§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Jim Fitzpatrick.]
9.30 am§ Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North) (Lab)The first thing that I want to do is to pay tribute to all those involved in regeneration in Nottingham, North—we never want for effort and commitment from our community activists, full-time workers, councillors, Members of Parliament and Ministers. They and we are part of the answer, not part of the problem. I dedicate this debate to one of those selfless regenerators, Norman Allcock, the chief executive of Nottingham Business Venture, who, sadly, passed away on Friday. His sense of dedication and public service typified that of all those involved in regeneration in Nottingham. We will miss his experience and dedication.
My objective today is to draw on their and our experience, define the problems evident in the failure to regenerate Nottingham, North and come up with some possible ways ahead for the Minister and others to think about. I will hold an open discussion at the Crabtree community centre in my constituency from 10 am to 1 pm on Friday 3 December, to see whether we can take those suggestions forward, and I hope that the Minister will find time to pop along.
I have grouped the problems around some key themes, the first of which is low impact. However hard we have all tried, there is no doubt that, despite our efforts and years of generous funding, there is often little discernable impact on or sense of progress in the communities that we are trying to serve. That leads to cynicism and then distance between the regenerators and the community. Joined-up thinking must mean, above all, joining up with local people. Initiatives themselves need to join up.
Let me take housing as an example. Nottingham, North is a series of former council estates, unleavened by industry or recreation, brick-built semis described by one Home Office official as
the most densely packed housing I've ever seen".Residents in Nottingham, North make it clear that the quality of the environment and building out antisocial behaviour—"externals"—are at least as important as internals, such as the Government's decent homes standard, which means that 95 per cent. of spending goes into the internal appointment of houses. Unfortunately, implementing the decent homes standard is the key floor target imposed by central Government via our One City Partnership; it is the main string attached to housing funding. There used to be estate action funding, which allowed people to plan "externals" from year to year. Now we have a potpourri of different bits of funding. For many, the £5,000 per house that will come with the arm's length management organisations, welcome as it is, will not do it.254WH Many identify the need for estate reconfiguration to provide security and social mix. However, there is no mechanism to do that systematically, so it can degenerate into speculative building on community assets such as parks and former school grounds, creating middle-class ghettos rather than integrated shared-ownership schemes. No one seems to know what regeneration is about any more.
What is the vision for the outer-city former council estates that feel so neglected? My constituents, with possibly the lowest educational attainment in the UK, have not read the Deputy Prime Minister's speeches, let alone examined websites or had access to them. More importantly, they do not have the feeling in their gut that all this is for them. Without people on the ground buying into a clear vision, priorities for regeneration funding are set by regeneration professionals and organisations with a vested interest. For example, a project might be funded by one type of funding and when that finishes, another source is targeted so that the project can continue. We rarely ask about the impact of a project on child road fatalities, teenage pregnancy or the reading skills of the under-fives, or of housing policy on antisocial behaviour.
One community worker told me that they had had a recent experience while action planning where it was possible to see professionals trying to put forward projects that they had an interest in rather than addressing local needs. In the urgency to show improvement we may be guilty of applying funds without fully understanding what we are trying to achieve and how.
The nature of some funding applications can be restrictive as it leaves little room for the flexibility to respond to, and grow with, acquired understanding. Outcomes have to be predicted, and we end up "bending" the monitoring and reporting to fit the funding rather than meeting a need. More local control over funding could enhance partnership and provide strategic and flexible responses, delivering regeneration that local people could see and feel, which would have a serious impact on key problems.
My second theme is the bypassing of local government. Many schemes seem to be designed to avoid giving locally elected councils the ability to spend money as they, rather than the centre or its appointees, see fit. That is partially because Whitehall, No. 10 and Ministers have less experience in local government than ever before; it is also due to past failings in local government. The Minister and I have debated the issue of independent local government, which should be able to decide for itself where its local share of the national income tax kitty should go. That is one end of the argument and is commonplace in most western democracies, but we are currently at the other extreme, where everything appears to be controlled by the centre.
All the "new localism" jargon cannot conceal the fact that the "one size almost fits all if you don't look too closely" model is in operation. That can only be ultimately resolved by constitutionally defining in writing the roles of central and local government. Until then, we will all continue to twist and wriggle around the issues, with regeneration being just one casualty of the lack of clarity.
255WH Despite that, the city council in Nottingham, on its own initiative and driven by two council leaders—Councillor Graham Chapman and Councillor Jon Collins—has developed nine area committees, of which three are in my constituency. They are council-led, multi-agency, and respond to the needs of two or three housing estates. Although resources are small, the early signs are good. At best, area committees are run less like council committees and are seen as a genuine forum for discussion and dialogue, although procedures in some still need to be more inclusive, informal and welcoming to the community. MPs, councillors and communities need to have genuine dialogue on the role of elected members as modern community leaders.
All nine area committee action plans are realistic and specific, and come together as one plan for the whole city. However, a lot of schemes or methods of working seem to be imposed on us by funding bodies such as the Greater Nottingham Partnership, the East Midlands Development Agency or the Learning and Skills Council, often late in the financial year when the struggle is to meet deadlines to spend money or to meet centrally set quotas. Even the pre-existing officers structure of the local council, if it is not given proper political direction, can arrest area committee development or obstruct regeneration: property professionals are the most obvious example of that.
If the Government wish to continue funding through a plethora of bodies, as a first step they could agree to fund only in support of the contents of agreed area action plans, echoing what Labour's founding fathers of planning aspired to in 1947 before bureaucracy overwhelmed town and country planning. Catching up with 1947 is not much of an ambition. Perhaps the vision needs to be not only independence for local councils, but a serious commitment in the manifestos of all parties to democratic structures at neighbourhood level, promoting the debate on what those democratic structures might be on the lower level. Come what may, helping local councils to get better without devising ever more Byzantine ways of bypassing them must be a key part of the regeneration answer that we all seek.
My next theme is confusion. I have yet to meet the Einstein who completely understands the multitude of bodies, even in Nottingham, North alone, that have direct and indirect connections with regeneration: all the funds, grants, and programmes, and all the initials and jargon. The commander of the city police tells me that he counted 36 different funding streams before he gave up. I spent the whole of last summer trying to come to terms with that and still do not feel confident about it, so how can one of my constituents grapple with it?
On structures, schemes overlap and reproduce rather than complement. Greater shared understanding would help to focus genuine partnership funding, planning and application. At the moment, too many partnerships are pulling in different directions on the same agenda. We need one integrated model that defines responsibilities and relationships between the people, local agencies and the big spenders of the Learning and Skills Council, the East Midlands Development Agency, the Government 256WH office for the east midlands and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, as well as local government. We operate within an environment of vague awareness rather than understanding. A high-level agreement between partnerships contributing to a single shared strategy would help. As professionals, we can all get caught up in blaming the partnership that we least understand.
Millions of pounds could be redirected by reducing duplication and reinvesting in delivering a service—for example, returning park keepers, and localising street cleaners and youth workers to do a job with just one set of targets and performance measurement and one clear line of account that hard-wires straight back into the community.
Again, I have spent hours trying to track the labyrinthine lines of account for various funds and if I do not understand it, how can my average constituent? Despite the best efforts of the excellent, high-quality people involved, I am still not really clear about why the functions provided through local learning partnerships have a line of account through, I think, Greater Nottingham learning partnership, the Greater Nottingham Partnership, and the framework for regional employment and skills action, finishing at the East Midlands Development Agency. Can hon. Members follow that? For that one example there are dozens more.
At regional level, our Government office might well be better co-ordinated with the regional development agency were it to be united under effective regional government. It is a shame that, eight years after our 1997 victory, coherent regional government is still not even a prospect in my region; we suffer the consequences daily. What should localities expect of the regional level? A tour of my patch by the dynamic chair of the East Midlands Development Agency resulted in a welcome yet unsustained burst of activity, yet a local school that ambitiously engaged an international motor company in the provision of further education on its site feels let down and unsupported by the region and makes progress only by using personal networks, including my and other people's good offices, rather than such matters being delivered because the structure is right.
Similarly, at local level, do we want just one funding stream or one spending body that everyone understands and can go to? If so, which? Should the social spending of One City Partnership for Nottingham amalgamate with the economic spending in the Greater Nottingham Partnership, or should both be subsumed within the city council and its area committees or, perhaps, an all-encompassing regeneration board, partly or wholly owned by local government and the various agencies. If that were to be the case, should the city boundary itself be redrawn to encompass the real Nottingham—the wider Greater Nottingham? At community level, should Nottingham, North's three area committees and its three partnership arrangements consider unifying in some way that does not result in some financial forfeit or the loss of the experience of the very good people who work within those arrangements?
One of the advantages of preparing and researching a speech of this length is that it is an interesting learning curve. I discovered on Friday that the Government are 257WH to pilot some amalgamations of funding streams in their local area agreements. No doubt the Minister will talk about that at greater length. I do not wish to be unkind, but allowing one of those per region displays neither the urgency nor the radicalism needed. I am sure that the Minister will correct me if I have misrepresented the Government's view.
I am also conscious of the irony that to correct the structural problems—one of which is interference from the centre—I must provoke yet another intervention from the centre. Frankly, it requires the brute force of the centre to cut some of the Gordian knots that we locals can only pick away at unsuccessfully.
In planning and the confusion of planning, area coordinators, local councillors and others often feel that they cannot influence regeneration funding. They sometimes feel consulted only when someone else has taken the decisions. The recent action planning for our area committees for neighbourhood renewal funding was a welcome break from that. However, I understand that, in achieving that break, many enemies were made, both in city council departments and in external organisations, which assumed that they would get the resources that ultimately went to the localities through the area planning process.
One funding stream or spending body may be out of immediate reach, but shared understanding should not be. Perhaps the different models tend to generate professional competitiveness about funding and claims to success. A single, inclusive regeneration strategy could identify partners and responsibilities with far greater clarity and could identify shared priorities in themes such as education inclusion and crime reduction.
Unusually, Nottingham, North is also amenable to a constituency-based solution, as it encompasses seven homogeneous former council estates with identical problems from one end to the other. Not many Members of Parliament have that level of sameness in a constituency. Perhaps the situation lends itself to a constituency-based answer. In Nottingham, North we could have a local regeneration board to replace the Greater Nottingham Partnership, the One City Partnership, the local learning partnerships and so on. It could work with the East Midlands Development Agency, the Government office for the east midlands and the city council.
At constituency level, issues could be addressed estate by estate, feeding into the three area committees and the one strategy and bringing together multi-agency groups to link education, law and order, environment and culture for one area. They could be given a recognisable and accessible public face—perhaps, God forbid, even giving Members of Parliament a formal role.
All those ideas may reveal my lack of knowledge about the work of existing structures and groups and may offend some people. That is not my intention, but it is not in doubt that the system is not working for those it was created to serve.
My next theme is lack of local involvement. Regeneration is "done to" Nottingham, North partly because of weak community networks and partly because of professionals with their own, mostly well-intended, agendas—although some plunder regeneration budgets cynically to resource their 258WH organisation's spending plans. Notoriously, regeneration moneys do not stick but flow out of the community unless it deliberately grips and roots them.
Similarly, there is a need for consistency and long-term involvement of key staff. Constant moving on undermines organisational knowledge and the perception of a real personal commitment. Beat officer policing is a classic example. I was in Holland last week. There, a beat officer contracts to an area for a minimum of four years. Having fought to retain beat officers in my own constituency, at one point I had six vacancies out of 16 beat officer posts.
Area co-ordinators move on, as do housing officers, yet we expect constituents and the public somehow to keep a grip of all those movements and to make progress as well. The personnel and career structures of all our local organisations must take account of, and attack, that problem, and give local workers and community workers—I include beat officers, probation officers and others—the merit, prestige and recognition that they deserve, rather than putting them at the bottom of the pecking order, as often happens.
Even a measure such as changing Sure Start into children's centres undoes continuity and undermines the word of mouth so vital for that client group. That is not to mention the fog of initials and jargon that conceals regeneration from all but the in-crowd. Everyone knows the NHS, but instead of referring to the local health service, we have PCT. Hardly a soul on the ground in our constituencies knows what a PCT—primary care trust—is. Instead of parents knowing the class that their kids are in by how old they are, we have year 1 and year 2, key stage 1 and key stage 2. Thankfully, getting the LAC's or PCSO's MO on NIM is always straightforward.
All of that comes under the heading of social capital, or capacity building. Social capital is central to local ownership of problems and solutions; there is a need to integrate it into one agreed community strategy, and into the way in which agencies deliver services to increase resident ownership of services and outcomes. Social capital means giving people the capacity to work out their own answers—which includes tenants' associations and neighbourhood watches, as well as having a healthy infrastructure of political parties and community activism. When local forums cannot get enough people to set up a committee or to sign off a set of partnership trust accounts, when political parties do not have a viable branch network and when witnesses do not have a greater mass than criminals, we do not have social capital and we can say that regeneration is not succeeding.
The new deal for communities programme in Nottingham did not cover my constituency, but I am told that it demonstrated that we cannot pluck people out of the community and expect them to be fully fledged board members the next day. Leadership and commitment do not just fall from a Christmas tree. So how do we build local community capacity, to control and direct money meant for local regeneration? Rather than delivering a package of help that conforms to national norms, local capacity has to be built by enabling communities. Can we train local people in the skills and knowledge to lead regeneration themselves?
259WH There is no serious capacity programme in my area. By serious, I mean three things. The first relates to scale. We need enough people being trained and recruited to make an impact—a minimum of 20 a year. There are several existing models to which the Minister could refer for such schemes, including those in Sheffield and Coventry. Any such programme must be long term, not least because of Nottingham, North's position as an educational blackspot. We need efforts to be sustained if we are to build capacity. The second aspect is content. We must give people graduate-level thinking and analytical skills relating to all the domains of regeneration—health, education, employment, community safety, housing and the environment—coupled with project management skills locally. For example, we could link architects' departments at our local universities with local communities to help their design schemes. That would benefit students and local people alike.
Thirdly, we need follow-through. A programme must lead to appropriate-level jobs in the regeneration industry, and existing agencies should commit to employing graduates of the programme. The model is an apprenticeship programme. For example, local Sure Starts are already starting to use local mums to work in the new Sure Starts that are coming on stream now. Such a programme is not cheap. The jobs must pay a wage that includes child care and housing costs. However, that is cheaper than failed regeneration programmes. A similar model is being piloted by the new deal for communities, and it would be helpful if the Minister would consider such an approach for Nottingham, North.
My next theme is the need to communicate what is being done. Ordinary people in Nottingham, North do not have a clue what is being spent on regeneration, why or by whom. Current poor practice demonstrates the need to get the basic structure right before moving forward. If we tried to communicate to ordinary people what is being spent, why and by whom, I am sure that we would serve to confuse and disappoint. The way that people have to monitor and report their work for Government purposes does not lend itself to telling real people what is actually going on. I am talking about the target-led, jargonised reporting back that we insist that our professionals undertake—sometimes for good reasons. However, we should let the communities help to set the measures of success, and then they will be keener to monitor progress and able to understand what is going on in their name.
We are in a state in which professionals and volunteers do not know what is being spent, why or by whom. To try to explain this more widely would not achieve any clarity at present. We do not yet have a shared understanding of the players in the ball park and what positions they play, but more players are being introduced as we speak. We produce many lengthy documents and excuse ourselves by saying that that serves as communication. Let us stop turning out documents that we do not have time to read, and start communicating. An immediate aim should be to produce a structure that identifies and maps all those involved in regeneration, at different layers of authority, and their contribution. That could be shared and honed by e-mail. We should then seek to identify and formalise 260WH communication routes between those involved: for example, there could be a single meeting structure rather than duplicate meetings.
It would be useful to attempt honestly to review the current structure and be brave enough to admit where it is not helping, rather than to forge on without a clear strategy. In education, for example, what is the relationship between local learning partnerships and area committees, between the Greater Nottingham Partnership and the One City Partnership Nottingham, and between Connexions and Aimhigher and local schools? I hear reports of Greater Nottingham Partnership meetings and One City Partnership Nottingham meetings and I try to spot the difference. Responsibility is increasingly difficult to recognise.
So, who would be able to draw up a new structure? Perhaps the local conversation in December that I have initiated could be a starting point for review and responsibility allocation. If so, it would need to be attended by all those with authority to agree change or propose it to Ministers. If no one else will, I suppose I will organise an annual regeneration conference in Nottingham North, at which players will stocktake and make further concrete proposals for reform.
However, basic workable structures are not going to be produced by entrepreneurial MPs. They should be the conscious product of that fount of all funding and source of all schemes: the Government, who need to become sensitive enough to get the best out of the localities and authoritative enough to cleave through the sclerotic duplication and vested interest that they have allowed to develop.
My next theme is the withdrawal of public services from the front line. On the one hand, Government regeneration tries to build up localities, yet on the other hand, Government mainstream services flee the outer city. In Nottingham, North post offices close, probation offices have been relocated away from clients, and local further education sites are sold or invested in for non-locals. We had to fight to regain local policing. The health authority headquarters has moved out of our constituency—the last Nottingham-wide headquarters to leave Nottingham, North. The agendas are contradictory and appear self-defeating to local people.
At local level, decisions driven by central budget controls and officers who rarely venture into my constituency can also mean that social infrastructure is stripped out, aggravating long-term degeneration. For example, park keepers' jobs are done away with to save money, but park keepers are soon to be replaced by antisocial behaviour teams. Rent increases for local football teams and bowls clubs drive them out of existence so more has to be spent on removing graffiti sprayed by bored youths and providing extra care for elderly people who have been made more housebound. Bulwell youth club is now open only one night a week, but the saving is tiny compared with the cost of providing the neighbourhood wardens needed to help police youth dispersal orders in the area. Instead of being in youth clubs, kids are standing on street corners.
Yes, we need centrally based specialists in our cities, but cost-cutting has swung the pendulum too far. As far as logistically possible, we need to return to services that are based at the sub-city level so that we can reach 261WH appropriate agreements with service deliverers on the ground, such as the police and local authorities. We should then let the area committee measure performance and set targets.
Immense local efforts can be blown away by insensitive mainstream decisions. I put massive energy and hours into creating the post of an education champion for Nottingham, North and I do not begrudge any of that, but such initiatives can be dwarfed by a local further education college's decision to close one of its sites in an educationally deprived area or by a learning and skills council's decision to put millions of pounds into the only sixth-form college in my area, when there was no further education provision to attract local youngsters in addition to youngsters from outside.
I have spent three years trying to make FE provision on school sites a mainstream activity, and that is essential in Nottingham, North's circumstances. However, such initiatives do not fit with national norms, including the provision that one organisation should not receive 14–19 capital funding, so they are alien to the centralised target culture and tremendously difficult to achieve. Meanwhile, every June, we flush 1,000 kids out of school at 16.
Equally, and staying with education, all the Aimhighers and learning partnerships cannot hope to have an impact as long as the low "prior attainment" of Nottingham, North's 16-year-olds is not attacked by means of adequate disadvantage uplift funds. Currently, the distribution of those funds disincentivises local FE colleges from undertaking their educational mission. For all the talk of joined-up thinking, there is no question but that central and even local government mainstream policies often produce degeneration, not regeneration, and turn regeneration into an essentially remedial, rather than proactive, instrument.
My next theme is sustainable funding. Many excellent schemes have time-limited funding, resulting in employees spending much of their time trying to botch together new funding to keep themselves afloat, rather than doing the job required. Good projects often disappear when funding runs out. The problem is especially chronic in voluntary and community organisations, which will always be better than anyone else at reaching the most difficult client groups. As the patron of the Bulwell toy library, which gets toys to poorer families, I have kept our workers only by cobbling together bits of funding from—this is not the full list—the county council, the primary care trust, Sure Start, the single regeneration budget, the education action zone, the health action zone, Children in Need, the children's fund, the local network fund and the city council.
Of course, there will never be the resources to pick up everything supported by short-term funds within core budgets, but we must get better at identifying and learning from what has been done differently and at integrating the lessons into mainstream service delivery. We need far more effective evaluation and reporting on activity, and fewer free-standing, short-term initiatives running parallel to mainstream services. Any short-term projects must be designed honestly and planned as short-term projects, not designed in the hope that someone will come along to pick up the tab later. We need fewer high-profile, short-term initiatives launched 262WH out of No. 10 and the Departments, fewer bandwagons and fewer people trying to make their name. In their place, we need more local direction and involvement, and more consistency.
What makes a difference may not be fashionable, and it probably will not make a difference next week. Good, caring family support, parenting skills, child protection, long-term development work with young people, and putting the teaching of social behaviour alongside literacy and numeracy at the heart of the national curriculum should all be fundamental to local and national budgets, not the province of pilots, initiatives and one-offs.
In the broader context, inappropriate central government funding formulas dwarf the tiny amounts given in benign grants. For example, the funding formula in the NHS gives wealthy Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire £8 million too much and the deprived city of Nottingham £7 million too little. That cannot be balanced by spending the odd few grand on smoking campaigns, healthy eating or photo opportunities for local MPs. As with many of the other themes that I have outlined, what is needed in sustainable funding is a lot more clarity and honesty about the rules and expectations. Even knowing where we are will produce the certainty and consensus that are regeneration's greatest allies.
My last theme is central skew. Central bright ideas, pet schemes and irrelevant targets for local circumstances often skew local priorities. Civil servants sometimes try to keep Ministers quiet by offering them their little schemes. The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), for whom I have great respect, was as excited as I was about the concept of local learning communities—bringing granddad and grandma into the educational family. What the scheme boiled down to, however, was the estate in my constituency benefiting to the tune of a couple of thousand pounds. Local needs have to be squeezed into central criteria in order to qualify for largesse. Recently, our choice in Nottingham was not between trams and buses, but between trams and no trams. At the same time, local bus services for our immobile elderly communities were reduced.
How can we regenerate locally? I shuddered when the Prime Minister reacted to an increase in muggings with the street crime initiative, which sucked police officers out of my outer constituency to stand, at double time of course, on inner-city street corners and produced a massive rise in burglaries and car crime in Nottingham, North. There is little point in stating the intention to respond to local priorities but then cutting local government out of the equation and imposing centrally determined targets that may or may not relate to local needs. For example, focusing on five grade A to C GCSEs to the exclusion of all else promotes, in my patch, a tiny number of youngsters whose educational profile is like that of Ministers' families, but marginalises the majority of kids, who could be helped to get the "prior attainment" that I mentioned in order to better themselves in vocational training.
One example of the problem is the inability of the NHS to negotiate local health targets—in Sure Start work, healthy living centres, early intervention by district nursing, and health visiting for families that may 263WH become a problem in later years—because it spends so much time and community health resources helping hospitals to reach their national targets, but without having any extra money to do so.
Another pernicious example of central skew, via the targeting culture, is the difficulty in justifying pre-emption or preventive measures, where outcomes are hard to measure. For example, despite the low level of confidence in the criminal justice system in Nottinghamshire, its most popular face locally—the drug abuse resistance education programme—is unfunded by the centre because it catches no burglars. Programmes to get out into crime-ridden estates to explain witness support, crime prevention, and the role of the police and courts are subject to institutional pass-the-parcel, because reinforcing social behaviour cannot be bean-counted.
Schemes to get young offenders to do good works at the direct request of the community are regenerative at so many levels, but there are no brownie points there. In the target culture, no brownie points means no action if other priorities dictated from the centre have to be met. Capacity building, confidence building and regenerating in such a scoring system become difficult, if not impossible.
Regeneration in Nottingham, North is underachieving. It is being frustrated, but not by a lack of the right people. As I said, well-meaning, energetic, dedicated community workers, councillors and activists, and Ministers, Members of Parliament and others are involved. The problem does not lie there but in the profusion of schemes and programmes that are largely beyond the control or comprehension of local people. Although each of the programmes is well intentioned and many produce successful outcomes, taken together they give maximum scope for central Government and regeneration professionals to impose their objectives on local communities. Put simply, too many things are happening in Nottingham, North because someone had the money to make them happen, and too many things are not happening because the money, direction and structure are not there.
Making regeneration work will mean getting it right at the strategic, management and operational levels, then pushing forward local ownership and embedding it so that it is sustainable. That begins with trust—not treating Nottingham, North as some colonial outpost but trusting local people to define what regeneration means to them and training them, and enabling local structures, especially elected local government, to deliver it. Then we would be doing something worthy of the great people who work in regeneration at all levels in Nottingham, North and doing something for my constituents, who need and deserve better.
§ Matthew Green (Ludlow) (LD)May I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on his excellent speech? He clearly outlined many of the problems faced in attempting regeneration in his constituency. Although his constituency provides excellent examples of the difficulties that are faced by Government, and the 264WH Government's failure to find solutions to them, the problems go far beyond Nottingham, North. It is tempting to come back after the recess and put the boot into the Government, but I do not intend to do that; nor do I think that the hon. Gentleman intended to do that. I sensed that his speech was made more in sorrow than in anger.
The problems are not necessarily of the Government's making. Some are long-term problems that have existed under many Governments. The difficulty for this Government is that they have not yet come up with solutions. Indeed, no Government have come up with effective solutions. The hon. Gentleman touched on many of the reasons why attempts at regeneration have not worked. I wish to draw on a few of his comments and offer some suggestions of my own. I welcome the positive new ideas that he put forward. I shall reiterate a couple of them and throw in a few more on top.
Clearly, housing is a major issue in Nottingham, North but, in terms of regeneration, it is also an issue in large parts of the country elsewhere. The hon. Gentleman was absolutely right to point out that antisocial behaviour is not being designed out of our communities. There is very little funding for that. As he said, all the money is being spent on the inside of the house rather than the outside. The Government's approach to antisocial behaviour is rather like sticking-plaster. They try to deal with problems afterwards, rather than come up with preventive measures such as designing out antisocial behaviour and providing funding for that. Draconian antisocial behaviour Bills are introduced to tackle the problem after it has arisen. That approach sums up too many of the Government's failures in regard to regeneration.
It is easy to see why this happens: young people causing problems make headlines in local papers, and Ministers come under pressure to deal with the situation. To be seen to be dealing with the situation means producing a Bill that says, "We are going to stamp down harder on this," because that gets the press back on to the other side and makes it look as though the Government are doing something. Frankly, many of the real long-term solutions do not attract that sort of publicity and do not get the headlines. Consequently, there is a great temptation when in government to adopt the easy, sticking-plaster approach. I can see why that happens, but it is a strong and brave Government who actually face up to the problem and put money into dealing with fundamental issues such as youth provision.
We have heard about the running-down—that is the best way of putting it—of youth provision in Nottingham, North, which has been mirrored in other parts of the country. Often, the only time that we have new youth provision is when the funds come from the Home Office in an attempt—again, rather like using sticking-plaster—to keep young people busy during the school holidays because that cuts crime. Why are we not increasing spending on youth provision in order to benefit young people, rather than simply the rest of the community, which seems to be the only reason why the funding is made available?
There are far too many central Government targets, which are the source of outputs. I know only too well that projects are made to fit the funding package, rather than the funding package being made available to suit 265WH the local project. Just to step outside Nottingham, North for a second, we saw that with the market towns initiative, which was led by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Countryside Agency, and originally involved social as well as economic outcomes. They ran out of money for it and, in the west midlands at least, it was taken over by Advantage West Midlands, which is, of course, funded by the Department of Trade and Industry. The DTI wants only economic outputs and jobs, which means that market towns initiative projects are possible only if they create jobs. The number of jobs that will be created has to be calculated in order to secure the funding. It is a centrally driven target for which boxes can be ticked all the way up and some kind of table can be filled in so that a Minister can stand up and say, "X is the figure that we arrived at." What that actually means, however, is that the projects do not fit on the ground. The Government's belief that they must run their initiatives in that way shows a failure of trust in local people and local bodies.
The hon. Member for Nottingham, North mentioned area committees of councils, and I am delighted that he did so as I am a great believer in them. They can be a very effective way of making progress and of involving the local community much more directly in council decisions. Councils that have set their heart against area committees should reconsider them, because they are a very good way of involving the community.
Too many organisations deal with regeneration, and they tend to encounter two problems in particular. One of the problems, as we saw with many of the area-based initiatives such as the new deal for communities, is a very high administration cost. The body dealing with a new initiative has to be set up afresh each time, which costs quite considerable sums of money. On average, about 10 per cent. of the total funds for the new deal for communities initiative was spent on administration. Instead of using existing structures such as the local council, a new layer of organisation is created, new people are recruited, and the body is disbanded after a couple of years.
Secondly, centrally driven projects have also had a problem with underspend. There has been quite significant underspend on some of these projects in the past few years because of the assumption that the money will filter through if a project is announced and a new tier is set up. Surprisingly, however, certainly in the first couple of years of most initiatives, the infrastructure is not in place and the money does not get through. All that happens is that the Treasury banks it and the Chancellor announces that he has more money to play with than he thought he had last year. What has happened, in fact, is that he has banked some of the underspend from many projects. That, of course, leads to cynicism, because people believe that something will happen when an announcement is made, but the money does not filter through and does not even get spent.
The hon. Member for Nottingham, North also raised the issue of regional government. He is absolutely right that we need an effective regional tier, but an effective regional tier must go further than the Government's proposals. There is a lot of sympathy among Ministers in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for enhancing regional government, but they are fighting other Departments that do not want to hand over some of 266WH their pet projects to regional government. The enthusiasm in the ODPM must win through; we need the Deputy Prime Minister to act like a Deputy Prime Minister, use some muscle against other Departments and win some projects for regional government. Regional development agencies need to come under regional government and not just sit alongside it. It is astounding that we aim to establish regional governments, but that the RDAs will only sit alongside them. The Learning and Skills Council, which is now regionalised, should also come under their remit.
I imagine that getting the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Education and Skills to agree to these things is rather difficult for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. That is one of the problems that the Government face, and it is why they are hitting brick walls on their route to regional government. If they saw fit to go for it wholeheartedly, they would win much more public support and would not have to back out in their push forward.
The hon. Member for Nottingham, North made an interesting suggestion about the role of MPs. I agree with him entirely. Unless I actively sought to involve myself in such matters, I would never become involved in them. All that would happen is that my constituents would complain to me about them. Yet, we are the people who are most easily accessible to the Government and who invented the schemes in the first place. The assumption is that MPs do not want to be involved, but many of us want to engage more formally with regeneration efforts in our constituencies, and it is a failing of the system that some of the people with the greatest access to resources and the most influence in an area are the least involved unless they set out to be so.
Too many projects last for just a short period. That is not a failing of this Government, but a failing of Governments for generations. A project is announced, it lasts for about three years, then it is scrapped or repackaged with a new name, and the money is announced as if it were new, fresh money when it is in fact the old money under a new name. Somehow that is seen as moving the process along. We heard the excellent example of Sure Start, which many have begun to understand as a label, but which is being replaced by children's centres. We see schemes repackaged and relabelled all the time. That may give the impression that Ministers are doing something, but it leads to confusion on the ground and a long-term lack of confidence in the Government's ability to deliver regeneration.
I will end on the issue of trusting local communities. If central Government really trusted local communities such as Nottingham, North, they would trust local councils. Successive Governments—not just this Government—have failed to trust local councils and have taken power away from them. As a result, some of the best people do not seek election to councils, because they cannot change things, and there is a downward spiral in the abilities of councillors—and perhaps even the officers, as some of the most capable go off to work for regional development agencies and quangos.
The Government put sticking-plaster over the problems and put money into improving the leadership skills of councillors, which is welcome, but they must turn things around by trusting councils to deliver. It is clear that the Government trust their own, rather than the local electorate's ability to pick individuals to run 267WH schemes. That is a damning indictment, because they are failing to trust not only local councils but local people. Local people know best what the problems are. They might not have the solutions, but they can elect the people to run the projects that will provide the solutions from elsewhere. The most damning example of the lack of trust is capping, and Nottingham is one local authority that has been capped. It has been told that it was just under £200,000 over budget, and it will now have to spend about £250,000 to re-bill to make that £180,000 saving. It is perhaps the worst recent example of how the Government do not trust the people of Nottingham to run their own affairs. If the Government had any sense, they would get off the backs of the people of Nottingham, give power back to them and let them run the schemes, providing the money through a source such as the council, which is probably best placed to understand local needs.
§ Mr. Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)I should first like to declare an interest as a director of a property company with interests in the building industry. It may not be relevant, but it is best to be certain these days.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on a comprehensive and wide-ranging speech. There is little that I can say to add to the hon. Gentleman's knowledge and passion in representing his constituents. He has done them a great service today. He raised a lot of important issues and, more importantly and unusually for a Member of Parliament, he has come forward with several solutions. That means that the Minister will have a more difficult job, in that if he has sufficient time—and I aim to give him that—he will have to respond to those ideas.
We all know the difficulties of regeneration and the long-term problems that many communities have faced. Recent trends have shown that many of our proud provincial cities have been undergoing a renaissance, especially in their centres, whether that involves coffee bars, wine bars, gentrification or new build. However, there is a problem with many of the large, peripheral estates, which feel that they are not at the centre of regeneration in communities. Nottingham, North is one example, as the hon. Gentleman has illustrated.
The hon. Gentleman set out a theme with which I wholly agree. Indeed, there was not much that I disagreed with in his speech. I thought "Thank God" when he mentioned regional government, because there was a difference between us on that topic. The problem is that there are lots of schemes—we all know that Governments love to make announcements about what they are doing—and lots of funding sources. The hon. Gentleman referred to the police officer mentioning 36 different funding schemes, and the situation is extremely complex, even for Members of Parliament and Front-Bench spokesmen, to understand. If the various Front Benchers did a knowledge test on regeneration schemes, I do not think that we would get many marks. The Minister may comment later about how experienced he is with the schemes.
I thank the hon. Member for Nottingham, North for giving me a copy of his speech before the debate. I had wondered what, in a debate that is so specific, one could 268WH pick up on, but thank God for the worldwide web, as www.nottinghamcvs.co.uk gave me a flavour of what is going on.
These are a few of the schemes having an impact in Nottingham: the single regeneration budget challenge fund round 2: the "Capturing the Dynamics" Greater Nottingham Partnership regeneration scheme; the SRB challenge fund round 3: the "Secure in the Meadows" GNP regeneration programme; the SRB challenge fund round 4: the "Lifelong Success" GNP regeneration programme; the SRB challenge fund round 5: the "Connecting Communities" GNP regeneration programme; and the SRB challenge fund round 6: another GNP regeneration programme. There is also: regional selective assistance; Sure Start north-west Nottingham; Nottingham education action zone; Nobel Road home zone; urban management areas; healthy living centres; Nottingham health action zone; the social action research project; the new deal for communities, which the hon. Gentleman was disappointed was not having an impact in his constituency; Nottingham links; the European Community objective 2 programme for the east midlands; the European social fund objective 3 programme; community safety/crime reduction; the "Phase Ten" regeneration scheme; Sure Start St. Ann's; and the communities against drugs initiative.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Phil Hope)I think that's fantastic.
§ Mr. SymsI would say to the Minister that there is common ground in this matter and that we all want to help and to do things better. However, if the system becomes so complex, and if those running the schemes have to spend most of their time looking for sources of money and trying to fit their programmes to the objectives that the Government have set, I can understand why local communities become slightly bewildered, and I am not sure that, on the ground, it achieves what it is supposed to.
The hon. Member for Nottingham, North made a good point about the conflict between the priorities of the Government and those of the community. We sometimes see that happening in local government, when performance indicators are set by national Government, whose indicators of what is important may not be important for local authorities. The authorities and their communities may have very different objectives. It would be interesting to know, when we are considering the schemes in Nottingham, how many of the people who work in regeneration live in the hon. Gentleman's constituency or, indeed, in Nottingham. If they do not, they might not be as plugged in to the community. The same is often true of senior officers in local authorities.
The hon. Gentleman has been a marvellous community advocate today. However, I believe that the Government should spend money on training people in such communities to put forward the objectives that they want. Quite often the people who represent those communities are not the most articulate, but given a little training and a bit of confidence, their ability to articulate their priorities would be far better.
Moreover, as we heard earlier in the debate, the fact that all the money comes from the centre skews priorities. Perhaps we should be considering 269WH endowments for the schemes, so that local schemes could have a bit of local money that they could contribute to projects or to match funding. That would be important in giving more independence to local regeneration schemes, and would make local people feel that they had a little bit of money to bring to the table, even if they were still relying predominantly on national funding.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that one size does not fit all. There are different problems, and communities may have different priorities from those of the Government, so a more flexible and long-term approach is needed. The improvement of any of those communities will take place over a long cycle, so work will be needed to set the priorities under this Government, the next Government and probably the one after that. It is important that we find agreement on this issue across the political spectrum so that, when Governments change, things do not necessarily go topsy-turvy, with schemes being withdrawn or rapid changes taking place.
I thought that the hon. Gentleman was extremely deft when he talked about capping—
§ Mr. SymsWell, the hon. Gentleman talked about the independence of local government, which I read to be about capping. He made the important point that the Government are focusing a great deal of initiative and money on that area, but that other Government policies—post office closures and the closure of probation offices, for example—also have an impact that could have the opposite effect on the community.
It is important to have a proud local authority—the Audit Commission said that Nottingham was a fair authority in terms of its performance—involved in what is going on in its communities. I was interested that the hon. Gentleman mentioned the area schemes that have been set up. I think that the hon. Member for Ludlow (Matthew Green) said that the Government's capping proposals have an impact only because they think that the authority has overspent by £180,000 and that the costs of re-billing, if that is what eventually happens, may be substantially in excess of that figure. The Government are sending out mixed messages, and should sort themselves out on this issue. As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, communication is very important.
Many important points have been made, to which I hope that the Minister will respond.
§ Matthew GreenDoes the hon. Gentleman support the capping of Nottingham city council? I understand that the local Conservative group does. Given his comments, I would be intrigued to know.
§ Mr. SymsNo, I do not. I do not believe that the Government should cap. We are a broad and large party, and I see no conflict between my views in Westminster and those of local authority councillors. To presume that everyone must agree with everyone else in the Conservative party is a very "old politics" way of looking at things.
270WH The important point is that we have to work out what the cost of failure would be. If we consider family breakups, crime, and the impact that poor housing has on health, the cost of failure is unthinkable for the country and its communities. That means that we must do our best to turn those communities round, to build on what is best, and to give people the best opportunities that we can.
The general theme of the debate is that there are probably too many schemes, too many funding streams and too much complication. Simplification is needed—perhaps an audit of the schemes' effectiveness—in order to reduce the number of schemes and funding streams and to give more local flexibility.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Phil Hope)I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on securing the debate. I believe it is unique to have an Adjournment debate for an hour and a half on an individual constituency. My hon. Friend deserves great credit for having achieved that, and for taking the opportunity to act as an advocate for his constituents and to express their needs and concerns in his characteristically robust and analytical style, with his usual common-sense and plain-speaking approach. His constituents look to him to represent their interests in Parliament and he has done a good job of doing so this morning.
I will not necessarily agree with everything that my hon. Friend says; I hope to answer many of the points he raised because, like other hon. Members, he circulated copies of what he would say in advance. I will not respond to his speech blow by blow, but I will try to pick up some of his themes.
The debate has provided some good quality time to consider major issues, which affect not only Nottingham, North. As the hon. Member for Ludlow (Matthew Green) said, many of the issues that my hon. Friend raised apply in other parts of the country too, and we need to acknowledge that and to address those matters. The hon. Member for Ludlow mentioned the market towns initiative and issues that affect rural areas. Nottingham, North is, of course, largely urban and densely populated, but some of the issues affect urban and rural areas.
I shall address the concerns raised and talk about what the Government are doing to tackle the problems and issues in Nottingham, North. At the heart of my response is a theme that I want to emphasise, and it echoes my hon. Friend's theme: it is important to make progress, get improvement on the ground and support the funding streams mentioned in the debate and the sources of cash for areas such as Nottingham, North, but significant improvements can be made only if all the partners in those communities are willing to work together to resolve the deep-seated, long-term problems. By "partners" I mean not only the official bodies—the local authority, the police, the health authorities and so on—but the communities themselves, the tenants' and residents' representatives, the community workers, the volunteers and the many people who live and work in the constituency, those who grew up there, people of all ages who can work together as partners. There are 271WH complex problems and I was pleased that my hon. Friend paid tribute to all the people who contribute to helping to solve them.
My hon. Friend generously dedicated the debate to one of his constituents, Norman Allcock, who played a key role. That reflects the truism that regeneration and improvement are possible only if local people in local areas take part in the change and own it, and do not have change imposed from above. As my hon. Friend said, simply imposing change from above will not necessarily be sustained; it can achieve many things, but real, sustainable change comes when local people and their local authority work in partnership with regional and central Government.
As my hon. Friend said, too, many players are involved—local authorities, the police, the health service, Government Departments and many others. The challenge is finding a way to get the structures and the processes right to engage them effectively at local level. I am especially pleased that my hon. Friend mentioned his December meeting to bring all the partners in his constituency together, and to say, "Look, all of you have a role to play. All of you are doing things and playing your part. Can we do it better, by co-ordinating matters and working together?" I thank my hon. Friend for his invitation to attend. I cannot say yes or no—my diary secretary always goes crackers when I say yes to anybody immediately without checking that I can be there—but I will certainly consider it. If I cannot come, I can at least tell him that officials in my Department are keen to be involved with him on that initiative. I shall say more on this subject later, but there are concerns, certainly in the Government office, about how to join the various funding streams at a local level and how to get the right structures in place.
We have a close interest in ensuring that floor targets are delivered. The hon. Member for Ludlow made a point about the feeling that there is a top-down approach. The use of floor targets—that is to say that no part of the country should fall below a particular level of achievement or outcome for its residents—sounds like a top-down approach but is actually bottom-up. It actually means that nobody, no matter where they live or what local decisions are made, should suffer below a certain level. We should not allow people to fall through the holes in a floor to experience poverty, deprivation and disadvantage, and we need floor targets to prevent that. Of course we want people to do better than the floor targets, which is where local effort and partnership working comes in, but that minimum is set so that a local authority of any hue cannot abandon a community. No authority, whether it be a local police force or a health authority, should be able to walk away and say that it does not care. Authorities have to care, because there is a basic floor target.
We can debate how many floor targets we have and what they are, but the principle is not about a top-down approach; it is about a fundamental right to achievement and success for people across the country. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North would agree that that is the right way to proceed. The question is how to ensure that we have the right floor targets and that they can be built on as a trampoline for achievement and future progress.
272WH The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) listed, in his brief contribution, the many funding opportunities and resources going into Nottingham, North, which I had not done before. I think that he was being critical, but I suggest that instead of "University Challenge", a regeneration challenge would be an interesting game to play to see how those things work together. There are many sources, and we might need to consider how to resolve some of the complexities, but we should not take resources away from a constituency such as Nottingham, North. It is not an issue of cutting resources going into an area, but of managing them more effectively.
This has not been a party political debate but you will forgive me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for pulling out the point that resources allocated to local government since 1997 have increased by 30 per cent. in real terms, compared with a 7 per cent. cut in resources during the four years of the previous Administration. Also, we have pledged to increase resources given to local government by about 2.7 per cent. a year in real terms over the next spending period—compared with a cash freeze. The people of Nottingham, North communities will be able to make their own choices, faced with the contrast of a history of growth and investment versus cuts, and pledges of growth and investment versus pledges of cuts. That is the only party political point that I shall make, but it is important given the criticisms that we have heard about how we deliver resources, structure and funding. The money must be provided for there to be criticism of how it is spent. Without the money, the people of Nottingham, North would be disadvantaged.
Mr. Deputy Speaker, can you confirm that the debate finishes at 11 o'clock? Is that the time scale we are working to? I want to make sure that I have got my timing right.
§ Phil HopeThank you very much. In that case I shall say a few things about funding.
We have heard about the various funding streams and a point was raised about mainstream funding and funding that has been project-based or time-limited. I am pleased to say that there has been an increase in mainstream funding to Nottingham city council, which feeds into services in the local area. For example, there have been significant mainstream increases in education and health funding. Also—this is a fundamental philosophical point—as well as providing more for everyone, as I have described, the Government want to provide a little more for those who need it most: they want to target help. That carries difficulties, as the hon. Member for Ludlow suggested. How should we deal with the plethora of schemes and the extra resources? However, the idea of what has, I think, been dubbed progressive universalism—more for everyone but even 273WH more for those who need it most—is an important part of our approach. The aim is that the areas in most need should receive extra while everyone benefits.
§ Matthew GreenThe point is not that money should not be targeted, but that an existing structure, such as the local council, should deal with the targeted money—there need not be a new invention every time.
§ Phil HopeThe hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. I shall be talking about an initiative that the Government are developing, called local area agreements; my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North referred to it and it is relevant to that point about how—when there are different initiatives for different problems—to get money into an area in a way that is developed in partnership between central and local government and the community.
I shall not go through all the figures, but we can say that more money has been going into the area. Money has been entering the area through different schemes and the question is how to organise things better, to improve targeting, delivery and local ownership.
Before I go into detail, I want to respond to my hon. Friend's discussion of the impact of the resources and of whether the plethora of schemes and the fact that the structures have not worked in some respects, and that we need more partnership—as I mentioned at the outset—amount to ineffectiveness. He may have under-emphasised some achievements in his constituency. Crime levels have fallen overall in Nottingham city, including volume car crime, burglary and robbery. There has been educational success in the hon. Gentleman's constituency, with Nottingham's GCSE attainment levels. I took his point about what indicators are used, but educational performance has improved. The GCSE figures show a rise of 3 per cent.
There are several relevant schemes including the city division's community safety officers fund, which is providing more money for police officers. My hon. Friend made a point about police officers being moved, and we are all concerned about that, but the new community support officers—we have announced our intention that if we are re-elected there will be more of them—are local people working with their communities, like neighbourhood wardens. They provide community support. The people know them and they do not get withdrawn to other work if there is a murder or other crime. They carry on working in their community. My hon. Friend's communities will know the benefit of that approach, which we have piloted and implemented. We are now implementing it in many more communities.
My hon. Friend was concerned about the rate of staying on in education post-16 in Nottingham, North. That is a problem in many constituencies. The importance of the education maintenance allowance, which is available to young people throughout the country, including those in his constituency, is that it provides people on the lowest incomes in the most disadvantaged areas—young people of 16 who are tempted to leave school, to turn their backs on education and all that it brings in personal self-development and to enter the world of work or, worse, the world of no work, no training and no future—with 274WH a financial incentive to stay on in post-16 education of various forms, to gain the benefits of continuing education. His constituents, and the young people in particular, will, I think, find that of great benefit.
My hon. Friend raised some key questions about structure and co-ordination. I accept his point that there have in the past been problems, when regeneration money has not been as well co-ordinated, targeted and used as it could have been. I want to stress two points in response. We have just issued a short publication called "The future of local government: Developing a 10 year vision", which places local government at the heart of local regeneration. It deals with the idea that the role of local government should include community leadership—taking on an empowering, facilitating and enabling role for communities, with the resources that are coming into an area through the local strategic partnership; the aim is to take that forward. We have a long way to go in setting up many of the structures that will back up that basic concept of the role of local government. My hon. Friend's speech today will play an important part in our thinking and the outcome of the review in December.
We had debates about the constitutional relationship between local and central Government. My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that as we develop our 10-year vision of how local government should be, while we may not be going all the way to have the constitutional settlement he describes, we wish to establish clarity about the roles and responsibilities at local, regional and central level—and indeed below local, at neighbourhood level. We also want to be clear about how these levels interrelate so that we avoid the difficulties that he described.
One initiative that we are currently discussing and will be piloting concerns local area agreements. Basically, a local area agreement is an arrangement between Government, the council and all the delivery partners in an area, bringing into play all those other areas such as the police, health and education. They will look at the national outcomes, the floor targets—the things that we want to see—and the local priorities and come up with an agreement about the funding that goes into that area under three major headings: children and young people spending, the safer and stronger community spend and the healthier communities and older people.
If we can reach an agreement about the money so that the communities are directly involved in channelling those resources we can come out of the silo mentality and get into an area mentality. That is very exciting. It is a fundamental change if we achieve it. We are running pilots because we need to ensure that all the inevitable wrinkles involved in such a change can be ironed out. If it is successful we will want to roll it out across the country.
§ Mr. AllenI thank my hon. Friend the Minister for the positive way in which he has engaged in the debate this morning, as have the representatives of the other parties. It is a credit to the House. Could Nottingham, North itself be considered as a pilot for a local area agreement?
§ Phil HopeWhy am I not surprised by that intervention? I will take that bid away. It will go into the pot and we will look at it. We will be making decisions 275WH about that fairly soon. The important thing about these local area agreements is that the local authorities and all the local partners, through the local strategic partnership, will have fewer funding streams to deal with. All hon. Members spoke about different funding streams. The funding will all go into one area pot, thereby streamlining all the bureaucracy involved with those different funding schemes and the transactional costs. Bringing those partners together in that way to deal with real cash will strengthen the partnership.
This will not be a talking shop; this will be a real debate. That is critical. One of the key tasks for the partnership is to engage with the local communities in developing that local area agreement to ensure that the professionals in the various organisations relate directly to the communities that they serve. Importantly, the agreement offers a point of contact with Government. Only yesterday the Prime Minister called a meeting of front-line workers and managers to ask them what we can do to cut out unnecessary bureaucracy in their area of work in local authorities, the health services and the police. I was present at that meeting along with other Ministers. The local authorities' representatives saw local area agreements as a major innovation that they were keen to pursue.
There is a lot more that we can do to cut out unnecessary bureaucracy. We have done a lot already. We have reduced inspections by a third. If an authority is judged excellent under the inspection scheme, 90 per cent. of its inspections disappear. We have un-ring-fenced grants so that people can have local flexibility about how they spend that money. We have given local authorities freedom to borrow and to trade, to give them more flexibility to meet local priorities and needs.
We looked at all the area-based initiatives and funds that were available, and cut them by a half as a pre-runner to the local area agreements. We have heard loud and clear the problems and issues that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North raised in many other forums and have already taken direct action on them. There is clearly more that we can do. The Prime Minister himself is directly involved in listening to frontline staff, workers and managers in organisations. We are taking many steps forward but there is more that we can do.
How right my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North is to say that we must do much more on community leadership and engagement. For some of the 88 most deprived areas, we have introduced the community empowerment fund, which is about developing community networks and building social capital. That is what the community chest and the community learning chest money is all about; it is deliberately targeted at areas where social capital has been most eroded and where most effort is needed to bring it through. There is also a plan for improving 276WH individual skills and knowledge; regeneration can come down to that, as well as to relationships between people in communities that need to be regenerated—in this case Nottingham. A scheme of regeneration apprentices is planned for that very purpose as part of the wider plan for Nottingham.
The first term of our Labour Government was about getting the economy right, getting people back to work, getting interest rates and mortgages down, and so on. The second term has been about reform of and investment in public services. The big challenge for the third term—this is my personal opinion—which we are addressing already, must concern the relationships between people in communities. Sustainable regeneration is not just about buildings, but about how people relate to one another. We must do a great deal more to build social capital, such as parenting skills and support for families—my hon. Friend knows my enthusiasm for that. We have got the hardware working, and decent homes are being built. However, the real challenge is what I call the software that binds communities together, which will tackle antisocial behaviour issues.
The hon. Member for Ludlow will forgive me, but I think that it is right that both happen at the same time. We must crack down hard on young people and others—much of the antisocial behaviour comes from adults, not young people, who are often the victims. At the same time, we must invest in educational maintenance allowances and youth schemes, for example, which engage young people in social and personal development and learning. It is both, not either/or. Our local communities expect that to happen
I have not mentioned the places project in Nottingham and would like to comment briefly on it. In recognition of such problems, the project was based on our need to map all the things going on, in relation to floor targets for example. Nottingham is one of the pilot areas where we have tried to map that activity. There was an interim report on that in July, from which some fo the ideas such as cutting bureaucracy and funding streams came. A further report is due in December, and the contribution that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North has made this morning can feed into that.
We have had a good debate. I did not think that I would have enough to say, but there is so much more to add, and I have not covered everything that I prepared in order to respond to my hon. Friend. It has been a worthwhile debate, and I hope that I have outlined some of the key themes that we are taking forward. It is very important that we maintain both mainstream and additional funding. We must tackle the problems of overlap and the silo mentality, and in standing up for his constituents, my hon. Friend's efforts are helping us to do that. I wish him luck in his meeting in December and look forward to hearing the outcomes, which will take forward a much better quality of life for the people whom he represents.