Neighbourhoods

Walk less, weigh more. Really.

Did it ever occur to you to compare the bodyweight of people living in sprawl towns that encourage car use, with that of people living in more walkable ones? Nor me. A man called Richard Jackson has done so in, er, well the USA actually, and found the difference to be about three kilograms.

"Urban designers need to wake up to the link between neighbourhood layouts and rising obesity and mental illness."

Via Planning resource.

Fings ain't gonna be what they used to be

Dysfunctional neighbourhoods mess people up, and they can mess up older people comprehensively. The Social Exclusion Unit has just published a major report on ending inequalities for older people and it looks like a landmark policy document.

There is a section on social relations and participation:

"We want to see everyone - family, neighbours, pharmacists, GPs and shopkeepers, and older people themselves - acting to ensure that isolation amongst older people is reduced."

And there is a (albeit somewhat terse) section on 'The local area' (reassuring to see the authors eschew the C word. That's progress for you).

The main message in the report is the expressed intention to develop a Sure Start approach to policy for older people. This will be developed by the Department for Work and Pensions through the ‘Link-Age Plus’ programme in due course.

The full report is here. Alongside, SEU have published a detailed statistical analysis of exclusion among older people, available here.

The role of the ward councillor

One of the things we'll see cranked up in the coming year is the role of local elected members, not before time.

"Government policy in the period up to 2004 neglected the ward councillor role. Significant attention has been focused on neighbourhood management on the one hand and on community engagement on the other. Both these agendas have failed to deal with the ward councillor role."

From The neighbourhood agenda and the role of the elected member by Jane Foot and Ines Newman, published by IDeA, January 2006. (Thanks Martin).

More on front gardens

From the Royal Horticultural Society, no less.

"Paving over your front garden affects far more than the environment on your doorstep... laying hard surfaces contributes to flooding and increases local temperatures."

Their new short guide is available here.

Guide Neighbourhoods

Yesterday I was back in Devonport with a group of residents from the Havelock estate in Southall, on a visit as part of the Guide Neighbourhoods scheme.

This Home Office funded scheme is designed "to enable strong, successful resident-led neighbourhood organisations to share their knowledge and experience with other neighbourhoods trying to tackle similar problems." The idea is a kind of 'seeing is believing' visit combined with peer-to-peer sharing of insights and experience.

Four volunteer activists from Havelock made the journey, together with their community development consultant Bev Carter from Partners in Change, as guests of the increasingly-famous Pembroke Street Estate Management Board. We toured the neighbourhood and took the chance to learn what we could about how local people had managed to transform things, and we went away impressed and inspired - which is how it should be. Now I hope to have the privilege of watching and helping things change on Havelock.

The Guide Neighbourhoods scheme is managed by Housing Justice - more here.

A quiet crisis of connections

While the academics were batting the research issues about at last week's 'respect' seminar, I was sitting thinking about what I perceive to be the needs on the estates where I've been working lately. The keywords for me being conversations and connections. The problem I was silently pondering was how hard it is, as a freelance practitioner, to persuade policy makers and funders to invest in stimulating conversations at local level, and yet how crucial it is to do so.

Later I blogged a note about the Young Foundation book, Porcupines in winter, and left out the names of the editors because I wanted to take a moment to flag up their excellent introduction.

The book was pulled together by Alessandra Buonfino and Geoff Mulgan, who note (I think with quite telling precision) a "quiet crisis of connections" in British everyday life. They go on:

"Most governments find it easier to deal with categories and aggregates than with the messy and rough world of real communities and lives. They invariably rely too much on mechanistic tools - spending money on big generic programmes or passing coercive laws - and pay a high price for ignoring the subtler knowledge that sociological investigation can provide."

I thank Alessandra and Geoff for that. It sums up what I've been clumsily but doggedly trying to articulate for some years.

Community libraries

"Libraries get £80m - but none of it to go on books," thunders the Times.

The former newspaper has picked up on the Big Lottery's new programme which includes an £80m fund for 'community libraries' - a topic close to my interests - and it seems upset at the notion of public libraries as places that people go to locally for a wide range of reasons.

“This is preposterous. They’re turning librarians into de facto social workers” says one quote, admirably dropping from daily mail into latin and back again. (Is it just me, or is there something preposterous about people who use the word preposterous?)

The varied uses of libraries have to do with the restoration of the public realm (to spell it out for those who, not having seen it for some time, had not realised it was diminishing). Whether we like it or not, the printed word no longer plays as dominant a role in that realm as it used to. Libraries essentially represent the public realm: hence (or ergo if you prefer) they cannot be expected to focus solely on books. QED.

Only a few days ago I was confronted in a workshop with a similar set of attitudes, with one participant publicly denigrating the local librarian for lack of education (a degree in literature or theology was called for, in this case). Running similar workshops with a colleague recently, I had been quite excited by the creative ideas that people in low-income neighbourhoods (and especially one group of young people) came up with on the future role of libraries. Perhaps we just need to educate a few folk suffering from a surfeit of education.

I happen to think that what are being called 'community libraries' have a future, it just needs a bit of concerted re-invention. If we ignore the fact that, defined simply as resources of book-based learning, they face insurmountable competition, we would certainly hasten their demise. The unique selling point of public libraries, IMHO, is that there isn't one single USP: their special significance is in the remarkable resource-combinations that they offer to local people. We need to be working out the various configurations for particular localities and particular constituencies, in order to spend that meagre £80m wisely.

ISC seminar: presentations

The two presentations from this week's seminar on informal social control are available: by Jacqueline Barnes, on the 'Families and neighbourhoods' study here_; and by Liz Richardson on the 'Incentives and motivations for neighbourliness' study here .

There is also a short pdf summary of the latter study, written by Gerry Stoker, available here .

The Future of Community Festival

The Future Cities Project is organising 'a day of debate' on the future of community, Saturday 4 March 2006 at the Central St Martins College of Art and Design, Holborn, London.

It looks an exciting programme, although it's probably a fair criticism to say the line-up is heavy with esteemed 'Overviewers' and a bit short of people working at local level. Check it out here.

Informal social control

Yesterday's seminar on informal social control (details here) attracted 60 people and stimulated a lot of discussion. I'll post a link to the presentations here soon: meantime a few points and thoughts that emerged.

Inevitably we paid a lot of attention to how the fear of retaliation discourages people from intervening when they witness delinquent or anti-social behaviour. Jacqueline Barnes's research, as I have mentioned before, shows that monitoring of children associates strongly with informal social control; low fear of retaliation and more non-family networks predict more informal social control. In her presentation Jacqueline noted that "it's the families that retaliate, not just the young people."

In discussion about the policy implications, she suggested that more attention be paid to the retaliatory (and presumably, intimidatory) behaviour of parents within communities. At which point Richard Sennett, chairing the discussion, asked: "Because fear is a poor motivator, what do you put in its place?"

Liz Richardson's research at CASE complements this in several fascinating ways. Essentially she has been looking at ways in which neighourliness could be incentivised, and the degree to which formalising local social relations has an effect.

In the areas studied, when considering intervention in response to delinquent or anti-social behaviour, some 80% of people said they would do something. One focus of Liz's anaylsis was then on the extent to which people felt the need for official (police or other uniformed) support if they were to try and stand up for acceptable norms. (This theme was also covered in some absorbing research by Rowland Atkinson and John Flint in a 2004 paper in Policy & politics).

The CASE research found high levels of neighbourliness in the study areas:

• 47% look after keys at least once a year
• 80% do favours at least once a year and 60% monthly
• 63% visit neighbours at home at least once a year, and 43% monthly
• 85% say hello at least monthly
• 46% know most or many people in neighbourhood, 12% do not
• 29% trust most or many people, 16% don’t

I had been conscious that the programme did not cover the significance of the built and natural environment, so I'm grateful to a couple of participants who readily picked this up and stressed it, banging the drum for urban design and sensitive regeneration policies.

Polly Toynbee challenged the government representatives with the point that policy approaches appear not to reflect the common survey finding that people of all ages and backgrounds think there should be more things for the kids to do. Partly acknowledging this, David Halpern from the Cabinet Office told us that investment in youth interventions, pound for pound, is 40 times as effective as investment in policing.

So why (the cry went up) is there not more of such investment? Of course, as David himself clarified later, that calculation is a bit of an over-simplification, and there is (apparently) plenty of money going to local authorities for such purposes, much of it diverted into education. This needs disentangling: we await the Youth matters paper with interest.

We also heard from a member of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, hinting with reference to the Respect Action Plan that much of what strikes us as a punitive approach, hitting the worst cases, is from the government's point of view "actually symbolic - sending signals that can have a beneficial knock-on effect." (This is what I was pondering a few days ago).

Richard Sennett drew our discussion to a formal close noting that "informal social control has to be positive. There has to be a mutuality. The data presented to us suggest that people don't feel that bond."

Jacqueline Barnes's book Children and families in communities is due out soon from Wiley.

I'll post some thoughts on this soon.

Warm spikes

The Young Foundation have just launched their first publication under their new name. It's a collection of mini-studies and essays on 'the pleasures and pains of living together in modern Britain.' Note the word 'together' in the sub-title, because that's the theme of the collection and of course it is rightly and proudly conscientious about the foundation's intellectual inheritance from the Institute of Community Studies.

The book is called Porcupines in winter and you can find out why, and more, here. A quick skim-through hints at some real delights to come, when I get the time - tales and snapshots from local everyday life that help us accumulate a rich picture of how we live. There are contributions from Paul Barker, Kate Gavron, Stephen Marshall, Tom Steinberg, Ray Pahl, Malcolm Dean, Peter Hall, Paul Hilder and numerous others. It's a treasure (especially after the discomfort of the launch, in the shiny glamour of London's Guildhall, watching some of the rich and famous swigging wine and listening to speakers talk about 'the poor' in their absence. Yes, I know why).

Front gardens

When Toby Gale and I talked to people in Manchester as part of the neighbourliness review we did a couple of years ago, we came across a man living in a semidetached house in a relatively affluent area, who had only spoken once to his next-door neighbour in 15 years, and that was on the day he moved in.

He put this down in part to the layout of the long front garden, with cars parked at the top near the house. And whatever the length of the garden, hard standing for cars outside the front door is a surefire way of minimising contact with neighbours.

But making roads out of front gardens has other implications as well, and in Ealing they're taking it seriously. The Ealing Front Gardens project has just set up a website with a couple of reports and a tabular presentation of detrimental effects.

Apart from the implications of loss of vegetation, there are various other concerns such as the reduced amount of rainwater percolating through soil, detrimental effects on water quality and on wildlife, 'heat island' effects, and reduction in gardening activity. Among other negative implications listed are: "Reduction in community cohesion" due to changed appearance/aesthetics; and "Adverse effect on neighbour relations" due to loss of demarcation.

Via Local Sustainability UK.

Dissing kids

Good Will Davies asked me the other day what was my take on the government's Respect agenda, and I hesitantly admitted to having mixed views. It's obviously right to be trying systematically and thoroughly to confront issues which blight many people's lives in unacceptable ways; and it's fascinating to watch an overtly moral government stance being adopted with the explicit intention of changing behaviour. But I still want to know how two key questions affecting young people are to be answered.

First, where are kids in low income neighbourhoods expected to go, and what are they expected to do, when they're not welcome at home? The argument has been made often enough that they do not have sufficient places where they can get inexpensive food and drink, and can sit around chatting without feeling they are being judged by adults all the time. Perhaps the reason the arguments haven't been heard is because middle class kids don't have such difficulties and middle class parents often know nothing about them. So what do we get? A much trumpeted youth volunteering scheme.

Secondly, what attempts are being made to deal with our widespread negative stereotypical images of young people? That's a massive social problem in my view: so this past week we've had ministers feeding bucketsful to the media to help them stoke the stereotype, rather than stifle it.

Now, happily, here's Richard Sennett in a Guardian interview with Stuart Jeffries, noting that there is a tipping point with a lot of young people, between acceptable and anti-social behaviour, and policy needs to recognise that. Referring to his own past experience:

"What kept kids out of trouble was giving them something to do. We're not talking about hardened msicreants now but people who could go one way or the other."

He also puts his cellist's finger on another key point, to do with the limitations of using muscular criminal measures to address extremes of anti-social behaviour without addressing the sensitive issues of uncivil behaviour - unchallenged insolence and rudeness in the street and so on.

And with apologies for the repeated publicity - but I could hardly be expected not to mention again this chance to learn more about these issues in a London seminar on Wednesday, to be chaired by Richard Sennett. We'll be hearing about two fascinating pieces of research which explore informal social control, with presentations by Liz Richardson from LSE and Jacqueline Barnes from Birkbeck.

Anti-social behaviour and civil renewal

Some time ago the Civil Renewal Unit set up half a dozen research projects, which have now reported.

For me, by far the most interesting is a local case study of how measures to address anti-social behaviour contribute to civil renewal objectives. The report is written by David Prior, Kathryn Farrow, Basia Spalek and Marian Barnes.

The researchers found a high degree of pessimism among residents about the prospects for achieving positive change.

"This pessimism stemmed both from a lack of confidence in their capacity to accomplish anything constructive that would not quickly be negated by those who engaged in anti-social behaviour, and from a perception of the danger of reprisals, whether physical or verbal, from such people. It was also fed by what they generally regarded as the failure of the public agencies to do anything effective about putting a stop to anti-social behaviour.

"Evidence of such attitudes was apparent at all levels of the study – frequent comment was made about people’s fears in going about their everyday lives, in using parks, shopping centres and other public spaces, and in having to make special arrangements to avoid potential dangers in very mundane activities (for instance, the resident who would phone a neighbour to keep a watch over her as she walked from her garage to her flat). Experiences such as these appeared to be widespread, suggesting a major challenge for national and local agencies in providing the kind of developmental support that will gradually build confidence and reduce fears."

Among the question it raises is, to what extent does the Respect action plan hold the promise to overcome this pessimism? It's clear that that is the intention, and I hope someone is given the chance (if the residents are ok about it) to go back to the study area in a couple of years' time and assess the impact of the new measures.

I note also that one of the recommendations is for more commitment to community development, especially with young people. Perhaps what needs to be stressed at this point is the difference between youth and community work on the one hand (not that there's enough of that going on) and community development work on the other: the latter is emphatically about empowering people to be able to maximise their own participation and contribution in the collective interest.

The report summary is here. Full report is here.

Lively street life vs quiet and spacious

"Keep an unappealing pedestrian environment with nowhere to walk to, and you end up with the worst of all worlds." Latest thoughts on the critical importance of street life over on Planning Livable Communities.

Neighbourliness in theory and in practice

Yesterday to a Young Foundation seminar on neighbourliness, which reminded me of a note I wrote a couple of years ago about the need to explore the connection between neighbourliness and engagement with governance.

Low levels of neighbourliness do not necessarily mean disengagement from democratic processes, but in many residential areas they suggest an impoverishment of the public sphere. The balance between cohesion and heterogeneity can be critical, which is why we need to keep pressing for clear understanding of community cohesion and not treat it as some policy fad that has been and gone.

Neighbourhoods with strong internal ties may be precisely those where there is the greatest suspicion of, or simply detachment from, the wider civic society and its governance processes. Thinking about the most active neighbourly people I know, none of them is involved to my knowledge in any official governance role, far from it. By the same token, neighbourhoods where place-based relationships are less in evidence can have relatively high levels of participation in formal governance. And again, looking at gated communities in the USA raises concerns about the fracture between island-building local governance and contributions to governance in the surrounding areas.

I seem constantly to be banging a drum about the understanding of informality in social relations. The eruption of the Respect agenda, or the re-invigoration of interest in neighbourliness through JRF funding the Young Foundation to look at it, to me just serve to highlight this peculiarly-ignored need.

Another point on neighbourliness occurs to me. There's a tendency to imply that what we might call traditional close-knit local neighbourhoods (such as those described by Young and Willmott, let's say) were communities in which people lacked choice in their social relationships. We assume that the car and the television in particular, plus the distribution of employment, greater wealth and mobility, have allowed us to develop what Talja Blokland has described as a diminished need to be neighbourly, the possibility of being neighbourly more at one's own discretion.

I have no doubt that this is true but I wonder sometimes if we don't rather exaggerate it. Perhaps it's my age, and the fact that I grew up in a suburb with what were then unremarkably high levels of neighbouring.

Last night I drove into my neighbourhood (shame!) coming back from a car trip to the supermarket (shame!). Between car and front door I exchanged a wave with one next-door neighbour and had a five minute chat with a neighbour a few doors along... He was keen to get a few of us together for a drink and a chat to thank us for our active support over a series of incidents that affected his family in the autumn. I'm lucky enough to live in a cul-de-sac (shame!) where such relations are pretty much routine and expected.

Transience in cities

High levels of transience can be problematic for community development and the viability of neighbourhoods.

In terms of cities, which attract high numbers of transient people, there are complex issues to do with the provision of services.

Greater London Enterprise published last month the report of a European project which sought to understand the implications of population mobility. The main themes of the recommendations are:

• Making neighbourhoods attractive places to live through more responsive services
• Breaking barriers to accessing services, and
• Recognising the impact of population mobility.

More on the project on the URBACT site.

The Social Exclusion Unit is due to publish a report on 'people who move frequently' fairly soon.

Government WILL manage behaviour

And here it is. The Respect Action Plan and the respect website now published. Tony Blair's speech is here.

A quick read-through of the plan suggests it's more thorough than I had been led to believe but seems to confirm the sense of almost unrelieved negativity that we got from the publicity trail. Enforcing respect is seen emphatically as an issue of democracy: 'what the majority wants.'

Various points of interest:

"Within the next year we will ensure that all Government funded regeneration schemes are accompanied by measures to manage behaviour." (Empahsis added).

OK, that's pretty clear. As for the scrutiny process:

"We will place a duty on district level ward councillors to consider issues, and respond within a prescribed timescale. The majority of problems should be resolved at this stage."

On Local Area Agreements:

"By 2007, all upper tier local authorities will have an LAA, including a mandatory outcome on Respect and anti-social behaviour." This provision will include a requirement for all authorities to ensure that intensive family support projects are in place where they are needed.

And yes, there are proposals for activities for children and young people (see chapter 2) - although they look pretty skinny from here.

Broken window of opportunity?

Plenty of comment out there today about the Respect agenda. I chose to watch tv and GMTV's coverage was so poor - bizarrely calling on Anne Atkins in a blurry attempt to stir things up - that their editors really deserve a parenting order. The BBC, meanwhile, gave us an insightful visit to street level work in Manchester; and in the studio, Tristram Hunt again making more sense than most.

Among the proposals:

• 'Local scrutiny committees,' which will have to examine problems flagged up by local people in "community calls to action."
• More parenting courses, with more agencies able to impose parenting orders on those parents who refuse to take up help when their children are "out of control."
• A "national parenting academy," to train social workers, clinical psychologists, community safety officers and youth justice workers about advising parents.
• Powers to close any property which is the focus for "persistent and serious nuisance."

The first of these is the most interesting I think, in the way it continues the fragmentation and reconfiguring of local democracy. How will these committees relate to the structures of neighbourhood governance? And more importantly perhaps, is this going to increase the likelihood of potentially damaging divisions between the locally-engaged ('committee-people') and the disengaged ('not-a-busybody' or 'simply too-busy')?

Anyway, this doesn't look like a package of draconian measures to me. The legal powers are not really the point. I think (hope) it's this government's way of giving momentum to what is essentially a civil society issue. As Hunt said, there are a whole lot of forces working in the other direction - decline of the family, decline of faiths, increased mobility, globalisation etc; and civil relations are a legitimate area for government influence in the face of that.

What the government appears to be trying to do is to stimulate a campaign, and the Respect action plan has to be seen in the context of other approaches including Cleaner Safer Greener, and the Safer and Stronger Communities Fund.

That said - 'Attending Parenting Classes' will become a label like ASBOs. Where's the improvement in social services and mental health services for the parents who are having difficulties? (Setting up something called a 'Parenting Academy' is simply asking for derision).

And where's the provision for young people? The Youth Matters consultation should give some hooks on which to peg demands: but really, 'Give respect Get respect' was a gaping opportunity for the government to claim some kind of role in providing places for kids to go, increased services for parents, and even (we can always hope) "the development of community networks and local engagement."

£50m may not be much for the Respect agenda but some of it would do nicely for a few youth centres and youth workers.

Regeneration glossary

I've been sent an important glossary on regeneration, which comes from a subscription newsletter called Brownfield briefing.

It includes some nice examples, like this:

Stakeholder: One who approves of government policy
Scoping: Guesswork
Visioning: Wishful thinking
Gateway: Location remote from town centre
Quarter: Rundown area in need of regeneration
Community: Area where community has broken down

Super output area: Depressed income area
Evening economy: Binge drinking and public disorder
Growth area: Area of unlimited urban sprawl
Protected area: Area of limited urban sprawl

I think it's time we had one for neighbourhood governance - anyone care to kick it off?

The year of community (bis)

Here's a post from Simon Parker over on Demos Greenhouse, predicting 2006 as the year of 'community.' Unfortunately the Greenhouse spat my comments back at me, so some of them end up here instead.

Simon suggests 06 could be the 'year of community.' I agree, but it would be about the fourth in succession.

"The rhetoric," he says, "will be about 'putting communities in control.'" I agree, but ditto. And I disagree with him when he says that location has never mattered less.

And although he doesn't offer it as a prediction, the suggestion that "maybe we can only ever have a limited, managerial sort of local democracy" is one I think I'd agree with.

For me, perhaps not a new year prediction, more a faint hope: someone somewhere in government will spot that high levels of connectedness through social networks are needed for neighbourhood governance to get down the runway (let alone off the ground), and we need more than promoting formal volunteering as the policy-approved way of bringing that about.

Respect: MORI survey

You may want to look the other way now; there's a welter of policy publicity about swearing, queue jumping, dropping litter and so on, on a street corner in Westminster. MORI have today published a survey on British views about respect.

One or two bits seem only tangentially to do with respect - how closely can you equate it with 'giving money to charity,' for example? But on the topic of informal social control, this is interesting:

• 55% of people have asked someone they did not know to stop behaving rudely.

The survey also found that young people are just as likely as the rest of us "to be irritated by those who fail to give up their seat to the elderly/pregnant or by people who do not say please, thank you or sorry."

The basic question that is raised for me, among the flurry of figures, has to do with the extent to which we see respect as being about civil relations with people we don't know. Showing respect for people we already know, well maybe sometimes it can be hard, but I think there's an important difference.

Anyway it's a fascinating development in policy. It arises partly because government is so keenly aware that many social interventions are simply provided too late. And it's also the case that the distinct roles of governed and governing, in terms of rights and responsibilities, are having to be clarified rapidly. There's a direct lineage of course back to David Blunkett's papers on civil renewal two years ago (here and here) and it would be interesting to reflect on how the argument has evolved.

And of course it's not easy, in any role that implies governing and unequal power, to present comfortably the appropriate balance of coercion and sanction. Ask any parent. Or Richard Sennett, who will be chairing our seminar on informal social control: he notes this towards the end of his book Respect:

"treating people with respect cannot occur simply by commanding it should happen. Mutual recognition has to be negotiated: this negotiation engages the complexities of personal character as much as social structure."

--------------------

Postscipt - here's Tristram Hunt in the Observer - "it is difficult to see how far any eye-catching initiative can confront our ingrained culture of righteous autonomy... The difficulty of the 'respect' agenda is its nebulous, totalising ambition."

Policy on parenting and neighbourhoods

In December HM Treasury published a paper called Support for parents: the best start for children.

It's mostly a review of government provision since 1997 but deceptively I think it may represent a key policy statement, worth noting if only because of the source and its signposting of policy in the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review next year.

There's a chapter called 'Stronger neighbourhoods and communities' - it doesn't say anything very significant but I was struck by one point in particular: as part of the 2007 CSR, it says, the government will consider how it

"can best support the development of community networks and local engagement alongside investment in improving the physical environment in deprived areas..."

It's great to have a government that acknowledges these themes as significant, but we shouldn't get too excited about such pronouncements just yet. My take on the government record, FWIW, is that hugely encouraging insights into various needs under the broad theme of social capital tend to have spawned cautious policy that is very much oriented to formal measures. Hence what I regard as a heavy over-emphasis on formal volunteering and on democratic participation, for instance, perhaps at the expense of putting effort into all sorts of possible ways of stimulating networks of informal connections among neighbours, that in themselves might provide such outcomes, along with many others.

Also, I'm helping in a very modest way to clarify the policy context for Jacqueline Barnes's Families and Neighbourhoods (FANS) Study, and it will be interesting to see how her findings, as they emerge, might contribute to this policy agenda. If you want to find out more about Jacqueline's insights into informal social control, check back to here and join us at LSE in London on 18 January.

Respect Agenda - web chat

Ahead of the imminent action plan for the government's Respect Task Force, Louise Casey, the task force coordinator, will be taking part in a live web chat this Friday 13th.

Which reminds me, there's an interview with Louise Casey in the last issue of the MORI Social Research Institute newsletter, which you can get here.

Properties from hell

The government is to introduce a new power to cover any home or other property “which is the focus for persistent and serious nuisance to local communities.”

"Properties from hell" will be "shut and sealed" under proposed powers to be unveiled next week by the Prime Minister as part of the Government's ongoing drive against anti social behaviour. The new measure is a central plank of the Respect Action plan to be published by the Home Office's Respect Taskforce.

The press release goes on to describe how

"Many communities will know of a flat, house, pub, club or shop which is a magnet for persistent and serious nuisance - noisy and abusive neighbours in and out at all hours intimidating law abiding residents; gangs of kids hanging around, threatening people and causing mayhem; raves or late night parties, trails of litter, needles and vomit around them; children buying and drinking alcohol.”

Most of us won’t have any trouble with the principle here. What I begin to wonder about is the relentless negative language, and the repeated association of ‘kids hanging around’ with mayhem, threats and disorder.

Sustainable communities without community cohesion?

Researchers from ippr - which on tv last night was referred to as "the government's own think-tank" - have been asking existing and prospective residents in the Thames Gateway regeneration about the growth plans for the area.

Among the findings -

• Existing residents believed that only new residents would benefit from any improvements such as new facilities and services.

• And they expressed "very negative attitudes towards prospective new residents, with some people expressing racist opinions and an expectation that new and existing residents would not integrate."

The researchers' recommendations include:

"Give greater priority to community development and invest in increasing the capacity and skills of local authorities and the community and voluntary sector to address community cohesion issues,"

"Engage with and consult existing communities to ensure that the investment in the Growth Areas reflects their needs, as well as those of new residents,"

and a candidate for No-Brainer of the Year Award,

"Invest in infrastructure and community facilities that will make places attractive to people."

Surely they're all no-brainers, I can't really believe the implication that no involvement of local people has gone on or that upgrading of community facilities, amenities and transport has not been part of the plan from the outset? Perhaps things are far worse than I thought.

It seems the need to understand community cohesion issues is pretty urgent. The report notes:

"Perhaps the most troubling insight was into the ill-informed and suspicious attitudes of the existing residents we interviewed in the outer areas of the Gateway." People's concerns "were underwritten by a general sense of powerlessness and exclusion."

How do you transform such tensions into the WIMBY principle - Welcome Into My Backyard? Obviously it takes some skilled community development, lots of work on engagement and, I suggest, an early start.

The report is here.