One from the heart

One from the heart

Shouting at the telly

Last month, ITV’s Tonight with Trevor McDonald ran a two-part programme attacking the proposed demolition of housing in Liverpool. The programme makers used an interesting tactic to make their case: they spent the £24,000 that it would cost to demolish one of the minuscule houses in the Welsh Streets district to fit it with new bathroom, kitchen and wallpaper, thus making it “ideal for a style-conscious first-time buyer”. It was at this point that Delyse Bailey began shouting at her television.

Bailey is one of two project managers working in New Heartlands’ delivery team, and for her, the programme exemplified all that is superficial and glib about the public’s understanding of Liverpool’s problems. Tackling the problems of areas such as Welsh Streets with wallpaper is like treating a cancer with sticking plasters. “People can’t get their head around the fact that there are surplus houses here.”

Bailey points out that Liverpool has 34 conservation areas and 1200 listed buildings, many of them empty. These are the ideal homes for style-conscious first-time buyers, she says, not the relentless rows of Victorian cottages built to house Welsh navvies.

She does acknowledge, however, that her work is contentious among Liverpudlians. “The problem is that we are taking people’s homes away from them and that’s an emotional process. We don’t always see eye to eye with the community. They think we’re behind in giving them information, but often we’ve not got the information to give them yet, so we can be out of kilter.”

But the television programme provoked an unusual response in the pathfinder community, Bailey says. “After the programme, a lot of residents contacted us and asked us to come and value their houses because they wanted to sell.”

Working in a goldfish bowl

One early piece of research carried out by the New Heartlands team was a survey of 250 buyers of trendy apartments in Liverpool’s city centre. They were asked whether they would be willing to move to one of the less rundown areas within the pathfinder. Just 1% said they would. “Our challenge is to make that figure 20, 30 or 40% – I can’t think of a bigger achievement,” says John Glester, chairman of New Heartlands.

The criticisms of its work have put New Heartlands in “a goldfish bowl”, admits Glester, who as former executive director and deputy chairman of the Manchester 2000 Olympic Bid is used to taking on a challenge. “We’re in the front line because of the attention focused on the Welsh Streets. But there’s no reason to have second thoughts,” he maintains.

Glester knows what he wants from the new-look ODPM. “It would be good if there were a national voice for pathfinders to respond quite quickly to this criticism. We’ve had that in the past from the ODPM and we know we’ve got strong support at the top. We can do what we do with confidence, but we don’t want to be out on a limb. What I want is for ministers to come, see and understand.”

Looking at the big picture

I’ve heard all the criticisms before and I’m sure that what we’re doing is on the right lines

Richard Edgington, Bellway Homes

New Heartlands has suffered more criticism than most because it is tackling the most problematic areas first, says Tom Clay, project manager with New Heartlands’ South Sefton team. “What’s happening is that people are seeing it as knocking down houses and they’re not seeing the overall extent of the programme.”

Clay’s territory includes the Klondyke, an area in Sefton packed with more than 600 two and three-bedroom houses arranged in a grid. The arrival of the bulldozer is imminent – but can Clay, as a trained architect, see any redeeming design merit in the homes?

“These are bottom of the scale in terms of the housing being built at the time,” he says. “They were designed cheap and small and mean, and there are thousands of properties like them here on Merseyside,” he says. “There is no real garden, no off-street parking, and the streets are narrow. There’s nowhere for kids to play. The roof structures to the houses are failing. The drains are failing so there are rats around.” In fact, the only reason he can see to retain any of them is simply as an exhibit showing how people used to live (see “Typical faults …”, overleaf).

There have been reports that local developers are among the staunchest critics of renewal, because they believe it is robbing them of the chance to refurbish failing housing. Clay says that far from losing out, developers large and small will have more opportunities through renewal: “As a result of the activity under way, private developers are working up proposals for specific redundant sites and buildings – private sector interest that hasn’t been seen for many a long year. So it is working.”

Standing his ground

Richard Edgington worked on slum clearance in Walsall and in Aston, Birmingham, in the 1970s and 1980s, and his faith in the process has held firm ever since. “I’ve heard all the criticisms before and I’m sure that what we’re doing is on the right lines,” says Edgington, who is regional managing director of Bellway Homes, which is New Heartlands’ developer partner in the Klondyke and Wavertree areas of Liverpool.

Critics who say it would be more economical to refurbish rather than rebuild underestimate the costs, he continues, mentioning one refurbishment currently under way in the city in which £1m is being spent to create 10 family houses. On early new-build schemes, Bellway is trying to keep sales costs down by developing standard housetypes, albeit with site-specific external designs. The typical build cost for an 800 ft2 semi is therefore around £56,000.

The housebuilder says rebuilding helps regeneration in other ways. For instance, it is committed to using local suppliers and subcontractors and to training apprentices from the renewal areas.

The training programme signed up its first batch of 20 recruits a year ago, and is now sifting through 1500 applications for its second recruitment round.

Edgington is fearful renewal’s opponents could have an impact on all this. “So far the attention we’ve received isn’t having an adverse effect. It might if we, who are pouring resources into this, find that there might not be a chance to capitalise on it,” he says.

“John Prescott is already restricting housebuilding activity in the North-west outside the pathfinder areas [where a building moratorium is being enforced through planning controls], so you have to wonder what would happen to the North-west if the government changed course and restricted housebuilding in the pathfinder areas, too. I know that in cost terms, refurbishment is not an option, but there is a fear that the attention will provoke a rethink and hold up the renewal process. That’s something we have to be very careful about, because ultimately we are not talking about Victorian heritage, we are talking about people and where they live. We need to see an unswerving commitment from the government to what we’re doing.”