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Community, Cultural and Economic Development – On a Shoestring…

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This is the modest challenge I have set myself. A challenge for several reasons.  Firstly these phenomena are usually divided up and tackled by different teams, using different professional jargon, working to different policy objectives in different departments and sectors (for profit, public and third). Tackling community, cultural and economic development as a kind of holy trinity vitally important.  Yet we usually separate them and often end up with economic development that breaks community or ignores culture and vice versa… Another challenge is the fixation that many policy makers and leaders have with ‘big ticket’ solutions.  Want to stimulate culture?  Let’s build an Arena or a Gallery?  Need to stimulate economic development?  How about an Enterprise Zone or a Technology Park?  Or, anyone for high speed trains?  Multi-million pound projects that rely on politicians, bureaucrats and professionals working together to invest millions.  In these austere times there are economic development consultancies that will write you papers on how to finance these projects using tax increment finances and other such stuff! But let’s get back to basics on this. Community, Culture and Economy are like ying and yang, except there are three of them!  They are facets of the same thing: Human endeavour (or as the policy makers prefer to call it enterprise). So, if we want to develop community, culture and economy we are in the business of developing Human Endeavour. And that need not cost a lot….

A Window Into Council Revenues…closes on August 19th

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Did you know that, up until August 19th 2011, you are entitled to look at, and to ask for copies of, any documents relating to Leeds City Council financial transactions that happened during the year 1st April 2010 and 31st March 2011.

The exception to this is any documents which contain personal information about a member of staff, which the legislation excludes from the inspection rights. Depending on the areas of income or expenditure that you are interested in, the types of documentation available would include invoices paid by the council, invoices sent out by the council, contracts, and documents showing how internal charges from one service to another have been calculated.

Once you have inspected any documents that you want to see, the legislation gives you the right to either ask questions to the council’s auditors (KPMG), or to raise objections to them about any aspect of the accounts.

The Audit Commission’s guidance on this ‘Council’s accounts – your rights‘ is downloadable as a pdf from the Council’s website..

 

West Riding House – another story of win/win in Leeds?

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West Riding House in Leeds

I met yesterday with a tenant of the ‘affordable’ West Riding House, an iconic 1970s office block in Leeds City Centre, which I believe is owned by Moorfield (a UK ‘real estate’ investor, developer and private equity fund manager, with some £3 billion currently under management) and Holbeck Land .

It caught my eye because several organisations I know have recently moved in, some of whom are extremely cost and value conscious.  The building has become ‘affordable’ because it is cheaper, I am told, for the owner of the building to encourage occupancy at a low rent in order to avoid paying business rates on an unnoccupied building.  A nice win/win.  The owners save a few bob  and the organisations get refurbed office space in the heart of the city centre that usually they could never afford.

Except of course there are losers.

Other landlords (generally owners of more modest estates on the edge of the city and in the doughnut of despair) are losing their rents; the communities in which these organisations used to be based are losing much needed trade.

And the Council are losing out on the rates, presumably.

When, and if, the economy picks up and office space becomes more valuable these new tenants will probably have to move back out or face increased rents.  I just hope that the buildings that they have left behind are still in a reasonable condition.   And if they have fallen into disrepair as resources are sucked from the suburbs into the centre, never mind, perhaps we can negotiate an asset transfer project to bring them back to the community.

I am sure for many tenants the decision to move into West Riding House is a simple, straightforward and commercial one, driven by their business aims and intended social impacts, and their ability to exploit short term notice periods.  For others it must have been a much more difficult judgement.

In these hard times we all have to do what we can to get by.  But we need to understand how the system in Leeds, and every other city, can suck resources into the centre and leave the fringes further marginalised.

Meanwhile Time

All over the city there are similar examples of landlords agreeing low rents that allow ‘unusual suspects’ access to resources that they usually could never afford, to do exciting projects that would probably never get off the ground in better economic times.

The key question for me?

Strategically are these projects just about meanwhile time, merely setting up a low cost ‘holding pattern’ until ‘normal’ levels of economic activity resume?  Or are they ‘hotbeds’ in which we can incubate a generation of new social and cultural entrepreneurs who will help Leeds make a real transformation?  Time will tell of course, although those that own the assets are pretty clear about the ‘meanwhile’ nature of these arrangements.

With the recent Resolution Foundation Report suggesting how the poor have ‘missed out’ on the benefits of economic growth over the last 30 years, I can’t help but think in the medium term, unless we are careful, this is a phenomena in which those that are used to winning will get to win again.