BENVGUR6

If Planning is anything, it is not Housing Market Renewal

Pathfinders: the case of East Central Rochdale.
How Rochdale responded to a well-funded but ill-conceived government
initiative

Urban Problems and Problematics Essay

Candidate Number: STWD7

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Introduction

The spectre of rows of abandoned and decayed terraced houses in Northern England so
haunted former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in the early 2000s that he decided a
“new approach” (ODPM 2003 p 26) was needed. Heavily inspired by a 2001 report Changing
Housing Markets and Urban Regeneration in the M62 Corridor, the government was soon
throwing millions (and later billions) at nine areas it had designated as “the most deprived in
the country” (ODPM 2003 p 24) in the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) Pathfinders scheme.
At the outset, there was no specific budget and “no blueprint” (ODPM 2003 p 24). The idea
was to somehow change the housing market in deprived areas by tearing down old houses
and replacing them with “modern sustainable accommodation” (ODPM 2003 p 24).

The essay will look at the East Central Rochdale (ECR) scheme, one of four initial projects
proposed by the Partners in Action (PIA) Oldham Rochdale HMR Pathfinder. After Prescott
picked PIA as an area that should be funded, the incentive appears to have been to apply for as
much money as possible.
“The council is promoting this because there’s money to be had from central government,”
said Robert McCraken QC, respresnting residents of Derker, another PIA scheme (Minton
2009 p 86).

This essay will argue HMR schemes were not ‘planned’ by central government, and in the
scrabble for cash, local authorities submitted poorly tested proposals, knowing they would
not be scrutinised in the same way as if the initiative had been theirs. Using empirical
evidence from the National Audit Office, CLG, PIA pathfinder and other reports combined with
visual evidence from a site visit, it will examine how appropriate and valid the intervention in
ECR has been.

Choice of ECR

The Pathfinder scheme has been judged “slum clearance” by some of its fiercest critics
(Minton, Hathaway) writing about resistance in Liverpool and Oldham. To really understand
the motives behind the scheme, this author felt it wise to avoid sensationalism and purposely
focussed on ECR, where such an emotive claim does not hold. It is an area where according to
the Audit Commission, lessons were learnt from opposition to HMR demolition in Derker
(Oldham). As a result the PIA pathfinder employed a “structured approach” to community
engagement, moving “on a more natural timescale that residents are comfortable with.”
(2008, p7). The local community was consulted and efforts were made and to ensure that
people living in the area are able to stay. To bridge the gap between the new more expensive
properties, ECR residents were offered an equity loan of up to £35,000 towards the purchase,
which doesn’t need to be repaid until the property is sold (ECR Newsletter Spring 2009).

The rationale for intervening

This essay does not argue there was no need for intervention. On the contrary, terraced
houses in ECR had been subject to several refurbishments to adapt housing for an Asian
population who had come to work on the now silent mills and are now living in an area of
high unemployment (CLG 2007 p25-27). Many were in a bad state of disrepair.

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The social costs of “people left in one location” (Couch 2003 p 23) by economic decline have
been studied by many academics. Left to the market, the problem may not sort itself out.
Smith (1996 p 66) says a developer will only invest in a neighbourhood to turn it around if the
price of land has fallen to a level where he or she can purchase the land, pay building and
interest costs and still sell for a satisfactory return. There are few developers willing to
intervene of the scale put forward in ECR, justifying government action.

However, even with subsidies (for demolition and clean-up of industrial sites), developers are
still struggling to sell or lease properties (Photo 1). Although only a five-minute walk from the
town centre, the pictured apartments (which come without parking facilities) are unsuited to
families and difficult to sell to “executives,” perhaps because the charity shops and pawn
brokers of Rochdale high street are not considered worth walking to by such people (who
might prefer to drive to Manchester or the Trafford Centre). This suggests that regeneration,
while justified, was not the appropriate type.

Photo 1: John Street apartments in refurbished textile mill

Lack of planning

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In a document entitled “If Planning is Anything, Maybe it Can be Identified” (1983), Eric Reade
sought to define the decision-making method known as ‘planning.’ Among the nine
constituent elements he set out was a requirement that planning requires an explicitly stated
outcome, the possibility to monitor progress, and an attempt to forecast the outcome.

The HMR schemes certainly lacked an explicit objective. In its own report, the government
admits that rather than inviting bids for worthwhile projects, it identified “nine areas where it
considered that action was urgently needed” (CLG 2007 p. 12). Such was the urgency under
which the government felt it had to act, it failed to identify specifically what it wanted to
achieve in those areas, let alone studying whether its aims were feasible (ODPM 2003). In
2003, Prescott published a timetable which showed by 2010/2015 pathfinders would be
demonstrating “all the features of a successful and sustainable community – including a
healthy housing market with balanced supply and demand” (p 29) , but there was never a
serious attempt to plan how to get there of to define what that meant.

There was also little effort to monitor progress. The Rochdale-Oldham PIA was described in
2004 by the NAO thus:

“Due to the nature of the information base, trend data could not be considered, but there was
also no attempt made to assign any relative importance or weightings to the factors, so that
they all counted equally. However the two tables provided with the prospectus did not
actually include all the factors originally specified, and only one had been ranked to produce a
priority-order list of neighbourhoods experiencing housing difficulty. It is unclear whether the
process originally envisaged was later amended by the Executive, or whether only partial
information has been presented in the prospectus. There is also a lack of transparency around
the subsequent stages of the selection – ie on how the trade-offs between the rankings and
other factors was managed” (p31).

Report after report states how difficult most pathfinders were to monitor. The House of
Commons’ Public Accounts Committee in 2008 found that it was “difficult to determine”
whether improved demand was a result of intervention (p 3). Although the government
claimed that National Audit Office findings “clearly show” that the Pathfinder areas have
outperformed other areas with problems of low demand, they failed to quantify how and to
what extent. (HM Treasury 2008, p 70).

As for forecasting the outcome, government gave no specific targets, even as the scheme
progressed. In the case of PIA, the audit commission said of the bid for £602.5 million in 2004
“It is difficult to say at this early stage with certainty that any set of proposals will succeed in
restoring market confidence.”

According to these criteria therefore, the scheme was unplanned. This meant there was no
proper strategy for deploying the billions of pounds the government would pump into the
project.

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Why was ECR proposed?

The East Central Rochdale masterplan was commissioned from London-based consultants
Shillam+Smith. They claim the area suffers from the opposite of abandonment: excess
demand, albeit of a particular, non-market type. ECR therefore did not fit the governement’s
criteria and an Audit Commission report (2004, pp 30-31) found the area was joint-ninth in
priority ranking of the 31 neighbourhoods put forward for intervention by the PIA. But at the
start of the program, the government was taking a “hands-off” approach (CLG 2007 p18) and
the scheme went ahead.

It seems likely that Rochdale put forward this scheme because it fitted its own objectives
rather than central governement concerns about market failure, although some attempt was
made to allign its criteria. The Shillam+Smith report says “the area is not currently considered
attractive for private development investment,” (p 1) even if residents appreciate the area.
From Rochdale’s perspective however, the area was selected for renewal because the two-up,
two-down terraced housing stock is unsuited for many of the Asian families who have
clustered in the area.

Assessment of the HMR Pathfinder scheme

The recession and the fact that the coalition government is withdrawing support is a good
excuse for defenders of the 10-15 year scheme, who can argue that it has failed to yield the
intended results because of external conditions and because it has been halted half-way.
There may be some traction in this argument, but only to a degree. This essay has argued that
Pathfinder didn’t live up to expectations because those expectations were never quantified.

Four years into the scheme, the audit commission said that “value for money is the most
underdeveloped area.” (2006, p.4). In 2008/09, the local government watchdog was still
advising government to identify how to determine the impact of the program, and improve
monitoring (p.11).

In a detailed assessment, the National Audit Office (2007) said Pathfinders was a “radical,”
“high risk” (both p. 22) and “top-down” (p.25) approach, whose benefits are unclear at best.

“While there have been physical improvements in some neighbourhoods, it is unclear

whether intervention itself has led to improvement in the problems of low demand,” said the
head of the National Audit Office Sir John Bourn when his 2007 report was published (NAO
press release). “And in some cases intervention has exacerbated problems in the short-term.”

Some commentators have been more scathing still. Writing in The Guardian, Owen Hathaway
says: “Pathfinder was New Labour at its worst, an exemplar of its authoritarianism, its
arrogant assumption that the core vote can be screwed over indefinitely, and its blind faith in
the market.”

In total, the government threw £2.2 billion (NAO 2007 p7) at its HMR scheme. In May 2010 a
report to members of parliament cited a 2009 Shelter report as the most recent assessment of
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the overall scheme. While broadly supportive of the investment, it says results “could be
strengthened by ensuring that regional plans for housing growth both support, and are
mutually compatible with, HMR strategies.”

A 2008 House of Commons report notes that with 10,000 homes demolished but only 1,000
built, there is “a risk that demolition sites, rather than newly built houses, will be the
Programme’s legacy.” (p 5).

Assessment of ECR

By 2008, in contrast to earlier reports, the Audit Commission judged PIA as scoring “well” or
“strongly” in every criteria except delivery and impact (due to the program being at an early
stage) (2008, pp 6-7). But it is on this criteria that it must be judged.

On the PIA website, the page devoted to ECRi lists the achievements to date: construction of
ten “striking new homes” at Halifax Street to replace “dilapidated terraces,” and 25 family
homes on Nelson Place (Photo 2). It also lists refurbishment of hundreds of homes, a new
website and an annual funday each August. One of the vacant sites is expected to see progress
this year, with only a weak promise that at some unspecified time in the future “further
development could follow at locations we have prepared for future building.”

Photo 2: Developments for sale on Trafalgar Street/ Nelson Place

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In ECR many sites have been empty for several years (Photo3), and recently advertisements
for the new homes to be build have been painted over. Still, demolition of tinned up properties
continues before the HMR funding dries up (Photo 4), leaving many residents looking at
empty spaces where members of their community once aspired to live.

Photo 3: Nile Street, ECR. Temporary landscaping to prevent travellers and crime on a site
cleared at least two years ago and still awaiting development. The flood wall at the back
suggests it may not be appropriate for the riverside housing foreseen by Shillam+Smith.

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Photo 4: Tinned up houses on Ramsay Street, ECR. Demolition will begin when the remaining
residents have been rehoused.

Conclusion

“There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend – the figure is usually put
at a hundred billion dollars – we could wipe out all out slums in ten years,” said Jane Jacobs in
her classic work on what makes cities work (1993, pp 5-6). “But look what we have built with
the first several billions.”

This essay has argued that it takes more than just money and goodwill to transform an area: it
takes planning. In the case of HMR it should have been obvious from the raft of reports that
enough care had not been taken to lay out a roadmap and to work out if that roadmap was
feasible. Given the amounts of money involved, it would not perhaps have been politic for the
government to admit they moved too hastily. But for communities waiting for the economy to
recover to transform the buildings sites they live next to, it might have been better if they had
done so. The residents of Ramsay Street and Nile Street will probably be living next to open
space for years to come.

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Word Count: 2165

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