Recently in RDA Category

The housing and planning package announced by the government a few weeks ago seems to be something of a slow burn. I guess folk are still digesting it.

The proposals are for an additional 5,000 homes built for rent at market rates in line with Sir Adrian Montague's report on boosting the private rented sector (PRS), with the government to invest £200m in housing sites to ensure that the high-quality rented homes needed are available to institutional investors quickly.


I dedicate this blog to Jonathan Bull Diamond (a great real estate professional, who has done so much to help establish UKR) of Jones Lang LaSalle, who has been remonstrating with me recently about not sufficiently appreciating some of our northern towns and cities. 

Regular readers of this blog will recall the good-natured exchange I had with Howard Bernstein at MIPIM over the Enterprise Zones (10 March 2011). I still intend to furnish Sir Howard with his (highly alliterative) "empirical evidence of the efficacy of Enterprise Zones", but Dr Evans is on holiday right now (as a cheeky person quipped earlier today: "The President's Brian is Missing.") so I haven't gotten around to it yet. I'll keep you posted.

But Sir Howard certainly continues to excite strong emotions. On Tuesday, Manchester Evening News carried an hilarious interview with Barbara Spicer, chief executive of Salford city council, where she explains how she has become incredibly close to her Manchester city council counterpart (Sir Howard Bernstein, of course), and describes their relationship as "almost like that of a mother and daughter". As she says (with apparently genuine affection): "It's a little like you'd say, 'Mum, what do you think about this?'."

The article is headed "Howard Bernstein is like my mum", which is a bit of a shame really, as the piece is, in all other respects, exemplary. Well, the mind boggles! Ms Spicer gets us into this unfortunate mire of maternalism (which I bet she is truly regretting now) in her attempt to explain that there wasn't a natural partnership with Manchester when she took the Salford job over four years ago. She says: "I'm not saying that the politicians weren't talking, but in organisational terms, there wasn't any real partnership. And to be honest, I think there was some kind of competition. Very early on, I made it clear that any competition with Manchester was over. In terms of developing the core of the conurbation, we take a very singular view and that is one of the things that we will look at in the round: we discuss which sites we are going to bring forward."

Very good outing this week with regeneration finance types at the SocInvest conference. We were treated to a veritable tour de force by my mate Andrew Screen (now fetched up at GVA as head of financial consultancy, and good for him!) who gave us a whirlwind tour of the "collapse of monolines and collateralised debt obligation". Blimey, it was exhausting! And wonderful to see the sainted Chris Munday of the WDA, who is best in class by a country mile in the JESSICA stakes (not a classic of the flat-racing season, I assure you) and one wonders whether those Welsh know how lucky they are to have him...

Despite the sterling work in Wales by Munday, though, the big news for the market came from the keynote address given by my good friend and all round seven-brains, Mr Brian Field. He told the conference that billions of pounds of European funds are still available for urban regeneration projects struggling to cope with UK government cuts. Actually, this isn't really big news (as Chris has proved): it has been "out there" for years, but it remains such a trade secret because of the fact that the programmes are complex and not readily understood. They are monopolised by consultants who demand huge fees as the entry price. And, of course, they have daft names.

But our Brian, who is the urban planning and development adviser at the European Investment Bank, is trying to dismantle the barriers. He told our delegates that many councils and regeneration bodies are unaware of the funding streams available from Europe and said that the European funds, mainly in the form of loans, were now a much more attractive proposition for local authorities owing to the rise in costs for other forms of lending. He said: "We tend to lend money in large denominations - it was €9bn-€10bn last year. You can get a lot of money from us if you have decent urban projects. In the past, we have not been an attractive lending product because the Public Works Loan Board has been able to undercut us. However, the board's lending rates have gone up recently, so now we are competitive."

Planning Resource Magazine this week carries the rather entertaining story that government ministers are preparing to establish a network of six regional teams intended to support the new "public-private-led" Local Enterprise Partnerships. One of my valued (although somewhat terse) correspondents, who is shortly to join a very prestigious planning consultancy (bravo Monsieur!), alerted me to the story in an e-mail thus: "The R Word. I thought the coalition had abandoned all regional structures - U-turn?"
 
The proposed regional teams are to be called "BIS Local". (This is a bit close to "Sainsbury's Local" for my taste; in a flippant moment on the bus the other day, I was wondering why Sainsbury's hadn't capitalised bit more on the splendid naming of their convenience stores in the localism debate. Sincere apologies to Sue Wilcox, she always has been a far subtler operator than me!)

The teams will "deliver areas of BIS policy, feed information on local economic issues back to Whitehall and provide locally based support and guidance to the joint public-private LEPs, which are intended to replace regional development agencies".

A BIS spokeswoman said: "It is important that BIS has a policy presence outside Whitehall so we can communicate effectively with local enterprise partnerships, businesses and other organisations. The network is still in the early stages of development, but it is expected that there will be six small teams in different parts of the country, although locations have not yet been confirmed. The teams will support BIS's overall objectives particularly those relating to growth, jobs and rebalancing the economy."

Hmmm. Well, you have to smile. First, the government removes all the structures which artificially attempted to create a separate, regionally accountable tier of governance (the RDAs, the Assemblies, the Regional Spatial Strategies in planning, the Government Offices) but now somebody has realised that, blow me down, it can be helpful for civil servants working on some issues to be organised around geographical areas, so a new thing gets invented.

I was dead busy yesterday, and despite everyone shouting at me for a view, I was seriously struggling to find the time to get abreast of the White Paper publication Local Growth: realising every place's potential (formerly known as The Sub-National Growth White Paper - I'm so very relieved they went for a snappier title).

Some 24 Local Enterprise Partnerships were announced, which is more than had been tipped, but it still left massive gaps across the country, particularly stark in some of the North East, the South West and East Anglia. Oh, and London of course.

Well I've yet to digest the White Paper fully (and I don't understand why it was solely a BIS publication and not joint with CLG, as was the press release). But I thought it set the right tone.

That's if you disregard the bit on page 18 which asserts that "the government is committed to an "orderly transition from the RDAs". One of my correspondents shrieked "this must be ironic!".

And certainly, news from the front is that what is going on out there could hardly be described as "orderly".

Was in Manchester for the Northern Regeneration Summit (somebody has to!) and was mightily impressed, both by the turn out, and by the optimism on the part of the delegates.

As I've observed before, you do need a preternatural ability to "look on the bright side" in our game, and regeneration types will always try to laugh rather than cry. But it cannot be claimed that it is sane or rational behaviour.

Mark Prisk, Minister of State at BIS (one of our own, of course, having studied Land Management at Reading and done his APC at Knight Frank Rutley before setting up his own development business) gave us a polished performance with his elegant "four measures for business growth" treatise.

He slammed into the RDAs with his statistics on economic growth being the same in both northern and southern RDA areas over the last ten years, and saying that as they (the RDAs) had failed to narrow the gap, then they must be deemed a failure.

I was a little bewildered by all this, as I didn't ever recall the brief of the RDAs being set up to address the north-south divide.

Reflecting on Arnie Vinick (and actually, very much more to the point, Al Gore) I am forced to conclude that power is an elusive concept.

One of the tricks in the armoury of the regeneration practitioner is to seize power, assume it really, where in reality none exists.

All of the many achievements of the Urban Regeneration Companies (URCs) for instance, were delivered despite the fact that the URCs didn't have any planning powers, or CPO powers; they didn't own any land and what budgets they had were limited in comparison to their host local authorities, RDAs and so forth.

I appreciate the picture is mixed but seriously it is a wonder that anything was achieved at all! And it was always easier to commission a feasibility study than to get any tangible benefits going on the ground for real people.

The good urban regeneration practitioner will use other peoples powers if necessary and combine this with influence (lobbying and publicity) and bullying and charm - in equal measure - to get something going. It's exhausting but it's how we do it. Of course, this "art" will become ever more necessary in more-for-less Britain.

I once sat on a private sector-public sector committee of an initiative called "Fair Cities" that was chaired by the luminous David Michels, then Chief Executive of Ladbroke Hilton. We were debating whether the then Prime Minister (Tony Blair) could do anything about a fairly trivial (in David's eyes at least) condition for those claiming Job Seeker's Allowance to not exceed so many hours training each week.

The Financial Times this morning has got into the whither-the-RDAs debate. The headline in the FT Notebook claims "Tory RDA plans 'hazy'".

The Tories are urged "to produce a formula that allows regional decisions to be taken at a sufficiently strategic level if they are serious about offering councils the chance to form local economic partnerships to take over regional development agencies' (RDAs) economic development responsibilities and funding".

Further on the Conservative's criteria are described as being as hazy as the likely fate of the RDA., with some surviving, such as the London Development Agency, because it is already devolved under the mayor, and possibly others such as One North East.

But Notebook takes the view that it would seem perverse if London were able to keep its RDA while lagging regions lost theirs.

Hmmmm. Nice to know that this blog is somewhat ahead of the FT! But it is genuinely difficult to see how it would work in practice if parts of the county kept their RDA, by virtue of strong local stakeholder support (or the special circumstances of the London Mayor), while other regions have to manage without theirs.