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

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.

Say it With Flowers

There are places in Liverpool that make your heart leap and others that make you want to weep. These two adjacent roads in Granby manage to do both at the same time. Granby is the very essence of a deprived community, on almost any indicator of poverty it does almost unbelievably badly. 94% of children living in poverty 70% of the resident Somali population are unemployed, cancer and heart disease rates are 250% of the national average. Why you might think would anybody want to live here? With over 11% of the houses long term empty, it might appear that they don’t. But nothing in Liverpool is ever simple. Problems have been simmering here for many years. 25 years ago they blew up. This is where the Toxteth riots took place. Last week, walking along these streets I was stopped by a life long resident. “This is their punishment for the riots” she said commenting on the row of bricked up vacant houses on her street “For daring to protest they’ve decided to grind the life out of this area.” She claimed that a deal between council and housing association meant that every house that becomes empty is bricked up rather than re-let. “We’re all getting old here” she said “in a few years we’ll all be gone, then they’ll come in and flatten all the houses.” It was enough to make grown man want to weep. But the resident’s response to the perceived war being waged against them was unexpected and extraordinary. Residents had painted the brieze blocks that replaced the windows on empty homes in Cairns Street and Beaconsfield Street. There were brightly painted curtains where windows had once been, a painted cat peeping out onto the road, butterflies, even a Tuscan castle. The front gardens of abandoned houses were neatly tended, along the length of the street every conceivable receptacle had been used as plant pots; car tyres, a water tank, a couple of old trailers, even a small chest of drawers overflowing with flowers. Most of the houses in these roads were empty, but none were unloved. In the circumstances where most communities would have given up, this one was showing a strength that truly made the heart leap.

Last Days of the Welsh Streets

These are the last days of the Welsh Streets in Liverpool. The area was built in the 1880s by and for Welsh construction workers, with  streets named after towns and villages in Wales they came from. Wynnstay, Voelas, Rhiwlas, Powis, Madryn, and Kinmel. In 2005 a decision was made by the council to demolish an area of 300 houses encompassing most of the Welsh Streets. In the last five years the houses have been systematically emptied out and acquired by Liverpool City Council; leaving what must be the largest area of empty houses in the country. Baring a last minute reprieve, the bulldozers are set to roll on October 14th. Yesterday, a warm late summers day I took what might be a last look.

Sows ears and silk purses

It’s hard to believe it now, but in the 1970s when I grew up the glamour football team to support was Ipswich town. It happened to be my hometown club, but their support spread far and wide. The team was filled with well-mannered, clean-cut role-models like Paul Mariner, George Burley and Mick Mills. But if you were a bit rebellious and liked your footballers cut a bit rough, there was nobody better than Eric Lazenby Gates; a grizzled and aggressive forward who always managed to look a mess but play with astonishing skill. He was the type of man who even if you dressed him in a Saville Row dinner suit would somehow still look like a tramp.

When I was ten my parents paid for me to go on a summer football course, coached by Ipswich Town players. I found myself in a group coached by Gates. His thick Northeast accent proved too impenetrable for most of the boys, but with Geordies in the family I understood it perfectly. So did my parents who asked me to be moved into another group to get away from the torrent of smutty jokes and filthy language that were part of his coaching style.

Eric Gates disappeared back to the North East with a transfer to Sunderland a few years later and for many years I thought nothing more of him. That was until earlier this week when I found myself outside the house he was brought up in, in the ex colliery town of Ferryhill in county Durham.

Ferryhill has the curse that has befallen many so-called regeneration hot spots. Its renaissance has been put-off or petered-out. The plans were ambitious. In 2006 a ten year plan was announced by the council that would have seen 400 hundred ex miners cottages demolished and hundreds of new homes built in their place. The works started with the flattening of a chunk of houses in streets named after the great industrial men of their day Stephenson, Watt and Faraday.  But then nothing, the money ran out and with the 2008 market crash, investment slipped away. Far from regenerating the area, the talk of demolition caused, those that could, to move away. Today Gates’ house stands among many others empty and forlorn overlooking a few acres of wasteland.  There is no plan B for Ferryhill, or indeed the many other similar areas where ambitious renewal plans have stalled or been shelved half way through. As we await the Comprehensive Spending Review, there seems little prospect that help will come from elsewhere, or that budgets will be replenished to enable stalled regeneration plans to start up again. The age of demolition and rebuild is, for now at least, over.    

But all should not be lost. These houses could be homes again. Creative thinking like the approaches used in Salford or Anfield can remodel terraced housing and make it appealing and attractive to people looking for homes. Regenerating an area doesn’t have to mean flattening it and starting again.  The great news for places like Ferryhill is this approach is cheaper and therefore more financially viable than the plans that have been abandoned. Places can reinvent themselves, just like people. Eric Gates today earns his living travelling around the Northeast as an after dinner speaker , dressed no-doubt in a Saville row dinner suit.

Building Houses on Old Kent Road

When Charles Darrow invented the Monopoly board game. He stuck this area at cheapest end of the board. Not much has changed. The Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle takes up that vast area between Walworth Road and Old Kent Road. It is one of the poorest areas in London. In the early 1990s I was called up to jury service at a trial for a series of people that had been arrested at a crack house on this estate. It wasn’t a comfortable experience. The trial revealed to me a troubled and frightening place that was failing to do anything more than keep the weather off the people who lived there. No doubt over the years many people tried to create a viable community here, but in the late 1990s the council decided it was beyond hope. The estate and the hideous neighbouring pink shopping centre were scheduled for demolition and replacement with new housing and shops. It sounded like a good idea.

 But this is a big place. And Southwark is not a fleet footed council. It took ten years to find a developer prepared to take it on. And several years more to negotiate with partners over the road layout, access to underground stations and the like.  

Four years later nearly all the people have gone. The estate was emptied (or decanted as housing people like to call it) the bulldozers were ready to roll. Plans were readied for replacement homes. Something was going to happen.

But when I visited yesterday it was silent. 1000 empty flats and not a sign of a builder. The Heygate like many other big housing regeneration project ran into trouble with falling house prices in 2008. The projected income from sales of new homes no longer added up. The development ground to a halt. Like many other stalled projects there was hope that it would be bailed out by generous government grants. After all down the road the Aylesbury estate redevelopment was salvaged by a whopping £42 million kick start grant last year. But no such luck  for the Heygate a few weeks ago the unallocated funding in the Kick start programme was cut and doubt thrown over whether similar funding will made available again. The Heygate is just one estate. But there are scores of them around the country stalled, empty and unviable. Some doubt whether bailing out big projects like this is a good idea anyway. But it’s an academic discussion now.

 For years we’ve been told not to worry about the thousands of vacant flats and houses that are in regeneration schemes. “They’re all the process of development,” we were told. But they’re not now. The process and the development have both stopped. Somehow we have to find a way to turn these places back into homes.

In the board game, if you play your cards right it’s easy and cheap to build houses and hotels on Old Kent Road. In reality it’s proving much more difficult.

Forgotten Story

Last year Liverpool campaigner Elizabeth Pascoe lost her fight to stay in her home, and halt the emptying out and demolition of Edge lane. She was forced out last year. But what has happened since? These two photos of her front door taken before and after she left, perhaps offer an answer.

Replacing Cities with Farms

Sir Peter Hall has had a remarkable career. For many years he was a government planning adviser, he led regeneration of the Thames gateway and the building of the channel tunnel, was a member of the urban taskforce and the Barker review of housing supply. But if anything proves pre-eminence it is the ability to be proved right. He has achieved this many times, and it looks like he has done it again over his prediction of the fate of the city of Detroit. Back in 1998 in his book , “Cities in Civilization,” he said that Detroit “has become an astonishing case of industrial dereliction; perhaps, before long, the first major industrial city in history to revert to farmland.”

Detroit has a claim to be the world’s vacancy capital. In its motorcity heyday in the 1950s it was the was the fourth most populous city in the United States. Today it has slipped to eleventh. The decline is not simply that others have overtaken it; Detroit’s population has gone backwards. The impact of this is dramatic. A survey last month showed a vacancy rate of a staggering 35% . Meaning more than 100,000 homes are standing empty.
There has been much soul searching about what can be done, but this week it appears Sir Peter Hall correctly predicted what would happen twelve years ago. Yesterday AP reported that new city Mayor Dave Bing is set to announce that 10,000 houses are to be cleared to make way for farmland.

Of course we know something about this idea in the UK with similar announcements having been made about the future of post industrial cities in the north of England at the end of the last century. The programme that ensued (housing market renewal) originally planned to clear 400,000 houses under rather pessimistic sounding terms like “managing decline” As far as I can recall nobody at the time suggested that the land should be used for farming (an industry that appeared to be in terminal decline itself at the time) But in the decade that has followed the language and the aspiration has subtly changed and now housing market renewal talks about rebuilding housing markets and communities. Some even claim that objective now is for the programme to increase population and housing supply. This is a low point for Detroit, and at such times getting rid of the problem might seem to be the best idea. In the UK it turned out the doomsayers were wrong. With national population increasing our post-industrial cities have begun to recover. The concept of clearance merely as a method of reducing housing supply has been mercifully ditched. Sir Peter Hall may have predicted the response correctly, but hopefully in the end he will be proved wrong.