Built by the community - at the opening of Cullingworth's new village hall

Yesterday I made my final appearance on a pubic platform (which I quite literally managed to fall off - but that's a different story). It was the opening party for the brand new Cullingworth Village Hall. Here are my words...

"Who’d have thought that, when Bryan Hobson said we needed £500,000 to build a new hall, that nearly six years – and best part of a million pounds – later we’d be standing in a place this magnificent.

And the best thing about this brilliant new hall is written on the artwork you all saw as you walked in…

BUILT BY THE COMMUNITY

It wasn’t built by the council, by some agency of government or some benevolent billionaire – it was built by you. And it will stand as a reminder that, if you set out to do something as a community, you can succeed.

Standing here talking to you today is, pretty much, the last thing I’ll do as your local councillor. And it is great, for me if not for you, that my last speech is in the village where I live congratulating the people of that place – my neighbours – on what they’ve achieved.

There is a huge long list of thank yous – many captured on the artwork in what will be the café area – and I’m not going to attempt that list. Instead I want to single out 4 women without whom this hall wouldn’t have happened: Jill Logan, Kathryn Toledano, Jill Smith and Janet Toner. I’ve seen how many hundreds of hours have been put into raising the funds, getting planning permission, negotiating with the council and getting the hall actually built. I’ve witnessed the highs and lows, the tearing of hair and the jumping with joy. I know many others played a part but without those four women, we wouldn’t have got to where we are today.

I’ve often said that, if we want a better world, we need to start by making our little world better. With the things we can see from our doorstep. It’s easy to point at distant governments, at local councils, at us politicians – ‘they can do it, it’s their job’ – but isn’t it our village, our community, our place, shouldn’t we start with asking what we can do not wait for someone else far away to maybe notice us?

I hope this new hall allows for a host of new projects, new ideas – anything from a bunch of people learning Spanish – the new hall's first paying customers - to events and support for old and young.

I promised to be brief and so will stop at this point. I’ll leave you – before handing over to Jill Logan who’ll talk a little more about how we got here – with a thought:

A village is about the people who live there. What makes such a place work is that these people care – about each other, about the village itself and about making it a better place. We don’t always agree about what’s important but, saying that, we all have what Gandhi called an ‘imagined village’ in our heads. And, you know, most of our imagined villages look pretty much the same.

So well done. Give yourselves a round of applause. Shake your neighbour’s hand. Give them a hug.

And enjoy your hall."

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A story of jobs (and why immigration is important)

We went to Harrogate yesterday afternoon. The sun was shining, it's a nice drive and we like the town. We'd nothing planned beyond a mooch followed by some food and drink. So this is what we did - window shopping (plus some actual impulse purchasing of a funky lamp that clamps onto a shelf) and then an Italian.

Harrogate has been undergoing what I'm sure the Council calls regeneration. At the top of the town centre by the railway there's a new Everyman cinema (interestingly about 100 yards from the existing Odeon) and, as happens these days, a collection of mid-market chain restaurants - CAU (who sell lumps of meat Argentinian-style), Byron Burger, Pizza Express, an Italian I forget the name of and a similarly unmemorable chain bistro. The cinema was having it's invitation only pre-opening shindig - the full opening is on Friday.

We'd originally planned to go to the Yorkshire Meatball Company for its advertised craft ales and artisan meatballs - what's not to like! But on arrival at said restaurant there's a big sign in the window (well actually quite a small sign) saying it's closed for September because the arrival of all these new chain restaurants has led to a staff shortage. Here's a little more from the Yorkshire Meatball Company's website:

Unfortunately, coinciding with the development of our retail products, the huge influx of chain restaurants into Harrogate – most notably those within the new Everyman Cinema development – has not gone un-noticed, as brands more commonly found in larger cities and retail parks now focus on regional expansion. Whilst we always welcome healthy competition, the recent openings have brought with them an unprecedented demand for hospitality staff, particularly kitchen staff, at a time when there is already a known national shortage of skilled chefs. This presents an incredibly challenging recruitment environment for small independents like us. Unfortunately, as a result we’ve had to say a sad goodbye to some; losing a number of our key staff in a relatively short period.

This piqued our interest and, as we continued our wandering around town we began to notice, in window after window, signs saying that there were jobs available. It was pretty clear that, right now, Harrogate is suffering a shortage of retail, waiting and cooking staff. And it struck me that, for all of Harrogate's attractions, it's an expensive place to live if all you've got is the sort of wage you'll get for most of these jobs. In other places ready access by public transport makes it relatively easy to travel a little distance but Harrogate lacks the public transport links that would make it possible to commute. Plus the bus company isn't going to put on a bus just so some workers can travel from Keighley or Harrogate for a job in a restaurant.

Now I'm sure that the situation in Harrogate will settle down, that I'll get my meatballs and craft beer, and most (if not all) of the chain restaurants will thrive on the back of that vibrant cinema crowd. But this situation rather reminds me of Cullingworth's chicken slaughterhouse (the food has to come from somewhere) and its workers.

When we first moved to Cullingworth in 1989, the chicken factory no longer employed many people from the village or indeed from surrounding communities. This was simply because most folk had better paying and less gory employment so didn't need work killing spent hens. So the company imported workers in a minibus - it used to stop just down from our house. These workers came from Doncaster recruited courtesy of an agency there who were willing to sign up the workers and arrange their transport to and from Cullingworth.

Some while later, when I next encountered the workforce of the factory it came as a result of a visit to a house on Lees Moor, about a mile from the village, who had a problem with an overloading and polluting septic tank. This tank served two houses, that of the couple who'd contacted me and another which was rented out. It was the tenants who had (inadvertently I hasten to add) caused the problem with the septic tank. These tenants were eight or ten Romanian women who were employed to kill those spent hens at the chicken slaughterhouse.

And what is the first thing ten women who've been killing chickens for eight hours do when they get home? Have a shower - a long and thorough shower. The septic tank was designed for the regular sort of use from one farm family and simply couldn't take the strain. I can't remember the solution we came up with to resolve the problem but all this tells us that the factory was no longer ferrying workers to and from Doncaster but was, instead, putting up workers from Eastern Europe in rented property nearby. Today, things have moved on with the (still mostly East European) workforce now coming in to work by car and bus from Bradford or Keighley.

It may indeed be the case that Harrogate's hospitality and retail staff shortage will disappear - or at least get under control allowing everywhere to open - but the story of the Yorkshire Meatball Company and the job vacancy signs in shop windows suggests that, as the UK's job market continues to tighten, it will become more and more of a problem. In one respect this will be good news for staff as it will tend to push up wages but there's obviously a limit to that as those costs end up on the price of food thereby risking fewer customers.

Even in Bradford, which may be a fabulous place but isn't a tourism mecca, local business people tell me there's a problem with recruiting good hospitality staff. This isn't because folk are sitting around doing nothing but rather because the sort of people who might in times past have chosen a hospitality job are now getting jobs with 9-5 hours in sales, marketing and financial services. And, just as is the case with killing chickens (and for that matter building houses, cleaning toilets and picking fruit), without immigrant labour these businesses struggle to fill the jobs they produce.

It is for this reason that the sort of UKIP (and sadly Tory right) policy of 'points-based immigration' is a daft idea. Here's Raedwald:

Agriculture and horticulture is utterly dependent on EU migrant labour to get strawberries into our dessert bowls and vegetables to the freezer plant. There have been harvest labour schemes long pre-dating freedom of movement from the new accession states.

None of these would get in under a points system. Nor would young European Erasmus students spending a year in 'intern' type jobs in our hotels and restaurants. Nor would the French Mauritian delivery driver who delivers French goods in London from 'French Click' with care, passion and pleasure.

To agriculture and horticulture we can add hospitality, retail, construction and facilities management - without immigration these things just don't happen. With a points-based system based on "high level skills" these unskilled workers who are essential to our economy simply aren't available. This has nothing to do with whether we're in the EU or even with what that malign body calls free movement. Rather it's about our economy and tells us that if someone arrives in Harrogate or Cullingworth with a job to go to, it doesn't matter whether they're from Keighley or Karachi, Basingstoke or Bucharest they should be allowed to go and do that job.

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When will the Big Lottery Fund start serving the whole country not just carefully selected bits?

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It's always great to see Bradford organisations getting funding from the Big Lottery Fund to do great work so this is brilliant:

A project called Improving Your Life, run by Reach Beyond, received £746,345 to convert the empty ground floor of its building in Grattan Street, Bradford, into a community services centre.

The venue, run by the Christian charity, will provide support for vulnerable members of society, including working with charities on homelessness, addiction and mental health problems.

The biggest chunk of this cash is going towards creating the centre with the rest being a couple of years worth of running costs. There's also a welcome cash donation to Bradford Woman's Aid and Cafe West on Allerton estate. Again this is great.

However, there's a problem and has been for a long time. For all the fantastic work funded by the lottery, perhaps 90% of voluntary organisations simply cannot access the funding. This isn't for want of trying or asking but rather because the priorities of the Big Lottery Fund's large grant programmes exclude support for most places and most communities in the UK. It doesn't tell you this, of course:

The Big Lottery Fund is responsible for distributing 40 per cent of all funds raised for good causes (about 11 pence of every pound spent on a Lottery ticket) by the National Lottery - around £670 million last year.

Since June 2004 we have awarded over £9 billion to projects supporting health, education, environment and charitable purposes, from early years intervention to commemorative travel funding for World War Two veterans.

Our funding supports the aspirations of people who want to make life better for their communities. We deliver funding throughout the UK, mostly through programmes tailored specifically to the needs of communities in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland as well as some programmes that cover the whole UK.

Whenever I'm talking about raising funds for projects in the places I represent, we always start with the lottery. And, when we get to the larger grant programmes like Reaching Communities, it's clear that there is no chance at all of the communities of Bingley Rural getting anywhere near a decent sized grant. So when Cullingworth Village Hall took a look at these programmes, it was quickly clear that the focus on "disadvantage" will rule the community out from access to the lottery. We need a new hall but the Reaching Communities Buildings theme says this for projects over £100,000:

More than £100,000 if supporting particularly deprived communities (see eligibility checker and exceptions process)

Doesn't look promising does it? Still let's check - there's an 'eligibility checker' into which you just pop the hall's postcode. It says this:

Sorry, your area is not eligible to apply for Reaching Communities funding

And that's it. The idea of a lottery fund supporting voluntary groups the length and breadth of the country is a lie. OK, it's fine that some emphasis is placed on areas with greater need. But to completely exclude a place like Cullingworth from being able to get some lottery cash is wrong. Absolutely wrong.

Let me explain. For reasons I won't detail, the hall has about £500,000 towards a new hall. We know the cost of a new hall - a minimum of £750,000. If the lottery was available to places like our village, that money might be there to make that new hall a reality. A hall that won't cost the lottery another farthing but will serve our community for decades. Isn't that what the lottery was created to do?

The Big Lottery Fund's blurb tells us it "supports the aspirations of people who want to make life better for their communities" - except it's only some communities, some places. That blurb also says the Fund delivers "throughout the UK" - I'm guessing that, in the bizarre world of the Big Lottery Fund's board, Cullingworth isn't in the UK. That's the only explanation.

It's time the Fund, and its board, started serving the whole country and every community - started living up to the flim-flam on its website. It's time it changed to doing the job it was actually set up to do all those years ago.

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Why everyone is right about immigration...

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City-AM published a piece of mapping showing - or purporting to show - the lack of relationship between high levels of immigration and UKIP voting habits.

The results are similar across England and Wales, with Ukip's key messages on Europe and immigration hitting hardest in the areas with the fewest immigrants. 

Now I could quibble with the conclusions made about the map since the Boston area clearly shows some of the highest proportions of residents with a non-British nationality and UKIP is pretty strong there - it's one of the places where they've a better than evens chance of winning in next year's general election.

But this isn't the point I want to make. Rather I want to argue that only relatively small numbers of immigrants are needed to alter people's perceptions of immigration. So we'll start with this statement from the article accompanying the maps:

Ukip's first elected MP, Douglas Carswell, represents the coastal seat of Clacton, where residents with a non-British nationality make up between one and three per cent of the population.

Clacton's electorate is 67,447 - is 1-3% of these people are not UK citizens that's 1349 adults, Add in children and we've between two and three thousand immigrants in Clacton. I'm going to guess that these immigrants are concentrated in the parts of the constituency with low cost housing, often (and this is especially true of seaside towns) close to the centre of town. There'll be a shop saying 'Polski Sklep' or similar that caters for the community. One of the pubs in town will become a gathering place and there'll be a collection of lurid and overblown stories about crime or violence. Someone, somewhere will say the town is being 'swamped' by 'these people'.

So while folk like me who say that immigration is far less of a problem than people make out are right, it's also true that these perceptions - the impact of immigrants on how people see a place - are true. People do see that their town has changed, and don't always see that change as being for the best. And we shouldn't dismiss such botheration as 'xenophobia' or 'racism' or those who express concerns as narrow-minded little Englanders (or whatever chosen pejorative us who know better have selected).

If there is a solution then it lies in getting to know the immigrant, in breaking out from the 'Parallel Lives' situation that described Bradford after the riots of 2001. Now I think a good deal of the onus here is on the immigrant to respect local culture, mores and rules - it is completely unreasonable for us to be expected to change the way we talk, act or otherwise behave so as to accommodate immigrants. But this also means that one of those old customs - being a good and welcoming host - applies. And this is down to us who already live here.

Three years ago I wrote about the village where I live:

Friday night, Cullingworth Conservative Club and it's quite busy. There are a few blokes who've chosen to watch the rugby here rather than at home as well as the usual Friday night collection. Some people are playing dominoes in the corner, others are playing snooker and the rest are sitting or standing to talk and drink.

All very typical of that English culture which presents such a barrier to those from different cultures we might say. But let me invite you to take a little closer look - and to discover why the separate development theory of multiculturalism was wrong.

Stood, pint in hand, with the rugby watchers is Manu - newsagent, Parish Councillor, avid Bradford City fan. Across the lounge sits another middle-aged Asian lady with her friend - her white, bottle-blonde friend. Occasional side conversations are held between her and others passing by - some older, some younger. Friendly exchanges about shared experiences in village, mutual acquaintances and other such matters of moment.

Among the domino players is Pete - Chinese takeaway owner and former ping-pong player. Pete's also on the club committee and, while his accent's a bit impenetrable after a few lager & blackcurrants, he's as much part of the Club and the village as anyone else.

I'm pretty sure that, if I put my head round the corner past the one-armed bandit, there'll be a selection of the Brown clan - mostly third or fourth generation in the village and varying in colour from dark brown to a good sun tan. And sitting with them will be friends and neighbours, girlfriends and boyfriends - also native to the village but with a paler hue.

And there will be others less noticeable among the crowd. People whose parents arrived after the war from Eastern Europe, for example. Beyond the Club, there's a Muslim lady who's our GP, there's 'Smiler' who owns the general store and many others who - like me - aren't from the village. Yet we seem to get along alright. There aren't all that many fights - and these won't usually result from racism.

This is the sort of world we should aspire to and it isn't served by wanting to stop all immigration now nor is it helped by telling anyone who expresses worries about immigration that they're thick xenophobic racists.

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...go and make where we live even more fantastic than it is already

A while ago I wrote about the little boy who built a little library in his front yard (it was America where the word 'garden' presumably has another meaning). Well the blogger who brought that story to my attention has another story of the busybody - this time about that quintessential institution of US suburbia, the lemonade stall:

This time, it’s a more timeless marker of community that’s emerged as the source of conflict. Specifically, it’s 12 year old T.J. Guerrero and his Dunedin, Florida lemonade stand.

T.J. is, by all appearances, a pretty savvy young entrepreneur. Toying with and measuring the performance of different hours and locations, he ultimately settled on 3-7pm and secured permission to operate in front of a neighbor’s house with desirable, intersection proximity — something that didn’t sit well with nearby resident Doug Wilkey. Wilkey calls the stand an “illegal business” and has contacted the city on at least four occasions in an effort to get it shut down.

Now to give the local council its due, it has made clear it's not in the business of shutting down T.J.'s enterprise (although the local planner's response suggests this is a 'won't' rather than 'can't' decision). But, as I'm sure my fellow councillors will appreciate, there is a sort of person who wants that perfectly ordered, directed and controlled garden city environment free from anything enterprising or unusual and certainly anything noisy or involving children.

The blogger here - Scott Doyon - makes another interesting observation:

Politicians, especially local ones, tend to require some level of political cover when it comes to taking on new ideas. They need constituents organized in support of shaking things up. 

The big problem here is that people like Doug Wilkey are the people us local councillors hear most from. They're at the neighbourhood forum, they attend the parish council meetings (indeed their enthusiasm for attending means they often end up as members of that parish council), they write letters - these days emails, even tweets - of complaint to local politicians and officials. As local councillors we can always get that 'political cover' Scott describes by opposing things, by saying 'no'.

A few days ago I went to Bradford Council's Regulatory and Appeals Committee at the conclusion of a fairly long process. And, for the first time ever, spoke in favour of a major housing development - not because we're all ecstatic in Cullingworth about 238 new houses but because supporting the development meant we could get a new village hall and pre-school some time ahead of hell freezing over. The balance of benefit for Cullingworth was better with the new development than without.

But doing this was only possible because the existing village hall charity has provided that 'political cover' - doing the community survey, collecting names for a petition and raising awareness about the need for a new hall. Without that 'cover' I would either have been stood there opposing the development or else sat at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

This may be very different from that lemonade stall but the truth is that both situations are about how we respond to initiative and how just a few people can have a disproportionate impact - good or bad - on a community. And it seems to me that, if we want the few people to be positive, innovative and fun, then we have to look for those in our communities that want to do something rather than those who want to stop something happening. We need people who respond to what others want to do by saying something like, "how do we make what you want happen without causing a problem for other people", rather than the more commonplace, "the rules don't allow that to happen so you can't do that".

Parish and town councils illustrate this problem perfectly - for every parish that's embracing neighbourhood planning, promoting new initiatives and dragging the district council into acting for the community's good, there's another that sees its job as turning the regulatory wheel, stop change and seek to control individual initiative. Sadly 'not invented here' syndrome is all too common in local government and we see that too often the first response to any proposal is 'no'.

In the end, communities are made worse by people like Doug Wilkey and better by people like T.J. Guerrero. Yet many of our suburban communities are filled with and dominated by Doug Wilkey sorts - described so well by Jane Jacob's in her criticism of 'garden cities':

His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

Where councils - at whatever level - adopt this outlook, they create lifeless places where the interpretation and enforcement of the rules dominates, where communities are more concerned with policing their neighbours than with creating something with those neighbours.

Although Scott Doyon talks about 'shaking things up', I'm not really sure that's what its about either. You probably like your house but that doesn't mean you've no plans to change things - some new curtains, a speaker system for the telly, some new kitchenware or a makeover for the front bed in the garden. What you don't want - or need - is some sort of comprehensive regeneration, a massive change making the place completely different.

Take this into the community and it becomes a case of making the place even better not some sort of abstract 'change'. Maybe the War Memorial's looking a little in need of attention or the high street could benefit from flowers, flags and bunting. Perhaps the recreation ground needs better drainage or the football club new kit. A hundred little things that make the place that little better, more of a place, more of a community.

So if you want to know what your parish council should be doing (and how to get your district councillors involved) it's a load of little betterments that show the place is loved and cherished. The neighbourhood plan isn't just a grand thing for the planning authority to use, it's a set of ideas - changes, initiatives, actions - that the community can get on with doing. It should gather together all the T.J. Guerrero types and say to them: "here's a list of stuff to do, it's not definitive, go and make where we live even more fantastic than it is already and have some fun while you're doing it."

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Why do authorities fear public gatherings so much?

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We were in Dent. It's lovely place and you should visit - winding cobbled streets, at least three drinking places and it's own brewery in a farm a mile or so up the road. Dent also has an annual beer and music festival, which (as chance would have it) was on this weekend.

So having wandered around the village, paid a brief visit to the festival and generally chilled after our exertions (we'd been for a pleasant walk along the valley), Kathryn and I call into one of the pubs for a drink and a sit. Up to the bar to order a couple of drinks. And to our surprise they're served to us in plastic 'glasses'.

Now I'm absolutely certain that Dent isn't part of some bizarre plastic loving cult. Indeed, I'm pretty certain that the use of plastic glasses is either a requirement of the festival's licence or else the result of many meetings and stern advice from Cumbria's constabulary. Because, as we know, folk festivals in the Cumbrian countryside are places of terror and violence - without these stipulations the festival-goers will resort to glassing eachother in the manner associated with the rougher parts of, say, Glasgow.

It seems to me that these controls - like many others prescribed in the interests of 'safety' - are rather indicative of authority's fear of public gatherings. To give another example, to hold the Cullingworth Gala now requires a licence costing £11 from the Council. It seems that authority cannot countenance any gathering of people taking place without their stamp of approval and the application of a set of pointless controls such as serving beer in plastic skiffs.

The idea that places and spaces in places like Dent and Cullingworth are for people's leisure and pleasure has been replaced with a desire from the police and local council to control, direct and, if not done properly, ban any activity. And especially any activity that might involve drinking, dancing, singing or the playing of musical instruments. Doubly so if the audience might include 'young people'. We are to be treated as infants given a set of instructions on good behaviour by the police and council jobsworths.

For sure, most of the time this isn't a problem - we can put up with booze in plastic glasses - but there is a point at which the costs imposed by officialdom start to put an end to gatherings. Dangerous gatherings like street parties and, but for a last minute intervention, Bradford's annual Boy Scout parade and service are ended because their organisers give up on jumping through hoops and paying out more money on the latest piece of over-the-top crowd management imposed by some bloke from the council.

The police and council fear that these events foment disorder, that all these people gathering together will encourage criminals and that, in some respects, gatherings are merely formalised anti-social behaviour. The authorities would much rather we sat quietly sipping something alcohol free from our plastic skiff - or better still that these inconvenient, even dangerous, events didn't happen in the first place. It's not a vain attempt to silence political dissent but rather an organised endeavour intended to limit and control our pleasure - most often in the supposed interests of 'safer communities' or 'public health'.

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Perhaps we should stop trying to create communities - mixed or otherwise.

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I live in a mixed community. Socially, in terms of income and, to a degree, ethnically. But the real magic about the place is that it wasn't 'created', there wasn't a great masterplan that would mean Cullingworth had a variety of housing - flats, terraces, semi-detached and detached, old and new, large and small. Nor was there a grand plan to make sure that the village had about 20% of its stock available for social rent. Yet somehow we've managed to have that mixed community that makes Cullingworth such a fine place.

So it does rather concern me that the solution to some communities - whether Belgravia or Easterhouse - not being 'mixed' is to chain up the wrecking ball and knock stuff down. It's as if we're channelling some petulant child troubled by the failed sandcastle - kicking out at our failures. So, as Peter Matthew's describes:

An area of predominantly social housing is demolished, replaced with a mixed-tenure community, with a net reduction in the numbers of social housing units and an increase in rents. These developments intend to, and do, push the poor and marginalised out of our cities.

We have done this time and time again. Even Cullingworth wasn't immune to slum clearance - back in the 1960s the then Bingley Urban District Council bought up the back-to-backs in the village (paying an average of £43 pounds - no I haven't missed off any noughts - for each house) and flattened them. For a few residents there were new council houses in the village but for most the new Woodhouse Estate at Keighley beckoned.

I make this observation to provide a context for the assertion that knocking stuff down and starting again probably isn't the right solution - however despairing we may be at the prospects for residents of Holme Wood or Bracken Bank (these great peripheral estates has such appealing names). Nor are we served by the common assertion that somehow the depressing dreich of the council estate is responsible for the failings of that estate's residents.

Indeed, just as health inequality is caused by the mobility of the healthy and wealthy, places of multiple deprivation come about because they are the only places where the poor and ill can afford to live. And we know that, at the first opportunity, those poor and ill folk will up sticks and head for a nicer place - indeed the most ambitious will leave before they cease being poor and ill in the expectation that another place, however tough, will provide the opportunity for escape.

This is why people from the other side of the earth will crowd into unsanitary, damp and dangerous accommodation in Bethnal Green - the prospects are better than in Sylhet or Timisoara. And why young people from Barnsley and Huyton head to London, prepared to pay through the nose for a shoe box and have a job. The problem is that, once these places start to work, the authorities decide they must act - and acting means enforcement, slum clearance, regeneration.

Nor - however cute the argument might be - is there a case for turning the approach upside down and:

...demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing...

This suffers from the same problem as slum clearance except instead of kicking at our failed sandcastle we run over and trample on some other kid's spectacular sand version of Versaille. Such demolition utterly fails because - like slum clearance - it doesn't really face up to the problem but rather neatly sidelines that problem. We get action for the sake of action, a sort of Gentilean approach to regeneration rather than asking why it is that we residualise social housing and marginalise the residents of social housing. Or for that matter why it costs £650,000 to buy a 3-bed terrace in Hackney.

The truth - or at least the beginning of truth - is to remember where I started: mixed communities should be places of the willing rather than creations of the planner. Indeed, more often than not, our planning disrupts that process of community building. Indeed, as Jane Jacobs remarked about that godfather of the planned community, Ebenezer Howard:

As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

Every day I see examples of planners disrupting people's innovation because it fails to fit their rules - from little examples like not allowing people to keep goats in Detroit or getting a couple to demolish their rather beautiful woodland home, to the grand plans that make land too dear and too precious for the growth of wonderful communities.

So to return to Cullingworth. There's an application from Barratt Homes to build 233 houses on the edge of the village. It's a brownfield site, it's not in the green belt and Cullingworth's a nice place to live. The development will happen - all we really want as a village is for the developer to build us a new village hall. We'll cope with a classic estate development because the remaining 1200 homes are so diverse and we're watching to see what happens to other sites in the village - some homes for rent maybe, a few more apartments and some smaller houses for younger couples.

But in other places - already cursed by planners - we'll see 'urban extensions' into the green belt that consist of vast swathes of suburban sameness, the very opposite of the mixed community we want to create. And this, like so much else about Britain's housing (from poor space standards to the price of housing land) can be laid firmly at the door of our planning system. Even the much maligned housebuilding companies exist in their current form because of the manner in which land markets are skewed by the, often bizarre, decisions of planners.

In the end regeneration isn't about knocking stuff down. Cullingworth wasn't created by demolition and rebuild (the land the back-to-backs occupied prior to their demolition remains largely - the existing and ageing village hall aside - open land) but rather by the interaction of its residents, by the fact that there's a chance for most of staying here and by the initiative of businesses and individuals. Perhaps - and there are many places like Cullingworth - we should restart our search for community by looking at these villages and learning about how they stay mixed.

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Do mutuals scale?

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Charles Moore (among many) comments:

More attention should be paid to the failure of the Co-op Bank. It suggests that an ‘ethical’ motivation does not guarantee that the interests of the customer will be well served.

This may well be true, indeed the 'ethical' argument was always more of a positioning statement than something inherent to mutual organisation models.

My question is more fundamental given the problems with the Co-op (and the banking disaster has taken attention away from its underperformance as a retailer and aggressive behaviour as an undertaker) - can mutuals scale up to be large national organisations and maintain business effectiveness?

It seems to me that the problem is one of accountability - the leaders of large mutual organisations (especially those that are consumer mutuals rather than worker mutuals) are not as accountable to their members as joint stock companies are to shareholders. The business cannot go to its 'owners' for more cash and those owners either cannot or do not act to replace the management when it fails (such as by arriving cap in hand asking for the money to clear up mistakes).

Cullingworth Conservative Club is a mutual organisation - it works because having about 800 members who live in the village and use the club means that the leadership is accountable. A national mutual - the Co-op or one of the big building societies - has a leadership that isn't subject to this attention or scrutiny, that isn't really accountable. Perhaps here lie some of the problems?

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If you can't be in the place you love, love the place you're in!

This weekend is Cullingworth's scarecrow festival. Not that this is important to you. Or maybe it is, perhaps you 'get' (as Mr Cameron would say) that place matters and how invented tradition is one of the soft things about a place that makes it magic.

And our attachment to a place matters more than you think. It's not simply some sort of pride or defencive reaction to folk who criticise, we're talking about real attachment here - about love:

We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

So what is that "softer side of place"?

It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way.

This isn't about grand civic marketing campaigns replete with logos, embassies in New York and well-resourced teams of regenerators extolling the virtues of a place. Nor is it that grumpy "you can't criticise, you don't live here, that's our job" attitude we see from defensive residents of struggling cities. We're talking about a desire to love the place we're in - and when we love something it's an active emotion, it drives us to do things. To do the placemaking equivalent of buying our place chocolate and flowers or taking it to the movies.

That's what scarecrow festivals, duck races and reinvented traditions are about. It's us - the people who love a place - showing our love by doing things to make that place smile:

Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply.

So, if you want regeneration - even if you're parachuted in from afar to deliver it - you have to fall in love, to remember those words that Steven Stills wrote:

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with

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Cullingworth Village Hall - a tale from the Big Society

Back in the early 1970s, the villagers of Cullingworth laid their hands on the redundant Salvation Army Citadel in Keighley and moved it, every last screw and post, to the village where it has served as the village hall since 1973. Not bad for a second-hand wooden hut!

Today, the hall is showing the wear and tear of time. All those plays, play groups, pensioner lunches, parties and parish council meetings have left their toll, the roofline sags, the wooden structure doesn't quite stand up straight and the running costs don't get any lower. The management committee - led by Bryan Hobson (the new younger chairman at a mere 80 years old - replacing Ken Batchelor, who'll be 90 this August) - have decided a new hall is needed.

Which rather explains why I was at the Hall this morning along with people from Bradford Council's Estates Management to talk about how this might happen and how the Council (which owns the land) can help us along. It's early days yet but we've opened up a dialogue and now face not just the challenge of planning, land swaps and sundry bureaucracies but the need to raise around £500,000 to actually build the new hall! Any help is, of course, welcome!

Afterwards, stood in the car park in the glorious sunshine, we spoke to the couple who look after the garden at the hall. Ken mentioned that they'd not really contributed much beyond a few Marks & Spencer's vouchers to the efforts in making the Hall's flower beds look great - and they do. Yet again, a couple of neighbours have been willing to put their own time, their own money and their own care into making our village look good.

Somebody once asked what the "Big Society" was - well this it it really. Ordinary folk caring for the place where they live and for the neighbours they live by - not for money or medals but because it's what we do. Long may it continue.

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Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run...

Baked Pasta with Rabbit

Run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run!

Don't give the farmer his fun! Fun! Fun!

He'll get by

Without his rabbit pie

So run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run

 

The conversation goes a little like this....

“Why don’t people eat more rabbit? It’s not like there’s a shortage of bunnies?”

“Three reasons – eww, how could you, bunnies are cute; never tried rabbit, so will stick to nice safe steak; and ‘oh, it’s so cruel to shoot and eat wild animals.”

(There’s a fourth reason if you’re Jewish – rabbit isn’t kosher).

Now I like rabbit – it’s lean, full of flavour and carries a sauce very well. Plus it’s usually pretty cheap – posh rabbits from Bolton Abbey estate are £4.50 in Cullingworth’s butcher and I’d lay a bet that you can get them cheaper than that in Bradford’s John Street Market.

Plus, of course, if you can shoot and have a landowner’s permission, you can go and get your own!

So there you are, dead bunny in hand (skinned and cleaned by a helpful butcher in our case) – what to make? Pies and stews are the classics but, for a change, try doing it Italian-style.

Lorenza De’Medici published a book on pasta and accompanying sauces including several recipes for rabbit and I’ve stolen the approach from her (although the actual recipe is not the same).

Baked Pasta with Rabbit (to feed six - or four greedy folk)

One rabbit (cut into sections)

Two medium onions roughly chopped

Three or four good sized carrots thickly sliced

Two good sized sprigs of sage

Large glass of red wine

Pennoni rigati (about 300g)

Pint of white sauce

Couple of fresh tomatoes

Salt

Black pepper

Olive oil

Heat the oil and brown the rabbit pieces and soften the onions and carrots then transfer to a roasting tray. Roughly chop the sage over the rabbit and vegetables and pour the red wine over the top. Cover tightly with foil and slow roast for about 3 hours at 100° (we want the rabbit to fall off the bones easily without being too dry – it’s worth checking after a couple of hours).

Strip the rabbit meat from the skeleton – you want it to be quite finely shredded so pull apart the meat as you take it off the bones. Mix the meat back into the vegetables and set aside.

Cook the pasta for half its recommended time (typically about 5 minutes in salted boiling water), drain and mix thoroughly with the meat and vegetables. Turn this mixture into an over proof dish.

Make the white sauce and pour it over the top of the rabbit and pasta mixture. Decorate with slices of tomato and bake for 35-40 minutes at 200° (180° in a fan oven). You’ll know it’s done when the top has begun to brown a little and is bubbling.

Lovely!

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