URBAN IMPIETIES

John Redwood on a better

way than the churchmen's for reviving inner cities

LESS than one in 100 of the people living in inner cities goes to an Anglican church on Sundays. Only £2 million out of the Church's huge income from its estates, investments and voluntary donations is channelled into specific inner city projects. So much the latest clerical report on the inner city frankly confesses. Many of its facts and points illustrate a problem we can see all too readily as we travel round the country.

Much of the rest of the report reads as a tolling of the bell for alms and more alms. It reads fatalistically, as if the inner cities have to be full of the poor, the unemployed and no one else. As if enterprise should take place elsewhere, but having passed by on the other side then offers a levy, genu- flecting to the inequalities of the world, to salve its conscience.

Curiously, the report recommends aboli- tion of the mortgage interest subsidy, that motor of owner occupation, when the inner cities cry out for more affordable housing for purchase to create some bal- ance and mix in those communities. More strangely, it recommends even more public sector housing be built to rent, when the inner cities abound with empty council properties that no one wants. It fails to ask why the £1,000 million a year of govern- ment monies channelled to Merseyside, for example, buys so little happiness. It fails to grasp that you cannot build a successful community on one type of housing and a guilty conscience. You need something more.

In the centre of Southwark lie some streets of pleasant brick Victorian terrace houses. They were the lucky ones. The urban bulldozers did not remove them before the money and passion for building concrete tower blocks ran out in the early 1970s. But some of these streets are lined with empty tinned-up properties staring blindly out over tracts of rubbish-strewn wasteland. In Greater London alone more than 30,000 public sector dwellings stand empty.

On the south bank of the Thames, even closer to one of the richest areas of real estate in the world, there are still boarded- up warehouses and disused industrial buildings. In Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Lambeth, Brent, in the centres of Birming- ham, Manchester, Salford and Newcastle there are acres and acres of idle land. Some is fenced, some is open to the gangs of local youths who may kick the empty cans about or tip their rubbish on it. Our inner cities have gradually become a landscape of dereliction. Business has slowly sloped away. Those few active people who held on have often themselves subsequently disappeared to the suburbs or the shires.

To civil servants, the clergy and others this is the 'inner city problem'. With any luck it can be ring-fenced, like those derelict acres. If it is in the news, then there will be a recommendation or two, the usual reflex reaction of an official machine under pressure. Maybe a few papers will be written and it will all end with a Cabinet debate over 'more money'.

Yet the inner cities have been killed by public monies and taxation almost as surely as by anything else. It took oodles of taxpayers' cash to bulldoze those streets of artisans' brick houses and put up the tower blocks. It is taking still more to support the actions of local councils through the rate support grant, which is paid most heavily to the cities. The Urban Programme, the Youth Training Scheme, the welfare pro- grammes are all heavily biased towards urban areas.

Enterprise has come under pressure, which forces the cities into ever more reliance on subsidy and tax. The old trades of central London — printing, clock- making, light industry based on the life of a large port — have been in retreat. New businesses have found the prospect of gazing out over derelict land and facing an ever-rising rates bill unappealing. In the city centres there has been an absence of decent housing for sale, inattention to transport needs and often a pervading feeling of decline. So the businessman's prophecy has come true: more dereliction; fewer ratepayers; higher rates; fewer businesses; more dereliction.

So then, the housebuilders and planners argue, why put up new houses for sale? The locals could not afford them. Why build speculative office blocks or light industrial units, for people are moving out, not in? Who would want to buy anything there? So the decline of enterprise becomes set in the architectural landscape. The tower blocks stay surrounded by vacant land or by each other. As the community becomes more and more lopsided so its politics move left- wards. Skilled working men leave. Aspir- ing families leave. Managers and execu- tives travel through these areas on their way to work, glancing out of railway carriages or BMWs at this alien world. Those who remain are often too poor to move, too sick, too old. Or they may be unskilled, demotivated, down on their luck. Some are young, black and angry.

Labour's response — for these are Labour's heartlands — has been to choose spokesmen from the loony or the militant Left. They have chosen whole councils of people who see the problem as one for government to resolve. And resolution means only one thing—. more of somebody else's money. The cities become the testing ground for left-wing theories, the platform for their causes, the central front in the battle against government and even at times against an ordered democratic state.

It is this political change which rein- forces the others and makes any solution more difficult. Sometimes the old com- munities turn out to have more common- sense and self-respect than Labour reck- oned on. Ted Knight has lost the odd election even in a safe Labour seat in a decent year. Peter Tatchell lost one of Labour's best parliamentary seats in a by-election — and, far more significantly, Labour failed to recapture Bermondsey in the subsequent general election. Even in Liverpool there is now a strong popular movement against Derek Hatton and his more extreme views.

But despite the earthy realism of the old dock community of Bermondsey, the suc- cess of the Left in capturing council after council and parliamentary nomination after nomination has been remarkable. Paul Boateng, Bob Cryer, Bernie Grant, Ken Livingstone (now a right-wing figure by comparison) are all parliamentary candi- dates in old Labour heartlands. Russell Profitt, Ted Knight and even Derek Hat- ton will doubtless follow.

The final important change in cities has been the growing impulsion to crime and violence. The older local people are often scared to go out after dark or to go out alone at all. The locksmiths and chain- makers have worked overtime to bolt and bar the doors of flats and houses. There has been an ever more dramatic rise in tension and apprehension about possible crime. There are sporadic outbreaks of widespread looting and rioting, culmina- ting in the use of firearms, the burning of cars and the hurling of petrol bombs.

None of this is a good start or a good advertisement for any programme of res- toration and rebuilding. What is being done and can be done to reverse the tide?

If you walk eastwards from the Tower of London you may begin to pick up some ideas. For you are treading the land of the London Docklands Development Cor- poration. At the Tower itself tourist monies have brought some business and life. Next door at St Katharine's dock there are a boating basin, pleasantly renovated brick warehouses and a fairly new hotel. As you travel eastwards you will see rehabilitated houses, new brick terraces, hi-tech factories, new roads.

It all began by concentrating on land use. The land was lying idle because it was unattractive, unserviced and unavailable. The LDCC cut through the resistance of local authorities, to grant planning permis- sion for private housing and commercial development. It bought the land from the public sector bodies that had been hoard- ing it. It used limited government monies to tidy the land up. It encouraged other capital to come in. It built service roads and helped railway and airport projects.

The elements of success can be applied elsewhere. It will not always be possible to transmute the entire LDCC concept. What made that possible in docklands was the absence of many residents. In more thickly populated areas the powers of an unelected authority would be more bitterly resented by the duly elected councils and their supporters. But you can learn from the mechanisms.

The central government already has powers to require public bodies to sell land. Much of the wasteland is owned by local councils, the Government itself, and the large nationalised industries. It has Powers to buy the land compulsorily if it is not sold. If planning application after planning application is turned down by the local authority the Government can grant applications on appeal.

The monies going into the city areas can be better marshalled and spent. The evi- dence suggests that money targeted on particular objectives gets better results than blanket subsidy. Yet by far the greatest sums are spent through rate support grant, a mechanism for transferring tax revenues from the rich South-East to the North and the cities. This subsidy is often spent on current account services and on political campaigning to the detriment of capital programmes that could open up the decaying areas.

Some of the best-used money is spent through the derelict land grant scheme to refurbish land before onward sale and reuse, and through housing repair pro- grammes. More of the money needs to be spent on service roads, on improving the built environment and on other transport facilities. The programmes can be ex- panded through disposals proceeds and the attraction of private capital. Those tinned- up houses in Southwark could be sold to new owners who would rehabilitate them themselves. The warehouses along the Thames can become offices for companies finding north of the river too dear. Blocks of flats can be sold to developers for wholesale rehabilitation, or turned into tenants' co-operatives or refurbished by a developer free — by giving him some empty flats to sell. Many businesses will invest in the Midlands or London if they feel the worst areas arc on the turn.

As you begin to restore balance to the housing situation — by selling council stock, renovating dilapidated homes and building new housing for sale — so the communities will start to change as well. New owners with higher incomes will bring new spending and new demand. More small businesses can grow to service them. Building workers will be needed. Every new office block needs clerks and cleaners, messengers and secretaries as well as man- agers and graduate technicians. More jobs will come and the communities will come to a greater stability, Neighbourhood watch will become a reality. More streets of decent houses, shops and commercial buildings will begin to counterbalance the tower blocks. Eventually more rate re- venue may permit the destruction of the worst concrete estates and their replace- ment by low-rise housing. The crime pre- vention programme monies can be used in the better construction of the buildings of those areas.

It all takes time and patience. Given the political balance in our cities it will require formidable political skills. Docklands shows it can be done, and more quickly than many thought. It now needs consider- able political will to apply the lessons more widely and more rapidly.

John Redwood was until recently head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit.