As end draws near for SRB funding will Blackbird Leys be left high and dry?
This article, written for the Leys Independent is loosely based (including a few observations of its own) on a more detailed article by
Maurice Lean: ‘Single Regeneration Budget: Where do we go from here?’ which is reproduced below.
For the past few years Blackbird Leys has played host to Leys Linx—a ‘community development initiative’—funded by central government as part of the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB). In March 2004 funding for the scheme will come to an end, threatening to leave several community projects high and dry.
While recognising the effort that local people have put into various SRB projects, the IWCA believes that in many ways the scheme has been detrimental to community development on the estate.
Leys Linx is a non-political body by design, but paradoxically this doesn’t put it ‘above politics’ but instead places it in hock to whatever party or group controls the funding, currently New Labour, at both national and local level.
Without a clear political outlook firmly rooted in the community, it is government and middle class professionals that dictate the approach. On Blackbird Leys, as elsewhere, this has lead to the adoption of a managerial outlook prevalent in the public/voluntary sector, which ends up alienating ordinary residents who are supposed to be involved in the projects and helping to sustain them.
Even when individual working class residents do get involved with the likes of Leys Linx there is an unfortunate tendency for these ‘activists’ to join the ranks of the professionals rather than putting their newly acquired skills to work for the benefit of the whole community.
Despite all this, though, it is shameful that the local efforts that have been made should be squandered just because funding has come to an end. The City Council has been extremely vague, especially given there are only a few months to go, about how projects can continue.
The IWCA will oppose the continuation of schemes that assume to speak for the community whilst paying scant regard to views outside their meeting room. But we are looking to ensure that the best bits of the SRB scheme continue and we will work with others who have the same ends in mind.
Without alternative funding, schemes will need to seek support from a much wider pool of residents. However, at present this wider pool of residents doesn’t seem to have much interest in such schemes. This was demonstrated by the turnout at a recent ‘community conference’ held on Blackbird Leys. Despite months of advertising only a handful of local residents turned up. After many years during which local people have played, at best, a marginal role, this will take a great deal of hard work to turn around. It remains to be seen if the existing participants are up for this.
There may be one positive outcome to the final withdrawal of funding from the various, seemingly overlapping, projects on the estate—we may at last have an opportunity to take stock and ask what has been achieved so far, and which aspects are really worth keeping.
Leys Independent, issue 20, December 2003
Single Regeneration Budget: Where do we go from here?
By Maurice Lean, November 2003
The Single Regeneration Budget for Blackbird Leys, which has funded various local projects and facilities, is set to end in March 2004. The purpose of this article, rather than to review and appraise the scheme and projects themselves, is to assess the scheme’s role in facilitating long-term community development in Blackbird Leys, the effect of its withdrawal in the shorter term and the impact of this on the local political programme of the IWCA.
It is hoped that the observations made here will help other branches, as well as our own, in identifying key features of public community development schemes as they may already exist in their areas, while alerting them to the possible implications of the future development of that sector for the implementation of our own local strategy.
There can be no doubt that the injection of several million pounds (£5,736,598 plus £20,111,544 of match funding in total for all three SRB schemes currently
running in Oxford and £335,150 plus £307,166 in Blackbird Leys [1] into an area will have an impact on local community and voluntary services in the short term.
However, it is also true that, despite the impressive looking figures, community life has been and will be shaped by social and economic forces that both pre-date the project by decades and were never within the remit of the project to tackle. A mere couple of years is insufficient time to even contemplate resolving the issues that are being taken on.
There can be no criticism, then, of those involved at ground zero (regardless of their approach) for the strategic decision-making that adopted the SRB regime or the overwhelming structural forces that shape the social and economic environment in which the project took place. A lack of effective, locally-based political activity has allowed bodies set up by government (rather than the community) to dictate models/approaches to community development.
The resulting professional/managerial outlook that characterises the both public and voluntary sector approaches to community development tends to see itself as avowedly ‘non-political’. But nonetheless it is inevitable that the allocation of scarce resources both to the project itself and to local public services in general is deeply affected by political values and the overlooking—and at times gross denial— of this impacts on the political work of an organisation such as the IWCA.
A classic example of this ‘non-political’ stance is the ‘Kingfisher Green’ incident (see Leys Independent, issue 14, July 2002), in which the Leys Residents Association refused to allow the IWCA councillor to hold an advice surgery at these community premises because it would involve ‘using them for political purposes’. In practice this meant preventing someone from providing advice to residents on a part of the estate otherwise ill-served in terms of community facilities.
Yet the LRA is one of several bodies on the estate that enjoys the active involvement of members and even councillors from the Labour Party—the party of government both nationally and locally. These participants may claim to be acting in a separate capacity but the reality is that the ‘non-political’ label suits the Labour incumbents, who have represented Blackbird Leys in the council chamber for many years and without serious challenge up till now, because it allows them to see off any challenge to the status quo.
In these terms it would not be unfair to suggest that the word ‘political’ stands for change while ‘non-political’ stands for stasis.
However, as the threat of the withdrawal of funding gets closer there is perhaps a dawning realization of the ‘politicisation of resources’, as a local community professional recently expressed it to his peer group. As well as giving the lie to the notion that there can be an approach to community development free from the ‘taint’ of politics this also surely vindicates an approach which both acknowledges and embraces the political reality that faces working class communities in the fight for crucial resources.
The local impact
Looking firstly at the impact on our political work with regard to community development, the initial observation to make is that as a young organisation the IWCA was essentially pre-dated by the SRB in Blackbird Leys. The introduction of the scheme had no impact on our programme and if anything it was us that have reacted or operated in parallel to it. However, this is not to say that more recent individual projects within that scheme have not affected us (see below) and as the current scheme draws to a close, future initiatives may well have an impact on ongoing work. This possibility will be discussed further.
By way of illustration it may be useful to refer to a neighbouring SRB project in Oxford that was introduced alongside a pre-existing local, autonomous community facility. The latter could not hope to compete with the relatively generous resources that the new project could offer the community in such a short time scale.
Ask yourself, if you were a local person looking for help to get something done would you go to an organisation that was poorly resourced, would expect you to muck in with its work by way of return and offered only a possibility of success after a lot of graft in the long term? Or would you instead prefer to go an organisation that enjoyed the endorsement of respectable organisations and could provide you with an application form offering the possibility of four/five figures worth of funding within months.
Whilst in no way suggesting that this project was offering easy money there was definitely scope for an element of social, even enlightened opportunism, i.e. a short-cut—which is understandable if not, in the long term sustainable—or indeed cynical drafting of applications to fit the funding preferences of the scheme.
Returning, then, to the point raised above regarding a project within the scheme that has affected our work, the clearest example would be the Communities Against Drugs (CAD) group. There was a certain amount of cynicism within the IWCA locally that having won its council seat highlighting the menace of Class-A drugs locally, a group should be set up within months (if not weeks) of the election when the whole issue of drugs on the estate had been previously downplayed.
Yet now there was staff time, administrative resources and funding being made readily available to get it going. One of the main priorities of the group was even to follow our intense consultation with some of their own. In fact at the time of writing it appears that the short-term activity of this group may well peter out once the SRB and its attendant support disappears next year.
The impact on the IWCA is that its demise may see the community regard our own project to deal with the problems caused by dealing and use of hard drugs, which by necessity is long-term, as ‘yet another scheme-here today, gone tomorrow’- the guilt by association problem.
Added to this problem is the emphasis of CAD on the role of professionals (despite claims of being community centred) and their agencies serves to undermine the central role of the working class community itself in dealing with the attendant issues. Indeed it has been people associated with the group, some of who seek to join the ranks of ‘drug’ professionals who appear to be gaining most from the existence of the project rather than the community as a whole.
The effect of withdrawal
The withdrawal of the SRB threatens to leave the projects under its umbrella, including CAD, high and dry as resources dry up. With five months to go before the
official end of SRB, local groups are uncertain as to the outcome of plans for future funding, which will be formulated and decided not locally but at a regional and
even national level. Urban Forum [2] (www.urbanforum.org.uk) have identified capacity building and community development, the activities which make up much of the
work of Leys Linx, as being those most in danger of losing funding in the post-SRB world.
There are three things to be said here: (1) fair enough, the reality is that we all have to make a living so anything that helps, grab it; (2) organisations can change the emphasis of their policy output to satisfy funding requirements and achieve the same (predetermined?) outcome; (3) going back to the comment above regarding the importance of underlying structural social/ economic forces, it is argued that it is these factors that have dictated policy outcomes and will continue to do so regardless of policy outputs of future schemes.
The situation of these schemes —their funding being their future—creates difficulties for long term planning. Other organisations with a broadly similar remit to the SRB project are being approached to offer logistical and administrative backup but are, quite understandably given the uncertainty, reluctant to give firm commitments at this stage. The local CAD group has negotiated with a local housing association to administer projects as a ‘default’ should the SRB fail to establish a successor organisation. Quite how this sits with the ‘community centred’ ethos is lost on me, especially considering our ongoing struggle to get local housing associations to address issues to do with anti-social behaviour generally but drug activity in particular.
Further uncertainty is added by the fact that employees of the SRB project will be leaving. With them will go high levels of expertise, experience, local contacts and credibility. These are all qualities that will be impossible to replicate in the short term (indeed high staff turnover throughout the project was a problem identified by the local scheme itself).
Even in the longer term the professional/managerial structures that facilitate inter-agency co-operation will be difficult to emulate. It is an unfortunate reality that, rightly or wrongly, professionals prefer to work with other professionals: they speak the same language, they are paid to turn up to work which infers a degree of competence, accountability (although to whom is the question) and reliability. They are also ‘unencumbered’ by political affiliations.
Volunteers and activists seem, to them, to lack these essential qualities and are thus marginalized, making a transition to a post SRB regime that is authentically community centred far more difficult. Continuation/exit strategies by the SRB itself to address these problems will probably be ineffective in combating the professional culture among the wider statutory/voluntary world that pervades inter-agency working.
Filling the vacuum—again?
‘Filling the vacuum’ is a phrase all in the IWCA will be intimately aware of especially in its wider political context. More narrowly, in a ‘community development’ context’ (although I suppose we should be working to eradicate any effective difference) it will fall to the local branch(es) to help ensure the continuation and development of projects that correspond to manifesto commitments and the ethos of the organisation.
This will involve a consideration of the time and resources that the branches can spare. Given the ‘black propaganda’ (see Leys Independent, issue 19, Sept 2003), reticence to get involved politically and local rivalries that abound within ‘the community’, it will be for the IWCA to demonstrate its credibility in the long term whilst ascertaining for itself the value and reliability of those projects/individuals we seek to work with. Our ongoing local work, as expressed through the quarterly newsletter is demonstrating our credibility as well as allowing us to identify local players, movers and shakers (as well as the plonkers, fuckwits and shysters).
It is difficult to escape the reality that despite the qualities of the people who will remain post SRB, many schemes will falter in a new funding regime that has different priorities. If we can show that we are achieving largely analogous goals, in a sustainable way, then the potential to get people on board should not be underestimated. This may read as being rather cynical, but setting up a scheme with ambitious aims but a cruelly short timescale in which to achieve them, reflects the real cynicism that has pervaded community/economic development for decades.
The post SRB environment
Getting any sort of information these days is like getting blood from a stone. As one development worker once declared blithely when berated for not relaying essential information, ‘if you want to know something, find it out yourself!’ Everyone seems to be vague, on voice-mail or just plain ‘out of the office’. Our picture as to how the community development world pans out post SRB is at best shady—the policy document issued by Oxford City Council itself acknowledges this vagueness in its discussion of the changing community development environment.
We are aware of the existence of Local Strategic Partnerships, which appear to be more centralised than the SRB approach and, given the constitution of their membership, will involve an even more top-down approach than previously experienced. The council document also seems to emphasise the economic regeneration model of community development that has been in and out of fashion for decades.
The nature of the beast makes it appear unlikely that there will be much mileage in working with it and its distance from the community—organisationally as well as geographically—will make involvement, oversight and critique more difficult. Funding, with its new strings, will be administered from a ‘single pot’ emphasising a recentralisation of resources. Even where local funding budgets exist and continue, the Byzantine nature of their administration has baffled seasoned professionals never mind local activists—the adage ‘information is power’ can reach a fairly banal conclusion.
But if it is indeed this model that will continue local community development work into the future with concomitant impact in our areas of activity we will have to continue monitoring progress and challenging the negative effects. Manipulation of community projects for the political ends of our opponents is sure to be a continuing feature of the sector.
An effective and credible local press has been and will continue to be an essential tool in highlighting how the community/voluntary sector is impacting (or not) on what are the major issues that exist/emerge in the locality. As our mandate develops we will have to ensure that emerging schemes are aware that foggy notions of ‘community development’ and practice at odds with local working class interests will not go unchallenged.
Engagement on equal terms with those who we identify as the players (in the progressive sense) is the other pillar on which our approach to ‘community development’ may be best advanced. An ability to achieve the latter is a pragmatic outcome of the already acknowledged situation of ‘developing’ a mandate for the IWCA at the ballot box. It also demonstrates an innovative (a word much loved in the community development world—sorry couldn’t resist it!) approach to local community activity by a political organisation in a world where political relationships of the left have been dominated by a near obsessive courting of the trade unions.
Afterword
You know how it is, you’re sitting in the pub talking about some issue, ‘Write an article about it,’ says he, ‘Bag-O-Shite’ says me and for years I manage to keep it that way. Articles that I’ve come across are invariably coherent, balanced (allowing for blatant bias), even scholarly and nine times out of ten that general approach is best for the widest possible readership if any degree of credibility is desired—it’s the approach I’ve tried above. The article was in draft during the stage that the local scheme appeared to start addressing the issues around exit/continuation strategies. This afterword was written immediately following the ‘Community Conference’ called to address the withdrawal of SRB funding. As a result of that conference any inclination to coherence, balance and scholarly writing is rapidly going down the pan (though the scholarly bit was probably well on the way anyway).
Firstly, after the amount of resources committed to both the scheme (see main article) and the conference itself it beggars belief that any significant engagement with the locality can be claimed at all, given the attendance (see below). On arrival I was given a badge (bad start), a set of instructions as to its significance and what I should do (just what I needed on a Saturday afternoon), and some bits of paper.
First up, on the bits of paper front, we are furnished with a series of quotations including a note from Molly Florey (a New Labour city councillor) and other ‘local luminaries’. Amongst other things Molly says, ‘we need to avoid giving negative views of the Leys’. Oh aye and I suppose we shouldn’t hint at, never mind highlight, the failure of New Labour locally and nationally to deliver on issues of direct concern. Lets just ignore the worst bits and hope or pretend they’ll go away. Well if something looks like shit, smells like shit etc. then as an organisation that operates at the less glamorous end of the political spectrum it seems fitting that we take on the job of addressing and highlighting those concerns.
Etain O’Carroll (Leys News) continues, ‘paid workers are essential for organisations to be efficient.’ Confucius could have retired a lot earlier if he had come up with this nugget. In my experience a person’s position, or not, on the payroll has been a total non-issue in any attempt to gauge their efficiency, dedication, ability and even, yes, professionalism. You’d have thought a ‘community centred’ approach would have punched home the message that voluntarism doesn’t equal amateurism. Paid workers have been more successful in contributing to the total destruction of community/voluntary organisations than any volunteer, WMD etc., could ever hope to.
‘Steve’ from the Socialist Party (his quote is the first indication that this organisation has ever been anywhere near this estate) manages to pave the shining path
to community nirvana in just over half a page—and all from the comfort of his armchair. So that’s what all those extra buttons on the remote control are for!
Another document, over three pages, sets out the findings of an evaluation that has been carried out. It contains bits that make sense and other bits that send the alarm bells ringing big time, considering some of the points raised in the main article.
The document lists recommendations for a possible future organisation, which the existing scheme may have worked toward if it had been given a more realistic timescale. The scheme has used the term ‘community centred’ to describe some of its work. This document, perhaps understandably, is ‘organisation centred’. It looks at how it may eventually interact with the outside world; the outside world, however, is moving on
A lot of it, judging by the attendance, is not that interested anyway, while other bits of the world are moving in terms of funding/development priorities, partnerships etc. so any emergent scheme rather than being ‘central’ to that world will be marginal at best.
The last part took the biscuit: a form to challenge the next census asking every question under the sun, Apparently I was number 00308348, the other 308310 must have pissed off down the pub or something.
A generous headcount at the eventual start of proceedings put the figure at about thirty-five, of which the majority were local community professionals. As one of the few credible attendees noted, ‘its just the same old people doing the same old thing’ and indeed they were. Over the years I have become progressively sceptical, cynical and eventually positively shit-scared of the sticky dot and post-it routine that is Participatory Appraisal (PA).
This routine apparently ‘facilitates’ community decision making, though funny enough the last time I experienced PA the organisation using it went belly-up a few months later. Another local organisation that ‘benefited’ from the underlying wisdom of the approach can now be most charitably described as dysfunctional, I don’t wish such a fate to befall the SRB scheme so why do the organisers? Any claim that the PA approach has a role in facilitating community organisation in our social and political environment is, at best negligent, at worst a gross misrepresentation. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that it is so ‘innovative’ it is twenty years ahead of its time; there’s a lot of work to be done in the mean-time to make it effective.
I must admit I left after an hour. Life’s just too short and I couldn’t get that Jasper Carrott sketch out of my head where, after taking out sleeping time, commercials etc. he worked out that he had no time left on this planet. My life was ebbing away big time too.
Notes
- Oxford City Council, ‘Report to Executive Board—22nd September 2003,’ SRB Forward Strategy.
Leys News, December 2003. Back
- Fishbourne et al., ‘Out of the SRB Into the Pot: What are the implications for the voluntary and community sector,’ Urban Forum, 2003. Back
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