Empowering Communities Through Change: Regeneration Seminar Insights with Jim McCormick

1. Poverty, Place and Change Regeneration Seminar, 9 February 2011 Jim McCormick, Scotland Adviser – Joseph Rowntree Foundation

2. Sources • Impact of Devolution on low-income people and places (JRF 2010) • Housing and Neighbourhoods Monitor: Affordable Housing (JRF 2011) • Tackling Poverty Board (2011): • Pockets • Prospects • Places

3. Impact of devolution: findings • Reserved policies had a bigger impact on tackling poverty, but devolved policies still matter • Some need to be applied on a much bigger scale, more consistently and for longer (e.g. Working for Families; New Futures Fund) • Need to achieve better results from training/skills; regeneration; address ‘flat-lining’ in public services (the lowest-attaining 20% in secondary school); and drive down costs for low-income households • Improve administrative devolution (the case of Pension Credit, Universal Credit)

4. Pockets: Poverty and work trends • Poverty down by one-fifth among children • Down by almost half among pensioners • Little change for working-age adults as a whole • Unemployment: lower rate than England entering recession but now higher. Net 50,000 jobs lost in 2009 mainly full-time among men with four in ten affecting under 25s. • Working age people claiming out-of-work benefits fell to 16%, but rose to 18% by 2009. Biggest increases during recession in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire.

5. Area concentration of worklessness: is the glass half-full?

6. Prospects: Skills • For the least qualified, odds of being in work only 50:50 before recession. • Access to job-related training for those lacking qualifications did not improve over the decade. • Young people at high risk – fully 40% of jobs lost in recession affected under-25s. • One of the long-term policy drivers against poverty which is devolved.

7. Places: Devolution & Regeneration • Continuity: England (New Deal for Communities) and Wales (Communities First) • Change: Scotland • Stalled: Northern Ireland • Concern about loss of focus on ‘place-making’ • Housing and environment improved but horizons still restricted • Balance between improving neighbourhoods and linking them to wider work, training and learning

8. Places: Tackling Poverty Board • In poor places, address the failure in markets (labour and essential services) as well as public services (satisfaction, quality). • Dynamics: SIMD shows limited churn, mostly short-distance, with some thinning of deprivation in real terms. Four in five datazones in the most deprived in 2004 stayed there by 2009. • And three-quarters of people in poverty don’t live in the most deprived areas

9. Risk of low income by area (2008-09)

10. Regeneration as a system • Models and mindsets: co-production or expert-knows-best? • Skills, learning and work/inactivity • Housing, environment, demography and flux/stability (Go-Well residential outcomes) • Unpaid work: family care, volunteering • Cohesion or disorder: neighbourliness, crime • Market and public services • Physical assets and connectivity

11. Challenges for practice • Priorities/tradeoffs in context of huge cuts: who decides? • Is high-quality evidence treated as a precious jewel or just background noise? • What kind of guidance/lead is needed to take effective action via localism? • Can we focus more on culture than strategy, and function more than form? • Is ‘Total Place’ likely to stick – and will integrated budgets follow?

12. In touch On the web: www.jrf.org.uk Follow on Twitter: @jrf_uk