Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) were

Re-thinking the Urban Development Corporation ‘Experiment’: The Case of Central Manchester, Leeds and Bristol

IAIN DEAS #, BRIAN ROBSON * AND MICHAEL BRADFORD *

# Department of Planning & Landscape, * School of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

Biographies

Iain Deas is Lecturer in the Department of Planning and Landscape at the University of Manchester. He has co-authored a number of CUPS reports, including Assessing the Impact of Urban Policy (HMSO, 1994). He is currently part of a team, funded under the Economic and Social Research Council’s Cities programme, exploring the relationships between urban governance, economic competitiveness and social exclusion in Liverpool and Manchester.

Brian Robson is Professor of Geography and Director of the Centre for Urban Policy Studies (CUPS) at the University of Manchester. He has had a long involvement with work on urban issues, both through his academic articles and books (such as Those Inner Cities, 1988) and through his work for DETR on policy evaluation and the development of its Index of Local Deprivation. He was a member of one of the working groups of the Urban Task Force led by Lord Rogers.

Michael Bradford is Professor of Geography and Head of Department at the University of Manchester. He has been centrally involved in many of the CUPS research contracts. In addition to his work on urban policy, his research has focused on education and the provision of public goods and services. He has played key roles in developing geography as a teaching subject and is currently President of the Geographical Association.

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Contents

Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 5

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... 6

1.

Introduction ......................................................................................................... 7

2.

The Origin and Evolution of the UDC ‘experiment’ ........................................ 10 2.1

The Rationale for the UDC Programme ...................................................... 10

2.2

Characteristics of the Three UDCs at Designation ..................................... 16 2.2.1 Central Manchester Development Corporation ................................ 16 2.2.2 Leeds Development Corporation ...................................................... 19 2.2.3 Bristol Development Corporation ..................................................... 24

3.

4.

5.

The Property Market Consequences of UDC intervention.............................. 30 3.1

Reviving Land and Property Markets ......................................................... 30

3.2

The Local Consequences of Property Market Intervention......................... 51

The Social Consequences of UDC Intervention ................................................ 57 4.1

Housing Regeneration ................................................................................. 57

4.2

Employment Creation ................................................................................. 63

The Political Consequences of UDC Intervention ............................................ 70 5.1

The UDCs and Inter-institutional Relationships ......................................... 70

5.2

UDC Impact on Regeneration Agendas ...................................................... 78

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6.

Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 86 6.1

Physical and Social Regeneration ............................................................... 86

6.2

Objective-setting, Monitoring and Review ................................................. 88

6.3

Life-span of Regeneration Agencies ........................................................... 90

6.4

Durability of Development.......................................................................... 91

6.5

Relations with Local Partners and Communities ........................................ 93

6.6

The Size and Boundaries of Regeneration Areas ........................................ 97

Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 100

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Abstract

This paper reports on a comparative study of the experiences of Bristol, Central Manchester and Leeds Urban Development Corporations (UDCs). It assesses the contrasting fates of the three UDCs in terms of the success with which they revived local land and property markets and the degree to which their interventions yielded social benefits for local residents. The paper highlights the differing ways in which each UDC read its remit, the strategies formulated to meet locallyspecific aims and objectives, and the contrasting outcomes engendered as a result. In doing so, it considers why ostensibly similar bodies - with similar structures and resources - generated quite different outcomes. In a broader sense, the paper also explores the extent to which the UDCs altered local politico-institutional landscapes within their respective cities.

It considers the

differing styles of operation of each UDC: their attitudes towards cross-agency collaboration; their views on linking UDC outputs to local communities; and the balance struck between economic and social objectives. In doing so, it highlights the impact of each UDC upon the ‘process’ of regeneration in the three cities, assessing the extent to which all three managed to alter attitudes, working methods and relationships amongst the broader network of regeneration institutions, in line with the initial government expectation that UDCs would strive to alter established institutional practices and outlooks. The paper concludes with an attempt to identify the lessons which might be drawn from the UDC experience, and their implications for current regeneration policies such as the Regional Development Agencies and the New Deal for Communities.

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Acknowledgements

This paper draws upon research commissioned by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR). The authors are grateful for the assistance of Dr David Riley, Dr Steve Nuttall and the DETR project steering group, and for the help of Anna Fielder and Simon Franklin in conducting part of the fieldwork on which this paper is based. responsibility for the views expressed.

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The authors accept sole

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Of the many urban initiatives introduced by the Conservative governments of 1979-97, Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) provoked the most polarised opinion. From their inception in 1981, the UDCs came to symbolise the core elements of Conservative policy on the ‘inner cities’: they represented a high-profile attempt to supplant local authority responsibilities in the field of urban regeneration; they epitomised the subordination of redistributional to economic growth concerns in urban policy; they embodied the preoccupation with responding to ostensible private sector needs, and embracing the outlook of business in public policy; and they exemplified the pursuit of ‘physical’ intervention in local land and property markets at the expense of sociallyfocused regeneration. Lauded by proponents for their vigour and zeal, and extolled for the refreshing attempt to challenge the assumptions and working practices of existing regeneration agencies, the UDCs simultaneously were subjected to a battery of critical scrutiny. Critics railed against the failure of the UDCs to engage with local communities; at their lack of concern for the social consequences of their activities; and at their disdain for local accountability (CLES, 1990; Haughton, 1999; Imrie and Thomas, 1999; O'Toole, 1996; Robinson et al, 1993). At the same time, there was also a range of government-sponsored attempts to evaluate the impact of UDCs, which catalogued their achievements, but highlighted their limitations and questioned the extent to which they could be viewed as successful, even in terms of government's narrowly-conceived criterion of 'value for money' (Cambridge Policy Consultants, 1998; National Audit Office, 1993; Robson et al, 1998; Roger Tym and Partners, 1998).

Eighteen years on from their inception, the UDCs stand as one of the more lasting of government's 'experimental' forays into the 'inner city', and as the urban initiative on which most comment has been expended. In this paper, we seek to augment the extensive literature on UDCs by providing a

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comparative study of the experiences of Bristol, Central Manchester and Leeds Development Corporations, the first of the UDCs to be wound-up. Much of the research on UDCs has yielded overtly critical conclusions, and much of the analysis assumes a uniformity of experience across what, in reality, are very different agencies, with differing sets of problem, approach and outcome. This paper attempts to assess the contrasting fates of the three UDCs in terms both of the success with which they revived local land and property markets and, in a wider sense, the degree to which they altered local politico-institutional landscapes. The paper explores the reasons why these ostensibly similar bodies - with common structures, outlooks and resources - yielded quite different outcomes.

We consider these questions in four sections. The first details the genesis of the UDC programme in general, and the third wave of UDCs in particular. It outlines in brief the rationale for the creation of new institutional structures in light of the wider programme of reform of public policy on which government embarked in the 1980s, and explores the place-specific factors which encouraged the establishment of UDCs in the three study cities. The second considers the impact of the three UDCs in terms of the extent to which they met the goal of reviving local land and property markets. Related to this, it focuses upon the extent to which new economic activity in the three UDC areas represented net benefit – additionality – or simply reflected displacement of activity from elsewhere. The third section explores the degree to which the UDCs’ activities proved to be beneficial in social or distributional terms. It considers their contrasting approaches to housing regeneration and considers the degree to which employment generation was of benefit to adjoining (but non-designated) local communities. And the fourth section assesses the impact of the UDCs on the local politics of, and ‘process’ of, urban regeneration. It explores the variable ways in which each UDC interpreted the narrow brief set by central government, and considers the extent to which all three UDCs managed to alter attitudes, working methods and relationships amongst the broader network of regeneration institutions, in line with the initial government expectation that UDCs would re-orient established institutional practices and outlooks.

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The paper concludes with an attempt to consider the durability of the changes instituted by the three UDCs. In light of the emerging suite of regeneration policies under the Blair government, we assess the degree to which, and the ways in which, the three UDCs provide lessons on which emerging regeneration strategies are beginning to draw.

In addressing these issues, we draw upon a three-stranded programme of research conducted in the three cities.

First, a range of standard UDC output and expenditure data were assembled,

augmented by locally-specific outcome data detailing changes in the employment and property market circumstances of each city.

Second, a series of ninety open-ended semi-structured

interviews was conducted with a range of regeneration policy-makers, with the aim of gauging views about the aims and impacts of the three UDCs. Third, two questionnaires were undertaken in each city: a survey of new businesses and households within the UDC areas in order to explore the displacement effects of new investment; and a survey of new employees in the three UDC areas to examine the extent and form of the trickle-down of employment benefits emanating from new investment.

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CHAPTER 2

The Origin and Evolution of the UDC ‘Experiment’

2.1. THE RATIONALE FOR THE UDC PROGRAMME

Introduced under the 1980 Local Government Planning and Land Act, the UDCs were to replace the predominantly Labour-controlled local authorities in England's major cities as the lead agents in planned urban regeneration. With the exception of those in London Docklands and Merseyside, they were relatively short-life bodies with lifespans of ten years or less. They were centrallyappointed agencies, statutorily responsible to the Secretary of State for the Environment, run by boards with a majority of private-sector members. Funding came in streamlined fashion, direct from the Treasury on an annual basis, with the potential to raise additional resources through capital receipts generated from land and property sales, and to trigger additional private sector expenditure. Formally, their objectives, as set out in the 1980 Act, were four-fold: to bring land and buildings into effective use; to encourage the development of existing and new industry and commerce; to create an attractive environment; and to ensure that housing and social facilities were available to encourage people to live and work in the area.

Within these objectives, each UDC could develop its own focus to reflect local circumstances, but the principal aim straddling all the UDCs was to correct the supply-side causes of market failure. To do so, they were equipped with wide-ranging statutory powers. Within designated Urban Development Areas (UDAs), they could buy, develop, service and sell land through extensive ‘vesting’ and Compulsory Purchase powers; they could alter the physical fabric of designated areas by assisting environmental improvements and encouraging the restoration of existing buildings; they could develop infrastructure; they were empowered to help with the provision of health,

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training, educational and community facilities, and to assist the voluntary sector; and (with the exception of Cardiff Bay) they were to act as statutory development control authorities within their local areas. Beyond these core powers, UDCs could also engage in a variety of related strategies to boost market confidence levels and alter place-imagery by developing promotional campaigns and publicising opportunities for investment by the private sector. In doing so, the intention was that UDCs should ‘enable’ or facilitate private sector-led development, rather than act as developers in their own right.

Thirteen UDCs were designated in England and Wales (together with one in Northern Ireland) in a series of batches between 1981 and 1992 (see Table 1). London Docklands and Merseyside were the first two to be established, in 1981. A second generation was designated in 1987 in the Black Country, Cardiff Bay, Teesside, Trafford Park and Tyne and Wear. A third wave came in 1988/9 in Bristol, Central Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. The fourth - and final - phase came in 1992/3 in Birmingham and Plymouth. The designated areas of the UDCs varied widely in extent, from the special case of Plymouth with less than 100 hectares (comprising three specific ex-MoD sites) to the almost 5,000 hectares at Teesside covering the banks of the River Tees and extending into Hartlepool. Most of the areas were old industrial zones with extensive amounts of derelict and under-used land; some were in potentially prime locations with considerable potential for development. Despite the variable characteristics and scales of the designated areas, the principal focus in all UDCs was on physical renewal and redevelopment: on the correction of failing local land and property markets. This entailed a common emphasis on site acquisition and assembly to overcome land fragmentation; site preparation and servicing; infrastructural improvement; and the disbursement of grants to enable private sector commercial, industrial and residential property development to proceed.

* Table 1 about here * The UDCs were generously resourced, benefiting from funds in excess of £4 billion (excluding UDC-related public expenditure from other sources) by the end of the programme in 1997. This

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comprised £1.99 billion spent in Birmingham Heartlands, Black Country, Merseyside, Plymouth, Sheffield, Teesside, Trafford Park and Tyne & Wear UDCs (Roger Tym and Partners, 1998), and £284 million for Leeds, Bristol and Central Manchester (Robson et al, 1998).

For London

Docklands Development Corporation, direct net UDC expenditure (at 1998 prices) was estimated by Cambridge Policy Consultants (1998) as £1.87 billion, but to this must be added the additional £2.03 billion from non-UDC public sources.

The enlargement of the UDC programme, with a third wave of designations, had its roots in Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 election-night declaration that government would seek to address the problem of ‘those inner cities' (Robson, 1988). In the wake of the launch of government's Action for Cities programme, the eight existing UDCs were supplemented by the creation of new UDCs for Central Manchester, Bristol and Leeds. All three were cities which, to varying degrees, were seen from within central government as resistant to Conservative thinking on urban regeneration and dominated by municipal Labourism (Imrie and Thomas, 1999). This provided one motivation for their establishment, and in this sense the concerns underlying their designation mirrored those informing the establishment of their predecessors. However, the rationale for their establishment marked them out as distinctive from earlier generations in a number of respects and represented a partial but discernible re-orientation of the UDC programme. First, and most obvious, the UDCs at Bristol, Leeds and Central Manchester were the most transient of all the UDCs. Leeds, formally designated in June 1988, closed in March 1995; Bristol, designated in January 1989, closed in December 1995; Central Manchester, designated in June 1988, closed in March 1996. Second, they differed from most of the earlier UDCs in terms of the small size of their designated areas: Leeds extended to 540 ha, Bristol to 360 ha and Manchester to 187 ha. However, it was the relative buoyancy of economic conditions in the three UDCs prior to designation which most strikingly differentiated them from their predecessors. All three were located in cities benefiting from the pronounced growth in the service sector - and the associated upswing in property market fortunes which characterised the Lawson boom of the mid- to late-1980s (Peck and Tickell, 1995). All three lay close to their respective city centres, locations which conferred a degree of growth potential

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denied to some of their forebears. As a result, forecasts of the scale and quality of physical and economic development within the UDC areas were pronouncedly optimistic. Indeed, such was their perceived growth potential that Nicholas Ridley, the then Secretary of State for the Environment, suggested that the latest UDCs would come to embody a new concept in regeneration. The ‘cashless UDC’ was to be a body where initial investments in releasing developable sites and in improving the development climate would be counterbalanced - and perhaps exceeded - by income flowing from capital receipts generated by the on-sale of improved land and property assets, ultimately eliminating the need to call upon substantial public resources to fund regeneration.

For all three cities, then, the designation of a UDC was premised on an assumption that some part of the growth within buoyant city centre economies could be captured for the designated areas. In Manchester, a UDC was designated in order that the economic upswing benefiting the city centre based on growth in financial and producer services, and around a retail sector rejuvenated by the consumer credit boom of the late 1980s (see Peck and Emmerich, 1992) - could radiate outwards providing that investment was forthcoming to unblock supply side constraints. Prior to CMDC's establishment, there was already evidence indicating a buoyant office market, with 'top-end' rentals alone increasing by 80% between 1984 and 1988 (Manchester City Council, 1995). However, consultants appointed by central government warned that the momentum underlying recent growth in the service sector could dissipate if the functional reach of the city centre was not extended. One-quarter of CMDC's area at designation was derelict, disused or under-used, and problems of fragmented ownership further undermined the scope for development. Initial intervention, it was argued, was necessary to trigger the self-sustaining revival of the local property market (ECOTEC, 1988a).

At the same time, such arguments were given added force by the feeling from within

central government that relations between the city council and the private sector were less than harmonious, and that this in itself justified the introduction of a single-purpose regeneration agency.

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In Leeds, similarly, the establishment of a UDC was intended to draw upon, and itself complement, the service-based expansion of the city centre. As in Manchester, the principal aim was to extend the geographical extent of the city centre by facilitating mixed-use development in peripheral land bisected by the River Aire, and in so doing to consolidate the broader rejuvenation of the city centre. Again, in the lead-up to designation consultants expressed fears about the frailties of the city's economic revival; the supply side fundamentals of Leeds's economy, they argued, remained problematic (Robert and Whitney, 1993). In particular, the southern peripheries of the city centre had been excluded from the wider upswing of the city’s economy. Following the lead of other UDC areas, the diagnosis was that physical obstacles were reinforcing negative stereotypes about property market opportunities and constraints in the fringe city centre areas along the River Aire. Although some rather faltering public sector intervention had already yielded some improvement in the form of housing development, it was argued that the longer-term prospects for economic growth were undermined by an unwillingness on the part of Leeds City Council to engage with the private sector. If Leeds was to reinforce its reinvention from northern manufacturing city to prosperous centre of finance, retailing and leisure, clearing both the physical and political impediments would be essential.

In Bristol, the diagnosis and remedy were similar. Again, pre-designation consultant reports identified the potential for over-heating in the city's economy as a result of an under-supply of developable land (ECOTEC, 1988b). The designated area - running from St Philips Marsh to Temple Meads railway station, together with the Upper Avon Valley - comprised industrial land characterised by physical problems: inaccessibility, fragmented land ownership, dereliction and contamination. The removal of these constraints could help offset the shortage of developable land, but as with Central Manchester and Leeds, an equal part of the rationale for the designation of a UDC was government’s perception that the City Council had proved unable - or unwilling - to address these impediments to development. The resultant log-jam in development, it was argued, would be more effectively addressed by a single-purpose agency that possessed the commercial nous absent from existing public sector agencies, and from the City Council in particular.

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For all three UDCs, then, the factors underlying their designation were similar. In each city, the existence of intractable areas of land in and around the fringes of the city centre was perceived to constitute a check on the hesitant service-fuelled economic growth characteristic of the late 1980s. And in each city, central government's view was that local authorities had proved unable to address these problems through conventional public sector intervention, and unwilling to engage sufficiently with the private sector in order to reinvigorate land and property markets along the (arguably) successful lines of UDCs elsewhere. Yet while this diagnosis was propounded for all three cities, and while the institutional solutions applied were superficially similar, the results, we will argue, differed markedly. In the next section we explore this contention. First, we outline the specific problems and opportunities facing each UDC and highlight the nature of the strategies formulated to address them. Second, we assess the degree to which the UDCs met their core goal of reviving local land and property markets, and consider the extent to which their variable performance can be explained by the contrasting ways in which each interpreted the remit set for it by central government.

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2.2. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THREE UDCs AT DESIGNATION

2.2.1. Central Manchester Development Corporation

CMDC was granted responsibility for regenerating an area which extended to 187 hectares, making it the smallest of the three UDCs. The designated Urban Development Area (UDA) flanked the southern edge of Manchester city centre, surrounded by some of the city’s most deprived areas. Eastwards lay a sliver of land through Openshaw and Beswick suffering from some of the most intense after-effects of the city's economic and physical decline - an area of habitual policy intervention, from the Urban Programme assistance of the late 1970s to expenditure in support of the city’s ‘sports-led’ regeneration in the 1990s. Threaded around the southern and western fringes of the UDA was a string of similarly impoverished areas, from Hulme and Moss Side running west to Salford. However, the tone for much of CMDC's subsequent activity was set at the outset with the decision to delimit its boundaries so as to exclude these areas. To Whitehall civil servants and consultants - all of them operating to a brief set by Conservative ministers - defining the area consciously to exclude impoverished communities was the most effective means of ensuring that the UDC retained the necessary focus and single-mindedness emphasised by the enabling legislation.

This also meant excluding non-residential land-uses deemed to lack sufficient

development potential. As a result, a decision was taken to exclude the northern periphery of the city centre along the inner relief road linking Piccadilly and Victoria stations. This was also seen as allowing resources effectively to be concentrated in order to trigger development and to ensure that developer interest would never entirely be satisfied.

The UDA incorporated a swathe of city centre back-land. Its western extremity comprised the area around the former Pomona docks, abutting the major regeneration areas of Trafford Park Development Corporation and Salford Quays in Manchester's neighbouring local authorities. On the southern and eastern fringe lay the Castlefield area, intersected by a lattice of railways and

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canals, the historic hub of the old Roman fort from which the city grew and an area for which tentative regeneration plans had already been developed by the City Council, in tandem with the former Greater Manchester Council. The designated area continued along the Whitworth Street corridor to the south of the city’s retail core and to the north of the higher education precinct: an area for which proposals for private sector-led regeneration had also been developed. The underdeveloped area around Piccadilly station on the eastern edge of the city centre, fringed by the city’s inner relief road, completed the eastern boundary of the designated area (see Figures 1 and 2).

* Figure 1 about here *


In total, over half of the designated area was defined as ‘developed land’, but the remainder of the area presented CMDC with some significant physical challenges, most obviously in the form of the one-quarter of its area defined by consultants as ‘derelict, ‘disused’ or ‘underused’ (ECOTEC, 1988). The existence of substantial tracts of derelict land (some of it contaminated) was further complicated by the fragmented pattern of land ownership, which served further to undermine the development climate in the area. Investment was needed to assemble and prepare developable sites, and to bolster the supply of sites in an area which, it was hoped, might benefit from the spillover of development pressures emerging elsewhere in central Manchester in the late 1980s (ECOTEC, 1988a).

The establishment of CMDC marked a discernible change of tack in the UDC programme in that it incorporated some significant assets within the designated area. It was these assets which were to underpin CMDC's strategy. The remnants of Castlefield's Roman ruins were regarded as one potential asset for spin-off tourist developments. Similarly, the array of canals which laced the area were seen as another resource, providing that the necessary investment was forthcoming to overcome their derelict appearance. And some pioneering policy interventions had already yielded

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benefits in the way of some of the first residential developments to be completed in the city centre. However, it was the strength of the city centre economy which constituted CMDC's most potent asset.

Buoyant property-market conditions were reflected in central government’s initial view that CMDC (together with its counterparts at Bristol and Leeds) would be granted more modest resources than the first two generations of UDCs. As a result, over its eight-year existence, CMDC’s grant-in-aid from central government amounted to £82.1 million, augmented by an additional £5.1 million from European Regional Development Fund monies. These provided the bases for total expenditure of £100.6 million between CMDC’s establishment in 1988 and closure in 1996.

Outwardly, CMDC's strategy resembled those of most of its sibling UDCs. Its formal objectives drew directly from the 1980 Local Government Planning and Land Act: to bring back into use land and property; to support new developments sympathetic to incumbent buildings; to utilise private finance to underpin (re)development; and to improve the environment of the UDA.

More

significantly, however, these were complemented by two rather more strategic, and locallysensitive, objectives. First, the functional reach of the city centre was to be extended beyond the southern and eastern fringes of the designated area by releasing developable land and buildings, by pump-priming major property development and, less tangibly, by restoring developer confidence. Central to this was the desire to support the incipient growth of the city’s financial and producer services sectors, which were increasingly seen as central to Manchester’s hesitant revival in the late 1980s (see Peck and Emmerich, 1992). CMDC's role in this was to overcome the shortage of accommodation of the required scale or quality. The bulk of additions to the city’s stock of office space in the late 1980s had comprised refurbishment rather than construction, and many of the city’s financial institutions were shoehorned into a narrow ‘square half-mile’ financial district, with limited opportunities to develop elsewhere in the city centre (ECOTEC, 1988a; CMDC, 1990; Manchester City Council, 1990; PA Cambridge Economic Consultants, 1991).

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CMDC's second strategic objective was equally far-reaching. It sought radically to alter the character of the city centre's southern fringe by supporting a series of housing and leisure-based developments which, it was argued, would assist the diversification of the city centre. A revitalised office and commercial property sector would provide another element to this broadening of the function of the city centre away from its reliance on retailing. At the same time, it would also reposition and re-brand much of CMDC’s territory as a distinctive area within the broader city centre (CMDC, 1990). This itself was a strategy which - through its emphasis on leisure and housing developments on the one hand, and financial and producer services on the other - would foreshadow the emerging agenda of the City Council, which increasingly emphasised the importance of professional services and the emergence of 'innovative' cultural industries (see Quilley, 1995; Peck and Tickell, 1995; Mellor, 1997).

2.2.2. Leeds Development Corporation

Unlike its counterparts in Central Manchester and Bristol, the area covered by Leeds Development Corporation (LDC) straddled two separate and contrasting sub-areas. South/Central Leeds, extending to 376 ha, covered an area bounded to the north by the edge of the city centre, running westwards along the southern extremity of the commercial core to Leeds City railway station at the north west corner of the designated Urban Development Area. To the south, moving further from the city centre, the ex-industrial areas of Hunslet and Holbeck formed a larger area, bordered by the M1 motorway and railway to the west and running east towards the edge of the existing Hunslet industrial estate. A second, non-contiguous designated area, Kirkstall Valley, extended to 164 ha, forming a corridor of land running north west from the city centre and bordered to the north and south respectively by the residential areas of Headingley and Armley (Figure 3).


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For both areas, the rationale for their inclusion within the designated area was to address supplyside land and property difficulties which were perceived in the lead-up to designation to constitute a check to the on-going growth of the city's economy.

In contrast to earlier UDCs, the

establishment of LDC was premised on a perception that the supply of quality sites and premises particularly within the city centre - was close to exhaustion, and on the associated fear that the continuing development of the Leeds economy could be jeopardised if additional land supply was not forthcoming. Initially, consultants appointed in 1987 anticipated that the delimited UDA would comprise South/Central Leeds, Kirkstall Valley and a third area, Seacroft/Killingbeck, as the solution to the land supply problem in the city (PIEDA, 1988).

Seacroft/Killingbeck was

ultimately excluded from the designated area since it was deemed by consultants to lack the requisite supply of potential sites due to major site contamination and stability and infrastructure problems. However, the fact that three separate areas had to be identified, in contrast to the contiguous areas present in most earlier UDCs, was itself seen as evidence of the scale of the land shortage facing the city.

At the time of LDC's establishment in 1988, the two designated sub-areas suffered from a combination of fragmented land ownership and, in the case of Kirkstall Valley, severe contamination arising from its earlier use as a power station. In South/Central Leeds, 16% of land was defined as derelict or disused, 5% as open space and 50% already developed. The remainder comprised infrastructure. The protracted decline of the area's manufacturing base had generated the problems of dereliction and environmental degradation, but these difficulties were exacerbated by the fragmented nature of land holdings. The inadequacy of road networks - and, in particular, the area's isolation from the expanding inter-city motorway network - added a further dimension to the physical difficulties afflicting the area. In Kirkstall Valley, the intensity of the area's postindustrial distress was even more marked in physical terms, with pronounced ground and subsurface contamination accentuating the difficulties posed in an area in which derelict sites

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comprised one-third on the total land. At designation, only 31% of the area was in productive use (PIEDA, 1988: 7-16).

While intractable physical problems were limiting the scope for development within the designated area, LDC shared with its counterpart in Central Manchester a range of existing assets on which it was assumed the area's regeneration would draw. Indeed, the city's recent economic trajectory suggested that the city was markedly healthier than other northern industrial conurbations, leading consultants to conclude in the run-up to LDC's designation that 'Leeds has developed resilience in the face of economic recession…it is a city where the private sector is willing to develop and invest' (PIEDA, 1988: 3). Pronounced demand for developable land in the city centre was one manifestation of this overall economic buoyancy. Another was continuing growth in employment, which increased by 3.9% over the course of the 1980s. Particularly marked was the expansion of the service sector, which grew in employment terms by more than a fifth between 1981 and 1991, a period during which the corresponding figure for the wider county remained broadly static. Much of this comprised growth in the financial services sector, reflecting Leeds's emergence as the major northern regional centre for banking and finance. This sector alone provided a net gain of more than 18,000 jobs - an increase of two-thirds - over the same ten year period, the bulk of it concentrated in the city centre (Roberts and Whitney, 1993).

At designation, it was clear that service-based employment was prospering, and that Leeds was reinforcing its position as regional capital, particularly for financial services. However, the supply of sites to accommodate this scale of growth within the city centre was close to exhaustion, and spillover to surrounding areas had been tentative and halting. The northern portion of the South/Central Leeds area, abutting the southern edge of city's commercial core, had proved unable to benefit fully from the on-going growth of the city centre, with recent development amounting to little more than the construction of waterfront housing for young professionals and some associated commercial premises. Further south, the River Aire and the east-west railway routes jointly constituted a physical and symbolic barrier which developers appeared unwilling to bridge.

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Development in much of the area had been hampered not only by this perceptual boundary in the minds of developers, but also, more tangibly, by land availability problems. Aside from limited warehouse-based commercial development, and the Asda corporate headquarters on land immediately to the south of the River Aire, no significant commercial development had breached the twin barriers of railway and river.

LDC supplemented and elaborated the four statutory UDC objectives by publishing a strategic plan that highlighted twenty-three specific aims (LDC, 1988). To some extent, part of the overall strategy simply reiterated existing City Council objectives. For example, the City Council had for several years attempted to encourage commercial development around the area bounded by the M621 and the M62. Similarly, the attempt to effect the southward expansion of the city centre was again a policy inherited from the City Council. In other senses, though, LDC's strategy marked a discernible change of direction for regeneration policy in Leeds. This was most dramatically expressed in LDC's plans for Hunslet Green, formerly an area of local authority-owned high rise housing which had been demolished in the 1960s, but which - despite City Council plans to provide new social housing - had lain derelict in the subsequent period. LDC plans for the area envisaged not the construction of social housing, but a mixed tenure area, the dominant element of which would comprise housing for owner-occupiers in an area from which private developers had hitherto shied.

Much of LDC's approach adhered to the property-led model of regeneration around which the UDC programme as a whole was based. It emphasised unblocking particular physical supply-side constraints by intervening to reclaim derelict and contaminated land; by purchasing and disposing of sites in order to assemble developable parcels of land; by assisting with the conversion and reuse of redundant buildings; by embarking on a programme of environmental improvements; and by supporting the development and improvement of infrastructure. These 'bricks and mortar' activities were augmented by other forms of intervention - general marketing campaigns and more targeted attempts to lure economic activity and residents to the LDC area - aimed at improving developer

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confidence and altering perceptions of the character of the local land and property markets that fell under its jurisdiction. Equally significant were the missing elements from LDC's approach. Little attempt was made to try to ensure that the benefits of new job creation accrued to the residents of surrounding areas. This was a stance which drew criticism from other agencies, but which LDC justified on the grounds that training activities were not part of its formal remit and were the responsibility of other agencies; that its designated area excluded any significant population and it was not empowered to intervene in surrounding residential areas; that its resource endowment was too slender to allow it to extend beyond land and property-based intervention; and that a broadening of its efforts would have represented a distraction from its core mission of property-led regeneration.

That LDC's approach was relatively narrow (measured against CMDC's more expansive goals) and strayed little beyond the focus on land and property issues which lay at the heart of the UDC programme is confirmed by the strategies employed for the two sub-areas. In South/Central Leeds, the strategy comprised three separate and quite different strands, but each based around mainly physical forms of property market intervention. First, LDC attempted to induce further southward expansion - but not migration - of the city's commercial core by enabling high-profile property developments along the Calls and on the Riverside. Second, it tried to re-build the employment base of the southern part of the South/Central sub-area, in Hunslet and Holbeck, through the more prosaic means of supporting the provision of sites, premises and services for commercial, office and industrial development. And third, it invested to support site preparation, access and service provision for the Hunslet Green residential development (Figure 4).


In Kirkstall Valley, the strategy was different, reflecting the peculiarities of local circumstances, but still emphasising narrow land and property concerns. In part, plans for the area, as expressed through Kirkstall Valley Strategy Plan (LDC, 1988), reiterated those already developed by the City

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Council, through LCDC, in partnership with a major developer, Mountleigh. The objective was to construct a new economic base for the area, utilising the substantial acreage of derelict land to support major office and retail development in large-scale business parks, and to enable the development of associated leisure facilities and the construction of housing. These ambitious plans were subsequently revised in light of less helpful property market circumstances, with altered proposals in 1991 advocating the area's development through scaled-down commercial facilities coupled with more extensive recreational provision and open space (Figure 5).


2.2.3. Bristol Development Corporation

Establishing a UDC in Bristol, to outside observers, may have seemed surprising in view of the city's longstanding prosperity, particularly when measured against the economic and social difficulties evident in its counterparts in Manchester and, to a lesser degree, Leeds. Bristol, by contrast, had escaped much of the post-war economic decline impacting on the UK's largest conurbations, and had benefited from pronounced growth in aerospace and office employment from the 1960s onwards. By 1981, it was one of the few urban areas in Britain to employ more people than thirty years previously. This, in turn, helped to explain the fact that the city - again, in contrast to Leeds and (especially) Manchester - had largely failed to benefit from the injection of urban and regional policy resources directed to selected areas over the corresponding period, although it had been in receipt of government expenditure on defence, aerospace and transport infrastructure.

Clearly, the designation of BDC, to an even greater extent than in Central Manchester or Leeds, was posited on the presupposition that a UDC might capitalise on this enduring relative prosperity. However, this stereotype was belied by some of the social and economic difficulties which faced 24

the city in the lead up to BDC's establishment. The poverty of the central and southern sectors of the city, in areas like Cabot and Lawrence Hill, or in the peripheral, largely local authority estates like Filwood, stood in marked contrast to the images of affluence with which the city was commonly associated. In the decades prior to designation, longstanding socio-spatial polarisation was accentuated by the decline of the traditional staples of trade and manufacturing, and the simultaneous growth of employment in the financial services, media and hi-tech industry sectors. On one hand, the twin impact of the decline of manufacturing - which resulted in the loss of some 30,000 jobs between 1981 and 1994 - and the later 'peace dividend' - which led to the shakeout of 7,000 defence and aerospace jobs between 1990 and 1993 - left concentrated pockets of poverty within the city's boundaries. On the other, new zones of growth were beginning to emerge beyond the city's boundaries, on hi-tech business parks like Aztec West, home to Hewlett Packard. The same shift was also evident in shopping: Bristol had long suffered from competition with Bath for high-quality shopping, but the post-war Broadmead centre also began to face out-of-town competition from centres developed in Northavon. In combination, the juxtaposition of areas of growth outside the city's administrative boundary, and areas of decline within it, left a contradictory picture of opportunity and difficulty which, it was felt from within central government, a UDC would be best equipped to address.

BDC came into being in January 1989 and formed an area stretching to 360 hectares. The agreed UDA included a population of 1,500 in a narrow stretch of land to the south and east of the city centre. The area lay between the A420 to the north and the A4 (Bath Road) to the south, extending eastwards along the Avon Valley (Figure 6). Much of this area comprised industrial land. At its heart lay two areas forming much of the city's industrial 'backyard'. First, Temple Meads, focused on Brunel's historic station complex, was an area which had fallen into decay and was surrounded by a mixture of partly derelict industrial and warehousing sites and premises. Second, the Central Development Area (CDA), forming over half the total designated area, included St Philips Marsh, an industrial area with a rich variety of engineering, chemical and distribution firms and historically constituting the industrial heart of the city. There were also a number of non-industrial

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areas: for example, a pocket of interwar local authority housing, 'The Dings', lying within the industrial area; some late 19th Century housing opposite Arnos Vale Cemetery, Temple Meads Station and the GPO sorting office at Cattlemarket Road. Further to the east, along the Upper Avon Valley, the UDA comprised the St Anne's and Crews Hole areas. The derelict industrial area of St Anne's formed a sliver of industrial land lying to the south of the River Avon, dominated by large manufacturing plants, including engineering works and St Anne's Board Mills, which had been in decline since the early 1970s. Crews Hole, to the north of the river, was a steep-sided area of open space, part of which had suffered from industrial contamination (Figure 7).


In total, the UDA suffered a number of severe physical problems which limited the degree to which it could benefit from the city's wider prosperity. Since the early 1970s, the industrial areas of the UDA had altered substantially: older manufacturing industries had been replaced by distribution and service depots; and sites were either redeveloped or remained derelict. As a result, the UDA at the time of BDC's designation contained some 60 hectares of derelict, vacant or underused land. This was exacerbated by accessibility problems. The road system consisted mostly of a nexus of convoluted routes with single carriageway roads interlinked between a complex arrangement of waterways and railways. The lack of a main road servicing the area was compounded by the existence of two major railway lines, together with the sidings, depots and disused tracks which traversed the area, and the Avon and Feeder Canal; these presented considerable barriers to road accessibility between north and south. Nevertheless, while difficulties with dereliction and internal communication were restricting the area's development, it retained an important position as a source of employment. Although employment levels had fallen sharply - for example, from 16,000 in 1981 to 14,000 by 1988 - the City Council estimated that the area remained home to approximately 500 industrial small-firms in the area, jointly providing 7000 jobs.


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The designated UDA suffered from a number of intractable physical difficulties and this helped shape the agenda that BDC began to develop. However, equally important in informing BDC's strategy was the nature of the areas excluded from the UDA (Figure 7). As a result of deliberations by the House of Lords - in response to a petition from Bristol City Council challenging the validity of the decision to establish a UDC - the adopted UDA differed from the one originally proposed some twelve months earlier. The overall area was reduced in size, and excluded from the UDA were the majority of sites with existing planning permissions or with imminent or on-going development. This offered an immediate contrast with Central Manchester and, to an even greater extent, Leeds: it would be less likely that BDC could anticipate early capital receipts from areas with existing development interest. One important implication of the diminution of the UDA was that it became more difficult for BDC to develop large-scale initiatives with a city-wide or regional significance (just as the Lords' judgement had intended) or to progress developments untrammelled by competition from alternative sites within Bristol. For example, neither the adopted nor the initially-proposed UDAs included Canon's Marsh at the western end of the Avon, an area which offered clear development potential and which subsequently became the site for the City Council's major plans for its Harbourside development. The limited geographical extent of the adopted UDA meant that BDC was restricted in the scale and ambition of its proposals, unless it was to work in close harness with the City Council, but the fraught history of the UDC's birth made that prospect initially implausible.

The resultant agenda developed by BDC attempted to reflect the delicate balance between addressing the physical problems of much of the designated area and exploiting the development opportunities afforded by the broader health of Bristol's economy. The boldness of BDC's vision for its area - to transform the city into 'one of the great cities in Europe' (BDC, 1989) - reflected the scale of the city's assets. Its strategy to do so involved familiar UDC objectives: assembling development sites in order to overcome fragmented ownership and problems of dereliction; bolstering investor confidence and creating a more vibrant development climate; enhancing the

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landscape, amenity and recreational potential of the area; and encouraging the development of retail, office and leisure facilities to compensate for the decline of manufacturing. To these was added a distinctive, locally-specific agenda which related to what BDC saw as the fundamental problem impeding the area's regeneration: that of inadequate communications. BDC's approach to addressing this particular difficulty involved attempts to improve the area's accessibility by providing direct links to the national road network, and improving flows within the UDA by upgrading the secondary road network (ECOTEC, 1988b). Consultants were appointed in 1989 to conduct a study of the area's transport needs, and these gave rise to more specific recommendations, the most noteworthy of which was to improve north-south access through the UDA by constructing a new road linking the M32 and the A4. This new Spine Road, as it was termed, became the centrepiece of the Corporation's entire strategy, promising to open up the whole UDA to development opportunities and reduce congestion around the key node of Temple Meads.

Other proposals for the area were dependent on the Spine Road, which was to be the Corporation's pivotal intervention. Its success (or otherwise) was critical if a range of other BDC projects were to be viable. Plans for Avon Weir - which sought to stabilise water levels and thereby enable development on the banks of the river - were reliant on spin-off developments from the Spine Road in order to meet costs estimated at £8 million. Proposals for the declining industrial area of St Philips Marsh were also dependent on the Spine Road to boost accessibility and enable the natural redevelopment of many unused or marginal-use sites, some of which were seen as having potential for hi-tech industry (such as medical technology) of the type that, while prevalent in Bristol, had hitherto bypassed the designated area.

Infrastructure improvements were viewed as the base on which the area's revival would be constructed. The Corporation's strategy was to revive its area through a range of property developments made viable by the improved communications network, and thereby to contribute towards the overall aim of making Bristol a city of significance on a European scale. Major property developments were central to meeting this challenging aim. Plans for Temple Meads

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railway station, for example, were to help create an image of an 'outstanding gateway to a great European city' through a programme of refurbishment to the station, and by reducing congestion in its surrounds. These were changes which in turn would (it was hoped) help stimulate further retail, office and leisure activity through a flagship development to be called Quay Point (BDC, 1989). Plans for a floating harbour, likewise, anticipated a major mixed-use development - involving a hotel, conference centre, high-quality shops and restaurants - which again would help anchor the area's revival.

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CHAPTER 3

The Property Market Consequences of UDC Intervention

3.1. REVIVING LAND AND PROPERTY MARKETS

Reinvigorating local property markets lay at the heart of the strategies employed by all three UDCs. For each UDC, the thrust of the approach to instigating broader economic revival in their areas was to administer, in the dominant political discourse of the time, a ‘short, sharp shock’ to lethargic local property markets. The approach adopted relied heavily on the purchase of land and buildings and their subsequent improvement and re-sale, together with associated programmes of grant allocation to property developers, environmental improvements and infrastructure provision, in order to facilitate rapid high-profile development. In doing so, the aim was to ensure that property developers and other agencies were made aware of initial successes in stimulating development, which in turn would promote the image of the designated areas in the eyes of developers, and accelerate the overall pace of regeneration. In the initial post-designation period, this involved each UDC striving to establish an immediate presence as a key actor within local land and property markets. As a result, all three developed plans from the outset to encourage flagship buildings. While Central Manchester was always keen to downplay the emphasis accorded to flagships, all three sought to be seen to take the lead in ambitious development proposals, and to be active in the property market: funding projects, brokering deals and bringing a new vibrancy and enthusiasm to areas characterised by listless land and property conditions.

While all three UDC shared a common emphasis on what in the case of Leeds was termed the 'property solution', the means by which each attempted to initiate development varied in their emphases, in part reflecting the differing local circumstances in each area, but also suggesting quite

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disparate conceptions of, and views on, regeneration techniques. Table 2 gives an indication of the proportion of expenditure across a range of standard UDC categories, and suggests a degree of variability between the three. While some caution needs to be exercised in interpreting these data given that UDCs tended to record similar sorts of expenditure under different headings (Shaw, 1995), there are suggestions of contrasts in the strategies employed in the three cities. In Leeds and Bristol, expenditure data broadly approximate to UDCs’ customary templates, with relatively high proportions of spend on the purchase and preparation of sites, and on the development of infrastructure, with expenditure on the Spine Road project in Bristol (recorded under 'major projects') accounting for almost half its spend. In Central Manchester, by way of contrast, greater emphasis would appear from the expenditure data to have been accorded to environmental improvements and the disbursement of grants, both to industry and to the voluntary sector. There are, though, similarities in the emphases of the three UDCs. All three appear to have given a similar level of priority to marketing; spending on services was slight or non-existent in each UDC; and administrative and staffing costs were restricted to similar proportions of total spend in each.

* Table 2 about here *

These headline data suggest a degree of disparity in the precise means by which the UDCs sought to induce the revival of their areas, a suggestion that is reinforced on closer inspection of their activities. CMDC's efforts quickly to establish its credibility on the property development scene met with some undoubted initial successes in areas like Castlefield and the Whitworth corridor, giving it an immediacy and presence which reinforced its credentials as a ‘big hitter’ in the local property market, and in the local political arena. During its first two years, the pay-off from the injection of sizeable CMDC resources was considerable, as rental levels in the designated area outperformed those in rest of the city centre during the property boom of the early 1990s (see Figure 8). The near £27 million of private office investment generated by the time of its closure in 1996 stands comparison with most other UDCs and many other regeneration agencies. Although much of this total simply reflected a predictable increase in developer optimism stemming from the £7

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million of CMDC resources invested directly in propping-up the office sector, CMDC could also point with some justification to longer-term benefits of its activities. The development of highquality office space, for example at the Great Bridgewater Hall, reflected CMDC's desire strategically to counter the structural shortage of prestige premises which was said to exist throughout the city centre in the late 1980s, rather than merely indulge in another cycle of speculative office development. Developments of this sort were by no means isolated. The new Grand Island office development for the British Council at Gaythorn also went some way towards remedying the shortfall of new (as opposed to refurbished) office space coming on-stream in the city centre (PA Cambridge Economic Consultants, 1991). But it was the £100 million of investment in 70,000 sq. m. of office space for which CMDC provided no direct assistance which might be viewed as the most compelling indicator of the degree to which its activities boosted the property market in a way which might prove durable in the absence of the supporting buttress of central government resource.


Yet while the output figures suggested a dramatic upturn in the fortunes of the designated area, individual reverses continued to blot CMDC's record throughout its existence. This was most strikingly illustrated by the prolonged sparring over the future of the Great Northern Warehouse development, a proposed £100 million mixed-use development of offices, festival-shopping, housing and a hotel, based around the refurbishment of an historic warehouse. CMDC inherited ambitious proposals from the former Greater Manchester Council which were subsequently revised and scaled-down, but the project was repeatedly hampered by the caprices of property market and political conditions, as compulsory purchase powers proved a cumbersome and blunt mechanism with which to speed the development, and, later, as the local Civic Society proved a potent adversary to the developers. Further difficulties emerged with proposals for the Joshua Hoyle building in Piccadilly, another landmark building of historic value which CMDC again laboured to redevelop. The building was rescued amid much publicity from impending demolition in 1988 in

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an attempt to signal CMDC’s powers in the property market, but also, in the longer-term, to form the flagship development around which the strategy for the Piccadilly sub-area would progress. However, the depth of the subsequent downturn in the property market, and the paucity of interest from developers, meant that even though the development was subsequently completed after the Corporation's wind-up, it remained an embarrassing physical blemish throughout most of its lifetime.

Far from reinforcing its potency in the eyes of property developers, CMDC's difficulties in progressing some of its most prominent flagship developments illustrate the limitations of the property-led approach to regeneration when property market conditions are not conducive. Alongside some spectacular individual reverses, the shortcomings of CMDC's property-led approach are also confirmed by property market data. After an initial burst of activity, rental values in the UDA dwindled by almost one-tenth, at a time when values in the rest of the city centre were broadly stable. This might suggest that property market conditions in the designated area remained more capricious than in the rest of the city centre, but it also implies that, despite CMDC’s early efforts, the area remained insufficiently hardy to withstand the deterioration of broader property market conditions.

These limitations raise legitimate questions about CMDC's effectiveness, and about its efficiency when measured against the ‘value for money’ criterion on which Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s were insistent that regeneration agencies should be judged. Yet there were some emphatic achievements. Although it is difficult to refute criticism of the coarseness of government-approved UDC output measures (Shaw, 1995), the limited amount of quantitative data with which it is possible to measure impact suggest that – notwithstanding isolated difficulties over particular developments and the continuing fragility of the local economy – CMDC did manage to improve property market performance. Private investment levered – in the eyes of UDCs and government, the principal standard against which success should be measured – amounted to £303 million, exceeding the initial expectation of consultants (ECOTEC, 1988a). And while data on

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commercial floorspace and land reclamation offer a less salutary picture (Table 3), this has to be offset against the unpropitious property market conditions which applied throughout much of CMDC's lifespan.


For Leeds Development Corporation, the story has strong echoes of the Central Manchester experience. Individual successes with regard to flagship property developments were offset by some equally striking reverses, while the extent of the property market revival was somewhat erratic and uncertain within parts of the designated area. There are important points of contrast too, not least of which is the relatively larger proportion of expenditure devoted by LDC to physical, property-and-land projects. Of its total spend of £70.99 million during its seven year existence, spending on land assembly, reclamation and site preparation amounted to approaching half (46.2%) of expenditure, whereas the equivalent figure for Central Manchester was only 14.5%. Although there are significant imprecisions concerning the ways in which similar types of expenditure were recorded by standard category across different UDCs, it appears that LDC opted to invest a larger proportion of resource on physical forms of intervention in the property market. When spending on environmental improvements (12.1%), infrastructure works (9.2%) and the allocation of grants to developers (6.0%) are taken into account, some three-quarters of monies spent were directed towards physical improvements. Such a contrast might simply reflect the varying amounts of derelict land with which each UDC had to contend - Leeds was faced by a derelict area of 101 hectares as opposed to 47 in Central Manchester - but the proportion of expenditure devoted to tackling physical problems also reflects the broad thrust of LDC's approach: one in which the stress was firmly upon land-and-property issues.

The clarity of this focus helped yield immediate and tangible results in terms of individual property developments. High-profile projects like the museum and visitor centre at Tetley Brewery Wharf on the River Aire, linked to the adjoining brewery, offered an immediate demonstration of LDC's

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potency. Similarly high-profile developments had to wait until later in LDC's life, but again illustrated the scale of the physical transformation which LDC was seeking to induce. The Royal Armouries, relocated to Clarence Dock on the Riverside at a cost of £54 million, was the most dramatic of these. LDC provided £9.6 million in the form of initial site preparation works and expenditure on improved access, and although the development did not come on-stream until 1996, after LDC's closure, the injection of resource by the Corporation was essential in ensuring the development's viability.

These high-profile developments were complemented by efforts further south in the South/Central Leeds area. LDC supported the development of a range of office, commercial and industrial premises in Hunslet and Holbeck in an attempt to ameliorate the impact of the collapse of the area's manufacturing base. Developments such as Leeds City Office Park at Centre Gate, or the 120,000 square metres of commercial floorspace at Hunslet Business Park, Jack Lane industrial estate and the Riverside Place industrial park in Low Fold, were all facilitated by LDC's intervention to prepare sites and services, provide grants to developers and institute appropriate planning frameworks within which developers could operate.

These latter, lower profile types of development may have lacked the immediacy and glamour of some of the projects along the Calls and the River Aire, or the prominence of the refurbishment to buildings along Boar Lane in the city centre, but their combined impact in employment terms was significant in allowing LDC to claim overall figures for job generation that exceeded the corresponding data for Central Manchester and Bristol. Gross employment created in new developments within LDC's area amounted to some 9066 jobs, whereas in Central Manchester the figure was 4944, and in Bristol 4825. Other output figures reflect the marked degree to which LDC concentrated on land and property intervention. Leeds's leverage ratio of public sector resource expended to private sector monies invested stood at the end of LDC's lifetime at 1:5, in excess of the corresponding figures of 1:2.1 and 1:3 for Central Manchester and Bristol respectively.

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Such figures, both for job creation and private sector investment, have to be treated with a degree of caution since calculation methods, as well as the vigour with which they were implemented, varied across the three UDCs. Nonetheless, they do suggest that LDC's efforts with regard to intervention in property and land markets met with an obvious degree of success. On closer inspection, however, the scale of LDC's achievements are more questionable. This is illustrated by data on derelict land reclamation. LDC inherited derelict and unused (or under-used) land which was estimated by consultants to amount to 101.4 hectares. While the proportion of derelict land at designation was lower in Leeds than in Central Manchester (19%, as opposed to 25.1%), LDC was faced with an absolute area of derelict and unused or underused land that exceeded the 47 ha in CMDC's area, and, significantly, with extensive tracts of heavily contaminated land in Kirkstall Valley. By the time of LDC's closure, this had been reduced by 68 hectares - in relative terms a lower proportion of reclamation than in Central Manchester, but in absolute terms almost double the land area. However, that it marginally failed to meet the target set by consultants - 70 hectares is surprising in view of the level of resource expended, and given that LDC was granted a two-year extension to its lifespan.

Part of the difficulty associated with LDC's failure to achieve its derelict land reclamation forecast was the unforeseen shifts in property market conditions after the targets were set in 1989. Initially, increasing land values were held to have limited LDC's progress with regard to land acquisition, leading the Corporation to bemoan the consequent strains this placed on its core budget: 'the baseline budget allocations, voted by Parliament…based on [consultants'] work now grossly underestimate the Corporation's land acquisition needs' (LDC, 1989: 6). Later, an altogether different problem arose as property prices slumped, prompting a decline in levels of receipt from land and property disposal. As a result, LDC consistently failed to reach its estimated level of receipt - as outlined in Corporate Plans - until 1993, and as early as 1990 it was admitting that 'as a result of a downturn in the economy receipts are now forecast at a significantly lower level than previously' (LDC, 1990: 8). Both factors combined to limit the area of land acquired and disposed of by LDC to 49.3 hectares. This is a figure only marginally (7.7%) lower than initial forecasts,

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and could be explained by the severity of underlying property market difficulties, but it is rather less impressive given that the Corporation was granted two additional years in which to meet its target.

Less advantageous property market conditions offered plausible but partial mitigation for LDC's failure to meet land reclamation and acquisition targets. And while LDC devoted considerable resource (and no little publicity) to its strategy of physical regeneration, it is important not to overstate the scale of this deficiency given that the proportion of derelict land was reduced from 16% at designation to only 4% at wind-up. Nevertheless, LDC did encounter some embarrassing misfortunes in its property-led strategy, and these are most starkly exemplified by the difficulties it faced in Kirkstall Valley.

The original plans for Kirkstall Valley, published in 1988, sought to effect a radical transformation of the area, which had been blighted by the closure of a power station in 1980. The difficulties facing LDC were daunting. Derelict and unused (or underused) land extended to 54 hectares, constituting one-third of the total area, and this was compounded by the severity of the contamination afflicting the area, with subsidence, flooding, an excess of fly ash and poorly compacted soils presenting particular problems. Initial proposals to address these were ambitious, adhering to the notion underpinning the UDC model of regeneration which held that ostentatious intervention was necessary in areas of protracted property market difficulty or failure: a degree of flamboyance would be necessary to trigger the area's revitalisation. As a result, LDC willingly embraced plans already hatched for the area by LCDC, the City Council's economic development arm, which had lain unfulfilled partly because of the daunting scale of their ambition, but also as a result of the dormancy of LCDC. LDC adopted these plans, advocating that the area's regeneration would be secured principally through a comprehensive commercial development scheme involving a major programme of retail, office and leisure development in a series of business parks (LDC, 1988).

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Such a plan in itself offered little to differentiate it from other ambitious proposals in LDC's area, or in other UDC areas, but represented a conspicuous challenge when viewed in the context of the scale of the problems afflicting Kirkstall Valley. A number of factors combined to undermine the original plans.

The onerous cost involved in treating the extensive tracts of derelict and

contaminated land within the area, coupled with the general downturn in property market conditions which coincided with the first half of LDC's tenure, meant that plans for the area were jeopardised at an early stage. This was compounded by the parallel critique to which the plans were subjected by a well-marshalled and vociferous campaign from community activists. The Kirkstall Valley Campaign produced an alternative plan for the area, drawing upon proposals produced by Leeds City Council in the Kirkstall Valley Local Plan in the early 1980s and advocating the retention of public green space which was perceived to be under threat from the planned commercial development. The rival vision for the area was one which advocated a recreation-based approach and which rejected the more purely economic development-driven agenda of LDC's proposals in favour of more environmentally-sensitive plans. The community groups' case would perhaps have been easily ignored had it not been for the weakness of prevailing market conditions. Jointly, though, these multiple difficulties led ultimately to the withdrawal of the key developer, Mountleigh (Northern) Ltd, around whom the plans were based, and with whom they had been developed.

LDC reconsidered its proposals for the area and produced amended plans in 1991, this time offering drastically scaled-down suggestions for the area which were less likely to generate hostility from community groups, but which, more importantly, retained a degree of commercial viability appropriate to the altered property market climate. The new plans suggested the retention of proposals, originally discarded from the 1980 Local Plan, for a 25-acre nature reserve, together with associated recreational facilities such as a mini-golf course, and a programme of environmental improvements along the canal-side corridor traversing the area. This was to be an environmentally-sensitive strategy in which the principal aim was 'to enhance the central area of Kirkstall Valley as a green space' (LDC, 1991: 19).

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The plans continued to be viewed by

community groups as token gestures to placate opposition, but the revised, less ambitious plans for a supermarket, coupled with small-scale industrial development at Wyther Lane industrial estate, did yield some measurable benefit in the form of private investment said by LDC to amount to some £25 million - ten times the sum expended on physical site reclamation and infrastructure works (LDC, 1995).

While the leverage of funds in an area previously untouched by private sector interest would appear to represent a notable achievement, what is more significant is that, as a result of the difficulties encountered, LDC chose increasingly to prioritise the development of the South/Central Leeds subarea at the expense of Kirkstall Valley, a decision signalled in its 1993/94 Corporate Plan. In effect, the revised proposals for Kirkstall Valley, and the subsequent developments supported, reflected a decision on the part of LDC to withdraw from Kirkstall Valley, aside from intervention on a modest scale to ensure the viability of the scaled-down plans for the area.

The particular reverses suffered in Kirkstall Valley limited the overall effectiveness of LDC's intervention, and these exacerbated the Corporation's failure to meet its targets for land acquisition and derelict land reclamation. In a more general sense, however, these could be viewed as isolated misfortunes, and there is evidence to suggest that the scale of the property recession of the early 1990s was more limited in Leeds than elsewhere, and that this may have been partly the result of LDC's activities (Trinnaman, 1995). This is illustrated by data on land and property values within the UDA, as measured against property market trends elsewhere in the city. Using rateable value figures for the Uniform Business Rate as a surrogate for property market health, data were assembled to compare relative changes in commercial and industrial rateable values in the UDA, in a set of comparator wards adjoining the UDA, and in Leeds as a whole. The data over the period 1990-95 suggest a complex pattern of change, and are further complicated by the fact that the comparisons are based on all properties (and therefore include new as well as existing property), providing a mixture of real changes and additional observations. Nonetheless, in comparison to the city as a whole, the UDA showed a more marked increase in the average value of office and

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industrial properties - the core sectors targeted by LDC - though a lower increase for retail properties (Table 4). While LDC's attempts to tackle the physical problems of Kirkstall Valley may have stalled embarrassingly, the broader data suggest that the substantial resources expended on property-based regeneration generated more positive impacts.


Bristol's experience with regard to property-led regeneration differed markedly from both Leeds and Central Manchester. Total expenditure of £111.8 million included £20.5 million of Department of Transport monies, which augmented core grant-in-aid of £79 million (£5.5 million of which was eventually reimbursed to the Department of the Environment) and £33.6 million realised through capital receipts. Of this, intervention in land and property markets accounted for a substantial proportion: £34.4 million (31%) was devoted to land purchase, a proportion exceeded only by Leeds.

This much is unsurprising, but what immediately stands out is the overwhelming stress given to two 'set-piece' interventions, the success of which was argued to be essential if a wider, organic revival was to be triggered. The first was the construction of the Spine Road (or St Philips Causeway as it was later re-christened), which formed the backbone of the Corporation's infrastructure strategy, and, indeed, the entire strategy for its area. Its function was two fold: first, it was to open-up developer interest in the strip of land along its route; and second, it would play a broader strategic sub-regional role as a distributor to funnel traffic away from the city centre by providing a north-south link between the M32 and the A4 road to Bath. To achieve these objectives, spending on the Spine Road amounted to £53.1 million or 48% of total BDC spending (or three-quarters of total public sector funds flowing to the Corporation).

In a narrow sense, the Spine Road was completed in an efficient and effective manner. At a total cost of £59.8 million (including private sector funds), it was completed for £5.2 million less than

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originally anticipated. To the Highways Agency, the success of its design-and-build format was hailed as a blueprint on which future road construction schemes might draw. Evidence on the road's impact on traffic flows provided a less straightforwardly salutary picture. On one hand, a study by the consultants Halcrow Fox, based on a simulation of the impact of the Spine Road on traffic flows, suggested that in future the road would reduce congestion across key routes within the city. Further investigation by Avon County Council offered evidence of the immediate impact of the Spine Road. It suggested that there had been a significant reduction in traffic volumes in Bristol's inner circuit network, with flows reduced from 24,000 vehicles per day in 1990 (before the Spine Road's construction) to 18,000 in 1995. Elsewhere, the road's impact was less impressive. Survey data for the A420 at Lawrence Hill suggested that the Spine Road had failed significantly to lessen the problem of 'rat-running' through the Lawrence Hill residential area adjoining the northern boundary of the UDA. In this instance, flows increased from 20,000 to 22,000 from 1990-95. And within the UDA itself, survey evidence provided a similarly negative picture, with flows along the Feeder Road - the main secondary road in the UDA and the main access route for St Philips Marsh - remaining unaltered.

Judged against its broader impact on economic fortunes, the effectiveness of the Spine Road is also questionable. BDC's 1995 Annual Report suggested that the road's construction provided a catalyst in attracting private investment to the tune of £200 million. This claim was based principally on the growth of the Unicorn Business Park and Kingsland Trading Estate, both of which were claimed to have experienced substantial investment, reflected in the relative buoyancy (though still absolute decline) in rental levels in these areas as measured against comparable areas outside the UDA. But other data serve to dispute these claims. Investment Property Databank data on rental values for five roads within the vicinity of the southern end of the Spine Road suggest a negative impact, with retail capital growth, rental values and rental yields remaining in line with the rest of Bristol until 1990/91 (when the construction of the Spine Road began) but declining sharply thereafter in comparison with the city as a whole.

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The Spine Road was clearly a central part of BDC's strategy. It dominated its patterns of expenditure; it was seen as a key means of generating the capital receipts required to make viable much of BDC's strategy; and it was seen as an important adjunct to attracting new investment to the area. In financial terms, it was a success. It met the targets set for it by the Treasury, its lower than anticipated completion cost helped offset the reduction in capital receipts flowing to BDC, and it acted as a magnet which allowed BDC to attract an additional £20.5 million from the Department of Transport. The Corporation was also able to point to major developments which were made viable by the road's construction. Developments such as the retail and leisure activities of 'Little America' at Avon Meads/Castle Court - the largest leisure and retail development in the South West region - stand out in this respect.

By 1995, the complex had attracted private sector

investment of some £50 million, while 860 jobs were associated with the development; part of this may be attributable to the Spine Road, and part to BDC's work in assembling land and constructing a development framework.

These are all arguments in favour of the Spine Road, but they are offset by the counter argument that many of the same benefits could have been achieved by a more modest surface-level road link combined with smaller-scale improvements to internal roads within the CDA. This is reinforced by the failure to assist in achieving the broader regeneration impacts on which the road's construction was justified; beyond the (disputed) instance of Avon Meads/Castle Court, relatively little tangible development could plausibly be said to have occurred directly as a result of the Spine Road. Survey evidence on the road's impact on traffic flows further call into question its efficacy. Significantly, the view of Avon County Council's transport department was that the Spine Road had done little to alleviate traffic pressure within the city centre and at Quay Point: one of the main objectives of building the road. Given that the Spine Road consumed three-quarters of public monies flowing to the Corporation, questions remain about the extent to which it represented 'value for money' in light of the slenderness of its impact.

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A second instance of pivotal 'set piece' intervention, this time at Quay Point, further questions BDC's reliance on a small number of key projects. Quay Point was planned as a complex of high quality office, cultural, and residential uses which would represent one of 'the most prestigious developments in Europe' (BDC, 1989) and which formed the centrepiece of the broader strategy for the surrounding Temple Meads area (Figure 9). After revision, the proposals envisaged a 120,744 square metre development (later drastically reduced), of which major high-quality retail space amounting to some 37,000 square metres would constitute a significant element. This would help to create a regionally-important shopping centre which would compete with Bath and the centres (such as Cribbs Causeway) on the outskirts of the city in Northavon. Intended as BDC's most prominent flagship project, it was anticipated that the development would contribute substantially to private investment forecast to amount to £580 million in the surrounding Temple Meads area, while jobs created for the area were forecast to number approximately 8,500.

The 9.3 hectare

development site housed a mixture of derelict and semi-derelict buildings and car parking. The complicated ownership of the site, fragmented amongst forty different parties, created an additional obstacle to development and, after the failure of BDC's attempts to broker an agreement with owners, necessitated the use of compulsory purchase powers to assemble a developable parcel of land. A particular impediment to the progress of the Quay Point CPO was the existence of industrial units on Great Western Way, which BDC argued conveyed an impression of the area inappropriate to the 'modern' identity it was trying to create for such a high-profile, central location.


While the plans were given an initial boost by the decision of Nat West Life to locate on an adjacent site, bringing 400 new jobs, by 1993 it was already evident that the scheme was floundering. Familiar objections to BDC's plans had already been voiced at a public inquiry, echoing many of those expressed for major property developments in other UDCs. BDC's proposals, it was argued, were too grandiose; a more modest form of development would be more likely to succeed in the middle of a recession; a gradual, incremental approach to development

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would be more effective, allowing market confidence slowly to be cultivated. While the City Council broadly concurred with the broad thrust of BDC's proposals for the Temple Meads area as a whole - deeming them to conform to the draft City Centre Local Plan and, later, the adopted Bristol Local Plan - it strenuously opposed plans for retail development. These, it argued, would lead to conflict with the existing Broadmead shopping centre, in which the City Council had a direct financial interest, and to which resources for refurbishment were already being channelled.

These problems were compounded by the depressed state of the property market, which - coupled with protracted difficulties in progressing the CPO for the area - were hindering the entire development. Prospective developers for an International Trade Mart at the core of the site could not proceed until all the land had been acquired, and would not proceed unless the supposed blemish posed by remaining industrial uses had been removed. This, in turn, jeopardised much of BDC's broader strategy: plans for Avon Weir, for example, were dependent for funding on capital receipts flowing from land sales as part of the Quay Point development. The Corporation was further hemmed-in by the Department of the Environment's initial refusal (reversed in 1994) to provide £3.5 million 'bridging funds' to assist with land assembly. This coincided with the rapid turnover of lead developers: Wilson Connelly, the company appointed in Summer 1994, withdrew in Autumn as a result of the decision to reduce the scheme's retail element; Argent plc was appointed preferred developer in December 1994, but withdrew within three months.

In combination, these difficulties prevented the realisation of the Quay Point plans. The remaining plans were greatly reduced, especially in respect of retail development, for which planned floorspace was cut by two-thirds. Although preparatory work had been undertaken on land assembly and in developing a planning framework for the area - on which English Partnerships was subsequently able to capitalise - the failure to realise any tangible physical development meant that BDC's key flagship project had not materialised and that the anticipated capital receipts were never available to fund the Avon Weir project. infrastructure project.

This, alongside the Spine Road, was BDC's key

By stabilising water levels on the Avon and thereby improving the

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environment of an 8 km stretch of waterfront, the development of offices, industry and retailing would be possible in St Philips and Arnos Vale and would allow a new link between Temple Meads and the city centre. Total private investment as a result of the Weir project, BDC estimated, would amount to some £300 million and would generate 8000 jobs. However, while BDC spent somewhere between £1.5 and £2.7 million on preparatory studies for what would be a complex engineering exercise, by 1995 all mention of the Weir had been expunged from its Annual Report. The entire scheme had depended on the success of the Quay Point, and the failure of that project had major knock-on costs for the rest of the UDA.

The interlinked failure of major schemes at Quay Point and Avon Weir - and, as a result, in much of the surrounding area - represented a major reverse for BDC. But in other senses its propertybased efforts left a clear mark on the physical townscape of the UDA and on the city's stock of buildings and infrastructure. The Spine Road, road improvements in the CDA and in the Avon Valley, new warehousing and industrial estates in St Philips and the Avon Valley, and the leisure and entertainment complex at Avon Meads/Castle Court: all of these represent additions to the economic base of the city. At the same time, the scale and pace of development on much of the land adjacent to the UDA, and which did not benefit from BDC's efforts, was patchy. Some development occurred - notably housing projects in Totterdown and office and industrial development in the site opposite Quay Point - but in other areas it occurred haltingly, such as the Bond Street/Newfoundland Street site adjacent to Broadmead.

However, further evidence for BDC's limited overall effectiveness is provided by its performance when measured against forecasts for standard UDC outputs (ECOTEC, 1988b). The data illustrate that eventual outputs fell short of initial forecasts, despite the fact that the latter were based on the assumption that UDC expenditure would amount to £15.78 million as opposed to an actual total of £111.83 million. An anticipated ratio of public:private sector investment of 1:16 dramatically outstripped an actual figure of 1:3. These forecasts were informed by the then vibrant state of the property market, but they were subsequently revised in 1991 to take account of less helpful

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property market conditions (Table 5). Nevertheless, this revised comparison still reflects the mixed performance of BDC. The Corporation failed to meet the targets for housing units constructed, floorspace developed, private investment levered and jobs created, and exceeded the anticipated cost-per-job forecast. Only for roads constructed and land brought back into productive use did it meet the forecast figures. These suggest that the evident failures at Quay Point and Avon Weir did not just constitute isolated misfortunes, but rather that BDC's entire strategy for land and property revival proved to be ineffective.


It is clear, then, that all three UDCs invested heavily in their attempts to reinvigorate local land and property markets and, unsurprisingly, as a result were able to point towards significant impacts of the sort catalogued. At the same time, though, difficulties arose because all three UDCs, to varying degrees, posited these property-based strategies on the assumption of relatively healthy market conditions. All three UDCs - in common with all second and third generation UDCs (National Audit Office, 1993) - were clearly disadvantaged in having been established close to the height of a land and property boom, thereby raising the costs of the land purchase necessary to assemble developable sites in areas where market failure (in the face of wider buoyancy) was largely the result of the preponderance of derelict, contaminated and fragmented sites. For all three UDCs, land was purchased, in effect, at the top of the market, with the subsequent downswing limiting the expected returns through capital receipts from land sales and constraining the subsequent development of UDC strategies. However, there appears to be some validity to the argument that, while intervention in the land market was necessary, UDCs might have been more cautious in their purchases, and might have phased acquisition in such a way that property market movements could have been taken into account more sensitively. On the other hand, UDCs can justifiably point to the undoubted impossibility of fully anticipating property-market changes; to the support of District Valuers (on cost grounds) and DoE/Regional Offices (on policy grounds) for these early purchases; and to the fact that they were statutorily required to adopt a property-focused approach.

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Nevertheless, the argument that the UDCs might have staggered land acquisition, and placed their emphasis less exclusively on property-based initiatives, remains a compelling one: more diversified strategies could have offered one way in which the three UDCs might have responded to altered market conditions. Yet while all three UDCs were eventually compelled by market conditions to do so, there are revealing differences in the degree to which, and the pace at which, they instituted revised strategies.

In this respect, Central Manchester stands out from Leeds and Bristol. In devising a strategy, rather than simply operating opportunistically in line with shifting property market rhythms, it was able to interpret the area's problems, and the opportunities its circumstances afforded, with a degree of coherence. It was helped, in this sense, by the existence of earlier plans and ideas on which it was able to capitalise, most notably those for Castlefield and the Whitworth Corridor.

CMDC's

successes in reviving the office market and, in attempting to broaden the function of the city centre to embrace housing and leisure-related activities as well as retailing, were a reflection not just of its own activities or of the sizeable resources at its disposal; they also reflected the fact that the Corporation deliberately strove to become part of a wider network of agencies which was beginning to agree a common perception of the way in which the city centre would evolve. In line with this broad 'vision', CMDC tried to anticipate the trajectory of the property market and formulate responses accordingly. It diversified its activities and downplayed its initial emphasis on flagship developments once it became clear than these were likely to become more precarious in light of property market ill-health. As an alternative, it broadened its strategy to support the development of a mix of offices, leisure-related developments and housing, building upon the opportunities provided by the fact that the commercial core of the city was restricted in scale. It envisaged the potential for growth around the creative arts, hotels and entertainment facilities, and foresaw the opportunities presented by the expansion of student and young-people’s housing for a range of a related entertainment and consumer facilities. The development of the Concert Hall was one successful flagship project, but the sum total of the numerous small-scale developments in

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Castlefield may have been equally important in fuelling the momentum of the city centre's revitalisation.

By contrast - and contrary to assertions that there is some unitary, homogenous model to which all UDCs adhere - Leeds and Bristol planned to operate in a quite different way, to a large extent eschewing the 'strategic' approach of CMDC and focusing more narrowly on individual developments within their areas. Leeds pursued an emphasis on extending the city centre to the south of the line of the river and railway and, in this, was largely successful in speeding-up a process which had started, falteringly, in the pre-designation period. This clearly responded to local conditions in the property market in which demand had begun to outstrip the supply of sites in areas close to the city centre. Furthermore, many of the land-uses which LDC encouraged helped to reinforce the city’s aspirations to develop its potential for leisure, entertainment and culture-based activities, in line with the wider objective (shared with other key players in the city) to create a 24hour economy. The hotels and restaurants attracted to UDA were part of this; so too was the completion of the Royal Armouries Museum; so too was the opening-up of the river frontage and the associated environmental improvements; and so too was the refurbishment of The Calls area as a functioning part of the city centre. These and other developments offered a powerful testimony to LDC's ability to exploit the opportunities presented by a relatively healthy property market. But in contrast, LDC’s experience with regard to Kirkstall Valley, as we have seen, is illustrative of its difficulties in applying the same sort of property-led formula in circumstances of some adversity. Initial proposals for the Kirkstall Valley clearly proved misplaced in light of the subsequent downturn in the property market. But while this initial misreading of property market conditions presented some difficulties, it was LDC's failure to alter its plans for the area until a much later stage in its life which was the more telling failure, and which contrasts most markedly with CMDC's sensitivity to property market circumstances.

Bristol's experience, to an even greater extent than in Leeds, illustrates the difficulties presented by over-reliance on a property-led approach when economic conditions are less advantageous than

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anticipated. The UDC’s aim to make Bristol into a city of note in a European sense was, at the time, appropriately bold for a city with enormous unrealised developmental potential. The quality of the city’s architectural heritage and the potential attractions of its complex water frontages were already helping it to attract limited numbers of tourists, and to develop some related leisure activities, but, before BDC's designation, the degree to which it had exploited these assets was limited. In view of the city's potential, then, BDC was justified in its attempts to encourage the city to 'think big' when developing future proposals. At a trivial level, for example, the argument propounded by BDC that Temple Meads warranted major refurbishment as a prime gateway into the city was an appropriate one; at a larger scale, BDC's lobbying for major redevelopment of the whole Temple Meads area was reasonable for a city which needed to raise the scale of its ambition.

In light of the insularity of the city in the 1980s, heightening the aspirations of the wider network of policy-makers in the city - and particularly the City Council - was also an appropriate aim in the context of Bristol. However, what was less relevant was its dogged pursuit of a small number of high-profile projects at a time when the property market was collapsing. Difficulties encountered in progressing flagship developments such as those at Quay Point and the Avon Weir reflect the limited effectiveness with which BDC was able to interpret, and respond to, property-market conditions. Even though it was the downturn in the property market which undermined BDC’s hopes of realising many of its projects through capital receipts, it can still be criticised for having persisted throughout most of its lifetime with plans which became increasingly unrealistic. To an even greater extent than in Leeds, the enduring and unrealistic optimism of BDC officials meant that it chose not to institute a revised programme of projects more appropriate to changed property market conditions.

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3.2. THE LOCAL CONSEQUENCES OF PROPERTY MARKET INTERVENTION

All three UDCs concentrated on attempts to stimulate property-led regeneration within their formal boundaries. Yet it is also clear that the activities (or, equally, the lack of activities) of all three impacted upon surrounding, non-designated areas. In Manchester, CMDC developed little collaborative activity with the deprived areas immediately outside the UDA boundaries, yet its interventions impinged on these areas in some form. In Bristol, initial proposals for Quay Point prompted fears about negative spillover in the form of the potential damage that the planned largescale retail developments might have on the nearby City Council’s Broadmead shopping centre outside the UDA. And in Leeds, the initial controversy concerning, and subsequent changes to, proposals for Kirkstall Valley were fuelled by local residents’ fears about the negative spillover effects of the proposed commercial developments.

Measuring the degree to which the impacts of each UDC - both beneficial and detrimental radiated outwards beyond the formal UDA boundaries is one indirect way in which the broader consequences of UDC activities can be explored. Such spillover effects are notoriously difficult to measure. However, one way of approaching this is to identify ‘vacancy chains’ created by ‘new’ businesses generated within each of the UDAs (Robson et al, 1999). Using survey data assembled for all three cities, it was possible to trace the chains through subsequent vacant premises and, in doing so, to explore where firms had moved from (if they had moved) and whether the resultant vacancies were (or were not) subsequently filled by other productive activities. This provides a helpful way of identifying negative and positive spillover effects. In each case, the chaining effects of the ‘new’ firms created in the UDAs were followed through successive links so as to distinguish between additionality and displacement: cases of additionality through new businesses, the expansion of firms, and in-movement from outside the local economy; and cases of displacement through moves which leave vacant premises or sites in the local economy.

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The exploration of vacancy chains suggests that regeneration activities within the UDAs had some significant domino effects on the broader property market (Table 6). The total of 115 ‘new’ businesses in the three UDAs generated an overall total of at least 182 transactions in the wider property market. Whether this volume is typical of business chains in general is impossible to say in the absence of other studies with which comparison could be made. Nonetheless, what is clear is that the spatial reach of this property ‘excitation’ appears to have been limited, with few chain lengths of two or more links and few instances of UDC activities triggering impacts on areas much beyond the surrounding conurbations. Even where the chains extended beyond the UDAs, at most this involved premises elsewhere in the relevant city. In Leeds, one chain extended to the Rothwell area on the south east edge of the city, and two extended beyond the Leeds post-code area to nearby Doncaster and to Wakefield. In Bristol, two chains involved the adjacent district of Avonmouth, one extended to Stroud in Gloucestershire and a fourth represented the only longdistance link, to Guernsey. In Manchester, one link reached to Cheshire and a second involved the partial relocation of an office headquarters from London. Apart from these cases, all other transactions lay within the parent cities. Clearly, the vacancy chains in each place suggest that the wider area affected by UDC activities had a very limited reach. To this extent, the interest in displacement and additionality is predominantly restricted to the impacts (either negative or positive) that UDC activity had on the UDAs and on the economies of the three cities themselves.


Vacancy chains shed further light on the extent of displacement and additionality engendered by the UDCs’ activities. Conventional approaches to the analysis of the impact of regeneration concentrate largely on the immediate outcomes of activities within UDA boundaries, and would have produced data only on the initial birth of businesses. From this, it would have appeared that the activities of the UDCs had involved a relatively high proportion of displacement and this would have led to the conclusion that regeneration was associated with a high level of migration from the parent cities and the UDAs. Thus, ignoring later links in the chains, those instances of chain starts

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which appear to represent boundary-hopping from elsewhere in the parent city or moves within the UDA itself comprise 16 of the 37 chains in Leeds, 19 of the 37 in Bristol, and 22 of the 41 in Manchester. In the absence of following-up the subsequent uses of the vacated premises, the evidence would have suggested that the UDCs had merely encouraged a large amount of redistribution of activity from elsewhere in the parent cities and their UDAs.

However, a somewhat different, and more favourable, set of conclusions emerges by using the chaining approach. Even where businesses were relocated to the UDAs from elsewhere in the parent cities or from within the UDAs, so long as their premises were ultimately re-occupied by commercial uses the relocation cannot simply be considered to represent displacement. Only where a chain ends in the vacancy, demolition or conversion of premises within the parent city can one define UDC activity as involving negative displacement. In all other cases, the effect is positive or, at worst, neutral for the overall economy of the relevant city.

To determine whether chains were associated with additionality to the ‘local economy’, on the one hand, or displacement on the other, the analysis used the following geographical definitions of the local economy: for Leeds and Bristol, the city boundaries; and, for Manchester (which has comparatively narrow administrative boundaries), the conurbation as a whole. The chaining approach then took account of the domino effect associated with subsequent moves in each chain. The relevant ‘event’ is therefore not the immediate move of a business to the UDA, but the net effect of the completed chain.

Displacement can be associated with a move to a UDA from within the local area which left behind a vacant or demolished building or one which was converted to non-commercial uses. On the other hand, additionality can be defined as any chain which ends with one of the following: the creation of a genuinely new business; the establishment of new net activity through the creation of a new branch or through expansion, merger or reorganisation (on the grounds that, in the absence of appropriate premises, such expansion might either not have occurred or might have taken place

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outside the local economy); and relocations where the in-moving business derives from outside the local economy.

Seen in this light, there was a relatively low level of displacement. At worst, it occurred in 11 of the chains in Leeds; in 10 of those in Bristol; and in 9 of the Manchester chains. Some of the vacant premises were also either in process of refurbishment or appeared likely to be re-occupied and would therefore in the longer term not represent displacement. Equally significantly, a number of the vacancies were in the UDAs themselves and reflected the UDCs’ conscious attempts to enhance the environments of the areas through the refurbishment of business sites and the consequent relocation of pre-existing businesses; a process especially true in Bristol’s case. If we therefore look only at instances of vacancy/demolition in areas of the parent cities outside the UDAs, the chains which represent displacement number six in Leeds, two in Bristol and seven in Manchester. The percentages of additionality and displacement are summarised in Table 7.


In all three cities, a preponderance of chains represented net additionality to the local economy: 70.2% for Leeds; 75.6% for Bristol; and 78.1% for Manchester. Additionality resulted from somewhat different reasons in each case; with Leeds having a higher proportion of new businesses and Bristol and Manchester having higher proportions of expansions. In all three cases, the extent of in-migration was low: Bristol had the highest percentage (although two of its cases referred to moves from Avonmouth which might be considered part of the city’s local economy, and whose exclusion would produce a percentage identical to that of Leeds).

The most interesting comparisons are for the levels of vacancies. Leeds appears to have suffered the largest proportion of displacement through vacancies, with Bristol and Manchester having somewhat lower percentages. However, a significant number of the vacancies in Leeds and Bristol were for premises or sites within the UDAs themselves, reflecting the extent of clearance and

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redevelopment of land within the two areas. Some, if not all, of such cases were an integral part of the process of regeneration by the UDCs. In contrast, few of the Manchester cases applied to vacancies within the UDA. If we exclude cases of vacancy within the UDAs, however, the pattern of displacement suggests a somewhat different percentage distribution of displacement, with Leeds and Manchester having significantly higher levels than in Bristol.

For Manchester, a high percentage of the overall displacement was associated with offices moving to the UDA and leaving vacant premises in the city centre. To that extent, the city centre was adversely affected by business displacement to CMDC’s area. The chaining data suggest the beginnings of a migration of the city’s office sector away from its traditional core. While it is evident that many of the offices which moved to the UDA from the city centre were replaced by substitute office uses, of the seven displacement chains involving the city centre, no fewer than five left unfilled office premises. To this extent, there was a ‘hollowing-out’ of the city’s office core with new high-quality offices (for example in the Bridgewater development within the Central Manchester UDA) attracting relocations from the offices in the core, where older premises required costly refurbishment to meet the needs of top-of-the-market office accommodation. Manchester’s office core was therefore dispersing, arguably with CMDC’s area constituting a competing secondary node. This offers some support to the claims made by policy-makers in Manchester that CMDC’s intervention in city centre land and property markets served to fracture the geographical integrity of the city’s office market by drawing development into the designated UDA, although this could be viewed more positively as testimony to the Corporation’s success in physical land and property renewal and the marketing of its area as a location for business.

In Leeds and Bristol, by contrast, office displacement was more limited. This partly reflects the characteristics of the respective designated areas, since - unlike CMDC - LDC and BDC did not lie entirely within the existing city centre. Nevertheless, in Leeds, the shortage of developable land and the more general growth in the office sector in Leeds, particularly in financial services, might have suggested that the city’s office market would expand southwards into the LDC area. In this

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sense, the lack of office displacement - at least in comparison with Manchester - could be seen as a failing on the part of LDC, particularly given LDC’s strategic aim of drawing the existing city centre southwards.

Overall, the results also suggest a high degree of additionality, with a not inconsiderable proportion of firms new to the designated areas represented by new starts or new branches. The high percentages give some indication of the progress made by the respective UDCs in prompting net economic benefit; the UDCs stimulated net economic benefits to their cities, and this is corroborated by the limited scale of business displacement. This suggests that there has been little commercial blight or negative 'shadow effects' on the property markets or on the economies of nondesignated areas, with the possible exception of the ‘hollowing-out’ of Manchester’s office core. For all three cities, there was an apparently small proportion of ‘negative’ chain deaths associated with demolition or vacancy and some of these could be considered positive in that previous premises were subject to redevelopment proposals, or were undergoing refurbishment at the time of the survey.

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CHAPTER 4

The Social Consequences of UDC intervention

It is clear that, for the most part, all three UDCs met the core objective of reviving property market fortunes, and in all three the extent of additionality outweighed displacement. Each UDC suffered particular reverses with regard to specific developments - and particular uncertainties remain about the efficacy of Bristol's efforts with regard to restoring property market vitality - but it seems fair, if unsurprising in view of the scale of the resources expended, to conclude that all three UDCs could make legitimate claims to have improved the workings of the land and property markets within their control. However, their effectiveness is much more questionable when judged against broader regeneration criteria which provide an indication of the social consequences of UDC intervention, in addition to their impact on land and property markets. Here, the comparison between UDCs is as marked as it was for strategies employed to promote property-led regeneration. The following sections consider the social consequences of UDC intervention in relation to two specific sphere of activity: housing regeneration and employment creation.

4.1. HOUSING REGENERATION

CMDC’s experience with regard to housing regeneration, for example, offers one illustration of the more questionable effectiveness of its approach if more than just narrow property market criteria are used as evaluative benchmarks. If judged solely on the extent to which housing market fortunes were improved, CMDC could point to its undoubted success. In effect, it helped create a market for owner-occupied and private rented housing in an area which house builders had consistently ignored. Prior to CMDC's inception, there had been no concerted effort to channel public resources

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to develop city centre housing in Manchester. Whereas the adjacent local authority of Salford had seen substantial resources expended throughout the 1980s in an effort to refurbish local authorityowned stock and promote owner-occupation (Bradford and Steward, 1988), housing development in Manchester city centre had been restricted to isolated developments such as those at St John’s Gardens and at the Arndale shopping centre. Although there had been some initial attempts to stimulate new-build at Piccadilly Village, and some pioneering refurbishments along Whitworth Street, the total population in the UDA at CMDC’s establishment was estimated to amount to no more than 250 people. By the time of CMDC's closure in 1996, this had changed dramatically, as expenditure of £13 million (excluding monies spent on related environmental improvements) yielded more than 2,500 new or refurbished dwellings in the UDA. This represented a five-fold increase in the proportion of land-use in the UDA claimed by housing between 1989 and 1995. Indeed, such was the scale of the transformation of the housing market within CMDC's area that by 1995, despite City Council exhortations to developers, residential land-use in the non-CMDC portion of the city centre lagged behind the total area of housing land in the UDA. The continuing buoyancy of the housing market in the post-closure period further evidenced the effectiveness of CMDC's intervention in the housing market. Non-subsidised housing in Castlefield and in Gaythorn/Whitworth Street – the first of its kind in the city centre – offered a telling demonstration of the scale and durability of the CMDC-inspired revival of the area's fortunes.

The evolution of the housing market offers a clear illustration of the success with which Central Manchester met its core property-oriented responsibilities. It also demonstrates, in a broader sense, one of the ways in which CMDC contributed to the wider re-positioning and diversification of the city centre, in line with the agenda that was emerging from a variety of policy actors in Manchester in the late 1980s. In both respects, CMDC could justifiably proclaim emphatic and positive impacts. However, the extent to which these successes helped the Corporation meet the distributional goals which central government increasingly came to emphasise for UDCs, and for urban policy more generally, from the late 1980s and early 1990s remains more questionable. On one hand, CMDC’s housing objectives did acknowledge the objective of providing 'affordable'

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housing for low income groups, and did make reference to the goal of securing tenurial balance (CMDC, 1990).

At the same time, though, an overwhelming proportion of housing stock

constructed during its lifetime (and subsequent to its demise) comprised owner occupied and private rented stock, much of it targeted at affluent groups. Indeed, there is a powerful case to argue that this type of housing was central to CMDC's overall strategy for the revival of the city centre. By creating a community largely comprising affluent, childless households, many working in the city centre, and some with second homes, an assemblage of related city-centre services was given the commercial viability it had previously lacked. Housing development at Castlefield, for example, was an essential ingredient in the wider strategy of reviving the area through a series of up-market bars and cafes. Alongside this, the emphasis on social housing was barely perceptible, despite CMDC’s initial plans and subsequent protestations. With the exception of a solitary social housing development at India House, low income groups were revealingly absent from the UDA.

The experience of Leeds was somewhat different. Again, the scale of the physical transformation induced by LDC was impressive, reflecting the particular emphasis and aptitude of the Corporation. According to consultants' baseline study, there were 355 housing units in the Leeds UDA at designation. A total of 571 new housing units were constructed during LDC's lifetime, leaving 926 dwellings completed and 746 committed or under-construction by the time of the Corporation's closure. This represented a four-fold increase - albeit from a low base - during LDC's reign.

There are some complications which limit the extent to which it is possible to draw firm evaluative conclusions from these evidently impressive figures, not least of which is LDC's failure to distinguish between developments for which it granted financial assistance, and those for which it merely provided planning consent. This led to criticism during LDC's tenure that the Corporation was falsely claiming credit for development for which its only input was to exercise its statutory planning powers in an area in which healthy market conditions meant development was already proceeding. These reservations apply particularly to The Calls, an area running along the north of

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the River Aire, where some of the housing development to which LDC laid claim was already planned - or, in some cases, under construction - before the advent of the UDC. For other parts of the UDA, however, these uncertainties have less validity since LDC's intervention was able to trigger housing development in areas in which interest from private house builders had been notably lacking. This was most dramatically illustrated by the experience of Hunslet Green, an area formerly dominated by high rise local authority housing, the demolition of which in the late 1960s had left the area derelict in the subsequent years. LDC developed plans for an identifiable mixed tenure community, containing owner-occupied housing as the dominant element. Assistance from LDC took the form of £3.5 million - one-twentieth of its total budget - invested in land assembly, site preparation and servicing, environmental improvements and infrastructure development. The principal developers, Wimpey, constructed houses on a 50-acre site, marketing them primarily at first-time buyers. In addition, there was an element of social housing in the form of a 58-unit development managed by Leeds Federated Housing Association, comprising a mix of general and special needs accommodation.

These achievements offer another illustration of LDC's capacity for accomplishing significant property development, but in many ways housing also represents the Corporation's most prominent contribution to social change in its area and constitutes one of the few interventions which was conceived in more than just narrow commercial, physical and economic terms. Here, there is an obvious contrast with Central Manchester, which did not accord the same priority as LDC to targeting housing development towards particular non-affluent social groups. At the same time, the fact that LDC, in collaboration with developers, saw the area as potentially home to first-time buyers of modest income was as much to do with a reading of the commercial prospects of an area lacking any history of owner-occupation as it was to a desire to progress social change.

Bristol's experience with regard to housing development tells a similar story: a mixture of successes and failures, with development incorporating some affordable housing which may or may not have been an intended consequence of policy. On one hand, the planned development of

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Kingsley Village, adjacent to Temple Meads, stands out as the most conspicuous reversal suffered by BDC in its attempts to rejuvenate housing markets within its area. Kingsley Village was to be an area in which a mix of new housing and refurbishment to existing stock would be accompanied by, and would itself encourage, mixed commercial development. This, it was hoped, would reinforce the existing residential area of The Dings. In the event, by the end of BDC's lifetime no new houses had been built at Kingsley Village. Indeed, the only housing development in the area consisted of improvements to existing stock by the City Council.

By contrast, the development of housing at the St Anne's and Avon Riverside area in the Avon Valley was viewed by BDC as one of its most successful interventions, and has some interesting parallels with LDC's approach to the development of Hunslet Green. The area comprised a 72-acre site formerly home to St Anne's Board Mill, which had lain derelict since the mill's closure in 1981. In the subsequent period, redevelopment or reuse had been impeded by a variety of problems stemming from the area's three hundred year history as a centre for mining, quarrying, smelting and pottery. By the time of BDC's establishment, ownership of the area had shifted through a number of hands, and potential reuse of the land faced a number of apparently immovable post-industrial constraints: deteriorating ground conditions; the scarring caused by large volumes of boiler ash, domestic refuse and rubble; inadequate infrastructure; and the area's propensity to flood. BDC spent a total of £961,000 in tackling these physical problems, mainly to develop infrastructure and support environmental improvements. However, the principal role of BDC was one of persuasion: cajoling the landowner, Nationwide Building Society, to retain ownership while the Corporation attempted simultaneously to develop a master plan for future development and attract interest from national house builders. This strategy proved effective as a range of house builders - including Barratt and Britannia - were enticed to the area. The resultant scale of activity, with 600 new dwellings by the end of BDC's lifetime, enabled the Corporation to claim that St Anne's/Avon Riverside represented the largest and most successful housing development in Bristol. And as in Hunslet Green, the majority of the dwellings constructed was claimed by developers (and by BDC) to constitute affordable housing, much of it in the form of two-bedroom properties.

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BDC's experience in Kingsley Village prompted unease in an organisation whose raison d'être was to facilitate property development. However, the scale and form of housing for which BDC claimed credit in St Anne's - and the development in 1995 of 200 additional dwellings on the northern side of the river at Crews Hole - provided substantial compensation. For a UDC identified by the National Audit Office (1993) as having devoted a lower proportion of expenditure (0.11%) to community initiatives than any other - and which had spent only £175,000 on support for voluntary organisations and community facilities by the time of its closure - the apparent social focus to the development of housing at St Anne's appears somewhat incongruous. As in Leeds, there may be some validity to the argument that this social dimension was an unintended, marketdictated by-product of the pursuit of housing development, rather than a conscious objective of policy.

For all three UDCs, then, successes in supporting a range of housing development - much of it in areas lacking any recent history of private sector house-building - were paralleled by a limited interest in consciously targeting the benefits which these provided to the needs of residents of adjoining communities. Further corroboration for this is provided by the results of a questionnaire survey undertaken to gauge the nature and origin of residents of new or refurbished housing supported by the three UDCs. Of the three UDCs, owner-occupied housing in the St Anne’s development in Bristol appeared from the survey to have provided the greatest opportunity for firsttime buyers, with large proportions of its residents drawn from local areas (Table 8). Of the 106 residents of new housing development surveyed in the St Anne's area, an overwhelming majority were owner-occupiers, and two-thirds of these were first-time buyers, almost all of whom came from previous addresses within Bristol. The new developments clearly met a real need within a city in which demand for affordable housing - in view of the city's general economic health and the growth of employment - had been manifest. The Manchester housing developments were relatively of less local benefit, but in absolute terms almost 70% of owner-occupied housing was bought by first-time buyers and over 40% of residents came from within Manchester City (most of whose

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population is non-affluent). Leeds had a less striking incidence of local benefit, even in Hunslet Green, and when the figures for the Riverside developments are included the percentage of firsttime buyers falls to 38.5% and the percentage of residents from within the urban area falls to 66.7%. Nevertheless, both for Manchester and Leeds, while the beneficiaries of new housing were predominantly less local and non-affluent (assuming that first-time buyers are relatively nonaffluent), this has to be set against the benefit that has subsequently derived from the fact that developments both in LDC and CMDC benefited the cities themselves by creating a wider mix of residents and encouraging and sustaining a range of entertainment and other facilities within the city centres.


4.2. EMPLOYMENT CREATION

The shape and form of all three UDCs' efforts to trigger housing development encapsulate the limited but varying degree to which each was able - and, arguably, willing - to progress a more socially-sensitive approach to regeneration.

Employment creation provides another revealing

illustration. Notwithstanding the uncertainty and controversy surrounding the calculation of job creation estimates, it is clear that each UDC made substantial advances towards their formal objective of bolstering employment levels. As we have seen, Leeds was able to claim particular success in this regard, having overseen the creation of gross new jobs on new developments which (at 9066) almost amounted to the combined corresponding totals for Central Manchester and Bristol.

Although, for all three UDCs, employment generated represents a notable achievements when judged against the problematic economic conditions within which each had to operate for most of their lifetimes, questions remain - as with housing interventions - about the resultant social consequences. All three UDCs appeared indifferent to arguments for employment generation

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actively to be linked to attempts to alleviate unemployment in the surrounding deprived communities. CMDC, for example, maintained that employment had grown in all but one of the years of its existence (1991/92 being the exception) and while the net addition of 5000 jobs fell short of initial forecasts, its efforts were hindered by national recession. However, as with its putative achievements in the field of housing regeneration, CMDC officials appeared to have disregarded questions of equity and made a calculated judgement not to engage with any of the impoverished communities which encircled the designated area. The view from within CMDC was that labour market intervention, and training and recruitment issues particularly, were the exclusive responsibility of the Training and Enterprise Council.

Similar views emanated from Leeds. Net employment growth was claimed to amount to an impressive 6852 jobs over LDC's lifetime, but as in Central Manchester the Corporation chose not to enter into the sorts of collaborative agreements with other agencies (such as TECs) to ensure that the benefits of this growth accrued in part to local residents. Such arrangements were neglected largely on the grounds that employment training was perceived as of tangential importance, something to which senior echelons of LDC staff readily (and perhaps surprisingly) admitted: 'our view was that training was not our job…it should be left to the TEC and the Chamber of Commerce', stated one senior LDC official interviewed. Senior LDC staff sought to justify this stance with reference to the constraints of the enabling legislation, but the more interventionist approach of UDCs like Tyne and Wear Development Corporation suggests that alternative options were possible (Robinson et al, 1993; Russell, 1998).

A similar story was evident in Bristol. Given that property market conditions were less helpful than anticipated, BDC might have been expected readily to embrace growing government support from the late 1980s for the conscious targeting of job creation to deprived communities. But in spite of its location close to the highly deprived communities to the north in Lawrence Hill and elsewhere in south Bristol, BDC chose to channel little of its expenditure to community activities which might have benefited the employment prospects of people from such areas. For example, its

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early expressions of support for training activities resulted in no discernible projects; and its initial overtures to bodies such as the Commission for Racial Equality failed to produce any tangible results once it appeared that BDC was less than enthusiastic about partnership with the voluntary sector.

The results of these insular stances were reflected in a second questionnaire survey to assess the distributional impacts of the three UDCs, this time to consider the degree to which jobs were taken by the ‘deprived’ or the ‘non-deprived’. A survey of employees was undertaken, covering 211 firms employing a total of 15558 people, in which data were collected on employees' home postcodes. Data for companies in existence prior to the advent of the respective UDCs were used as a control group against which to assess the relative success of the UDCs in encouraging employment opportunities for local residents. The aim was to assess the extent to which the benefits of newly generated employment within the UDAs accrued to residents of local inner city areas as against commuters or non-local employees. For each UDC, an area was defined to represent the 'local deprived' population of the city in question. The definitions of 'local' or 'deprived' areas were calculated on the basis of census variables showing high levels of population density, unemployment and other socio-economic factors indicative of inner city deprivation. The postcode districts corresponding most closely to the ward-based definitions of 'local deprived' areas constituted the final delimitation: for Leeds, LS1-LS13 inclusive; for Bristol BS1-BS7 and BS13; and for Manchester M1-M18.

Since it is difficult to define exactly comparable areas as being ‘local deprived areas’ for each of the cities, and because the sectoral mix of new and pre-existing businesses differed for each UDA, the significant comparisons that should be drawn are not between the absolute percentages of jobs going to ‘deprived areas’ across each city, but between the percentages for new and pre-existing firms within each UDA (Table 9). In this respect, it is clear that in Leeds and Bristol newlygenerated jobs benefited ‘local’ (and, by implication, more deprived) people to a greater degree than did pre-existing firms within the UDAs. In Manchester, there was no discernible difference

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between the two proportions. Some part of this contrast may result both from the more central location of the Manchester UDA which encourages wider commuting, and from the higher proportion of professional office-based jobs created in the UDA. By comparison, Leeds had a significantly higher proportion of industrial jobs and many of the jobs were created in areas such as Hunslet which had stronger ties to a local work force; and in Bristol a disproportionate proportion of the employment was in low-skill service-related businesses. For both Leeds and Bristol, the types of job attracted or created more closely approximated the occupational composition of the adjoining residential areas than was the case for Central Manchester.


Interpreting these data is problematic. On one hand, Bristol appears to have been particularly successful in that, not only did the new firms in its UDA employ disproportionately large percentages of ‘local’ people, but the differential between the figure for new and old firms was correspondingly high. For Central Manchester, contrariwise, the types of employment generated tended to be in higher skill sectors and this could be viewed as a successful attempt to modernise the city centre economy; responsibility for up-skilling the residents of deprived areas to benefit from these jobs, the Corporation would and did argue, was the responsibility of the local TEC. Nevertheless, while it may be claimed that the large numbers of ‘local’ employees - both in Bristol and elsewhere - may reflect the creation of low-skill low-paid employment amongst the new UDA firms, this does not cancel out the benefit that has accrued from the creation of opportunities for work for local people. But Bristol's apparent success in this respect may not have been an intended consequence of policy, but rather a beneficial by-product of the attempt to create employment, regardless of type.

Overall it is clear that all three UDCs chose not to inject substantial resources to supporting community and voluntary organisations. While - again - some caution has to be exercised in interpreting the proportions of spending recorded under different headings, it is clear that all three

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spent relatively small fractions of their total budgets on voluntary organisations or social facilities. In the case of Central Manchester - which, of the three, was perhaps the most committed to supporting such activities - spending amounted only to 1.7% of the total spend, although in absolute terms the allocation of £1.75 million was far from trivial in the context of the then ever tightening funding regime for the voluntary sector. This level of expenditure was certainly well in excess of the less than £200,000 allocated by Leeds and Bristol, sums proportionately exceeded by all of the other second and third generation UDCs (National Audit Office, 1993).

In spending such low proportions of their budgets on community development, the three UDCs differed little from most other UDCs. Equally, in rebutting criticism about the lack of a social dimension to their regeneration strategies, the UDCs were able to point with some justification to significant mitigating factors. Alongside the limited brief handed to them by central government, a further, related constraint was posed by the narrow delimitation of UDA boundaries, which in each case were delimited consciously to exclude significant residential populations. In light of these twin factors, it is unsurprising that all three UDCs chose to interpret their regeneration brief so narrowly. They gave little priority to ‘social’ projects or to training and spent little of their resources on such initiatives. In this they differed from some of the UDCs elsewhere in England where expenditure on training and human resource development proved valuable not only in terms of direct supplyside outputs, but also as a way of helping to create a local culture more amenable to UDC intervention. The narrow property-based focus of the LDC, for example, helps to explain the difficulties it experienced in its initial plans for Kirkstall Valley.

For all three UDCs there must be doubts about their almost exclusive concern with the physical aspects of regeneration. The land and property emphasis has to be seen as only one facet of regeneration. It is one which encourages short-life organisations to ‘cherry-pick’ the most commercially attractive or the more tractable sites and premises; an approach for which there is some evidence in all three UDCs. The UDCs may have argued that broader non-property-led concerns fell outside their remits and that the criticism is related more to national policy than to

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their specific objectives. However, by the end of the 1980s government itself had come increasingly to realise that, if it were to be lasting, regeneration had to encompass social as well as infrastructural and economic dimensions. Moreover, some of the UDCs elsewhere in England did consciously incorporate into their activities an alertness to this social dimension, for example by offering support to local community activities or by encouraging (partly in association with TECs) the training of unemployed people living within or adjacent to their UDAs. None of the three UDCs gave such activities a priority in their objectives or in the pattern of their expenditure: BDC chose to ignore any conscious targeting of the adjoining deprived communities in Lawrence Hill and Filwood; LDC remained unconcerned about the residents of Richmond Hill; and CMDC left the fate of residents of Hulme and Ardwick to their respective regeneration agencies. This was in spite of the down-turn in the property market which might have reinforced the argument for diversifying their activities in such ways. Manchester gave a larger percentage of its expenditure to support voluntary-sector and community-based activities than did Leeds or Bristol, but this nevertheless involved very small absolute and relative sums. In all three cases - but to a lesser degree in Manchester than in Leeds or Bristol - the UDCs rarely raised their sights beyond the boundaries of their UDAs and failed to play very effective roles alongside other partners in developing realistic visions of the broader city economies or broader city planning.

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CHAPTER 5

The Political Consequences of UDC intervention

5.1. THE UDCs AND INTER-INSTITUTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

In all three cities, the establishment of UDCs was ostensibly to address property market difficulties of varying type. Alongside this, however, there was also a view that institutional failings were preventing these difficulties from being tackled in an effective way. From central government's perspective, local authorities in all three cities in the late 1980s were insufficiently entrepreneurial, perennially wedded to an outmoded preoccupation with social equity, and lacking the commercial adroitness required to foster links with the private sector or to regenerate stagnant land and property markets within their territories. In a broader sense, too, the stances adopted by all three cities, to varying degrees, were perceived to threaten the extensive reforms to public policy on which central government had embarked. The potency of this threat was underscored by the continuing strength of Labour's local electoral base in each city, which ran counter to the then national ascendancy of the Conservatives.

The apparent imposition of Conservative-sponsored UDCs in Labour-dominated cities might have been expected to prompt considerable friction, mirroring the experience of UDCs like London Docklands or Teesside (Brownhill, 1993; Robinson et al, 1993). As well-resourced creatures of central government, lacking the electoral legitimacy of local authorities, the three UDCs had quickly to establish themselves in the face of initial resistance from local politicians and policymakers. This was particularly important if they were to produce immediate impacts through major property developments.

However, as in other UDC cities, local authority objections were

manifold. The UDCs, in the eyes of the local authorities, lacked any local electoral mandate; they

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were unfairly empowered to assume wide-ranging planning and development powers (some of them from local authorities); they appeared to flaunt their comparative wealth in the face of local authority impoverishment; they espoused a property-led approach to regeneration which was anathema to the local authorities at that time; and they were likely to be dominated by unelected business people and politicians from the minority Conservative groups on the respective councils.

All of these objections were expressed in the three cities, but met with contrasting and revealing reactions from the UDCs themselves. In the case of CMDC, from an early stage in its life there was a recognition of the importance of maintaining good relations with the City Council, and initial conciliatory gestures towards the ruling Labour group were seen as essential in ensuring that the Corporation avoided the marginalised existence which had befallen some of its predecessors. Here, the propitious timing of CMDC's birth was important in that it coincided with a shift in the politics of Manchester City Council, as the ruling Labour group began to embrace the ‘new realism’ emerging in the aftermath of Labour’s general election defeat in 1987.

This involved the

beginnings of scepticism regarding the traditional agenda of municipal Labourism, as well as a more forthright rejection of the radicalism of the more interventionist ‘new urban left’ which had come increasingly to characterise its politics in the early 1980s (Quilley, 1995). During the course of CMDC’s existence, Manchester City Council displayed an increasing eagerness to involve the private sector in local economic regeneration projects; it became progressively more relaxed about utilising private finance to fund public-sector capital development projects; and it became more sensitised to the collective ‘business voice’ (Peck and Tickell, 1995). These were all approaches which CMDC was also keen to pursue.

The shape and form of Manchester City Council's emerging political stance was critical in restricting the disapproval which CMDC's launch might have been expected to prompt. Indeed, it helped facilitate an emerging dialogue with CMDC that was later reinforced through particular projects, most notably the bids to host the Olympic Games of 1996 and 2000 (Cochrane et al, 1996). This was consolidated still further by the composition of the CMDC board, and the

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sensitive handling of the appointment of a chairperson. In view of the longstanding enmity between public and private sectors in the city - one factor which had prompted the decision to establish a UDC in the first place - the choice of chairperson required delicate treatment. The appointee had to possess the necessary political astuteness, while lacking party political allegiances; and he or she needed also to demonstrate a commercial nous if unease amongst the business community was to be avoided. The perceived success of the eventual appointment made CMDC’s early dealings with Manchester City Council less strained than might have been anticipated.

A further factor easing CMDC's absorption into the city's policy community was the effectiveness of day-to-day working relationships. The concord that was beginning to emerge at more senior levels was reinforced amongst more junior ranks with the decision to employ the City Council to handle statutory development control responsibilities which had been assumed by CMDC at its inception. Whereas conflicts with local authorities over strategic planning issues undermined many of those UDCs which opted to retain development control powers in-house, CMDC was able (notwithstanding the protracted wranglings over plans for the Great Northern Warehouse) to proceed with the City Council’s consent on planning matters. That CMDC was able to accelerate the process of determining planning applications - and to meet its target of making decisions within eight weeks - offers a further indication of the consensual inter-institutional context within which planning matters were agreed.

The combination of these three factors - the opportune timing of its birth, the politic appointment of senior personnel, and the development of effective cross-institutional relationships at a junior level - helped give a dynamism to the establishment of CMDC. A similar story was evident in Leeds: initial hostility was followed by the development of working relationships between the Corporation and City Council, but the intimacy of the alliance was less marked than in Central Manchester. The decision to establish a UDC in Leeds, as in Manchester and Bristol, was partly based on central government's perception that existing public sector bodies - and most notably Leeds City Council - had proved unwilling or unable to address problems of under-supply of land with the

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necessary degree of vigour. Not unsurprisingly in view of this, LDC was initially viewed with a degree of scepticism, and sometimes outright antipathy, by many of the city's policy-makers. In part, this reflected politically-informed fears about the sorts of approach upon which a foreign, imposed body, answerable to central government, would embark. This was true to a degree of Leeds City Council, which resurrected the then dormant Leeds City Development Company as a 'spoiler' in response to the threat of an imposed UDC. At the same time, there were also less politicised fears about the consequences of LDC's establishment for relationships across the existing array of agencies in the city. For example, some senior members within the influential Chamber of Commerce and Industry argued that although Leeds City Council had failed to devote resources of a scale sufficient to ensure that peripheral city centre areas were able to exploit the city-wide pressure for development, imposing a UDC ran the risk of disrupting the delicate relationship between Chamber and City Council that had evolved over many years. When added to existing economic development agencies such as Yorkshire and Humberside Development Association, Leeds and Bradford Task Force, Yorkshire Enterprise and a whole series of enterprise agencies and voluntary sector bodies, the danger was that LDC might disturb the carefully balanced set of agreements and understandings over the areas, policies and functions over which each agency had principal responsibility (Roberts and Whitney, 1993).

After initial unease about the intrusion of a UDC had settled, scepticism regarding LDC was as much a reflection of pragmatic fears about the practical implications of the Corporation's birth as it was of the political ramifications of the advent of another unaccountable government-controlled agency. To a large degree, this reflected the city's long history of corporatism, and the still evident pragmatism in its Labour politics, particularly after a change of City Council leadership in 1989. The result was that while the City Council publicly adopted a hostile posture towards LDC, there was never the same degree of council disapprobation as was evident in some other UDC cities. As in Central Manchester, the Corporation's absorption into the policy community was assisted by the decision to appoint local politicians to LDC's board. This, in turn, helped enable LDC to submerge itself in a number of cross-institutional initiatives in the city, most notably the Leeds Initiative, a

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city-wide economic development body established in 1990, led by the City Council and involving the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the then regional office of the Department of the Environment, and a range of public and private actors. Recognition on the part of the City Council leadership that the advent of LDC represented an injection of central government resource to a city denied support through Assisted Area or Urban Programme Partnership status provided another practical reason not to oppose the Corporation with too great a vigour. And while conflicts existed over initial LDC proposals over Kirkstall Valley, these were subdued by the fact that many of the most vociferous community activists were also at loggerheads with the leadership of the ruling Labour group, and by the fact that LDC's plans had merely reworked those originally developed by the City Council for implementation by Leeds City Development Company.

Relations with the business community followed a trajectory not dissimilar to those with the City Council. The city's business community had traditionally been active and participative (more so than in Central Manchester) with historically strong leadership offered by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and with a long history of collaboration between the Chamber and the City Council (again, in contrast to Central Manchester). LDC, to a large extent, was marginal to this relationship, particularly in its early years, but it became progressively less peripheral over time. The Chamber was represented on LDC's board, and the Corporation developed formal reporting mechanisms to the Chamber. Both bodies were members of the Leeds Initiative.

This expedient, if less than enthusiastic, tripartite relationship between the City Council, the Chamber and LDC generated some tangible positive impacts. The success in attracting the Royal Armouries museum to Leeds was one example. Seen from within LDC as the result of the strong working relationship which the three bodies, after some initial difficulties, had formed, it signified that LDC felt comfortable in providing £9.8 million towards the £33.3 million cost of site and infrastructure works for a project whose completion would be delayed until after the Corporation's closure. At the same time, it also illustrated that the UDC, the City Council and the Chamber could

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present a joint bid to entice the development to Leeds in the face of competing claims from rival cities.

Bristol presents a very different picture. The advent of BDC was more contentious than those of Central Manchester or Leeds or, indeed, any other UDC, including London Docklands Development Corporation. The announcement, in December 1987, of the decision to establish a UDC for Bristol provoked considerable local opposition, not least from the two tiers of local government in Bristol and Avon. It represented an immediate affront to the politics of the City Council, which had been dominated by Labour control (punctuated by fleeting interludes of Conservative rule) since the 1940s. The politics of Bristol City Council, as in Manchester, could be characterised by the long-standing dominance of traditional big city Labourism, which remained in the ascendant throughout the 1980s but which was under challenge from the new municipal radicalism evident in many British cities at the time (Gyford, 1985). The result was that, in the lead-up to BDC's inception, relations with the business community were perceived as vestigial at best, and - reflecting the rise of the 'new urban left' - hostile at worst. That this was a perception shared by central government was instrumental in the decision to establish a UDC in Bristol.

This history of mutual suspicion, and sometimes outright hostility, between local politicians and the business community was reflected in the initial period of BDC's incumbency. From the outset, relations with the City Council were characterised by sometimes intense animosity. Elsewhere in the country - and certainly in Manchester and Leeds - there may have been unease at the establishment of UDCs, but this was not of a scale to prompt the formal representations that Bristol City Council tabled before the House of Lords in June 1988, seeking to prevent the designation of BDC. Part of the City Council's case to the Lords was ideologically-driven, reflecting a deep hostility to the imposition of a rival, Conservative-sponsored agency. But the case was also based on more specific, factual objections which disputed the formal grounds on which BDC's designation was based: that fragmented land ownership was not a problem; that major problems of land dereliction and contamination had already been resolved; that a UDC might threaten the status

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of the conservation areas within the UDA; and that the area was already benefiting from substantial manufacturing investment. These claims were considered by a Lords Select Committee and the decision to establish a UDC was confirmed. While a number of constraints were placed on BDC's operation - for example, that the UDA must be reduced in size and that it should not undertake grandiose developments involving major land acquisition - what was significant was not the formal, ceremonial decision to seek Parliamentary review, but that the City Council felt sufficiently ill-disposed towards BDC to attempt to undermine it from the outset.

The degree of animosity with which BDC's inception was greeted by the City Council offers one contrast with the experience of Central Manchester and Leeds. Whereas the advent of CMDC, in particular, coincided with the beginnings of Manchester City Council's 'entrepreneurial turn', it was only at a later stage that Bristol City Council began to undergo a similar transformation, and even then it was rather more hesitant than in Manchester. From the early 1990s, but particularly in the wake of the Conservatives' national re-election of 1992, Bristol City Council became markedly more receptive to the notion of partnership formation, recognising it to be the only way in which resources (both public and private) could be attracted and the city's economic fortunes advanced. At the same time, The Bristol Initiative (TBI), a body established at the behest of the regional Confederation of British Industry, and later the re-launched Bristol Chamber of Commerce and Initiative (itself a creation of TBI), were exhorting businesses and the myriad of public sector agencies in the city to develop new partnerships. This responded not only to the weaknesses of the relationship between business and the City Council, but also to the fact that many existing business networks - some, like the Merchant Venturers, of long-standing - had little discernible interest in, or direct input to, local political control. This began to alter as a succession of initiatives explicitly sought to involve hitherto excluded business groups. Between 1990 and 1995, initiatives such as Bristol Regeneration Partnership, Building a Better Bristol, Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol Housing Partnership were launched, and all involved the private sector and the City Council (Basset, 1996).

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This shifting climate - of more pragmatic and business-friendly politics from within the City Council, and of broader attempts to stimulate public-private partnership - might have been expected to benefit BDC, partly by involving it directly in some of the new partnerships, but also by removing the sizeable impediment presented by City Council hostility to Corporation proposals. Neither proved to be the case.

Although the establishment of many of the new partnership

initiatives coincided with BDC's tenure - and might therefore be assumed to reflect the UDC's attempts to nurture links with business - it might equally be argued that it was hostility to the Corporation which encouraged the emergence of these new coalitions. This is evidenced by the fact that while BDC was sometimes consulted on particular activities pursued by the various public-private partnerships, continuing City Council hostility meant it was never formally (or centrally) involved in them. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, while the establishment of BDC may have helped to prompt an awareness of the need for collaborative action across the city and that hostility to it from the City Council ironically helped to forge closer links between the public and private sectors in the city, the Corporation itself was not directly instrumental in the process of partnership formation in Bristol.

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5.2. UDC IMPACT ON REGENERATION AGENDAS

The varying effectiveness with which cross-institutional alliances were sealed in the three cities was of critical importance in determining the extent to which each UDC was able to generate the tangible property outputs that lay at the core of their remit. Central Manchester was able to make some immediate inroads in restoring property market fortunes, and Leeds marginally fewer; in Bristol, institutional sparring was the principal factor explaining the delay to BDC's inception and its resultant difficulties in securing development throughout its lifetime. At the same time, a parallel, if tacit, objective of the three UDCs was to alter the regeneration agenda in each of the cities. This can plausibly be conceived as the fifth objective for all UDCs. The extent to which they met this goal again varied between the three.

In the case of Central Manchester, the UDC's activities were consciously aimed at executing the transformation of the city’s regeneration agenda: constructing a new consensus about the priorities for urban regeneration, and about the most effective means by which these could be achieved. This reconstructed regeneration agenda centred on attempts to broaden the range of economic activity in the city centre. The concept was of a city centre whose vibrancy would stem not merely from retailing, but from the emerging clusters of nightclubs and bars, sports stadiums and concert halls with which it was increasingly endowed. The burgeoning succession of events and festivals - from the annual gay Mardi Gras to the Castlefield Carnival - offered an alluring illustration from within CMDC's area of the benefits of a ‘pro-culture growth strategy’ (Lovatt, 1996). This was a 'vision' which CMDC was keen to promulgate, although the extent to which it was the City Council, rather than the Corporation, which was the driving force behind the emergence of this new agenda remains questionable. But what is clear is that CMDC was central to the development of a longterm strategy, in partnership with other agencies, and this was very different in form to the often erratic, go-it-alone opportunism characteristic of some other UDCs (Imrie and Thomas, 1999).

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That CMDC was able profoundly to influence the regeneration agenda of the city's policy-makers is evidenced by the continuing influence of the pro-culture strategy and related attempts to diversify the city centre. A 20,000-seat events arena at Victoria railway station, for example, drew from CMDC's earlier experience in 'enabling' the Bridgewater Hall concert venue. Similarly, the expertise CMDC gleaned from successful attempts to kick-start the housing market in Castlefield and the Whitworth corridor informed later proposals for the conversion of refurbished mills and warehouses under the Great Ancoats Single Regeneration Budget Challenge Fund initiative on the northern edge of the city centre. The City Council’s long-term blueprint for the city centre was drastically re-drawn, and again bore the imprint of CMDC’s influence (Quilley, 1995). Part of this simply reiterated the incessant promotion of attempts to create a 24-hour city, but it also drew more tangibly on CMDC's successes in Castlefield by attempting to establish a series of distinctive cultural quarters across the city centre. From the cluster of unorthodox (but award-winning) housing developments and nightlife in the Northern Quarter at the city centre’s northern extremity, to the Gay Village in the south of the city centre (part of which was inherited from CMDC), the City Council's attempts to market areas with distinctive cultural selling points drew heavily from the approach pioneered by CMDC.

In Leeds, the approach adopted was markedly different. LDC was essentially an insular body which read its remit narrowly, concentrating almost exclusively on development within its designated area. While it did enter into partnership with other agencies through fora like the Leeds Initiative, it was the City Council and Chamber of Commerce which lay at the heart of these bodies (and which had lain at the core of earlier bodies such as Leeds City Development Company). In contrast to Manchester, LDC did not actively seek to encourage the development of a clearly articulated agenda for the development of the city - something that was subsequently signalled by the decision in 1997 to establish a City Pride partnership in the city - and the Corporation’s activities did little to suggest a desire to contribute to the broader development of the city beyond its own boundaries. One senior City Council official interviewed cited LDC's unwillingness to involve itself in proposals by West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive and the City Council for a 'super tram'

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light-rail system - part of which would link to the Royal Armouries and Clarence Dock within LDC's area – as evidence of the narrowness of the Corporation’s horizons: '[LDC] didn't endorse the strategy, although every other organisation in the city did…the lukewarm attitude to supertram was symptomatic of [LDC's] lack of strategic thinking and a lack of interest in city-wide implications…perhaps they just thought it wouldn't happen in their lifetime'.

It was this apparent lack of interest in contributing to the development of broader, strategic citywide goals - in contrast to Central Manchester - which remained a feature throughout much of LDC's life. This prompted criticism during the Corporation's life of its apparent disdain for strategy-building and its seeming reliance on piecemeal development and planning, proceeding to a large extent on a project-by-project basis. One local authority-based interviewee characterised LDC as 'a glorified estate agent…they just want development - any development - in their area'. But a more accurate interpretation would be that while LDC consciously resisted the temptation of what it saw as the 'distractions' of immersing itself in city-wide initiatives - choosing to do so only when the maintenance of good relations was deemed to be of practical benefit to development within the UDA - it is clear that the Corporation did invest time in developing strategic priorities for its own area. Although its activities were clearly development-led, the southwards expansion of the city centre was a clear strategic goal which underpinned much of LDC's intervention, and this guided much of the project-based work the Corporation attempted to pursue.

In Bristol, a different story emerges. Continuing hostility from the City Council, which remained throughout BDC's life, prevented the Corporation's involvement in any formal attempts to agree a vision for the city's development through the various public-private partnerships established in the early 1990s. Yet while BDC was largely excluded from these new bodies, the Corporation's views did inform the agenda for the development of the city. From the outset, BDC's priority was to think on a bolder and larger scale than policy-makers had done in the past. BDC's aim of raising aspirations to that of a city of European significance may have succeeded in prompting the City Council, Bristol Chamber of Commerce and Initiative and the various regeneration partnerships to

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develop a more appropriate ambition to their thinking. The City Council's own audacious plans for the Harbourside area - and the possibility of more daring schemes for Broadmead - can be argued to have been not only a defensive, aggressive response to the perceived threat posed by BDC's Quay Point proposals, but also to be more in tune with the city's asset base and its needs in competing effectively with other cities. This requirement for more entrepreneurial styles of policymaking was something which some cities of northern England had begun to realise a decade earlier; BDC may well have stimulated Bristol to think in similar terms in the 1990s.

The form of the developing regeneration agendas in the three cities, and their variable inclusiveness, offer an instructive insight into the degree to which each UDC managed to meet the fifth, tacit UDC objective of altering the outlooks and working methods of existing agencies. But what is equally illuminating is the elements missing from this new agenda. Here, the objective of bolstering industrial development offers a revealing illustration of the pace and scale of the turnaround effected by the UDCs. In Central Manchester, the goal of promoting industrial development - notably in the Pomona/St Georges area in the western fringes of the UDA, adjacent to Trafford Park industrial estate - was prominent in CMDC's initial development strategy (ECOTEC, 1988a). By the time of CMDC's closure in 1996, however, initial plans for the area had disintegrated, partly as a result of the practical difficulties posed by the area's declining infrastructure of railways and canals, but more significantly (and arguably) because industrial development had come to be viewed as out-moded and counter to the spirit of opportunity-driven development which CMDC was keen to promulgate. As a result, by 1996 the Pomona/St Georges area had received fewer resources (£47,000 in total) than any other CMDC sub-area.

This would appear to call into question final expenditure data for CMDC which, recorded by standard UDC category, suggest that assisting industrial development was given greater priority than in Leeds or Bristol. Over CMDC's lifetime, £24.7 million (24.5% of total spend) was directed to 'support for industry', whereas Bristol chose not to spend anything under this heading, and Leeds £5.0 million (7.0%). This, in part, reflects the perennial confusion surrounding the way in which

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UDC expenditure was recorded. But what it also reflects is the fact that CMDC opted not to spend its money on 'conventional' manufacturing industry of the sort once prevalent in Pomona; rather, it invested in emerging growth sectors and tried to nurture them in a variety of ways. The 'creative industries' emerging around music, design and multimedia were seen as one such area of growth which could benefit from CMDC's support. Cheap, short-lease properties such as Ducie House in the Piccadilly sub-area or, more successfully, the CMDC-supported development at Eastgate House in Castlefield, were 'enabled' in the hope that the nascent cluster of software authoring houses, recording studios and (later) web design companies would attain the necessary critical mass to contribute more substantially to the city's economy.

The experience of the Pomona/St Georges area is instructive not only in that it reveals the changing nature of CMDC's regeneration agenda, but also in that it illustrates the remarkable extent to which such a fundamental reorientation of policy was able to proceed with no discernible objection from Manchester City Council. Within the five years which had elapsed since CMDC's inception, the city's implicit regeneration master-plan had been altered so fundamentally that the decision to excise industrial development from the CMDC strategy prompted no perceptible protest from the City Council. In this sense, Manchester might be said simply to have tracked the trajectory of national regeneration politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, the fact that Manchester endorsed this new agenda so readily, and at such an early stage, is indicative of the appeal of CMDC

and

the

effectiveness

of

its

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emollient,

consensus-seeking

approach.

It is clear, then, that the impacts of the three UDCs on the institutional politics of their respect cities varied in form and degree. Of the three UDCs, Manchester worked most smoothly with other players in its local area. This was partly a function of the fact that, after the initial ideological opposition from the city, the involvement of the Leader of the Council and the widespread respect in which its high-profile Chairman was held helped greatly to seat CMDC within local networks. It was partly too a reflection of the learning experience that the city drew from its two Olympic bids (and subsequently from City Pride and its successful bid for the Commonwealth Games) which helped to predispose many local individuals and organisations towards a corporate coalitionbuilding style of governance.

Leeds was less successful in this regard, always being somewhat more marginal, not least in its relationships with the business community, but this was a matter of degree. Its decision to interpret its brief rather less generously than in Manchester led it to eschew many of the attempts to foster wider regeneration coalitions, and in doing so it ran counter to the general drift of policy in the early 1990s towards building broader alliances across regeneration agencies. The lack of involvement in formulating, and the subsequent lack of any ownership of, cross-institutional goals was a feature constantly bemoaned by the non-LDC regeneration agencies canvassed in our programme of interviews. While LDC was involved in key city-wide programmes such as the Leeds Initiative, this was viewed from outside the Corporation as grudging and peripheral, and borne of the necessity to be seen to be involved. Nonetheless, over time, it is clear that LDC did increasingly work pragmatically, if unenthusiastically, with other agencies in the city, even though the Corporation was reluctant to deepen its involvement in alliances which extended beyond its boundaries, and even though some mutual suspicions remained throughout its life.

Bristol was faced with the most challenging context with regard to cultivating partnerships. It would be too harsh merely to conclude that BDC failed to work effectively and harmoniously with other ‘players’, since at least in relation to the City Council it would have been surprising had this not been the case. Furthermore, there are both many examples (such as in BDC’s joint working

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with Avon County Council on the traffic flows model, or its involvement with initiatives such as the Cabot festival) where it did work collaboratively. Nevertheless, the Corporation found itself far more isolated and marginalised - from the local authorities, from developers and from the private sector - than was the case with either Manchester or Leeds. It is difficult not to conclude that part of this reflected the fact that the staff and board members never succeeded in establishing their credentials within the city as a whole and that the Corporation did less than it might to develop imaginative olive branches or liaisons through which it might have cultivated better local networks.

Yet while all three UDCs experienced, to varying degrees, difficulties in developing partnerships at the strategic level, there is evidence that in a day-to-day sense many of the UDCs’ staff worked productively and effectively with individuals from other agencies in the three cities. This is certainly true for Manchester and Leeds, and to some lesser extent also true of Bristol, despite the rather fraught inter-institutional politics of the city. In planning and development issues, for instance, all three UDCs exercised their role as planning authorities for their areas responsibly and effectively, despite adopting different working methods. In the case of Manchester, on one hand, the decision to contract-out the day-to-day operation of planning control to its local authority was an approach from which the process of regeneration gained greatly, both in terms of the professionalism of the handling of planning applications and the working relationship between the two bodies. At the other extreme, given the circumstances of the Bristol UDC’s establishment and the argument that it had been created to overcome the anti-development stance of the local planning authority, it is not surprising that BDC did not opt to follow suit in this respect.

The general conclusion across the UDCs must be that they were only partially successful in developing and sustaining new networks or development coalitions in their areas. By far the most successful in this respect was Manchester, but much of its success appears to have been as much the product of the fact that the city itself was in a state of preparedness to develop growth (or grant) coalitions across the public and private sectors, as of the undoubted skills that CMDC showed in working with the grain of local partnerships. In Leeds, the UDC coexisted with a series of evolving

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networks, but largely as a partner peripheral to alliances such as the Leeds Initiative which focused around a central nexus of the City Council and Chamber of Commerce. In Bristol, the UDC was always marginal to the embryonic networks and part of its impact was ironically to cement some of these partnerships as a result of hostility towards the Corporation. Part of the limited impacts of the UDCs in this respect appears to be a product of their short lifespans; the UDCs could be ignored by other local policy actors because they were temporary foreign bodies, and in due course the local authorities would resume their previous roles.

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CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Even though the UDC ‘experiment’ is now a matter of history and it seems improbable that similar agencies will be established as part of future urban policy, it is important that lessons should be drawn from the experiences of the three UDCs in order to inform current and future regeneration agencies and strategies. We discuss these implications in light of the UDCs’ experiences with regard to: the balance between the ‘physical’ and ‘social’ dimensions of regeneration; the means by which regeneration objectives are developed, agreed, monitored and reviewed; the duration of their life-span; the durability of developments assisted; accountability and relations with local partners; and the size and boundaries of regeneration areas.

6.1. PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REGENERATION

It is clear that the UDCs proved effective as agencies of physical renewal. The creation of singlepurpose bodies charged with the assembly and improvement of land and buildings in targeted derelict areas had some dramatic effects in helping to reinvigorate the local property markets within the UDAs. The problems associated with extensive areas of contaminated land or of fragmented ownership were largely surmounted by the single-minded commercially-sensitive actions of UDCs in a way that would have been much more difficult or, at the least, much less rapid had it been in the hands of traditional all-purpose agencies such as local authorities. The physical legacy of regeneration in Leeds, Bristol and Central Manchester is clear to see.

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These achievements undoubtedly met government’s narrowly-specified property-led objectives. The UDCs were able justifiably to point to significant achievements in supporting local property markets during a period when their cities were suffering from the property recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, the concern with physical regeneration does appear to have been too exclusive a preoccupation. The overall impression of the three UDCs is of bodies restricted to the pursuit of an essentially property-led agenda. All three opted to give a low priority to the rather broader remit which characterised the successful work of some UDCs elsewhere. They almost wholly eschewed any commitment to the provision of training for the residents of adjoining communities, and the local incidence of job benefits identified in our analyses seems as much the result of chance as of any conscious or concerted effort on the part of the UDCs. This property-led priority can be justified by the tightness of UDC statutory objectives, by the narrowness of UDA boundaries, and by the existence of other agencies specifically charged with the support of local training. However, if sustainable regeneration is to be achieved it is as important that policy consciously assists in fostering the capacity of local communities by drawing them into the process of regeneration as it is to be concerned about the land, infrastructure and physical nature of targeted areas. Sustainable and effective regeneration needs to have a social as well as a physical focus. This is clearly a lesson which contemporary policy has begun to recognise; the focus on encouraging the co-ordination of training and education, of housing, of job creation and of physical regeneration in such programmes as City Challenge, the Single Regeneration Budget and, most recently, New Deal for Communities offers a marked contrast with the UDC approach. If there is an over-riding criticism of all three UDCs it is that they could have done more to move towards such a balance, but opted not to do so.

There may well be lessons in this for the newly-created Regional Development Agencies that have inherited two of the three key regeneration budgets from DETR – the Single Regeneration Budget and the regional expenditure of English Partnerships. The evidence of the need for comprehensive approaches to regeneration – approaches that meld together the physical, economic and social dimensions of regeneration – suggests that the RDAs need to ensure that their preoccupation is not

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solely with strategic sites, economic competitiveness and job creation. If their intervention is to have long-term effect, they need also to consider the linkages between deprived people and communities, on one hand, and the generation of economic wealth on the other. It is only through comprehensive programmes that attempt to ensure that the beneficiaries of regeneration include the poor that long-term change will be effected. This equation is perhaps especially germane in those areas where social needs are greatest since it is precisely these very areas that suffer from less competitive economies; the danger is that the RDAs might be tempted to follow the lead of the UDCs and focus purely on the economic dimension of their remits, to the detriment of areas of social need.

6.2. OBJECTIVE-SETTING, MONITORING AND REVIEW

The experience of the three UDCs poses questions about the appropriateness of their objectives. In particular, it raises the issue of the degree to which their objectives were posited on an informed and realistic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their areas. It remains questionable whether the UDCs were as alert to the characteristics of their designated areas as they might have been. The strategies devised by all three were strongly informed by consultants’ assessments, which, with the dramatic reversal of the fortunes of the property market subsequent to this, left the UDCs in a vulnerable position, with strategies somewhat out of kilter with prevailing market conditions. While it would have been impossible to anticipate the collapse of the property market of the late 1980s/early 1990s, this emphasises the need for more regular and more thorough strategy reviews.

In the case of Leeds, any such review might have prompted LDC radically to

alter its plans for the Kirkstall Valley area which, in the wake of the tightening property market, proved to be misplaced. In Manchester, likewise, plans for Piccadilly and Pomona might have been revised had more stringent interim review procedures been a requirement of government funding (although here, CMDC’s success in diversifying its activities must be acknowledged). Most strikingly in Bristol, BDC’s insistence on retaining its proposals for Quay Point and the Avon

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Weir, in the face of what seem now to have been unambiguously pessimistic signals from the market, might have been circumvented had procedures been in place for more rigorous mid-term evaluation upon which more appropriate strategies could have been based. For all three UDCs, more thorough strategy review might have prompted the necessary changes tailored to these changed market conditions. It might have prompted the UDCs to nurture developer confidence through more careful phasing of development; it might have encouraged the formulation of viable proposals that did not rely on the prop of additional monies from expected flows of capital receipts from land sales; or it might have encouraged them to engage on broader regeneration measures (in training, or in community capacity-building, for example) based less exclusively on a minimum degree of buoyancy in the property market.

Were there to be a requirement for mid-term reviews, this raises questions about the mechanisms for conducting such reviews. The range of statutory output measures used by UDCs captured only very imperfectly the breadth and depth of their experiences. Such measures revolved around narrow property-oriented definitions of regeneration, and suffered from a lack of definitional precision (seen most obviously in the debates about the robustness of Leeds’s data on job creation and private-sector investment) which renders difficult any cross-UDC comparison purely on the basis of quantitative information. If more demanding interim evaluations were to be conducted in order to inform revisions to the work of regeneration agencies, this would need to be based not just upon rather crude - and certainly contestable - output measures, but upon more meaningful information, both quantitative and qualitative, which agencies would be required to collate from their outset. Given the likely sensitivity of regeneration bodies to any review that might determine future funding, any such work clearly would have to be subject to detailed external audit. The particular challenge in this is how best to develop indicators that better reflect the broader impacts that regeneration should seek. So long as ‘hard’ output measures are dominant, regeneration agencies seem likely to be preoccupied with the kinds of tangible priorities that emphasise land and building reclamation, housing outputs, job creation and the like.

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6.3. LIFE-SPAN OF REGENERATION AGENCIES

Our assessments also pose questions about the length of life of the UDCs. While the three UDCs were unusual in having such relatively short life-spans, this throws into harsh perspective the question of whether seven years is a sufficient period in which to complete developments, not least in areas selected precisely because of the kinds of physical problems of land contamination, dereliction and fragmented ownership which characterised the UDAs. The relatively short time period was made even more difficult by the down-turn in the property market which the UDCs faced almost immediately at their outset. It could be argued on one hand that such limited lives greatly concentrate the mind, and that they help in achieving precisely the kinds of kick-start to development that government sought in areas where there was evidence of market failure or a lack of readiness or ability on the part of local authorities to encourage development. Such arguments were voiced with some vigour in Bristol and, to a lesser extent, in Leeds. Indeed, the UDCs’ very evanescence might plausibly be interpreted as having given them a greater flexibility in exploiting rapidly emerging opportunities, or, indeed, addressing unforeseen problems. In all three cities, the UDCs possessed antennae rather more sensitive to the caprices of the property market than those of the respective local authorities. But even single-purpose UDCs clearly had varying degrees of difficulty in reading property market signals and, consequently, of achieving their targets. No construction work on Bristol’s principal flagship at Quay Point had started at the end of BDC’s life; Leeds’s Royal Armouries project was only completed after LDC’s closure, while the Kirkstall Valley area hosted only developments of a relatively modest scale; Manchester’s Great Northern Warehouse and Joshua Hoyle building were in differing degrees of non-completion at the end of CMDC’s life. The short time period had the disadvantage of encouraging UDCs to tackle easier and more commercially attractive sites and buildings, at the cost of the more intractable; and such approaches run the risk of leaving ‘spotty’ improvements which are less likely to restore developer confidence across designated areas as a whole. None of the UDCs showed any great sensitivity towards strategic planning and the wider needs (or indeed the longer-term needs) of the areas in

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which they sat, opting instead to pursue essentially reactive approaches to opportunities within the UDAs.

The more general conclusion to be drawn from the time-scale of the UDCs is that, since regeneration is essentially a long-term process, longevity and persistence must be features of future funding regimes. If seven years proved to be a short life for agencies with predominantly narrow physical and infrastructural objectives, it would seem even less appropriate for programmes which involve physical, economic and social regeneration. The move, in City Challenge and the Single Regeneration Budget, to the principle of making commitments to 5-year or longer programmes is therefore only partially reassuring. It could be argued that even longer time spans are appropriate for many areas and types of regeneration. For future area-based agencies, there is a compelling argument that government might consider the merit of moving towards longer time spans which embody mid-term reviews at which point poor performance could lead to the revision of programmes, or in some cases to closure. The experience of the New Deal for Community pilot areas (and of other area-based initiatives such as the Health, Education and Employment Action Zones) will therefore be of some interest in this respect.

6.4. DURABILITY OF DEVELOPMENT

Questions also remain regarding the durability of developments supported by the UDCs. Two aspects of durability are entailed. On one hand, there is the question of whether UDAs required continuing future public investment and activity either on projects already embarked upon or for sites untouched by the UDCs. This raises the question of the degree to which UDC activities genuinely turned-around the prospects of areas which had suffered from problems of market failure. On this, the general conclusion must be that the three UDCs made some plausible inroads in light of the market circumstances in which they operated. In Manchester, for example, one of the most significant developments late in the life of the UDC was the increasing evidence that private

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house builders were beginning to undertake non-subsidised housing. CMDC’s strategy of pursuing a multitude of development opportunities, rather than relying exclusively on a few flagship schemes, undoubtedly helped to create a momentum of development within parts of the UDA to which developers subsequently responded. In each of the three areas, there is some evidence that developer confidence had been restored, at least in some parts of the UDAs. Nevertheless, it is significant that in all three UDAs there were large areas in which little physical regeneration occurred. In Leeds, in addition to the well-documented failings in Kirkstall Valley, development in the Holbeck area failed to keep pace with that in adjoining Hunslet; in Manchester, the Piccadilly and Pomona areas proved resistant to the more general improvement in the development climate in the city centre. In such cases, the internal spill-over effects of the restoration of confidence was clearly limited.

With the benefit of benign hindsight, however, it could be argued that in all three cities the initiatives prompted by the UDCs led to some degree of subsequent economic renaissance. Leeds has proved remarkably more ebullient than have its neighbouring large cities, as measured by the growth in its jobs, the strength of its professional services sector and its ability to retain population (Turok and Edge, 1998). Much of this has continued the thrust towards service-based activity that was at the heart of LDC’s strategies. Bristol’s Harbourside development has begun (admittedly somewhat falteringly) to take shape through the activities of the City Council, and it could be argued that this is attributable to the City’s new-found readiness to tackle more ambitious largescale projects after the promptings of officials in the Government Regional Office who had seen BDC’s achievement as precisely that of helping the City to think more adventurously. Manchester’s central housing market has continued to thrive, even in the absence of direct public subsidy, and the city’s entertainment-based economy has continued to grow despite the continuing overall loss of jobs and population in the city as a whole. Again, this has strongly built on CMDC’s achievements in Castlefield and the Great Bridgewater initiative.

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Related to this, there is also the question of the cost and likelihood of specific UDC developments being maintained in the future. There can be no doubt that at the closure of the UDCs the local authorities inherited genuine assets as a legacy of the UDC regeneration activities. Nevertheless, there must be some doubt about the financial ability of the respective local authorities to meet the maintenance costs of some of the developments: keeping soft-end environmental improvements in good state, repairing roads, maintaining infrastructure and the like. Two elements of UDC activities seem worth encouraging as models of good practice. One is the insistence on high standards of construction and the use of high-quality materials in renewal projects, both of which are likely to produce longer-lasting improvements. The other is the provision of some form of post-designation financial reserve for maintenance; where CMDC’s establishment of the Castlefield Management Company is an excellent example, and LDC’s contribution of £200,000 to the local authority for maintenance is another.

6.5. RELATIONS WITH LOCAL PARTNERS AND COMMUNITIES

The experience of the three UDCs also highlights important pointers for the ways in which future regeneration agencies relate to other institutions, and to local communities more generally. By their nature UDCs were unaccountable to their local areas, and in this they reflected the particular political climate of the time. In some cases their very creation was seen by government as a necessary mechanism for overriding the perceived inadequacies of locally-accountable bureaucracies. Their creation echoes a period in which government saw the role of local authorities as being part of the problem rather than a key element in the solution of urban decay. However, the experiences of the three UDCs demonstrate graphically how regeneration can be effective when single-purpose bodies like UDCs work in partnership with local authorities and other local agencies. At the time when the UDCs were created, their remits were drawn narrowly to emphasise property development, and their boundaries were, to a large extent, defined consciously to exclude significant residential populations. Ironically, experience suggests that this may have been

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unhelpful to the achievement even of some of the UDCs’ commercial goals. For example, Leeds may have benefited had the UDA been drawn to incorporate residential areas surrounding Kirkstall Valley since this could have offered LDC the option of instituting social projects to offset opposition to their original commercial proposals for the valley itself. In all three UDCs, the importance of human resource development may have better been appreciated had the UDAs incorporated residential areas. Interestingly, the ‘communities’ which were included in the UDAs were largely businesses communities: Manchester came late to an awareness that the small businesses in Knott Mill were a community of interest whose support could work to help CMDC’s goals; Leeds’s relationship with the business community evolved from one of mutual unease to a pragmatic, if passionless, coexistence; Bristol acted more imaginatively in this respect through its encouragement of the Unicorn Business Club. Future regeneration strategies might helpfully recognise the potential that businesses represent as communities of local interest, and cultivate their involvement as stakeholders in the strategy for the designated area.

The general point, however, is that the creation and maintenance of good local networking is a prerequisite for effective regeneration. Many of the difficulties faced by Bristol’s UDC arose from its never becoming an effective part of the evolving dialogue between local players. Conversely, much of Manchester’s success was that it worked smoothly with others in the local area. Leeds provides a still more apt lesson. While LDC’s establishment initially met with a degree of unease amongst existing policy networks (and most notably on the part of the City Council and Chamber of Commerce), the Corporation strove to improve relationships and was successful in cultivating links which may have lacked the strength, depth or breadth of those in Manchester, but which enabled developments to proceed on a day-to-day basis unhindered by the inter-agency tensions evident in Bristol. The difference in experience between the three was partly a function of the preexisting chemistry of the governance of the respective local areas and of the willingness and ability of individuals in the UDCs to work creatively with existing agencies and partnerships in their areas. Sensitively handled, the additional resources that the UDCs brought to their areas might have been

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expected to be a powerful incentive to help in changing such relationships where they were hostile to partnership.

Part of the problem was the commercial ethos adopted - in some cases aggressively - by the UDCs. While a more entrepreneurial outlook was a welcome contrast to the sometimes anti-private-sector approach of some public-sector bodies at that time, and helped to anchor some notable property developments in each of the cities, this commercial bent could equally be viewed as inimical to the sort of public-spiritedness which might have enabled a wider range of interests to be embraced. Given the difficulties experienced in nurturing broader networks in Bristol, and to a lesser extent Leeds, UDCs might in hindsight have been more proactive in ensuring the openness of whatever UDC business was not commercially confidential.

The siege mentality which arguably

characterised some of the UDCs’ dealings with outside bodies may initially have stemmed from the hostility of the latter to the perceived threat posed to already established networks, relationships and working practices; by the end of the UDCs’ lifespans such a stance was misplaced as partnership working came widely to be viewed as an essential ingredient for successful regeneration.

Relationships, both with other institutions and with local communities, clearly were of critical importance in determining the effectiveness of the UDCs’ strategies. There may be a message here to argue for the establishment of codes of conduct for regeneration agencies so as to ensure the maximum feasible transparency of the conduct of their business. There might also be arguments about revising the membership of the boards so as to incorporate some minimum number of elected representatives onto the boards of such agencies, using either councillors or specifically elected ‘local’ representatives. And, third, there might also be an argument for the establishment of clearer action plans, agreed with local stakeholders, at the outset of the existence of regeneration agencies. This latter principle already applied at the city-wide scale to the first tranche of three City Pride programmes, each of which was built around a process of consensus-building amongst local agencies and the definition of a corporate approach straddling the manifold interests of the different

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local players. At a more focused level, the same principle was also extended to City Challenge and SRB, and was applied (with mixed results and only in the case of the North West) to the allocation of EU structural funds. In all of these cases, the requirement that bidders prepare a clear action plan to which local players are signatories helps to offset inter-agency friction (and the conflict with local communities) which undermined some of the work undertaken by the three UDCs.

These sorts of approaches might, for example, have helped to offset some of the conflicts which arose over the UDCs’ area-specific proposals, on one hand, and the strategic objectives of the local authorities, on the other, expressed through unitary development and structure plans. On the other hand, it might equally be argued that the decision to leave statutory plan-making powers in the hands of local authorities was a sensible one since the need to ensure that development control decisions adhered to plan provisions necessitated the formation of effective working relationships between UDCs and local councils. Just such an arrangement appears to have been the case in Manchester. However, the long-running conflicts apparent in Bristol and, at a much less intense level, in Leeds suggests that, where city politics are more fraught than was the case in Manchester, a more formalised and proactive approach is necessary at the outset of the UDCs’ existence in order to ensure that agreement is reached about strategic development priorities. This need not involve formal updating of statutory plans, which would bring with it time-consuming requirements for consultation and adoption which short-life single-purpose UDCs were established partly to avoid.

Instead, a looser agreement between local stakeholders about strategic

development objectives would go some way to ensuring that the sorts of conflict exemplified by the Bristol experience might be avoided, and that future regeneration agencies might be able to work in the more harmonious climate from which CMDC benefited.

6.6. THE SIZE AND BOUNDARIES OF REGENERATION AREAS

94

A final lesson from the UDCs’ experiences concerns the most appropriate sizes of regeneration areas. All three UDAs were small by comparison with the average areas of UDCs. Ironically, the smallest, Manchester, proved successful only in concentrating its activities in its core area, largely to the exclusion of its peripheral areas in Pomona and Piccadilly. Manchester was a somewhat special case because of the density of active commercial premises in the UDA. Nevertheless, there are arguments that its UDA might have been extended more broadly. For Leeds and Bristol there are compelling arguments that the boundaries were drawn inappropriately. Leeds would have been helped had the Kirkstall Valley either been excluded or, if included, had its boundaries been extended to incorporate the residential areas on one or both sides of the valley. This may have helped both to prompt LDC to develop a stronger community dimension to its priorities and to diffuse some of the local opposition to the Corporation. For Bristol, there are strong arguments that the UDA should have been drawn much more generously, perhaps even to incorporate a significant length of the lower Avon. This could have prompted more strategic planning within BDC and might also have helped to resolve some of the competitive battling between the City Council and BDC over what became alternative - but could have been complementary - sites in Quay Point and Harbourside.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the size and boundaries of area-based approaches to regeneration is the way in which spatially-limited agencies might be encouraged to develop approaches with a stronger strategic dimension and a longer-term perspective. Inevitably, any spatially-defined agency, faced with the imperative of producing performance indicators, is likely to concentrate on development within its defined area. This is likely to be reinforced where the agency is given statutory powers tied to a geographical area, such as the planning powers given to UDCs. In such situations, there is always a danger that the focus of a regeneration agency will sit uneasily with the strategic aims of its broader encompassing area and of bodies with wider remits. It may, of course, be an aim of government to introduce just such a discordance, as was suggested most forcefully in the case of Bristol. However, if there is a case for developing strategic planning at a city-wide or indeed regional scale (and this appears ever more relevant in the context of

95

European-wide competition between cities, the development of Regional Planning Guidance and the establishment of Regional Development Agencies), there is clearly a need to reconcile a smallarea regeneration focus with a broader city-wide or regional focus by seating regeneration agencies more firmly within broader strategic networks. There is an increasing need for such co-ordination both within local authorities and across broader regions, not least since the Blair government has created such a plethora of ‘zonal’ initiatives (of which there are now no fewer than fourteen types with lead departments spread across the whole range of central government’s spending departments). There is a pressing need to develop mechanisms by which the goals of spatiallybounded regeneration agencies and those of the wider conurbations and regions might best be reconciled. Whether the integrative roles that might be played by regional bodies such as Government Regional Offices or Regional Development Agencies will prove effective remains a moot point. During the lifetimes of the three UDCs, the regional offices acted purely as local representatives of DoE: providing avenues to Whitehall; acting as vetting bodies for UDC activities; and to some extent acting as advocates for the UDCs. There may be merit in broadening this overseeing role still further so that future regeneration bodies more clearly contribute towards wider strategic priorities.

The whole UDC experiment was very much a product of its time. Much has been learned since the 1980s about the most effective mechanisms and processes through which to pursue regeneration. Many of these lessons have been incorporated into subsequent policy instruments such as City Challenge, the Single Regeneration Budget and New Deal for Communities, and into subsequent agencies such as English Partnerships, the Regional Development Agencies and the Government Regional Offices. The UDCs have played a central role in informing this learning process, both through their successes and failures: the importance of developing partnerships across local public and private stakeholders; the key facilitating role that local authorities can play as accountable long-term local stakeholders; the importance of co-ordinating expenditure and programmes across the economic, environmental and social domains of regeneration. What the UDCs also clearly achieved was to help in the process of altering the context in which physical regeneration was

96

tackled; their introduction of a more single-minded and commercially-sensitive approach to physical renewal attracted private-sector involvement and private-sector investment into areas from which resources had previously been progressively withdrawn. This was an important spur to prompt the private sector and local authorities and other public-sector bodies to work more collaboratively. Undoubtedly some part of the now numerous partnerships which exist in British cities have been influenced by the resources and the experiences introduced by the UDC experiment. Leeds, Bristol and Central Manchester are different places today not only because of the often dramatic physical renewal within their UDA areas, but because of the wider and more informed interpretation of regeneration that has in part stemmed from the inheritance of their UDC experience.

97

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102

Table 1. UDCs in England and Wales

UDC

Date of

Lifespan

Population at

Area at designation

designation

(years)

designation

(ha.)

Birmingham Heartlands

1992

5

12,500

1,000

Black Country

1987

10

34,405

2,598

Bristol

1989

7

1,500

360

Cardiff Bay

1987

10

500

1,093

Central Manchester

1988

7

250

187

Leeds

1988

7

2600

540

London Docklands

1981

17

40,400

2,226

Merseyside

1981

17

450

350

Plymouth

1992

5

600

67

Sheffield

1988

9

300

900

Teesside

1987

11

400

4,565

Trafford Park

1987

10

40

1,267

Tyne and Wear

1987

11

4,500

2,375

Source: Imrie and Thomas (1993: 13); Robson et al (1998)

103

Table 2. Expenditure by category in the three UDCs

DoE Expenditure Heads

Central

%

Leeds

%

Bristol

%

Manchester £m Staffing and Administration (A)

£m

£m

11,319

11.2

8,938

12.6

11,892

10.6

489

0.5

0

0.0

894

0.8

Environmental Improvements (C)

21,239

21.1

8,600

12.1

3,915

3.5

Land Purchase (D)

14,357

14.3

27,411

38.6

34,384

30.7

Land reclamation/site preparation (E)

243

0.2

5,403

7.6

0

0.0

Provision and Renewal of Services (F)

0

0.0

270

0.4

2

0.0

506

0.5

6,507

9.2

2,559

2.3

24,692

24.5

4,976

7.0

0

0.0

1,750

1.7

112

0.2

175

0.2

Major projects (K)

17,200

17.1

5,000

7.0

53,136

47.5

Marketing (L)

5,635

5.6

2,304

3.3

4,873

4.4

Corporation Tax (M)

2,799

0.5

1,466

2.1

Other

2,728

2.7

106,011

100.0

70,987

100.0

Estate Management (B)

Roads and Transport (G) Support for Industry (City Grant and other grants) (H) Support for Voluntary Organisations /Social Facilities (I)

Total Expenditure

104

0.0

111,830

100.0

Table 3. Final UDC output figures

Central

Leeds

Bristol

Manchester Land reclaimed (ha)

35 [31]

68 [106]

73 [50]

Roads & highways (km)

2.1 [NA]

11.6 [3.4]

6.6 [3.0]

Non-housing floorspace (000m2)

139 [194]

374 [336]

122 [288]

Housing units

2583 [471]

571 [990]

676 [874]

Gross new jobs in new developments

4944 [5900]

9066 [9490]

4825 [9874]

Private sector investment (£m)

303 [188]

357 [233]

235 [621]

Total expenditure (£m)

101

71

112

Total area (ha)

187

542

420

Derelict & un/underused land at designation (ha)

47

101

64

Notes:

1.

Figures in square brackets show early forecasts of expected final outputs. In all three cases, they must be read with caution not least where they predate the recession. They nevertheless provide benchmarks of early expectations.

2.

For Leeds, the forecasts are derived from those made by Pieda in 1988 and were based on an expectation of a lifespan of 5 years.

3.

For Bristol, the forecasts are derived from BDC’s 1991 Corporate Plan which was able to take some account of the different market situation brought about by recession.

4.

For Manchester, the initial forecasts are those made by ECOTEC in 1988 for the period to 1993/4. The fact that the Corporation met or exceeded most of those targets by the end of its life in 1996 reflects the scale of its achievements. The under-performance on commercial development and the striking over-performance on housing reflect the switch in emphasis which developed over the course of CMDC's lifetime.

105

Table 4. Non-domestic properties in Leeds and the UDA: average Rateable Values

Average Rateable Value at

Average Rateable Value at

% change in Average

1/4/90

1/4/95

Rateable Value 1990-95

Leeds

9185.77

12328.68

34.21

UDA

15323.86

19698.25

28.55

8949.65

12051.22

34.66

Leeds

14064.44

28837.28

105.04

UDA

23930.95

52431.15

119.09

All Leeds excluding UDA

13245.96

26239.55

98.09

Leeds

17117.92

22800.95

33.20

UDA

12258.01

17827.95

45.44


17836.70

23502.81

31.77

Leeds

13383.22

19730.11

47.42

UDA

12705.94

17557.19

38.18


13439.85

19921.39

48.23

Retail:

All Leeds excluding UDA Offices:

Industrial:

Other:

106

Table 5. Forecasts and BDC’s actual end-of-life outputs

ECOTEC 1988 forecast

BDC 1991 Corporate Plan

to end of year 5

forecast

77.6

50

73

Housing units

1172

874

676

Floorspace (000 sq.m.)

275

288

122

Private investment (£m)

250

621

235

Roads (kms)

0.7

3.0

6.6

Direct jobs

6,060

9,874

4,825

Net UDC expenditure per job (£

2,604

11,326

23,177

Land (ha brought into productive

BDC outputs 1989-96

use)

per direct job)

107

Table 6. Chain lengths

Chain length

Manchester

Leeds

Bristol

TOTAL

0

21

21

16

58

1

15

13

18

47

2+

5

3

3

10

Total chains

41

37

37

115

Total transactions

65

56

61

182

108

Table 7. Percentage of chains in different categories

Manchester

Leeds

Bristol

New businesses

31.7

37.8

18.9

Expansions

44.3

24.3

40.5

In-movement

4.9

8.1

13.5

0

0

2.7

22.0

29.7

24.3

(17.1)

(16.2)

(8.1)

41

37

37

Additions:

Displacement: Change of use Vacancies/demolitions (Displacement outside UDA)

Total number of chains

109

Table 8. Nature and origins of residents in new housing in the UDAs

Manchester1

Leeds2

Bristol

% First-time buyers (owner occupiers only)

68.3

57.0

95.3

% Previously living in inner core

42.7

na

42.4

% Previously living in urban area

58.2

85.3

69.7

Notes:

1.

For Manchester, the figures are for residents other than students; including students, the percentages for residents from the core and from the urban area are respectively 50.0 and 61.9.

2.

The Leeds figures are for Hunslet Green; for the Riverside developments the figure for first-time buyers is 16.7% and for residents from the urban area is 39.1%.

110

Table 9. Percentages of employees drawn from ‘local deprived’ areas amongst new and preexisting firms in the UDAs

Manchester

Leeds

Bristol

New firms

19.5

45.0

54.71

Old firms

19.5

36.92

39.4

Notes:

1

Refers to analysis carried out excluding one large company (including this company, the figure is 42.0%)

2

Refers to analysis carried out excluding one large company (including this company, the figure is 28.2%).

111

Figure 1. Central Manchester Development Corporation and the CMDC boundaries

112

Figure 2. Central Manchester Corporation Area: geographical sectors

113

Figure 3. The designated LDC Area

Note: The schemes shown are the major proposals planned or completed during the lifetime of the Corporation.

114

Figure 4. Leeds Development Corporation: South/Central area

115

Figure 5. Leeds Development Corporation: Kirkstall Valley area

116

Figure 6. The UDA in its Bristol setting

117

Figure 7. Areas excluded from and included in the final UDA

KEY:

Areas included in the UDA:

Areas excluded from the UDA:

1. Troopers’ Hill

2. Birch Wood

3. Nightingale Valley

5. Old Market Conservation Area

4. Crews Hole Woodland

9. St Jude’s

6. St Philips Marsh/Avon Meads

10. Office blocks

7. Arnos Vale

11. Totterdown

8. The Dings

15. Victoria Street

12. Crews Hole

16. Cart Lane/Temple Way

13. Mardon Son and Hall site

19. Bond St./Newfoundland St.

14. St Anne’s House

20. Masson, Scott and Thrissell site

17. Old Distillers’ site 18. National Carriers’ site 21. St. Anne’s Board Mills site

118

Figure 8. Index of rental values in UDA and remainder of Manchester city centre, 1984-95

280 260 240

CMDC area

220 200

Manchester city-centre excluding CMDC area

180 160 140 120 100 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995

Note: Index: 1993=0

Source: Investment Property Databank.

119

Figure 9. Projects completed by BDC

120