THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD: CHALLENGE AND RENEWAL

Speaker A: Welcome to the Grimshaw Podcast. You are listening to the fifth series the Resurgent City with your host, Tim Williams.

Speaker B: Hi, uh, this is Tim Williams. I'm your host for the Grimshaw Cities Podcast series. Uh, my guest today is Andrew o', Brien, who's head of the Secretariat of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods. How are you doing, Andrew?

Speaker C: Very well, thank you. It's a nice grey day here in London, as normal. So. Uh.

Speaker B: Well, it does actually. Uh, we do actually, despite the fact I've been here 15 years and I still don't really understand that it rains. We do actually have rain. And uh. Uh, yeah, I know we have weather. We used to say the joke about Australia was that Australia doesn't have weather, it has climate. But I don't think that's true anymore. I think we have defined seasons now and uh, so we're on the edge now. We're into spring now. Um, are we, or is autumn? It's because I'm a northerner transplanted to the south. But I'm not going to take any of that out by the way. I think it's authentic. So, uh, anyway, so I'm delighted you could join us today because I wanted to talk about the report, uh, and the inquiry you've been, uh, involved in actually into the performance, if you like, of neighborhoods, uh, in the uk, uh, disadvantaged neighborhoods and what to do about them. So could you say a bit about the commission and what it is and how it came about?

Speaker C: Yeah. So, uh, the commission was set up in September 2024. Um, and essentially we're funded by an organization called Local Trust, which was itself funded by the National Lottery, which is a big funder in the voluntary and community sector here in the uk. And the program they were running called the Big Local Program, was coming to an end and they wanted to investigate, well, what could we. What was next, what was next for neighborhood interventions and kind of community building, uh, once that program had finished and we were given this mandate to look into how you could support the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in England. And we're chaired by, uh, Baron. Hillary Armstrong will be no stranger to you, Tim, uh, and sends her best as well. Um, and uh, she had been a Labour Cabinet minister and uh, had also been responsible for a lot of the neighbourhood renewal work and tackling social exclusion had happened under the New Labour government. So, uh, alongside uh, a mix of commissioners from local government, from academia, from, ah, the voluntary sector, from community leaders themselves. Um, we've been doing, you know, visits around the country, evidence sessions, reviewing the policies and previous Interventions that worked. Um, and we've done sort of two big pieces of work. One was called Think Neighbourhoods, which came out last year in March. Um, and that was making the case for why we should look at things at neighborhood level and broad terms. And I mean, I'm sure you'll know this but, you know, we look at a lot of issues as national problems, unemployment or ill health or crime, ah, and antisocial behavior, but they're actually quite heavily concentrated in a few places. Uh, and a place that has, you know, high levels of crime will often also have bad, high, ah, levels of ill health. It'll also have high levels of unemployment. So when you actually look at problems, you really need to focus on those kind of clusters of disadvantage where there's multiple overlapping problems. So that was last year. We sort of make the case for that. And as a consequence of that report and others as well, we saw development of something called Pride in place, which is a. Well now a 5.8 billion pound program by the UK government which is looking to tackle, uh, disadvantage, uh, for some of the most deprived areas of England. And it's giving £20 million each to communities to administer themselves in collaboration with their local authorities to um, do whatever they like really, but within, uh, within the goal of trying to invest in things, both capital and programs that can help to improve outcomes there. And our last piece of work, which came out in January this year, it ah, was our sort of main report of a calling it called no Shortcuts, where essentially we're trying to take that work and say, well, okay, that's a great start. You know, we do need to rebuild social and civic infrastructure, but we also need a pipeline of neighborhood improvement and renewal. And what could that look like and how does it bring public services together, the economy, skills, et cetera, and brings it all together. So that's roughly what we've been up to.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, no Shortcuts, which is available, uh, online, uh, and is actually called no Shortcuts Towards a National Strategy for Neighborhood Recovery. So the first piece of work was like lots of kind of analysis to some degree. Uh, and then this is more the strategy piece, but kind of just let's talk a bit about neighborhoods because a lot of people listening, uh, just to reassure them in a way, although this is actually about, I was going to say British, it's largely English data and our experience in England of, you know, disadvantage at a neighbourhood level. I think that the analysis that you've done and the strategy you've come up with would be of wider interest, uh, internationally, because I think you've just, you know, you're looking at how neighbourhoods might recover. And although there are, you know, a unique kind of English and sometimes very local, uh, circumstances, there's some general principles at work here and I think the whole thing is very commendable. Uh, by the way, I just want to make sure that people, whatever you do, go away and have a look at this work, um, in terms of. In terms of, you know, um, I was going to say to you, what's the problem that you were set up to try and solve in a. Say, you know, I. E. Why is this such an important issue? What is disadvantage in the UK and is it very spatial?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, I mean, there's a few bits in there. I mean, I think, you know, first of all, what is disadvantage? Um, I think there's been a lot more work. I think, historically, I guess if we were doing this podcast 10, 15 years ago, I think we'd be firmly focused on economic disadvantage. We talk about income levels, we talk about maybe deprivation. Um, but I think the, the kind of debate has evolved and I still think the economy and economic disadvantage is a. Is a key challenge. But again, Local Trust, who, who sort of supported our work, had done a lot of analysis, uh, identifying what they call doubly disadvantaged. So you've got places. So, so the most, you know, this, you know, the most deprived areas, those places you would go to and you would feel that sense of decline and the loss of services and the loss of economic actors, lot of anchor institutions. If you go to those places. Generally, there's two things. One, yes, there's low levels of economic investment, income, employment, but then they also have a low level of what we call social infrastructure. So this is your kind of community centers, this is your clubs, cafes, uh, pubs, um, it's sports and culture and other artistic institutions. And if you lack those, it sort of creates a bit of a feedback loop essentially between the two. Because what happens is that people become isolated from each other, they lack that support network around them. And then when you're already dealing with quite a high level of disadvantage. So, for example, I mean, we think it's just easy. Well, not easy, but, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, just, just put your kid into university, get them a degree, get them a job, that'll. That'll solve the employment outcome. Well, yeah, but if you've been in an area where there's historically been high levels of unemployment and actually there's quite a lot of side routes, you can get pushed down. Whether that's just apathy, uh, and long term structure employment, whether that's crime and social behavior, whether there's other kind of negative kind of social activities, um, you need a very strong network of people around you to resist those pressures. And if you don't, that um, you're going to struggle to try to change those economic fortunes. And, and that's where you kind of get the interaction between the social and the economic. Um, and I think, to be kind of really honest about it, I think why we were set up in this neighborhood was not just to do the usual, which was usually to say, oh, if you want to improve this advantage, you know, economic investment, build more infrastructure, uh, you know, build light business park, uh, industrial business parks on the peripheries, you know, connect the road network, all that stuff, which is, I don't discount, is really, really important. But we all, we were actually really, really interested in the social and how you build that cultural, civic life as well.

Speaker B: I think this is really an important part of the discussion, Andrew, actually, ah, which is, um, that you've been trying to understand how these places work and to what extent they fail, as it were, to meet certain standards and therefore what are the reasons behind that. And some of them are in the neighborhood and some of them to do with the social capital. You put quite a lot of emphasis on social capital, which is a very interesting international discussion. You know, an American audience will know that there's, uh, been quite a lot of discussion about social capital and bowling alone and all this kind of stuff. And then you've got the argument about the broader framework and the economy, uh, within which this particular neighborhood sits and the link between the two. But what I like about your work and the emphasis of the whole report is on positivity is on things, uh, that you can do. Because there's too many of us being in the kind of urban, new generation, urban transformation world that say we've seen these same neighborhoods, you know, fail tests over decades and there's nothing to be done. Right. And instead of which they do kind of useful, but sometimes bouncing off these places like you say, you know, we'll set up an industrial site, you know, five kilometers away and expect people to benefit from the jobs that are going there without doing anything else. So I like your positivity, but before we get to the positive things that you're recommending, what I also like and I think is really good, you've got eight pillars of neighborhood recovery. But that also suggests that you've been Working out how these places work, fail or succeed. And that therefore these pillars are really important. Um, and I've got them in front of me and I think they are quite persuasive by the way. I think they're very interesting. Um, you've got foundational, uh, pillars, you've got transformational pillars, you've got sustainable pillars. Um, so I'm gonna talk about that. I just wanna go back one step. It's my fault. Uh, for people internationally. Give us a flavor of some of the condition of some of the uh, neighborhoods that we're talking about. Just to position it for people. What kind of place are we talking about? And what are the kind of indicators of relative deprivation that you wor.

Speaker C: Rear boat? Yeah. I mean if in terms of the places anyone knows geography of England, uh, we're overwhelmingly talking about the north of England. Uh, and we're talking about I think sort of almost 70% of the places that neighborhoods we've identified and we identified 613 of what we call mission critical neighborhoods. So these are the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. Roughly populations of a few thousand in each one. So you're looking at sort of a million people roughly, um, who we think are living in the most advantage overwhelming the north of England. Two types really. 1 de industrialized towns and the peripheries of de industrialized cities. Um, and you know again Tim, you'll know from, from kind of your, your home country. I mean the, the UK has gone through quite a rapid, well historically quite rapid. I mean it probably doesn't feel very rapid people living there, but it's gone through quite a significant de. Industrialization basically. Um, and, and, and a lot of the towns you visit. So, um, you know, um, example that we use in the report, um, you know, if you go to Wakefield, ah, one of the estates on there, they're not seeing the estate there. Um, you know, it used to have um, a power plant, um, that was essentially serving energy for the industrial users in local area. And then when those steel mills, everything else closed around it, the power plant became pointless and it just shut down. But nothing's replaced it. So the whole estate was built around serving a singular economic purpose. And that's what happened. And the similar, the other example, and it's fascinating guess from an Australian perspective because of course your whole country is built around the coastal line and actually the closer you are to the coast, it feels the more vibrant and more economically developed you are. Um, in, in the UK it's sort of the opposite actually. And coastal areas have tended to be significantly disadvantaged. So, you know, you're talking about. I mean, Blackpool is probably the uh, the kind of the most quoted example. And we obviously identify a lot of challenges in Blackpool in the report. Visited it a couple of times. Um, you know, these are places that used to be hubs of fishing or seaside tourism. And as the UK has moved away from those sectors, economically, um, they've really, really suffered. I think that's the key point in terms of, I think, looking at this kind of more carefully. I think when I came into it, like a lot of people, you sort of come in with a. Not a fatalism, but a sort of, okay, here we go again. You know, I was reading reports in the 1930s where you're talking about depressed areas and development areas. They're the same places in many cases that we're talking about in this report. So you start to think, oh, there must be some natural reason as to why these places are the way they are. And I think the conclusion I've come to actually is the opposite, which is there's no natural reason. It's just these are policy and economic choices that we made. I mean, take Spain, for example, or, uh, France. You know, they've done a lot of work to preserve their fishing industries. We didn't choose to do that. And as a consequence, you go to some place like Grimsby, for example, um, and there's quite a lot of economic deprivation. Um, you know, similarly, industry, steel, chemicals, others, these are things that we've chosen not to develop. And as consequence, those places that were linked to that have not done as well. So I think there's any natural reason why these places shouldn't be economically and socially vibrant. But what they have shown is that first of all, two things. One, clearly, if you don't build an economic strategy that helps those places, they will decline. But second of all, and come back to what you said earlier about sort of just locating jobs and industries near places. If you don't build up the social capital of places, they won't access the jobs, even if they're right next door to them. There was a really interesting report my colleague Ross did called the Missing Links last year, and we worked together on that. And, you know, you can take places where there's neighborhoods where one neighborhood receives quite significant economic investment. Maybe a new factory or warehouse has opened up there, or, you know, shopping center, and the neighborhoods next door to it won't necessarily benefit at all because they're just so isolated, they wouldn't even think to apply for the jobs or have the skills to apply for the jobs that have been created just down the road from them. So, you know, we. You need a much more deliberative connection between neighborhoods and your economic strategy. But I'm, I guess I come out of this Tim, more of an optimist about what could be done, uh, than a pessimist, which surprised me because I'm actually quite naturally pessimistic and cynical.

Speaker B: Right. Well, I, I was quite surprised by it. And in fact, one of the forms by surprise took was delight that you actually praised a previous program that I, I can't claim much credit to, but I was involved in the department that was in charge of it, which is the, uh, back of the day was in its peak, which is the New Deal for communities. And, uh, this is, by the way, for those people internationally that don't know, this is a kind of big program. I want to talk about the money actually, a little bit. Uh, this is a big program. Some of the areas that we're talking about, I think there were 30, am I right? 39 focus areas for the New Deal community across England. Um, and what the review that found at the end of the program in 2010 was that it actually had had some significant successes and I think 32 out of the 36 indicators, um, and they were things like, um, employment, health, uh, economic activity, things are pretty cool. Uh, they'd actually seen some progress on. And this quite surprised me because I'd worked in government and I'd got used to a slight negativity that, you know, we take the horse to water, but will the horse drink? And, you know, are we making a difference? And looking back, it looks to, uh, Andrew, as though a government program did make a difference. Uh, and if you add into it some of the broader things that the Blair government was doing around anti poverty and economic activity, you know, as national programs, you report that there was significant progress made in terms of employability and even in some of these hard to reach areas. So you look back and think some of these programs did some good work.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I think New Deal for Communities has got very, very strong evidence base for it. I mean, we're very fortunate. Again, Hillary, our chair, uh, Baroness Armstrong, she, um, insisted that there was a rigorous independent evaluation of the program. And she's big on evaluation and data. And, you know, there was a huge piece of work done by, uh, Sheffield Hallam University and the department to investigate what happened. And it wasn't perfect everywhere. I mean, I think there's certainly stronger areas. I would say, you know, Looking at crime and ancestral behavior, uh, and employment outcomes, I think it was probably a lot stronger. I think health was somewhere which, you know, I think they would say at the time, and you probably, you know, have experiences yourself in government. There wasn't that sense of dealing with neighborhoods. Sorry. Health, being a kind of population level issue was much more seen as a kind of hospital medicalized challenge, which is still, is, I mean there's still a huge amount of that in the uk. We haven't by any means fixed any of that, but I think we recognize now the kind of social determinants of health, as we would call them and there's a much more of a focus on health, but there's some very, very strong impact. And also as I mentioned, the big local program which Local Trust ran, which was a very small version and slightly more community led than the new dual communities, also had some, you know, our early evaluation of it has generated some significant results. Um, and there's also, you know, schemes in Europe as well, which we've reviewed. Um, I think the overwhelming sort of message we've been trying to give government over the past couple of years is, you know, we do know what works roughly. I mean obviously implementation is always different on the ground and there are always challenges. Uh, and also we have to deal, I guess in the UK context, particularly with the impact of the kind of cuts in funding to local government and public services over many years, which has hollowed out some of the kind of partners that you would want to work with in those areas. But, but that to one side, in broad terms, we know, if you put long term patient investment into these places, if you build community engagement and participation in the identification of how that money should be spent, if you use that to then mobilise and leverage local people to take action to improve their area and you focus on those foundational aspects, things like the social infrastructure of communities, the place they meet, the spaces that they share, building public services which meet those most pressing challenges. Uh, and you connect that with a, uh, pathway towards developing the skills that people might need on employment. Um, if you do those, those things, you know, you will make progress and you can significantly improve areas. It's just, um, you've got to be patient. It takes a long time. It's not a linear process. I mean, one of the things I've been saying to government for some time is you'll actually flush out more problems at the beginning than you anticipate. You're going into an area, even an area you might think is really disadvantaged. You will find even more problems in that area once you start really digging under the surface. And you have to not be put off by that and sort of double down and keep going. And if you keep, if you keep going, you will make progress. But I think it's easy to say, yeah, I mean I'm not a politician, I'm going to get elected in five years time. Uh, and I also, you know, don't have uh, a department with 20 or 30 responsibilities like the MHC or Housing and Communities Local Government Department does have in the uk. Um, however, just looking at the data and objectively, um, yeah, we should, we, we have enough to get cracking and to give the government some credit. I think with the Pride in Place program, they have started to do something. I think though, as you touch on Tim, in our report, we call it Towards a National Strategy for Neighborhood Recovery. Because I don't think the strategy is quite there. I think we've got some really interesting programs, but we haven't really got a strategy and that's what we probably need to crack on with.

Speaker B: It's interesting. Uh, I agree with all that. I just want to give you one, uh, from your report, Andrew, that might uh, really interest people about what had happened in the 2000s, uh, between 2001 and 2011 in some of the harder, more disadvantaged areas of the uk. The various programs at work in that era had in the worst performing 10% of neighborhoods, uh, the employment rose from 31% to 54% which is a dramatic gain. Right. And I love your conclusion which I'm going to quote from you. I never do this in a podcast. I'm going to quote, by the way, you're excellently written and rather well, uh, researched report. We must believe that recovery is possible for too often policymakers and the media discuss disadvantaged communities as if there is nothing that can be done to help, to help them and that they can never be fixed. We cannot accept such defeatism. And I think that's great and not just a moral statement because uh, as I intimated you've come up with some intelligent strategies I think about what will make a difference. I think the question mark we'll come back to is there's always money required for some of these things and the government I think at the moment either thinks it hasn't got enough money because I think it's panicking about money, or doesn't quite give the priority to this program and potential, um, strategy for these areas that I think it should and I'm hoping it still will. And I Think there is some sign that it is listening to you. I think the pride in place thing was partly, you know, come out of your work. I believe so well done on that. I do think they listened to and they might, I think, go more ambitiously towards this direction, which I think they should. And just for those who are, ah, know about some of the history or are going to ask about it, I mean in the previous government there was a kind of attempt at understanding the spatial and regional inequality in the UK through leveling up.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: And it was the, it was the right idea. Uh, but they didn't. And I quite like the idea of leveling up, but they didn't have the resources or strategy behind it, I think. Is that true, Andrew?

Speaker C: Ah, completely. I mean one of the things going down a bit of a rabbit hole. Uh, one of the things I was reading over the Christmas before we were drafting this report or as we were drafting this report, was the employment white paper in 1944. And I think what really came out from that was just this complete total political commitment to not repeating the Great Depression. And you know, there's some. I think I used a quote at the beginning of it saying, you know, um, the government will not accept, uh, the demoralization of communities, uh, through essentially, um, you know, prolonged unemployment, um, and lack of economic investment, uh, and said, you know, I think the phrase is the corporate life for these communities will not, cannot be sacrificed. Um, you know, we've built places, we've got to stick with them. And I think leveling up was a classic example of where I think, I think in 44, I think they absolutely knew the scale of the challenge of what they were trying to do and how difficult it would be, but they were ruthlessly committed to that. I think leveling up was an example of. It sounded good and I think there was some interesting analysis in the leveling up white paper. I think has got some very commendable elements to it, but I think they just did not realize. I would probably, if I was being really harsh on this government, I'd say they probably still don't realize. I think policymakers in this country still don't realize just how long the road back is going to be. And as you said, Tim, you know, how much investment and time needs to be put into it. Um, ah, but it starts with that, that political will to act really because, um, um, ultimately the factors and forces which have led to the decline, in my opinion, personal opinion, not necessarily commission opinion, my personal opinion, uh, that have led to those declines has Been the politics, uh, to some extent it's been a sense of these places are not important anymore. Um, and you know, we're going to focus on something else. Um, and I think leveling up was a view of oh well we should do something about that. And I think when we opened the bonnet on the car and went, oh my God, this is require, you know, much more, you know, the state having a much more directive economic strategy, a lot of investments, it then sort of devolved into, well, let's put a few hanging baskets in the high street. You know, let's, let's. Because that's easy, right? I mean, yeah, and I think, I think this government, again to give it some credit, I think is not interested in the. I mean obviously like all governments of course is interested in the cosmetics and it wants people to feel bright, better and happier about the places they live in. But I think it is genuinely interested in a much more fundamental transformation. But I would say you're absolutely right that you know, the Pride in Place program, I mean £6 billion for 300 or so, so it's 289 areas over 10 years sounds like an awful lot of money and it is an awful lot of money. Um, but it's not going to fix all the public services in these places and it's certainly not going to create economic strategy. So there's a lot more that needs to come in behind that. And I think that's, that's the challenge. It's getting the rhetoric to beat the reality.

Speaker A: You are listening to the fifth series of the Grimshaw podcast, the Resurgent City with your host Tim Williams.

Speaker B: I think also the um, and ah, not to be uh, deflationist about it as it were, but the, you know, there was a very big uh, program in Germany to balance up Germany, East Germany and West Germany and the kinds of resources that was required to do that were way, way in advance of what we're talking about at the moment in, in the uk however, the bit that I think they didn't do well is the stuff that you're talking about. Uh, so I think that they actually, it's interesting, I never thought of it before, but half the German experiment is a good thing, which he would support, and half of it was actually not successful at marrying this kind of new economic national energy thing or you know, momentum, uh, uh, with local development sort of projects. So the bottom up and the top down work together. And I think that was done enough. They got the kind of national economic settings and the idea of investment into the area. That's great. But I think there wasn't enough leverage going on to make sure that you anchored a lot of this. And so they lost a lot of people to the West Germany m. West German employment market. I was going to say, um, you've

Speaker C: got to do it right. I mean, I think just on that point, there's a lot of, um. We're very good in the UK I think sometimes of sort of, uh. A lot of press releases and a lot of media hype, particularly in sort of in the country internally about various projects. But your East German example is very, very opposite because I think essentially you've seen, you know, ingrained disadvantage in the north and in parts of the Midlands and in coastal communities. And also, I mean, we didn't. You. You hit the other head at the beginning. If we did on Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, those places would have been. I think it had an even more kind of shift, uh, towards particularly large parts of Wales and. And kind of the deindustrialized elements of Scotland as well. Um, and, um. So, you know, this is. Is, you know, this is a sort of. In a way, if you were to put a kind of diagonal line across. I think they still. Sometimes you get maps of it. This kind of. It's like the sort of the old Dane law, as it were. You know, the areas of Anglo Saxons. Yeah.

Speaker B: Northeast to southwest, northeast to southwest.

Speaker C: If you were to cut that, um, you actually, I think, you know, Scotland, Wales, northeast, northwest, you know, and bits of the West Midlands and that up a bit would. Would all be. Would be quite considerable there. But in. In East Germany, over the course of the renovation, they spent the equivalent of €2 trillion, um, on. On kind uh, of reintegr. Integrating those bits together. And there were special tax mechanisms and investment. And you're right, not all that money was spent well. Although what I would say is to take half your country, which was essentially Sovietized and very corruptly, difficultly governed, and even shift it into some kind of form of, um, progress is a hell of achievement. So if you think that in broad terms that means they're spending roughly sort of in the UK context, equivalent to 25 and 30 billion a year in regional investment and re. Industrialization programs. Everything else around that we have never spent in any single year more than a tenth of that results. So I think, uh, again, it's not just a money problem. I think to be honest, you probably could have done a lot. A lot, as you mentioned, a lot of what East Germany could have achieved probably could have Been done for half the resource, but yeah, yeah. Still, I mean, the gap, there's a resources gap, right.

Speaker B: Massive. Yeah. So. And we haven't cracked, but I think. No, but I think that your report, uh, is good because it helps say that the, the money can be well spent.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Uh, because we've got good examples of what even limited resources have been able to do. And I want to go there next because you've got some good case studies, some good, like, inspirational initiatives in the report from various towns up and down the country. Any come to mind that you'd like to sort of point people towards?

Speaker C: Yeah, there's a few. I mean, um, so one I know that, uh, the commissioners were particularly struck by was someone called Lawrence Weston, uh, in Bristol in the southwest. So, um, it's Bristol itself, the city is quite prosperous. But the peripheral periphery of Bristol, a lot of it, again related to the dockyards. Everything else used to be there is actually very, very disadvantaged. This to our other main point, which is, you know, need to look much more carefully, not just go, oh, well, that's a rich city. So it's probably fine. There will be these pockets. And Lawrence Western is one of those challenging areas. Um, and what they've essentially did was develop their own neighborhood plan, their own local plan. Um, and uh, they did the hard yards of surveying local residents, understanding kind of what some of the challenges were. And the first thing they discovered was that what they wanted was a decent supermarket in the area. Because actually what they had was, um, a lot of kind of convenience shops and which were very, very pricey. And I think, you know, people might go, what's that got to do with neighborhood improvement? Well, the point is they felt completely isolated from the mainstream of the economy and didn't really feel like anybody cared about them. So working together, they managed to get one of the big supermarket chains to come and locate a supermarket there. And what that did was it opened the door permission, as it were, for the community to go, okay, well, so if we say things, we can actually do something, you know, if we want to get a supermarket, we can get a supermarket. And then the ambition has just skyrocketed from there. And, um, they've actually now got the largest wind turbine, uh, in inland community owned wind turbine in the country, which they built because the local community looked at all the options, were like, well, okay, we've only got a million pounds from this big local program. How are we going to maximize the money from that? And what they did was then use that money to then borrow more Money to build a wind turbine to then pay that, that investment. And when once that's done, you know, tens of thousands of pounds a month will be available to sort of support community level projects and skills. And, and they're now training up and developing an academic uh, apprenticeship program to train up local people in kind of green jobs and um, you know, installing heat pumps and solar panels and all that kind of stuff. Because again that was sort of, there was a view that there's a lot of, of economic opportunity with that in the local area. So it's just a great example of, I think sometimes when it comes to neighborhoods it's not, as I say, it's not a linear process. You kind of got to go with what the community is interested in. And what that showed is you can go from sort of what feels like the very mundane of I want a supermarket where I can get my groceries at a cheap rate to we're going to build one of the biggest wind turbines in the country. We're going to turn this area into a powerhouse of sort of not just energy production, but also creating green skills as well. And it's just, you know, you gotta have confidence and faith in the communities you're working with. I think if you have serious conversations with those people, they will surprise you with the ambition that they can come up with.

Speaker B: I agree with that totally. I think people underestimate the skill and capacity that sometimes can be found at local level. You know, uh, I always tell people that uh, you know, some of the wisest people I've ever met, you know, they left school at 15 and you mustn't ignore these people. And uh, uh, I also love the fact that, fact that not all change projects for an area need to be vastly expensive. They just need to be smart, uh, and appropriate and to build on perhaps existing comparative advantage or local uh, passion and skills and commitment. I mean, so I want to go there next because I'm going to say this. You've got a good, very simple, um, kind of before and after approach to the old approach to neighborhood, ah, renewal. So let's just, just put a line into certain things. You make the case strongly that you don't just need big top centralized programs. You can actually get a lot of mileage and benefit from focusing on the local level. Uh, that doesn't mean that you ignore the strategics uh, out there. You want a big program of small projects or small, uh, focuses on small areas of disadvantage. But it'd be good to have a national program that's well funded for that. But you also look to what can be done to catalyze even better local neighborhoods through some interesting and not necessarily vastly expensive projects. But they make sense. Right, so your old approach would be spreading resources across all communities, I guess too thinly. And you say a new approach would be concentration of resources based on need. Then another old approach would be one. This is a real problem. Anybody listening? Everybody has been through this one off programs and interventions, a series of separate sort of ideas that don't cohere in a coherent long term strategy. And you say, and I want to talk about this a bit more step by step approach through building, bridging and bonding social capital through community led social infrastructure. So let's have a look at that. Right, so you play a lot of emphasis, Andrew, on the building of social capital or indeed the strengthening of social capital that's already there now. You know, there's been an international discussion about different kinds of social capital. What are you talking about, bud?

Speaker C: So, um, when we, when we started, I think we had a view that there would be a lot of bonding social capital as we would call it. So that's the kind of relationships between different people in a place, uh, and their sense of connection to each other. So, you know, again, uh, you know, making a, a wild stab in the dark. As a Welshman, I'm presuming you're a bit of a rugby fan and it might be that, you know, um, you know, I'm also a bit of a rugby fan as well. So it might be. That's kind. You can bond, we could bond together over that, that, that uh, that, that shared love of uh, of a sport. Um, and I think the view we had at the beginning was you're going to go into these places and find that there's not, you know, this because of the decline and the disadvantage, there's going to be a lot of sort of apathy to the area and people are going to feel very connected to each other in their streets. Ah. And again, what we found is the opposite actually. In many cases the bonding social capital is quite strong. Um, what we do need is that bridging social capital in particular. I mean you need that bonding capital as well because that's the organizational glue that enables people to, you know, know to do things. You know, it's my ability to knock on your door, Tim, and say, oh, let's do a litter pick and let's clean up the local park or something. You know, we need to be bonded enough for me to do that. But the bridging social capital. So that's your ability to connect with people outside your social group. So let's say you and I, Tim, live on the same street. Um, but you know, there's a big town, you know, or city, you know, a few miles away. You'll be surprised how few people from that neighborhood will go there actually and will see any of the opportunities and a lot of the community work that we've seen. Uh, I'm thinking, um, to give an example, we were in Wolverhampton. So again, this sort of used to be part of the kind of the industrialized belt, the black country would call it. You know, a lot of coal, a lot of, you know, steel, metalworking, other things, not steel actually, just general metalworking, ironworking. But anyway, um, a lot of industry. Um, we went to something ah, called the Scotlands estate there. And um, there's a sort of group of mums, gornzel, ah, the pink ladies who uh, go around and they sort of do a lot of kind of community organizing. And when you listen to the stories, um, they've had some fantastic results when it comes to employment. Uh, and when you listen to stories, what happened was that mums and families who sort of were interacting with these community groups, they never met anybody from outside their social circle. So when they started to meet other people and they realized, oh, maybe I could actually take a job in childcare or maybe I could be a nurse or maybe I could do this. Just that ability to see different people and get examples and experiences of things that can happen rather than just narrowly focusing on your own family where maybe things haven't been easy, maybe there's been intergenerational unemployment, maybe there's been drug or alcohol abuse, maybe there's been other challenges. You just can't see beyond that. Um, that bridging social capital I actually think is the dynamism you need really to transform a lot of those places. Because it just gives people the inspiration and the opportunity to think that things can be different and better than they otherwise would be and leveraging different kind of experiences and skills that people require. So the bonding, social capital is. You can't proceed without it. But I think, think to my surprise, in a positive way, I think there's a lot of bonding already there. People feel very committed to and connected to each other at a neighborhood level, uh, and they recognize their estate or their town or small village, they'll feel a connection to that. But what they lack is the ability to often think, okay, well how could it be different? How could it transform what Could I do differently? And that's when you need the bridging social capital to really, really be there. And I think we need to invest particularly in that aspect.

Speaker B: So I agree with it. I was going to say violently. That's not quite right. But we're in violent agreement, uh, about it. I think when I first discovered the terms bonding and bridging capital, they explained my universe to me because, I mean, I grew up in uh, a mining village in South Wales and you know that cliche, the first person in the family to go to university and I, uh, left and it was my first 18 years were the happiest experience almost I've ever had. They were just incredibly supportive. Supportive community that valued my learning and supported me, you know, beyond my family. It was this extraordinary positive place to go up. But, uh, there wasn't. I was one of the examples of bridging capital and I was leaving, uh, you know, that is that uh, it's really vital for the success of a place to have both access to as much of both as possible. Bonding capital is critical, but bridging capital. And the good news about bridging capital is that lots of people with bonding capital can acquire bridging capital through programs, projects, activities, learning. And I think that's the positive. I want to say to you that what I like about what you've written is that you've got, uh. I think you say consciously that you've got a theory of change, uh, and that too much of the money that's gone into urban renewal in the uk, I think over decades, has often not had a good theory of change behind it. I think you say it one point, point, um, that one of the challenges we've identified is the lack of a clear vision or strategy for neighbourhood recovery across government, civil society and the private sector. Government is often developing policies in a vacuum without a clear understanding of how to deliver change. Right. So it's pretty important that, you know, the governments that we have work out what the change required is and then how to get it. And I think too often we've thrown a bit of money at some of these places partly to make us feel good at the center, actually, that we're doing it. But your point is that we kind of have a good idea of what works actually, and um, we should focus on that. You do put a lot of emphasis on building up of recognizing bonding capital and working with its kind of local leadership, I guess, to some degree, but also building up bridging capital. The whole idea of social capital is pretty critical to your neighbourhood strategy approach. Is that a fair summary?

Speaker C: Absolutely. So, I mean, we got to. I mean, we, we call it a kind of staircase model, or if you're kind of really crude, if you're being really crude, it's also. It's sort of three steps, but repeated and sort of overlapping with each other. But in broad terms, I think where we got things wrong is first of all, we start with economic and we just go, oh, well, uh, the reason why these places disadvantage because they lack jobs. Okay, well, let's just locate a load of jobs nearby or let's build something locally nearby. And then as you quite really say, Tim, you build something and then nobody from the local area gets employed there. And I've been to a few areas where there are some wonderful gleaming factories or new industrial complexes. Um, or there even might be. No, take Manchester, for example. You've got the media city and everything else like that. You know, some fantastic cultural and civic spaces created, but they just don't ripple out. Um, so, you know, we're starting often from the wrong lens. And I guess our approach is first of all, you know, starting with the social infrastructure. Ultimately, it's the people that we're trying to help in those places. There's a geographical element, as you say, you know, um, you know, a spatial element of inequality, but it's the people in there. So how do you help the people? And that starts with the social capital. It starts with that bonding, that connection, um, strong families, the strong communities that people need. And then, as you say, it's the bridging capital. It's that ability to kind of connect themselves with opportunities and ideas and things beyond that. But then you need to leverage that to something else. And that's the next phase, which is about public services and, you know, with all the will in the world. I mean, you, you know, your, your personal story to me is a great example of this, right, which is that, you know, you could have had a great bonding, you know, uh, opportunity, and maybe, maybe you had some bridging capital, maybe you'd have thought, I would really like to do learning and develop my, my thinking on politics or economics or sociology or whatever, but if you didn't have the access to decent education, higher education, secondary school education, you wouldn't got anywhere with that. Um, so you need, you need those institutions around you, and again, you need to invest in those at the neighborhood level. Um, and again, another area on the negative side, I guess, is looking at things like policing and health as well, where, you know, actually what we've seen in a lot of these areas of retreat. Retreat. The state has retreated from some of those most disadvantaged areas because they're quite expensive to operate in and it's kind of agglomerated services much further away from neighborhoods. And you know, the most depressing examples often I find are, ah, you know, there are some communities we visit where, you know, you've got to travel for an hour, two hours just to get an A level somewhere. I mean that's sort of an intermediate.

Speaker B: And an A level is, is a, is a school, is a school credential.

Speaker C: Yeah. It's not universal degree. It's sort of something you should get when you're roughly about sort of sort of 17, 18 years old. Um, uh, so it's, you know, it's not the highest level qualification but you're traveling a long time to get there, so then you need to use that. But again, if you just locate public services in the area, like take for example a school. One of the challenges that schools often have is the lack of buy in from the community in question to participate in some of the change that you're looking to achieve. So that's where you need that baseline of social capital to make those public services work effectively and then link people together. And then you can start thinking about economic opportunities. Once you've got people who've got, you know, decent levels of skills and found educational, uh, kind of skills like literacy. Literacy, they have good qualifications, they need, you know, decent level of health, decent uh, level of transportation, then if you build economic opportunities in these places, they can actually benefit from those economic opportunities. And it is a bit more patient. I mean it's, it's easy to build a, you know, a business park and just locate it somewhere. It is harder to do what we're saying. But if you want people in that neighborhood benefit from the business park, you've got to start from the social to the public services, then into the economic development. And that's kind of the staircasing model we're talking about, uh, through the report.

Speaker B: I think, I think that's very good. I think also you kind of nail. There's a simple binary that needs to be brought together which is people and place.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: And sometimes we've tried place stuff without the people stuff and sometimes we've tried people stuff without the place stuff. And we've got to try and bring these things together. I would like you to say a little bit about your eight pillars of neighborhood recovery because I think it's a really compelling part of It. I know we can't do too much detail on the air now, but if you can say a bit about. You split them into foundational, transformational and sustainable.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Could you say a bit about the pillars of neighbourhood recovery?

Speaker C: Yeah. So, I mean in broad terms the foundational elements are looking at things like uh, the kind of capacity of the community to organize itself, uh, and feelings of safety and security. Basically the foundational elements of neighbourhood renewal are getting people Giving uh, people the sense that it's. That they have the tools they need to make things better and it's not a waste of their time and that they have the security and confidence in it, that they can proceed to organize themselves and to develop programs and policies that can. Can really improve their area. So that's the foundational pillar. Then you've got transformational, which is. Mostly connects to public services and it's sort of. Once you've built that kind of social organizing capability, um, you know, how do you connect that in with you know, the key outcomes on health skills, um, on um. Sort of. Yeah, sort of broader, uh, educational attainment, transport, etc. How do you connect people back into those kind of local uh, economies? Um. And that's where the public service element I think is qu. Important quite critical. And then the sustainability element with it, which is how do you leverage in the economic opportunity to kind of revenue over time. And you know, we have examples of. You know, again, um. There's a great example in Gloucester which uh, again pods me the state which we visited, which is, you know, again, Gloucester. People who might know the UK might go, oh gosh, it's really leafy, it's lovely there. I mean, you know, Gloucester's lovely place to go, but the estate on the periphery is quite significantly challenged. And um, what they were able to do is um. There was a motorway being built, I think under New Labour. Tim actually, um, and I think John Prescott and others got the Highways Agency to essentially work with areas, in many cases identify where there might be local economic opportunities that could benefit those places. And in the case of this uh, this motorway they were building, uh, they decided that they were going to build a kind, um, of service station, a sort of stopping point on the motorway, uh, quite near to this estate. Um, and. And you know, the developers working with the community created a new service station which actually I think it's second or third best service station now in the country or something. But it basically uh, it has a. It generates local produce so it sports local businesses. They sell their stuff in this service station which Gets, you know, millions of people stop off it every year. Um, so it gets quite a lot of footfall. They also have a share of the profits then goes into local area. So you know, it's sort of. Of how do you create those kind of economic opportunities to bring revenue resources back into places? Um, and then I think, you know, those broad, those pillars, those eight pillars kind of interch across those three lenses. So there's some that are very foundational, giving people the skills they need, keeping them safe. The second, the kind of transformational, it's getting the public service outcomes, getting people to be in a position where they are able to get the jobs and the opportunities that they require. And then the last element is, you know, how do you get the economic investment and the revenue in to sustain this stuff? Because as you know, Tim, it's not just something you can do in a one off off. You know, this is decades and decades and decades and you need to build income streams that can help these places for years to come.

Speaker B: That's. I want to talk about that because I'm very interested in the um, kind of asset, uh, development side of what you're talking about. And I completely agree that, you know, the sustainable side of this is that you. And the cliche, you know, you give somebody a fishing rod so they can effectively do their own economic activity and fish themselves rather than be given the gift of fish. You know that. And I agree with all that completely. I was just going to ask you dig a little deeper on the. So foundational we've talked uh, quite a lot about. But it's. For example, if you've got a lot of crime in your area, you know, it does. We really do need the police to help clean up some of this stuff. In certain hotspot areas, you've got capacity building. Yes. And I want to come back to that. Community leadership. You actually talked about something like creating a new institution which is like a national college of community leadership. That sounds doable. Do you think, uh, there's something. Is there some interest in that?

Speaker C: There is some interest in it and I'm hopeful that you know, obviously do a report like this, you're not expecting all your recommendations, um, get picked up. But I would say that community leadership aspect, um, we talk about Nightingale skill centers in there, uh, about creating foundational skills in communities. I think that's really been shocking to people as well. Just the low level of foundational qualifications, um, and some of the work we're doing around policy, uh, coordination as well. I think we've Already started to see a bit of progress on that. So, um. But, yeah, I mean, I think. I think the College of Community Leadership, you go into these places and so often the first thing that people say in government is, oh, there's no one to work. Who are we working with in this area? Where are the community leaders? And first of all, I would say is there are always community leaders. I've, uh, not visited a single area where there's not been some entity or anchor or group of anchor institutions. And sometimes, again, we're not always looking in the right place. Not to bang on about sport, Tim, but one of the things that's come out is your rugby league club, your local football team, your cricket club. Often these are the hubs of the community that they're in. And, uh, we really respect those institutions enough as much as we should do.

Speaker B: I completely agree with this. And by the way, just as a segue into my favourite thought at the moment, which is what to do. Welsh rugby, uh, that the, uh, government and the regional and the national level are missing a very fundamental point, which is that rugby is at the heart of community vitality in so many parts of the South Wales Valleys that I'm from. And therefore investing in it isn't just sort of being preferential to one sport. And why should we do that? It's actually, you know, sustaining the sustainable m. The social hub of these places, without which these places would be far diminished. And, you know, they also. Loads of kids get fit, you know, through doing kind of sport. And then there's health benefits. Yeah, here's a question, here's a question. Did you. Did you address in your report one of the things that's always been a conundrum, national government silos, you know. Right, so they've got your health silo, you've got your education salary, you've got your economics silo. And so what happens if somebody does a benefit that produces, like a health benefit, but they get no money? Because they're not a health service doing this, they are the school. So the school has helped make kids fitter, but the money goes to the health service. So there's no kind of benefit for the human benefit you created because the silos are funded separately. Do you have any thoughts about bringing budgets together? And I know you've got a lot of discussion about the private, sorry, the public sector, um, across the silos, working together at a spatial level, working with communities and stuff. That's a serious issue, isn't it? There's a serious problem around.

Speaker C: It's a big problem. I mean coordination in our, we did sort of green paper of sort of policy options, uh, a problem with politics. Anything you work on over a kind of a long period of time is you know that things are constantly moving around. So we did you know, look at what we call neighborhood budgeting as a way of sort of trying to pull these resources together. But actually the government then announced uh, saying it's a kind of a bring back from your time in government Tim, the kind of Total Place program um, is coming back and that sort of is an attempt to bring together different budget lines within different locations. Um, I would say I think there's a huge amount of work we can do on that but I think there's also you know much more we could be doing about creating integrated public services as well. Um, and particularly at a neighborhood level. Um, you know one of the things recommendations we made in this report which we're making, I hope some steady progress on this creating some neighbourhood service hubs basically. Uh, because it's the classic issue, you know, government will have, you know a housing program, it'll have DWP working with you on unemployment or welfare. You'll have the Education Department with its family centers and its skill centers and they're all different. You're getting pushed from pillar to post and nobody's really working with each other and they might be working in the same area and have no idea what the other one's doing. And we've sort of evaluated this to death really and we know that it just doesn't work. And um, what you need to do is create one stop shops with link workers so that a family or a person goes in and says you know, I to need help with X. Usually it's not just X any help with, it's also Y Z a B. You know there's lots of other issues but get them, triage them and then kind of put them into a place where there's this kind of supportive network around them. So um, Total Place. I'm hopeful that there'll be some positive benefits from the funding integration but I think we also need sort of service integration as well. And that's always the tricky because as you know, I mean everyone protects their fiefdoms like it's their life really and nobody wants to give that up.

Speaker B: But somebody at government central level needs to say to, to people who manage silos, we're no longer going to give you a promotion on the basis of your success in your siloed activity. We want to also make sure. That you do the joined up thing at a spatial level and that you're going to get noticed. The system requires that we reward people for collaboration across silos, basically. And I think that's, uh. So there's work to be done ahead on that. I want to come to that. In conclusion, about where you go next. Uh, this is a good, good report. Uh, it's got good, uh, foundations and good analysis and it's got some really good recommendations. Uh, where are you going to take it? Next bracket. I want to say one last thing about total place, because I am obsessed with this thing. I've been obsessed with this thing forever. We once found out that we did a total place in government analysis. That's like all the public spending in a place. So we picked Peterborough, I think it was. And we looked at. What we found was amazing, really. We looked at Child Services in Peterborough and, um, we excluded schools, I think. But what we found was that they were like, let's say I'm making the number up from memory, but they were like, um, every child in Peterborough got, you know, the equivalent of 2,000 pounds a year spent on them or something. You know, then we. So there were like 50,000 of them. Then we discovered there were 5,000. They were getting about £50,000 a year spent on them, often by agencies who had never been introduced to each other, didn't know that they were separately funding the same person or the same difficulty. They just had never understood that data hadn't been shared. The protocols of silos were too rigid. It was all that kind of stuff. And then there were like 10 kids that were getting like a million pounds each, you know, spent on them by the public sector. And it wasn't just that we wanted to cut. We wanted to improve the outcomes for those individuals by better collaboration between the center and the space. And here's the last thing about collective sort of spatial problems that people don't always notice. There were schools in South Wales where people hadn't noticed that the underperformance of children, they might have all looked very different and, you know, uh, different backgrounds, they often lived in the same streets, that the kids that were underperforming were often spatially concentrated. And we just hadn't picked that up. Right. So I think your analysis is really crucial, uh, that there is something to be done successfully at local level. Uh, we need to make sure that we leverage, that, uh, leverage great national programs and those need. And we need more money. Government in the uk, Please pay attention to this. You could do great work with a relatively inexpensive, expensive program in comparison with some of the things that you will be spending on. And you will find that you will restore vitality to some areas, reduce unemployment, reduce health, uh, inequalities and make benefits that will benefit all your programs. If you can work this one, it will be an investment to progress and that's really important. So let's come back to you now and um, uh, you've got this report. Local uh, Trust is kind of the parent sponsor for this, uh, which you're part of as well. So tell us a bit about what you think, what are you trying to do with the report at the moment and where you think it goes?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I think. So Local Trust, um, is disappearing. I think it'll be gone next year. So uh, you know, they've done their program, they've spent their money and they're evaluating nas and publishing some really, really interesting research which I would recommend people have a look at if you're interested in neighborhood level work. They've got some really interesting research they've done there. Um, so, um, for the commission, I mean we're, we'll, we'll continue on for at least 2026, we'll see what happens in 2027, 2028, but our kind of priority I think this year will be around. And this is a really boring stuff about policy change which, which you'll note Tim, which is sort of trying to institutionalize this. Um, you know, um, it's, it's not easy but it's again compared to what you quoted back at me earlier from the report, it's very easy to one off programs and interventions and just say, you know, oh, we've got pride in place, we've got this. Okay, but how do we build this thinking that we've been talking about here on this podcast into the mainstream so that when we're developing any policy intervention, when we're thinking about an investment program, we're thinking about these places, we're thinking about this model, we're thinking about how we do it. And so I think over the next year we're looking to try and find levers within government. Uh, and uh, there's conversations about bringing a team together within governments, look at place and how that can operate and how policy can be coordinated there. Um, and also looking at some of those institutional uh, kind of vehicles. So you, you've mentioned total place. Um, there's also, you know, a kind of burgeoning public service reform agenda which might help to build some of this new neighbourhood level, uh, Analysis and thinking. So um, we want to try and really embed that and then if you can. I think our theory here is if you can embed the institutional kind of knowledge again. And going back to what you mentioned, you Deal for Communities, which was a fantastic program, um, which the New Labour government did, that also started with the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit and uh, the Neighbourhood Renewal strategy as well. And having that institutional thinking about social exclusion and why it was important we tackle this advantage and what can we do about it. It led to interesting programs like the New Deal Community. So we're trying to, in a way we sort of done it back to front. We sort of did. Pride in place got announced very, very quickly after our interim report, which was fantastic. Obviously we love to see government investing in this. Um, but we haven't really built the institutional architecture sure to do this. So that's the kind of big challenge. How do we get this really, really firmly embedded um, and hopefully we'll make some progress.

Speaker B: Well, so to conclude, I could talk about this all bloody day and it's the most important agenda, not just in the UK but internationally, which is essentially about what in America they might call underserved communities. Right. You know, which is. And how you turn them around and you can, is the point of this research. Uh, but we mustn't just view it as a kind of top down programmatic thing, that it's about eliciting local strengths uh, as well as, and using them. Which I think is entirely correct. And I think your discussion. Thank you very much for this tonight. I think the contribution from the intellect in the report and the spirit in the report is good and correct and it is about in the end getting stuff done in government. Uh, that is, can you persuade, as I was going to say, technically the buggers to adopt some uh, of the, this stuff. And the answer is I think he can. Um, because I think the good thing about the current state of the British government, particularly at the moment, is that they are still in flux, they haven't settled and they're still looking for uh, their big idea, I think. And I think this is a moment where if they keep their nerve, this is a really good big idea that I think will pay back both politically and in terms of real change on the ground. So thank you Andrew. Thank you to the team that did the report and if anybody wants to find out more, they should, they should look at local Trust's work, they should look at the Independent Commission's work. I really do recommend it. The only thing I'VE missed. Uh, and I am as obsessed with this as I am with Total Place, and I want to finish with it, is asset transfer. Uh, the whole idea, which I think is in your report that you like, and it's one of your sustainability issues, which is that it isn't just about grant giving over the long period. If we can try and create some uh, uh, assets and some economic activity which, which then it generates its own kind of renewals. Could you say something about your aspiration on that? To close?

Speaker C: Yes, I think ultimately it's sort of, you know, to kind of quote Churchill, give them the tools and they'll do the job, they'll finish the job. And I think one of the tools that they need are, ah, the assets that, you know, the community spaces, the buildings, the infrastructure in places and control over that because, um, if you do that a, you're giving them the certainty and security that they can keep organizing and mobilizing. We've seen a lot of libraries close, we've seen a lot of community centers close in this country. And I think that has demoralized places because there's nothing worse than walking past boarded up buildings, um, that are, that are kind of declining. So putting those assets in the community's control makes that less likely to happen. And also being really, you know, cynical about it, there's a sort of, there's a financial element as well, which is, as you say, that, you know, there is, you know, we've seen it time and time again through the creative use of space, space, whether that's renting it out for, uh, other public services to use it, uh, or whether that's for office space or cultural activities. Communities are very good at generating resources from assets. So we do need to try and think about how do we not just fire, sale and dump assets that we don't want anymore in the public or private sector, but how we really sustainably work with communities. And sometimes it requires a bit of investment, not just the asset, but absolutely, I mean time and time again, um, uh, you know, the note of optimism is if, you know, if we give people the tools, if we give them the confidence, if we back them, they will deliver change. I think that's the, you know, the unavoidable conclusion of all of our work, which is very inspiring.

Speaker B: So two inspirations to end. Uh, one from America and one from my own village in South Wales, which is called Bather, which uh, uninspiringly, uh, means graves, uh, in English, translated, uh, here's the American 15, 20 years ago, when I was working with the government in the UK and we were looking at all this kind of stuff. I saw a presentation by an amazing group called Chicanos, Porto la Causa, Chicanos for the Cause. A Mexican American group who 50 years ago had been given a building by some local authority and they'd leveraged that over 50 years into a $2 billion social enterprise, uh, where they trained people, they offered them home ownership schemes, they could train you to do all sorts of, of jobs and all this kind of stuff. And it was an amazing self organised success. Wales, South Wales has a history of community self organization actually and lots of, lots of cooperative enterprises. And the one I'm going to conclude with is that the key institution in my entire life and career was the local library which uh, you know, transformed my, my life much more than any school ever did, it seemed to me. I that closed officially about eight to ten years ago now because the local authority through austerity ran out of cash and it was taken over by a community enterprise and it's still being run by a community enterprise, I'm very proud to report. And it's a key institution uh, in that village. So I'm with you 100% and I'm on the journey to renewal. I think your work has been essential. So thank you very much Andrew for your time.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: You have been listening to the fifth series of the Grimshaw Podcast, the Resurgent City with your host Tim Williams. Join us again for other episodes in the series with your favourite podcast provider.