Neighbourhood Watcher

If the environment is going to take its rightful place at the heart of local regeneration schemes, then one man is well placed to make it happen. Ian Christie talks to Joe Montgomery, head of the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit.

Joe Montgomery is at the head of the government’s £1 billion programme for regenerating the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods and lifting the quality of life of our most excluded communities. A former director of regeneration at Lewisham Council in London, he has a wealth of experience of the complexities of renewal at both the strategic and grassroots levels.

When he took up his post at the Neighbourood Renewal Unit, one of his first jobs was to deal with the band of NGO squatters camped in his office, demanding that the environment become a more explicit theme of neighbourhood renewal. In the months that have followed, the NRU has begun a dialogue with the NGO community, exploring how the concept of ‘environmental justice’ might bridge the gap between the green movement’s call for sustainable regeneration and the government’s intensive focus on social inclusion. References to ‘liveability’, sustainability and even the global environment now season the output of the NRU, but there’s still some way to go before environmental concerns reach an equal footing with crime, employment, health, housing and education.

So will the NRU - the biggest experiment in regeneration for a generation - be able to bring us a truly integrated approach?

Green Futures: The NRS came in for a lot of criticism over the lack of attention to the environmental dimensions of exclusion and renewal, and to sustainable development as a framework for policy. The impression given is that truly joined-up policy is still far off. Why was the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy so weak on these basic issues at the outset?

Joe Montgomery: I would not want to underplay the immense achievement of the government in getting a very wide range of stakeholders to accept that issues of crime, housing, joblessness, environment, education, poor health and so on, are connected in the process by which deprived neighbourhoods are dragged down into a spiral of decline... Great strides have been made in acknowledging the complexities and the need for effective work across agencies to deal with the problems. But none of this is easy and inevitably there will be strong calls from interest groups for ‘their’ issues to be at the heart of the process of intervention. We’ve rightly been held to account by people who want issues of environmental justice, race and gender - to name just a few - to feature much more prominently in the NRS. Encouragingly, Lord Falconer, the minister responsible for the NRS, has been receptive to many of the calls to strengthen the Strategy, including those relating to environmental justice.

GF: But what progress can be pointed to in bringing environmental issues into the NRS and using sustainable development as a framework for strategic planning? How is the NRU geared up to make these connections and act on them now?

JM: The strongest signal that we needed to change the NRS was Tony Blair’s speech to Groundwork in spring 2001, when he borrowed Al Gore’s term ‘liveability’. This sums up the issues people in disadvantaged areas face in relation to the quality of the local environment. Things that make a difference locally might seem minor, but they accumulate and help damage quality of life - graffiti, dog fouling, fly-tipping, litter and lack of street cleaning. Many of the major concerns of local residents are about the quality and attractiveness of the street scene, the environment around their homes. We’ve been drawing much more attention to good practice in tackling local environmental issues - for example, pointing to initiatives like the Pathfinder project sponsored by Bristol New Deal for Communities, which brought some dramatic ‘quick wins’ to the Bartons Hill area. And we’ve been bringing environmental expertise into the NRU - we’ve taken on two secondees from Groundwork and Encams, who will help shape our thinking on environmental issues and sustainability. We’ve also tried to be active in influencing the cross-cutting review on liveability themes, such as open space, that’s been part of the Treasury’s spending assessment. We want to see good levels of resourcing for these themes so that our local partnerships have a good chance of success.

GF: Is ‘liveability’ a strong enough concept to be such a strategic theme for the NRU? Isn’t there a risk that important issues such as environmental justice and rights, and the local dimension of global environmental challenges, will get marginalised?

JM: I remember well trying to pull together a Local Agenda 21 strategy in my time as director of environment and then of regeneration at Lewisham, and the challenge of trying to get environmental themes built into the core of council thinking and practice. I’ve got some sympathy for the idea that ministers might need to consider launching a new Policy Action Team process [which saw Whitehall open up its doors more than ever before to academics, regeneration practitioners, faith-based groups and residents from disadvantaged communities, so that they could take part in policy-making] to focus on the links between social exclusion and the environment, in the broadest sense. Bear in mind, too, that DEFRA and DTLR have an explicit commitment to sustainable development. In fact at the next NRU board meeting, we will be focusing on how we can make our contribution to the DTLR strategy on sustainable develop-ment. So these debates are all alive and well in the Department and the Unit. We’re receptive to the idea that they should be at the heart of the NRS.

GF: What’s your view of the way Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) are handling sustainable development and environmen-tal issues? So far these seem to be pretty marginal themes for LSPs.

JM: I’d be glad to work with organisations in the environmental field that feel they aren’t getting engaged with LSPs - I’d be delighted to see how we can get the Environment Agency, for example, into a fuller partnership with the NRU and the LSPs. They have skills and powers highly relevant to promoting liveability of local areas, and to combating local environmental crime. I’ll certainly look at how we can take that kind of partnership forward practically. As for the criticism of LSPs, they face different challenges around the country. And there are issues of scale - they need to be small enough to be workable, while still trying to reflect a wide range of stakeholder views and interests. Environmental interest groups might not always get into the inner sanctum of LSPs, but they should make a point of feeding ideas into the NRS plans that all the LSPs must produce by August this year, setting out local priorities for how they will operate and how they will spend the neighbourhood renewal funding.

GF: What can the NRU do to make sure that more integration between the environmental agenda and the social and economic priorities of LSPs does indeed take place?

JM: The most powerful tool we have in this respect is our ‘knowledge management’ role - distilling good practice lessons and spreading them around. Part of the job of our secondees from Groundwork and Encams is to help us do this effectively. And I’d encourage stakeholders from the environmental field to get active in supporting New Deal for Communities partnerships and pathfinder projects like Neighbourhood Wardens and Neighbour-hood Management. These are our flagship schemes that demonstrate how joined-up initiatives can achieve real gains for disadvantaged areas.

GF: Finally, what do you see as the main indicators of progress that will tell us in five years’ time what difference the NRU and NRS have made to local liveability and environmental justice?

JM: Obviously we’ll pay close attention to the Best Value performance indicators used to hold local councils to account. And the cross-cutting review on liveability should help clarify thinking in government on how we can assess progress. The NRU will play a full part in that process. But I’d stress that as well as using these ‘dry’ measures, we also need to make use of local residents’ perceptions of the quality of their environment and of their well-being generally. Even if some of the numbers seem to be going the right way, people might well feel that progress is not really being made as far as their actual quality of life is concerned. So we need a rounded approach to assessing progress, and people’s experience is a key part of that.

Ian Christie is associate director of the Local Futures Group
(www.localfutures.com)
NRU, www.dtlr.gov.uk/citcomm.htm

7 September 2006

Ian Christie