Lessons for the Big Society: Planning, Regeneration and the Politics of Community Participation

Denis Dillon, Bryan Fanning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317105602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides concrete examples of the ways in which shifting academic debates, policy and political approaches have impacted on a specific place over the past 30 years. It offers a critical analysis of the history, politics and social geography of the high profile London Borough of Haringey, in the decades prior to the 2011 Tottenham riots. The Haringey case study acts as a lens through which to explore the evolution of theoretical and policy debates about the relationship between local institutions and the communities they serve. Focusing on the policy areas of planning and regeneration, it considers the local implementation and outcome of central government strategies that have sought to achieve such accountability and responsiveness through community participation strategies. It examines how the local authority responded to central government aspirations for greater community involvement in planning, in the 1970s, and regeneration, from the late 1980s onwards, before looking in detail at the implementation of New Labour neighbourhood renewal and local governance policy in the borough. In doing so, the book provides a longitudinal case study on how various central government community empowerment agendas have played out at a local level. It offers important lessons and indicates how they might work more effectively in future.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book addresses intersecting debates about local government, planning, urban politics, urban sociology and, community development in Britain since the 1960s. We locate our analysis within the history, politics and social geography of the London Borough of Haringey since its formation in 1965. The aim of doing so is provide concrete examples of the ways in which shifting policy and political approaches have impacted on a specific place. We mostly draw on research undertaken in the early 1990s (prior to the emergence of New Labour) and a decade later on the relative abilities of local communities to influence planning and regeneration processes. We examine both institutional efforts to promote community participation in such processes and the political geography of unsolicited activism in the borough. Much of Haringey’s local politics and the Council’s problematic history of responsiveness to its deprived communities can hardly be explained without reference to local history and demography.

In Haringey, in October 1985, a riot occurred on the Broadwater Farm Estate following the death of Mrs Cynthia Jarrett, a black resident. The riot resulted in the death of PC Keith Blakelock; Broadwater Farm became yet another byword for urban policy failure. It had been built in the face of local opposition on open land that had been used as allotments (Gyford, 1986: 14). In 1965 the Council awarded a contract for a scheme using the Larsen-Neilson method of system building. It was apparently built with high hopes. In the words of Haringey’s Chief Executive at the time of the riots in 1985:

The Chair of Planning in those days thought Broadwater Farm would be an everlasting memorial to him and his committee. That was the genuine belief. I have talked to him about it since then. What they were trying to do seemed the right thing at the time (cited in Gyford, 1986: 15).

Construction started in 1967 but was held up for some time in 1968, after the Ronan Point disaster when a similarly constructed block collapsed, and work was completed in 1973. Initially, residents were enthusiastic about the quality of their new homes. As with many such schemes, allocations were predominantly made from the clearance of old back-to-back housing. What the end result lacked however were the essentials for making the estate into a living community for over 3000 people. The shops, pub, laundrette and doctors and dentists surgery specified in the original design were cut from the scheme due to cost (Gyford, 1986: 16). Transport facilities were poor. The estate was difficult to get to by bus and from the beginning there was a dangerous polarisation between the estate and neighbouring residential areas whose residents opposed its construction. Some years before the riots a Department of the Environment report on difficult to let housing had concluded of Broadwater Farm that:

At best the local authority can hope to make tolerable for the next decade or so, but eventually, because the estate is so monolithic and comprises such a large proportion of their total housing, the possibility of demolition is one that will seriously have to be considered (cited in Gyford, 1986: 18).

Subsequently, the inquiry into the riots concluded that: ‘The high hopes of the planners were confounded almost from the start. The history of Broadwater Farm through the 1970s is a spiral of deterioration’ (Gyford, 1986: 18). These kinds of unlikely hopes have been written about extensively. For example, Patrick Wright’s A Journey Through Ruins (1991) examined how the planners’ dream went wrong on the Holly Street Estate in neighbouring Hackney. Wright contrasted the unrealistic ‘swish perspective’ of architects drawings approved by councillors with the grim unfinished product: ‘There was a little toy car parked in the place where, in the real world, a stinking overloaded skip is usually to be found; and a plastic bush stood amongst herbaceous borders where the green void would soon form’ (Wright, 1991: 110). Such criticisms of past British urban policy have been well rehearsed but unrealistic claims keep resurfacing in new forms, the latest being David Cameron’s Big Society.

Chapter 2 examines various interlocking academic and political critiques of Britain’s planning malaise from the later 1960s to the early twenty-first century. Within this literature poor urban design variously exemplified simplistic beliefs in progress, a crisis of technocratic rationality, an urban crisis or one of Western modernity. Much of this boiled down to preoccupations with poor decision-making and a lack of accountability amongst the various architects of urban policy, politicians, planners and the central state which put in place the financial incentives that, as Wright put it, turned tower blocks into machines for harvesting subsidies (Wright, 1991: 109). Disparate critics of British urban policy failure also blamed a post-WW2 paternalistic municipalism.

To a considerable extent, the remedies identified were political ones. Various advocates of community development, champions of new social movements, advocates of managerial forms of accountability to customers and clients and, most recently, promoters of the Big Society have all argued in their different ways that representative local government alone is not enough to ensure accountability to local communities. Chapter 2 examines the interplay between shifting academic and political perspectives on the politics of community participation in planning and regeneration from the 1960s until the early twenty-first century New Labour era. Academic and policy debates have been preoccupied with shifting claims about and theories of accountability; ongoing interrogations of community-institutional relationships run through these debates as a common thread. To some extent, the focus of Chapter 2 is upon the battles of ideas that have influenced political and policy debates about accountability to communities within British urban policy and on the role of local representative government.

Cynthia Cockburn in her 1977 book of the same name coined the concept of the local state. This title referred to how local authorities acted as if these were in some way constitutionally independent of central government. Local authorities had responsibility for and, at the time, delivered most public services whilst at the same time were often the major local employer and the largest owners of property in the forms of public housing, land banks, commercial real estate and public parks (1977: 46). At the time Cockburn was writing, what Gerry Stoker termed ‘the traditional public administration model of government’ was still very much in place. Under this model the local authority reigned in monolithic pre-eminence as the dominant local institution and service provider. In Stoker’s summary:

The assumption was that what was required was largely known. It was to build better schools, housing and roads and provide better welfare and that we could rely on and expect officers and politicians to define what was precisely needed in any locality (Stoker, 2004: 12).

In the decades since the election of the Thatcher Government in 1979, the functional and political sovereignty of local government has been eroded to a considerable extent. Under the Thatcher and Major Administrations, the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering and the transfer of key local authority functions to quasi-autonomous non government organisations (quangos) weakened local authority sovereignty (Skelcher, 2004: 27). Under New Labour the growth in the role of quangos continued. New Labour also promoted new local governance arrangements through which power and resources that were once the preserve of local authorities became distributed among a range of stakeholders and service providers. Local government had to adjust to an environment where it was expected to advocate, persuade, broker and play a leadership role in delivering outcomes for communities in lieu of the command and control power it once had. It was also expected to become more responsive to local communities, or more correctly, meet central government targets relating to New Labour’s civil renewal agenda.

The declared policy approach of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government that came to power in May 2010 is to usher in an era of localism and to free local authorities of control by the centre. We shall see! The Localism and Decentralisation Bill currently working its way through parliament sets itself the aim of distributing power away from the centre to local government and communities giving a general power of competence to councils while increasing their freedoms and flexibilities. However, the Bill also looks likely to continue the erosion of local government sovereignty and status. For many local authorities however, the intense budgetary pressures being faced as a result of government cuts raises questions about the degree to which they will be able to meaningfully exercise new freedoms. In reality, there is little indication that coalition policy will reverse local government’s loss of sovereignty and power. In the area of education the new government seems intent on removing the bulk of what remaining power local authorities have over the running of schools. While the Localism and Decentralisation Bill confers new powers on planning and housing powers to local authorities, it also appears to give local communities power to veto council decisions on these matters. The bill further undermines the remaining functional sovereignty of local government by giving communities the right to take over the running of local state services, including those run by local authorities, and making it clear that it expects the delivery of most provision to be open to competition.

Despite this ongoing loss of power and status, local government has continually sought to assert its role as primary local decision-maker. Almost like Monty Python’s Black Knight who gamely continues to challenge all comers in battle, as one limb after the other is chopped off, it has faced each setback and challenge by using what leverage it possesses to optimise its influence over local decision-making. This pre-disposition to promote and protect its own position reflects an underlying municipalist ideology with philosophical roots that can be traced back to earlier idealisations of city government from the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century (Gilbert, 1991). However, the major political and socio-economic developments of the twentieth century worked to undermine municipalism. World War Two and the advent of the Keynesian post-war welfare state all extended the centralising role of the nation state and undermined the capacity of cities to act as autonomous entities (Hebbert, 2007: 4). So too did the rise of neo-liberal economics in the post-Keynesian era.

Historically, the concept of municipalism has been applied to city-level government. In the British context it can also be scaled down to borough level local government as this has been the main geographic and administrative unit of local decision-making. In the face of sustained challenges from central government representative local government has fought to defend its status and relevance. As powers were taken away it sought to establish new roles. For example, during the 1980s a number of Labour-run Councils set up economic development units and implemented their own local economic strategies in defiance of Conservative government market-led regeneration initiatives (Pacione, 1997: 31). Likewise many Labour run local authorities did their best to undermine Conservative Compulsory Competitive Tendering legislation by promoting and favouring their in-house service as much as possible. In essence, the municipalism demonstrated by such local authorities has asserted the primacy of the democratically-elected local authority as the entity that is best-placed to represent the local community and act in its overall interest.

Municipalism as such refers to goals of institutional self-preservation to be achieved either by defending existing roles or seeking new relevant ones that might sustain the influence of local authorities. In effect, these are expressed in the prioritisation by the local authority of its own political, strategic and corporate interests within the decision-making process. These also find expression, a number of our case studies suggest, in symbiotic alliances between elected councillors and local authority officials aimed at defending the local authority from community activists or local interest groups that have not been co-opted by the local state.

The Invention of Haringey

Benedict Anderson (1983) memorably described nations as imagined communities and so too are units of local government. The London Borough of Haringey was formed in 1965 through the merging of the existing boroughs of Hornsey, Tottenham and Wood Green. Like the other new boroughs that it bordered, Camden, Enfield, Waltham Forest, Barnet, Islington and Hackney, it forged a new municipal identity. A new coat of arms was created and along with this a motto, ‘progress with humanity’.

Haringey had previously been part of Middlesex; after 1965 it became part of the new Greater London Council. The political geography of what came to be Haringey reflected the histories of its various localities as well as its socio-economic and ethnic geographies. Firstly, some areas, particularly in the West retained strong local identities. These found expression in ongoing community activism on planning issues and in defence of local amenities. Secondly, as detailed in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, there were considerable differences in the nature and extent of such community activism that were rooted in socio-economic disparities between the prosperous West and the relatively deprived east of the borough.

The West included Muswell Hill, parts of Highgate and Crouch End, all being leafy prosperous areas. The greatest contrast was with Tottenham a declining industrial area to the East containing poorer rundown residential neighbourhoods and a much higher proportion of social housing. Tottenham was part of the Lee Valley that led northwards out of London to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. Much of the original housing stock in Tottenham was built to accommodate the workers in the various local industries and their families and, since the Victorian era at least, there has been a historic concentration of lower income households in this area. The houses tended to relatively small in size and residential densities came to be higher than in than in the affluent West. Yet, many of the environmental conditions stereotypical of ‘inner city’ deprivation were absent in the East. For example, there was no widespread dereliction and relatively few tower blocks. Broadwater Farm in the West Green Ward was the exception. Much of the social housing in Haringey became concentrated in the east and centre of the borough. Here, the flat landscape made building easy. By contrast, in the West, areas such as Highgate and Muswell Hill, which are hilly, were not suitable for large-scale cheap housing and have substantively retained their affluent Edwardian residential character defined by larger houses with larger gardens and tree lined avenues. Two wards in the West, Highgate and Muswell Hill, contain private roads.

From Alexandra Palace, further above sea level than any other part of London, there is a panoramic view of Haringey to the south. Most of the prosperous West appears hidden beneath trees. The flatlands of the East, which begin beyond railway lines that divide Haringey are mostly covered in low rise housing – the towers of Broadwater Farm are the most prominent exception – and brown field industrial sites. The railway line that splits the borough also demarcates the two parliamentary constituencies of Tottenham and Woodgreen and Hornsey and Muswell Hill. The East, as the cliché has it, on the wrong side of the tracks. For decades pronounced socio-economic and demographic differences have persisted on an East-West basis, the exception being pockets of deprivation in south Hornsey which adjoins the East.

The East of Haringey contained an area called Harringay; both derivations from the same word. Harringay was bisected by the Green Lanes road that led north from Finsbury Park to Turnpike Lane to where it became the Woodgreen High Road leading out of the borough to Palmers Green in Enfield to the North. The Harringay ladder came to be settled by Greek Cypriots who traded on Green Lanes. Over time many of the more prosperous of these migrated north along Green Lanes to Woodgreen, Palmers Green and Enfield. They were to some degree supplanted by Turkish Cypriot migrants who in turn were partially succeeded by Kurdish ones. Such patterns of intergenerational straight-line ethnic migration from London towards to outer suburbs are not unusual in London. To some extent the high rate of population turnover became possible due to the prevalence of private rented accommodation in the area. By the early 1990s Harringay Ward contained the highest proportion (57%) of black and ethnic minority inhabitants in the borough. The 1991 census recorded that of a total of 202,204 residents in Haringey 43.2 per cent were from black or minority ethnic communities. By the time of the time of the 2001 Census this proportion had risen to just under 49 per cent.

The most deprived part of the borough (and indeed one of the most relatively deprived wards in England) has long been Northumberland Park. Its other claim to fame has been as the location of the Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs) stadium. Along with Seven Sisters Ward at the other end of Tottenham High Road it has been the focus of regeneration programmes. Between both, but some distance west of the High Road, is West Green ward which contains the Broadwater Farm Estate. West Green has also the focus of regeneration programmes.

To some extent, politics in Haringey reflected these East-West spatial disparities. The Labour Party dominated the borough as a whole. While its strength in the West has declined – no Labour councillors were elected there since 2006 – the East has been a Labour Party fief kingdom where only occasionally since 1965 have non-Labour councillors been elected. From 1982 the numbers of black and ethnic minority councillors increased; these were predominantly from the East, from Tottenham, Harringay and Green Lanes wards. Labour-controlled Haringey Council engaged very differently with different parts of the borough. Much of this book is concerned with the implications of such demographic and socio-economic divisions for local government and social policy. It examines how differing levels of community activism and disparate institutional responses to the West and East of the borough influenced planning decisions and approaches to regeneration.

Map 1.1 Ward Map of the London Borough of Haringey. Crown Copyright Ordinance Survey: All rights reserved.

Chapter 3 outlines the political history of London Borough of Haringey since its formation in 1965. Part of its job is to contextualise the case studies of planning and regeneration-related community activism in the London Borough of Haringey that appear in subsequent chapters. In its own right it provides one of shifting political commitments to community participation, the social inclusion of black and minority ethnic communities and the regeneration of deprived neighbourhoods from 1978 when the new left first began to influence local politics to 2006, towards the end of the New Labour era. Haringey became one of the new left local authorities which pioneered the political inclusion of black and ethnic minorities in local government. Many of the ideals it emphasised like racial equality and the rights of lesbians and gay men have since moved into the political mainstream. However, it also acquired a reputation for poor public services. In practice, there were considerable institutional barriers to community participation in decision-making.

Chapter 4 focuses specifically on planning and regeneration decision-making in the borough. It examines changes and continuities in how planning officials responded to demands for community participation in development control, strategic planning and regene...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Community Participation in Theory and Practice
• 3 Local Politics in Haringey
• 4 Institutional Perspectives on Community Participation
• 5 Spatial Inequality and Community Planning Elites
• 6 Community Activism, Localism and Anti-Municipalism
• 7 Community Capacity, Regeneration and Neighbourhood Renewal
• 8 Lessons for the Big Society
• Bibliography
• Index