Demolition row

This morning, the bosses of England’s housing market renewal pathfinders find out if they are to face the death penalty. A Conservative win in the general election will mean that the programmes are chucked onto the bonfire of the initiatives promised by shadow chancellor Oliver Letwin.

If, as expected, Labour has won, the future for the pathfinders is safe for at least three years: chancellor Gordon Brown’s £500m grant in last year’s Comprehensive Spending Review guarantees that. But even if Labour does win, the prospects for the pathfinder programmes still look less rosy now than they did last year.

For one thing, there are question marks over whether John Prescott will continue to head an ODPM. He is the initiative’s chief patron, but he is also 66 years old. Even if he does stay, several factors are increasing the political pressure on the programme to demolish, refurbish and reshape moribund housing across the North and the Midlands. Communities in the pathfinder areas are rising up in revolt against the programme and soaring house prices are undermining its raison d’être. The market renewal honeymoon is over. The question is: will the government and the councils hold their nerve and go ahead with the demolitions?

Within the past few months, a string of newspaper articles and radio programmes have highlighted the damage that the programme threatens to wreak on England’s industrial heritage. One market renewal expert says: “People are taking it very seriously because it’s the only publicity the pathfinders have been getting and it’s very hard for people to put across the good news.” David Rudlin, director of consultant Urbed, which drew up the masterplan for the Oldham and Rochdale pathfinder, says: “The atmosphere’s definitely changed in the past few months.”

That change has been marked by increasing exchanges of fire between the interested parties. SAVE Britain’s Heritage, which recently succeeded in securing the preservation of a large chunk of London’s Smithfield market, is leading the charge for the conservation lobby. The charity is putting the finishing touches to a report into the market renewal programme that is likely to make uncomfortable reading at the pathfinder offices. SAVE director Adam Wilkinson gives a flavour of the tone that the report will adopt with his description of plans to cure low housing demand in the Lancashire mill town of Darwen as essentially insensitive.

The fight against the bulldozers

Then there is the increasing acrimony between the ODPM and English Heritage. EH’s budget freeze late last year was widely interpreted as Prescott’s punishment for daring to challenge the demolition of 150 Victorian terraced houses in Darwen’s neighbouring town of Nelson. Henry Owen-John, EH’s north-west regional director, says that although his organisation does not take a position of outright opposition to demolition, it will not be cowed. “There are not very many areas that have the integration of townscape like Nelson,” he says, “but there are plenty with sufficient distinctiveness to be taken into account.”

It is not only misty-eyed, tweed-jacketed conservationists who are worried about the demolition plans. The nerve centre of opposition to them is the working-class Oldham neighbourhood of Derker and Werneth, where hundreds of local households are fighting against the regeneration of their neighbourhood. One of the key rationales for demolition is that it is the solution in areas where house prices have dropped so much that carrying out repairs makes no financial sense. But the picture that local resident Maureen Walsh paints of her neighbourhood is very different from the powerful images of semi-abandonment that opened Whitehall’s wallet two years ago.

She echoes the complaints of campaigners in Nelson, when she says abandonment is the result of the market renewal programme and not its cause. “People have only moved out since the housing market renewal moved in,” says Walsh. “We were in the middle of putting in a kitchen when we first heard about the plans,” she adds.

Regeneration minister Lord Rooker felt the full force of local residents’ anger when he paid a visit to the Oldham and Rochdale pathfinder’s office and found a demonstration in progress. A week later, a coach load of Oldhamites turned up at No 10 Downing Street to deposit a 700-name petition objecting to the pathfinder’s demolition plans, which was probably the first time that many people at that address had heard about it.

The bad news for the government is that it is not only in Oldham that the plans are sparking a backlash. About 150 householders in Darwen are fighting Elevate East Lancashire’s plans to get rid of their homes. In Liverpool, conservationists and homeowners have accused housing associations and the local council of allowing their inner city neighbourhood to become so rundown that demolition becomes the only option. And although the anti-slum-clearance campaigners of the 1960s had to fight alone, their contemporaries can swap tips over the internet using the recently launched website, www.fightforourhomes.com

It’s not all the conservation lobby. The nerve-centre of the opposition is in the working-class communities of Oldham

What the property upturn means

Announced at the same time as the South-east’s housing growth plans, the market renewal programme has always carried with it the slight suggestion that it might be a political consolation prize for the north of England. Now that it is generating so much antipathy, and the public finances become increasingly straitened, the programme could look like a political liability to those operating the Whitehall machinery.

Sceptics won’t have been won over by the parliamentary select committee report on market renewal published last month. This only distanced the committee from its previously enthusiastic support for the programme, and commented that it ran the risk of becoming perceived as slum clearance.

The committee also raised concerns about the impact that rising house prices may have on the programme, pointing to evidence of falling numbers of empty homes in the pathfinder areas. Look for a recent house-price hotspot and there’s a good chance that it will be in a pathfinder area. The fastest house price increases in the Yorkshire and Humber region have occurred in Doncaster, which lies within the South Yorkshire pathfinder. The same is true for the west end of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. And house prices are rising faster in Liverpool than in any other part of Merseyside, according to a recent Halifax survey.

Many suspect the price rises are fuelled by buy-to-let speculation, and that the pathfinder areas will be the first to catch a cold if the property downturn continues. Irrespective of what is causing the increase, it becomes difficult to justify spending public money on demolition schemes when rising prices make it worthwhile for owners to carry out refurbishments. And rising housing demand could also make it more difficult for planners in the North-west to make a case for preventing housebuilding outside the pathfinder areas, as they are presently doing.

From the pathfinders’ point of view, rising property prices will inevitably make securing compulsory purchase orders more expensive and add further complexities to an already fraught process (see box). But Richard Kemp, the former chair of Liverpool council’s housing committee, and one of the key architects of Merseyside’s market renewal programme, points out the silver lining. “It’s more expensive to do it,” he says, “but on the other hand, it means that we don’t need to knock down as many properties. We have to take stock of what can and can’t be done.”

The upturn could even prove to be the programme’s saviour, according to Duncan Sutherland, whose firm Inpartnership brokered the funding for Manchester and Salford’s pioneering market renewal scheme in Higher Broughton. Although £500m sounds like a lot of money, he points out that it has to be spread across a big area. “Three years ago, with the programme that the government set up, there wasn’t enough money to do everything that people needed. Now there’s the ability to be far more selective and focus on the areas that really require it.”

The pathfinders plough on

Pathfinder executives may be bloodied by the opposition, but they are certainly not bowed. Mike Gahagan, chair of the Transform South Yorkshire pathfinder says: “If there ever was a honeymoon, it’s over now, but that’s only to be expected.” Kemp argues that many groups opposing market renewal are unrepresentative of the community as a whole. “In both of the areas where we are planning demolition, there’s been a majority of local people in favour of the proposal. The proposal that the civic society is criticising isn’t John Prescott’s or the council’s proposal, but the proposal of the community.”

He adds that conservationists’ concerns that the north of England is about to turn into a massive demolition site are overblown. At the current rate of demolition, there will still be Victorian terraces in two centuries’ time, he says. “We will still have left more than 75,000 terraced houses in Liverpool, including fortunately the one that I live in.”

At the current rate of demolition, there will still be Victorian terraces in two centuries’ time

Mike Gahagan, Transform South Yorkshire

Gahagan agrees: “We are not going for wholesale clearance. We are refurbishing more properties than we are demolishing because there will be a need for more housing in the long term, but not for small, poor-quality housing.”

His own pathfinder has scaled down its demolition plans in Fir Vale neighbourhood after local residents rejected the original proposals as excessive. That could be interpreted as a sign that the opponents are starting to win the battle. Significantly, in John Prescott’s own back yard, the local council’s Labour administration has put its foot down and secured a scaling back of the Hull pathfinder’s demolition plans.

“Where there are areas where the community is solid, what you need to do is to partially take out, but make the environment better,” says Inpartnership’s Sutherland. In some cases, this might involve hiring wardens, who can ensure that the neighbourhood is kept up to scratch. The only problem with taking this approach is that the pathfinders must spend the bulk of their cash on capital schemes and not on revenue projects, such as hiring wardens. And by taking the softly-softly option, pathfinders run the risk of incurring the wrath of the Audit Commission, which vets their business plans.

Whereas communities were accusing the pathfinders of trampling on their sensitivities, the public services watchdog gave them a roasting for not being radical enough. The commission’s assessment of the programme said that so far the pathfinders had taken too many council refurbishment projects “off the peg”.

Urbed’s Rudlin responds that the commission’s bean counters are being too aggressive. “The Audit Commission is the villain of the piece. It has very little understanding of the process of regeneration and has pushed councils to do things that they would not otherwise have done. Instead of giving out grants to do up properties, they have been asked to masterplan what an area is for. You can’t do that in two or three years.”

But where pathfinders appear to be on firmer ground is with their concern that councils are still allowing too many new homes to be built. Experience suggests that residents find demolition easier to swallow if they see evidence of new homes being provided. The danger with this approach is that in chronically weak markets, such as east Lancashire, there is the risk of recreating the vicious circle of oversupply that created the lack of demand in the first place.

However, the programme’s backers say new properties will not saturate the market providing that they are catering for a different clientele. Sutherland points out that 80% of the homes he is helping to build in Higher Broughton, where many of the area’s traditional Victorian terraces were empty a few years ago, have been sold already.

Kemp holds with his belief that demand exists for property in Liverpool, pointing to recent statistics showing that the city’s population rose in 2004 for the first time in 72 years. “Our analysis shows that although on the margin there are more houses that can be saved, we are still left with an imbalance of two up, two down houses and the fact that the number of people who aspire to live in 50 to 60 ft2 off the street is limited.”

Even if abandonment is not as bad a problem as it was, the poor condition of much housing in the pathfinder areas and the overcrowded circumstances in which many people live are a good enough reason for the government to hold its nerve, Gahagan argues. “There’s a certain quality of housing that no civilised community should be allowing people to live in.”