Recently in Housing Category

It's official! Brent is the new Southwark. It is, quite simply, Land of Opportunity.

This has been a pet thesis of mine in recent years but is now totally reinforced in the light of the news that my very good mates over at Brent council have launched their vision for a new Alperton. And quite right too!

I regularly used to eye up Alperton when I was CE at the Park Royal Partnership. And me and my old muckers at the dear-departed Brixton plc used to stomp around there on a regular basis (btw is it really true that the beauteous, but thoroughly mild-mannered, buttoned-down, measured and considered Peter Dawson is going to give evidence against Tim Wheeler at the high court next month? The mind seriously seriously boggles!).

Now, the energetic and pragmatic cllr John Detre, lead member for regeneration at Brent, wants to see Alperton transformed into a place that people choose to live, work and invest. Opening up the splendid Paddington branch of the Grand Union canal "turning it not only into a place to travel to and from home, work and school but also a place to visit and enjoy". 

A big man has died.

Alan Cherry of Countryside Properties was a true gent and one of the few volume house builders who genuinely thought about how people lived and could thrive in new-build housing. One of the few who could talk genuinely and authoritatively about social cohesion.

And he was unswervingly good to Yours Truly.

Frankly, it is a pathetic travesty of the case to say that the world is a significantly poorer place for his loss.

Always with a twinkle in his eye, and sometimes with his tongue firmly in his cheek, I first met Alan when I was Chief Executive at Kent Thameside.

Alan was a big player in Kent Thameside; a progenitor of the "Kent Thameside Association" indeed (the forerunner to the government establishing the Kent Thameside Delivery Board) where he had certainly stuck in for the long haul.

And gawd alone knows you needed fortitude to stay in the game at Kent Thameside.

Alan was developing the Gravesend Canal Basin and Springhead when I was there and I was somewhat overwhelmed (amazed!) when he accepted my invitation to Chair the Kent Thameside Economic Board (a poisoned chalice if ever there was one!) but the bloke had true commitment, as anyone with half an eye could see.

I was very interested to learn yesterday when reading the Sunday Times (look, back off, I'm busy, OK? And I'm not the only one to read the Sunday newspapers on Monday or Tuesday, or even Thursday, I see people all the time doing it on the tube!) of the huge number of "hidden homeless" that there are in the UK, in an article, written by an Old Etonian, who is himself homeless. 

My pal, Leslie Morphy of Crisis, had advised the writer that Housing Benefit (which he doesn't receive) was incredibly complicated to apply for and doesn't cover deposits and so forth, and this got me thinking again about poor Dorothy McEwen and her son, and my (strongly) emerging thesis that the headline figures for unemployment or homelessness (which look grim enough), do not account for vast numbers of unfortunates who, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to access welfare systems and therefore do not appear in the statistics. And, whilst this was ever thus, I believe that the problem has become much more acute in recent times.

The other day somebody (who I respect, so that made it worse, of course) described me as the "patron saint of lost causes" and my (admittedly rather feeble) rejoinder was that you had to be a bloody masochist to be in urban regeneration in the UK - especially these days! And this is certainly true. Almost all true regeneration practitioners are a bit self sacrificing not to say a bit messianic; indeed some have definitely got more than a screw loose! And certainly when I first went to Paddington I was told I was stark staring mad (and after the first three years when very little had actually happened I was beginning to believe it....)

But you have to stick with things I reckon. And this exchange got me thinking: why do I continue to fight to make BURA fit for purpose for New World? It's more than a bit of a struggle. Why don't I get a quieter life? And I guess the answer is that I just can't. There's something really compelling about developing a new agenda coming out of the only independent regeneration body which isn't solely about money or politics or urban design. We could be more than part of the solution. BURA has the potential to be a really powerful platform in more-for-less Britain: we have a willingness to engage in a disinterested fashion - with the same energy as, say, the BPF or the BCO or the BCSC, but without the devaluing vested interest element, and not like a government agency such as CABE, which always runs the risk of being the poodle of government.

After all, our members know what they're talking about! They need a voice and a place at the table. And channeled in the right way, they could make a very real contribution to solving our workless and homeless problems.

It was wonderful to see the news about my old gaffers, that ultimate pair of old lounge lizards, Nigel Hugill and Robin Butler, setting up their own development company.

And they've already purchased 1,100 acres in Huntingdonshire. Hurrah!

The company is to be called Urban & Civic. Well ! It has a certain ring to it, I guess. I like "Urban" (of course!) and I like "Civic" (connotes ownership and leadership and pride). But what will it be shortened to d'ya think ? U&C or UrbCiv ? Whatever.

Here's hoping that we're talking about Urban & Civic in 20 years, in the same way that the boys in white shirts now talk of "Land Sec" or "CapCo"; that is, as part of the furniture. Certainly it is the case that Robin and Nigel are really smart and they deserve success on that scale.

And about bleedin' time, some would say, as we groupies have been hanging about for a year since the announcement they were leaving Lend Lease. I got fed up of fending off enquiries about what that pair were up to; my stock retorts being "I know nurthing", "you think they'd tell ME" and "I am not my brother's keeper" (none of which, clearly, was going to be good enough for the boys' huge adoring public).

More seriously, though, is that the urban regeneration sector cannot afford for the likes of Hugill and Butler to be out of commission for too long. There are a number of excellent mixed-use developers who "get" urban regeneration although still too few (and I mention these precious individuals repeatedly in this blog) but Nigel and Robin are first among equals and it will be a thrill to see them back in action.

And we need them to set the bar for enduring development, once again, as we come out of recession.

The inevitable cuts we are going to experience in public services will invoke the usual schizophrenic response in the private sector. 

Any move to slim down the HCA after the general election will be warmly welcomed, of course, as the private sector harbours a huge amount of inchoate suspicion in respect of waste in the public sector and mutters darkly about "jobsworths" and red tape. 

However, housebuilders and all their multifarious friends and relations (aka consultants) will be the first to cry "foul" if their schemes are not processed quite as quickly as they would like. Simply slashing the resource and carrying on with the same old systems will not do the necessary; the trick in more-for-less Britain will be how to reform an existing (and still very unsettled) housing agency into a stable, streamlined and efficient service (and that's before we begin to tackle the planning system!). 

Easier said than done, of course. And all of this to be considered against a backdrop of the mixed fortunes of the HCA\TSA apparatus, still in its infancy after all. Just where do you establish your baseline (if we aren't to rely on anecdote or prejudice)? 

Up to South Kilburn on Tuesday morning for the launch of the Granville New Homes development (pictured) with Brent Housing Partnership; guest of honour being Richard McCarthy CBE, director general at the CLG.

And - despite the rain - what a very jolly affair it was too!

It was lovely to see Richard, who I first knew when he was on the PRP Board at Paddington (and chief executive of the Peabody Trust) and who, later, when I was in the Thames Gateway at Kent Thameside and he was at the then-ODPM, was our senior report in government.

By this point (which must have been about 2005, I guess) Richard was held in such reverence in Kent circles that I was once - seriously - formally reprimanded for behaving "inappropriately with a civil servant at MIPIM" (a reference to an incident when I had kissed the blessed McCarthy on the top of his head as I was leaving a dinner and, yes, of course I had partaken of a glass or two of Vimto, although I would have done the self same thing had I been sober!).

I was a bit dismayed to find how much housing associations were out of favour at last week's Conservative Party Conference. Having worked with many housing associations over the years I would contest that it really is not fair to view them all as a problem; very many are very well run and are committed to providing decent housing (and all sorts of other interventions) to help the poorest people in this country. And I will name names if pressed. 

Obviously all sectors have failures - organisations that over extend themselves, are poorly run and get into trouble - and it seems that the gossip circulating the conference bars about Genesis (which seemingly has only survived by being given large handouts of additional grant by the HCA) is affecting the reputation of the whole of the housing association world.  

I picked this up with friends in the RSL sector at the weekend, and I won't bore you with the detailed explanations that I got, but a few things struck me:

First, the rate of failure of housing associations is tiny and the amount of money recently injected by government to ensure that housing associations could continue to house the poorest people in our communities is nothing as compared with the amount we have injected into the banks.

We drove Kidult to university on Saturday. It was a tough day, physically and emotionally. Sorry, but I still get a bit lachrymose thinking about it!

She nearly didn't have any accommodation to go to, as a few days prior to scheduled departure we discovered that she hadn't posted the confirmation form. Needless to say I almost marmalised her. I was so exasperated, I cannot begin to tell you. I was tempted to get on the phone to Mark Allen at Unite (who I had met at a couple of conferences) and call in a favour, but I'm glad I resisted. She had to sort this out herself. 

And, indeed, a combination of Kidult deploying a bit of pester-power on the phone but - in the main - the super brilliant and amazingly sensitive performance of Unite's customer services team in Exeter (these guys clearly well used to the antics of gormless adolescents) pulled it around and we moved her into a lovely room with an en-suite shower (very different from my day I have to say), so very well designed that it even managed to absorb the pantechnicon of clothes and shoes that had been selected for the University Debut (purple high heels, I ask you!). And we left her in high spirits, if a little nervous.

There must be easier ways of making a living, you mutter to yourself as you battle with the pre-paid ticket machine at Paddington before clambering aboard a train to Newport (!) to spend two days in the strangely enervating resort hotel known as the "Celtic Manor" (or "Escalators R Us" to the cynical) for Resi 09.

What a very bizarre place it is. Even more bizarre with 1,000 or so of your closest friends from the resi industry sculling around within it, like peas in a biscuit tin. Doesn't bear thinking about really.

I leapt out of the taxi to bump straight into dear old Richard Page and David Green of Delph properties (made an assignation to meet them later in the bar) and whizzed into an Olympics Legacy Workshop with Mathieu Le Noir (or Matt Black to you) of CBRE being smug-and-knowledgeable and Elliott Lipton of First Base being urbane-and-progressive (made an assignation to meet Matt later in the bar).

So far so good.

Then into a workshop on the future of mortgage finance (I think it was) with the lovely Andrew Pratt of Grainger. Andrew is a very good friend and I have genuinely never heard anyone make fun of his name before but when someone uttered the immortal words "The-Bank-of-Pratt is clearly more generous than The-Bank-of-Mum-and-Dad" the comic timing was such, that the room fell about. Made an assignation to meet Andrew later in the bar (but as Grainger was - rather generously - buying me dinner, then perhaps this wasn't strictly necessary).

Close observers will know that I have decided to be encouraged by the advent of the concept of "localism" which is around everywhere but is most attenuated in current Conservative thinking. As far as I can make out, localism just means "bottom-up" or "community-led" endeavour. And, for nearly 20 years, the British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA) has existed to celebrate a bottom-up approach and to connect and share best practice with those who are effecting real change on the ground; change which radically improves people's lives.  

This is most vividly illustrated by the BURA Awards Scheme for Community-Inspired Regeneration, a programme run for us by the adorable Dan Sequerra, a veritable guru (some of you may have known Dan when he was a senior officer in Sheffield - the bloke is a leg-end).  

Awards are conferred for a vast range of projects, all with a localist tang, whether it be a group of pensioners pulling on their Marigolds and cleaning up a half-mile stretch of canal or some feisty, single mums setting up a much-needed child care resource in the outskirts of a northern conurbation. This is all bottom-up stuff, makes a real impact on real people's lives, and is rarely dependent on vast sums of grant funding.

"Localism" seems to seek to do nothing more or less than support the local - villages and towns (aka "sustainable communities") - and anyone who cares about bettering the lives of real people, has to welcome a return to viewing life on a human scale.