Many people will be poorer because of welfare ‘reforms’ such as fewer disabled people being eligible for PIP, the bedroom tax and reductions in Council Tax Benefit.
Poorer people are already more excluded than others from out-of-town malls and complexes, and rely instead on real and local shops, more than people with higher incomes with access to computers and cars. How many elderly women with shopping trolleys do you see in places like Bluewater, Meadowhall or the Trafford Centre?
Disabled people are already disproportionately poor, and are generally about to get even poorer.
Firstly, for people who rent from social landlords there is the new bedroom tax, reducing Housing Benefit by 14% if one bedroom in the home is empty, rising to 25% for any others. The loss in benefit will have to come from other living costs such as food. The Riverside social landlord charity based in Liverpool has researched how this will hit tenants in the north of England the worst, and Channel 4 has shown how disabled people often need a second bedroom for a family carer or support worker. There are also the family needs of divorced parents with visiting children.
Secondly, there are the new PIP Regulations with the harsh requirement that anyone who can walk more than 20 metres will no longer be eligible, down from the current 100 metre regulation. This will not change the number of disabled people in itself, but will make many disabled people both poorer and less able to buy their own mobility solutions.
Thirdly, for many non-elderly poor people there will be reductions in their Council Tax Benefit as a result of government changes. For urban designers, these changes will result in pressures for:
(1) more one-bedroom flats but with enough internal space for mobility (if any social house building is possible) and the dangers of social isolation that one-bedroom homes exacerbate;
(2) more High Street designs which include social and community uses and outlets where social contact does not depend on making a purchase; and
(3) for pedestrianised areas to be better designed for people who are mobility impaired and less able than ever to buy their own solution to overcoming even short distances, such as previously with an adapted car, scooter or powered wheelchair.

Yes, and maybe.
Yes, it is technically possible to run this train using existing trains and track and border security systems. It would take over five hours until HS2 is built, so an overnight train is probably more attractive. Also, at night the UK west coast main line is less congested. On the French side the train would ‘slot into’ an existing service pattern between Lille and Paris. So why then only maybe?
The key is to find a train operating company that would want to take the risk of possibly losing money by running this service, though the forecast is profitable. International passenger services do not attract UK government franchise payments. Currently in the UK only London has international passenger trains, yet night trains could run to other cities.
On the freight side there is a wide variety of international trains every week passing through the Channel Tunnel, but it is easier to organise trains to the Continent carrying goods than passengers.
I started researching a possible Manchester – Lille – Paris passenger service in 2008, and have written the results in a small book (free) in case anyone is interested, especially a train operating company. Some companies have considered the idea in confidence, and while they did not go forward for various internal reasons, I’m hopeful that one day a company will see the opportunity as worthwhile. Reference:
Night Trains from Manchester to Paris: an outline business case Tony Baldwinson (2012), free as pdf and in Google Books preview. Paperback copies on request.

In case it is of some interest, I have written up a case study of the campaign which changed the law on disabled people’s access to buses throughout the EU. The campaign was from 1995 to 2001, and resulted in a change to the Single Market making it mandatory that every bus made after 2003 must be fully accessible.
This campaign was run on a shoestring and in the early days of email it created, in a modest but effective way, enough international pressure across the EU by co-ordinating the local lobbying of Members of the European Parliament and national Ministers of Transport and of Trade, as well as lobbying the European Commission.
The campaign also built alliances across political parties, non-governmental organisations and progressive companies within the private sector. These days it would be called Corporate Social Responsibility, but back then it was, well, just ‘doing the right thing’. I hope the case study is still of some use for learning today.

Reference:
Buses for All (Europe): a case study of a campaign for access by law by disabled people, 1995-2001. Tony Baldwinson (2012).
ISBN 978-0-9572606-0-3; 82pp; paperback £7.99; pdf free; and free preview in Google Books.

Politicians have a key role of in pushing forward the rail possibilities of urban regeneration. The best can be the intelligent client, the leader in more than title, whereas too many will only have a short term view.
In the public perception of city governance the two issues of transport and crime are probably the key defining characteristics of a city and therefore also of its mayor or leader.
In terms of taking a long term view, transport infrastructure can shape a city for centuries to come. Consider the city and its river or port: trade relied on boats for many centuries before roads and wheeled transport. The city often started where the river was just narrow enough to cross and just wide enough to sail away. Roads, canals, railways and airports have all since both shaped and grown cities.
At the UK level for rail, the politician many would regard as the intelligent client of recent years would be Lord Andrew Adonis. He constructed a cross-party consensus for rail investment, and not just for high profile projects such as HS2 but also the mundane but essential task of rail electrification. Unlike some of other ministers he started with a vision rather than a spreadsheet. Putting electric wires above the track makes sense for so many reasons (pollution, climate change, faster journeys, further destinations, reliability, cost). But some previous transport ministers even felt proud in justifying their department having no investment plans for further electrification.
And having a capable transport minister at the national level helps politicians at the city level, especially cities outside London, to take their city vision forward.
London has its own legal powers to organise transport that are denied to other UK cities, and historically has had a first call on national rail funds for grand projets such as ThamesLink (north-south), CrossRail (east-west) and HS1 (international).
City-regions such as Greater Manchester have led the way in “pushing the envelope” of rail development and urban renewal, with both tram and train, by using political soft power to make up for hard legal powers.
Somewhere there is a political book to be written on, the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA), public (mass transit) transport and urban regeneration and renewal from bus deregulation in 1980s to Metrolink and HS2 in 21st century. The lessons would be enormous, in my view.

Sir Terry Leahy has said that the closure of small, independent shops on the High Street is “part of progress”, that some High Streets are “medieval” (is this bad?), and that out-of-town shopping malls and supermarkets are the way forward.
The former Chief Executive of Tesco was speaking on the BBC radio programme, Desert Island Discs.
He has also endowed the University of Manchester with a Centre for Sustainable Consumption.
Commercial property owners, and the pension funds behind them, will not be happy with the “silver lining” comment that shop closures will help with falling rents. All in all, a good case study for urbanists of dismal development. Link:
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21310808

Recently I’ve been pleased to be back in touch with all old friend from university days, Paul Baker.
Hearing voices can be very distressing, but some of the drug based treatments can shorted life by up to 20 years. Paul has worked tirelessly since the 1980s on other options, developing support groups for people who hear voices, along with their families and friends; all around coping and recovery from distress.
Paul is also involved in a range of radical mental health groups, including the international Hearing Voices Network which, from when he started, now involves 28 countries around the world.
I hope I can be of some assistance to this area of work, and if you are interested in these approaches to mental health even in extreme circumstances then these links may help. Links:
1. International Centre for Recovery Action – http://www.icra-wholelife.org 2. Recovery, Hearing Voices and Well-being – http://www.workingtorecovery.co.uk 3. Hearing Voices Network – http://www.hearing-voices.org
4. The various support groups also use FaceBook in significant numbers.

Previously: urban regeneration and rail development is more than increased land values next to new stations (taxed by the Community Infrastructure Levy) and lower land values next to new track (paid from taxes as compensation). What else can we consider?
One aspect which receives some attention in textbooks is the conflict within rail systems between local stopping trains and long-distance services. As an example from Manchester, the long-closed rail station at Longsight and the barely-open station at Ardwick are both on key routes for long-distance trains. The reasons for a station closure are rarely simple, but the pressure for long-distance services adds to the reasons to reduce or end local services. And these pressures are often highest within the inner city ‘doughnut’ surrounding the city centre and each rail terminus, thereby removing these inner communities from the connectivity benefits held by suburbs and commuter towns further out. Curiously, a rural station may be closed because there are too few passing trains; whereas an inner-city station may be closed because there are too many trains wanting to pass.
Equally the new ‘Northern Hub’ programme of rail improvement projects is a good example of how to improve local rail services because the new layouts will separate train routes which are currently in conflict. Local politicians have especially noted that significant local service improvements should be possible within north Manchester, a disadvantaged quarter of the city.
There are also light-rail or tram systems, such as the expanding Metrolink network in Greater Manchester, which provide a local rail service with greater access to urban centres by running on-street as well as on segregated track (usually previously used for heavy-rail).
It is a matter of public policy to direct or ‘bend’ these light and heavy rail urban developments towards re-connecting disadvantaged areas – serving the poorer areas that commercial services would otherwise just rush past. The skill or craft in implementing this public policy direction is an area to be explored next.

I’m starting here what I hope might become a mini-series on rail and urban regeneration.

Hope? Well, a bit of me thinks that it will already be written, in books or online: the obvious that needs no introduction.

But another part of me thinks it still needs to be spelt out. I am especially disappointed every time I see the phrase ‘regeneration’ used in connection with a new railway line or station, when they really mean ‘increased land values nearby’. Especially when they own that land.

The connection between increased land values and railway developments has been known since the 1800s. There is an argument that the early Victorian railway companies were about land ownership as much as they were about transport. Perhaps the best example is ‘Metroland’ in north west London with the growth of suburbia along the Metropolitan Railway Company’s new line, all skilfully planned and marketed, as later brilliantly captured in poetry by John Betjeman.

However, 130 years ago and more in prose than in poetry, there was the Cheap Trains Act 1883 which helped the London County Council in particular move working families out of the filthy inner slums, reinforced by the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890. These developments are covered in the main textbooks for students of urban geography, but it seems to me only as a period in time ending in the 1930s when suburban development was still an area of rapid growth.

The next post will be to explore what rail can do for urban regeneration in the 21st century.

The idea of an EU referendum is politically divisive, but all sides support EU funding reform. EU regional policy and funds look set to change, but what might these changes look like?

This month the UK Prime Minister has set out how an EU referendum might happen around 2018; and the Labour Party front bench has made media comments on their agreement in the UK seeking reforms of EU regional policy including the EU structural and cohesion funds (SCF).

This could be the policy pendulum swinging back to the 1970s.

Prior to being outlawed in 1988 in the UK there was quite a move, especially within local government, to promote ‘contract compliance’ by which progressive and anti-discrimination practices could be written into taxpayer-funded contracts.

And prior to 1992 it was possible for countries in the EU to operate regional and industrial ‘preference schemes’ to channel aid to areas and industries in or at risk of decline. The politics of the 1980s reduced and then ended these ‘state aid’ schemes, characterised as ‘lame ducks’. More recently, the former EU Commissioner and UK politician Peter Mandelson noted wryly: ‘these schemes were less about governments choosing failing businesses, and more about failing businesses choosing government support’.

Over time the EU single market law took a deeper hold and any forms of local protection became outlawed, to be replaced by grants and loans through the new SCFs run by the EU. These new funds were also improved: projects were bundled together into five-year programmes with devolved administation, avoiding (it was hoped) the Brussels bottleneck.

Maybe some or all of these changes from the 1980s will now form part of the EU reform negotiations. It is an open secret that the UK Treasury does not like the SCFs, seeing it as an inefficient way to be paid back around 60% of the UK’s financial contribution to the EU, and with strings attached. However, local politicians like the SCFs for the same reason, that it provides a significant pot of money which the Treasury cannot confiscate.

So much of the public debate has been about the quality of the activities funded by the EU through these SCFs such as the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The Open Europe organisation, not the EU’s greatest fan, published its view in a booklet in 2007: ‘Why the EU should not run regional policy’ which included anecdotes such as:

‘In the South East an ESF grant was given to a “cafe van”, whose owner is meant to tour the country for the purpose of teaching builders about sustainable development. (Building, 27 Oct 2006)’ which by the Executive Summary had become a burger van for builders. To be fair, the booklet also makes some more measured points on the limitations of the chosen method of economic statistics in targeting funds on the most deprived areas.

Where next?

The very topic of regional policy was an anathema to the Coalition Government in 2010, though the increasing North-South gap and the lack of growth are becoming more politically visible as time passes. The report on enabling regional growth by Lord Heseltine has become a rallying point for many politicians north of London, of the left and centre if not the more neoliberal right.

So perhaps the next stage is a reform at the EU level of competition policy within the single market, to allow again for subsidies in areas of greatest need. EU competition policy assumes a level playing field which it preserves by law; it is useless when the field is built on a steep hill and the poorer regions are forced to play uphill. A new regional remedy may be part of the reforms. Lord Hesletine has spoken in favour of the French system of compulsory membership for businesses in their local chamber of commerce. He may also like the French ‘Colbertist’ culture of strategic state subsidies too.

This Monday (28 January) the UK’s BBC Radio 4 Today news programme included an interview suggesting that the UK construction industry regularly uses too much material in making a modern building.

Dr Julian Allwood, at Cambridge University, was speaking about his new report on how we use too much material when we make stuff, including buildings. He suggested that one reason is that staff time is expensive when compared with the cost of materials, so shortcuts are made at the design stage by adding in extra construction materials ‘just in case’ rather than taking the time needed to design the building in a more efficient way. He also questioned why new buildings are expected to last 200 years when the evidence suggests that they will only last 40 years before being demolished and replaced.

One question, at least in the public sector which accounts for 40% of UK construction, is whether the new UK requirement to include Building Information Modelling (BIM) processes from the design stage onwards will help achieve the efficiency savings in the whole life costs (WLC) of a new building.

Links:

BBC Radio 4, 28 January 2013

07.23am “Dr Julian Allwood,(www.lcmp.eng.cam.ac.uk/welcome/people/julian-m-allwood) from Cambridge University, explains a report that he authored that says industries must radically cut the amount of materials they use to combat resource shortages and climate change.” www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21227152

Cambridge University

“The Low Carbon and Materials Processing group is a research group within the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Our work [includes how] … engineering can contribute to a low carbon future, particularly through reduced energy demand in industry.” www.lcmp.eng.cam.ac.uk/welcome/introduction