Urban Regeneration (England)

Anne Main Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend and I share not only the region of Merseyside, but similarities between our constituents and constituencies. St Helens has seen huge cuts to local government, plans for investment in transport shelved, a moratorium on a new police station and now the proposed closure of the court house. Given the points that she has made, does she agree that that denigration of the status of our town discourages business and, most importantly, people?

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. May I ask for interventions to be kept brief? That was more like a mini-speech.

[Alison McGovern]

Thank you, Mrs Main. I think that was the first intervention that my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn) has made in Westminster Hall, so I am sure he will take your advice.

My hon. Friend is right, however. Of course I care that businesses should be successful; I want people to be able to make a profit, to enjoy their town centres and to have a good environment to be in. My main point, however, is that regeneration matters because of what the quality of buildings and the built environment do to people’s hearts and souls. Being from a place that other people think is rubbish is no good—I know—so regeneration matters not only because it helps people to make a buck and to get a job, but because of the pride we take and the status of our towns. That is why I am having the debate today.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North made another good point. The problem with regeneration is the fact that the Government pull away access to capital from every direction. The housing market renewal initiative, which was helping lots of parts of Merseyside, including just up the road from New Ferry, has been cancelled and done away with. Swathes of grassland just by New Ferry are not being built on because the market is providing no capital to build the houses, and the Government will not do it. Regional development agencies—gone. Bromborough, where I am from, was rebuilt by the regional development agency, which identified business opportunities and pushed friendly capital towards there, so that our place would grow, and it did—but the RDA is now no longer there. We have the local enterprise partnership, which is a lovely organisation, but it has no resources. As my hon. Friend said, every Department of Government has stopped spending capital that previously went to regenerate our towns.

The net impact is that market failure simply cannot be addressed. Where a town centre has deteriorated to such an extent that no business can make a decent case to the markets to access capital to invest there, nothing can be done. Only the state can fix this—it is not for the private sector alone. It is not down to Government alone, either, but it cannot be done without Government.

I want to say a few words about New Ferry. It is where my office is, and I have spent time trying to get a regeneration scheme off the ground there. It is very close to a cancelled housing site that is now just scrubland, and there are lots of empty shops. There is a genuine need, not just for business investment but for regeneration. The area needs reshaping and a new idea of what it can be; there are so many empty shops that people do not go there any more. No business is prepared to risk expending capital by itself on New Ferry. What the Government have done means that there is no mechanism to make regeneration happen, so I am standing here today to ask the Minister to create a mechanism—to find a way for the state to do regeneration in our towns once more. That is desperately needed and it must be done.

I will briefly share some of my constituents’ views. In advance of this debate, I distributed leaflets and used Twitter and Facebook to tell my constituents about it, and they have written to me in great numbers to tell me what they think. Miriam Clack of Stanley Road in New Ferry said, about the place that we are from:

“it’s a pig hole, and it’s a disgrace, and no one is in the least bothered about it.”

I am bothered about it, and I think the Government should be as well. This is the place where we live. She asks why the closed shops are not pulled down or made into something else, and she is right to. She goes on:

“If I was younger I would leave but I can’t so I’m stuck in this hole.”



Another constituent, Matthew Thomas, has had a great idea. He says:

“I think we already have a sufficient number of shop premises. I would even say we have too many. In my opinion it is worth considering the impact of removing the shops”.

He is right. New Ferry needs to be reshaped, but only the Government can do that. No one business, on its own, is going to lead a private sector solution to deal with it; it needs to be a partnership.

The local community has done great things, but, as Joan Rawcliffe of Ortega Close said,

“in spite of considerable efforts carried out by the New Ferry Regeneration Action Group (e.g. the farmers’ market, the landfill site”—

we have a new park there—

“regeneration of the area as a whole failed to take place. Monies from outside sources…were not received by New Ferry.”

Such money was received in other areas, but is not available now because of the Government’s actions.

In closing my contribution, I put it to the Minister that the situation is desperate. I see it, day in, day out, week in, week out, when I am in New Ferry staring at boarded-up buildings and the crumbling bricks of those beautiful old buildings I mentioned. I see it; if he does not, he is welcome to come with me to myriad town centres up and down our country to see it. I ask him to think about this: if he, as a Government Minister, could do one thing, it should be to restart the regeneration of our country. That is desperately needed and I ask him to do it.

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[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I think this is the first time you have been in the Chair when I have spoken, so I welcome you to your position. I also welcome the Minister to his position; I think this is the first time I have spoken when he has been winding up for the Government.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on securing this debate about an issue that affects us all, wherever we live, whether in England or Wales. There is nothing worse than the situation she cited in her speech: when someone does not have pride in their community because they believe that the Government or society do not care about them—a feeling underlined by boarded-up shops or derelict places in their communities.

I am also pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders). I was very friendly with his predecessor, who was known as one of the great scientific minds of Parliament. I remember how, in one of our last conversations before he left this House, he waxed lyrical about the fact that his successor knew local government inside out. I am glad that my hon. Friend is bringing that knowledge to bear in the House today.

I will try to keep my contribution short, given what we have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston and for Wirral South. I would like to bring two examples before the House. Community regeneration is something I have been interested in for a long time, in particular through living and having grown up in south Wales, where we are part of the post-industrial age.

In all the time I have been a Member of Parliament, I never thought that I would speak in a debate and praise a Government led by Mrs Margaret Thatcher. However, I find myself doing that in drawing attention to the Cardiff Bay development corporation, which was set up in April 1987 to regenerate the 1,100 hectares of old derelict docklands of Cardiff and Penarth.

If anybody remembers Cardiff Bay—as I know you do, Mrs Main, with your Welsh connections—they will know that Tiger Bay was a no-go area. The most famous person ever to come out of Tiger Bay was Shirley Bassey. It was known, unfortunately, for two things—dockers and prostitutes. It was not a nice place to go. However, when people go there now, it is modern—a place where someone can take their children for a day out. It holds modern office blocks. Essentially, it was part of the British Government’s urban development programme to regenerate particularly deprived and run-down areas of British inner cities, and it showed that when a Government have a political will, great things can happen.

The mission statement for the regeneration project was to put Cardiff on the international map. I am very pleased to say that it has done so, and not just with the Ryder cup 2010, held at Celtic Manor just down the road in Newport, or the recent NATO summit. The facilities in Cardiff—including Cardiff castle, where the President of the United States dined during that summit—really put Cardiff on the worldwide scene, and that is because of what is happening in the bay.

The five main aims and objectives identified in the regeneration project were as follows: first, to promote development and provide a superb environment in which people want to live, work and play. Having enjoyed some of the restaurants and the pubs—sometimes too much—I can say that it is certainly a place that I want to visit. My hon. Friends have encouraged the Minister to visit their areas in Merseyside, and I ask him to visit Cardiff Bay, not in an official capacity, but in a personal capacity, with his family. I think he would have a great day out there.

Secondly, the project aimed to reunite the centre of Cardiff with its waterfront, which is, of course, one of the focal features of the city. It has been used as a backdrop for many news programmes and as a filming location in programmes such as “Doctor Who”—unfortunately, a filming request for the new James Bond film, “Spectre”, was turned down.

The third aim was to bring forward a mix of development that would create a wide range of job opportunities and would reflect the hopes and aspirations of the communities of the area. Cardiff Bay is a melting pot; it brings together several cultures, like many dockland towns, such as those in Liverpool. I am glad to say that Cardiff Bay celebrates the integration and diversity that makes our country so great. Fourthly, the regeneration project aimed to achieve the highest standard of design and quality in all types of development and investment. Fifthly, it aimed to establish the area as a recognised centre of excellence and innovation in the field of urban generation.

Some of the significant achievements of the project included the construction of a barrage across the mouth of the bay to create a 200-hectare fresh water lake—I am glad to say that there are many boating trips on there now. There was the construction of new homes, including those at Atlantic Wharf, and the new offices at Crickhowell House, now the home of the National Assembly for Wales. The development also created commercial and leisure facilities, such as those at Mermaid Quay on the waterfront and the Atlantic Wharf leisure village. It is evident that investment in the regeneration of our towns and cities is vital for the most prosperous future. If somebody wants to see the beating heart of that, please visit Cardiff Bay.

My second example, from further afield, is Bedford-Stuyvesant. The change there was brought about by my great hero, Robert Kennedy, when, in 1964, he set in motion a round of legislative action that created the special impact programme, which was an amendment to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.

Kennedy called for the formation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation and the Development Services Corporation. Bedford-Stuyvesant, at that time, was a hotbed of crime and urban decay, and many of the brownstone houses that made up that beautiful community during the 1930s had fallen into disrepair. What Robert Kennedy outlined was a conceptual framework for a comprehensive and integrated community planning and development effort. His speech recognised that the efforts of community residents combined with those of the private sector and of Government could bring about economic, social and physical revitalisation of some of the most impoverished areas.

Robert Kennedy identified three critical threads, which I believe also link to Cardiff Bay: co-operation with the business community in self-sustaining, economically viable enterprises; integration of programmes for education, employment and community developments under a co-ordinated overall plan; and drive and direction to be given to those efforts by the united strength of the community, working with private foundations, unions and universities, in community development corporations organised for that purpose.

Many people wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South about her area; if there was the idea of a community development corporation that they could get involved in, I wonder whether they could put their ideas into practice. I see community development corporations, if they are taken up—again, with political will—as using the best expertise of business along with the activism of local communities.

Vital to this approach is the recognition that community development requires the direct participation and involvement of the community of residents. That means that however many Government schemes we have, and however much money is thrown at schemes by Government, they work only if there is buy-in from the communities themselves. That is not only in the decision making, but in the production, management and control of what is being produced. If people feel that a fruit and veg shop is needed in their shopping centre, that should be run as a food co-operative, or there should be some other way of bringing it about. However, that can be done only if we lower business rates and create the environment for it to come about.

The notion of community development connotes not only empowerment of residents, but the formation, development and maintenance of community-based institutions, including churches, schools, day care facilities for young and old, health centres, shops and recreational facilities. Thriving local economies are at the heart of a competitive UK economy, but development is needed to help towns and cities to meet their potential—from the quality and affordability of housing, to the mix of office space and the connectivity of transport links. Anyone who has walked down their high street and seen boarded-up buildings where shops once stood, or who is struggling to afford a decent home close to work, will grasp the scale of the challenge.

For too long, “regeneration” has been something of a dirty word. It is seen as something that Government deals with by throwing money at it. Some people will say that it is a waste of time—too big an effort. That is not helped by the fact that many grand projects have failed to deliver the benefits promised, and public funds have been wasted. But to me, regeneration matters; community and civic pride matters. For communities to thrive and prosper, people need to feel proud of where they are and where they come from. For the public, thriving local communities are about having the amenities that they need on their doorstep: leisure facilities, public services, good transport links and, most important of all, jobs. For businesses seeking to set up in towns and cities, the right environment can be the difference between success and stagnation.

We need a new approach to regeneration in which business, local authorities, central Government and local communities work together to deliver new homes and modern office space, rejuvenate our high streets and develop high-quality infrastructure to connect towns and cities. Even in the digital age, in which connections are increasingly made remotely, place, as well as a sense of being, still matters, providing somewhere to live and work and also the right connections to be able to get around.

According to a recent report conducted by the University of Plymouth, “The Failure of Regeneration Policy in Britain”, there are two main types of urban problem in the UK. The first is problem localities in prosperous cities. The second is depressed towns and cities. In both cases, and despite years of policy intervention, there is little evidence that the situation is improving. There are fundamental economic problems to be addressed on both the supply and the demand side. Preferences will have to be altered so that peripheral regions and problem areas become more desirable.

The changing balance of Government spending and the increased costs of motoring should be priorities. The first group involves the essentially prosperous economies of London, much of southern England and the provincial capitals of which Bristol is a glowing example. The second consists of locations that have struggling economies. They include former mining towns, which I represent, and centres of shipbuilding, which my hon. Friends represent.

The report draws the conclusion that the main solution seems to lie with education and training, design improvements, limited tax changes, proposals to clean up contaminated land, and targets for brownfield land and redevelopment. I think that the Government need to take a two-pronged approach. They need to look at the examples of Cardiff Bay and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Government will in Cardiff Bay has regenerated and rejuvenated that area. Community activism regenerated Bedford-Stuyvesant. At our best, this country does those things better than anybody else. I encourage the Government to promote these issues as best they can.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I would like to point out that I will be calling the Scottish National party spokesperson at 10 minutes past 5.

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[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I thank the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) for calling the debate, which I have found most enlightening. It is a shame that Government Members are not here, particularly given that I, a Scottish Member, am here speaking in a debate largely about English towns.

In particular, I want to say that we can learn much from one another across these islands in the way we approach urban regeneration—in the way we approach our towns and cities. I am a Glasgow Member. Glasgow is a city, but it is also made up of villages all around it. We might not recognise them as such because they are close together, but they do have their own distinct feel and vibe, and people are very proud of where they come from even within a city the size of Glasgow. Cities that have suffered the long-term social impacts of deindustrialisation, such as Glasgow, share a lot with cities in England and Wales. That is a particular challenge, too.

I want to highlight a few things that Scotland has done thus far to make progress on urban regeneration that might be of interest to my colleagues here today. Regeneration is difficult. It requires sustained investment, long-term planning and commitment. It is not a project to be embarked on lightly or for short-term political gain; and it cannot be done successfully without working with local people and communities and being led and informed by what they want to see on their doorsteps.

Projects have failed. The Glasgow East Area Renewal in the 1980s failed for a number of reasons, but the main one was that the people locally did not see anything for them in that. It came; it went; and there was nothing left afterwards. I absolutely agree with what the hon. Member for Wirral South said about market failure in our towns and cities. When that happens, an intervention is needed, which will not come from the private sector; local government and national Government will have to work in partnership to turn things around. In Glasgow, in the area I represent, Clyde Gateway has been key not only to doing the difficult land remediation projects, but to regenerating parts of Bridgeton and Dalmarnock. Across the neighbouring constituency of Rutherglen and Hamilton West, a lot of difficult work has been done, and Clyde Gateway has stepped in to fill the void.

In the Communities and Local Government Committee yesterday, I listened with great interest to the Minister for Housing and Planning, who talked about investment in transport hubs. People do not live in transport hubs, in my experience; they live in towns and places, towards which they feel great affection. The Government need to consider the place of towns in people’s health and wellbeing, and their sense of self. If we do not recognise how important that is, we are setting ourselves up to fail.

Many sites around our cities remain boarded off; they do not have the required investment because of the market failure that has been mentioned. In Scotland, we have recognised that. The Scottish Government have undertaken a range of initiatives, particularly through the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, which supports the role of local communities in taking ownership of areas in cities and towns, as well as in rural areas. That could play a significant role in regenerating urban areas, bringing people in and changing how they feel about the areas in which they live. Instead of being frustrated that they cannot do anything about the situation, people can come together and buy out that area, or have an option on that land, so that they can do something with it.

The Scottish Government have a lot of strategy for town centres. They developed the “town centre first” principle in agreement with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. The town centre action plan was started in 2013 and followed up in 2014. The Scottish Government established an empty homes fund for town centres, because part of the problem is that if people move out, there is no one to support local shops and local businesses. Scotland has a £2.75 million fund for town centre housing and a £4 million empty homes fund, so local authorities and housing associations can start to change that around, fix the houses that have fallen into disrepair and bring people in to live in towns and cities. The small business bonus scheme supports small local businesses below a certain rateable value by exempting them from business rates so that they can stay put, and that helps to sustain them in difficult times.

The regeneration capital grant fund is being used in my constituency in an innovative way. The Barras market is world famous for various reasons, but it has seen better days, and regeneration capital grant funding will bring derelict floor space in the Barras market area back into use. Industrial buildings or buildings that once contained market stalls, but that have fallen into disrepair, are now being brought back into use. Various organisations, including artists’ organisations, are coming back into the area. That will have a positive impact and will bring more business and other things into the area.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

May I ask the hon. Lady to address her remarks to the regeneration of towns and cities in England? She is coming to the end of her remarks, and they have been somewhat out of line with the motion.

[Alison Thewliss]

Yes. I am interested in hearing about what is happening in towns in England, and I believe that some of the ideas from Scotland may be of use and of interest to other hon. Members. I would be more than happy to visit the constituencies of other hon. Members, and I encourage them to come to Glasgow or elsewhere in Scotland to see some of our initiatives. There is a lot going on.