National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal
CCH Response to the Social Exclusion Unit's report National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal: a framework for consultation
by Nic Bliss, Confederation of Co-operative Housing
June 2000
1 - Transferring power to local communities?
When the SEU's report "Bringing Britain Together" was published, we were optimistic that its rhetoric about the failure of "top-down" and "parachuted-in" solutions indicated that there would be a substantial rethink of the ways in which resources are used in socially excluded neighbourhoods. Tony Blair, in the foreward to the report, correctly identified that "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."
We are not alone in thinking that the way forward is to transfer power to local communities. Demos, in a recent report that examines how cross sector partnerships can work effectively, argue that "for community groups to maximize their contribution to partnerships, they need independent resources. Without their own assets and income, community groups are always going to be marginal partners and feel frustrated."
The SEU's strategy should be built on how to transfer power to local communities, as envisaged by the Prime Minister. This is the only way to regenerate communities, and to protect communities who may otherwise degenerate into similar circumstances. However, while the report does contain some useful elements, a blueprint for transferring power to local communities it is not, and the emerging strategy is very disappointing.
2 - Learning from the Housing Co-operative model
When we responded to the SEU's original report, we indicated that we felt that the SEU needed to consider carefully the housing co-operative option. This was because housing co-operatives have been offering a method by which power can be transferred to local communities and have been tackling social exclusion for as long as 25 years in some cases. Many other community development schemes have come and gone alongside them. The lessons that can be learnt from the housing co-operative approach can be replicated and need to be replicated in other areas, such as crime, employment, education etc.
In particular, we pointed to key examples of success:
- housing co-operatives in a particularly run-down area that were set up in the 1970s that have remained successful over many years, have outlasted their founders by several generations, and are the only community organisations that remain in place from the time that they were set up.
- a tenant management co-operative who in their first 2 years of management saved £200,000 compared to what the local authority had previously spent, at the same time as clearing the backlog of repairs, creating a viable community, eradicating void properties, vandalism and littering on the estate.
- Housing Corporation registered housing co-operatives, run by co-operative tenants from local authority or other waiting lists, in the North-East region, which record demand for their housing in areas noted for low demand for both local authority and housing association social housing.
The Housing Co-op option, despite its strong record of success since the 1970s, is not mentioned in the SEU report at all. The report does mention tenant management, but there is no analysis of the factors that have led to the success of tenant management, and consideration of these factors would have led to different conclusions. We fear that the SEU has spent too much time talking to the people who have developed and supported the "top-down" nature of the regeneration industry and who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, rather than to members of local communities and people who have many years experience of tackling social exclusion. This is very disappointing and signals a significant lost opportunity.
3 - Engaging communities
The only way to safeguard expenditure is to ensure that the local community becomes empowered to become the guardians and trustees of the regeneration programme. Vague forms of token consultation and involvement are not enough. The greatest possible number of residents must become genuinely engaged and lead the process of regeneration, so that they will take on the responsibility of stewardship in the future.
Professional outsiders cannot create sustainable communities - it is only the members of those communities that can do that. The role of professional outsiders should be to facilitate and support community empowerment rather than make the decisions that should be taken by local people. There is a serious shortage of staff who know how to take this approach and the SEU report should be concluding that there is a need for training for staff in community empowerment.
Unfortunately current regeneration models have a low definition of success in the area of community empowerment. One Housing Action Trust that is portrayed as a model of regeneration claims that there are 600 out of their 11,000 residents involved in the regeneration process and that this is a measure of its success. Even if there were 600 residents involved, this would still only represent 5% of the local population, and there is a need for significantly more residents to become actively engaged if problems of alienation and social exclusion are to be combatted.
Despite this case being touted as a flagship regeneration programme, it will not be sustainable without the active involvement of the community. When the regeneration project leaves, the neighbourhood will not have overcome the stigma and alienation that characterised it before and more money will be required in 10, 15 or 20 years time. This is a tragic waste of public resources!
Compare this to the successes of the housing co-op model. While it will vary from co-op to co-op, we estimate that an average of between a quarter to a half of co-op members are actively involved, with many more engaged and feeling a responsibility to the co-op.
There is no inherent difference between co-op tenants and tenants in stock transfer or regeneration programmes. Co-op tenants come from local authority or other waiting lists in the same way as any local authority neighbourhood or RSL. If we were to get even a quarter of the residents of stock transfer and regeneration programmes to be become actively engaged in decision-making processes, this would have the enormous impact that is required. This is not a pipedream. It can be done if the will and the resources are there to do it.
4 - What lessons can be learned from the housing co-operative movement?
From our experience the following points are important in building sustainable communities, which will take responsibility for their homes and environment:
- Most successful housing co-operatives and tenant controlled organisations are small-scale neighbourhood based organisations. Genuine decision-making must be devolved to a number of properties that ordinary people can relate to (perhaps to as few as 50 properties).
- Communities are made up of individuals who come together with common aims, interests and aspirations - Individuals come together as a community in the knowledge that they will be able to achieve more by working together than by working individually. It is unlikely that a community can be sustained if the individuals that are part of it feel that their contribution is not achieving anything.
- Communities only come together if there is a reason for them to do so - this sounds obvious, but in housing terms this means that tenants and communities will only come together on a lasting basis if there is a realistic chance that they will genuinely have an effect on their housing and environment.
- Communities work best if they have access to appropriate support when necessary - tenants and communities need access to professional and sympathetic support structures. These support structures need to have as their aim that the members of the community should be empowered to control their own affairs. Many of the successful housing co-operatives have bought services from the dedicated housing co-op service agencies. The way in which these services are provided should become a blueprint for how other organisations in other sectors should work with local communities.
- Housing is one of the best building blocks for communities - although there are always variations between different housing schemes, the basics of providing housing are straightforward, and relatively easy to teach, compared with more complicated issues such as dealing with crime. Most issues relating to housing have common sense solutions, whilst there is rarely a right or wrong way to deal with other issues that face a neighbourhood. Therefore, tenant involvement and control of housing is an excellent way to build the capacity of local communities at the same time as dealing with real day to day issues. This is recognised in the Demos report previously referred to, where they note that for tenant management organisations "because they have a real influence, many more residents want to get involved that traditional tenants associations which have, at best, a consultative role". The report goes on to say that "community based organisations need some resources of their own with which to develop their own services, take risks, get some experience of implementation and negotiate genuinely joint projects. Real capacity building involves giving groups the independence to manage resources, not just training them in how to work on committees."
- Participatory democracy is more conducive to building communities than representation - Whilst it is important that community groups are truly representative of the section of the community that they are purporting to represent, an elective structure should never been seen as being the be-all and end-all of community representation. Elections are rarely contested at community level, and while they may be necessary to demonstrate community support at key times, it is the structures and methods that involve the wider membership of an organisation that are important in building communities.
- The concept of "community leadership" may be damaging for communities - communities need to be built on the premise that all individuals involved in a community have a valuable role to play and that no individual's role is more important than any other's. Simply getting tenants on boards, getting one or two individuals to be community leaders or champions, is not enough, even if what then results is tenant or community controlled. If we are to really get the benefits of community control, empowerment must be at 'grass roots' level and the community control structure built bottom up from that. It is often the less confident and articulate members of a community organisation who are the bedrock of the organisation, carry out the day to day tasks and have the best ideas for their neighbourhood.
- Inside everyone there is a community member waiting to get out - Housing Co-ops work on the principle that everyone has a role to play in building the community, and it is the role of the housing co-op to liberate the 'co-operator' in everyone!
- The reason for setting up tenant and community control is rarely about providing better housing management. The better housing management that springs from housing co-ops and tenant control is a by-product of the success of the organisation. The reason for encouraging tenant control is about accountability, community empowerment, about encouraging self-help and self-responsibility, about tackling social exclusion, about re-enfranchising ordinary people who will have often felt that they have no real stake in society
5 - An examination of the housing co-op option
We did not expect the SEU to take our word that the housing co-op model works, but we did hope that the SEU would examine the housing co-op model. Nonetheless, all the available research indicates that tenant control works and works well.
In 1995, the then DOE commissioned Price Waterhouse, a firm of city accountants who would hardly be predisposed to be sympathetic to housing co-ops, to examine the benefits of tenant control. Price Waterhouse subsequently indicated to us that the government at that time commissioned the report in the hope that it would indicate that housing co-ops were not good value for money, and Price Waterhouse were originally asked not to include ownership housing co-ops in the report at all. Fortunately, Price Waterhouse considered that their research could not be done successfully unless they considered all methods of tenant control, including ownership housing co-ops.
The results of the report were surprising to those who had commissioned it. Price Waterhouse concluded that housing co-ops:
- "outperformed their local authority and housing association counterparts and provided more effective housing management services with usually better value for money",
- "delivered wider non-quantifiable social and community benefits"
- and that "the most effective organisations were those whose members had greatest control over their housing management, finances and environment."
The clear conclusion, that the more power local communities have, the better value for money and the better services, was not one that the then government and the Housing Corporation were particularly happy with. It clearly indicated that housing policies at that time were inappropriate. The Housing Corporation attempted to criticise Price Waterhouse's methodology, although they refused to do so publicly and enable Price Waterhouse to respond.
Price Waterhouse's findings have been subsequently confirmed. In 1998, researchers from 3 universities studying the benefits of community and co-operative ownership in Scotland, where over half of the housing association sector is tenant controlled, concluded that "although a major programme in Scotland, the approach has not been adopted in England and Wales. The continued success of community ownership argues strongly for the model to be adopted more widely".
Finally, the Housing Corporation, when charged with developing a resident control strategy by Baroness Dean, the Corporation's chair, decided that there was need for further research. We did not feel that further research was required, because the available research already pointed to the success of the housing co-op model. Nonetheless, the Office for Public Management were charged with carrying out research and they concluded that the Corporation should "continue to recognise co-ops as one aspect of a spectrum of resident involvement".
A further study, carried out by researchers at Nottingham University and published by NIACE, the National Organisation for Adult Learning, demonstrated that the personal and social benefits of voluntary organisations went beyond the simple provision of and management of housing and concluded that participation in organisations such as housing co-ops led to increased knowledge, skills and confidence and the ability to control one's own life.
The ramifications of this is that the most successful way, and probably the only way, to regenerate our disadvantaged communities will be to transfer power to those communities. Transferring power is not necessarily a process that will be easy or cheap in the short term. However, a strategy for neighbourhood renewal should start from that aim and should investigate what is needed to transfer power to local communities in the short, medium and long term. As a society, we cannot afford to continually use taxpayers money to prop up regeneration scheme after regeneration scheme that are paternalistic and 'top-down' and which do not deal with the problems sustainably.
6 - Tenant Management
We particularly mention tenant management, because the report does refer to tenant management, but there is no analysis of the factors that have allowed tenant management to happen. Tenant management has largely happened because of the 'Right to Manage' and the DETR's Section 16 framework, which gives tenants access to independent funding and a clear framework to establish the tenant management organisation. The work done by the DETR's Section 16 department is exemplary, and there is no government funding that has done more to successfully empower communities.
There are between 150 and 200 tenant management organisations now operating in the local authority sector. In the housing association sector, there are an indeterminate number of tenant management organisations, and the fact that no one knows how many tenant management organisations there are in the housing association sector is clearly indicative of the Housing Corporation's lack of support for tenant control. Key factors that will impede the growth of tenant management generally is that there is no "Right to Manage", no funding available for tenants to establish tenant management organisations and no framework in the Housing Association sector. Given that it is the government's intention to see a majority of local authority stock transferred to the housing association sector, the lack of support for tenant management in the housing association sector will greatly impede tenants from creating the strong and sustainable organisations that have developed in the local authority sector.
It is not enough that the SEU report highlights the benefits of tenant management without noting that particularly in the housing association sector that there is next to no support for it.
7 - Employment issues
While lack of employment in disadvantaged neighbourhoods is centrally important, there are some key issues that we need to be wary of. The results of having active programmes to find people work may often be that the person who finds employment simply decides to move away from the neighbourhood concerned and the problems remain.
A recent study carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that "everyday life in deprived neighbourhoods is characterised by households' inability to complete a large number of basic tasks necessary for maintaining a reasonable quality of life". 82% of those studied wanted "to engage in more activity for themselves and others". The report goes on to say that "people are prevented from getting work done and from helping themselves and others by their lack of money, equipment, time, skills, confidence, social networks, as well as a perceived lack of a local sense of community". The research concludes that "the current approach of creating job opportunities to provide people with greater income needs to be complemented by more direct measures which harness people's abilities to help themselves and others."
The approach of enabling local residents to help themselves to develop their own employment solutions rarely seems to happen. The SEU report does support the Community Business approach and we obviously support that. Local residents will usually have good ideas about what services are needed on estates, and it is often the case that local residents will be able to develop a business to meet those needs, at the same time as ensuring that the money needed to pay for those services remains on the estate.
However, it is usual in regeneration schemes that "top-down" solutions will be preferred (possibly because this is what the professionals are used to). We are aware of one regeneration project that devoted much work to develop a "job-link" service. The person employed to make this service work reported to us that she had a wide range of schemes available, that would pay the person a reasonable wage while the person was trained to carry out the work. Other benefits were available such as childcare and transport costs. However, on an estate with an extremely high percentage of unemployment, she was facing big difficulties in finding someone to take these schemes.
Disadvantaged neighbourhoods are marked by extreme alienation, a perception that anything official cannot be trusted and that the ordinary people in the neighbourhood are not stakeholders in the community. Until that alienation and lack of trust can be broken down, it is unlikely that social exclusion will be successfully tackled. Once again, housing co-ops and tenant control models provide a route by which people who have never been given any responsibility can build up their self-esteem and widen their horizons so that they will be more keen to look at what opportunities are available to them.
8 - Conclusions
This is a response to the "National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal" that doesn't pull its punches. The scale of the problems necessitates that we can no longer rely on the paternalism that has marked every regeneration scheme since the 1970s. A bold approach is called for which is driven by an aim to transfer power to local communities. Anything less than this approach will be tinkering around the edges of the problems of social exclusion and will require continual public subsidy. The Housing Co-operative and tenant control approach has been shown repeatedly to be effective, both in research in this country and also in other western democracies - Canada, Norway, Denmark and closer to home, in Scotland, where over half of the Housing Association sector is tenant controlled. An examination of the housing co-operative approach and the lessons that can be learnt from it is long overdue, and its lack of consideration in the SEU report is a gaping hole. We urge the SEU to think again.
