Reading

16 June 2000

With "partnership working" at the heart of government philosophy I’m pleased to note this event is being co-sponsored by three regional partners, the Government Office (GO South East), the Regional Development Agency and the Regional Assembly. It’s a very good example of pooling expertise and resources to jointly combat social exclusion.

I am here today to talk about the Government’s proposals for a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. These proposals have been drawn together by the Social Exclusion Unit, based in the Cabinet Office, into a framework document. This document is currently the subject of an extensive consultation exercise, and I’m glad that you are all here today to feed in your views.

Today, I want to take some time to explain a little of the background to this work, to highlight some of the key ideas being put forward and the thinking behind them.

The problems are easy to see. As the first Social Exclusion Unit report found back in 1998, people living in deprived areas are much less likely to have a job. Less likely to have the skills or qualifications needed to compete for a job. More likely to be a victim of crime. And more likely to die young.

Perhaps most shockingly, over the last twenty years, poverty and deprivation have increased and have become more concentrated in certain neighbourhoods.

To combat these problems, the Prime Minister asked the Social Exclusion Unit to set up 18 policy action teams. They looked, in detail, at some of the problems facing deprived areas, and considered some potential solutions.

All of these teams have now reported. And the key recommendations form the core of the proposals in the framework version of the National Strategy which we have now issued for consultation.

I want to emphasise that social exclusion is not just a problem confined to northern cities. Social Exclusion affects the south too, particularly in coastal areas such as Hastings and Thanet. And the problem has worsened in recent years, as demonstrated by the DETR’s Index of Local Deprivation which showed that 5 of the 20 local authority districts undergoing the most marked increases in levels of deprivation were in the South East. Wherever we live, north or south, town or country, social exclusion is an important issue for us all.

So how did things get so bad?

The main trigger of neighbourhood decline is almost always economic, resulting in job losses, and the inability of new generations to get jobs. When concentrated in particular areas, this has knock-on effects, such as educational under-attainment, drugs and crime.

The problem has persisted, despite many attempts to sort it out. We believe there are four key reasons for this:

• Firstly, action on jobs has been ineffective. For many, the benefits system has failed to encourage or support a return to work. Poor educational attainment and training, and racial discrimination, both inadvertent and overt, have reinforced these inequalities.

• Secondly, communities have been left vulnerable, uninvolved and unsupported. Communities are often undermined by threats like drugs and anti-social behaviour. And there have been too few opportunities for residents to get involved in work to turn around their areas.

• Thirdly, the poorest communities have received the poorest services. Public services like schools and GP surgeries are often poorer in the deprived areas, where they are needed the most. And key private sector services can be absent.

• Finally, there has been a lack of an effective strategy. The many influences on deprived areas have not been joined-up, and proper leadership has been absent at every level.A lot of the time, this has been caused or worsened by the failure of successive Governments to have a coherent strategy for addressing these deep-seated problems.

But as well as pointing out what’s failed, the work of the Social Exclusion Unit has highlighted some successes. Over the last three years, many of this government’s main programmes have had a particularly positive effect in deprived areas, with early results which are particularly promising on education and employment.

For instance, unemployment has fallen in very deprived areas - by 25% in Manchester, and by 15% in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets. This trend is also apparent in some of the deprived areas within the South East, although from a lower baseline. Many deprived neighbourhoods within these areas have benefited.

And deprived schools make up the majority of those which have shown the greatest improvement in standards of literacy and numeracy.

But the over-riding sense coming out of our work is that the huge amount of valuable improvements which are being made on the ground – through the efforts of hard working and dedicated front line staff – are not properly recognised, supported or replicated.

So the strategy is about taking good ideas from one place and making them work elsewhere.

Following the consultation, the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy will set out a ten-year plan. This will aim to arrest the wholesale decline of deprived neighbourhoods, to reverse the trend of decline, and prevent it from occurring again.

Success will be measured against two goals: first, narrowing the gap between the most deprived neighbourhoods and the rest; and second, getting more jobs, less crime, better health and better educational attainment in the most deprived neighbourhoods.

This is ambitious. Nothing like this has ever been tried before. But we believe it can work. The report lists lots of examples where local commitment and innovative thinking have made big changes in the most difficult areas.

The Government can’t achieve all this alone. Commitment is required from all sectors, so that policies, people and resources are marshalled behind the strategy.

The framework version of the strategy proposes action on four fronts:

• reviving local economies;
• reviving communities;
• ensuring decent services; and

• encouraging leadership and joint working

The report goes into these in more detail - I’ve only got time to highlight key ideas that illustrate them. Before I discuss these, it might be useful to say what the strategy is not. It is not another area-based initiative. Nor is it a blueprint for new action zones or other localised or temporary measures. It is nothing less than a step change in the way Government interacts with deprived areas.

So, let me turn to the four key areas for action. First, reviving local economies.

A neighbourhood will not improve without jobs. The framework version of the strategy puts forward ideas to help residents in deprived areas to compete for jobs.

First, by re-skilling people – especially with the IT skills that are increasingly vital in the new jobs market. Also proposed are teams to help link people without jobs to jobs without people, and changes to the benefit system so that people who take a job can come back to the same level of benefit if their job falls through.

Matching jobs with people is part of the answer. But bringing new jobs to deprived areas is just as important. Many new jobs are created by small businesses. But, as the Social Exclusion Unit Policy Action Team on enterprise found, there is little or no encouragement for small businesses to be established and to thrive in deprived areas. The Regional Development Agency has identified the need to develop business and social connections between areas of deprivation and economically dynamic areas. And the Government Office has arranged that when the local Small Business Service offices are set up, they will meet with key partners engaged in social inclusion.

It is impossible to turn round a deprived area without the help of local residents. So, our second area for action is focused on Reviving Communities.

This is partly about tackling threats like crime and anti-social behaviour. These are often impediments to people getting involved in their communities.

An increasing number of areas are finding that ideas like neighbourhood wardens can work effectively with the police to reduce crime and fear of crime. The strategy puts forward proposals to promote and support neighbourhood warden schemes.

Other proposals focus on a range of issues, such as how to prevent housing becoming vacant; how to tackle racial harassment and other forms of anti-social behaviour; and some first thoughts on what can be done about drugs. The recently published Home Office Code of Practice on recording racist incidents, aimed at local authorities, Housing Associations, community groups and schools, is another important dimension.

A second ingredient in the recipe for reviving communities is community confidence. A key part of this is to give deprived communities opportunities to help themselves. Regeneration programmes like the New Deal for Communities and the Single Regeneration Budget are already leading the way on this. And new mainstream initiatives will help, such as Connexions, which involves young people in designing new, integrated services to help and support them through the teenage years, which is when they are at particular risk of drifting into exclusion.

But we want to extend the principle further. We want to ensure that local people have much more of a say in influencing and running main services, not just special initiatives with limited lives and small budgets.

We want to try out a new idea called neighbourhood management, which is about giving local residents more leverage over the core public services that often make or break their quality of life. The idea would be to provide bottom-up pressure for the improvement and customisation of services.

Which leads us onto the measures we propose to ensure decent services for residents in deprived neighbourhoods. As I have said, the Social Exclusion Unit’s work to date has shown that core public services are often worst in the poorest communities.

We have looked at what drives public sector performance. There are many factors, but at the Whitehall level, one of the main drivers is the set of targets that Departments agree with the Treasury in return for their money.

Our proposal is that Government departments should be set targets not only for their achievements across the country, but also for their achievements in the most deprived neighbourhoods. These targets should be challenging, and should be adequately resourced.

So a core part of our Strategy would be to ensure that Department’s main targets were framed in such a way that Departments wouldn’t be able to ignore the needs of deprived areas.

A special Spending Review of Government Interventions in Deprived Areas is looking at this, and what it would cost. Results will be available in July.

As well as making sure that services are incentivised and resourced to deliver in deprived areas, we need to be sure that they are suited to the needs of deprived areas. The Strategy proposes that there needs to be at least one on-the-spot service in every neighbourhood, accountable to residents, which could act as a gateway for others. Quality, on-the-spot housing management can be a good way to do this - but there are many others, and it is important to be flexible and creative about this.

Our fourth area for action is leadership and joint working.

The problems of deprived areas are joined up and many organisations have a role to play in addressing them. A joined up response is vital. This means having the right mechanisms in place at several levels: in Whitehall, in the regions, in the local area, and in the neighbourhood.

One key level is the local authority level, where resourcing decisions are often made for public services.

Our proposals include the idea of local strategic partnerships, co-ordinating action from across various sectors in the most deprived areas. But this mustn't add to the number of partnerships already out there. Indeed, the report argues strongly for rationalising a number of joint functions into a single local partnership. Where possible, this would build on what’s already there - such as the New Commitment to Regeneration. It would need to be tied in with the new Community Planning framework.

These structures - if developed right - could empower communities, by making services more accountable to them, and provide a more rational structure into which a variety of organisations - public, private, voluntary and community sector - could plug in.

But even when services work together, they need better support. The Policy Action Team work has suggested that, too often, key public services are ‘flying blind’, as they don’t know what’s going on in deprived areas, nor what would help to sort out their problems.

Part of the solution here is to ensure that we have an accurate view of the full picture. We need to radically improve our Neighbourhood Statistics, which will help all of those involved in tackling the problems of deprived neighbourhoods to gauge the size of the problem in different places, design the right response, track progress and spot emerging trouble elsewhere before it became serious.

That is very much a whistle-stop tour of what is in the report and the summary that you will hopefully have seen.

But I have left the most important question till last. If we implement these proposals, what would actually change?

We think that the framework put forward offers the right basis on which to start to improve life for those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods. We want to see more people getting jobs, more people starting businesses, less neighbourhood crime and more opportunities for people to get involved in renewal. We want to see a comprehensive response to young people’s needs, with good quality schools and health services. And we want an on-the-spot public service presence in all deprived areas.

Our research shows us that this is what residents want too. They don’t want the earth. But they do want things that are often taken for granted by those who don’t live there – such as a job, less crime and a future for young people.

All of this is dependent on whether we have got our proposals right, and whether the framework for turning our ideas into action is the right one.

The main purpose of today is to hear from you. This is a massive subject, and there is always the danger of missing important things and just scratching the surface. That’s why we want to hear your views, and shape the final strategy accordingly.

I’m sure there will be a number of different areas of interest and we are anxious not to confine the way in which you respond to these proposals.

The full version of the Strategy includes some detailed questions for consultation and the address for you to send responses to. The deadline for written responses is 30 June.

After that, we will consider responses and, in the light of decisions made in the Government’s Spending Review; we will set out the elements of the final strategy later this year.

We are on the brink of the most significant change in regeneration policy. We must get the next step right, which is why we have been so keen to consult each and every region on the draft strategy. Championing a Policy Action Team, as I did, brought home to me how much is needed to be done to learn the lessons of the past, and how important it is to give help to communities to encourage them to take up leadership roles. This will help local practitioners to become more effective at working with each other and within the community, which in turn will help national policy makers to understand better the issues communities face. Poor communication of knowledge and ideas has exacerbated the mistakes of the past. The challenge is to get it right from now on for lasting benefit in our most deprived communities.

Please make your views known and I look forward to receiving any written comments you may wish to make.