpool runs so deep that it would make little difference if it were real blood. Cllr Kemp has not only instigated many of the housing clearance programmes in Liverpool he is actively in favour of continuing the policy of demolishing houses and the Welsh Streets is his next target. In a recent blog post he explains why.

It (housing market renewal demolition) was predicated on a fact – Liverpool has too many two up two down Victorian properties for which there would not be a market to the current extent even if they were modernised.

A worrying start. This isn't a fact, it's an opinion, and one that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. In areas where homes were modernised such as Chimney Pot Park in Salford the demand has been huge.

Anyway he goes on : We actually went and asked a vital group of people a simple question in 1998, “Why did you move out of Liverpool?” The answer was complex but compelling. They were moving because our services were crap and the housing did not meet their aspirations. They wanted to live in 3 bed roomed detached and semi-detached homes in a nice clean area with a good school. We didn’t provide any of these things.

The comment about crap services is refreshingly honest, but the rest is bizarre. Is this not how cities are supposed to work? People move to the best housing they can afford. They aspire to better housing, and if they can afford it they later move out to semis in the suburbs. The fact people did so in Liverpool is entirely normal. This is not to say that the Welsh Streets were without problems, but it hardly justifys knocking them down.  Had the Welsh streets had been left alone another generation of people would have followed. But the Welsh streets were not left alone. Instead the council consulted residents on whether they should be demolished. Cllr Kemp explains:

They (residents of the Welsh streets) overwhelmingly supported limited demolition. In the Welsh Streets for example after a 3 year consultation process 68% of local residents voted for a demolition programme and only 15% voted against. That’s democracy in action.

Note the word “limited” The consultation actually showed 338 against and only 97 in favour of the near total demolition of the Welsh Streets that is now proposed. It certainly isn’t democracy in action. But what would replace the demolished houses? Kemp explains:

In their place we would create demographically balanced housing with different types of accommodation and different tenures for different people at different times of their life. In other words we would build housing inside which communities could form and neighbourhoods would flourish.

Yet virtually no housing has been built to replace any of the houses that have been demolished in Liverpool. There are no plans for replacement houses in the Welsh streets. No subsidy to pay for new affordable housing. So what was it all for?

In Liverpool 8 if you brought up your children well, gave them a good education there was almost an inevitability that they would move out and take your grand children with them. In other words we had housing policies which by accident or design broke up families and communities because we allowed no flexibility of provision.

So the answer is to demolish the houses and move everybody out guaranteeing the community would be broken up?
Kemp's explanation shows the very strange thinking that led to this bizarre policy. On the one hand diagnosing real social problems and yet prescribing answers that only make things worse. Anyway  it all ought to be academic now. Not only has the government stepped in to try and stop the demolition, they have withdrawn the funding that paid for the whole programme. This might sound bleak, but there is an answer, It's one I have already proposed to the council, and one I will explain in my next post.