Views

'REGENERATION THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION'

SPEECH BY DAVID MILIBAND TO THE COALFIELDS COMMUNITIES CAMPAIGN ANNUAL MEETING

11th SEPTEMBER 2001

I am delighted and honoured to have been invited to this conference, and not just because I can welcome you to South Tyneside and this magnificent Town Hall. I also want to be able publicly to pay tribute to the work of the Coalfields Communities Campaign, to share ideas about how to achieve social and economic progress in our towns and villages, and to commit myself to work with you so that the needs of miners, their families and our mining communities are not forgotten.

For a number of years I worked for the Prime Minister and saw the statistics concerning the ex-mining areas; now I am looking through the other end of the telescope, as a local MP, working at ground level to achieve positive change in a constituency built on mines and ships, but whose last shaft closed 7 years ago.

My case to you this morning is simple. You have fought hard for justice from the government. And at long last, there are some real successes. But now, with a government on our side, it is time to open a new front in the battle for coalfield regeneration…a campaign on the home front, for regeneration from within, regeneration from the bottom up, regeneration that meets the three great challenges that confront us as we seek to deliver change for and with for our communities: the need to modernise mainstream public services to tackle inequality, the need to define a distinctive economic and social future for each one of our communities, and the need to mobilise people grown weary of successive blows to their lives and livelihood.

I believe that for regeneration, we need experimentation. That is a big responsibility for all of us, a challenge to our imagination and our vision. But it is also a responsibility for the government, a responsibility to back the risk-takers at local level, and give them the tools to make the changes needed to tackle entrenched disadvantage.

National Responsibility

Responsibility is not a word associated with government policy towards coalfield communities. The story of the closure of Westoe Colliery, just down the road from here, told in a remarkable and moving book Westoe: The Last Pit on the Tyne, tells all that is wrong about the past:

a closure plan announced out of the blue
direct redundancy costs of £65 million
male unemployment pushed up to 28 per cent
half the Borough's population left on benefit
and no plan for the future

No wonder that at the height of the outrage at the 1992 closure programme The Sun screamed at John Major: "Do you have a plan to get us out of this bloody mess?"

Of course he didn't have a plan at all. The most efficient coal industry in Europe was closing mines the fastest, the least efficient, in Spain, closing them the slowest, and only in Germany was there an attempt to diversify local economies and develop an economic future beyond coal.

The triumph of the CCC has not just been to ask the question "What is our future?", but to help government answer it. Stephen Byers yesterday set out the government's approach. There is a good story to tell, but we have to keep up the pressure.

For example in South Tyneside alone we believe there are at least 10000 ex-miners, but at the current rate of progress it will take about seven years to clear the backlog of claims for compensation for disease. Last month we were able to start to make use of Britain's first mobile testing centre. But we need more progress. That applies to the tests, but not just them. It is one thing not to be tested; it is double agony to be tested, but then for the claim not to be processed and paid out. DTI Ministers are working hard, but we need to keep up the pressure on the system to deliver.

Then there is the complex issue of miners' pension funds, and specifically how surpluses are distributed. No one doubts that the Government should get some part of any surpluses for taking on the commitment to dig into its own pocket if the fund is in deficit, but the 50 per cent split seems arbitrary, and given the record of the fund, unfair. Let's get more of that money into the hands of the people and communities who originally paid the pension contributions.

Regeneration through Experimentation

National government has a responsibility to get these things right. But it is up to local government and local communities to make change happen on the ground. I passionately believe progress will only come when action from the top-down is matched by energy and imagination and commitment from the bottom-up.

I want to talk today about how we can maximise our chances of moving our communities from below the national average for education, health and housing, to above the national average. This is the challenge of 'regeneration from within to match 'justice from outside'. Charles Booth, the 19th century reformer, said "Trades leave, people stay" and we have to prepare ourselves for a new future.
There are three areas in which I think it is vital we work together for our communities. I don't have all the answers, but I believe we must work together to find them.

First, to tackle inequality we must do more to make the most of mainstream government programmes: the investment and reform in public services, the modernisation and reorganisation of tax and industrial policy. We need local modernisation suited to our own circumstances

Second, we must develop distinctive local visions of social and economic renewal, because in the modern world, where not just money but also people are more mobile, each of our communities needs to define something for which it is above average, and which makes it special for the people to choose to live and work there.

And then third, we need to build local coalitions of support to put change into practice, because we all know that regeneration over the heads of local people, or regeneration imposed on local people, is so much less successful than regeneration driven by local people, and for that I think we need some early downpayments to them on the process of change.

Modernising Public Services

Let me start with public services. The Government was re-elected in significant part because of its commitment by 2003/4 to raise public spending; if plans are fulfilled, capital spending will have doubled between 1997 and 2004; spending on health will have increased by a third in real terms over five years, in education by more than the entire increase between 1979 and 1997.

So there is great investment. And in the midst of this increased spending there is a temptation to focus on additional schemes to tackle specific disadvantage - hence the insistence of the CCC that coalfield areas get the full benefit of Education Maintenance Allowances.

But what of the other 99% of education spending, mainstream spending, that will do so much to frame the life chances of children in coalfield areas? It is especially important in disadvantaged areas that that money is put to good use. We can't afford average services, never mind below average ones, because people in our communities depend on better-than-average services if they are to have decent chances in life. We have to ask the question whether these mainstream services are yet organised to tackle the disadvantage that exists. Let me give you two examples of what I mean from our experience here in South Tyneside:

-Our primary schools now achieve above the national average, but our secondary schools still leave 60 per cent of children without five good GCSEs. That means we need to put ourselves at the forefront of national programmes to tackle the main deficiencies in secondary schooling: more teachers and support for them, consistent help for children who fall behind, mentoring to raise aspirations. But then we may need to push the boundaries of national policy really to give our children a leg up - whether it be through radically smaller class sizes, or extended hours schooling, ore new links with local universities, or greater flexibility in the National Curriculum. We have a new education leadership team in place in our Borough, and if they come up with ideas to tackle our disadvantage, government should back them.

Or think about jobs. Unemployment in my constituency has fallen by over 1000 since 1997, and the level of youth unemployment is reduced by over 50%; but we need the Employment Service, now Job Centre Plus, to be doubly effective in tackling entrenched and structural unemployment, which in some wards is up to 17%, over 20% for men. All over the country over the next two years the Employment Service and Benefits Agency will be merging their office and personnel; we need to make sure that our communities are at the forefront of the change in structure and culture to make 'Employment First' the guiding light of welfare policy. But we may need more: maybe if our local benefit offices were given more flexibility and control over the use of their budgets, rather than conforming to national rules, they would achieve better results. If they are ready for it, let's see government back them.

None of this is easy. But the end goal is clear - a better service to the public, more consistently of high standard, and better suited to 21st century needs. It means asking searching questions of ourselves and own staff, but I believe that in our public services we have people of outstanding calibre, who will thrive on more responsibility, and accept greater accountability. Too much time in government is spent seeing whether plans fit rules, not whether they will work. If local staff come up with new ideas government should be backing the experiments, not saying no. National rules are there to be bent to local circumstance, not turned into a straitjacket on local innovation.

Distinctive Local Vision

The second challenge of regeneration from within is perhaps the hardest task of public leadership today: defining a viable economic and social future for a local community in a world that is changing fast.

Coal made us distinctive in the last century. The challenge now is to be distinctive again, not this time as coalfield areas, not this time as ex-coalfield areas, but as communities renowned for something new as well as something old. Let me try and explain what I mean.

We live in a world where people as well as capital are more mobile, whether they are choosing where to live, where to shop or where to spend their leisure time. We have become used to cities striking out in new directions - Birmingham through the Exhibition and Conference Centre, Leeds into financial services, Newcastle-Gateshead now bidding to be the European Capital of Culture.

I believe the same process, the same search for a unique selling point, needs to take place more locally. People in South Shields are certainly loyal to the local area, but we are all competing for time, money and commitment. Every ex-coalfield needs to define something for which it is special - above the national average - and which people value.

Let me take South Tyneside as an example again. The issues raised are fundamental: whether to prioritise jobs for people from the area rather than bringing jobs to the area; how to build on historic strengths, nurturing our small firms, for example in shipbuilding, without being trapped in the past; whether to try and attract new businesses, or focus on growing existing ones; how to complement the growing entrepreneurialism of our bigger neighbours in Newcastle and Sunderland; how to be attractive to young families without neglecting older residents.

One thing is clear: muddling through will bring decline. The American business guru Rosabeth Moss Kanter says every community needs to get into the business of making, thinking or serving - and preferably two of the three. In Britain in the 19th century, local coalitions of politics, business and philanthropy drove innovation and renewal. Today, similar clarity is needed, backed by local coalitions for change.

Mobilising Social Capital

Let me conclude by talking about our third challenge - mobilising our communities in support of change. The task is huge; asking for ownership of new ideas from communities battered by social and economic change is an uphill struggle; absence of hope can be harder to replace than the absence of industry.

Reading the work of Chas Critcher and his colleagues, comparing European experience of coalfield renewal, I was struck by the emphasis they put on the effectiveness of local institutions for channelling energy and commitment. They call this 'institutional thickness'. Another way of looking at it is to call it 'social capital' - the networks of trust and mutuality that hold a community together, from homework clubs to pensioners' groups.

Social Capital is about links and connections - vertical links between regional and local government, because I believe it is vital that we do generate in places like the North East strong and vibrant institutions for regional economic renewal, but also the horizontal links into the private and voluntary sectors where many people devote their energy and make their livelihood.

To the outsider, Britain's coalfield communities seem rich in just this sort of institutional development. But in the world beyond the miners' lodge, Critcher and his colleagues find a picture of underinvestment and underdevelopment: regional and local institutions matter and make a difference, but in Britain centralisation of power has made it difficult to establish local institutions with real roots in the community.

Local authorities have a key role. But providing the vision is not just the task for the local authority. Everything we know about achieving change tells us that telling people what they should believe is not as effective as helping them discover it for themselves. Local Strategic Partnerships are an important innovation - but even they can seem like a committee of committees, unless local people are given their say, through public consultation and initiatives like Citizen's Juries and internet voting.

But I think there is another ingredient: hope built on achievement. Long term visions need concrete early gains to channel frustration and anger into positive commitment. There is an opportunity available to us.

Coalfield communities, like all economically distressed areas, need more local money to be recycled within the locality. With the public sector as a major and growing spender, we need to ensure public procurement policy increases the local impact - the 'multiplier' - of public spending. For example, 600 houses are to be built on the old Westoe colliery site: every ex-miner or child of an ex-miner engaged in some part of that project will help persuade people change can be positive. That is a challenge to the public sector, and the private sector, which will get many of the contracts. Ideas of public planning have been scorned for twenty years, but today we need to think radically and laterally at local level, and then press government to back our good ideas.

Conclusion

I started by saying that coalfields have for twenty years been asking a simple question: "What is our future?". Thanks to the CCC and the Government, the playing field is being made more level. I see most days in South Shields that nothing can make up for the damage of unplanned pit closures; but also that we now have the chance to build our own futures.

George Orwell calculated that the average miner produced 8400 tonnes of coal in a lifetime. Dangerous, hard jobs that most people would not want to do were defended with passion above all because there seemed to be no alternative. Now we have no alternative but to find one. The Government are offering us justice; the task of regeneration falls to us.

There is something special about all coalfield areas, and something special about each one. We have to build on that to develop a viable future. The people who live there deserve nothing less; and with the right local vision to match national action, I believe we can build that future, and I look forward to working with you in that task.