Counting the human cost of regeneration
08.10.2006, 10:09
The location of our homes and businesses is an essential aspect of our everyday lives.
Culture of Vilnius
The way we travel to and from work, open up the office, drop the children off at school or go to the shops can be radically affected by changes in our area. It may be the smallest of things - road improvements that restrict traffic to one lane and hold us up - or the bigger things like a new shopping centre with free parking that offers late-night shopping every Wednesday.
These physical alterations that you see in your local areas and streets are the result of much planning and deliberation by local councils.
Although we sometimes complain and fail to see the direct benefit to ourselves, decisions are by and large made with the aim of improving an area through encouraging new investment to boost the neighborhood's economy: creating jobs, offering affordable housing and developing a better infrastructure for local good and services.
These decisions require adequate consultation with the council, local residents and businesses. Plans to change any area are going to have an impact on the local community in one way or another.
For example, the positive effects that regeneration can bring are clear - improving run-down areas, attracting new businesses and shops and creating jobs and wealth among communities weighed down by poverty. But it is when these communities are not consulted or even considered that the CRE is concerned.
You probably receive a council magazine or leaflets telling you about the next community forum event and inviting you to put forward your views.
These events are an opportunity to present to the local community the council's plans to make physical changes to their area, explaining why, what for and how long in the simplest terms possible.
We may not like these plans. They may impinge on our daily lives or have serious consequences such as putting local traders out of business to make way for a new leisure centre. If however, we feel that we and our whole community have been consulted and all our diverse needs have been taken into account, we may accept such decisions even if we don't agree with them.
The CRE sees regeneration as a multibillion pound industry that has an impact on every member of the community. If these decisions are not made with the cooperation and blessing of local people after proper consultation, then the result can be badly planned regeneration projects that lead to segregation and displaced communities and increase local tensions.
We are not interested in scaremongering, but this is a serious concern, which the CRE sees as impacting on everyone, not just ethnic minority communities.
The Ted Cantle report on community cohesion, commissioned after the riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001, identified regeneration schemes as a significant factor. The report said: "The towns showed a 'depth of polarisation' around segregated communities living 'a series of parallel lives'."
Regeneration projects have a crucial role to play in building an integrated society. Local authorities are bound by a legal duty to promote race relations at the heart of their service delivery and functions.
Regeneration is one of the tools they can use to improve race equality and promote good race relations. But for this to happen, regeneration policy and practice need to be sensitive to race issues.
Lack of consultation and transparency during project development can increase local tensions by encouraging the perception that some parts of the community are reaping greater benefits than others.
As the guardian of the Race Relations Act, the CRE holds organisations to account if the act is breached in any way and it is concerned that for all the social and economic good intended by these projects, those involved in delivering them may not be considering fully the effects that schemes may have on different racial groups.
The CRE recognises that in sharing the benefits of regeneration it can be difficult for authorities to strike the right balance between commercial considerations and the interests of existing communities, but these decisions must ensure that communities do not feel alienated or displaced.
Regeneration featured as an issue when meetings were held following the disturbances in Lozells, Birmingham in October 2005 in which a 23-year-old man, Isiah Young-Sam, was killed. Local communities expressed suspicion, hostility and resentment over some of the regeneration proposals, believing that particular communities were benefiting more than others.
The lesson to be learned from Lozells was that consultation was clearly inadequate and that the local communities, the key stakeholders in any regeneration debate, felt marginalised and ignored.
The CRE, from its experience in this area and from issues that have been raised with it, is concerned that public bodies involved in regeneration are not properly considering their legal duty to promote good race relations.
As a response, the CRE has decided to use its powers under the Race Relations Act to conduct a year's investigation into regeneration projects in Britain. A general formal investigation is a good tool to enable the CRE to look at these issues and examine how regeneration affects communities living and working in that area.
Once the investigation is concluded, the CRE will prepare a report of its findings, making recommendations where appropriate. If there is substantial evidence to build a case, we will consider taking legal action against any local authority that has failed to balance the needs of its community against commercial interests.
A crucial part of this investigation is our call for evidence. We need help to put the spotlight on regeneration projects in specific areas. We are calling on members of the public, community and voluntary groups and other organisations to give evidence to help us build a really robust and meaningful evidential base that will allow us to identify the areas where regeneration projects have been successful as well as those projects that have failed to engage with their local communities.
Regeneration is an issue for us all. Local authorities should be working towards building integrated communities, ensuring that people are not restricted from accessing nearby amenities, stepping onto the property ladder or prospering in business.
So it goes without saying that any plans for physical alterations to our local landscape should give the very people who are most likely to be affected the opportunity to have their say.