Making a 'sustainable' park - thoughts from a visit to Rome

"Towards a sustainable park" proclaims the blurb on the posters that have been carefully pinned to the solid but, one hopes, temporary fencing. Or rather it says that in Italian complete with diagrams, pictures and the mindless impenetrability of bureaucratic language.

So what is this 'sustainable park' you may very well ask? After all that word 'sustainable' is one of those weasel words so confounded by being discussed and contested that the sense and purpose of the original word is lost in a fog of verbal concern wrapped around with calls for poorly specified action.

As we arrived in the park, it was clear that is was - as your mum would say - in a rather sorry state. It wasn't just the temporary fences or the lack of grass where the grass should be but rather the impression that nothing much had happened for a very long time. Yet the park had sustained - it's probably among the world's oldest parks (the very definition of 'sustainable' one might suggest) so it's not its continued existence that is the bother for those bureaucrats but something else.

Indeed, despite its slight sad state the park was well used combining the dog-walking and children playing functions of parks with a newer purpose of providing a place for African immigrants to lounge around - taking a break from the tough job of trying to flog cheap stuff to tourists (the plaintive cry of 'selfie selfie' being the newest street call from those trying to get folk to buy a selfie stick). And there's a basketball court (or rather whatever the Italians call a 'multi-use games area') where a bunch of young men were playing volleyball as well as what might once have been a properly laid out five-a-side pitch.

Along the sides of the slightly potholed paths are trees. Big trees - mostly stone pines, that icon of Italian treedom - and smaller trees. A multitude of trees. And it's these trees that are the problem with that sustainability. We have - as well as the conflict with regular every day uses of the park - an additional complication for this is Rome and the park is the Colle Oppio, one of the original seven hills of ancient Rome. Meaning, of course, that underneath every inch of the park lies irreplaceable ancient heritage. Those lovely trees - and most of them are lovely - have root systems that are gradually destroying that precious remainder of the lost city. The structures that remain - old bath houses, thermal springs, mosaics, monuments and homes - are unstable, quite literally crumbling away resulting in the project to do something.

And the something is - at its core - trying to get to a balance between the park as a place of play, the park as a green place in an urban environment and the park as a preservation of the past. You get a sense that each tiny piece of completed betterment has only come as a result of careful bartering between the heritage champions, the greens and the local folk who want somewhere to sit or a place for their children to play.

When people ask about political decision-making, we tend to think about new laws or grand strategy. We seldom consider that the toughest political places are these very contested places where many good things are wanted but their priority is contested - ancient ruins worth saving, trees that help the city breathe, playgrounds for toddlers to swing and gardens for us to walk. We can have all of these things but only if we accept some limitation and it falls on the political process - in its broadest meaning - to decide on those constraints, to broker agreements between trees and ruins, and to referee the disputes and disagreements. While all the time knowing that there's an imperative to get the job done, to make that sustainable park.

Right now the Colle Oppio is a mess. At some point it won't be. The challenge will be - and I hope this is the case although my Italian is far too limited to understand everything the signs say - to balance those competing needs, to make a place for tourists (Colle Oppio is 400 yards from the Colosseum), residents, workers and the inevitable flotsam of a city park.

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Jim and Sandra move to the countryside. A story of planning policy.

Jim was fed up. Fifty hours a week running the print and design business, endless repairs to a house he didn't really like and Sandra moaning on and on about her job and how she wants more time with the horse.

For the bloke looking in at them, thought Jim, it looks a great life. Big four-bed detached, Range Rover and enough cash to have a couple of decent holidays every year as well as eating out regularly and the occasional weekend break.

But Jim was fed up. Tired. And ready for a change.

That chance came when the two guys with the web design business called and offered silly money for the business. A few sums, a chat with the accountant and it looked like a deal. The buyers want to keep on Steve, he's three years from retirement so he's probably sorted. Looks like best part of a million quid once the value of the old mill building he'd bought for a song thirty years ago is factored in. The buyers probably want to convert it to trendy loft apartments.

What to do thought Jim as he headed to the King's Arms for a pint and a ponder.

In the pub there's the usual crowd and Jim parks himself on a stool in the main bar. Propped up at one end is a copy of the Sunday Telegraph and Jim has a quick flick through, not really reading much just absorbing the headlines. As he's doing this one headline leaps from the page:

MPs fight to save the National Parks from suburbanisation 

This strikes a chord for Jim. Not the politics but the idea of moving to the country. I'll look into that he says to himself. Maybe find an old barn or farmhouse to do up - would be a project and at the end a great place to live.

Once he's home Jim tells Sandra about his thoughts. She's thrilled, full of ideas and excited at the prospect (and a second horse). Jim does some research and finds out that the government is relaxing the rules on converting farm buildings by removing the need to get planning permission so long as certain conditions are met such as keeping the same footprint, height, design and materials as well as complying with rules on flooding, highways and so forth.

Jim sets to with looking for an opportunity - he's got two possible places in mind. One's a smallholding on Dartmoor where the farmer has finally had enough of 80 hour weeks, no holidays and an income less than the minimum wage. Getting half-a-million for the farm means he can retire - nice bungalow in Torquay and enough cash to provide an OK pension. The other's a ramshackle set of farm buildings near Honiton, not as nice a location (and a nicer price), where there's already a planning permission for a barn conversion.

Jim and Sandra want the Dartmoor place. It's the sort of place they like, they're not bothered about the isolation and it's not so far into Plymouth by car. With the new relaxed rules they can use the farmhouse (perhaps with a little extension to give another bedroom although this would still need planning permission) and build three good houses on the footprint of the barns, two to sell which should recoup much of the cost of buying the farm and a third for the kids when they visit.

Looks like a deal, thought Jim, we'll drive down on Saturday and make a good offer. But first it's a pint at the King's Arms.

Down the pub Jim is telling Clive the landlord about his plans, he'd be sorry to leave but no point in waiting too long - "I'd be too old then" jokes Jim.

Clive frowns, picks up the newspaper. "Looking at a national park are you? Maybe you should read this then."

Jim reads the piece Clive points to:

As reported in the Daily Telegraph, the Government is planning to exempt National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) from measures that would allow landowners to convert barns into up to three houses, without having to get planning permission.

Jim read it several times. The deal was off. No way was he taking the risk of buying the farm now, not if he might not get the permission to do what he wanted. Bad news for Joe, the farmer, who'll have to stay there longer or else take a lot less money. Joe won't get to retire, move to Torquay and live his life out in modest comfort.

Apparently having him (and a couple of other families) living up there isn't as sustainable as Joe staying on his uneconomic farm struggling to make a living. And him converting the place would 'change the character of the area irreversibly'. What nonsense thought Jim, what nonsense.

Still Dartmoor's loss is somewhere else in Devon's gain. The National Park has won its point, Joe, the farmer, is still struggling on trying (and mostly failing) to make a living and Jim with Sandra and the horse are spending their wealth in Honiton. And Dartmoor remains a place where only the rich can buy the few houses that come on the market, not the old farms needing conversion but the little cottages and already converted farms. The place is trapped in an environmental timewarp condemned to an unviable, unsustainable economic base because the advocates of viability and sustainability are plain stupid.

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How to prevent small business getting public contracts the Manchester City Council way

I know, dear reader, that you love the great city of Manchester. I know that my criticisms of that city's civic leadership have focused on their budgetary incompetence but today I want to use their procurement processes to show just how anti-business - or rather anti-small business - Manchester City Council has become.

I spent quite a lot of today - on top of a previous frustrating day - trying to complete a 'pre-qualification questionnaire' for a research and analysis 'framework' contract. Now it seems to me that this sort of contract - in essence an approved list of research, evaluation, intelligence and analysis providers - is an area where there are a multitude of smaller providers, one man bands, partnerships and social enterprises. Manchester however has clearly decided that these smaller providers are beneath them for they require the following documents:

• Two years of audited accounts - bit tricky for a start-up business, maybe a couple of recently redundant council officers just starting out!
• Insurance documents showing £10m public liability, £5m employee liability and £2million professional indemnity - that's a grands worth of insurance just to bid!
• Signed and dated policies covering equal opportunities, quality, health & safety, environmental and sustainability
• Three testimonials and three public sector references for work done for each lot - if you're bidding for all the lots on offer that's nine testimonials and nine public sector references
• Certificates, qualifications and profiles of all the people who have worked on the projects referred to in the testimonials

And in the City council's PQQ documents there's a whole sector on "sustainability" (bear in mind this is a tender process for research and consultancy rather than supplying products, digging roads or such) including such gems as:

Please summarise how you minimise the environmental impact of your work activities, including any procedures for life cycle analysis of the procurement, use and disposal of products.

And:

What environmental objectives and targets have your organisation set against which performance is measured? Where appropriate, please state your current top three objectives and their relevance to your industry.

We're talking here about small consultancies providing research expertise - these sort of questions are simply not appropriate nor to they contribute anything to making Manchester City Council more sustainable - whatever that means. It does, however, get even better:

Please summarise how your business can help the city support the Council’s Sustainable Procurement Policy’s key objectives? A copy of the Sustainability Policy can be found here: www.manchester.gov.uk

And:

Please detail your willingness to work with the city council to contribute to the city’s Climate Change Action Plan target to reduce the city’s CO2 by 41% by 2020. A copy of Manchester’s Climate Change Action Plan can be found here: www.manchesterclimate.com

This approach to procurement - adding in spurious idiocies about "sustainable procurement" and "climate change" that might make some sort of sense in the buying of gas supplies, building materials or road construction but just put off small suppliers of consultancy and research.

Councils and other public sector bodies talk a great deal about opening up procurement, about supporting small business and the voluntary sector in the procurement process and about local purchasing strategies. This one PQQ demonstrates to me that - in Manchester's case - this is just talk. The procurement process merely suits the bureaucrat and the big business, it prevents innovation, discourages small and start up business and excludes new entrants through the use of frameworks and approved lists.

But then, why am I surprised? It is Manchester City Council after all and we know they can't manage their way out from a wet paper bag!


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Regeneration ain't about sustainability or community. It's about people.

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Something of a curate egg from Julian Dobson over at Living with Rats - a set of slides on regeneration that are challenging but sadly contradictory. Most worryingly though - given the reality of life in our modern day slums - Julian focuses on the touchy-feeling, greeny, sustainability, no-growth stuff that will to precisely and absolutely zero to help the poorest folk in our society. Here's some comments to the first six of his slides - I have been restrained.

Slide 1. The idea that we can infinitely add more to what we currently have underpins most 'regeneration' strategies.

After about ten years involved in regeneration and a period studying the past 40 years of regeneration strategies it seems odd that the same knee-jerk, anti-growth position opens up these slides. A cursory look at the primary regeneration investments since the early 1990s – City Challenge, SRB, Neighbourhood Renewal, New Deal for Communities – tells us that this isn’t the case. The focus has been on what Steve Hartley, then Chief Executive of Bradford Trident, called “making the place normal”. While there were job creation schemes and business support these made no distinction between types of business or between the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Bluntly, it is untrue.

Slide 2: Our response to the financial crisis of 2008 was to prop up what we had. The banking system now is not fundamentally different to that of 2006.

I agree with the essential observation – that the response to the current banking crisis has been to save the banks (and the bankers). But what do we mean by ‘sustainable’ in this context – seems to me that the Obama (and Osborne) position of separating retail and speculation plus seeking smaller banks is more sensible than trying to reinvent economic theory with well-meant words and some reddish-green ideology. And one thing that should be made possible is for setting up a retail bank to be much easier – barriers to entry were one contributor to the crisis. Without schumpeterian renewal (a party colleague got into trouble for talking about creative destruction so I won’t) banks – and indeed other institutions including government – become ossified, become a problem not a solution.

Slide 3: To create new ideas, is it sensible to start in the old places? Was Google invented in a reference library and if it had been, what would it look like? We need to think laterally and creatively and stop being proprietorial about ideas.

Good words but is it meant? Show me the epochal, world-changing innovation that came as a result of government initiative? There are none – government doesn’t do creative, creative is scary. Government does “how big a piece of elastoplast do you want, sir?” The big changes – the massive innovations – have been in the private sector. And that is where future innovation will be driven from – unless, of course, you cut it off early by following the ideas implied in ‘slide one’!

Slide 4: We need to think too in terms of the natural lifespan of ideas, economies, and institutions. A process of growing, flourishing, maturing, expiring and recreating is something that adds vitality and vigour to our social, physical and economic fabric. Shouldn't we think of regeneration as the process of nurturing and assisting that constant change?

Now we’re getting silly. The “natural lifespan of ideas” – you mean that suddenly the ‘idea’ of freedom or philanthropy or equality suddenly ceases to have relevance? Or is it the idea of ‘evolution’ or ‘gravity’ that stops working? Maybe this is a call for creative destruction – for recognising that times change, that things are not set in stone. But did you say that in 1985 when they started the second round of pit closures? Did you say that in 1990s Birmingham as they watched their manufacturing industry move to China? Probably not. The sentiment of this slide is with us – people are getting used to the end of ‘jobs for life’ and for the personal responsibility that goes with that situation. But there’s still many who think the job of regeneration is simply to stop change happening – at least while it affects me!

Slide 5: There's a difference between that organic, assisted process and the directed, programme-driven forms of regeneration we've seen in the last three decades. The role of institutions should become one of nurturing and supporting what already exists and enabling it to grow, not one of constantly imposing grand strategies and plans.

And what precisely “already exists” on Seacroft Estate in Leeds? Or for that matter on a hundred other estates across the country? A culture of benefit dependency. A world where drink, fags and sex set the boundaries of life and the person in work is an exception rather than the norm. What are we nurturing here? What are we giving to these people? Have the schools done their job or are the teachers just a combination of childminder and prison warden? We – politicians, press, ‘experts’ – get shown round regeneration schemes. You’re being fooled – this is the East German tour not a real picture of the problem.

Slide 6: That means rethinking our approach to funding programmes, targets and accountability and creating new, hybrid organisations that bring together those who have a common interest in improving places and communities. Nobody has a monopoly of ideas and nobody should have a monopoly of implementation.

Much though it pains me to say so, we need to stop thinking at all about programmes, targets and schemes. Rather than sinking further into the collective groupthink we should consider the individuals – the young girl with three kids from two fathers, the lad who can write his name and recognise McDonalds but not much else, the thirtysomething bloke who has spent six of the past ten years in prison and the rest of the time waiting to go there, the obese 45 year old grandma so addled with drink she barely knows her own children let alone the grandkids. Schemes, institutions, programmes – all the superstructure of regeneration does nothing, has done nothing, for these people. The problem isn’t special programmes but the mainstream programmes of education, health and social care. Oh yes, plus a dreadful, debilitating, divisive and stifling benefits system. And we fund programmes to increase “benefit take-up”!

Lets be clear, I make my living from regeneration – just like a load of other comfortably off, intelligent, caring people living in nice places. There’s lots of lovely conferences, debates, seminars, workshops and sharings of best practice. And mostly it’s just an excuse to talk – little better than me sounding off on my blog here.

But let’s be clear. We have failed. Yes, you, me, Julian Dobson, Nick Falk, the Prince of Wales, Michael Heseltine, John Denham. We’ve failed. And we are going to fail again. And again. And again. Until we remember that salvation comes one soul at a time. Until we remember that people aren’t just some spit in a pool called “community”. Until we put an end to groupthink – to the crazy collectivist idea. To fancy dan chattering class nonsense like “sustainability” or “socially useful jobs”.

Until we give that girl, that lad, that bloke, that grandma some hope, some reason to do something different with their lives. A reason to smile, work, detox or slim. A reason to live not just exist.

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Why "food security" is just protectionism rebadged.

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This exploration of so-called “food security” starts with an article in the Sunday Telegraph by Bee Wilson.

“Will we soon be stockpiling canned mandarin segments and clawing one another’s eyes out over powdered milk in Tesco?”

Apparently “food campaigners” have been begging us to face up to this dark future for some time now. According to the doyen of such food campaigners, Tim Lang, Professor of Scaring the Pants Off Us About Food at City University suggests (according to Bee) that we are “sleepwalking”:

“…into a future where our food security was likely to be undermined, whether by natural disasters, rising fuel costs, climate change or the massive pressures placed on the global food system by a rising population.”

Be afraid, be very afraid…we are all doomed unless…unless we buy into the food security deal. Which takes us to the prosaic little document entitled “Food 2030” that the former Department for Agriculture has produced. Littered with words like “resilience”, “sustainable” and “healthy” this is where it’s at when it comes to the future strategy for our supply, consumption and attitude towards food. And the big deal is another producer-driven protectionist ramp – “food security”.

“Food 2030” starts (after the sick-making foreword from Gordon Brown) with the usual lecture and an assumption that the “challenges” are solvable through a “more joined up food policy”. Once it has settled down a bit it takes us to a strange, Stalinist world where markets, the creativity and innovation of individual farmers and the choices of consumers are as nothing besides the issue of “food security”.

Suffice it to say I don’t agree. I don’t believe the world is in imminent danger of running short of food and the “food security” argument is about protecting already wealthy farmers, powerful food distributors (aka supermarkets) and the role of bureaucrats in the food and agriculture sector.

In essence “Food 2030” for all its greenery, self-righteous smugness and “consultation” is a proposal to reduce free trade in food, to build protectionist barriers and to direct money to the food industry at the expense of us consumers and those who grow the basic raw produce. Nothing new in any of this, of course, but now it is wrapped in the language of greenery, of sustainability and the saving of the planet. It’s no longer about ensuring our farmers can afford a new Range Rover but about reducing carbon footprints and making us all more healthy (and I’m sure the Range Rover will be a hybrid).

I will be writing about protection in agriculture, the wrongness of geographic designations and the continued capture of food policy by food producers and distributors – mostly to the cost of us consumers. I might even throw in a recipe or two!

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