Oral evidence

Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Urban Affairs Sub-Committee

on Tuesday 20 May 2003

Members present:

Andrew Bennett
Chris Mole
Mr Bill O'Brien

In the absence of the Chairman, Chris Mole was called to the chair

__________

Witnesses: DAME SALLY POWELL, Hammersmith and Fulham Councillor, lead member for transformation of the local environment at the LGA, and MR MALCOLM SMITH, Director of Environment Regeneration at the London Borough of Newham, LGA advisor, examined.

Q151  Chris Mole: Good morning and welcome everyone to the second hearing of this inquiry: Living Places: Cleaner, Safer, Greener. Thank you for your assistance and apologies for the late start. I wonder if the witnesses would give their names for the record, please.

Dame Sally Powell: Councillor Dame Sally Powell.

Mr Smith: Malcolm Smith, Director, Environment Regeneration at Newham.

Q152  Chris Mole: Are you desperate to say anything specifically, in addition to your written submissions to the inquiry, or shall we go straight to questions?

Dame Sally Powell: May I just say a couple of words to start with. I have been reading some of the other evidence that you have received and I think it is very important to say that the environment, the built environment, is a multi-faceted thing that you have to deal with in a locality. It is something that is incredibly important - I think of increasing importance to local people in localities. Although, if you like, the bulk of our local government services, the bulk of our resources, is spent in social services, in education, the environment is something that is universal and experienced by the whole of the population, and I think it is of increasing importance to local authorities in terms of their relationship with the people whom they represent. When we developed our six commitments from the Local Government Association, the environment was one of the six commitments and it has now grown into becoming a shared priority with government. We do applaud the work that DEFRA have done, and particularly the commitment of the Minister Alun Michael in bringing forward what is a very comprehensive document. We do think there are some omissions, particularly in the transport field, which is often responsible for much of the environment. Although ownership is perceived by the bulk of the population as the responsibility of the local authority, obviously it often is not. If we really want to tackle more comprehensively the issue of the built environment, there do need to be some resources that back up some of the political commitment that is demonstrated in the document.

Q153  Andrew Bennett: That is all right, but actually public spaces have got a lot worse, have they not, over the last 10 years.

Dame Sally Powell: It depends where, in my view. If I speak for my own local authority's experience - which is Hammersmith and Fulham - we are a beacon council in terms of improving urban green spaces. We have just been awarded beacon council status in terms of highway and street management. I would say that it has become a lot better in some places. I think essentially that in different places things have different priorities. I do not necessarily agree that things have totally deteriorated but I do think that public spaces do need some additional investment, to catch up with the investment that we have had in education and social services.

Mr Smith: There may well be places where it has become worse. I think the difference or the change is that the public's tolerance of poor standards has changed. I think that is right. Because there is now a greater public awareness of this agenda and people's tolerance for bad behaviour in the environment, whether it is domestic or whether it is caused commercially, has gone up the agenda, so that people are expecting the public authorities, usually the local authority, to sort these things out. I think it is a combination. In some areas I think standards have improved and in some areas they may not have done because of all sorts of pressures within that local authority area, but I also think - which is right - people's tolerance of abuses in the environment is a lot less than it used to be.

Q154  Andrew Bennett: If you look at parks across the country, there are some terrible ones now, are there not?

Mr Smith: There may well be. I work for Newham, which is an East End borough. Interestingly, we have one of the city's parks in our area, and it is quite interesting to compare what we with our budgets are able to achieve with what the city with its budgets is able to achieve. I walk my dog in Greenwich, a royal park, and it is also very interesting to see that level of standard, which can be achieved, which I think is what everyone should expect. I suspect, to a degree, that is a resources issue but it may also be issues of efficiency and contracts and effectiveness. I think local authorities are all or mostly striving to improve their delivery and contractual delivery in those areas, but we have a hugely competing set of demands which we have to service.

Q155  Andrew Bennett: You want a framework. That is an excuse for saying: it is not our fault that they are in a mess now.

Mr Smith: I think it would be disingenuous for local authorities to say that none of the abuses in the environment are anything to do with them. In some cases they are. Local authorities are sometimes responsible for some of the problems in the area but more often than not I think there is a real commitment to improving those standards. I think we need to remember that abuse in the environment, abuse in parks, is caused by individuals. It is caused by people often who live in that borough, who think it is perfectly acceptable to trash a flowerbed or throw litter on the ground. That is a challenge but I think it is important to remember that results of this are as a result of people's behaviour.

Q156  Andrew Bennett: Is the issue not, as far as the small number of authorities who really do their parks and their spaces well, that because they are done well people have to look after them? They only tend to get trashed where they are pretty trashy to start with.

Dame Sally Powell: I do not think that is the case. In my area we spend a lot of resources on maintaining our parks. We are a beacon council, so I think that is an independent recognition in relation to our delivery, and we still get an enormous amount of abuse from people in terms of their behaviour. I think there is another big issue in relation to the maintenance, if you are specifically talking about parks, which is that all these things are not just about revenue investment in terms of daily maintenance but are also about capital investment. A park that was designed in the 1960s is now not as efficient to maintain. It needs revival and renewal. Where local authorities have had access to capital - in my authority it is very much through Section 106 agreements and bits of capital here and there which you cobble together - they have been able to review an area and then it is easier to maintain. That has not been available for all local authorities up and down the country. I do think that the freedom to borrow will enable local authorities to invest more in the built environment, although you still need the revenue stream to maintain that.

Q157  Mr O'Brien: Do we need legislation to make public spaces cleaner, safer, greener?

Dame Sally Powell: We were talking about this just a minute ago. One of the problems, if you like, for the public as well as local authorities, is that the legislation is a myriad. It is all over the place, whether it is in the Town and Country Planning Act or the Environment Act. A consolidation and a clarity of responsibility on who has the responsibility for the public realm, I think would be very beneficial for all of us.

Q158  Mr O'Brien: Who do you think is responsible? It is the local authorities, is it not?

Dame Sally Powell: No, it is not.

Q159  Mr O'Brien: Who is it?

Dame Sally Powell: I will give you an example. In a street you may well have a frontage, a part of the pavement, which is the responsibility of the person who owns the house. The next bit of the pavement will be the responsibility of the local authority. You will have an uplifted kerbstone because it is the utility underneath it that is responsible for that repair or that maintenance. You will have a cable company that will be responsible for another bit. Then you will have the highway authority - which is not always the local authority - responsible for the next bit. The complexity of whose responsibility -----

Q160  Mr O'Brien: What about open spaces? You just mentioned open spaces. We are looking now at public spaces, so why do we need more legislation to make public spaces to make them safer, cleaner and appeal to the public?

Mr Smith: I think I would agree with Sally that the legislation is spread across a large number of bits of individual acts across the piece as the Powers, Rights and Responsibilities document outlined. I think that, in many ways, there is a case for saying that, if they were rationalised and crucially that the sanctions that the courts imposed when we take people to court ... It is all very well having the legislation - and there is lots of legislation, you are right - but it is no good ... I will give you an example. We catch a commercial fly-tipper who has abused the public space, in this case actually a playing field. They tip two or three lorry loads of builders rubble on there and we catch them on CCTV, we take them to court and the court slap them over the wrist with a couple of hundred quid fine. We have the legislation to do that; it is cumbersome and it takes time to get them to court and you have to catch them doing it but assume that you get them to court, the courts, it appears to local people, do not actually recognise the severity of that. Those people should be put out of business. So, the legislation is only part of the story and I think it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the perception in many parts of the country is that the sanctions for these abuses, when they are brought in front of the courts, are derisory. The people can just tip off and carry on with the next job.

Q161  Mr O'Brien: Have you raised this with the Magistrates' Association?

Mr Smith: We have, yes.

Q162  Mr O'Brien: What is their response?

Mr Smith: Their response is that their hands are tied to a degree. They cannot simply locally impose sanctions that are outside the guidelines. I imagine - and I am no expert in this area - that it is a Lord Chancellor's Department issue about guidelines for the way in which those sanctions are applied because, as I say, it is hugely frustrating locally, both for the members and for residents when they see somebody taken to court ---

Q163  Mr O'Brien: The Government have just introduced new regulations on fly-tipping and the more severe fly-tipping. The point I am making is that legislation is there but that local government is not using it.

Dame Sally Powell: There is a raft of legislation in different acts and I think that local authorities try to use those parts of legislation that are relevant to their localities. No local authority will use all the available legislation, but one of the problems that there is is the cost of enforcement to local authority, so you have to be selective in what you use. For example, my authority prosecuted more utilities than any other authority in the country last year, but it costs us around £1,000 a prosecution and then the cable company or whatever will be fined £50 to £200.

Q164  Andrew Bennett: You get your costs as well.

Dame Sally Powell: We do not always get the costs of what it actually costs us to take them to court, I have to say. Newham, for example, do a lot of abandoned car removals because that is a problem in their area, but I think that what local authorities try to do - and it is increasingly becoming important - is to actually respond to the problems in their own localities which will be different.

Q165  Mr O'Brien: Will the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill help?

Dame Sally Powell: We very much welcome some of the measures in the Anti Social Behaviour Bill, particularly the measures on graffiti and flyposting.

Q166  Mr O'Brien: So you feel that the legislation that is in being now, the legislation that is on the statute, is sufficient and that we do not need any more legislation?

Mr Smith: I think I would agree. I think that the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill with the issues about giving rights of entry and the ability to tackle those other areas is really good and I think that the LGA and local authorities really welcome that. So, the legislation is there but I think that the local authorities have to make judgments about where they target their limited resources. I cannot manage to tackle all of the environmental abuses in my borough through enforcement because, if you view enforcement as the carrot and the stick, this agenda has to be more than simply enforcing people to change their behaviours. People have to understand that it is not right to behave in this way and that it makes sense not to because it diverts resources in that local authority away from things on which it would be much better to spend money. So, you are right, I agree that the Anti-Social Behaviour Bill is a huge step forward in giving us additional tools and tidying up some of the weaknesses that we felt were there and I think it is right to acknowledge that.

Q167  Chris Mole: We were talking about money just now and the Government have allocated some additional funds for local authority environmental programmes; is this going to me a difference?

Dame Sally Powell: Local authority funding, as we have seen recently in relation to education, is notoriously complex in terms of what money goes where, who is responsible, whether it is ring-fenced and whatever, but local government has long argued against specific ring-fencing of funding directed from Whitehall. It is acknowledged that some authorities have had an increase in their EPCS block and those authorities will be able to determine the priorities for that block of money and that block, in which the environment sits, covers a whole raft of issues, as I am sure you are aware: street cleansing, maintenance of parks, planning, removal of abandoned cars and planning control. Local authorities have to respond to the demands in their own areas, so whether you will see a blanket improvement in the environment as a consequence, I would hold my breath on that.

Mr Smith: I have read some of the other evidence that you have had and there has been some suggestion that local authorities are in some way syphoning off this cash to shore up difficulties in social services, children or education, wherever the problems are. Obviously I cannot speak for every other authority. All I know is that I have had additional money; I have had an extra £400,000 revenue in my budget this year plus £300,000 one off capital to put into the environment and that has been reflected in previous years and I know that other London boroughs have done the same. Southwark, for instance, is putting a huge amount into their cleansing programme. I think that certainly from a London perspective - and I cannot speak for all of the boroughs - more money is going in but I think it is a recognition that actually for many years not enough money was going into those budgets. It is very easy to get capital for things. Take CCTV. We have probably the most extensive CCTV network to support our anti-social behaviour work in London. The trouble is, that is as a result of me bidding to the Home Office for capital moneys on a regular basis and being very grateful to get it, but actually I then have to beg, steal and borrow to find ways of updating cameras and repairing camera because it is a fast-moving area. CCTV is a very important tool and weapon in anti-social behaviour and abuse in the environment but, if I do not have the revenue to manage it, run it and update it, then we are short changing all that capital investment.

Q168  Chris Mole: Given the competition from high-priority political objectives like education and social care, how do you get greater prioritisation from local government in this agenda?

Mr Smith: Locally, there is no doubt in my borough that joint number one is the environment but the elected mayor has to balance that with the need to put more money into children and also continue the passporting of money through to education and we have managed to do that in our borough with a single figure council tax increase also in the face of, for us, a difficult settlement. I think that will be a local judgment and I think it inevitably will be a local judgment, but certainly my experience tells me and my postbag tells me that it is the number one problem and that people expect the council to recognise that by putting more money into it.

Dame Sally Powell: Certainly in a lot of the opinion polling and research that we have done, that people want investment and improvement in the service comes out as the number one thing and I think it is because - and I do not mean to downgrade education and social services etc - not everybody has children in school and not everybody is in need of social services but the environment is universal. That is reflected in our opinion polling and I think it is reflected in the priority that a lot of us are giving to the environment. My own authority increased our cleansing bill by £1 million last year in terms of a smarter borough initiative.

Q169  Chris Mole: Given your comments about ring-fencing, if the Government were to make more finance available for environmental programmes, what certainty would there be that it would be actually spent on urban spaces?

Dame Sally Powell: This goes back to a core argument about democracy and accountability and devolution. In my area - and you can only speak from your own perspective - if we did not invest in our environment, we would not be re-elected and I think it is the same for many, many areas. Although you may perceive - and I think people do perceive, because I think people's standards in terms of the quality and what they expect have gone up - that things are not being invested in, I can assure you that local authorities are spending an awful lot of time, resources and effort in the maintenance of their environment, but it is a very costly business and it is often dependent on people's behaviour and, if people's behaviour deteriorates, it is more costly in terms of maintaining the quality.

Q170  Chris Mole: Will the best value performance indicator make any difference in cleanliness?

Mr Smith: I think it is a step forward. It is a basket of individual things to make up an indicator and I think it is important to recognise that the public realm is only part of the experience of the environment. We did an experiment where we cleaned the street, so it was grade A, spotless, and then we took a look at it and said, "You cannot now say that the street is in bad shape, so what are the factors here that are devaluing the environment?" They were public factors such as broken paving slabs and uneven surfaces, but, if we had then gone in and sorted all that out, what we were left with was the impact of private behaviours, whether that is two houses with boarded-up windows, two gardens full of rubbish piled up above the hedge, which exist, graffiti on an end wall on a private flank wall, so the lex indicator will give a more rounded perception of how the environment is in a given area.

Q171  Andrew Bennett: A good councillor would go in and tackle those problems, would it not?

Mr Smith: It would and many councils do that. We have a programme called "Respect" which is rolling through the borough which is an attempt to bring all the agencies together to tackle all the anti-social behaviour issues and we knock on doors and say, "Look, we can take this away for free." All of that costs. If you think of a given borough of, say, 220,000/230,000 people, that is a lot of properties. Many of the private properties, certainly in our parts of London, are rented, the owners are not there, so the residents do not have much responsibility for the environment in which they living. So, yes, the local authority should do that and many do, but, again, it is a case of spreading the jam very, very thinly. I have an enforcement team that can in no way hope to tackle those issues across the whole borough in any given period. It has to be selective.

Q172  Andrew Bennett: When we looked at the parks inquiry some time back, most local authorities did not know how much green space they had. Do you think that has improved?

Mr Smith: In terms of just an empirical amount of how much land?

Q173  Andrew Bennett: Yes.

Mr Smith: There are always little pocket of land that you think you know who owns it and then, when you come to look at it, you find that it is the ownership of one committee that did not know they had it and I do not think that there is any local authority that can put their hand on their heart and say that it knows exactly every blade of grass that it owns, but I do think that more authorities are doing more to ensure that, when they let new contracts, they are clear about those boundary issues, who owns what and who is going to be responsible for the bits where they join, but I think that lots of local authorities have a long way to go.

Q174  Andrew Bennett: Is not the danger with a lot of new contracts that it actually produces new landscaped areas and so councils have gradually taken over more and more areas without the resources to look after them?

Mr Smith: I do not know whether it is about taking over lots more areas, I think the problem with contracts traditionally has been that there have been contracts for housing estate maintenance, there have been contracts for public highway maintenance and contracts for parks and sometimes those contracts do not join up and you get these problems where, "It is not my responsibility, that it is the street-sweeper's responsibility" and vice-versa. I think again as part of best value, most authorities have looked quite critically at those contract issues and are trying to address them. So, I think progress is being made in that area but that we still have a long way to go.

Dame Sally Powell: I think it is difficult for local authorities in terms of developing new spaces because there is the issue which almost sounds like a good idea to begin with but then there is the revenue cost of the maintenance and the upkeep. So, it is not only just about identifying how you are going to develop the new space, you then also have to maintain it and then there is some evidence of some very good practice in local government of working in partnership with the private sector, so that, through a planning agreement, you may well create a new public open space which is then going to be maintained by the private sector for the benefit of the public and I think that is a good example of how we can, in certain places, actually improve the quality of open space.

Q175  Andrew Bennett: You put it into the category like burglary to make it unpleasant for people commit crimes on the estates and then actually guarantee that the litter remains there. It is very difficult to litter pick.

Mr Smith: Yes, it is, absolutely.

Q176  Andrew Bennett: So what are you doing about these fragmented spaces? Does the Government's Living Spaces document help at all?

Mr Smith: It did not jump out of the page at me that there was a huge new toolkit for how to tackle those nutty issues that you have described. I think that they have to be addressed through contract specifications but more importantly through proper effective clienting. Clienting skills are the all-important skills when it comes to managing these contracts, making sure that those difficult bits of litter that nobody feels it is their responsibility to pick up are properly dealt with and that is only done through good supervision on the ground so that people understand that it is their responsibility to pick it up and they do not just walk by it.

Q177  Chris Mole: You are concerned that transport issues were not covered by Living Places; how do you think it should have addressed those issues?

Dame Sally Powell: For many urban areas and the Urban Select Committee, the highway is a very substantial part of the public realm and open space and, if you talk to any borough engineer, there are a whole raft of issues that could be looked at in terms of the improvement of the highway in terms of public open space, whether it be the number of poles that you have to have to put signs on and whether there can be rationalisation of that and responsibility between different highway authorities. In London, we have two highway authorities and two transport authorities with "That's not our road; it is their road; they have to clean it." Also, getting transport authorities and the Strategic Rail Authority to keep the bridges clean, which people think are the local authority's responsibility. I think there is a whole raft of issues that could be looked at at a technical level in terms of trying to bring the highway and the maintenance of the highway up to scratch and that would actually improve public space and urban space. Quite a lot of open space, particularly in dense urban areas, is actually highway. A public square will be highway, not a park.

Q178  Chris Mole: You were talking earlier on about the cable operators in the street setting. Is not one of the problems that the legislation specifically allows them to walk away from the problem and earlier expectations of reinstatement do not necessarily last in the long term?

Dame Sally Powell: No and the quality of reinstatement. My authority has had 50 prosecutions, which is very substantial, in the last year and the quality of reinstatement when we go and bore what they have actually done is appalling comparative to the quality that the local authority would specify and therefore that leads to added deterioration.

Q179  Andrew Bennett: That is because you are a soft touch. If you really were tough on them, then they would never have got away with it, would they?

Dame Sally Powell: They do not get away with it in my authority but they do get away with it in a lot of authorities because it needs a specifically dedicated team of people to be that committed to take the utility companies to court all the time and, again, some of the fines they get are derisory comparative to what they have actually done to the highway.

Mr Smith: These are multi-national companies that have no commitment locally at all. They do not care whether they are in Hammersmith, Newham, Ipswich or anywhere and that is one of the issues. We try to engage the utilities and some are actually now beginning to understand that it is important.

Q180  Mr O'Brien: In quite a lot of your responses, you have been referring to fines. How will increasing fines improve the situation?

Mr Smith: Fining is a delicate art. Levels of fines have to be set in order that they properly reflect the offence but, from our point of view, if we were to keep the fines that would enable us to support the enforcement activity that generates them, then I think that is setting the right level. I do not think that the level is the only thing and that the threat of the fine is sometimes enough to get people to change their ways, but ultimately the fine does need to support and pay for the activity.

Q181  Mr O'Brien: You said earlier that the fines are low.

Mr Smith: They are low.

Q182  Mr O'Brien: And that prosecution is difficult, so if one of the aims is to keep the resources from fines, would it change things substantially?

Dame Sally Powell: Let us work on experience. One of the great successes was the decriminalisation of parking enforcement and the ability for the local authorities to charge for parking enforcement and to retain the resources. If you take where you are at the moment, Westminster, which has the largest amount of resources received in relation to parking enforcement in the country, they have invested a lot of the moneys they receive from those fines back into the highway and some of the built environment that it was ring-fenced to provide for. So I think that is a good example of where you receive the resources in terms of the offences committed in the public realm, you then use those resources to re-invest back into improvement ---

Q183  Mr O'Brien: Why can local governments not do it in general and follow the example of Westminster?

Dame Sally Powell: A lot of London does it but I expect that people commit more parking offences in Westminster.

Mr Smith: In Westminster, it is supply and demand.

Dame Sally Powell: It is supply and demand and the deterrent level has to be ---

Q184  Mr O'Brien: You were saying that it would be a shame if resources could not go back to improve the parks and make them more presentable. If that can happen in Westminster, why can other local authorities not do it?

Mr Smith: Westminster generates huge income because there is a small supply of parking and a massive demand, so people prepared to pay.

Q185  Mr O'Brien: We are talking about parks. We are talking about penalties for people dropping litter or fly-tipping and other issues which impact upon the quality of our parks. Westminster does it, why can other authorities not do it?

Dame Sally Powell: No, I did not say Westminster did it, I was talking about the example of the decriminalisation and local authorities retaining the resources to reinvest in an issue. There is a difficulty with fixed penalty notices which attach to a person as opposed to a vehicle in that you do not know always who the person is, you do not have a name and you do not have an address and you just issue a fixed penalty notice and hope they pay.

Mr Smith: You rely on them telling you who they are because you have no power currently to demand ---

Q186  Mr O'Brien: Are you saying that we cannot do anything about?

Mr Smith: I am not saying that you cannot do anything about it.

Mr O'Brien: Tell us what we can do about it.

Q187  Chris Mole: On the spot fixed penalty; is that the answer>

Mr Smith: Yes but, if they refuse to pay and you need to chase them, if they do not give you their name and address, the local authority, as things currently stand with litter notices, do not have the power to chase them ... I cannot march them to a police station and get a policeman to demand that they give up their name and address. Fixed penalty notices for litter have worked and they have been quite successful in some places because, if you rely on people's natural honesty, they will tell you. Certainly when we issue notices to traders, of course they have a location and we know who they are but individuals just walking down the street or acting in a park ... Some authorities have parks constables - we have them - and they have specific powers in the parks to do more than simply what someone on the street ---

Q188  Chris Mole: These would be the same as Leicester City Litter Wardens who have special powers. They told us that they could identify people without too much difficulty.

Mr Smith: Yes. I am not saying that it is not possible to identify them, it is just that legally it is difficult to. I cannot march them down to the police station to get the ---

Q189  Mr O'Brien: What powers does local government want? Do you want the power to set your own level of fines?

Mr Smith: I think we do, yes.

Q190  Mr O'Brien: That is included, it is not? DEFRA, when reforming their legislative framework, propose to give councils and police power to set their own level of fines.

Mr Smith: I think that would be good because the circumstances of different authorities ---

Q191  Mr O'Brien: The whole key is educating people not to drop litter and not to create offences in our parks; how can we go about that?

Mr Smith: There are any number of examples. You have heard evidence from ENCAMS. Their whole raison d'être was getting Britain to be tidier. Ultimately, there is a whole range of measures. For the young people, it is actually about finding cool role models to whom they can relate. It is no good me going into a school in a suit saying, "Don't drop litter." It works with kids up to age 11 but, beyond 11, something goes wrong in the wiring and they change. As a parent of two teenage boys, I can assure you that something changes although my boys do not litter. It is a combination of finding ways in which you make people aware of the impact of their behaviours and that can be at the global scale. If you try and sell a message that, if we have to keep spending millions on cleansing, that is millions we are not spending on leisure and on the things that actually they also want, so it is a whole range of things but this is the holy grail and nobody has found the answer, certainly in this country.

Q192  Andrew Bennett: You prefer to keep fines than this liveability fund because fines would be worth a lot more than this liveability fund; is that right?

Dame Sally Powell: The liveability fund is a capital fund.

Q193  Andrew Bennett: It is not much, is it?

Dame Sally Powell: It is not much and, if you spread it amongst all the local authorities, it would probably not achieve anything that would be visible.

Q194  Andrew Bennett: It all has to go to Fulham and Hammersmith?

Dame Sally Powell: No, I would not dream of saying that. It is the reality, is it not? It is not going to go very far although, as you know, a commitment for the first time to have some environment fund is very welcome in principle, let us not be mealy-mouthed about it, but I understand that currently the Government are trying to establish how this is going to be allocated and we always have a principle in local government that we will not give people advice as to how to allocate it as otherwise we will all fall out amongst ourselves, so I think it is a problem given that it is so small.

Q195  Andrew Bennett: Just solve this problem. There are local authorities who know they have a problem and they may well get the money, but actually the most worrying ones are the local authorities who do not realise that they have a problem and are probably most in need of the money because their parks and their open spaces are in the worst condition.

Mr Smith: It could be that simply giving money to those authorities is not the answer. If it is about an awareness that the problem is significant and that they need to address it, maybe that is the first step before chucking some money at them.

Dame Sally Powell: The issue about funding environmental improvement - and it is not just about parks and urban spaces, the liveability agenda is much bigger than that - is that, if we are going to have some specific funding, it needs to be three-year funding minimum, it needs to be predictable and there needs, if there is going to be a bidding thing, the rules which enable us to access it. It is still £86 million and we must be able to do something of value with it.

Q196  Andrew Bennett: The quality of a lot of public expense is now ruined because of people urinating. Most local authorities have got rid of a number of toilets; is this going to be an increasing problem?

Dame Sally Powell: It is very interesting that you raise that issue. My authority has just put in one of those toilets like you see in some parts of Westminster for men, though I cannot think what they are called.

Mr Smith: Pissoires is what they call them in Paris.

Dame Sally Powell: One has been put outside a big public entertainment venue and it has been fantastically successful in terms of the amount collected which is otherwise not now on the street and down the alleyways. There are some in Westminster that I know of and we have just put one outside a big entertainment centre in Shepherd's Bush. Some members of the public have been somewhat offended by them. However, I think the benefit to the community in terms of the urine that is not now on the street is a really good example of something that we can actually take forward, particularly in entertainment venues.

Q197  Andrew Bennett: You push them on entertainment venues but increasingly we have an elderly population who tend to want to use toilets and more people tend to be out and about, so is there not really some pressure on local authorities to actually be putting them in rather than in most parts of the country removing toilets?

Mr Smith: I can again only speak for Newham, but we put in a number of the automated units which are not universally popular but I have to say that they are more safer and more hygienic than unattended traditional toilets which we had to take out because they became themselves the location for some pretty nasty anti-social behaviour. We are putting toilets back; there are never enough and there are always people who are arguing that we should put a lot more in and what they want is a return to attended toilets as you have in a few places in Westminster where there are large, large numbers of tourists but, frankly, most local authorities simply cannot afford it and that is why they got rid of them in the first place.

Chris Mole: On which interesting note, can I thank you for your evidence.

Witnesses: MR JON ROUSE, Chief Executive, and MR DICKON ROBINSON, CABE Commissioner, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), examined.

Q198  Chris Mole: Can I ask the witnesses to give their names for the record, please.

Mr Rouse: I am Jon Rouse, Chief Executive of CABE.

Mr Robinson: I am Dickon Robinson; I am a CABE Commissioner currently chairing the CABE Space steering group.

Q199  Chris Mole: Is there anything that you wish to add to the written submission?

Mr Rouse: Just very briefly. Last Monday, we launched CABE Space in Corner Fielde in London and we had all interested groups represented there and some children to play with the sheep and chickens and generally enjoy themselves. It was at that moment that we realised the level of responsibility which we have now taken on. This is the first time that we are aware of that there has been a single national champion for public space. We are pretty daunted, I think it is fair to say, by the responsibility we have been given. We have a pretty small budget, between £2.85 and £3.3 million per annum over the next three years to play that role and we are dealing with a sector that has lost £1.3 billion cumulatively since 1979 in real terms. That is about £250 million per year less resources going into parks and public spaces than back in 1979 in real terms. That translates to about £0.25 million per authority across the country. So, that is the level of resource reduction we are talking about. We are also talking about a sector that has significant morale problems in terms of recruitment and retention within the relevant professions and, for a whole variety of reasons starting from CCTV onwards, a fracture in leadership and skill structures within the relevant sectors. So, we are daunted but we are glad to have the task and we are going to address it as best we can.

Q200  Andrew Bennett: So, you have enough to buy one first-class stamp to write to everybody who is involved in the sector; is that not right?

Mr Rouse: It is a little more than that. We have always, at CABE, tried to use a small amount of money and make it go as far as possible and one element that we are going to do at CABE Space is use public campaigning right at the heart of our activity.

Q201  Andrew Bennett: So you have come up with this buzz word "liveability"?

Mr Rouse: No, we did not invent that and you will never find us using it. It is an awful word. We will talk about quality of life and we will take about positive ---

Q202  Andrew Bennett: So, it is an awful word but can you tell me what it means in a sentence?

Mr Rouse: I think it is quality of life as experienced outdoors by people.

Q203  Andrew Bennett: So, what is the buzz word you are replacing it with?

Mr Rouse: "Quality of life". That is what we are all striving for. It is the overall quality of our experience and that will be our buzz phrase though I think it has been around for quite a while.

Q204  Andrew Bennett: Do you think that the Government document takes us forward?

Mr Rouse: In terms of a document, are you talking about Living Places?

Q205  Andrew Bennett: Yes.

Mr Rouse: I think we did not do as well as we would have liked out of the spending review 2002 as far as public space was concerned. When the Chancellor set up the cross-cutting review on public space, it was one of his seven key priorities. To be fair, I think that a lot of our expectations were raised pretty high. At the end of the day, in the context of the communities level of ability and the Living Places document, we ended up with just over £200 million of which about £95 million will go into what you call the liveability fund as was reflected in the statements of previous witnesses.

Q206  Andrew Bennett: So it was filleted and the good bits were thrown away and the rubbish was kept.

Mr Rouse: We do not know what happened is the truth but the reality is that we did not end up in the position we wished we had ended up with. There are not sufficient resources and therefore Living Places, whilst it has lots of good ideas in it, is always going to be constrained by the overall lack of resources that came out of SR2002.

Q207  Chris Mole: You talk about losing £1.3 million; do you think the funds that the Government are making available are going to make any difference?

Mr Rouse: I think it will make some difference. The reality is that, since 1997, the decline, which was pretty dramatic, has been halted. If you look at the statistics since 1997, we have experienced a one per cent increase in real terms over the period from 1997 to 2002, so we have stopped the rot in a sense but, compare that with the percentages that go into education and health, 17 per cent and 16 per cent in real terms, you can see that public space is still very much the poor cousin.

Q208  Chris Mole: You have just probably heard local government saying that they face these pressures to spend on education and health, so what more do you think needs to be done to reverse this trend locally?

Mr Rouse: One of the big question marks is about the statutory relevance in local authorities' minds of the various subjects and I think that one of the questions we have to ask ourselves - and it is quite a fundament question and the previous witnesses were absolutely right, the fact that all the local public surveys put quality of life and public space either first or second on people's radars - is, why is that not reflected in the idea of public space being a set of statutory services which local authorities should be providing? One of the problems we face is that, in terms of league tables, best value, weightings, CPA and all that raft, there tends to be a greater emphasis on other services than some of the more mundane bits and pieces such as parks management, streets management, cleansing and so on. Therefore, there is no surprise that that tends to get reflected in our local authorities' allocation of land.

Mr Robinson: One of the things that we would like to see is more of the benefit from development activity via Section 106s going into public realm and parks. Most development is actually housing and yet a lot of the surplus benefits from that development goes by way of Section 106s into affordable housing, which is an admirable thing and we need more of it, but of course that is a benefit for one sector of the community, albeit a very important one, whereas investing that benefit from development into the public realm would, in a sense, produce benefits for the whole of the community and actually might make development itself more acceptable to that community and that is actually quite important.

Q209  Chris Mole: Your chairman in a recent lecture suggested that more lottery funds should be spent on public spaces and parks. Would this make a significant difference? Have we not been hearing that it is revenue funds rather than capital that is needed to achieve good standards of maintenance?

Mr Robinson: I think we would agree with that. I think the crucial thing is that if you do not get your mainstream funding streams for maintenance and management sorted out at the right level, you cannot compensate by injecting chunks of capital from time to time, particularly if that is allocated on a kind of bidding process. The capital which is available should be regarded as something which is supplementary rather than something which is mainstream.

Q210  Chris Mole: Are there going to be any lottery funds available once we are into the Olympics?

Mr Rouse: There are two elements to that. One is, talking about London for a second, I hope that the Olympics bid will put public space and quality of public space right at the heart of that bid. This is what Manchester did very cleverly and successfully in the context of the Commonwealth Games in creating linear network of spaces going from the city to the stadium, which has really helped the regeneration of East Manchester. I was in Paris at the weekend and, in terms of quality of public space, Paris is light years ahead of London. It has less of it but the quality of it, the quality of the experience, the way it is used, everything from the way the streets are maintained and the way that utilities are not allowed to do restoration works that are inadequate or unfair in terms of what they impose on the public. If London does not get its act together, then we will be a long way behind Paris at least in that aspect of our bids. That is the first thing. The second thing is that the Olympics should not be allowed to distract from the needs of the rest of the country. One piece of good news from the last few years is that cities such as Leeds, Nottingham, Leicester and Manchester have really started to get to grips with their public spaces, particularly their streets and hard spaces, and I would not want to see that damaged by money from the lottery being focused more heavily on London supporting the Olympic Games bid.

Q211  Andrew Bennett: Is not the lottery funding for parks an own goal because, if you get it for an historic park, you then have to guarantee that you maintain it for the next ten years which means that more money gets concentrated on that park at the expense of all the other parks?

Mr Rouse: That is certainly an issue. Having said that, on balance, I think that the Heritage Lottery Fund has been very good news in terms of parks. First of all, in terms of significant capital improvement and uplifting, they have done more than anybody else to improve the state of our most important parks and I do not think that we should in any way underestimate that. On the revenue issue, the key thing now is to get a balance between what the British Lottery Fund is doing on the one hand with a specific focus and what the new Opportunities Fund or a successor fund is going to do for a more general swathe of green space, particularly smaller pieces of green space. What my chairman asked for is that, when the Opportunities Fund is reviewed in terms of its next round, the percentage of money from that fund going into public space should increase from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. We think that reflects a better balance of how much the public think public space is an important beneficiary of the lottery.

Q212  Mr O'Brien: Could I just follow up on that. "Liveability" is not your favourite word and the Liveabililty Fund is there with over £200 million over the next three years of which £41 million goes to CABE, £40 million to Groundwork and £30 million for Groundwork to help local authorities. How do you think that will impact upon the programme?

Mr Rouse: Let me split it down into its three parts. The money that is going to us in terms of public space is actually £17 million over three years. The key element that we will spending that on is actually helping those local authorities that have no form of public space strategy to put them in place because that is the point that was being made to the previous witnesses. We have to get to those authorities who do not even realise that they have a significant problem and that will be one of our main focuses through CABE Space, to bring the bottom up several notches so that they are in the game. That is our role.

Q213  Mr O'Brien: How do you identify them?

Mr Rouse: First of all, we are actually going to the local government communities. We know which local authorities do not have a strategy; it has been reported by the Urban Parks Forum in their latest assessment of public parks, so we know who they are. What we want to do then is correlate that against other indices such as levels of deprivation, where other regeneration investment is going on, so that we can work out not only which authorities need our help but where there is an opportunity then to use other funding to actually turn the new strategy into delivery on the ground.

Q214  Mr O'Brien: Has the Commission published those authorities?

Mr Rouse: They are published by the Open Parks Forum, so they are available.

Q215  Mr O'Brien: How do you think the £89 million that has not been committed should be spent?

Mr Rouse: We are in discussions with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister at the moment in terms of how that money should be distributed. One of the priorities for me is that those authorities that are going to go through the process of putting in place a proper strategy should then receive some of that funding to start to be able to put that strategy in place in order that the public can see some of the benefits of the work we are going to be doing with them on leadership, skills, structures and prioritisation.

Q216  Mr O'Brien: Are you saying that the money should be spent on those authorities that have no programme for improving parks but that the people who have made a great effort to improve their open space and parks should not receive any money?

Mr Rouse: If we were talking about a fund of £400 or £500 million, then I would absolutely agree with your sentiment that it should be distributed widely. £90 million is not a lot of money. If we spread that too thinly, we will end up doing nothing well, so we have to have some sort of rationale for distributing that money to 25 or 30 authorities where we can actually make a difference on the ground and it seems to me ---

Q217  Chris Mole: Are you not just rewarding bad practice?

Mr Rouse: No because what you are asking the authorities to do is jump through several hoops first in terms of turning around that bad practice and putting the right structures in place with the right leadership in place and only if they put that strategy in place should they then get access to the funds.

Q218  Mr O'Brien: Groundwork has been on that activity for a long while?

Mr Rouse: No. We are very clear about what our relationship with Groundwork is and we have very different roles. Groundwork's role is to work with local communities at community level to bring particular pieces of space back into beneficial use. Our role is to work at a strategic level with local government in terms of looking at their needs across the entire borough and looking at how your prioritise investment in space within a borough.

Q219  Andrew Bennett: CABE Space, 12 employees, what should they have achieved in three years' time?

Mr Robinson: I think that CABE Space is going to achieve a very great deal in three years' time. First of all, it will make contact with all those local authorities that do not have the strategy in place and will make sure that they are aware of what CABE Space is trying to do and that they are encouraged to take advantage of the funding that is coming into play. Secondly, CABE Space is going to be active in carrying out research. The first research we are going to do is to try and demonstrate the economic value of improvements in the public realm and in parks ---

Q220  Andrew Bennett: That information is available, is it not?

Mr Robinson: No.

Q221  Andrew Bennett: You know from estate agents that if you live close to a good park, your property is worth a lot more than if you live next to a rotten park.

Mr Robinson: That is anecdotal and we would like to put it on a proper basis because we think that would make it much easier to justify investment in public realm in the future. The first thing we are going to be doing is campaigning in advocacy; we are going to make sure that we raise the whole issue of renaissance in public realm as highly as we can in the media and get many members of the public engaged in this because ultimately, going back to what we were talking about earlier, if we are going to invest more money in management and maintenance, ultimately it is going to be local people who are going to have to pay for that through various local government taxation and we want them to be positive about that and supportive. The last thing is skills and professional development. We are going to work really hard with all the professionals who are managing and maintaining parks, landscape architects and others who are responsible for design and actually very much with clients. One of the things we feel is that ultimately people who are responsible at a political level or at a senior officer level in local authority just are not sufficiently ambitious, they are not sufficiently demanding of the professionals who are out there and we want to make a real difference to that.

Q222  Andrew Bennett: Green spaces rather than grey spaces?

Mr Rouse: Green spaces and grey spaces, actually. I think the point was well made earlier that it is all very well if you just improve the park, but if all the buildings and the private space around it is poorly looked after, that hardly helps and it is the same with roads and streets and squares and so on. I think that we have a remit here which is particularly focused on green spaces but CABE's sense is that we are concerned about the public realm in totality.

Q223  Mr O'Brien: CABE is suggesting in their submission that the problems we had with some of our parks is design; what about maintenance and the upkeep?

Mr Rouse: I would say in overall terms that management maintenance is more of a problem than design. That is not to downplay design, I think design is very important. If you take something like the housing market in rural areas, the design of new public space within those areas, if we take out certain numbers of housing units, it is going to be absolutely critical to the success of those strategies. We have got it wrong so badly so many times over the last 30 years when we have done clearance that I cannot stress that enough. However, for the mainstream, for most of our existing spaces, it is first and foremost about management maintenance and therefore what we are going to do in July at our annual general meeting is actually change our constitution and change the way that CABE is set out, so that our memorandum and articles actually state explicitly that our organisation is as much interested in management and maintenance as it is in design.

Q224  Mr O'Brien: If many of the local authorities had to follow though your philosophy, that would require tremendous departmental change in those authorities.

Mr Robinson: I think it probably would, actually.

Q225  Mr O'Brien: If you have local authorities who are struggling now to maintain their parks and CABE is suggesting that there should be change in the design and presentation of parks, that would mean a departmental change but what about cost? Have you done any assessment on cost?

Mr Rouse: I think the first thing to say is that we need to do more research but where I am suggesting significant changes in design such as the housing market in rural areas, I am not suggesting that local authorities should find that out of their normal resources; I think that would be unrealistic but, in the pathfinders there is £500 million identified in the communities plan for undertaking that pathfinder work. So, what I am suggesting is that a proportion of that resource should be spent on getting the public spaces right and not just subsiding volume house builders. It seems commonsense to me to actually spend money on getting spaces right and not just give it to the private sector to build houses.

Q226  Mr O'Brien: When you talk about getting public spaces right, does that mean broad ease of maintenance, for instance?

Mr Rouse: It absolutely does.

Q227  Mr O'Brien: Some of the problems we have with some of the designs is that maintenance is a problem.

Mr Rouse: I could not agree more and one of the jobs that we have to do is educate the architects and the landscape architects to start designing things which are safe and easy to maintain and sometimes they do not like hearing that because it might upset their aesthetic sensibilities, but I am afraid that they are going to have to hear it.

Q228  Chris Mole: Some of our street scenes that have been around for a little longer are pretty cluttered; are you concerned about poor management of street scenery in that sense?

Mr Robinson: We are, indeed. In fact, we have chaired a working party which has already reported on this very issue and, frankly, I think we are rather disappointed that that report has not had more impact.

Q229  Chris Mole: Is that Paving the Way?

Mr Robinson: Indeed and it has focused very much on those issues and I think that remains a big challenge to us. I do not think that it is helped by the fact that the responsibility for transport and environment is now once again split at Government level and we would like to see much more leadership as far as transport is concerned understanding that these environmental issues are a key part of managing and maintaining an effective transport network.

Q230  Chris Mole: A lot of people are saying that a highway engineer's perspective seems to dominate. Can some of the regulations around those decisions be actually compromising safety?

Mr Robinson: It is a leadership issue; I am sure that is possible. We were satisfied that that is possible. I just think that there is a huge amount of inertia out there. Safety is a really interesting issue because it is one of those things which, at one level, you can never argue against, but I think that is where professionalism comes in, which is in fact actually making an informed balance between the need to have safe spaces and the need to have spaces which are attractive, pleasant and desirable to be in.

Mr Rouse: We spent a lot of money on this report and one of the things that we did was that we took every single regulation piece of guidance and showed clause by clause how it could be changed. There is an annex of page after page of this which actually sets out how you would go about that. We have not had one response from the Department of Transport to this document. We even find it difficult to get meetings with them now and we find the division now between transport and the rest of infrastructure in terms of planning and housing and regeneration very, very difficult.

Q231  Andrew Bennett: In fact, that document was a waste of time, was it not?

Mr Rouse: It was not a waste of time because it helped me understand what needed to be done but, in terms of implementation, it remains extant but not delivered.

Q232  Andrew Bennett: Why not offer local authorities a nice prize for the one that can remove the most unnecessary street signs? Would that not be more effective?

Mr Rouse: We need to try all sorts of things. In terms of campaigns, I am going to see the BBC this afternoon and we are going to do a campaign with them called Waste of Space where the public actually identify the space they feel angriest about in the country and then we are going to put pressure on those who are responsible for that space. We are going to also write round to every local authority and get them to name the three utilities which are causing the most pain and then we are going to publish a league table. We are going to use whatever means it takes really to try and get this issue on the agenda.

Q233  Chris Mole: You are not in it for popularity, obviously! There is a lack of council officers with urban design and management skills; how can this be overcome?

Mr Robinson: CABE is taking on a new role in terms of skills development. The way you couched that question is interesting because the skills deficit up to now has been seen very much as a kind of professional issue, not enough skilled landscape architects or architects or engineers, and I think our sense is that there is a lot of talent and capability out there in this country in terms of professionals but that actually very often they are not given the opportunity to actually exploit their talents.

Q234  Chris Mole: Do you think that professional bodies need to be encouraged to change their curricula?

Mr Rouse: We want to get more of those professionals to be employed by local authorities and we want to develop their client-side skills, so that they are actually better at understanding how the finance works and actually managing that and challenging that and actually better at getting more out of professionals and out of contractors in terms of the service which they deliver.

Q235  Andrew Bennett: You have already said that really the Department of Transport is detached from the rest of Government. As regards this sort of cross-departmental working: we have a committee of ministers that have not met yet; should there be a committee of civil servants as well who try and draw these things together?

Mr Rouse: I understand that there is a commitment on the part of the ODPM to establish a committee of officials as well.

Q236  Andrew Bennett: Wait a minute. The ODPM has no powers; the others will just say, "So what?"

Mr Rouse: I do not even know how to begin to answer that, actually! That is a problem for the ODPM to work through and to address, but I understand that there is a commitment by the ODPM to assemble that group of officials and it is absolutely necessary because you have the sort of more defensive approach to public spaces, approach to anti-social behaviour to the Home Office, you have the DEFRA approach and their set of proposals within the consultation paper that came out with Living Places, we have the Department of Transport which we have already talked about, we heard about sentencing from the Lord Chancellor's Department and it is absolutely imperative that those departments are brought together around the table.

Q237  Andrew Bennett: So, you think a meeting before Christmas is possible?

Mr Rouse: It would be helpful.

Chris Mole: With that, can I thank you for your evidence and apologise for the haste.

Witnesses: MR TOM FRANKLIN, Director, and MR PHILIP CONNOLLY, London Manager, Living Streets, and MR JOHN HOPKINS, Member of Urban Design Alliance's Green Spaces Working Group, Urban Design Alliance, examined.

Q238  Chris Mole: Good morning. Would you give your names for the record.

Mr Hopkins: I am John Hopkins

Mr Franklin: I am Tom Franklin, Director of Living Streets.

Mr Connolly: I am Philip Connolly, London Manager of Living Streets.

Q239  Chris Mole: Is there anything that you wish to add to your written submissions before we go to questions?

Mr Connolly: No.

Q240  Andrew Bennett: Do you think people are optimistic that the local environment is going to improve?

Mr Franklin: I think probably not. Our perception is that we are still heading in the wrong direction although, on the hopeful side, we now recognise that we are heading in the wrong direction.

Q241  Andrew Bennett: So, we are going in the wrong way slower than we used to?

Mr Franklin: We are probably going in the wrong way slower, but the good news is that I think we are much more aware that that is the case, but we still have quite a lot of work to do to turn that round. Certainly if you look at public opinion polling, for instance MORI, what they show is that the public thinks that, on a lot of public services, things are turning the corner and they expect things to get better over the next five years. That is not the case with quality of the local environment where people still think that it is going to get worse. I think that also you could say that people are voting with their feet as well. The sure-fire way of measuring how we are doing in public spaces is to see how many people are using it on foot and, over the last ten years, the average person is now walking 20 per cent less than they were ten years ago. In other words, the quality of that public space is putting people off and they are choosing not ---

Q242  Andrew Bennett: How do you know that it is putting people off? Are people not just getting lazier?

Mr Franklin: We think that if you look at why people walk and what motivates them to use public spaces, it is to do with the quality of that space and what it is like when they are in it. We think that if you look at the level of traffic, traffic is still going up; it was one per cent over the last year. If you look at the quality of pavements, they are still getting worse. Although the carriageways are improving on the latest figures, the actual quality of the pavements are getting worse. If you look at the lighting stock as well, that is getting worse. The replacement rate at the moment is about one per cent a year whereas it actually needs to be at about four per cent a year just to maintain the standards that we have at the moment.

Q243  Andrew Bennett: So that is pretty depressing, is it not? The ODPM published Living Places; Cleaner, Safer, Greener and DEFRA published Living Places; Powers, Rights and Responsibilities. Has it made any difference at all?

Mr Hopkins: I think the potential to make a difference is there. I think that the analysis of the problem is very good in Living Spaces. I think the analysis of the problem in the adjunct document was very good as well but what we need to see now is action. It is very encouraging that CABE have been given the responsibility for raising parks and open spaces and the public realm in general up the agenda, but we need to see a co-ordinated response from government, more funding and an emphasis on cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental working in government and in local authorities to make sure that this agenda is achieved.

Mr Franklin: I would like to pick up a point about the Department of Transport. There were six different departments involved in the cross-cutting review including the Department of Transport. I have to say we were very disappointed with the involvement of the Department of Transport in that document. If you read it there is very little in there that seems to be input from the Department. They certainly attended the meetings but whether they said very much we are not sure. You cannot look at public spaces and how to improve those for people unless you are really tackling those transport issues. It is good on vision, as you say, but rather timid on concrete proposals for change.

Q244  Andrew Bennett: You more or less say that Cleaner, Safer, Greener document was gutted really and the key bits were taken out. What were the key bits that should have been in that that the Government lost its nerve on?

Mr Connolly: The big things were around the road and street network itself. About 85 per cent of public space is composed of streets and a large proportion of the streets is actually the carriageway, and obviously the traffic impacts on the community and people's use of the space in many different ways. I think that the Government lost its nerve in a sense over traffic speeds, for example, over road space allocation, over the issue of ease of access across the road as well as along the road. The Government lost its nerve and many aspects to do with that are just simply not provided for within the document.

Q245  Andrew Bennett: So what you are really saying is that the Department of Transport exercised a veto and made the whole exercise less effective?

Mr Connolly: That is definitely the impression from the document.

Q246  Chris Mole: Both of you in your submissions highlight the importance of management and continuous care of open spaces if it is to be a success. What is preventing this at the minute?

Mr Franklin: Part of the problem is the focus on public space by local authorities. I do not necessarily put all the blame on them at all. I have to say that in a previous incarnation I was leader of a London council and the level of regulation and scrutiny when it comes to other services provided by local government is much greater than it is in the area of maintenance of streets. If you look at the regulatory procedures, you have got Ofsted, the Social Services Inspectorate and the Housing Inspectorate. I know that when an inspector is coming in, the focus of the leadership on making sure that there is work in that area is very great. It is the same with ministers and champions at ministerial level. There are champions at ministerial level for all of those services where if they do not think they are matching up to standards they will get in touch with that local authority directly and in touch with the leader of the council. That is not the case with street management.

Q247  Chris Mole: Is that why you are arguing for tough national street management standards for local authorities?

Mr Franklin: I think there is a need for clarity there about rights and responsibilities. There should be more powers to local authorities but matched with more responsibility to local authorities and very clear leadership from the government setting out clearly what they expect local authorities to deliver and to take any action where that is not delivered.

Mr Hopkins: I would add to that I think CABE Spaces' emphasis on strategies for local authorities, both for park and green spaces is important - and let us not forget that it is parks and green spaces that have really suffered severe neglect. We need parks and green spaces strategies at local authority level, we need a public realm strategy for all local authorities to tie that together. We need action plans to make sure that there is an implementation strategy for implementing those, supported by capital revenue funding. It needs to go beyond the political cycle. The issue of parks and the public realm goes beyond, particularly parks and green spaces, the political cycle. They need continuous and continual investment in terms of revenue. You can get the capital funding from capital grants, from European funding, from central government and RDAs but the revenue funding is just not there to enable local authorities to manage and maintain this.

Q248  Chris Mole: If you are championing tough national street management standards what sort of things should they be covering, in your view?

Mr Connolly: We need to relate the standards to the experience of the people in the space. Just to give you one little example of how this would work out. 43 per cent of women will not walk their own streets after dark in their own neighbourhood. That is from the British Crime Survey. The biggest reason for that is fear of other people. The biggest problem they have is to be able to detect other people, see other people, and read the intentions of other people. The Building Research Establishment have established that at 12 metres you can read facial expression, so we need streetlighting that allows somebody to read a facial expression at 12 metres and take evasive action if need be. From research from the lighting industry we know what those lighting levels are, we know what uniformity of lighting is ideal, we know what the intensity of lighting should be, and we know what the height of the street columns should be. We very seldom find that in public space. Street lighting is there to make it easier for the traffic. Historically street lighting was there to light the carriageway, not the footway, and because it is related to the volume of the traffic it discriminates against disadvantaged areas where there is low car ownership, yet more people are actually walking there because it is a low car ownership area. That is one example but there are many, many others - I can talk about pavement maintenance and so on - where standards are missing or standards are inadequate for the way that people use the space.

Q249  Chris Mole: All sorts of people can dig up pavements and put up signs and all sorts of owners can let things exist on their property, so how are those standards for local authorities helping to address that?

Mr Franklin: Again, this comes back to the issue about responsibility and who has it. I have to say I do not think you are ever going get to a situation where public utilities are going to be restoring the footway to the condition that it should be. It is not their job. They are in the business of providing telephone or gas, not in the business of making sure that the carriageways are smooth and even and reinstated properly. The responsibility has to come down to the local authority and in all these areas it has to be clear where the responsibility lies. The public utilities should pay property rental for the space they are using so local authorities have the money to restore it properly. You have got to be very clear and more focused than we are on who has responsibility there. I know Kilburn High Road very well and they have just spent a large amount of money on replacing the footway and it looks a complete mess, to be honest, because they have only replaced half the footway, the other half is owned by the shops. It does not look any better than it was before. I do not know why they bothered, it was a complete waste of money. Again, it is not clear who has the responsibility and who does not. That is why we would be in favour of very clear legislation setting that out with local authorities having that responsibility.

Mr Connolly: Can I come in there on the resources. Camden, which is a bastion of good practice in London with their Boulevard Project, tell me, and I believe them, that the legislation is such that they can only inspect six per cent of remedial work of reinstatement by the utility companies and so they feel that they do not have the resources to do the inspection adequately to assess the state of the remediation. This is obviously a resource issue and maybe it is the way the legislation on the contracts fixed it at that level and why it is as low as six per cent.

Mr Hopkins: Local authorities need to be given strategic responsibility for the public realm. They need to be given clear legislation. They need to be given clear guidelines on reinstatement and utility companies. There needs to be some system whereby the local authority co-ordinate utilities' activities within their area on a five-year programme so that utility companies predict and provide where they need to put in utilities. If they need to go in with emergency powers they need to place bonds with the local authority so the local authorities have some power over the standards of reinstatement.

Q250  Mr O'Brien: You referred to new legislation. What would you like to include in that?

Mr Hopkins: I think the Paving the Way document is very comprehensive in assessing the areas that need to be addressed.

Q251  Mr O'Brien: Are you saying it is not available to local authorities now?

Mr Hopkins: It is available in too many different departments that are not co-ordinated.

Q252  Mr O'Brien: What you are saying then is that we need legislation so that local authorities can co-ordinate and we need joined-up departments.

Mr Hopkins: Yes.

Q253  Mr O'Brien: Surely that is just a case of knocking their heads together?

Mr Hopkins: No, I think the legislation lies in too many places and the responsibilities lie in too many places. Sometimes it is the Environment Agency, sometimes it is the highway authorities, and there are different highway authorities, et cetera, et cetera.

Q254  Mr O'Brien: You mention different highway authorities, but I represent a metropolitan area where there is only one highway authority apart from the Highway Agency so why should it not work in those areas where there is only one highway agency?

Mr Hopkins: It should.

Q255  Mr O'Brien: Why does it not?

Mr Hopkins: It is not just on highways because there are utility companies that go in.

Q256  Mr O'Brien: Utilities now are regulated.

Mr Hopkins: There is private ownership of land beyond the responsibility of the local authority.

Q257  Mr O'Brien: The utilities are regulated now, local authorities can impose upon them a timescale if they want to take action or dig up any street, and this is a question of applying legislation.

Mr Hopkins: The problem is they always say it is emergency work. We have just done a public round strategy for Barnsley ---

Q258  Mr O'Brien: Even for emergency work there is timescales. We see now on the motorways they are given a set time to do a job and the same thing can apply in urban and city areas. Why are we not doing it?

Mr Franklin: It is partly about using the powers that are there but it is also about making responsibilities very clear. I would like to see the legislation also include the issue about regulation of local authorities to improve the work they are doing. In a sense, the legislation has got out of skew when it comes to streets. Historically streets have had different uses. They have been about market space for exchange, they are a meeting space for people, and they are also a transportation space, and the legislation and government policy has become increasingly skewed so that streets have become focused on transportation, getting from A to B, and the other uses of the public space have been pushed to one side. We would like to see legislation shift the focus back to that historical balance.

Q259  Mr O'Brien: On the question of local government and legislation, local government tell us that there are too many regulations coming from the centre, there is too much legislation, it costs them pounds just to interpret the various policies that are put forward. Your philosophy is going to add a burden to them, is it not?

Mr Hopkins: All that legislation needs to be simplified and clarified so there is one point of contact, local authorities, and if you want to work in the public round then you have to go through the local authority.

Q260  Mr O'Brien: You are familiar with legislation and you know very well ---

Mr Hopkins: --- Parts of it.

Q261  Mr O'Brien: Once the people who are responsible for drawing up legislation get their hands on a new Bill, making it simple is not their philosophy. So what you are saying is we want to add more to that?

Mr Hopkins: No.

Q262  Mr O'Brien: The number of Bills that have been passed through this House on local government over the past few decades is a mountain, so why are you making representations to amend the existing legislation?

Mr Hopkins: I am not sure it needs a new Bill. I do not think I said that. We need to take the existing legislation and recast it.

Q263  Mr O'Brien: What do you mean by a Living Places Bill?

Mr Franklin: We would be in favour of pulling together all the things we are talking about.

Q264  Mr O'Brien: And introducing a new Bill?

Mr Franklin: As one single piece of legislation.

Q265  Mr O'Brien: One single Bill?

Mr Franklin: Absolutely, making it very clear.

Q266  Mr O'Brien: And yet Urban Design say they do not want a new Bill. We are talking about joined-up departments in local government and yet here we have got two groups who cannot agree.

Mr Franklin: It is nuances of difference between us.

Mr O'Brien: We are talking about the same issue. This is the problem. If we are going to report to Parliament as to the best way forward for better streets and urban design and better living, it is obvious that we need to collect evidence that is going to substantiate a positive report, but here we have got people who just cannot agree as to the best way forward.

Chris Mole: Shall we move on. Andrew?

Q267  Andrew Bennett: On this question of improving the planning system, what would you do?

Mr Hopkins: I think we applaud the changes that have been made to the planning system and driving it down to local development framework plans so that they are proactive rather than reactive and negative in their approach. PPG17 was a very good document and the adjunct document Assessing Needs and Opportunities is very good. That would give very clear guidance to planning authorities as to the nature of parks and green spaces and the public realm to which they need to aspire and that they can use through the development process to achieve contributions from private section through section 106 contributions.

Q268  Andrew Bennett: Do you not want a new strategy?

Mr Hopkins: For?

Q269  Andrew Bennett: For the local authorities to prepare?

Mr Hopkins: A parks and green spaces strategy?

Q270  Andrew Bennett: Yes.

Mr Hopkins: It is absolutely essential. Parks and green spaces strategies and public realm strategies, what we are terming them as is landscape and townscape frameworks that tie the whole of the environment together and which set the context for improving existing communities but setting the environmental context of landscape and infrastructure for future development as well.

Q271  Andrew Bennett: All that would fit within the local development frameworks?

Mr Hopkins: What we believe is that the strategies should be adopted as supplementary planning guidance under the new planning policy statements.

Q272  Andrew Bennett: The only trouble is that the most progressive local authorities have got a new strategy, have they not, to reduce the number of strategies?

Mr Hopkins: Yes they have. The Quality of Life agenda is absolutely crucial to where people live. If we do not have good quality streets, parks and squares then people are not going to want to live there, they are going to move to other areas. If you do not have a strategy in place that directs long-term capital investment and long-term revenue funds for managing and maintaining that public realm, then it is not going to help. You need a strategy that is based on action plans that indicates through a consultation process with local residents where the money needs to be spent the most.

Q273  Chris Mole: You cannot design urban space to be attractive because the highway engineers tell you that you have to have all this hardware for safety. What can government do to tackle that?

Mr Connolly: We need to review the highway legislation as well. We have these very large junctions which create severance of the community, with very large road signs where the only sign, in effect, is telling you to go to places that are outside of the borough, outside the place where you live, and the whole imposition feels like this is a place that is not for you, the dominant concern is the people coming through the area, not the people who actually live there. I think one of the reasons is because of the speeds that we permit. If we had lower speeds - 20 miles an hour as the norm in urban areas - we would have smaller junctions, smaller road signs, less signage, ease of access for people across the road, a more liveable environment altogether and, what is more, the junctions would operate more efficiently and traffic could flow quicker. When the traffic goes at the speed it does there are more bottlenecks.

Q274  Chris Mole: Are there other examples of highway safety standards that are excessively onerous?

Mr Connolly: There are numerous examples. Here we are adjacent to Parliament Square, one of the most prestigious public spaces in the whole world, yet you cannot walk to the middle of it. And why not? I would challenge all the Members to try and walk to the middle of it. Because the guard railings prevent you. You cannot even enjoy the space that is outside the House of Commons because of the way we have designed the junctions. So there are many, many examples of the way we inhibit the use of public space because of way we actually provide for the space as merely a traffic corridor.

Mr Hopkins: Highways legislation and risk assessments are very, very difficult to get around in designing good streets and places. We have just finished Warrington town centre where we worked very closely with the planners and the highways engineers to work within current legislation to create a pedestrian dominated environment there. It was successful but it required very high level political support and we achieved that. Another example of high level political support is the work that is being done in Kensington. The politicians there had to take personal liability to go against the recommendations of some of their officers to create a Kensington High Street now that is much better than it used to be. We need to change highways legislation to enable these places to be prepared. One of the members of UDAL is the Institute of Highways Engineers and they recognise there is legislation to do with trunk roads that is being dragged in and that safety regulations to do with trunk roads have been dragged into local communities, so we need to look at that. We also need to work across the professions, work with highways engineers and planners and politicians to have a different emphasis on safety. One of the post-construction safety risk assessments on Warrington pointed to some trees that we had planted that were multi-stepped, they were birch trees, and we were told to take off all of the lower branches above two metres because they would potentially poke out people's eyes. These were garden areas within the highways but just because they were within the highways this was assessed as a risk. This is ridiculous and we need to change our attitudes.

Q275  Chris Mole: Do they not tend to push up the pavements and cause trip hazards and all this sort of thing?

Mr Connolly: I think the answer to that is the modern practice of creating tree pits. One of the problems is that historically we concreted right up to the trunk of the tree. Two catastrophes happen. One is the roots of the tree eventually push up the paving slab and create a trip hazard for the pedestrians. The second thing is that the concrete compresses the soil, and prevents the oxygen reaching the roots and the trees. Street trees last about one-fifth as long as the same species of trees in the countryside are lasting. Some authorities have got design manuals that provide good practice in how to manage their street but very, very few authorities have got that, so what happens again is the line of least resistance, the highways engineers' preference often dominates, and the tree is not really seen as an amenity. It is not seen as an attractive feature, it is very often seen as a hindrance.

Mr Franklin: Again about the on-going management and maintenance, very often they are put in with no thought given to the after care, exactly the same as other local authorities as far as the streets are concerned. Street trees are one element of beautification of public space and making it more beautiful. I do not think enough attention is given to how to humanise streets to put them on the human scale with the detail and human interest that people like.

Q276  Andrew Bennett: So we need some plastic trees?

Mr Hopkins: I am a landscape architect and there is good research coming out of America, particularly Cornell University, and we used some of these innovative techniques at Warrington and other schemes. There is no reason why you cannot have street trees virtually wherever you want them. You have to provide the soil underground for them to grow, it is not a problem, and then you have to manage them.

Q277  Chris Mole: I thought the answer was to have mobile phones disguised as plastic trees. You have pointed to the shortage of urban designers and other professional skills and called for action. Are you not the people in the professional body responsible for the lack of skills out there?

Mr Hopkins: Yes we are and again we have been working with CABE and ODPM on the skills deficit. There is CABE Skills being set up. There will be a programme of educating through CABE Space on parks and green spaces and the public realm in general and also urban design skills.

Q278  Chris Mole: What would you like the Government to do to tackle the skills shortage?

Mr Hopkins: To get the message across. I think there is a political message to get across to local authorities to raise this as a really important issue. The quality of people's lives, where they live, as they step out of their doors, when they go to their work, to their parks, to their leisure centres, wherever it is, we need to get it up the political agenda.

Mr Franklin: I think it is about de-professionalisation, it is about mixing the professions. Some of the best local authorities have health professionals working within their transportation teams to get the health aspects to it and to get the professions to look at things from the end user perspective. We take traffic engineers and others out around the streets and show them and say, "Forget all the textbooks and everything else, look at it from how you see it when you are walking around." Very often it is a revelation to them, they do not get much chance to do that.

Q279  Chris Mole: So the message is get out more, is it?

Mr Franklin: I think so.

Chris Mole: With that, can I thank you very much for your evidence.