We've forgotten, in our rush to densify, that homes need gardens

The urge to make cities more population dense has led to us building homes without gardens - or indeed without any private outdoor space. This process, driven by policy and the transience of housing markets dominated by rented property, denies people's expressed preferences - here's a survey from New Zealand:

Among the respondents, nearly one-half (49 percent) considered a back yard “essential,” while another 42 percent rated the back yard as “nice to have.” Only nine percent considered a back yard to be “not important.” Among first home buyers, there was an even greater larger 55 percent considered a back yard as “essential.”

If we consider our own lives, then we'll quickly appreciate just how important "private outdoor space" - garden, yard, large balcony, veranda - is to people. Even in places that have poor weather, this private outdoors provides a vital space. The garden is less formal than indoors with fewer rules - it's a fun space too the part of our world given over to play, to letting out hair down, to leaning back in a chair and watching the world pass us by.

So, if we're to have more dense cities (because the NIMBYs in the outer suburbs won't let us have new land for housing, even tatty and underused land) then we've to work out how we design private outdoor spaces into the development. Communal gardens are great but they come with the community's rules. The garden out back of your house doesn't have these rules any more than does your living room or your garage.

Even in our screen age (perhaps more so) the ability to get outside is vital and having a small piece of outside that it ours provides an escape from the cabin fever of sharing lives with family and friends, with a space to chill or party or cheer, with somewhere that keeps our connection to soil and place. The public park with its playgrounds and planting is brilliant but when it's lunchtime we can't just walk away from the toys and go indoors, we can't leave the make-believe bus made from packing cases there for us to return to later. Our own outdoors let's us do these things - from putting off cleaning the barbecue all the way through to cutting out toenails or picking our nose.

Now travel to out cities and towns where planning rules make denser development inevitable. Look at the brand new blocks of flats and ask whether they provide that essential outdoor space? I sit at Leeds station sometimes and look around at all the fancy flats built with a fine view of the locomotives. If they've got a balcony it's just about big enough to put out one chair (or more commonly a bike and a few boxes of stuff) - you couldn't have friends round for a sunny meal or a glass of wine, using the terrace would be a solo act.

I'm not picking on Leeds here, London's world of high rise living is still more devoid of outdoor space and all the worse for it. Everywhere you go flats - apartments if you're feeling grand - are built with at best a minimal nod to the need for private outdoors and, more usually, little or none of this space. Yet it's perfectly possible to build high an densely and have gardens - here's the most extreme example, Milan's 'bosco verticale':



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Can we build family homes not factory farms for hipsters?

You'll hear it from time to time - "London is the least densely populated mega-city", "we could build higher and more denses to solve the housing crisis". I've a problem with this argument and it doesn't matter whether it comes from the anti-development CPRE or the trendily pro-development London YIMBYs, because it doesn't reflect what people want. And, while we can all have a laugh about the things local councillors say at planning meetings (certainly the twitterati had a field day here) but these guys in Leeds have a point:

“This is a very dense development.

“I look at that and think there is no public or amenity site on the development.

“There are odd days in the year where it’s nice, warm and sunny, and there is nowhere in this development for people to go outside and sit.

“It seems like you are trying to cram a lot onto this site with very little amenity space. If you had children you wouldn’t want to live here, because there is no space for them at all.

“I really don’t like this (application), and the more I think about it, the less I like it."

This is a proposal for 242 tiny flats that are said to have "co-living space" making it all fine, I guess. The problem is that Cllr Colin Campbell, who words are above, is spot on. Providing a laundry room and free (or 'included in the service charge' sort of free) wi-fi doesn't fit the bill. There are a lot of reasons why dense, high-rise developments of this sort are anti-family but they are also sub-optimal for any long-residency.

Spain famously has some of the most population dense cities in Europe - living in flats and apartments is normal for much of the population and generations of Spaniards were brought up in these sorts of places. But there's something important Spain gets right that we are failing to do - people need an outside. Not a tiny little balcony you can squeeze two tiny chairs onto if you jiggle them nor just access to some sort of communal garden or open space but a decent-sized outside where you can do something - from sitting and lounging to having a long lesurely dinner with the family.

"What about the weather" will come the obvious reply and, it's true, Spain does enjoy more sunshine and less rain than Leeds. But is it really beyond the wit of architects and designers to create places that have an outside - a roof garden, a terrace, an atrium - while providing for everything the British weather can throw at them? Whether it's the glass curtains that so many Spanish flats acquire or awnings, or part-covered spaces there is a way to give people the outside they want, a personal space where there's fresh air (or not so fresh in the case of some city centres), a view and the chance on a good day of some sunshine.

For densification to work in our cities it has to provide the things that people want from a family home. And a private outdoor space is one of those things (as are dining space, living space, good storage and car parking) yet we're building thousands of flats that fail to meet this requirement simply because the designers think outdoors is a luxury not an essential part of a home. So, for all that I'll grant developers the right to build soul-less and depressing bunny-hutches, it's time we recognised that this simply isn't meeting demand at any level beyond "have I got a roof over my head". At their best these high rise developments are factory farms for hipsters while their worst is as a sort of holding pen for society's flotsum and jetsum. It's family homes we need and what people want, perhaps we should build them instead?

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So is Bradford part of Leeds? On rebranding our Combined Authority

Tomorrow I'll be toddling across to Leeds where, among other momentous matters, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority with consider whether to change its name to Leeds City Region Combined Authority. This has caused a ripple of disgruntlement in my city as people ask quite why this decision is being taken now and whether it marks the end of Bradford's separate and individual identity.

I don't like the proposal. Mostly this is because it is totally unnecessary. We're told by officers that the current brand (essentially 'West Yorkshire') is confusing because there's another brand - 'Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership' - within the purview of the combined authority and having two brands might be confusing for high-powered, multi-million pound wielding international business folk wanting to invest. That and all the others are named after cities (well Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool at least but not Birmingham and Bristol).

The report tells us that the basis for the change results from 'comprehensive research':

"...benchmarking the WYCA against other combined authorities nationally or internationally, an audit of existing communications activity by the organisation, and substantial engagement with audiences including elected members, local authority chief executives, private sector business leaders, central government officials, partner organisations and WYCA employees."

Sounds good - just the sort of paragraph I'd have put into a client presentation about research when I didn't have any budget. What we have here is a series of chats with existing connections such as members of the LEP, political leaders (but not opposition leaders) in the West Yorkshire councils and senior officials who we work with. There's no script, no presentation of findings, no suggestion that we've done anything other than ask the opinion of a few people who we already know.

In the grand scale of things all this probably doesn't matter much. Except that, for us in Bradford at least, we'll begin to recognise that plenty of decisions previously made by councillors here in Bradford are now made somewhere else (Leeds) by a different organisation. This - as councillors on Bradford's area committees have discovered - includes mundane and very local stuff like whether or not to put speed bumps on a street in Cullingworth.

What annoys me most about this stuff is that we are gradually replacing accountable political decision-making with technocratic, officer-led decisions. So us councillors, for example, get pressure to put in speed cameras but have precisely zero say in whether and where such cameras are actually installed. Somewhere in the documentation of the soon-to-be Leeds City Region Combined Authority there'll be a line of budget referring to the West Yorkshire Casulaty Reduction Partnership. That is what 'member decision-making' means most of the time these days.

So to return to the name change. I'll be opposed because it's unnecessary nd divisive. But when it goes through (I love that they're planning an extensive 'member engagement' after they've made the decision) it will at least be a reminder that most of the big investment decisions out there are being made on the basis of Heseltine's 'functional economic geography' rather than using the democratically-elected local councils we all know and love. OK, not love- that's going too far - but you know what I mean.

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You can't have different rules for trendy social enterprises - however noble their mission

About four years ago a chap called Adam Smith set up the Real Junk Food Project:

We are a revolutionary concept designed to challenge and highlight the issues of food waste while creating inclusive environments where everyone is welcome. Consisting of cafés, outside catering, events, Sharehouse’s and Fuel For School, we use the Pay As You Feel Concept to utilise surplus food, educate the general public and campaign against global issues that food waste creates.

We intercept surplus food from a wide range of places including supermarkets, restaurants, wholesalers, food banks, food photographers and using common sense and decades of experience make a judgement on whether the food is fit for human consumption.

In a world where the default response of the environmentally-concerned is to shout at government and organise meetings, Adam Smith stands out as one of those people who just went and did something. Rather than ask government to spend taxpayers money he and his colleagues walked head-on towards the regulations and management practices that encourage food waste. This is both admirable and innovative and has my support.

There is, however, a problem because Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers (“FIC”) confirms that:

...it remains an offence to place food with an expired ‘use by’ date on the market and if such food is discovered then it must automatically be deemed unsafe. This is not a rebuttable presumption.

Yesterday the news broke that the Real Junk Food Project was under investigation by West Yorkshire Trading Standards:

West Yorkshire Trading Standards (WYTSS) said it found more than 400 items past their use-by date at the RJFP warehouse on the Grangefield Estate in Pudsey.

A letter sent to RJFP states 444 items, which were a cumulative total of 6,345 days past the use-by dates, were discovered.

The regulations, at least as I see them, seem pretty unequivocal and WYTSS had little choice but to conduct an investigation indeed failing to do so might be seen as failing in its duty. And WYTSS is clearly not singling out the Real Junk Food Project - here is a successful prosecution from May 2017:

A supermarket owner has been ordered to pay more than £20,000 in fines and costs for selling items of food up to nearly 50 days over their use-by date.

Trading Standards made a routine visit to Shimla Superstore Ltd, in Clayton Road, Bradford, on September 13 last year and discovered 88 items available for sale past their use-by date.

Of these, five items of a turkey product with olives were 48 days out of date.

When added together, the total number of days past the use-by date for all 88 items was 1,769.

It is clear that trading standards cannot make a distinction between a project such as the Real Junk Food Project set up with noble motives and a straightforward food retailer. This doesn't mean that RJFP doesn't have a defence - Adam Smith is, as he says, an experienced chef - but does ask the question as to whether the absolute nature of the regulation in question needs challenge.

If we are to improve the efficiency in which we use food resources (there's a debate to be had about this but, for now, let's assume this is a great idea and that efficiency is defined by how little is thrown away) then the way in which food safety regulations are applied probably needs questioning. At the heart of all this is where responsibility rests - with the consumer or with the manufacturer. In essence this is the same debate as that about raw milk cheese - if you go to, for example, to The Courtyard Dairy at Settle, they'll ask you whether you're OK with cheese made from unpasteurised milk as this provides them cover since the consumer is accepting the risk (as far as I know this wouldn't work in Scotland).

Others will doubtless pour over the laws involved here and quite rightly so. There will be calls for changes to the regulations (England's regulations on raw milk are, for example, far less stringent than those in Scotland) although, so long as we're members of the EU, this is a slow, torturous and contested process. But in the end, regulatory agencies such as trading standards and the Food Standards Agency cannot have regard to the mission of the organisation breaching the regulations regarding, in this case, the sale or use of products passed their 'use by' date.

What I hope is that this debate questions the manner in which 'use by' dates are applied by food manufacturers. There is a petition raised which again lifts the debate from the mundane pages of council committee reports or the shock-horror of local paper reporting but we have to accept that in a complex food distribution system and a dynamic market regulations exist to protect consumers. And that this applies just as much to trendy social enterprises as it does to huge supermarket chains. The regulations we have didn't arise to promote food waste (I'm sure food manufacturers and retailers would prefer more scope and less waste) but were introduced to protect consumers from the health risks associated with old, poorly-stored and/or damaged food.

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Why do public authorities have such a problem with motorcycles?

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I've noted before that West Yorkshire police's press office dedicates a huge proportion of its press office resource to sending out press releases attacking motorcyclists. It's not just that the popular portrayal of motorcycling and motor cyclists is almost entirely negative but that this form of transport is almost entirely ignored - except as a line in the accident statistics - by transport planners.

The Leeds branch of the Motorcycle Action Group (I so want to call it the Leeds Chapter) staged a protest that called for a greater recognition of motorcycling and, specifically, for bikes to be allow to use bus lanes.

Scores of bikers have taken part in a "demo ride" calling for rights to ride in Leeds's bus lanes.

Organised by Leeds Motorcycle Action Group (MAG), the ride started from Squires Cafe, near Sherburn in Elmet, and finished at a pub outside Leeds.

The group is campaigning for all motorcycles, scooters and mopeds to be allowed to use the city's bus lanes.

The response from Leeds City Council (interestingly this isn't the body responsible for transport planning but we can't expect the BBC to actually know this - it's one of the reasons we need a metro mayor) is typical council-speak about 'harnessing' the views of motorcyclists. Probably because the planners have absolutely no intention of doing what Leeds MAG suggest - recognising that motorcycling has a real role to play in urban transport and especially the relief of congestion. These planners are wedded to trains and buses (including in Leeds having a bus on a string), plus pedal cycles their new favourite means of transport, and see motorised private transport as a bad thing, the main problem from which we all must be modally shifted.

The consultation - being conducted as we speak (I bet you didn't know, did you) by the Combined Authority - completely fails to mention motor cycles and only mentions cars as a problem. I attended a meeting of the Authority's Scrutiny Committee where a presentation about the new strategic transport plan - a good 40 minute long presentation - didn't mention the word 'car' once, let alone refer to motorcycles. Why is it these planners have such tunnel vision? And why do they hate motorcycles so much?

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Rags, swag and pet food - Gentrification, markets and the grocery store...

Scott Beyer writes about gentrification:

If you’re an urban pioneer who settled in downtown Cleveland sometime in the past decade, you’re probably happy with the neighborhood’s progress. Even as the city as a whole has continued to lose population, the central area has revived thanks to an influx of young and educated newcomers. Downtown Cleveland right now has its highest-ever population, with more than 13,000 residents and lots of new housing developments on the way. There are more than 4,000 hotel rooms, with another thousand expected by 2016. And residents today enjoy a more walkable neighborhood, as new restaurants and bars open around old cultural institutions like the theater district. If you are looking for a large grocery store, however, you’re still out of luck.

Partly this reflects the high income of those gentrifying folk plus their preference for eating out - not so much at fancy sit down restaurants but at those street food places, coffee shops and bars that sell slices of cured pig. But it also raises a question about the economics of food retailing and the truth that retailers (especially convenience retailers) are entirely driven by 'counting chimneys' - or whatever the urban high rise equivalent of 'counting chimneys' might be. If there aren't enough people living in the area, there won't be a grocery store.

The response has been subsidy or financial incentive (or even worse - and UK planners are very guilty here - use class constraint). The problem with this approach is that it doesn't change the economic reality - if there aren't enough customers spending enough money then the store will close once the incentive dries up.

The answer - rather than chasing national retail chains or hoping for some hipsterish spin on the corner shop - may lie with something that can be great but is too often neglected by local authorities: the market. The problem is how to strike the balance between the municipal market's traditional customer base and the wealthier, trendier folk following in the wake of gentrification.

The commodification of the shopping experience, with its attendant fetishization of taste and provenance, is still in its early phase in Kirkgate Market, as indeed it is in other British markets. In this sense, Kirkgate and other similar markets are on the gentrification frontier.

Part of the irony here is that the 'hipster' is searching for authenticity, for the sense of discovery and difference, yet doesn't realise what is the authentic and genuine in an English municipal market (swag, rag and pet food as one trader described it to me a few years ago).  I have criticised Leeds Council's approach to Kirkgate - preferring long leases and high rents in the Grade I listed part of the market buildings thereby creating something of a false environment. This is not because I'm against long leases or higher rents per se but because it is very clear that this strategy doesn't work.

Given that markets are in publicly-owned spaces (whether open air or covered) and not operated for profit, there is the opportunity to both support the traditional low income customer base (who want swag, rag and pet food) and also to encourage new customers - whether from new immigrant groups or from those trendy gentrifying sorts. In and around Bradford's Oastler Centre (I still think I was wrong to agree to changing its name from John Street Market) we can see this mix in play as the old mix of stalls (meat, fish, greengrocery, clothing and cafes) is supplemented by stalls serving the new immigrant communities - the spice stall, the stalls catering for African, Philipino and middle-eastern communities. What has yet to happen is for new places to open that complement the customers served by the bars and cafes opening in adjacent streets.

But I'm not here to talk about Bradford's regeneration but to look more generally at how gentrification delivers both benefits and problems. The benefits come from the investment and from the spending power of a wealthier customer base -- no-one can deny that this can, and does, transform places. But the downside is that the improvements are all kecky-pooky. We get nice bars, cafes and specialist food or clothing retailers but the everyday stuff of the high street - grocery, hardware and so forth - doesn't arrive or at least doesn't arrive so quickly.

As Scott Beyer concludes (after two decades of gentrification) in Cleveland where the first general grocery, Heinen's, has opened:

Retail options are now focused around a few scattered nodes, namely the East Fourth Street pedestrian mall, the 5th Street Arcades and the Warehouse District. For the neighborhood to be truly livable, say Starinsky and others, the city will need to fill in the gaps with additional retail options. Attracting the right mix of stores will require continued focus by public officials and private groups alike. But downtown residents will no doubt look at the opening of Heinen’s as a crucial step in the right direction.

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Banning pub crawls - now that'll work!

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Yes folks, this is what the Government is encouraging with £90,000 worth of funding for the National Union of Students (NUS):

Boozy pub crawls such as the famed Otley Run in Leeds could be banned in a Home Office pilot scheme to crack down on binge drinking.

The 12-month Alcohol Impact Scheme was set up by the National Union of Students (NUS) to curb binge drinking and anti-social behaviour on campus.

It aims to stop pub crawls between university bars and also ban them beginning on university campus.

So these ghastly little tin-pot student gauleiters have decided that they'll stop the pub crawl!I wish them luck. Unless something has changed recently, young people don't need someone to organise their drinking escapades - the pubs are there and they'll parade from one to the next down Otley Road.

As the Yorkshire Post point out, drinking isn't really the problem the Home Office seem to think it is (this is though a reminder about Theresa May's inappropriateness as a future Conservative leader):

...official figures from the NHS and Office of National Statistics showing that drinking among students is actually in decline.

New figures show the number of 16 to 24 year olds who drink once a week has dropped from 71 per cent to 50 per cent between 1998 and 2012.

But hey, let's not let facts get in the way of a nice grant, eh!

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On the state of English education...

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From the Leeds school teaching all its pupils English as a foreign language:

She said that British pupils would benefit from the lessons because in many cases they had such poor command of formal English they would not be able to achieve good GCSE grades. 

What an terrible observation - all those Leeds-born children have (ignoring the now ubiquitous pre-school education) had nearly seven years of formal education before they arrive at the City of Leeds School.

What have the primary schools been doing?

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"Leeds, Leeds...everyone hates us but we don't care" (except you do really)

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OK, so I'm in Bradford meaning that what I say about Leeds is filtered through a historic rivalry. More recently that rivalry has been further tempered by a sort of sophisticated grumpiness - how come it is that Leeds is ever so shiny while Bradford struggles. We seek out the little wins - the fact that Bradford, all stone and grandeur, is so much better looking than Leeds; the superiority of the South Pennine uplands to grey, man-ruined central Yorkshire coalfield. And we point or laugh at the struggles of Leeds United.

But we're allowed this indulgence. It's a sort of West Riding sibling rivalry and, when the chips are down, both cities are both great and also in Yorkshire. Unlike Manchester.

So I smiled at this passionate grumble inspired (if that is the right word) by Evan Davies' 'Mind the Gap' programme on the BBC and its conclusion that 'only Manchester could compete with London'. Here's a flavour:

What the BBC tend to do on such occasions is ‘confuse’ the city of Manchester with Greater Manchester, which is not a city but a type of county. I’ve no idea how they sneaked Greater Manchester past the people of Salford, Bolton or Wigan. I do know that if, at any point in history, you suggested that an area of Yorkshire was called Greater Leeds then the proud people of Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax or Keighley (a town bigger than Wigan) would, quite rightly, be out on the street smashing and burning stuff.

Fighting stuff! But Mick McCann (in the mix for the biggest fan of Leeds as a city) needs to step back and ask a serious question. Why is it that Evan Davies concluded what he did about Manchester (other than rank bias because the BBC got transplanted - or is it dumped - in a city that isn't Manchester but is close by)?

Mick sets out all the statistics, observing that Leeds folk are wealthier, brainier and prettier than Mancunians, but this isn't the point. The point is that, while everyone knows about Manchester (blame football for this), Leeds is best described as "oh yes, Leeds, I forget about Leeds". Folk out there in the wide world know about Yorkshire - the Yorkshire marketing folk win prizes for their efforts:

Yorkshire's bumptious tourist board has retained its title as best marketeer in the World Travel Awards, the nearest thing to the Oscars in the industry.

And the county is great - what other English county gets its name chanted at rock concerts? (The London indie band Goodshoes, when they first appeared at the Cockpit in Leeds were taken aback - they thought the 'Yorkshire, Yorkshire' chant was 'You're shit, you're shit').  Across the world, Yorkshire ex-pats are telling people that it's the grandest, greatest, most beautiful and definitely most manly place on the planet.

But somehow this doesn't rub off on Leeds.

Leeds is boring, workaday, the dullsville of the West Riding. And not just because it lacks the glamour of a premier league football team. Ask people what there is in Leeds and they'll go, "er, shops?" People will stay in Leeds (hotels, restaurants) but remember the trips out of town - to Saltaire or Ilkley, to York and up into the Dales. So when someone asks those visitors where they went, the answer is Yorkshire not Leeds. Never Leeds.

Leeds needn't be boring - after all there's little to recommend Manchester (football and telly apart - and that's not really in Manchester anyhow) but it has scrubbed up well, put on its new pair of Converse and made out that it's the trendy place in the North.

Here's the problem for Leeds. Instead of a shaggy haircut, a beard and skinny jeans (or whatever is trendy these days - I'm not an expert) what Leeds has done is buy a Hugo Boss suit, some shiny shoes and a man bag. All those hipsterish trendsetters (or people who think they are and have access to a TV camera) aren't impressed.

So rather than dwelling on a (pretty impressive) arena, a (very fine) new shopping centre and some (splendidly grand) art and music venues, what Leeds needs to do is find something edgier, rougher and tougher. Perhaps change the perception so those visitors who came to Yorkshire go home and tell people they went to Leeds.

But what I do know is that moaning about how the BBC (or anyone else for that matter) has some sort of down on Leeds will get the city precisely nowhere.

Trust me on this, I'm from Bradford.

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Further evidence that government and investment don't mix...

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Via the fabulous Leeds Citizen blog:

An investment fund set up by local councils to overcome “market failure” in the banking system and help kickstart the region’s economy looks like it’s having difficulties of its own.

And the difficulties are that, a year on from starting the fund:

...while there has been “a degree of interest”, no funding applications have been approved yet.

So the Councils in West Yorkshire who run the fund are trying to recruit expertise from the banking sector to try and make the fund work. The budget is £120,000 - the good investment bankers aren't going to spend time in Leeds for that sort of pittance!

Another 'we can do better than the private sector' scheme. And another failure!

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It's Hallowe'en so we get some nonsense about rural crime from the Country Land & Business Association...

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We're always that October and November are peak months for burglary - lots of stuff about the clocks going back and the nights drawing in. However, this applies everywhere not just in that mystic place "the countryside" - however the Country Land & Business Association thinks otherwise:

Again sadly, rural areas present the greatest opportunity for thieves. Isolated houses and buildings, less lighting, fewer witnesses and the ease of being able to watch the owner’s movements all add up to a very attractive target for thieves. 

Except this simply isn't true. Rates of house burglary are much lower in rural areas compared to urban areas. To help understand this here are the country's top "burglary hotspots":

LS23, Bramley, Gamble Hill, Moorside, Rodley and Swinnow
BD12, Low Moor, Oakenshaw and Wyke in Bradford
N12, North Finchley
M30, Eccles
RM3, Harold Wood, Harold Hill, Noak Hill in Romford
SW12, Balham, Clapham South, Hyde Farm in London
LS18, Horsforth in Leeds
UB3, Hayes, Harlington in Middlesex
SE22, East Dulwich, Peckham Rye, Loughborough Junction, Herne Hill
LS28, Calverley, Farsley, Pudsey, Stanningley.

There you go - Inner London, Leeds and Bradford (and some place where they make pastry cakes with currants in). Not a rural place in sight.

In the Skipton & Ripon constituency (as rural as it gets really) there were 548 burglaries over the past year - that's 45.7 per month. In October and November last year there were 41 and 36 respectively - below the average.

By comparison in Leeds West (which contains the place on top of that burglary hotspot list) that average is 125.6 per month (1507 burglaries) nearly triple the rate in "the countryside". Again October and November at 104 and 109 respectively are below the average.

I also suspect that, if we were to exclude the two towns of Skipton and Ripon, the remaining countryside would have very little crime at all.

I've no problem with good advice about security - locking doors, putting tools away, marking property and so forth - but it simply isn't true that crime is going to rise "when the clocks go back" (it might but it might not) and it certainly isn't true that rural areas are targeted by thieves.

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Regenerating the North - a start...

There was a small storm when The Economist spoke of the problems facing the more peripheral Northern towns and cities:

The fate of these once-confident places is sad. That so many well-intentioned people are trying so hard to save them suggests how much affection they still claim. The coalition is trying to help in its own way, by setting up “enterprise zones” where taxes are low and broadband fast. But these kindly efforts are misguided. Governments should not try to rescue failing towns. Instead, they should support the people who live in them.

The articles pointed to places like Hull, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, once thriving places now struggling. The argument is that these places – and the word place is important in this discussion – have got beyond the fixable meaning that we need to manage their continued decline by supporting those who stay and encouraging those who leave.

In one respect this is an understandable, if depressing, conclusion – that places which have contributed so much to England’s glory should be allowed to die. But in other respects the conclusion is liberating.

The efforts aimed at regenerating the North have failed. I know we can point to grand shopping arcades, refurbished mills and many a shiny business park, things that have helped, have provided jobs and have created a sense of economic progress. But the truth is that these things are the fur coat that covers up the absence of underwear. The picture of Liverpool’s brilliant city centre, vibrant with culture, is wonderful. Yet the city still contains some of England’s poorest communities, places unbudged since the jobs went in the 1970s and 1980s.

And, before the wrath of scousers everywhere falls on me, the same picture is seen in Hull, in Teeside and, indeed, in Bradford. Faced with the pull of the South East and the attractions of Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle, these communities continue to struggle. Here’s one observer:

Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle have their stunning new developments and you can tell there are people there with plenty of money just by walking around. Go a few miles up the read, though, and you will find blighted and boarded up small towns. It doesn’t matter how cheap they are, employers are avoiding them. The worse they get, the less likely firms are to relocate. The lure of cheaper property and wages only goes so far. It may tempt organisations away from the South-East but only to the larger regional capitals. Small town Britain is a step too far.

I would go a step further in this understanding – this author suggests that firms may move away from London but only to places with those ‘stunning new developments’ (and I would argue within swift travel of central London – perhaps the only sound argument for HS2). The reality is that – unless, like the BBC, politics forces the move – these firms are not relocating to Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle let alone Bradford, Liverpool or Nottingham.

And the problem is about scale. Here’s a comment about Chicago, a far bigger and more successful city than Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle:

Some may say, “Aaron, weren’t you the one who said Chicago wasn’t a global city?” To which I’d respond, I’ve always said Chicago is a global city. I only think that the global city side of Chicago is not sufficient to carry the load for this gigantic region and state. It can’t even carry just the city, though to be fair if you broke off global city Chicago into a standalone municipality of 600-800,000 like San Francisco, Boston, and DC, it would be a very different story, at the municipal level at least.

In simple terms Aaron is saying that, despite Chicago’s success (the company headquarters, commodities exchanges and cultural excellence), it is not sufficient of an economic driver to drag the wider hinterland – that old rustbelt greater Chicago – along behind. Those communities get left behind.

Back in England, we can see the same in Manchester and Leeds – walk out from Manchester’s city centre and you quickly arrive in places that are the flip side of ‘shiny’ Manchester. Indeed, after Liverpool, Manchester has the highest number of deprived SOAs (‘super output areas’ for the curious). And Leeds with Seacroft, Harehills and East End Park isn’t so very different.

Even these more successful cities may not generate the critical mass to bring peripheral communities along with their thriving centres and odd little bohemian enclaves. If they do, this success will be at the expense of other places further removed and most significantly those sufficiently disconnected – Teeside, East Lancashire, Hull and The Humber.

Faced then with this challenge, what do we do? Right now we’re planning for a larger population, for new jobs in ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge’ industries and for more of the same (or what we believe to be the same). Except this isn’t the case. Quietly we are seeing a new focus – through ‘combined authorities’, local enterprise partnerships and city regions – on the three or four hub cities: Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and, perhaps, Liverpool.

This focus may not be enough (or does there come a point at which London is so expensive, so unattractive that people move away) to prevent continued relative decline but it does at least hold out some prospect of betterment. For us in Bradford – and for that matter, those in Oldham, Chester-le-Street and St Helens – we perhaps need to work out how to do three things:

1. Connect our communities to the City Centres – ideally by fast train or tram rather than by bus or trolley bus. This needs to be ambitious and requires some taboos – about providing free parking at railway stations, for example – to be broken. It’s not enough to simply tidy up the current networks, we need to connect places that aren’t connected as of now
2. Provide transforming space – just because you can get from Saltaire to Leeds inside 20 minutes doesn’t mean you have to do so every day. In these connected places (and especially the deprived communities we’re bringing into the network) let’s offer low rent studios and live-work spaces – on the proviso that those renting put something back in the form of art, music, culture or other improvement
3. Animate and decorate – create a sense of interest and excitement. Rather than some sort of dull positioning – Bradford’s current meme, I’m told, is ‘the producer city’ – we want to be a place where things are happening. But for this to work, we’ll have to let go of control and allow stuff (some of which might be a little odd) to take place.

These aren’t a solution – we can and should expect many of our brightest to go away, to leave for London or even for New York and Hong Kong. And – whatever the planners are saying right now – many of our communities will decline in size, the inner city will hollow out a little and the suburbs will get a little more crowded. But this process presents us with opportunities to do some things differently – to build an urban golf course in Allerton or a cycle track in Barkerend, to have some more new parks and open spaces and to fill them with the wild and wacky.

Rather than sticking our fingers in our ears when faced with (and it’s not the first time) the truth about the prospects for our cities, we should accept reality and work with change instead of pretending it isn’t happening. The alternative is another generation of local politicians (and the pseudo-politicians that clutter up LEP boards and so forth) clattering back and forth to London where they abase themselves before civil servants and junior ministers holding out the cap ready for the next slug of "regeneration".

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How much of a fix is this then? More from Leeds City Region...

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As reported by the estimable Leeds Citizen:

They’ll be rejoicing down on Albion St this week after it was announced that Leeds and Partners have won a £2.25m uncontested contract to deliver the city region out of the inward investment doldrums.

You've read that right folks - Leeds City Council (on behalf of the City Region) have bunged a multimillion pound contract in the direction of an organisation it set up itself but which they insist is a 'private' concern not subject to such pesky things as 'freedom of information'.

Does this seem like a fix to you? After all this is a body intended to promote investment into the city REGION - that includes Bradford. Yet I don't recall - as a Bradford Councillor - us being consulted on all this? Nor do I expect 'Leeds & Partners' to pay any attention to the inward investment needs of Bradford - it will, as ever, be "Leeds, Leeds, Leeds". A strategy that has worked ever so well for us!

So we have a contract issued without competition to an organisation that was previously called 'marketing Leeds' - as Leeds Citizen concludes:

Check out the Manchester investment site to see how a serious organisation does this kind of thing. And then tell me we’ve just taken on the only credible organisation that’s capable of doing the same for us.

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The predicable consequences of taxing alcohol...

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Eventually people start dodging those taxes - and the results are dangerous:

Magistrates fined the owners of the BED club in the Grand Arcade (Gatecrasher Clubs and Bars Ltd) £5,000 with £2,095 costs after 656 litres of fake spirit were found on the premises in September last year, according to West Yorkshire Trading Standards Service (WYTSS).

It’s the biggest seizure yet of fake vodka by Trading Standards in West Yorkshire.

This is the consequence of government action - it makes such illegal arbitrage worth the risk. At £2 a shot that's over fifty grand. Or, in terms of tax avoided, it's about six grand.

The more we load onto duty, the more of this we'll see and the more we'll read of people poisoned by:

...isopropanol, tertiary butanol and chloroform, none of which should be in vodka.

Sadly this won't be the lesson from this event - the tip of an illegal spirits iceberg - our lords and masters will carry on piling the tax onto booze in the interests of "health". With the direct result being, at some point, blind, even dead nightclubbers. 

H/T Leeds Citizen for the story
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More panic in Leeds...

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Last year (according to the figures in Wikipedia at least) over 25 million people trooped through Leeds station on their way to work, to shop or to enjoy Leeds celebrated nightlife. And in that same year 0.00089% of those passengers injured themselves:

In the past year 179 people have been injured at Leeds, and Network Rail said most incidents occurred when people lost their balance after a night out drinking.

Revellers have fallen off platforms, down stairs and escalators and slipped on the station concourse.

Injuries suffered included fractures, cuts and bruises.

Apparently this is a 'high' figure (although the BBC don't report any comparative figures from other stations) and is entirely due to booze:

Ahmed Abdalla, 20, said: "It's the city centre, people are drunk everywhere. From the afternoon they start, early drinking, partying all the time.

"They should be more careful, it's stupid. They're putting themselves and people around them at risk. It's mostly young college boys, uni boys, and girls sometimes."

Network Rail have panicked and are putting up posters telling people to be careful when they're smashed out of their brains. This is to cope with about three incidents a week.

Seems like another moral panic. What is it about Leeds and moral panic?

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Leeds & Partners - secrecy and cover up makes for bad regeneration...

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It's funny what you find out on a Saturday night that you didn't know about before. It seems there's a shadowy organisation called "Leeds & Partners" and it has something to do with promoting that city. All well a good and nothing to do with us here in Bradford except:

Leeds and Partners, which is a private company with ownership shared between the council and Leeds Chamber of Commerce, began operating in October when it succeeded the city’s former promotional arm, Marketing Leeds. Its remit has recently been expanded to include the Leeds City Region enterprise partnership which includes neighbouring councils Wakefield, York and Bradford.

So yet again we are reminded of just how unaccountable the delivery of regeneration has become - an organisation set up in Leeds, is funded by Leeds City Council and has just one publicly accountable person, a Leeds Councillor, on its board.

And the consequence of this corporatist, crony capitalism approach is just hwat you'd expect:

Lurene Joseph, who heads Leeds and Partners which is largely funded by Leeds Council, took the taxi from Leeds to her home in Buckinghamshire before taking another taxi to Heathrow airport later the following day at a cost of £57 and then flying out to Boston where she stayed in a top hotel for nine nights.

The total accommodation costs for the trip, which included another Leeds and Partners official, were £6,203 with a further £1,852 spent on flights. Ms Joseph took a taxi from Heathrow back home at a cost of £64.80 when she returned.

The first shocking - but not really surprising - thing about this revelation is that the Chief Executive (a full-time official) doesn't live anywhere near Leeds. And, like so many unaccountable officials, she seems to think that public money is there for her comfort and convenience.

However, the real shock (although again not a surprise) is that Leeds City Council is simply hiding behind "it's a private company":

Leeds and Partners only exists through council-funding which this year amounts to £2m, but the council - which has fielded virtually all media inquiries from the Yorkshire Post - said as it was established as a private company it did not have to provide a breakdown of expenses. Such information was “for internal use only”.

It might be that Leeds & Partners is doing an absolutely fantastic job - it's certainly racking up the air miles - and the City and City Region will be getting huge benefit from this work. But it would a lot better is the organisation was a little more accountable.

In the end, secrecy and cover up - this sort of 'we are untouchable' approach - makes for bad regeneration.

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On waste permits...and Leeds

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It seems that the Leeds City Council spokesman couldn't resist twisting the knife into Bradford:

Leeds City Council said it did not know how much it cost it to dispose of waste from Bradford. A spokesman said the authority recognised it might be more convenient for householders from Bradford to visit a Leeds tip, and that they were welcome to do so. 

He he! Of course Bradford doesn't have any idea how much it's disposing of either, it just pretends it does!

And the comments sum it all up:

I'm assuming that the tips that are being used by people from outside Bradford are the ones near the boundaries such as Queensbury & Keighley.

If they don't know how many Bradford residents are using tips in places like Menston & Yeadon how can they possibly use this 'net import' argument as a reason for introducing permits?

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Writing elsewhere...on the waste of cash that is HS2

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Over at the Culture Vultures you can read me ripping into High Speed Two:

Let’s put is more simply still – if the government put £30 billion on the table for The North to develop its transport network, do you think we’d even think of building a railway to London?

Go read - and comment!

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High Speed 2 would damage the regeneration of Bradford

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Not me saying this (although I agree with the argument) but a former boss of the Strategic Rail Authority:

“On regeneration, I know of no serious academics who support the view HSR will significantly reduce the North-South divide. Most research indicates the dominant ‘hub’ city benefits more than regional centres and in the regions the impact is likely to be a zero sum game.

“A Leeds HSR station would probably be surrounded by shiny new office blocks, but investment in West Yorkshire would be focused there, and the relative decline of Bradford would accelerate.”

And that's before all the suits whizz off to London on the lovely fast train we've built for their convenience!

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The Leeds planning problem and why Bradford must avoid it...

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The Leeds Citizen reports on the latest in a long line of problems facing Leeds City Council over development of land that it identified - in the last 'replacement Unitary Development Plan (rUDP)' - as later phase housing sites. Yet again, after huge bills for planning appeals and High Court challenges, the Council is riding for a big bill:

Councillors sitting on a planning panel in Leeds are being warned not to fight an appeal lodged with the Planning Inspectorate over the construction of 92 houses on a greenfield site in Morley.

Developer Persimmon Homes lodged the appeal after a Leeds City Council planning panel last month rejected a recommendation from council officers to give the controversial development at Daisy Hill the go-ahead.

Now the council’s chief planning officer is telling councillors meeting to discuss the appeal next week that the council could end up with costs being awarded against it if the appeal is contested.

Now there's a caveat here as we found out in Denholme when Bradford Council left an empty chair at an enquiry and the Inspector criticised the Council's decision - his decision was a close call in favour of the developer showing that Councillor's refusal has been reasonable. But the grounds Leeds Citizen reports are, to put it mildly, pretty weak (there may, of course, be more to them).

However. Leeds' problem is a direct consequence of the rUDP that members agreed. This released greenfield sites on the City's fringes in Phase 2 (after seven years) regardless of whether the key regeneration area - East & South East Leeds (EASEL) - saw its site developed. Those EASEL sites remain undeveloped but the Council can do nothing to stop the sites it identified elsewhere being developed. The advice being offered by officers is a direct consequence of the plan drawn up by those officers and agreed on by Councillors.

Currently Bradford is drawing up its Local Development Framework (LDF) Core Strategy and, in doing so, is sleepwalking into the same problem. Unless release of later phase land is predicated on the development of regeneration sites and the building out of existing permissions, the developers will simply wait seven years for the chance to develop nice greenfield sites in Airedale, Wharfedale and Thornton. And the Council will find itself in the same position as Leeds - eager to respond to local objectors yet unable to do so without it costing the Council (and the taxpayer) a load of money.

Perhaps Councillors and officers in Bradford might care to ponder on this problem before succumbing to the "help, help, there's a housing crisis" line peddled by planning lead Val Slater.

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