One of the key objectives of the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programme in Oldham and Rochdale was to promote community cohesion within the Pathfinder area. HMR aimed to meet this objective through providing a new build housing offer of differing types and tenures open to all sections of the community.
In 2007 HMR, supported by resources from the Tenant Services Authority and Oldham and Rochdale Councils, used seven different projects to test and measure approaches to tackling issues from race hate crime to friction between generations for the pioneering Cohesion Counts project.
Over the last 6 months, HMR has been putting the findings of the Cohesion Counts study into practice with partners and testing them on ‘real’ projects rather than pilots.
This most recent work – known as Taking Forward Cohesion Counts - has focused on exploring the idea that new housing development can present an opportunity to positively engage with the existing and new communities and has the potential to act as means of addressing cohesion issues, creating tangible positive outcomes. It has involved working closely with partner housing associations to examine how to build cohesion into new housing developments and the associated day to day work of Registered Providers working within the Pathfinder area. The output of this work is a series of papers examining different aspects of embedding cohesion in new housing developments.
In summary, the papers are as follows:
§ Section 1 - Action planning, including:
- Action Planning Community Cohesion - Main Report
- Action Planning For Cohesion – Key Learning Points
- Case Studies – three case studies examining variously, action planning and the production of risks and opportunities matrices
This first set of papers considers how to use action planning as a means of embedding cohesion. In doing so, it introduces the idea of considering cohesion risks and opportunities to inform an action plan at the outset of a development project. At its heart are three actual but anonymised action plans: the first (area X) is a stand-alone action plan; the second (site Y) also has a completed risk matrix: the final plan has completed risk and opportunities matrices (site Z).
The action plans are not in a particular format – each organisation will have its own format for action planning and there is not particular value in adopting a standardised approach.
Some of the action plans have been condensed. The intention was not to identify all conceivable activities or interventions that could be employed; it was to encourage thinking about the benefits of adopting a risk and opportunities management approach to developing community cohesion outcomes. The action plans will, no doubt, develop and change over time as work on the ground is completed and changes to the risks and opportunities are monitored.
None of the columns relating to ownership or reporting of the plans have been completed. These are decisions best left to those with a responsibility for developing and delivering the work. Again, individual organisations will have their own frameworks for project management and reporting and any community cohesion plan will need to reflect these.
§ Section 2 – Evaluation, including:
- Evaluating Cohesion in New Build Developments - A Case Study of Oliver’s Court, Werneth, Oldham
- Evaluating Community Cohesion in New Build Developments - Community Insight and the Importance of Developing Benchmarks (including a separate appendix – Embedding Insight)
The contention of Taking Forwards Cohesion Counts is that evaluation should be a positive learning experience. It is an opportunity to demonstrate effective performance and achievement of initiatives, projects, programmes or activities.
It is also a way of identifying risks and opportunities and developing solutions to recognised needs, and a process by which those lessons and successes can be disseminated to others to continue the cycle of learning. Evaluation is quite simply an essential part of everyday life as well as an integrated element of the management process.
Many Registered Providers are developers of new social or intermediate housing. This housing maybe built either as part of a larger owner-occupied scheme in conjunction with a private developer, or by the RP as an exclusively affordable scheme. Affordable and social housing is built in a wide variety of locations – from rural areas to the most deprived inner city neighbourhoods. In most cases, this housing will be built within, or attached to, an existing community. These communities may or may not be experiencing problems resulting in a lack of cohesion. Whether or not this is the case, it is likely that any proposed development will be perceived by the host community as having an impact - in some cases this will be a negative perception. This may be a result of concerns about the type of occupiers, the management arrangements, or the physical design and layout of the scheme.
As well as being perceived as a negative by a host community, new development can also be an opportunity to engage with the existing community and address any concerns. Viewed in this way new development has the potential to act as a tool that can be used to address cohesion issues in the wider community. This includes addressing any perceived issues between the existing community and new residents.
Using new development as a positive tool, and being able to evaluate impact and outcomes, however, depends on developing:
- good community insight - understanding the existing community – and
- a clear view of how the proposed development can have a positive outcome and turning this understanding into action.
The two evaluation papers examine this issue from two different perspectives. The first is based on a wider evaluation of a completed development - Oliver’s Court in Oldham. It examines the cohesion findings and methodology used and identifies cohesion learning points that should inform future developments in this area.
The second paper examines the role of “community insight” within an evaluation framework. It considers a number of scenarios linked to new developments where community insight could be usefully gathered and provides an example of how community insight can be embedded into the development process.
§ Section 3 - Barriers to Embedding Cohesion in New Housing Developments
Whilst community cohesion is generally viewed very positively in the context of social housing, there are a number of factors which have an impact on its delivery. Participants at a workshop on barriers to cohesion identified a range of things which prevented community cohesion being routinely built into and delivered through new social housing developments. This paper summarises the findings of the workshop.
§ Section 4 - New Housing: Mixed Tenure, Cohesion, Planning and Design
New housing developments, in the way that they are planned and designed, can affect the nature and extent of opportunities for social interaction both within the new development and between new residents and the host community. This has particular resonance where new developments consist of mixed tenure housing. This paper presents a short guide intended to offer some initial advice based on both a review of existing national research and the experiences of RP partners operating in Oldham and Rochdale.
March 2011