Groundhog Day on road to regeneration

Or bringing bigger business to the city to create more jobs? It seems those involved in this bureaucratic beast are not always sure themselves.

Look around the city and there are few places which have not been touched by the hand of the Brighton and Hove Regeneration Partnership.

During its ten years of dishing out Government money to revive the area, it funded everything from the refurbishment of The Dome to giving criminals a second chance to train and become gainfully employed.

The partnership had a finger in almost every pie throughout the city. Around 150 projects were funded, with the partnership giving £41m directly and generating another £90m - a grand total of £131m.

Lord Lieutenant Peter Field was on the board of the partnership. He said: "If we look behind lots of things that have gone on in the past ten years you'll see the hand of the Regeneration Partnership in there.

"We looked at the best interests of the city."

It started off ten years ago working on the traditional big projects.

Over the years these have included Westergate House, a £2m business centre using cutting edge eco-friendly building technology, Preston Barracks which is being developed into 400 homes and 20,000 sq m of business space on Lewes Road, and The Dome, where £5m of partnership money was spent.

At the beginning, regeneration was all big capital projects and probusiness planning.

The partnership was run by councillors and the discussions about where to spend the money had a stale and formal air to them.

Then there was a sea change in feeling as a greater variety of key community members joined the debate.

Overnight the kind of discussions held about regeneration changed.

The focus was less about economic regeneration and more about social regeneration - less about attracting people to the city, and more about improving the area for residents.

Community and Voluntary Sector groups were given two places on the decision-making board which gave the discussions a completely different skew. Nick Dodds, who runs The Dome and Brighton Festival, defends the money which is spent on big cultural projects.

He said: "In the four years since we reopened we've held 4,000 events. It was almost unuseable before. The Dome and the Brighton Festival have an enormous impact on the city in all sorts of ways.

"The festival alone brings in £20m to the city economy and the Dome has improved this whole area. But in terms of social regeneration, one in six city households come to an event throughout the year. I think it's wrong to compare one to the other. We need regeneration in the city centre as well as the suburbs."

But Anna Wilson-Patterson, who heads up the Community and Voluntary Sector Forum, said: "We were arguing that Brighton and Hove is awarded such big funds because of the statistics of deprivation, so the money should focus on that area.

"Getting us involved increased our understanding of how business and the council works and they saw the contribution the community groups can make which can't be measured in cash terms."

In the fifth stage of Regeneration Partnership funding, a huge survey of the city was completed.

Mr Field said: "We did a massive survey of the city to find out where all the problems are, and spoke to all the hard-to-reach people. Then we spent money on what they told us they needed in the next round of funding."

By asking people what they really wanted to improve their standard of living in the more deprived communities, the funding started being spent in entirely new directions.

Money was spent in three areas: Capacity Building, Community Safety and Lifelong Learning.

Capacity Building included the setting up of The Working Together Project, a scheme training and advising community groups and The Resource Centre, providing those same groups with equipment and services.

Community safety projects included What Next? which trained ex-prisoners for a new life away from crime and other important projects such as the Women's Refuge.

Lifelong learning gave those in areas of greater deprivation a feeling of renewed hope through increasing skills with The Family Learning Programme and Brighton and Hove Albion's study support centres.

But the fact that the partnership has now finished is absolutely no indication that its work is done.

Mr Field said the main areas for concern are now the London Road and Lewes Road areas and transport in the city.

He said: "Transport is a big challenge and a big issue for people who live here. Let's get the balance of the city right. Someone said to me 'if you have got healthy back streets you'll have healthy high streets' and I agree.

"If we can use the Open Market as a catalyst for the London Road area with healthy living, arts and crafts, performance areas and Dieppe markets, we could have somet0hing that will attract others into the area."

He also believes regeneration is not all about bringing new business into the city.

He said: "Inward investment is fine but if Amex decided to go tomorrow that would be our major employer out the window.

"Small and medium enterprises are 96 per cent of the economy. We need to get home-grown business sorted out, be less reliant on others and develop our own."

Meanwhile, the Regeneration Partnership has been replaced by something called the Area Investment Framework which is a pool of far less money putting the spotlight back on economic regeneration rather than correcting social deprivation.

Social regeneration has been left to a host of other initiatives - and this is where it gets complicated. Wading through the quicksand of bureaucracy surrounding social regeneration requires a scientific mind.

Initiatives involved in Brighton and Hove include the New Deal for Communities, eb4u, Sure Start, Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, Local Strategic Partnership aka the 2020 Community Partnership and now the Local Area Agreement.

The Local Area Agreement was sent to be the saviour of this plethora of schemes. It is supposed to combine every other initiative into a coherent framework which breaks up regeneration into Children and Young People, Safer and Stronger Communities, Health and Older People and, linked to these, Economic Development and Enterprise.

The focus is on a holistic approach, making sure that regeneration is a sensible combination of social and economic.

Sounds familiar? It does to those working in the field. For them the whole scheme has a whiff of Groundhog Day about it.

This is exactly what The Brighton and Hove Regeneration Partnership evolved into - so why the need to constantly reinvent the wheel? It is a great source of frustration for those involved.

Julia Reddaway, Regeneration and Renewal Manager at Brighton and Hove City Council, said: "Things are not given long enough to bed in, there's a new initiative about every two years and it's like digging a hole and filling it in again.

It's demoralising, and things are expected to be done in unrealistic times. They want things set up in months and it takes years."

Anna Wilson-Patterson said: "We've come full circle. It takes about five years for a partnership to really ensure that all of the people around the table fully understand all the issues. We brought together people with hugely different beliefs to decide what the point of regeneration is and what the focus should be."

Paul Bramwell, of The Working Together Project, said: "The Regeneration Partnership in the beginning had its difficulties as all new partnerships do and a lot of people put a lot of effort in to make it work.

"It could have morphed into the new partnership - this is just unhelpful. Most people don't respond to change very well."

Whereas The Working Together Project once filled out three funding applications, they now need 12. For each form to be filled out properly and guarantee them a successful application, it takes an average of two weeks of full-time work to complete.

That is 24 weeks of work instead of the previous six. It is not all negative news for regeneration in the city, however. The new agreement does have a strong vein of common sense.

There is a real recognition of the way that education links into health and crime. Poor education equates every time to poorer health levels and higher crime rates and this means improvement require greater integration between the council, the police and community groups.

Thursday, May 11, 2006