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Poverty street addresses one of the UK’s major social policy concerns: the gap between the poorest neighbourhoods and the rest of the country. It is an account of neighbourhood decline, a portrait of conditions in the most disadvantaged areas and an up-to-date analysis of the impact of the government’s neighbourhood renewal policies.
The book:
· explores twelve of the most disadvantaged areas in England and Wales, from Newcastle in the north to Thanet in the south, providing the reader with a unique journey around the country’s poverty map;
· combines evidence from neighbourhood statistics, photographs and the accounts of local people with analysis of broader social and economic trends;
· assesses the effect of government policies since 1997 and considers future prospects for reducing inequalities.
CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy series
Series Editor: John Hills, Director of CASE at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Drawing on the findings of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion’s extensive research programme into communities, poverty and family life in Britain, this fascinating series:
Provides a rich and detailed analysis of anti-poverty policy in action.
Focuses on the individual and social factors that promote regeneration, recovery and renewal.
For other titles in this series, please follow the series link from the main catalogue page.
This chapter discusses the history of the areas’ decline and divergence during the 1990s. It is noted that the fortunes of Southside and West-City pull apart. These two areas represent the extremes of the contrasts between poor neighbourhoods in the 1990s. The changing profile of the labour market had its impact both for older workers and prospective labour-market entrants. Economic change affected social and psychological outcomes as well as earnings and incomes. It is also observed that, in all the northern cities and outlying industrial areas, underlying trends of depopulation were deepening poverty concentrations in the least popular areas and neighbourhoods and, in some cases, literally beginning to empty them out. The uneven patterns of development meant that the fortunes of the areas started to diverge as they continued to be driven by the wider forces of the economic change, population movements, and housing demand.
This chapter discusses the failure of public services to manage the 12 small neighbourhoods effectively. It starts by addressing the problems with public services. The most obvious gap in service provision was in frontline services to maintain social order. There was a marked lack of low-level enforcement and deterrence. The interviews with residents in the 12 neighbourhoods indicated that the persistent failure of public management had become almost an expectation. The failure of local democracy to engage people in the governance of their areas and neighbourhoods is also noted. All of the neighbourhoods had some frontline provision. Over the years, the failure of public services to deal effectively with neighbourhood problems had become an expectation among many residents. Cynicism and mistrust created a barrier to engagement with services and to political participation.
This chapter provides a discussion on social interaction and neighbourhood reputation. One of the most striking features of the interviews with residents, who were mainly active within their neighbourhoods, was their allusion to the strength of community ties. Despite the evidence of strong community, it would be a mistake to portray the areas as single communities, socially cohesive and integrated. As communities shrank, residents found it increasingly difficult to exercise informal social control over neighbours’ behaviour and neighbourhood conditions. Community was also made up of myriad social networks and meant different things to different people. Defensiveness caused social networks to shrink and to be less effective in maintaining social norms and standards. Meanwhile, the extent of overlap with networks outside the neighbourhood was limited by poverty, local employment, or worklessness, and by the traditional strength of local social networks.
This chapter explores the policy responses, cataloguing attempts at regeneration, with a particular focus on the initiatives of the 1990s. The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) was the only current major programme in England by 1999. Nine of the 12 areas had regeneration funding from this source. The examples show both the difficulty of making regeneration an inclusive process and the possibility for change, given sufficient will on the part of local authorities and other partners. Most of the SRB programmes failed to overcome the problem that residents were effectively excluded from real power in the decisions made about their lives. The SRB was an insufficient basis for regeneration. By the late 1990s, it was evident that a longer-term, more strategic approach to area regeneration was needed, within the context of broader policies to tackle the causes of area decline and polarisation.
This chapter investigates the new policies of the New Labour government, including wider urban, regional, and housing policies. There have been two distinct phases of policy development in England: the introduction of a new range of area-based policies, and the introduction of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. The New Labour government’s area programmes, which became commonly known as area-based initiatives (ABIs), included both comprehensive area-regeneration schemes and specific programmes on health, education, employment, and early-years development. The Action Plan for the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal had five key elements. Building on this approach, it included over 100 specific elements, some of them new, some already being done. The New Labour government’s policy agenda for neighbourhood renewal was certainly broader than that of any of its predecessors, and seemed to have learnt some of the lessons of the past.
This chapter revisits Bridgefields, exploring the changes on that estate close-up. Bridgefields in 2001 was fairly similar as a living environment to 1999, with evidence of better management, and with the prospect that its transition to a smaller size could at last be made, through the injection of funds enabled by Blackburn’s housing-stock transfer. Residents were more involved in estate management, and interagency working had improved. There had been further job growth on the industrial estates close to Bridgefields and unemployment continued to fall. While the estate was being better managed and its longer-term future decided, there had been little change in the wider economic and housing-market trends that were driving its decline.
This chapter provides a better understanding of the benefits of new money and having better partnerships of agencies. Most of the new activity was funded through special funding programmes, the ‘funny money’ as it was often referred to. This money draws attention to what was not happening, which was an increase in core local authority, police, or health services. Joined-up government took on a new prominence under New Labour and was a major theme in the National Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy. The new programmes all had an emphasis on community involvement, and provided new opportunities and better structures for local people to influence decisions. In every area, partnership working between agencies had improved. Thus, in the way that regeneration was being tackled, it appeared that some of the lessons of the past had been learnt. There were positive signs of change.
This chapter shows the continuing trends in the economy, population movements, and housing markets. The growing population meant that Middle Row came under none of the pressures that were evident in Overtown. The interviews with employment advisers, economic-development staff, and labour-market analysts suggest genuine labour-market improvement. Britain’s economic geography was changing. The number of jobs was growing, but their distribution did not replicate the jobs map of the industrial economy. Some industrial areas outside cities were benefiting from job growth in call centres, warehousing, and distribution, although manufacturing was still in decline. It was evident that Britain was developing a new economic geography which would not replicate the jobs map of the past.
This chapter provides a discussion on the solutions for the problems of housing and labour. The major advantage of stock transfer was that it offered an unprecedented opportunity to improve housing conditions. Apart from the improvement of the existing stock, the other major development since the first acquaintance with the areas was the open discussion of the social and economic value of mixed-income and mixed-tenure neighbourhoods and the development of specific plans to break up poverty clusters. In the absence of stock transfer, funding housing improvements at neighbourhood level was difficult. Local authorities were also looking to reduce poverty concentrations by changing the tenure mix of neighbourhoods. The overall picture in 2001 was more optimistic than in 1999, and there were prospects of tackling housing-demand and -supply problems in the longer term.
