As Labour settles into its second term of government, deprived neighbourhoods in every region are the focus of initiatives to address social exclusion and miserable, limiting living conditions.
These are areas which have been particularly hard hit by the decline in traditional forms of employment, their people moving away and neighbourhoods being abandoned. They are blighted by complex and inter-related mixtures of social problems, which defy easy, top down, answers from statutory agencies.
A range of initiatives have already been launched to try and tackle the spirals of decline and decay, and the threats to social trust and cohesion, faced by people living in the ‘worst estates’ and the streets where deprivation is high. Many of these originate in the innovative and systematic thinking of the Social Exclusion Unit, established by Tony Blair as part of the Cabinet Office in 1997.
Neighbourhood management initiatives to co-ordinate the efforts of all those working to improve particular areas; the New Deal for Communities programmes; support for new forms of social enterprise which engage the ideas and voluntary effort of local people; new services such as neighbourhood wardens: all these steps and more have been presented – and welcomed – as promising ways forward. Thousands of people in community groups, voluntary organisations, public services, local government and – in some cases – the private sector are working hard to make the most of the opportunities they present.
Nobody would suggest that this is straightforward. The work throws up many questions and debates, and continuing dialogue involving politicians, academics, professionals, and people at grass roots level is going to be crucial in identifying best practice – and the blocks and problems thrown up by the shape of current policy.
Debates and questions revolve around three key policy strands: targeted work, partnership approaches; and challenges involved in building up social capital.
Neighbourhoods provide a focus for participation and integrated, effective initiatives. But it is important not to slip into the view that fundamental problems of exclusion are small scale and capable of being resolved through targeted policies. Some commentators, though, have suspected that the government’s focus on ‘the worst estates’ involves an attempt to argue that spending relatively little on a relatively small number of areas can solve national problems.
They point out that social exclusion is not experienced only by people in a few hundred wards. Problems of isolation, disadvantage and limited resources can be experienced in a particularly highlighted form if you’re in a minority facing them somewhere judged to be affluent and comfortable and ineligible for regeneration programmes. For those excluded in rural areas, for example, problems of money poverty and lack of access to services are exacerbated by a general perception (little offset by the foot and mouth plague) that it’s good to live in the country.
Conversely, not every individual who lives in a targeted area may be poor or excluded. Regeneration programmes can assume a sameness or homogeneity among people in an area that turns them all into ‘average’ residents. In fact, there will be some well off people in most of the poorest wards in the land. And seeing 6000 or 60000 people as average embodiments of the local index of deprivation obscures the fact that those facing oppression experience exclusion in specific ways.
Targeting can, perversely, generate a negative perception of an area, and be bad for the self-image of people who live there. They can see themselves, and be seen, as being in a ‘ghetto’, ‘fixed’ as disadvantaged, and at the bottom of the pile. This is an extra burden for local residents to bear on top of their socio-economic exclusion.
Targeting can also become the focus of resentment, especially in very poor towns and sub-regions. Wards which receive programme funds are not much more deprived than adjacent areas, and the extra expenditure they receive feels like money taken from the medium poor to give to the poor poor. Regeneration can thus, ironically, contribute to social fragmentation by increasing tensions and neighbourhood rivalries. These can take ugly forms through racialisation of the issue, or through people from one row of houses stigmatising people who live a few rows away. In these scenarios, the beneficiaries of government grants are both blamed for being themselves the authors of the situation which requires the handout, and envied for getting money which others cannot get. This happens in places where people might better meet their needs by arguing the case for the area as a whole. Little neighbourhoods may find that they are no longer left out and behind only when the whole north eastern city or north western sub-region of which they are a part is no longer excluded from national levels of prosperity.
Partnership is another watchword of current policy on social exclusion. This has highlighted such cross-cutting issues as juvenile nuisance and disengagement, which are not the sole responsibility of any one agency. Statutory bodies, voluntary organisations and community representatives have come together in work which is meant to be holistic. The need for collaboration results from the complex and multi-dimensional forms of exclusion, and from the need to overcome fragmentation.
But there are frustrations about the context in which partnership has become a buzzword. Social policy trends have led to the fragmentation of services. Privatisation and marketisation have dissipated power, responsibilities and routes of accountability. Problems of communication always exist where large numbers of people need to combine their efforts. But these have been compounded by a generalised culture of rivalry in which, for example, different agencies need to compete with each other for funding. Counteracting this collapse of the public service culture with calls for co-operation and coherence can seem to some either cynical, or rooted in a contradictory political approach.
The calls for local service co-ordination, and the efforts put into bringing different agencies together, are partly responses to the absence of relatively strong and coherent local government. The old, paternalistic municipal departments were shaken up through calls for efficiency, sensitivity and decentralisation that came from both left and right, and which addressed a range of frustrations which could not have been allowed to continue. But the wider erosion of power, responsibility and status of local authorities that has accompanied understandable changes has left a weak base from which to address many current social needs.
In this context, the continual forming and re-forming of local partnerships to address everything from levels of coronary heart disease to spending the latest allocation of European Union funding can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, a range of perspectives from agencies in touch with different constituencies is brought to the table. But the time and energy spent forming, sustaining and reporting on partnership working seems to many to be more expensive and less efficient than if particular policy areas were simply made the responsibility of one or other agency in the context of agreed divisions of labour.
Some problems in bringing together the concerns of all interests result from the different levels of power they hold. Successive rounds of regeneration funding have, in theory, depended on partnerships that increasingly value community voices. But community involvement is not always as empowering or positive an experience as it is meant to be. Government recognition of the problem of lip service has led to ‘capacity building’ funding becoming available – support for community activists to build up the skills necessary to articulate, promote and act on community agendas. This raises the question of whether the relationships between partners involved in regeneration work are equal and transparent.
Enthusiasm for social capital is evident in current policy debates. This is comprised of local networks; senses of shared identity; engagement in decision making processes; and a culture of trust and mutual support between people.
But building up social capital is not easy, especially in towns and cities where inequalities of wealth and power have been increasing. Perhaps these need to be redressed at a structural level before it is reasonable to expect problems resulting from the absence of social capital to be resolved at neighbourhood level. There are strong tendencies militating against the brave efforts people are making to recreate community. Individualisation is one, in which people get blamed and blame themselves for problems that are actually rooted in and consequences of broader social trends. People swallow pills, burn aromatherapy oils and buy lottery tickets against the stresses of modern living.
Increasing expectations on workers to be flexible about when and where they work also militate against the building of strong communities in which social capital is invested and grows. This trend directly works against the possibility of people investing time and commitment in settled, tidy, crime-free neighbourhoods. Working parents are particularly pressured and feel guilty with the mixed messages. On the one hand, they’re asked to be available for and committed to work. On the other hand, they’re called on to be loving, attentive, and involved parents. The processes needed to build up social capital cannot be legislated into existence. Schemes such as neighbourhood wardens or well-funded youth work can help encourage civility. But caring and responsible patterns of behaviour must, at the end of the day, come from within people, living to decent moral codes which shape their personal identities, and which they continually develop and validate in interaction with other people.
It is this fact that leads people to connect the decline of community safety to declining levels of religious observance. Churches have been, and remain, movements for moral living and have promoted much good work. Muslims and members of other faiths less valued than Christianity in British law have worship, offer religious education to their children, and generate positive social activity. Most of these have been important in focusing and sustaining the self-identity of people oppressed by racism.
But religious communities themselves can be exclusive and judgmental in unhelpful ways, promoting conservative moral codes which people have increasingly reacted against as excessive and oppressive. The influence of democratic values, secularisation, and the decline of deference have led to a rejection of the hierarchies characterising organised religions, with their ranks of self-appointed mediators for the supreme being they believe in.
The decline of social capital, and the cultural trends that make it difficult to build it up, provides a context for many negative developments. One of these is a collapse of aspiration. People reject the opportunities provided by ‘official’ society because of a suspicion that these will not lead to all that they promise. Resentments at the occasional successes of some lead to a self-defeating culture in which difference, self-development and positive behaviour are derided and pulled down.
More seriously, significant numbers of people continue to turn to crime as a way of making connections between the aspirations consumer society instils in them and the lack of legitimate resources they have to realise those aspirations. For all the condemnation of criminals, we must make the effort to ‘understand a little more’ and recognise that, for those who take this route, the turn to crime must seem a ‘rational’ and appropriate response to the social conditions they find themselves in.
But the corrosive effects of crime, anti-social behaviour and disengagement from public life must not be allowed to take an even greater hold. By effectively working through the key debates in neighbourhood renewal, and making the most of and bringing together the potential of current policies, ways could yet be found to lift the communities about to receive special funds out of the conditions in which these are necessary.