Cities of the Future – One City: building united, active and tolerant...

RSA | Westminster City Council Round Table II | Tuesday 24th January 2006

Cities of the Future – One City: building united, active and tolerant communities National Manifesto Challenge: Fostering Resilient Communities Speakers: Julie Jones OBE

President, Association of Directors of Social Services Deputy Chief Executive, Westminster City Council Director, Children’s Services Director, Adult Social Services

Lord Richard Best OBE Director, Rowntree Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust President, Local Government Association Member of Minister of Local Government Sounding Board 2002/2005 Chair, Giving Forum President, Continuing Care Conference

Parminder Bahra Editor of Public Agenda, The Times public and voluntary supplement

Chaired by: Sir Simon Milton

Leader, Westminster City Council

Date: 24th January 2006 Venue: RSA, 8 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6EZ

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Penny Egan: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I’m Penny Egan, Executive Director of the RSA. It’s very nice to see you all here tonight for the second of these events which we’re doing with Westminster City Council and it’s very good to be working with them.

Tonight we’re going to be looking at One City, which is Westminster’s five-year plan which they are consulting residents, businesses and visitors about. It’s specially designed to bring communities together. Now this fits very neatly with the RSA’s agenda. Many of you may know that we have a manifesto of aspirational challenges, one of which is Fostering Resilient Communities and I suspect that is exactly what this discussion will focus on this evening.

I’m going to leave Sir Simon Milton to introduce the panel and to chair the evening so over to you, Simon.

Sir Simon Milton: Penny thank you and good evening everyone and welcome (as Penny has said) to this second Westminster City Council and RSA Lecture entitled tonight One City: building united, active and tolerant communities.

Before I introduce our speakers and say a little bit about the format of tonight’s event a few words of introduction as to why we’re here. We at Westminster Council are seeking to do two things by sponsoring these lectures and this evening’s discussion in particular. The first is to highlight our City Innovations Month during which we’re seeking ideas from the public, from staff, from citizens about how we can improve life here in the Centre of London, ideas that are innovative, cost-effective and deliverable. It’s an open process. It’s a competition and there are prizes for staff, for members of the community, for young people and for community organisations which range I think - for young people the prize is an iPod – right up to community organisations, a donation of £1000. So a significant competition and you can pick up a leaflet outside after this if you haven’t got one. Or you can find out more information at www.myidea.org.uk.

The second reason as Penny said is that we’re consulting on our new five-year strategy

called One City and last night’s discussion we focussed on the built environment and the public realm. Tonight the focus is to people and communities.

London is experiencing a population surge and nowhere is that more true than in Westminster, which is officially the UK’s fastest growing population. At the moment our population is 250 thousand people (residents) and that is forecast to grow to anywhere between 300/350 thousand within the next ten years. So these population statistics are significant.

But they also mask some very significant population migration movements. London as a whole is losing something like 100 thousand people a year (Londoners who are moving out to other parts of the country), but they are being replaced - and indeed more than replaced - by immigrants coming into London from all over the world.

So London is becoming truly one of the world’s most global cities. In the next few years that means that we’re going to have to ask people to live at ever greater densities to live in a city that is becoming more 24-hour in its operation where the distinction between residential and commercial areas is becoming more blurred and where you are most likely to have as your neighbours, people who come from a completely different faith, background or culture to yourself.

We’re going to need to find homes, schools, jobs, skills and leisure opportunities for this increasingly diverse population and at the same time of course, ensure community cohesion and a safe, secure and tolerant environment for all.

Our One City document seeks to ask the necessary questions about how we can manage this dynamic set of challenges and tonight’s event is aimed at widening that consultation and seeking the views of colleagues here this evening. So the format:

There’s going to be a short presentation from each of our guest speakers


(no slides I’m told, you’ll be pleased to know) and they’ve been asked to restrict their comments to between five and eight minutes, which is completely unreasonable, given the scale of the issues that I’ve just set out. But nevertheless, that’s what they’ve been asked to do.

Then after we’ve heard from all three there will be a cross panel discussion where they can react to what they’ve heard from each other before I broaden it out and invite comments and questions from the audience.

Our three speakers - the third speaker whom we will hear from is Parminder Bahra. Parminder is the Editor of Public Agenda, which is The Times’ public and voluntary sector supplement. He also edits a new supplement recently launched by The Times called Career, dedicated to the jobs market.

Prior to that he worked on the Financial Times for eight years, and became their Senior Advisor on education projects. He is a regular speaker and writer on a variety of topics, focussing on the public sector at charities and business, and I’m told Parminder adds excitement to his life by acting as an Elections Observer for the Organisation of Security and Development in Europe, including most recently in Kosovo/Macedonia and the re-run of the Ukrainian Presidential Election.

Before Parminder we will hear from Lord Richard Best OBE. Richard’s been the Director of both the Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust since 1988. He is currently President of the Local Government Association and was a Member of the Minister of Local Government’s Sounding Board from 2002/2005.

Amongst his many other portfolios of interests he is Chair of the Giving Forum, and the Continuing Care Conference. And in a long career in public life has frankly held too many positions for me to list but has focussed very much on issues of housing, development and social inclusion.

I’ve been very privileged to work with Richard quite closely recently because he

agreed to undertake the Chairmanship of a new housing commission that Westminster has set up to look at the problems on how we create more housing in the centre of London for this population surge that I mentioned, and he chairs a very, very high level and talented group of individuals from Government, from the property and housing sector, from academia, looking at some of those issues. And Richard was created a Life Peer in 2001.

But our first speaker is somebody I know particularly well. Julie Jones OBE is currently the President of the Association of Directors of Social Services, having chaired the London Branch of the ADSS for three years. Julie’s worked in London in Local Government throughout her professional life. Firstly in Camden and since 1982 in Westminster, which is why I know her so well.

Julie is currently the Deputy Chief Executive of Westminster City Council, as well as holding the statutory positions of Director of Children’s Services and Director of Adult Social Services. And I will embarrass her by saying that she is universally respected as one of this country’s leading and most experienced Social Services Heads. So Julie would you please address us.

Julie Jones: Thank you. This is rather daunting but nice to see so familiar faces in the audience. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’ve been told very firmly that eight minutes is more than enough. So I’ll do my best.

I’d like to frame this by thinking about cities as places where people have to live and work in very close proximity and nowhere more in this country than in the heart of London where we are. But I think that’s its strength as well as its weakness.

I’d like to talk about what it’s like to be a child in those circumstances; what it’s like to be an adult who can’t live without some additional support very comfortably, and what it’s like to grow old in a city centre. So I’m really going to focus on what this


means for our residents and perhaps give you some scene-setting material to help the debate later about so where do we go from here then if the context that Simon’s just set out comes true. If in fact we do end up in ten years’ time with a city with 350 thousand people resident here - not 250 thousand - where we know still the population turnover is going to continue to be high.

So what’s it like to be a child in Westminster now? And how do we make sure that we create a city where children are both welcome and can thrive and both of those things matter. And we know they matter because the Government recently consulted children before the recent Children Act about the things that matter most for them in terms of having a healthy, successful and fruitful life.

Those children described it in ways that have been reduced to five main things. They’ve said it really matters to them to be healthy. It mattered enormously for them to feel and be safe. They want to be able to enjoy (and achieve) through their educational experience. They want to be seen as citizens who can give something back; not just take things out, and they want not to be in desperate poverty.

Now those things are not rocket science but they’re rather nicely framed as those five outcomes which is what the Children Act requirements now require all of us to do, working together to make Westminster a good place for children to live.

About 80% of our children at any one time will thrive because they are in well-supportive families who know how to love and nurture them. About 20% will need an enormous lot more than that. So in Westminster at the moment - just over 40% children - 400 of them in public care.

In Westminster that’s a particularly interesting cohort because about 80 of those children at the moment are unaccompanied young asylum seekers from abroad; in other words they’ve arrived here with no adults in their life. So there are roughly 400.

Another seven thousand are looking at significant harm or risk, or facing particularly difficult challenges. So that gives you some flavour of the sort of scale that we’re talking about in terms of the children (many of them for most of you, presumably) unseen in your daily lives, nevertheless children who are alive and well and living in Westminster.

So in the future I think we’re going to have to find ways to design children in to the city centre and our way of life. They are our future workforce so we have to find ways of investing in them in order to generate that future workforce and our Building Schools for the Future Academy Programme is absolutely at the heart of that.

I think we need to shift that balance so that 20% diminishes and there are fewer than 20% of children who need additional, extra support to thrive in this City. And we need to support families to support their own children. So the investment needs to be in whole families. I think we need to aim high and I think that means aiming at mothers. A little statistic, 80% of lone parents living in Westminster on Income Support. That doesn’t all go well for their children’s future.

So adults - a city where adults in difficulty can be more independent and in control of their lives. That’s what they say they want. We have up to 30 thousand people looking at some sort of physical disability, 10.5 thousand of them with mobility problems, 1750 with severe physical disabilities.

Is this an easy place? Is this a place where people with those sorts of physical disabilities can thrive and live independent lives? We have higher than normal mental health mobility. All city centres do. People craving anonymity and whose lives are breaking down come to city centres. Westminster’s no different, 2.5 times the national mobility for schizophrenia for example.

We have people with a learning disability who are now surviving childhood,


coming into adulthood with much more severe disabilities than we’ve been used to and who are likely to grow old in Westminster. We have between 500/600 people in that category. Their families look after them extraordinarily well for as long as they can but it isn’t an easy city if those are the stresses and strains that you face.

Substance misuse continues to be an issue for adults in difficulty - both alcohol and drug misuse - and that may well come into our conversation later.

And we have a significant homeless problem still. Well, less significant than it used to be but more significant than many other cities are facing where roughly 130 sleep rough on our streets each night. For every one we take off, 14 come on. These are heavy churn, high turnover risk areas.

So how do we create a city where there are employment opportunities in order that people can be self-sufficient and take control of their lives? How can we reduce the health inequalities? There are 16 years life difference between the life expectancy of the best and the worst in Westminster. In other words those people at the bottom end of the scale can expect to live 16 years less than the people at the top end. How are we going to reduce that health inequality?

The physical infrastructure and the Disability Discrimination Act is giving us new duties and new opportunities to get that right. It will help us to get the physical infrastructure of the city right (indoors and outdoors). But I do think it’s largely about attitudes and behaviours in local neighbourhoods and in local settings that make a difference to adults in difficulty and their ability to live fruitful lives.

We can use new technology. There are very good ideas developing around Smart technology and Telecare. All sorts of examples, that some of you in the audience know a lot more about than I do. But most of all we have to listen to those people themselves about what works for them.

Moving into old age, looking for a city where older people feel safe and healthy for as long as possible, leading independent lives. 26.5 thousand people roughly over 65, about 12 thousand over 75. That’s not part of a population that’s going to grow very significantly. About half of the people over 65 live alone, two-thirds of people over 85 live alone and one in five people over 80 will have dementia. Those are real challenges for living in neighbourhoods, living ordinary lives. There are big issues of loneliness and our aging population is becoming more diverse. That too is a feature of city centre life.

So in the future we’ll have a more demanding older population. I can guarantee that because I’m going to be one! We’ll have a healthier population because we’re looking after ourselves and taking control of our personal health in a way that perhaps wasn’t possible in the past, both our physical and our mental health, notwithstanding that we haven’t cracked dementia. So that is going to be a big issue for us.

We’re going to have an aging population more used to adapting to change than perhaps those who are elderly now. We need to adapt living space for them (internal living space). We also need to invest in the city infrastructure so that that the outside space makes a difference.

On my way over Marian was reminding me that things like benches between where somebody lives and where somebody goes shopping, make a huge difference to someone’s independence; somewhere to sit down on the way there and on the way back. Having somewhere to go to the loo in between also makes a big difference as to whether you feel safe going out. Small things. We know that when somebody falls over and breaks something in old age, deterioration happens very quickly. So, keeping our city free from encumbrances and the pavements in good nick.

And I do believe there is an opportunity for what I describe as ‘negotiated neighbourliness.’ Nobody wants to be


intruded upon by their neighbours. But negotiated neighbourliness that suits both parties it seems to me is an opportunity we need to look at.

So in summary, significant population growth, younger, more diverse, a lot of ‘single person’ households with a population that has all the opportunities to be more engaged, responsible and perhaps behave in a more considerate fashion. And getting that balance right for us between rights and responsibilities and care and control. I’d like to see a city where there are fewer people who are needing that additional help because they can be self-sufficient. And clearly some of the changes we could look for are small and they’re inexpensive.

Sir Simon Milton: Julie thank you for setting the scene very well. I’d now like to invite Richard Best to speak next.

Lord Richard Best: Thank you very much Simon. Can I say on behalf of all the guests, congratulations to Simon on his knighthood on the New Year’s Honours -extremely well deserved?

Well the bit that I’m to talk on is headed, ‘How do we best balance safety and freedom, rights and responsibilities for urban citizens?’ Safety and freedom, how do we balance these two for urban citizens?

Now the House of Lords agonises endlessly about this question. It looks at whether ‘trial by jury’ is being eroded. It looks at the Terrorism Bill, whether we’re overdoing things there. It’s pretty obsessed at the moment about ID cards and I’m not going to talk about any of those things.

I thought that I would interpret this question to all of us tonight to be about lower level crime and misbehaviour. That is the Respect Agenda as we’re now learning to call it, looking at the issues around anti-social behaviour and the ways in which our freedoms may have to be curtailed in the interests of safety.

We do have now quite a plethora of activity under the heading of ‘respect’ and

Tony Blair (on the 10th January - so this is a very topical theme) launched a new Respect Action Plan and in the Foreword on the 10th January the Prime Minister pointed out with some pride that 6.5 thousand ASBOs (that’s Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) have been issued. 13 thousand Acceptable Behaviour Contracts have been issued, 800 Dispersal Orders, 500 Crack House Closure Orders and over 170 thousand Penalty Notices (170 thousand seems quite a lot!) for disorder. I think that was think when you were led to the cash point, wasn’t it and fined on the spot. So an awful lot of activity out there and this is mostly about relatively petty crimes (small time crime), misbehaviour, incivility within society.

Are we going too far in all of this? Are we curbing peoples’ freedoms too much? Or is this approach an important issue for society in the 21st century, particularly in cities?

Now I think the answer to the question ‘Is this an important issue’ is answered in two ways. It’s answered first of all by the Mori poll in which 96% of the population thought that more strenuous efforts to curb anti-social behaviour were an important ingredient in government policy. Mori polls don’t usually get you quite that kind of a vote; 96% in favour. So beware David Cameron or anybody else who feels that a lighter touch would be popular with the electorate. This goes down well. People do vote for this and believe that there is a need for some curbing of freedoms.

The second answer is that any of us who deal with large estates (particularly I think away from London where there is more isolation of communities from the rest of society. Communities that are disadvantaged in different ways) we do encounter these problems for real.

I was not surprised when the Tenant Participation Advisory Service which represents tenants groups up and down the country issued a big press release welcoming the Respect Action Plan and saying that anti-


social behaviour was the ‘key’ issue for council tenants and tenants of other social housing.

I chaired a meeting today actually (I’ve come down from The North) and this was about an estate where we had a good number of the residents present - the Eastfield Estate in a major northern city -and the talk was of little else but what to do about the marauding hordes of young people who were out of control and frightening the older people in those communities. So this is definitely an issue that resonates with the public and which people feel passionately about, particularly in disadvantaged communities. It’s all very well for us Liberals (and Rowntree is full of all of this. We do have an abhorrence of intolerance of different kinds), and yet these are issues of real concern to people on the ground.

In my remaining four minutes my ten points of insights from the Rowntree catalogue under this heading. My first point is that the Respect Agenda is a potentially noble project. Respect is a good thing and in principle, I think one shouldn’t scorn the attempts to try to make all our lives both safer and more full of civility.

But my second point is that we do need vigilance in ensuring that Government does not cross an invisible line in terms of overdoing the heavy hand that Big Brother is always capable of exerting. The overdoing in this particular Action Plan I think is about withdrawing benefits and in particular, housing benefits from households in which there is bad behaviour within a local community.

Now it sounds like a good idea. How do you get at people without sending them to jail? Take away their housing benefits. They can no longer pay the rent and they’ll have to move away from the area where they presumably want to be.

It’s a bad idea. It’s a rather silly idea. By making people homeless you are offending all kinds of other planks of government policy. This is not going to work and it’s not going to be helpful. We can’t use the fact that some people are (in effect) tenants of the State because they get housing benefit, to come

down more heavily on them than those who are owner/occupiers or happen to have bought their council housing or whatever. So I think vigilance must be exercised by society at large in ensuring that the Respect Agenda never goes too far.

My third point is that community or neighbourhood policing, which is what everyone calls for - the bobby on the beat! In blue! The reassurance of the policeman who walks or bicycles possible around the estate - this is not going to do the trick. I can tell you this because we have a large estate in York. It has 2300 people living on it and when residents were asked by (in our endless discussion with them), ‘What do you really want?’ they said, ‘We want a community police officer just for us, who’s here all the time.’ I saw the Chief Constable of the North Yorkshire Police Service and I negotiated. (I’ll tell you the secret). It was £25 thousand a year for a three-year contract to get a 24-hour policeman or policewoman walking the beat and adding reassurance.

After two years we disbanded this because tenants, residents on our estate were deeply disappointed. The 24 hours per week never included the hours between four o’clock in the afternoon and one o’clock in the morning which was actually when we wanted this bobby on the beat. We’d always said that if there was a murder over the hill, of course having tea with the residents was less important and he or she could go over the hill. There was always a murder over the hill or some equivalent. We actually snapped when I found the community policeman directing traffic at York Race Day! It was an emergency; there was nobody else.

Community policing is not going to do it. In Manchester every night of the week there are 34 (I think) policemen who could be called in if there’s a riot or something happening, 34 police officers. This doesn’t take you very far. On the same night there are 1460 employed privately as security guards, as bouncers outside clubs. We are having to substitute for the Police Service because they are too thinly stretched and


that ‘hope the bobby on the beat will fix it,’ ain’t going to work or speed up a bit here.

CCTV is not going to do the trick either. Good old CCTV. Put the cameras everywhere. Film us wherever we go. CCTV can do good things on estates, let alone in shopping centres and on our high streets. It can do good things in moving people somewhere else. The people who live in flats above the 14 shops on our estate have had an intolerable time because it’s always around shops that all the trouble occurs. So bright lights and CCTV cameras and the badly behaved young people who all come from another estate (You must understand that. That’s always the case. They always come from another estate!) they go somewhere else. They don’t actually go very far but at least they give respite to the people who live in the flats above the shops. CCTV cameras can play its part in moving people along. It ain’t going to fix the problem.

The kind of things that will fix the problems are of course about helping parents, giving support to hard-pressed parents. I think there’s even (someone has told me this is so) even these TV programmes that give advice second-hand precariously through supernannies and others on how you can exert some discipline in a family, how you need to have rules. Even these can help. But certainly the Sure Start programme, the ways of reaching people in communities with strong support for parenting, those are measures, which are likely to be more than helpful.

Tackling poverty in equality. This is fundamental because people in a way have a licence to behave badly if their families and the place in which they are is a place in which poverty is concentrated, or inequalities are concentrated. I have to tell you (those of you who are Londoners) you never get the feel – I’ve worked both in London and away from London – you never get the feel in London of these areas in which everybody is poor, in which there is very little money to go round on the estate and in which you feel that the place is a dumping ground for all the problem families from far and wide. In those sorts of

places if we don’t tackle the underlying problems of poverty and inequality we’ll never get anywhere in expecting people to respect society as a whole and behave in different ways.

My next one is More Men is my note here. More Men. Quite often in places where there’s concentrated deprivation we’ve done away with an awful lot of men who used to do things around the place. They were on the buses, conductors, when the bus came onto the estate. They were the park keepers. They were the maintenance people. Now we have Call Centres that as far as possible don’t meet anybody face to face. We’ve stripped out an awful lot of men who exercised a form of social control. Pictures of our estate (this big one I was mentioning, 2300 people in York) pictures of this at the turn of the century or a bit into this last century, are full of the men who are looking after the grounds, who are looking after all kinds of things – the caretaker for the school. Of course the caretaker lived there and looked out of the window and could spot anti-social behaviour and knew the names of people. We have stripped out, by being leaner and meaner and more ‘efficient’ we’ve stripped out the men who used to be around and it’s not working well.

Mixed communities - back to my areas of deprivation – we have to create communities in which people are not segregated where you polarise society into poorer households.

In the context of Westminster talking about new communities, we’re talking very much about how we get all the new development in Westminster to be mixed. Not council estates, estates for poor people over here and estates for rich people over there. But mixed communities – and I know Terry Farrell was talking about this last night – of people on different incomes and with different tenures even in the same block.

Neighbourliness. I think I haven’t time to expand upon it but I liked your ‘negotiated neighbourliness’ Julie. That was a good


phrase. The Smith Institute is launching a report tomorrow on ‘neighbourliness’ and we have to think more about the ways of being creative and supportive for people who act in a good, neighbourly way.

My time is up. I think we need at the end of the day a balanced approach, the kind of definitive Joseph Rowntree findings – I think you may know that Rowntree publishes all it’s reports on four sides and puts it on the website; just Google “JRF” or “Joseph Rowntree” or even “Rowntree Foundation”. We get to the top of Google on all of those I’m glad to say. The one that I think is best for reference (if you get into this subject) is Anti-social Behaviour Strategies: finding a balance, which came out in June of last year. It’s by Professor Mike Hough working here in Westminster at King’s College, London.

My final point is that those who are interested in this topic, don’t think local authorities - Westminster or whoever – don’t think that even if you’re doing a good job everyone will be immediately (or swiftly) satisfied because all our expectations rise.

I visited the Poundbury community that Prince Charles has initiated near Dorchester six months ago and among the many rules for your behaviour in Poundbury is ‘no car washing on a Sunday. It’s anti-social.’ We’ll never get to the end of this line but let’s have a go at getting somewhere there. Thank you.

Sir Simon Milton: Richard thank you very much. Our third speaker is Parminder Bahra.

Parminder Bahra: Thanks very much. I just want to say that I’ve been a user and an abuser of this city for many years now and I’ve always loved it. One thing I’ve always wanted to do - I grew up in the suburbs and I’ve always wanted to move into the centre. I’ve got to Tower Hamlets now and one day I might actually get a chance to live in Westminster! But I don’t think I can afford it.

My area that I’m looking at is ‘How do we educate to innovate and provide opportunity within cities?’ The panel was asked before today

to give us what we thought were the best innovations in the last hundred years and the next hundred years. My response to the next hundred years was wireless technology and technology in general. So I think with that in my head and when I put this together I kind of ((still had?)) technology and I’m a big advocate of technology so a lot of the focus will be on technology.

The forces that impact and change society’s attempts to build social capital and thereby stronger and more cohesive communities are many. Our working lives have changed massively and we juggle our laptops on one hand, our Blackberries on the other. We balance our cappuccinos on our heads while we prepare breakfast for the kids as we head to have meetings with our MDs and our Chief Execs.

Politically we’re not as active as we have been. Voter turn-up is down and some MPs think that pretending to be a cat on TV is the way in which you can win back these disenfranchised voters – and I’ll leave that to you to decide, whether you think that works.

Our families are more atomised, the family unit is smaller and it’s likely that we’ve considerably fewer relatives living locally than we had 20 years ago, and we’re increasingly living alone.

Consumerism is on the rise. We are what we buy. And our associations - be they participation in religion, in sport - are all on the wane (well some are). Consequently some commentators are leading us to believe that our communities and our cities at large are under attack and splintering. I actually disagree.

I think whilst some of these issues are reducing social capital the same forces that are attacking our institutions can be used to strengthen our cities and our society. Now ironically – and perhaps on the flip side –society is perhaps offering more opportunities to communicate with each other than we’ve ever had before, and particularly internationally.


So on the one hand we’ve been told that we don’t communicate and we don’t talk to each other. On the other hand actually we have the opportunities for it to be so much easier to communicate with people.

I think we need to look at how we’re going to exploit these new opportunities and I don’t think we necessarily know what the answers are. We’re not quite sure how we’re going to use this technology to make our cities work together, and our communities. We’re going to need new approaches to old problems and more innovative approaches to new ones. Now for me technological change will challenge communities but it will also help to build stronger communities in cities.

I’ve been asked to comment on how we ‘educate to innovate’ and I think within this question there is a suggestion that there’s some sort of knowledge deficit. I would say that in the mainstream I don’t think that that’s the case. At the margins there is - and I’ll come back to that briefly but again that’s something perhaps that the discussion will throw up – but in the mainstream I think in terms of innovation there’s a lot going on. There are people there.

One of the sections that I edit which is called Career is aimed at the graduate to mid-manage your market and the surveys and the research suggests that those who are currently entering the labour market (or who have been in the labour market for the last five/ten years) are fully aware of the possibilities that will arise from this new technology.

They tell us that they want to work in creative industry. Not just the media but they want to work in industries that are creative, and they want to work for organisations that are forward-looking and risk-taking.

I think the issue here (as much as it’s about education) is about ensuring that the public sector and all those organisations that work in the public sphere can attract these people so that they are willing to put their skills and talents into the public sector, the voluntary sector and so on and so forth.

Innovation comes from those who have the ability to implement and who have a vision to use these new technologies and to look at institutions and how they can be reorganised and re-invented. If you forgive my jargonese for a moment I’d like to call these people change agents. Change agents work at many levels; they take risk. They speculate about the needs of the community and they also lead to institutional changes so that others can adapt to these new processes within organisations.

But as I said previously, conditions in working environments must be favourable otherwise these people will be lost to other sectors. You may ask, ‘doesn’t everybody want to work in the private sector? Doesn’t everybody want to sit at home downloading porn, gambling, watching TV, playing computer games? Isn’t self-interest and money the thing that draws everyone and is the major influence on people?’

Again I don’t think that’s entirely the case. Just today when I was going over Career (It’s publishing on Thursday) they had Carl Gilleard the Chief Executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters who says, ‘I don’t believe that salary for most graduates is the biggest pull. Job satisfaction, the type of work and the opportunity to train and develop are equally important.’

A couple of days ago I was at the Community Services Volunteers awards where they were celebrating the work of volunteers within the UK. Last year was the year of the volunteer in which 1.5 billion minutes were pledged to voluntary organisations.

We’ve heard a lot recently about social enterprises. These are enterprises that are profit making but work for social benefit. They have a Triple Bottom Line. They will make profits but they’d also look at how they operate in terms of putting something back into their communities in terms of social benefit. They’ll also perhaps look at sustainability and ensuring that their organisation is environmentally sound.


These kinds of organisations are very innovative. They are new approaches. They work at local levels, at community levels. They are also larger organisations - ((CAPA Direct?)) is a Social Enterprise - but these are the types of organisations that a lot of these graduates that we write about and that we speak to are also keen to be working for.

I think it’s within these organisations that people will innovate for social benefit and then at some point – and we’re already seeing a bit of drift into the larger corporate sector – that that drift will happen. If we want these organisations they need to be supported both in terms of the personnel but also in terms of finance. There are opportunities now for funds (lottery funds) and for European international funds for regeneration. A lot of these organisations that are quite small can use new technology to help further their organisations but they will need support. It’s very easy I think for small organisations to be left out of the pot as it were.

((?)) are more fragmented than ever before and part of this is down to technological innovation. As I said previously it’s very much the same technology that will help to connect these communities and help build social capital. I know that Westminster’s got a wireless area now and Upper Street in Islington is now wireless.

Now this is an issue that obviously can divide, and we have to ensure that everyone can literally log on and be involved. And there are organisations that are out there working to address this issue. I don’t think we’ll ever get everyone being computer literate. There will be people at the margins (my mother being one of them) and I think that their experiences and their education for that will come through people like us who will extend it. But I don’t think they will ever – my mother would never log on to a computer. I know that much. But I think it comes through us, through our community links.

A little while back I went to one of the Learn Direct centres and I was introduced to a number of people who are now in their ‘70s (I

think they were). These are people who had never used IT before. But usually through circumstances (maybe if they’d lost a spouse) that they suddenly found themselves with a huge hole, and they were encouraged by local community to go and attend their local Learn Direct centre. A lot of these people who had never even picked up a mouse were suddenly emailing their relatives in and around the world and they found this a revolutionary thing.

So there are these organisations at community level which can have a huge impact on the community, for marginally zero cost but these have to be supported. These change agents have to be put in place to ensure that these new practices are extended to all the people within the community.

One of the other people I’ve spoken to whilst being Editor of Public Agenda has been a chap called Bill Boler who’s working with a number of councils in the UK. He’s an American. He’s worked in places like Harlem and helped to regenerate areas of Harlem. Part of his issue is and what he raises is that you need to have partnerships and you need to talk to your community and you need to have channels whereby you can talk to communities.

Again I think IT and technology can provide possible solutions and make it easier for people to talk to each other. Again we’ll need innovators and change agents who will make this happen.

I’m not convinced that you can teach citizenship and teach people to build social capital in the classroom but you can teach innovation. I think that this is happening already. I think if you look at the way in which local councils have reacted to the enabling agenda and the way that they’re now providing their services online, which are not dissimilar to some of the private corporate organisations who’ve been spending huge amounts of money on providing their services online.

These innovators I think have to be involved in the public sphere and they’ve got


to set the culture and the agenda for public sector institutions to make the best use of this new technology.

Sir Simon Milton: Can I thank all three of our speakers? It’s three very different presentations. Two of them are going to get miked up so they can contribute to the next session.

But I’m going to start with a question, which really has been raised by Parminder’s contribution. He talked about small organisations and building social capital. In recent weeks we’ve heard from politicians as diverse as Gordon Brown and David Cameron (You may not think they’re that diverse these days) both talking about the role of voluntary sector and taking up more of the strain for dealing with some of the issues that we’ve heard raised today.

My question I guess to both Richard and Julie is ‘how realistic is it to expect small voluntary and community organisations to take up that strain and do we actually have the conditions that would allow them to do that, and what changes would you want to see?’ Do you want to start Richard?

Lord Richard Best: Yes. Should the voluntary sector accept the Queen’s Shilling and take over the running of various public services? Should they take the money and do a job that they don’t do at the moment? There are certainly some disadvantages in the growth that comes with accepting that challenge and taking the money.

The biggest example of a transfer of a big public service into the voluntary sector has been on the housing side where now we’ve transferred about two million council houses across from the council sector into the hands of housing associations, some of them set up just for the purpose and some of them looking very similar to the previous housing department.

But all of the new homes that are provided for social housing (subsidised housing) have been switched from councils doing the job to housing associations doing the

job. So we do have quite a big case study of how you might perhaps (Julie - with children’s services or something else) switch across to these other providers and I draw some lessons from that.

One is a rather negative lesson which is that the housing associations used to be great campaigners. They were very much advocates for change. And now they tend to be the people who, whatever the housing corporation - which is their banker - says they jump to it; they’ll do. What’s the latest initiative? Home buy. Don’t ask me what it is but they will do it and they’ll form an orderly queue or a disorderly queue and take the money and do something new. And we have lost some of that spark of advocacy on behalf of homeless people and people who are badly housed, which the housing sector used to bring; they have in a way, sold out.

On the other hand we’ve done several studies, one by a chap called Hal Pawson at Herriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. And the switch of the service across from the old council estate into new hands has never led to either the tenants or the staff in any of the cases where some quite intensive interviews have taken place, saying, ‘We want to go back. We preferred it when we were proper council tenants. We resent this change,’ which actually of course residents had to vote for in the first place.

So there is something about having more than one provider of a major service, not having a monopoly landlord if you like; all the housing for poorer households are owned by the council in each town, in each city; having a bit of pluralism, variety, diversity. Competition even. This does add a little extra dimension to a service, which it is difficult for a single provider. If you’re the only one providing the service to give you are a monopoly and you can become bureaucratic, you can become insensitive. And the housing associations (give them their due) mostly – in fact all of the cases in this quite big survey – have produced something that the people have preferred in terms of the liberating of staff to be a bit more


innovative, to be outside of the political spectrum and do (perhaps) a slightly different (if not better) job.

So there are disadvantages and we’ve lost I think quite a lot with this big switch in terms of the kind of ethos of how social housing was being provided before. But on the other hand there are advantages to society in having a pluralist approach to provision that doesn’t rely exclusively on one provider for one service.

Julie Jones: Absolutely! I find it quite hard to answer the question because the voluntary sector is tremendously diverse. On the one hand there are the very big national voluntary organisations (national charities that everybody’s heard of) who for some years now – certainly in the business of social care – have been providing services on a ‘not for profit’ basis, alongside others in a mixed economy of care, and there’s absolutely no doubt that’s pushed standards up. It has also improved value for money so it’s been good on both those counts.

The really good voluntary sector organisations never lose that cutting edge so that they can both advocate when they’re in that mode but also provide good services. And I think they know the difference between the two and they’ve learnt how to do that.

But at the other end of the spectrum are the tiny voluntary organisations that grow out of small neighbourhood issues and they’re tremendously powerful in local settings like Westminster, and long may they thrive.

The problem for them is developing enough capacity to be sustainable. What’s often very hard for us to do as a Council is to bring those small, new voluntary organisations together so that together they can actually offer perhaps more than separately they can. But they start off often a single issue and the trick is perhaps to get people to join up on things that matter in local areas (and I can see Bernard in the back row frowning at me because he’s our big voluntary sector man in Westminster and I’m sure will have something to say about this).

But there is everything in between. The very small local voluntary sector organisation, very focussed on local issues, and the very big providers who are big players now in the marketplace of social care and have been enormously important in that development.

So I think it does need all of those things and I don’t think that the strong voluntary sector organisations have lost a voice at all and I think the present push to get them back in with a strong voice about what works and what doesn’t is going to enhance certainly social care services enormously.

Sir Simon Milton: Thank you. One of the issues that hasn’t actually been raised so far this evening (surprisingly perhaps) is London’s diversity. In Westminster we have over 120 languages spoken in our schools. Over half the population was born outside the UK. What does this mean and should we be looking to promote unity or celebrate diversity? Trevor Philips and many other people have launched into this quite sensitive area. But it would be interesting just to hear our panel’s thoughts on that. Do you want to kick off on this one Parminder?

Parminder Bahra: Yes it’s transitory I think. Since 1950 since Windrush I suppose, the diversity issue has followed a particular trajectory and part of that has been about supporting new immigrants, supporting communities who felt threatened. And that in a way will continue to happen. But I think part of what Trevor Philips has said is correct in that we need to readdress these issues. Some of the communities that are now established in their second and third generation, we need to look a little bit more – not so much at integration but not focusing so much on separating communities. We’ve seen problems that arise from that.

New communities that come in will still need support but I think we’re a bit smarter. We have a little bit more knowledge now about how we can support communities who feel threatened who are arriving for the


first time. I imagine there’s probably literature that the Rowntree Foundation have put together that can be drawn upon to address the issues of new communities coming in.

Lord Richard Best: Thank you. The RSA has been involved in a very major programme on ‘immigration.’ It has produced a very interesting report recently basically saying what an important part of the economy and social life of the country immigration really is.

But one or two recent Rowntree Reports may be helpful. We did a study on Social Mobility on whether or not people were going up in the world compared with their parents and we looked at all kinds of different immigrant groups. The conclusion surprised some people from their piece of work at the LSE by Lucinda Platt because it showed that the immigrant groups from different backgrounds, from different ancestry, all prospered more than the white host community. They all did better in relation to their parents except the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, which is a big ‘except.’ But nevertheless all the other groups, Indians, Chinese community, African and Caribbean community, all doing better, if you were comparing like with like. It’s silly to compare a group that is on a very low income with a group that is on a very high income. But comparing like with like the social mobility was better universally, except for in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities which means that we need to think about what is holding those communities back in certain places, but that seems to put a lie (to make it an untruth) that people come here and are suppressed and repressed by the systems that we have because on balance people do move on rather better.

And take London, you know. Immigration into London, this is why London is a World Capital. It’s both a World Capital because it has so many diverse people coming in. But it remains the World Capital because it attracts talent and indeed people to do all the different jobs right the way down from bottom to top, right the way through. And this is what drives this city and keeps the whole country of course –because we have to accept that

London is what makes the prosperity for the nation – what keeps all of us rich. And it still is extraordinary to me that although we’re neck ‘n’ neck with China, we are probably still just ahead of China as the fourth largest economy in the world even though the population of China is 60 times greater and they’re making a quarter of everything that’s made in the world. We still hang in there and the reason we do is because we have London. Ultimately it’s because we have this hugely diverse global city from which we’re generating the wealth that spreads around on this little island off the side of Europe. So we must treasure the talent that we attract and the energy that we attract that keeps us in that poll position.

Sir Simon Milton: And the contrast is interesting is it not with Paris which of course had some pretty serious disorder and riots in the autumn of last year which would lead one to think that the experience is different coming to Paris to coming to London. Would you think that’s the case or do you think we shouldn’t be complacent and that could happen here?

Lord Richard Best: I’ve been to one or two of those ‘HLM’ housing association estates on the periphery of major cities in France and they are striking in being 100% Moroccan or Algerian, North African. And that kind of heavy-duty exclusion of a whole group in society always looks as if it’s going to lead to trouble. As you say I think we are becoming more sophisticated and understanding that we need to blend together and mix communities. So that massive segregation is not going to work.

Sir Simon Milton: I’d like now to broaden this out and invite members of the audience to speak.

Jim Kennedy: My name is Jim Kennedy. As an octogenarian I’m no longer affiliated. My question specifically is for Sir Simon and Miss Jones.

As part of the current Westminster initiative I wonder whether you entertain suggestions submitted by email?


Sir Simon Milton: We do and the email address for the ‘innovations’ is myidea.org.uk and that’s the site through which you can submit, through the website.

David Jennings: My name is David Jennings. I’m a Fellow here and I run my own company. My question is prompted by Lord Best’s comment about there being more men and this issue about the people who maintain social order if you like.

In making this point I have to say I’m not a car owner so it’s not with a chip on my shoulder but I just point to the fact that on the street where I live in, in Islington it’s not uncommon in 200 yards to see two parking attendants on the streets at any one time. And it just seems to me that there is an opportunity there. There actually are quite a lot of that particular kind of men (and indeed women) and there’s an opportunity at least to enrich their jobs by at least having some information gathering as well because they must see an enormous amount of things that go on in the local community. I wonder whether that and other classes of new roles don’t actually replace the ‘old men’ as you put it.

Sir Simon Milton: Yes. Maybe I should respond as the employer of more parking wardens than probably any other London authority. You are right, and actually this kind of Holy Grail that we’ve all … how to make those people in uniform do more. We reckon that in Westminster we have something like 1200 people on the street, employees of the Council, all are contractors in various services. From health inspectors to licensing enforcement officers to traffic wardens, etc on the street, and yet they are all managed in different departmental silos and they focus on their own little areas that they’re responsible for.

So the huge productivity gain (if nothing else) for us is to try to get them to be more cohesive and to put them inside a kind of control structure where they could be tasked as a group, could be multifunctional, multidimensional and report lights that aren’t working, if necessary issue a fine for dog

fouling, look after traffic management etc. That is where we would all like to go, and we are beginning to put in place the mechanisms to do that. But I suspect that we still have a journey - and other parts of London an even greater journey - but that is the Holy Grail that we’re all striving to achieve.

Lord Richard Best: I think that is really good that you’re struggling with that. It won’t ever happen if you contract out your parking wardens to some firm on a commission to collect the tickets and do nothing else. And the drive in society is always to take that route. What is the cheapest way to get the parking … not see the big picture that there are (as you say) strong men who can see and exert some influence.

We’ve just been through the inspection by the Audit Commission of our housing association - all housing associations have to go through this - and we have a direct labour organisation. Oh! Now that’s not very fashionable. But these are employees who are gardeners, caretakers and maintenance people all have a dual or triple role, because if you’re weeding the garden, you’re expected to just keep an eye because you are part of us; you’re on the team. ‘We haven’t contracted out which would have saved us money’ says the Audit Commission no doubt. So we’re in fear and trembling that we’re going to be marked down. But we know it’s right.

Sir Simon Milton: Okay I’m going to take a few comments before coming back to the panel.

Matthew ((?)): I wanted to address the word ‘active’ in your title. I thought it was very good when last year Westminster City Council set up local leaderships awards and everybody nominated people and so on. And it was very good even for those that did not become the local leader. And the mayor has also done this, sent out certificates and so on.

But I think that if you were able to build on that and consult with the people


running the football club, the community group, whatever, in these different villages. Whether they’re the geographic villages that make up Westminster or the cultural villages that make up the communities that live in Westminster and say what do they want to help them become more active. Is it maybe a bit of IT equipment or it is a bit of knowledge, a bit of information or would a bit of actual cash (a community chest) help them to do something more? So working with the people who are already active to find out how they could become more active and develop that active role within Westminster.

Sir Simon Milton: Thank you.

Female Speaker: We talked earlier about the partnership between the voluntary sector and the public sector and my question is around the partnership between the private sector and the public sector.

I do a lot of work in the private sector and what I do is actually advise companies on their diversity strategies. So diversity is a key issue on corporate agendas at the moment, as is corporate social responsibility. So I was wondering really whether you think the partnership between Westminster City Council and City of London with all these big corporates on your doorstep, is being properly maximised in order to deal with some of these challenges.

Michael Sander: My name is Michael Sander. I’m Chairman of a Housing Association. I spent many years working in the ‘council’ sector in housing and as a Chief Executive. I’d just like to pick up Richard’s example, the first one he spoke to in the question session. He gave a nicely sort of balanced answer there. But what I’d like to raise is in the days when the housing associations were passionate, the councils produced 280 thousand dwellings a year.

And now that the passion has gone out of the housing associations they’re producing about 20 or 30 thousand dwellings a year and we have this massive ‘affordable housing’ deficit which is extremely acute, not just in Westminster but almost everywhere in the

country. So I just wonder if he wants to come back on his answer and say something about the need for really powerful statutory underpinning of some of these things if we’re going to have proper communities.

Eugene Quinn: Eugene Quinn at BBC World Service. I’d just like to correct this figure that Britain’s population is (I think) 60 million. So six billion is the population of the whole world.

This question of diversity versus integration I think was asked but not really answered. I don’t believe that anybody quite addressed it. I went along to the Citizenship Ceremony for Kensington and Chelsea on Friday and of the 32 people there, two dropped out once they discovered that they were obliged to repeat an oath to the Queen because they simply didn’t have enough English to even mouth the words after the administrator. I just wondered whether the panel believe that all British citizens should be able to speak English.

Sir Simon Milton: Thank you. A very interesting set of questions. I’ll get some responses. Julie, do you want to respond to the question about the ‘private sector/public sector’ and ‘diversity?’

Julie Jones: Yes I think in Westminster we’ve got a good proud history of working really fruitfully with the private sector, and right across a lot of our businesses too.

The relationship with the corporation is also strong, both at political level but also at senior management level. Whether we’ve really tapped into what the private sector is now looking to do by way of giving back into communities, I suppose I’m unconvinced that we’ve done as much as we might. But we have got some very good delivery partnerships with the private sector, both in the world of social care as we have the first PFI nursing care facility in the country for example in Westminster, which is very successful and terribly popular. (‘A long waiting list; I don’t think I’m going to get in.’) So we’ve got it on that side but also the


whole of our customer service initiative is predicated on that really strong public/private partnership.

So I’ve absolutely no natural resistance to that at all and if you think there are ways that you can suggest we could up our game on that I would be very interested to hear about it.

Sir Simon Milton: Affordable housing Richard.

Lord Richard Best: Affordable housing. That’s music to my ears to make that point! Well this year and last year we’re producing less affordable housing than in any year since 1926. That is about 20/25 thousand homes compared with those heady days when local authorities built 200 thousand plus.

We have got a comprehensive spending review coming up in 2007 and the Treasury is warming up as to whether this might be a priority with health/education. Is housing going to get its fair share? In all the talk of efficiency gains and being slimmer and meaner and spending less, I am reminding Treasury (or explaining to the Treasury that so far they have made hard cash. They have done a lot better on the housing account (1) because mortgage interest tax relief has gone which is saving about £3.5bn a year. (2) They’ve been getting the receipts from council house sales, 75% of which goes back to Central Government which has produced over £30bn. (These are all in billions, these numbers.) They’re spending less on housing benefit than they used to because there’s less unemployment.

The housing associations are borrowing half their money privately. So we’re saving half the money of the housing corporation. And they’re getting £6 bn a year now in stamp duty on house sales and indeed on inheritance tax. They are swimming in money from the housing account and we’re not getting any of it back, and we have the lowest output of affordable housing since 1926. So you highlight a really crucial issue. The time has come to do more about that.

Sir Simon Milton: And I’m aware that in Westminster we have housing associations selling off stock in order to raise money to meet the Decent Home Standards. So, it’s a counter-productive set of performance indicators.

A gentleman over there asked whether English language and literacy should be a requirement for citizenship.

Parminder Bahra: I think yes but providing that the opportunities are given for future citizens to learn the language. I mean they’ve got to be provided, and there are various issues (particularly cultural issues). So providing that the services are there for people to learn the language then … I mean from a purely practical point of view I think it’s absolutely crucial that people should be able to speak English. But it’s not as easy as it sounds to just offer lessons. It’s much more complex (and I’m speaking from someone whose mother doesn’t speak English, having spent 32 years in this country.) And it’s not her fault. It took me a long time to realise that, that it’s actually not her fault. It’s incredibly frustrating for me but there are cultural issues there that need to be addressed.

Simon Milton: Let’s take some more contributions.

Estelle Burns: My name is Estelle Burns and I work for Crisis the homelessness charity. I like the sound of your mixed communities, and Crisis, as a charity, we’re looking to end homelessness through learning and skills. That’s our agenda at the moment. Mixed communities sound fab, but what about the electorate’s propensity to nimbyism? We can plan for these great solutions and mixed communities. How do we actually deliver when people don’t want them on their doorstep?

Anna Strong: My name’s Anna Strong and I’m a planner. My question is partly related to yours. I live just off Tottenham Court Road on a street, which has lots of mix of uses and I live in a block of flats, which has a whole range of people living


in it, and unfortunately nobody speaks to each other. I used to live in there where there was far less diversity and there was much greater interaction, which is a shame. I just wanted to ask all on the panel if they think that micro interactions - interactions at the block of flat levels - matter in building tolerant, active and inclusive communities, and how if it does matter, we can encourage that?

Simon Milton: Thank you and when we come back I’m going to ask Julie to lead first on that and maybe expand on this idea of ‘negotiated neighbourliness’ which I think fits into that.

Rob ((?)): Fellow. I’ve not heard about volunteering. We’ve got an enormous resource within the community of people who have retired, many of them as you say living alone who would value getting involved in something. And it is important that the community (whatever that means) and the Council it may be provides the forum for that and supports them in doing that. I am involved and I find it very difficult to get other people out of their chairs to be involved, and I know there’s a huge amount of talent out there.

Matt Durcan: I would like to add to that if I may. You made the point that there are 1200 Council employees who are doing other things in addition to their normal job. But of course there are 250 thousand or 350 thousand citizens in Westminster.

It seems sometimes quite hard to engage local government. You mention things like missing traffic lights or whatever. It’s quite complex for a citizen having seen something like that, to actually engage the Council and to get feedback which encourages that which in many ways I think is related to the previous gentleman’s point about volunteering. It doesn’t seem to be very friendly.

Simon Milton: Thank you. Okay let’s get one or two reactions. First of all on mixed communities and how do you get mixed communities when people like to live next to somebody who’s just like them. Richard.

Lord Richard Best: Well the decision is taken that the community shall be mixed by the Planning Authority and you don’t get your planning consent unless in London where Ken has his way. 50% of the housing is affordable - either low cost home ownership or renting. In York we’re on 35%. (It varies according to the pressures in different parts of the country. York is pretty pressurised). Will the planners hold to this? Will the leadership within the Council stand up to the animosity toward this at the local level?

In York I have been absolutely astonished at the strength of feeling when we try to develop any land at all within the circle of York. The protesters are so passionate. It doesn’t matter whether it’s six homes on the edge of town or we’re trying to build a new community (a model community) of 540, which is subject to a planning enquiry.

I get anonymous phone calls, death threats on the side of my car in the dust where I should have cleaned it! People get incredibly worked up at the thought that there will be living somewhere near them, poor people, the neighbours from hell, the view of any kind of social housing.

Frankly people don’t want any housing of any sort (even for millionaires) on the doorstep in most places. But certainly they don’t want anybody who is poor. They’ll all be drug addicts and so on. ‘Come and see our housing’ you know. ‘It’s well managed.’ ‘No. We don’t believe any of that. We’ll fight to the death.’ And it’s up to the leadership within local authorities to resist this and I think that the way in is for Westminster or York or wherever it is to understand (and they do) that for the whole of the city you need ‘x%’ affordable housing so that when the decisions come through it just follows like night follows day that you don’t get any consent unless the development is mixed, and you recognise that the city as a whole needs ‘x’ and ‘y.’ You have to do it as an over-arching theme which flows through.


So, I pick up on the other point which is about the fact that even if you have a mixed community people may not be nice. Well they may not speak to each other. They may be nice to each other and relatively neighbourly but it doesn’t necessarily mean you all get together.

I think one of the great things though about having a mixed community rather than segregated communities for people on benefit (the sort of ghetto mentality) is that you’re not labelling people who go into your block of flats. They’re not all stigmatised. That address doesn’t mean it’s very difficult to get a job because that’s were you come from – the grotty estate. That at school you’re going to be branded a failure of you’ve come from ‘the estate.’ You’re not labelled and stigmatised by the fact of where you live. So ‘mix’ does those things at the very least.

But there are ways - of course there are – in which people can be brought together within communities. That’s perhaps where the negotiated neighbourliness may be able to help bring people together and ensure that that interaction is positive.

Sir Simon Milton: Julie do you want to say something about volunteering as well?

Julie Jones: Yes I do and just to respond to Richard’s last point. If I can go back to what I said at the beginning, 50% of households in Westminster are ‘single person’ households. So without that micro interaction in your daily living it’s going to be a pretty lonely way of life. Now some people come to the Centre of London precisely because they’ve chosen a lonely way of life for this phase of their life. But many don’t. So I think that micro interaction yes is tremendously important.

Which leads directly into ‘volunteering.’ It’s good to hear that you volunteering and I wish there were more people who felt they were able to. There are some good local voluntary organisations who are able to support people once they decide that volunteering is for them, and maybe we don’t together make enough noise about that because there is a lot of talent in the city. A lot

of people that live very active and full lives and are not ready to stop but are not in paid employment anymore and I think the volunteering route is a wonderful thing to choose to do.

But I do want to take issue with the notion that actually we need just more men. I struggle with that a little! Not just because not all men are authority figures (Some men are more authority figures than others) but actually there is a place for encouraging women who are likely to live longer, to stay active and participating in the neighbourhood where they live, through volunteering. Certainly some of the work that we’ve been doing through our Older Peoples Services, there are some very, very active, very live and very powerful women around who are able to be fully part of that volunteering world. So I think if we need as a Council to make more noise about the opportunities that volunteering represents, I’d be very happy to do that.

Simon Milton: And in response to the point about Council’s helping citizens engage more, I saw some of the heads of my residents associations here tonight, nodding vigorously when you made that point, which kind of depressed me a bit! But you are right. I mean bureaucracies by their very nature are difficult beasts to respond to and engage with people out there.

We used to have something in Westminster called the Citizens’ Task Force which was a great name, and it was about getting people to take responsibility in their neighbourhoods, to be the eyes and ears, to report things, to come up with proposals to improve areas in low budgets and things (to support them). And over time it died down, partly because I think the Council got less good. There were changes in personnel and the Council just stopped being as responsive, and if it wasn’t being driven very powerfully by somebody who believed in it and wanted it to happen, the tendency of bureaucracies is to not respond to those sorts of things.


So I think you’re right but I think one shouldn’t under-estimate that it requires somebody who’s very passionate about precisely that within the organisation to make it happen. I don’t know if any of our prominent residents who are here may have a view on that and they can comment.

Deb Heenan: I’m Deb Heenan from The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit I’m responsible for ‘housing and planning.’ I’m just picking up on a couple of issues raised about new housing - and Westminster’s got a huge challenge in the next ten years – and on community engagement. How do you switch over and get local people - rather than to have a “nimby-ist” attitude - to take hard choices and to have a conversation around houses for sons and daughters, houses to match economic growth, houses with green space, sustainable communities that actually look and mean like that? And master planning and a picture of what their area is going to look like over the next ten years?

Kate Monkhouse: Thank you. Kate Monkhouse, London Civic Forum. We’ve painted quite an exciting picture of the future of our cities so far this evening. But I’m aware that for some people there’s a risk of globaphobia, the kind of almost panic and anxiety with the pace of change that’s happening around them creates. I’m interested to know about how you think we can create a dialogue to explore some of the issues that are difficult to discuss because of the nature of language and the labels that we give to things, and whose responsibility it is to take that dialogue and discussion forward.

Alex Theodorou: My name’s Alex Theodorou. I’m a Fellow. Just picking up on the point of anti-social behaviour, are we doing enough to engage our youth in activities (for example, sports) to do something about getting them off the streets?

Simon Milton: I’m going to carry on taking comments and then ask the panel to wind up.

Michael Holden: Michael Holden. I’m a Fellow. I work in the field of theatre, both in

management and in the design of buildings. Just a quick comment if I may. Last night I attended a Lecture here where you couldn’t get a seat, about ‘building,’ and tonight where we talk about the ‘society’ for which that building is taking place there are many empty seats. I as a designer of buildings would be horrified if I took so little interest in the briefing for my client.

I was born and brought up in Bloomsbury and Soho and the areas that we’re intensely interested in tonight, and I can remember my childhood as a series of village experiences. Bloomsbury was one village, Soho another, Ebury Street where I lived was yet another.

Those communities are lost, partly because of changes of turnover of people and a whole raft of other changing experiences. But I think too of the local authorities that we had. Holborn and St Pancras itself had I think a population of 19 thousand.

What we do in the theatre is quite often (in building new theatre buildings) is social engineering - cultural centres, places where people meet and interchange. What we don’t seem to be getting is neighbourhood-engineering responses in the Council. There are for instance people like the Soho Society. Do they have a good mode into the Council? Do they get a good response? It’s really picking up your Citizens Task Force idea. I would love to see that improved in our city centres.

Simon Milton: It so happens the next person who’s got the microphone is also a Soho resident.

David Wheeler: My name’s David Wheeler. I’m a resident in Soho and a Fellow of the Society. I would like to ask a question about the Youth Service and anti-social behaviour. I was a youth worker across the road in Camden or 20 years. When the idea was abolished there were 52 full time youth workers in Camden and now there are 12. It seemed to me the Youth Service had a major role to play in dealing with anti-social behaviour.


I know that certainly when we started our youth project in Covent Gardens within two years I remember being told by the Chief Inspectors of Bow Street and Holborn that there was almost no youth crime on the street south of Euston Road, and that was the vast part of our job.

No one ever talks about the Youth Service when they talk about the Respect Agenda. It may be because the Youth Service has largely disappeared. Do you have any views on that?

Secondly mixed communities and the wealthier parts of Westminster, whether it’s Knightsbridge, Bowater House, which is being redeveloped, Trenchard House in Soho.

Is it feasible to have mixed communities when every one unit you build in Soho you can build three units far more cheaply elsewhere? Yet without that sort of social housing in the City Centre and the wealthier parts of Westminster you won’t have mixed communities? So two rather different questions I’m afraid.

Dave Lim: My name’s Dave Lim. I work for a housing association. Can I just ask in terms of housing association whether they have a bigger part to play in terms of social inclusion, looking at building communities and regenerating areas as well?

Iain McKinnon: I’m Iain McKinnon. I’m a Fellow of the Society. I want to comment in my role as Chair of Ealing Hammersmith & West London College. We’re the largest provider of ESOL training in the country. (That’s English for Speakers of Other Languages.)

The original question about ESOL was whether people should be made to speak English, (required to speak English). Our problem in the College is exactly the opposite. We know that there are far more people wanting to learn English than we can help and certainly far more people wanting to learn English than we’re funded to provide for by the Learning and Skills Council; in other words by the Government.

As part of the glue that I think you talked about Simon, what joins the diverse community together, English language seems to me absolutely central and we need to get the question the right way round and make it possible for people to learn English who want to.

Simon Milton: Thank you very much. Right I’m going to invite colleagues on the panel to respond to individual questions. Perhaps let’s start with youth and youth activities and do we place enough emphasis on provision for youth? Parminder.

Parminder Bahra: No I don’t think we do as much as we have done. But I think that the nature of activities has changed. I actually play football on Sunday mornings and one thing I have noticed is that we do see a lot of young teens out there and there is some emphasis going into sports that I’ve seen. And you’ve seen people that support England who are investing money.

You’ve also got the private sector in Barclays who have invested £30m over the next the three years into Spaces for Sports. So in that sense I think there is activity taking place but at the same time I also am aware of various voluntary organisations that struggle to keep funding going.

One of the issues is sustainability and I think when these new projects come about they tend to have funding for ‘x’ number of months or years and then the facilities that are provided tend to become degraded and eventually they may fall down and collapse.

One of the ways again that this can be overcome is looking at social enterprise. I know that there are some social enterprises that are set up to run these facilities as a viable business but where the investment is made back into either the business itself or into the local community so that it’s actually getting people who have been say, long-term unemployed to be involved in these organisations.

So I think that there are attempts by people to make this happen, to make facilities


available for there to be youth services. But I think sustainability has been one of the issues but there are new models and new approaches that can actually resolve them.

Simon Milton: Okay. Julie to add to that but also perhaps (if you can) to try and tackle the question about how we can get dialogue going between different groups.

Julie Jones: Just to add to that question about youth locally, there’s been a real raising of the profile of what the needs of young people are and how to make it possible and encouraging for young people to take part in what there is on offer because there is quite a lot on offer. It’s not always the right thing or in the right place or at the right time, and use our customers too. So I think it’s a question of making sure that what there is available meets the needs of those young people. But there has been quite a significant investment locally in raising all of that.

And a good youth inspection not very long ago said that for our youth services - to respond to the gentleman who used to work in Camden - things are looking better than they were. We’ve got very few youth ASBOs in Westminster. We tend to focus on Acceptable Behaviour Contracts, which seem to work well. So get in a bit earlier, get into a contract with young people and their families, make sure that everybody understands what the boundaries and the parameters of that are and make that work. You don’t then need to go up the tariff and into an ASBO, and if you can keep young people off ASBO, you’re improving their life chances. So I think using things like Acceptable Behaviour Contracts is something that we’re proud that we do quite well.

The business about conversations and engagement at a local level, some of the initiatives are around Local Area Agreements, bringing local organisations in much smaller parts of the City together, bringing the people together and the resources they represent together, listening to local people about what their priorities are and working from there. That seems to me to be a very strong message to all local councils to get better at. And I think

that some of the things that are happening locally and that we’ve been working on for some time – and I think of the Church Street area for example where that’s been enormously successful or a good model for how to perhaps do theirs in other parts of the city. But very conscious that the city is a very diverse city and we need to tailor the approach locally for each of those neighbourhoods.

Of course there are some limits to that and there are resource limits to what can be sustained and supported and I think this notion of sustainability, making sure that what you invest in and put your efforts in and raise expectations around, does have some way to be taken forward and is sustainable, is really important because if you let people down they won’t come back.

Simon Milton: Richard. Thoughts about how Government can incentivise communities to accept more housing. What does it take?

Lord Richard Best: Well the Government’s latest wheeze is a Planning Gain Supplement so that the Council may benefit from a bit of extra tax, if Treasury doesn’t sneak off with it in the meantime!

Simon Milton: You’re such a cynic Richard!

Lord Richard Best: Okay! Well it’s all grist to the mill. I think that the main way where people can be inspired and enthused by more housing being built in mixed communities and sustainable communities, is through seeing and believing. Because we need more real examples in which one can see what we’re talking about. At Rowntree we’re keen to try to achieve models. In other housing, some are saying, ‘Is there a greater role in the future for the housing associations?’ Absolutely! Don’t leave it to the house builders for goodness sake.

We are not going to get sustainable communities if we depend entirely on house builders who are there to build things, sell them, get out and get to the next site. It’s the


people who are going to be there for the next 50/100 years who invest in that master-planning process who take it through.

So a very big role for the housing associations and as they do it, showing people that this is a better way than lots of little boxes on the outskirts of town and the council housing or the housing association estate over there. We can do it so much better and as it comes out of the pipeline people need to see and believe.

Simon Milton: Richard, thank you very much. Thank you all three speakers. We’ve reached the end of our time but I hope you’ll agree it’s been a fascinating and stimulating discussion with a lot of ideas and thoughts being provoked. And even though we may not have been able to answer all of the questions we’ve addressed all of the questions.

So can I invite you to thank your speakers for their contributions tonight?

Penny Egan: Well Simon’s asked me to remind you about the competition that’s been mentioned and in so doing, I’m reminded that this Society had a brilliant idea in the middle of the 19th century when it introduced the first public conveniences into Westminster!

Sadly we charge more than a penny and they were uneconomic and they didn’t work until actually the LCC took them on a bit later.

So to remind you about the competition! Westminster’s looking for practical, cost-effective ideas that will improve public order, increase social opportunity, assist enterprise or help renew the built or natural environment of the City. So you’re all encouraged to enter.

I want to thank Simon very much for chairing tonight and for supporting the two events with us.

Cities of the Future – One City: building united, active and tolerant...

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