Lots of  ”interesting” things have been happening and I need a way of getting stuff out of my head so this might help maybe?

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The images you have sent through show clearly that there are still outstanding defects that need to be attended to.

Contrary to various comments you have made on your blog I do care that this defective work is put right and I am not reluctant to sort it out.

It will be sorted out – as you know the contractor has done a considerable amount of work in correcting defects across the area over the last 9 months.  It is again obvious that there are still properties where further works are required.  These works will be done.  I am not moving on to any new pastures and will remain responsible and answerable to the KCIC, as will Acorn, until these issues are resolved.

I will keep you updated with what Acorn propose to do to put things right.

Regards,

Mike O’Connell

Partner,  BCA Landscape

The  whoel scheme was going to kick off in July 2008 and by the end it will have cost a mere £1.1 Million. Well the meetings seemed to be going well, we were asked adn told, and shown, but jsut before the work started there was a bit of bombshell, as it then was revealed that not every house was having the work done on them and a lot of the street furniture and changes were not happening either. Then we found out the the contract had been awarded to a local comapny called Acorn Building who were assured by Mike O’Connell, (the project manager from BCA Landscapes) that the company had done this type of work before, whichw asnt actually true (http://www.stepclever.co.uk/business/news/kirkdale-based-acorn-contract-services-wins-1-12m-gardens-contract.aspx the new machinery by the way was a £20,000 tramac machine). The work started and pretty soon it all started to unravel, to begin with there didnt seem to be many people on the job, the “Few” began in our street rebuilding the walls, and my first problem cam when a downspout pipe was broken and repaired with cement and gaffer tape, just before being buried under paving slabs. I got that sorted out and was told it was a “temporary repair” which it wasnt.

The next thing was the walls had concrete lintles put on them, the ones coming out perpendicular to the house was not laid even, (still hasnt be rectified) and the concrete block end finsihes rathe abruptly ( I was told this was a matter of aesthetics, not much consultation there).

The concrete lintles were painted….it rained and the paint washed off, they were painted again….it washed off again (Mike O’Connell laughes at this as it was obviosuly funny that painters had used the wrong paint twice). Third time lucky, the paint stayed although a little flakey.

The same men who built the wall then started laying the tiles and it became evident very quickly that they werent trained tilers. To cut a very long story short this matter was brought up time and time again, and we were assured that they would be sorted out in the snagging period or during the fault period., Mile O’Connell of BCA Landscapes seems to think these tiles are fine, I dont.

So any suggestiosn as to what we should be doing about these blasted tiles.

Ok that was then this is now, and as the building “rapidly” progresses  on the new Neighbourhood Centre on the site of teh Ice Rink, you have to wonder whether the people in charge have their priorities right, £3million local regeneration money ploughed into a private venture out which they get none of the profit. and we end up with a fucking Iceland

“Gimme gimme gimme  me the medal now” as Muttley used to say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeannette_Altwegg

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article7034802.ece

This newspaper has been drawn into a ministerial spat over a regeneration project that became a bonanza for developers

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• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Friday 16 March 2007
  • Article history

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday March 17 2007

In the comment article below it was stated that none of the contributors to a Guardian supplement, Promised Lands, which appeared with the paper earlier in the week, had been aware it was paid for by sponsors. In fact only one of the 10 contributors says he was unaware it was sponsored by Housing Market Renewal Partnerships. The comment article also claimed that “some were given to understand they were writing for the Observer”. The commissioning editor was an Observer journalist and this may have led to a misunderstanding.

Other big names were promised inside, including the housing minister, Yvette Cooper, though readers were saved from her famous prose style by a sweetheart interview.

The section ominously carried no advertising, but was not headed “advertising supplement”. Yet it was paid for by the government’s Housing Market Renewal Partnerships – which agreed the synopsis – to boost the controversial Pathfinder housing policy. In return for a large sum of money, the agency was offered pre-sight of the copy to “correct inaccuracies”. In effect, it secured sympathetic coverage. None of the writers (nor the Guardian’s readers) was told of this, or that their fees were being paid, in effect, by the Blair government. Some were given to understand that they were writing for the Observer.

The supplement was laudatory of the nine Pathfinder housing clearance projects in the Midlands and north. This potential honeypot of £5bn of public money (half an Olympics) was launched in 2003 to “kick-start” the renewal of down-at-heel cities. This admirable ambition was vitiated by the method chosen, to assemble and demolish Victorian inner-city neighbourhoods for sale to private architect/developers. The option of using the money to give repair grants to residents, or confront the horror of clearing postwar housing estates, was not pursued. Developers demand cleared sites, as with the green belt. The Pathfinders’ job was to find and clear them.

This was understandably controversial. Such policies were thought defunct at the end of the 70s. It was known that this kind of comprehensive redevelopment instantly blights a neighbourhood. Once the red line is drawn, services vanish, vandalism and crime increase, values collapse, and residents who would once have fought to stay become desperate to leave. Tenants are offered £1,000 to get out, while owners have been receiving, on Rowntree Foundation figures, some £35,000 less than the market value prior to the clearance decision. This technique, known in the 60s as “winkling”, was once performed by the likes of Rachman. It is now being performed by the state. Hutton describes it as “regeneration as a holistic intervention”. I can see why this passed the inaccuracy test.

I remember the citizens of Moss Side placed in the same miserable bind before their enforced removal to Skelmersdale in the 1970s (later bitterly regretted). Yet many residents, for instance round Welsh Streets in Liverpool and in Burnley and Blackburn, occupy sound Victorian terraces that, in the south, would be restored without argument. They found lawyers, surveyors and lobbyists to oppose Pathfinder compulsory purchase, and have been involved in six cases, some still pending – winning one in Liverpool’s Edge Hill. But they lack the funds of a government that has spent £163m on consultants for a policy that the free market in most run-down world historic cities eventually achieves.

A spate of investigative activity followed the launch of Pathfinder in 2003. The BBC’s File on Four spoke in 2005 to groups of residents enraged at their prospective eviction. ITV’s Tonight With Trevor McDonald showed that a Liverpool house could be more cheaply restored than demolished. The conservation group Save championed the cause of the northern terrace house in an exhibition and campaigning booklet. Jane Kennedy, a Liverpool MP, accused Pathfinder of “social cleansing”. None of them appeared in the supplement. Nor did the separate consultants working in Blackburn’s Darwen, who were found to have altered “fit” to “unfit” in their surveys a week after the council announced it wanted particular streets for a lucrative Blair academy project. Here Pathfinder was being used as cover for old-fashioned urban slash and burn.

The truth is that the northern property market is “renewing itself” ahead of Pathfinder. Central Liverpool is now experiencing a property boom, and areas such as Welsh Streets, were they to benefit from renovation grants, would achieve market regeneration without clearance. Even hard-to-let tower blocks in central Liverpool are being sold to new residents through private developers with no Pathfinder help. In Kelvin Grove, houses the government wants to demolish are now valued at £145,000. Brian Clancy, of the Institute of Structural Engineers, told Darwen residents (86% of whose houses had been declared “unfit”) that their houses were perfectly good and required no more than an average of £5,000 of renovation to be worth £60,000-£80,000 on the market.

Nick Johnson, of the developers Urban Splash, has been a cuckoo in the Pathfinder nest by securing funds to restore rather than demolish a grid of derelict streets at Langworthy in Salford. He regards the popularity of the British urban terrace as rooted in “the incredibly robust houses, in their ability to be transformed and reworked to each generation”. He did not feature in the supplement, and he must labour under the handicap of Cooper’s requirement that he pay 17.5% VAT on terrace renovation, while clear-and-rebuild is zero-rated. Perhaps he should christen his estate Olympics Street.

The developers boast that the government’s £5bn will attract £20bn of private money. But so might a few million spent on restoration grants and publicity. The government is trapped by putting itself in the pocket of developers’ interests, backed by the House Builders Federation – which is potent in Downing Street. These interests are in danger of losing both Cooper’s gushing consultancy fees and her actual subsidies. Already some 57,000 houses are scheduled for demolition, and there was once talk in Whitehall of a staggering toll of 400,000 Victorian properties coming down.

The plethora of local and national headlines about “the return of the 60s” has bolstered the Treasury worry that Pathfinder’s market renewal has already been worked out of a mission. The market waits for no man, and certainly not a government department. Hence the drift of the Guardian supplement, aimed less at its local enemies (none of whom was offered space) than at the Treasury. The section’s “editorial” pleaded with the Treasury that it was “crunch time” for Pathfinder in the spring comprehensive spending review. Developers and architects were reported to be desperate that the “revival will stutter if we do not continue to receive the resources we need”. The we, of course, is they. Gordon Brown might reasonably argue that, as of yesterday, he has a far more immediate call on his wasted consultancy budget: the Olympics.

Cooper’s agents have already been “buying” interviews on local radio stations to exclude local protesters. They have now bought a national newspaper. That taxpayers’ money is used to further the interests of private developers against local homeowners is bad enough. That such money should be spent inducing newspapers to dress public relations as journalism in a ministerial spat with the Treasury is close to sleaze.

Another battle will be joined next week in a Guardian supplement paid for by the pro-sprawl government planners of the Commission for Rural Communities. I guarantee that no contribution from the Campaign to Protect Rural England will be included. I wonder wh

Lives are being bulldozed and no one listens

In the Financial Times

Dispatch from Liverpool

By Matthew Engel

Published: February 13 2010 00:31 | Last updated: February 13 2010 00:31

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Nina Edge lives in Toxteth, a district best known by other Britons for a riot 29 years ago

Nina Edge lives in a five-bedroom terraced house, rather handsome, beautifully maintained. The park is just over the road. The city centre is a healthy walk or short bus ride away.North London? She would be sitting on a million quid. But this is Liverpool. The house is a slum, apparently. Compulsory purchase and demolition beckon.

And if this were north London, everyone in England would know the story. But the policy governing Edge’s house – “Pathfinder” – only affects the north and the Midlands, those distant areas that the media notice intermittently, usually in the event of snow, floods or serial killers.

Only a few politicians know anything about it. And one of those I spoke to thought I must be calling about “Pathway”, a new system of palliative care for the dying. This is more like Dignitas: assisted dying, but for communities, yet with the same central conundrum. Is it euthanasia or murder?

Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder is Britain’s biggest programme of home regeneration/destruction since the great slum clearances 50 years ago. If there is anything at all on which the entire political class can agree, it is that the 1960s clearances were unmitigated folly, in which vibrant communities and improvable homes were razed, their inhabitants scattered to distant estates and tower blocks.

In Liverpool, where folk memory is resilient, people can still remember the Jackie and Bridie song:

“Don’t want to go to Kirkby, or Skelmersdale or Speke/Don’t want to go from all we know, in Back Buchanan Street.”

Now here it comes again, but pianissimo.

Nina Edge lives in Toxteth, a district best known by other Britons for a riot 29 years ago. Tourists know it because of 9 Madryn Street, the house where Ringo Starr was born. The daily Beatles Magical Mystery Tour stops outside, but not for long. It won’t be there for long.

These are “the Welsh Streets”, originally occupied by the men who crossed the border to build the Victorian city and given names to match – an area of 470 houses due to be replaced by about a hundred fewer new ones. In the Welsh Streets the vast majority, including 9 Madryn Street, are already bricked, boarded or tinned up. There are dozens of similar pockets around this city and elsewhere.

The houses here are already deteriorating: flashing gone from the chimneys, downpipes removed – by council contractors, according to campaign groups, to make damn sure they cannot possibly be saved. In the end, the last recalcitrants like Nina Edge may have to be removed by compulsory purchase, though that step would attract attention and subject the policy to more scrutiny than it has yet had.

The credit or blame for Pathfinder belongs largely to Brendan Nevin, a planning consultant and academic, who in the 1990s identified a crisis. “Places like Liverpool and Manchester had lost half their population,” he explains. “There were huge empty spaces and high vacancy rates. You had increasingly impoverished local communities and anyone with the wherewithal was getting up and leaving. East Manchester, for instance, had gone down from 200,000 to 30,000 and couldn’t sustain a secondary school. The question was whether market-driven decline or a government-driven programme would be more socially equitable in terms of its outcomes.”

Nevin dismisses any mention of London terraces: “London is a world city and its economy is different from Burnley, Stoke or Liverpool. These are areas where the market is not going to adjust. This is about trying to stop markets destroying communities and stopping the problem spreading into adjoining areas, because dereliction spreads.

“I recognise there will always be people who don’t want to move. I also visited homes where people were desperate to leave and were saying ‘Why doesn’t the government do something?’”

This struck a chord with New Labour and, with the support of John Prescott and the Treasury, Nevin’s plan took wing. “What started as a policy to address a specific problem of worthless houses was suddenly rolled out in this enormous blanket across the north,” says Anna Minton, author of Ground Control, a study of modern cities. “They started riding roughshod over very decent homes and communities.”

Nevin insisted he was talking to me in his capacity as visiting professor at Manchester University, though he is also – pro tem – head of NewHeartlands, the quango running the Liverpool Pathfinder programme in conjunction with the city council.

Undoubtedly, many of the Welsh Streets’ residents were delighted to leave, especially the majority who were in property owned by housing associations or the council and given sweeteners to move. What is unclear is whether they wanted to go before the process began, or whether Nevin’s thesis is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Edge says that the council’s own figures show that eight years ago 73 per cent of the locals were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their homes. “In an area like this, the council empty the rented properties,” says city councillor Steve Radford. “That creates a barrier of dereliction, so they instantly deflate and degenerate the area.”

Radford is a breakaway Liberal, not part of the Liberal Democrat majority that controls the city. But it is not easy to find contrary voices. Warren Bradley, the council leader, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview (“Mention Pathfinder, and he won’t,” said someone). A NewHeartlands spokesman said he would send me names of residents who backed the scheme. They arrived too late to check out. And, in the Welsh Streets now, there is hardly anyone around.

In Treborth Street, I did find George Johnson, a former steward on the QE2. He wants out: “All our old neighbours have left now,” he said. “The community’s gone.” He voted for the scheme when it was first mooted. “We thought we would be rehoused temporarily and then have the option of coming back, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.” But were you happy here before anyone ever suggested knocking it down? “Oh, yes. It was a lovely area.”

And my eyes could see nothing wrong with these streets that could not have been put right by normal updating and refurbishment. Much of Liverpool’s old inner city is as handsome as Dublin. Or was. The developers, the Gleeson Group, will be in soon.

What I do know is that this is just the combination – a persuasive theorist, zealous top-down government, supine Commons, inept Opposition, bored media, salivating property developers – that in Britain tends to produce toxic policies. Even if Nevin’s recipe is right, a lot of lives are being sliced and diced to make his salad.

matthew.engel@ft.com
Matthew Engel’s Dispatch appears fortnightly

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