Back to index of Nerve 8 - Spring 2006

The Road to Ruin

Over five years ago, central government decided to give regeneration funding to two socially deprived areas of Merseyside. This money could be used as match funding to draw down European Objective One funding, which would substantially increase the final amount.

By Mike Lane

The areas chosen as ‘New Deal for Communities’ (NDC) areas were Huyton and parts of Kensington and Edge Hill. Each community was awarded £60m. Kensington NDC initiative covers 4,000 homes, where some 11,000 residents live. Six out of ten residents in the area were tenants - of which 20% were with private landlords and 40% with the council housing associations, now known as Registered Social Landlords (RSL’s).

From the onset of the £60m Kensington initiative, it became apparent to concerned community activists that the area had not been chosen because of its problems connected with poverty - bad housing, crime and social deprivation - but because of its strategic location close to the city centre and the M62 motorway. The M62 runs onto Edge Lane, which just happens to slice directly through the centre of the Kensington NDC area and (according to various eminent academics and economists from Liverpool's various universities) will improve the city's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

NDC resident community activists were informed that half of the community - some 2,000 houses - could be demolished. A document known as 'The Housing Proposal Document' was put together in glossy magazine form and 'sparsely' distributed around the community. The NDC administrators - who are accountable to the Liverpool City Council - went to great lengths to keep the wider community uninformed. This document was presented to central government by Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, who had just been voted in as chair of the NDC board. The bishop - accompanied by an entourage of various elitist city council officers and elected members - went to London, and in an atmosphere of media pomp proudly presented the document to Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. Of course, Prescott and his senior civil servants knew beforehand that the NDC funding (along with European Objective One funding) was going to be used to socially cleanse the area of poor people through mass demolitions, and that it would eventually be tied in with the New Heartlands initiative. The New Heartlands initiative is another scheme that has been imposed upon the region of Merseyside by central government and its main directive is to demolish as many perfectly good inner city terraced houses as possible so as to build as many new build houses mostly for sale only. The team who run the initiative are based in the Liverpool city centre and work in close partnership with the Liverpool City Council, the Government's Office for Merseyside and a host of other smaller agencies and quangos. They are all there to pave the way for outside vested interests - property developers, demolition firms and construction companies - to come into the community and impose their house building agendas with practically no opposition from the community.

The largest RSL within the NDC area was the Riverside Group, which is now one of the largest RSLs in the north west, having several subsidiaries - one of which is Community 7. Riverside have been accused by tenants and homeowners of deliberately making a decision to let their properties fall into a bad state of repair knowing that they would eventually be earmarked for demolition. To further enhance this social blight they moved many antisocial families into the area. They didn't deliberately choose these families, they simply put no adequate structures into place to address the issue of antisocial tenants. When tenants left through natural migration and through the antisocial behaviour of criminal families, Riverside never moved new tenants in. Instead they boarded up the properties, which further increased the look of blight within the area. The tenants didn't really bother Riverside because Riverside knew that the tenants would be more easily persuaded to leave, especially when central government decided to increase the 'Disturbance Allowance' from £1,000 to £3,000.

The main problem for the service providers and regeneration administrators was trying to persuade the homeowners to leave. After nearly two years of being browbeaten, only fifty of the homeowners accepted their Compulsory Purchase Orders. Of the 150 owned by the social landlords, the majority were boarded up and so the whole area now looks like a scene from a war zone. Of those owned privately virtually none are empty. Most of the fifty homeowners who accepted their CPOs have been moved into brand new Community 7 rented bungalows, which have recently been built in the Edge Hill area. But there is still a diehard group of at least eighty homeowners - led by a lady called Elizabeth Pascoe - who are refusing to accept the CPOs that have been served upon them. This group of homeowners go under the name of BEVEL, which stands for Better Environmental Vision for Edge Lane. Up to now these homeowners have caused untold problems for the service providers and the property developers, and are at present awaiting the outcome of a three week public inquiry on whether their houses will be demolished or not. Elizabeth told me: "Members of BEVEL are adamant that they won’t let their houses be demolished because of a land grab simply for profiteering by rich property developers and ruthless Registered Social Landlords."

There seems to be no end to the social injustice that is being surreptitiously perpetrated against the residents of NDC areas by Riverside and its subsidiary Community 7. Take for example the extraordinary case of the transfer of 286 council-owned properties within the NDC area over to the new social landlord Community 7 for absolutely nothing. If the council could do that, why couldn't they have given the houses to the tenants, many of whom have paid for them many times over in rents? Even the situation of tenants being allowed to buy their properties from the New Social Landlord is perverse because Community 7 were given them for nothing.

Local and central government are always trumpeting how they are trying to eradicate social injustice and social exclusion. The whole scenario connected with the perverse issue of stock transfers to corrupt RSLs is in itself a glaring example of social injustice.