May 2009 Archives

Everything seems to be in transition. Our democracy. The economy. And many of us are in career transition. For some, it's through choice. For others, it's been forced on them. As the dust begins to settle (as it will), we all need to make the best possible decisions so that the right regeneration people are in place in the right regeneration roles - this will be critical if we, as a sector, are to rise to the challenges of the "New World".

So what needs to happen? First, regeneration roles need to be properly and honestly constructed. The proposition needs to be clear and the core skills and competencies need to be clearly defined. We in our sector are best placed to do this, nobody else. And those seeking appointment need to honestly appraise their skills and present a compelling case with absolute commitment and total enthusiasm.

  So..... the (wonderfully named) Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, has announced that Andrew Altman, his Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, has accepted the position as founding CEO of the Olympic Park Legacy Company, under the Chairmanship of Margaret Ford. "This is truly extraordinary" said Mayor Nutter, in a moment of understatement, and he went on to reassure us that Altman was selected after "an extensive international recruitment effort".

Well, I'm not going to be childish enough to say "I told you so" (EG Regeneration Blog 11 May). And I'm certainly not going to stoop to making waspish remarks about Americans taking the big jobs in London and what a dreadful message this sends to the home-grown market. No, I am going to write a letter of congratulation to Mr ("call me Andy") Altman and I am going to issue a clarion call for us all to rally in support of in his endeavour to regenerate large tracts of East London. And he will have a number of allies he can count on, notably the sterling work being done by Paul Evans, BURA vice-chair and all round Good Egg at the "Five Boroughs" organisation.

Is it me or do you get a real sense that people are now getting bored with not doing things and are casting their nets around? I believe there is real evidence out there that people are now trying to "make their own luck" and good on them.

One illustration of this is the response to BURA running a business development study tour to South Africa (11th-17th October). This is something of an experiment for us and, if it works (and it looks like being a stonking success), it will be the first in a series of exclusive urban regeneration fact-finding missions which might include China, India, Russia and Brazil. These would enable BURA members to learn, share knowledge, and identify potential business opportunities. We're running this at cost (most lunches and dinners will be provided by our sponsoring hosts) but it is still a significant investment for any organisation to make in these straitened times. So we have been thrilled at the take-up thus far, which has been very good indeed. Colleagues at senior and strategic levels in important regeneration agencies have been signing up and - as one mate shrewdly observed - it's turning into one of those that is worth peoples' whiles to go on the trip simply to network with the other participants!

The level of anger in the country has to be unprecedented.

I am reliably informed (by one of the free sheets you pick up in the tube, who in turn nicked it from comedy channel Gold, so perhaps not THAT reliable then) that, in April, Brits were wound up by an average of four times a day compared with 3.5 times for the (surely more volatile) French. Apparently Scandinavians are angry just once in five days! And, of course, causes for British fury have now been dramatically escalated from queue jumping and road rage, so I bet it's eight times a day these days.

Is the MPs allowances row visceral or what?

And how can anyone be surprised at the levels of anger when you juxtapose the unedifying prospect of public figures cynically feathering their own nests with the fact that the total British (tax payers') personal debt was £1,459 BILLION at the end of March this year (according to charity Credit Action)? Many, many folk now have no jobs and no job prospects to go along with their massive debts. So it's hardly a wonder that they're grumpy.

Some of the manifestations of this anger are hilarious. The coquettish Martin Bell is flirting for Britain. The Today programme carries items likening the crisis to the Peasants' Revolt (who is to be Watt Tyler then? You can't seriously suggest Esther Rantzen!) And the sight of the deeply fragrant David Dimbleby trying to quell insurrection on BBC's Question Time for two weeks on the trot (among the normally decent, reasonable, middle Englanders who frequent these events) would be thoroughly amusing were it not so downright terrifying.

Actually I was in a pretty hairy public meeting myself last week. It was at South Kilburn where I was appointed last year to chair the Partnership Board (successor body to the South Kilburn New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme). The community is pretty bloody angry on that estate and with huge reason - £50m has been spent there over the last nine years and it's really not at all clear where it's all gone. I will sort it out and I have solemnly pledged to do so but it's going to take time and I am going to have to seriously rebuild trust.

I still maintain that we've all known for years that MPs allowances and expenses were bent. But I guess we had little idea of the systemic extent of the malaise (it reminds me of the time Bob Maxwell died - it had surely been clear for years to almost everyone that the bloke was a crook but even the closest observers had little idea of the far reaching extent of his perfidy). And I don't think any regeneration practitioner would seriously hold up the NDC programme as value for money, although we don't, as yet, know the full extent of the waste.

In my view, the Allowance-Gate row will rumble on for months and will presage a wholesale revision of our entire system of democracy. It will not abate until we've got through the general election and have returned a new cohort of non-toxic MPs. Quite right too!

I am hoping that the row at South Kilburn will subside once we get on site and finally start delivering real homes for our beleaguered community. It will not abate until we have done so. And quite right too!  

I've been heartened recently by tales of remarkable customer service that have restored my faith in human nature.

One of my mates - a hopeless non-techie (as befits those of us of a Certain Age) - had difficulty syncing (I think this is the word) his new iPhone 3G with his laptop.

Realising that everything in his life was stored on his phone, he called the Apple Support Line and their friendly, attentive and knowledgeable people based in Ireland patiently took him took him through what he had to do to sync (rather than sink!) his data.

They called when they said they would. They checked back to see everything was OK. They asked for feedback on the service they provided as part of their commitment to continuous improvement. He's now backed up and can sync away. Truly amazing.

It reminds me just how dependent we are on technology - our PDAs, laptops, hard drives, mobiles, etc. The subject of a future blog I think!

Another mate went into London Bridge station to put some credit onto his Oyster card. He encountered a friendly, smiling assistant (this in itself remarkable, of course) called Dolly who spotted that he had not "registered" his Oyster.

Well, needless to say he had no clue what she was talking about, but she explained patiently why it was important to do so (it's in case the poor old gimmer loses it) and gave him the registration form.

When he looked a bit blurry, she offered to register the card for him - so he stood aside, filled out the form, handed it back to the gorgeous Dolly and she registered him on the system.

She hugely exceeded his expectations and was friendly and helpful and gave him a glad heart. The thought of it still makes him smile.

I often remark on the luminous brilliance of the great Peter Hendy, the London Transport Commissioner. In my view the bloke is a saint and has even managed to get surveyors to use London buses (credit crisis may have had something to do with it too I guess).

Peter has got a mixed bag of folk around him but that Dolly at London Bridge is a true credit to him!

We've become so used to mediocre and sub-standard service today that examples like this really stand out. Yet we're all customers. Why are we so accepting of bad service?

I've seen lots of customer service programmes that are surrounded by bureaucracy and administration. They miss the point. It's about understanding what the customer expects and delivering that in a friendly and effortless way. If there's an opportunity to go further - GRAB IT!

As we move into the "New World" we need to start with our customers and work back from there. It's pretty simple really (btw, I have banned the use of the phrase "it's not rocket science"): if you start with your customer, you always arrive at the right answer.

"I've seen the future .... and it's Elephant and Castle!"

So says former President Bill Clinton at the C40 Summit in Seoul (I wonder if Lend Lease or St Mods agree?).

Just who has been talking to Bill Clinton then? Praising the sustainability credentials of this major regeneration project, Clinton promised to visit on his next visit to London. FANTASTIC!

This got me thinking. There is a vast amount of inspiring regeneration around in this country. You only have to look at Brindley Place or Paddington or King's Cross or Castleford.

But we're so ground down by the credit crisis, bankers' bonuses, MPs' expenses, swine flu, Fred the Shred, insurmountable bureaucracy, there is so much gloom and doom.

We are so lost in process and drowning in detail that we forget to stand back and see the bigger picture and imagine just what is possible.

I think the impending visit to E&C will need careful stage managing if the poor bloke isn't to become seriously disillusioned, but let's hang onto the bigger picture here.

We need more Bill Clintons. We need to be inspired. We need to inspire. We need a massive dose of positivity and we need to get out there and talk with passion and optimism about our industry and what we are delivering.

Our sector has a massive role to play in "the new world". Life will never be the same. What will emerge will be SO much better.

TIFs again!

I confess I am somewhat at a loss to respond to the recent comment posted by the lovely Ross Sturley, having been brought up by my canny Scottish mum to save up before I bought something, sweet old-fashioned thing that she is (of course I didn't always follow advice, but hey!). Thanks Ross, in any case, nice to know you care. Keep 'em coming.

I got a slightly remonstrating tug from the poor, hard-working souls at CBRE as I had written in a rather nonchalant manner (cavalier, moi?) that "CBRE was once very excited" about TIFs.

I am assured that we are still very excited indeed about the possibilities. BURA too - Michael Ward is actively working away on the policy case.

And, of course, the British Property Federation will be including it in their Regeneration Manifesto to be launched at CBRE's West End office next week .

Sorry, everyone, if I was a little high-handed. Of course I will grab at anything that could get regeneration projects going again. TIFs could very well represent a major new funding initiative for regeneration and we must all continue to champion the cause. I just wish we'd sorted it out during a rising market!

Come to think of it, there's a lot of things we should have sorted out in a rising market - I guess we were all too busy rising with it! We must learn from this.

There is significant momentum behind the concept of increased devolution and, for those of us that always started bottom-up (I was even born bum first!), this is to be welcomed. Whilst this is something that the current national administration will continue to drag their feet on, for obvious reasons there is an inevitability that it will happen.

The difficulty is to identify at what level it will happen and how it will be implemented. The current government always supported the regions as a concept - setting up the RDAs and following the same boundaries with the present HCA structure.

But for the Tories, anything regional is anathema, and the big momentum is toward more power to local authorities (and - natch - the backwoods Conservatives). Now there is an awful lot of space - an awful lot of space - between a good local authority and a poor one, but that is certainly the direction of travel (I would recommend the latest report from the Tory think tank, Localis, where it is very evident). And, once it gets underway, the sainted Sir Bob Kerslake's "single conversation" could be another pillar of the strategy.

Recession is a pretty normal state for me. After all, I graduated into a recession. In essence, I was poor for the three years that I was a student, I was dirt poor for the three years that I was a student politician, and then I was poor for at least another five years in my first two or three jobs.

In fact it wasn't until I left the grit and dust of the London Docklands Development Corporation to join Stanhope in dear old Bruton Street in 1988 that I began to taste a little luxury. I will never forget it. I left my soulless semi in Beckton and rented a room in a house with some posh girls near Chiswick Park. It was 1988 and I began to develop a taste for champagne. I bought a Russell and Bromley handbag. It was - I fondly imagine - a bit like coming out of some Eastern European state to live in San Tropez

So being poor is my norm really. Or at least it was. And I was very struck by a quite wonderful man who was at the local government gig with me on Monday. His name is Graham Burgess and he is chief executive of the Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council (yes, it is "with" rather than "and"; the acronym for his authority being BWD rather than the more obvious BAD).

Whaddya reckon to the old TIF (Tax Increment Financing) then? An idea whose time has gone?

There were a few of us practitioners together at a conference in central London on Monday, where Hazel Blears launched her new Regeneration Framework for the UK (and no, she did not arrive on her motorbike in her leathers, much to the disappointment of the senior local government officer I was sitting next to and, no, nobody was rude enough to mention MPs expenses. The very idea!).

The government has given the TIF idea some encouragement (for what that's worth!) when it announced a study into allowing the use of Accelerated Development Zones (ADZs) - a form of TIF - in last month's Budget.

I can't bring myself to look at The Daily Telegraph (10 pages today!) but I did catch up with the row in the Sunday papers at the weekend. "Taxmen to probe MPs over profits from home sales" screams the headline in The Observer, and The Sunday Times equally scathing.

Am I alone in NOT being in the least surprised about the row about MPs expenses? Shocked certainly, but unsurprised. I recall being...uh ... entertained by a Conservative MP who will (seriously, this time) remain nameless, in his opulent flat in Dolphin Square in the late 1980s. I solemnly swear that there was only the one (albeit quite large) gin and tonic involved and a brief discussion about a regeneration project and nothing else. Honest guv! But it was a complete eye opener to me (then living in a tatty two up two down terrace in Canning Town) nonetheless. Even at that time, I thought to do the sums and worked out that four nights in a hotel would be infinitely cheaper than paying for this elegant apartment, but of course I made the assumption that the chap concerned (sadly no longer with us) had deployed private money alongside allowances.

The finger-on-the-pulse lobby of CB Richard Ellis demand to know daily: what's occurring with the Olympics Legacy Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) then? And I struggle to answer.

In common with most of the industry, I have been watching like a hawk (when not being distracted by the pesky day job). Was I alone in thinking that the adoption of the 10 year old model of the Urban Regeneration Company (URC) for the SPV was something of a capitulation?

After all, we can hardly claim the URC template to be radical or on the cutting edge! Perhaps I am being a little harsh, almost certainly I would have been the first critic had the powers-that-be not learnt from best practice elsewhere, so perhaps I should be congratulating them on using a tried and tested vehicle (although with a patchy set of results up and down the country!)

I once heard one of my kids describing what I do for a living to one of her friends thus: "mummy does strange sad little places" and it would be quite hard to dispute this searing analysis. On the upside, it has to be said I'm not much in demand at the school careers fair!

In defence of my profession I will point out that the so-called "urban regeneration" sector is relatively new. After all we've only had the concept of "urban" for something under 300 years and "urban regeneration" as a concept has been around for three decades at best (in my view, since the London Docklands Development Corporation was formed - ibid).

If London was to be my specialist subject but you asked me to drill down further, then I would have to choose East London. It is in the East of our metropolis where I forged my career and spent my formative years; whether it was the Isle of Dogs, Royal Docks, Stratford, Dagenham Docks, Barking or Romford; you name it, I had a skirmish with it. Blimey! I even lived in Canning Town in the 1980s and then Beckton (oh yes!) in the early 90s before "marrying up market" (as Nigel Hugill once so elegantly put it, on the strength of having spoken to my husband on the phone) and decamping for leafy Chiswick to join the Stepford Wives. As you do.

Nice to be reconnected with East London over the last couple of years via the good offices of Matthew Le Noir (or Matt Black to you) Head of the CBRE East London Business and Man who Knows a Thing or two about E1 to E17. Somebody has to.

If I were ever to appear on Mastermind my specialist subject would have to be London. Never mind old Peter Ackroyd's brilliant biography of London stuff (STILL not managed to finish that worthy tome btw), I would have to confine myself to the regeneration story of London over the last (nearly) 30 years; from the point where - and I kid you not here - we invented regeneration at the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) in 1981. Ah, those certainly were the days. There were none of yer squabbles over whose planning jurisdiction we were in, or any question of a two tier planning decision, or a higher or alternative authority, none of these niceties. No, we determined everything - from Cabot Tower at Canary Wharf at the one extreme through to Mrs Miggins's back extension in Island Gardens at the other - it was a shining example of benevolent dictatorship at work.

It was certainly clear. And, there is no question, it did work. Leaving aside issues of democracy (and I always struggled here) and putting also to one side the national scandal of the jobs story (the defining theme of my career came as a result of watching the Docklands jobs go to anyone and everyone except Docklands residents; it was an utter bloody disgrace and I did - ahem - say so rather vociferously at the time and indeed have done ever since) we would never have secured London's future as a world financial centre - the financial centre of EMEA - had we not been able to underpin our economic future with the 14 million plus square feet of chrome and glass citadel that is Canary Wharf.

I am currently suffering from the double whammy of having not one but TWO adolescent children going through public examinations. The kidult is doing her A levels and the loud lanky lad is doing his GCSEs. Nightmare. For some reason, they both seem to think that the key to good revision is to cover the walls of the family bathroom and the downstairs loo with revision notes in bold felt pen colours (just goes to show what they think they spend most of their time doing!). Needless to say these revision notes (some of which are quite hilarious: "Women! Don't expect votes on a Thursday") tend to peel off, under the onslaught of condensation that is inevitable in bathrooms and get stuck back in a higgledy-piggledy type way. This, coupled with the fact that all the colours have now run into each other, means they make even less sense that they did before. I am now an expert on the suffragette movement (actually, if I say so myself, I was pretty fluent in this before, having been brought up by the blue stockings) and in osmosis. And I could make a fist of "viral advertising" if pushed (that's yer medja studies there) but I'm just dead grateful that it isn't me doing the exams.