INNER CITY PROBLEMS (Hansard, 30 March 1977)

§ Lord SANDFORD

My Lords, personally I have managed satisfactorily because I have been reading the reports as they came out. The noble Baroness has been kind enough to send them to me. I am not quoting my own views but those of a city and the voluntary bodies in the city which complain that they have had to respond in too much of a rush on this important and complicated matter. But it is not a matter of great moment. In preparing for this debate I had to decide what kind of debate we should have and what role this House might play in the general debate which the Secretary of State has called for.

Of course there is no end of fuel in the inner city on which to feed the fires of Party political controversy, but I am satisfied that the general view of your Lordships is that we would do best to leave that to our colleagues in another place and to those who are about to fight in the local elections. So I shall resist the temptation to say that if by now Socialism really worked its fruits should be showing in the inner cities where for so long they have been dominated by Socialist councillors and by Socialist policy. I shall take up no time in trying to impute blame on Her Majesty's Government for the present state of unemployment which is one of the things that bears particularly heavily on the inner city, and I shall not pursue any suggestion that the Government's latest housing policies have made thousands of units of private accommodation inaccessible to would-be tenants in the inner cities. These are all matters which I suggest could but should not be debated. At least I shall not raise them.

I have the feeling that we should try to eschew Party controversy, resist these temptations, and instead bring to bear on this complex of issues our relative detachment from the hustings. Our wide experience, reflected in today's list of speakers, make the most of the fact that a lot of us are well past having to grind particular professional axes and make the best of our broad collective spread of interests. Many of us have served in central Government, local government, shire counties and metropolitan counties; some have business insight, others have knowledge of voluntary sectors, and so on. I should have thought that this range of interests could do something to help the 899 councillors actually grappling with the daunting problems of the inner wards to find improved ways of managing, and perhaps also help central Government to find the right way of providing due support to these valiant, expensive but so far unsuccessful efforts in the inner cities.

I turn first to the malaise of the inner city and attempt a diagnosis of it. I think the symptoms of the malaise are well known. They are partly endorsed by these studies. What is felt—and it is very important—is a lack of confidence in the area, an unwillingness to invest in it, to live in it and to set up business in it. There is a sense of decline and decay, a feeling that the community has disintegrated, and now no longer cares for its own members or its own buildings. There is a feeling that the area has a poor image, a sense of shame in having an address in it, a sense of powerlessness and futility in the face of the changes that occur and are apprehended. These changes may be caused by outsiders in some London office deciding to close down a local factory, or by one's own council, only a few miles away but seemingly just as uncaring, deciding to close a cherished little school, bulldoze away a terrace of houses or put a new highway across the view.

The studies show convincingly that these and other things like them are symptoms of the malaise as the inner area patient feels them. There are other equally well known measurable symptoms all set out in these studies. Let us take the one from Small Heath in Birmingham for example: a large loss of population down from 50,000 in 1951 to 32,000 now; an increasing concentration of lower skilled families; the better off and more skilled have moved out and more unskilled have moved in; a declining economic and industrial base; a rate of decline in manufacturing jobs double that in the city as a whole; very little public or private investment in the area in the recent past whether in homes, shops, schools, amenities or workplaces. Incidentally, how much we all welcome the presence of my noble friend Lord Ashdown in this debate to give us his views on how the interests of the private developer can be brought in again.

So much for the symptoms of the malaise, but what of the causes that underlie 900 it? After three substantial seminars held in the Department of the Environment five or six years ago, Ministers were given no clear consensus as to what the causes of this malaise were. We decided to set up these inner area studies. As one reads these reports, it is surprising how much original survey work still needs to be done in each area before the causes begin to emerge. One has to say now that that ignorance has not been helped by the fact that there has been no Census since 1971. Certainly, these studies only go to confirm that the causes are not simple; they are not the same everywhere, but there are some general underlying causes that emerge. I will mention a few: slum clearance policies and new town development policies. Both are designed specifically to help the inner areas by relieving congestion there, both are indispensable and both probably, in some cases, are still required; but by now each in various ways and in various places has had serious unnoticed and injurious side effects in the inner areas by causing the disintegration and the impoverishment of existing communities that were there.

These policies may still be needed. My noble friend Lord Nugent, I hope, will be saying in a moment something about the state of the policy of dispersal as between the South-East and the Greater London area. All these policies now need to be modified and applied in a much more selective form. But of course slum clearance and new towns are by no means the only policies which in practice have injured the inner areas. The irony is that in their case they were the ones actually designed to help the inner areas by reducing the congestion in them. It seems that the inner areas are those which, over and over again, make the sacrifice called for in seeing through other major programmes, whether mounted by a department of the council or a Department of central Government or whether they are caused by some large-scale rationalisation of large-scale industry.

Huge capital programmes for central area development, for example, or for council housing, mostly in peripheral areas, have had the effect of pre-empting expenditure years in advance on rehabilitating and improving older housing. Take, for example, the view of the consultants, 901 again from Birmingham, on this matter. They say: Housing policy is not effective in directing resources to either houses or people in the greatest need. This applies to most aspects of public expenditure on housing. Then later, in paragraph 27, they say: There is a case in Birmingham for reducing expenditure on new construction of municipal dwellings. The funds released should then be redirected to increased investment in rehabilitation and parallel industrial investment… They go on, criticising Birmingham's housing policy in 1975/76: It is very expensive—people cannot afford the houses"— provided by council housing policy— without a large subsidy … The form of housing deprivation that it does most to reduce (sharing of dwellings) is among the less serious forms of housing deprivation. Take Liverpool. That study area has many problems; and not the least of them is an almost irreversible blight caused by the M62—not where the motorway has gone, but where for many years it might have gone. I doubt whether any highway engineers, planners or car drivers involved have lost much sleep on Edgehill's plight, which has been caused largely by motorway blight. Public health inspectors have set themselves targets of slum clearance in good faith; planners have set about removing non-conforming industry from residential areas, with the best of intentions; educationalists have closed popular and efficient secondary modern schools in pursuit of comprehensives; and businesses have rationalised their affairs after mergers and done all sorts of unforseen damage in the inner cities. All that has been done for sound reasons which seem excellent in the minds of the Department, the profession or the business concerned, but each has constituted another successive blow struck at the heart of the city. Those blows and many others, taken together, may well yet prove fatal.

The fact is that the ambition of most of our public civic professionals and private businessmen lies elsewhere, and there are few of them who feel they can leave their mark in their professional archives by having made the most of an inner city area. Civic pride fixes on 902 things like a new housing estate, a completed ring road or a profitable central area redevelopment or, best of all, the excitement of creating a brand new town. The inner city malaise has many other facets, many other symptoms and many other causes. I hope that this debate, like the studies, will bring them out. I have stressed what I believe to be the main underlying cause, and I turn now to prescriptions for a treatment or a cure for this inner city malaise. I offer three prescriptions, one of them to be applied to the affected part in the inner city itself.

First, I would say that I am against amputation. The inner city cannot be "eliminated". Despite the run-down appearance of houses, the empty factories, the vandalism, the aimless feel of the communities, there are physical capital assets and human talents in the inner areas which are far too valuable to neglect any longer. They must be regenerated. But a combination of policies—mainly concerning housing, I think—has virtually eliminated the interest of the private investor in these areas, and we shall be interested to know what noble Lords feel can be done to bring him back. The fact is that it is now the local authority which has to try to make the most of them, and it seems to me that probably the best that can be done is by adopting a more total approach, by various forms of area management in varying degrees.

Corporate management was advocated in the Bains Report and in the first three of our six Town Studies. It is now increasingly practised at the higher levels of local government—not without stress or strain, as the long tradition of strong and almost autonomous central departments in local government still persists. Listen to what the Liverpool Inner Area Study has to say about that: It was clear from the start that there was no strong political backing for the area management experiment in Liverpool. Senior politicians were prepared to tolerate it, particularly as central government was paying three-quarters of the cost. But there was no way in which the caucus of the major parties could be thought to have regarded area management as a significant experiment in the development of local government in Liverpool with the possibility of becoming an important element in the fight against urban deprivation. The politicians involved in the district committee were hesitant and, despite its status as a full committee of council, were not prepared to support overtly an area interest against 903 departmental policy lines. To attempt to interfere in the policies of other committees except through the party caucus or Policy and Finance Committee was unprecedented. Consequently, projects tended to be outside the current mainstream of council activity and therefore not permitting any influence on existing policies. Then there is a passage about how the experiment went, and it continues: Also it showed how strong was the departmental entrenchment that many people had previously felt but were not able to demonstrate clearly. And it showed how ineffective central decision-making could be over issues of purely local importance. In many cases the refusal of senior officers to countenance changes was not because they were stubborn but because they were unaware that anything was wrong with the way in which policies were transferred into action on the ground. Many appeared genuinely to believe that everything was working out perfectly. That was said by the consultants in Liverpool.

All those studies find a case not only for adopting the corporate approach to city management but also for taking it out to the area level. As long ago as 1974, the Department of the Environment set up trials of area management approach—Newcastle, Kirklees, Dudley and Haringey. Liverpool had already adopted it as part of its inner area study, and Stockport has since adopted it throughout its borough—as far as I am aware, the only borough to do so. Such value as is discerned for area management would best he safeguarded, to start with, if it were adopted on an ad hoc, trial-and-error, basis. No particular pattern has been claimed as best and no one is certain that the pattern should be adopted wholesale, although, as I say, Stockport has tried it out in its own borough.

The studies show, and common sense endorses, a number of merits in the system for regenerating our inner cities. Surely it must be right to adopt an overall rather than a departmental approach to these complex run-down areas, which have already suffered so much from distortions of excessive departmentalism. Secondly, it must be a help, if possible, to devise a plan and scheme for comprehensive management that is tailor-made for the needs of particular areas. All three studies see this advantage. The Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale has adopted such a comprehensive and tailor-made scheme for the rehabilitation of one of their run-down industrial areas in Crawford Street. That may well prove 904 another useful model for others to study and emulate.

Is this not, also, a timely moment to welcome the increased scope that "area management" can offer for the contribution that projects engaging voluntary and temporary labour can make? The noble Lord, Lord Allen, now chairman of the NCSS, my noble friend Lord Colville and, no doubt, other noble Lords will be able to develop that point better than I can. But it surely is better to have young, inner city school leavers trained, employed and caring for their neighbourhood, rather than unemployed and vandalising it. Until the economy is again managed in a way which provides an assurance of a job for school-leavers in the inner city, I think that there is much to be said for including in the patterns for managing these areas schemes such as the job creation programme, to ensure that young citizens, who do not get normal, permanent jobs, can get jobs designed to improve their own environment.

Another merit of this change of approach in tackling the multiple problems of an inner area by way of a more corporate approach, is that it will make much heavier demands on the councillor in his personal and representative role. I shall be interested to hear whether other noble Lords agree with me that more involvement with the wellbeing of his own ward, and less involvement in the running of a professional service department, is a trend to be welcomed, demanding as it will nevertheless be on the councillors concerned.

I turn to offer some prescriptions to be taken in Whitehall. Those last remarks amount to a prescription for the inner city itself, but there is no point in advocating a more corporate approach to certain parts of the inner city, tackling jobs, homes, welfare, voluntary effort, public participation altogether, unless support for it from central Government is forthcoming in forms that match the local, total, tailor-made approach. As the Liverpool consultants put it, the basis for action by central Government would be through its evaluation of programmes devised locally for individual inner areas, and just how this can be done is one of the most important things that Mr. Shore has to decide when he issues his White Paper.

905 Professor Eddison, Director of the School for Urban Advanced Studies at Bristol, has drawn my attention to the way in which the Scottish Office are proposing to set about approving the Scottish authorities' so-called "financial plans", which I understand reflect the corporate approach. This may be one way which the Department is considering, and I shall be interested to hear from the noble Baroness whether she can comment on that. Other models are the National Park plans, with which I have some familiarity. These are part of the outcome of the new unified total, local approach to those areas, and enable a supplementary block grant covering all the different expenditure, formerly paid under a string of specific grants for National Park purposes, to be approved and sanctioned under one central Government decision. But there remains for Mr. Shore and his Committee the thorny question of priorities between areas and cities.

There is, of course, the perennial temptation, which the Government surely have to face, of favouring their marginal wards and constituencies, and timing their announcements, as they are already doing, for electoral purposes. No one would complain about that, or be taken in by it. Many of your Lordships will already have heard the anxieties of the shire districts and cities, lest all the inner city resources are channelled to the metropolis. My own view is that the first lot of inner areas needing help, that should benefit from any new strategy, should be those which seem likely to show us soonest the results by which we can test the lessons of these studies and the new approaches to be made. In present circumstances, it really is not practicable to make rapid progress on a broad front. So my choice would be for those areas where extra effort, further resources and a new approach are most likely to show results and teach useful lessons.

In conclusion—and I apologise for going on for so long, but it is a massive subject—I should like to offer a prescription for your Lordships to consider. In view of the intractable nature of the inner city problems, you might care to consider—and, maybe, noble Lords would care to comment on this during the debate—whether thought might be given 906 to selecting a Committee of this House to monitor the progress made following these studies, and, following any initiative which the Secretary of State may shortly be announcing, to report from time to time on how things seem to be turning out in the inner areas.

The fact is that, over many years, the various departmental initiatives of central Government, the various departmental initiatives of local government, the oscillating approaches of the political Parties, the vast expenditure of resources, the valiant efforts of councillors and all the skills of their professional advisers have been rewarded by little or no advance in the inner areas, and little or no thanks or satisfaction among those who live there. It seems to me that, in these circumstances, it perhaps behoves us to see what we can do and address ourselves to the problem on a continuing basis. We can devote the work of no less than eight Committees to the problems of Europe. Perhaps we should put just one Committee to work on the problem of our native cities, and especially their inner areas. Meanwhile, I look forward very much to hearing the rest of the debate. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.