Standing up for ourselves

While rejecting ideas of a privileged position in nature for humanity, sustainability appeals to the humanitarian aspiration for a more equitable world.

Advocates use these environmental and social justifications for introducing constraints on development practice.

Meanwhile experts have lost professional self-confidence, and rely on interminable and inconclusive public consultation exercises. Environmentally sensitive designers are careful to avoid the charge of arrogance, believing that daring is reckless and that artistic expression is incompatible with industry.

People have got to understand what on earth sustainability means to know how to influence the debate.

There is some kind of perverse belief that the public is going to be bothered - quite often they are not - and are going to understand what you are talking about.

The new agenda to change society is about tapping into the energies, imagination and talent of communities...this is dangerously facile.

The people who should be in the room, such as the investors, are just invisible.

There are real benefits to talking projects or policies through.

There is a perception that certain groups will dominate at consultation exercises, and they certainly do.

Another bit of nonsense - social capital - what on earth is that?

It is appropriate for corporations to decide where the real power lies. We should only be asking Mr and Mrs Smith what they want to happen on their street.

Click to go to the discussion in this session chaired by James Heartfield

Does environmentalism turn humanism on its head?

James Heartfield (chairman) (Following Phil Macnaghten) The last speaker is Miffa Salter, who is Head of Regeneration at the Office for Public Management. She has undertaken a number of large-scale research projects and has been seconded to the Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions, where she acted as specialist advisor on stakeholder engagement in regeneration to the Urban Task Force. Miffa will be talking on the business of consultation.

Miffa Salter Some of you may not have heard of the Office for Public Management. We are a private sector management consultancy. My background over the past ten years has been in construction and regeneration. More recently I spent a year with Richard Rogers and John Rouse writing the Urban Task Force report Towards an Urban Renaissance for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. What I want to do over the next ten minutes or so is to focus on this nebulous concept of engagement, participation, and involvement in community. To challenge your thinking, I hope, about what this could and should mean for different stakeholders.

First of all a 'Whistle Stop' tour of current policy thinking and more or less give you my over view, not as a representative of my practice, but as a professional operating in this field. Then I want to look at some of the key issues, and finally to note the challenges that I think are particularly pertinent to our future. I am quite challenged by one of the things that Phil said, that quantification frustrates creative thinking, because that is something I would certainly agree with.

I want you to imagine yourselves back in May 1997. You have a newly elected Labour Government, promising greater public participation. Now for the cynical this is more or less a re-wording of past practice. A lot of the architects or planners, even the surveyors I work with say, "…not a problem for us, we've been doing that for years". Planners particularly point you back to the 1968 Town and Country Planning Act, and say, "…this has always been part of our agenda". I would argue that there is a very, very different context today because of a key word in this statement by Hilary Armstrong, the New Labour minister for local government in 1997.

"Everything we do will be judged by public improvements and public involvement. This is all about new ways of involving people. We must recognise the co-producer role of the public".

The "co-producer" role of the public is much more than ensuring people are aware of lines of responsibility. It is not just about giving people say in what they do and do not want on a particular scheme. It is asking them to be part of the solution. In terms of the debate about sustainable living or sustainability this has interesting implications. It means that people have got to understand what on earth sustainability means to know how to influence the debate.

Also we have to understand what we mean by sustainability as professionals. There is a distinction between the professional in this room and the expertise in the street. Essentially this new emphasis is allowing professionals to abdicate responsibility and place it with the public. I see this again and again, with commissions that are coming into my consultancy. Whether it is to do with 'best value', with individual construction projects, the review of government policies such as for housing, or even with the Urban Task Force report itself, before any decisions are made, government has asked us to consult the public.

There is some kind of perverse belief that the public is going to be bothered - quite often they are not - and are going to understand what you are talking about! As somebody who has stood up in a room of 250 people and talked about 'The Modernisation Agenda", about whether or not it makes more sense to have a mayoral system or the elected representative they currently have, people look at you blankly and quite rightly so.

The quote I have given you is from the Social Exclusion Unit, and any of you who have got their consultation document on neighbourhood renewal it makes worrying reading. Again what it is saying is the new agenda to change society is about tapping into the energies, imagination and talent of communities. That is now government policy.

I have spent 12 years now working on very run down estates in very difficult parts of the country and now have to tell people "…do you know you're the most powerful resource in your community?" I think this is dangerously facile. The most powerful resource in a lot of communities is the money coming from the public sector and the money that should be coming from the private sector, and I do not think we should dupe people.

What did the Urban Task Force say about consultation? I have to take part responsibility for this because I had to spin in the bit about public consultation. We have got lots of stuff about urban revitalisation being owned by the citizen and you cannot imagine the enormous debate we had to have about the word 'owned'. The civil servants were saying "…no, don't you mean that they're just participating in it?" I said "…no, they've actually got to own assets to be able to influence decisions". Over every sentence you have debates with people in Whitehall. Of course from Richard Rogers' point of view I think that there is an enthusiastic commitment to the idea that to be successful urban renaissance and sustainability should affect every street in every town and every household in every street. I would sign up to that 100%.

Of course all this kind of talk of consultation and getting people involved is great, but unless you are actually presenting people with parameters within which decisions can be made I think that you are on a hiding to hell. I will give you an example from the kind of projects that I get involved in. There are two projects in London at the moment, very high profile mixed use schemes. One in the south of the city and one in the north, both looking for a high density development influx of in excess of 200 residential units.

If you try and engage people from every walk of life, local people, in a discussion about the future of that area, you can be assured they are not going to opt for high density and 75% private residential accommodation, when previously this was predominantly public sector housing. You are not really starting fairly. That is why I have so much problem with people talking to me about planning weekends and these dreadful initiatives where people push polystyrene models around and think they are going to get somewhere. It is unfair that people can come away from these kind of events seriously thinking that their aspirations are going to be achieved within their lifetime, or that they are actually going to impact on decision making.

The people who should be in the room, such as the investors, are just invisible. What you get is a dynamic developing between the public on one side and the public authority on another, with the architects somewhere in the background, in a collar-less shirt, debating about colour drawings. At one of the public consultation meetings that I held architects were talking about putting a soul back in the community! For some of those households for 6 weeks last summer they did not have running water, and for somebody to come in and talk about putting a soul back in the community was a little bit difficult for them to deal with, unfortunately for the individual involved.

Of course I am not saying that we shouldn't consult, partly because I would be out of business and party because this is an incredibly important issue. There are real benefits to talking projects or policies through. There are reasons why we need to talk about something as complex or as difficult as sustainability, as urban regeneration, as revitalisation, as the modernisation agenda. We need to do something about information exchange. We do need to improve decision-making.

Persistently, the wrong decisions are being made. I think we do need to look at the accountability of decision-makers. Whether that is a local authority officer, a councillor, or whether that is somebody in the private sector. We need to monitor progress and we need generate support for initiatives that are broadly sustainable. We need to build confidence and capacity within individuals and move away from the whole concept of community. I think that there really is no such thing anymore. Confidence and capacity within any individual to address broader issues. To me that requirement is to legitimise a process of consultation.

Of course it's not going to be easy. The public has a very negative view of local governments who are invariably the proponents of these kinds of initiatives. They have very negative views of professionals in suits. There is a lack of awareness of opportunities to participate. What is supplementary planning guidance? What is the local plan? Why does the local plan need to go on deposit? People say to me quite understandably "…I thought as soon as I saw the drawings on the wall at a public exhibition, that is what is going to be built." There is a real problem explaining to people that this is the point you can enter into the debate to influence it.

I think quite rightly there is an assumption that those in power will not respond to public concerns. People have been saying to me again and again things like "…I've been on the housing register now for 6 years." One guy had been on the housing register for 20 years asking for a transfer! How on earth are you going to persuade him that people are actually going to take account of what he is saying? There is a perception that certain groups will dominate at consultation exercises, and they certainly do. I am sure all of you will know that it is the same people who turn up to public meetings. It tends to be the well resourced, the articulate or the crazy. Any combination of those three is very frightening!

Quite regularly I have people head to head with me, just screaming in my face! Which is fine because that is what people pay me to do. I was trying to explain to somebody what I do. I hate the word 'Managing Consultant'. I said to her, "…it's like the Northern Ireland Peace process, but massively down graded. I go in where people have been fighting for years."

One of the things that the pubic sector as well as the private sector is increasingly being urged to do is to make things lively and engaging. What they are looking at are things like citizen juries that Phil mentioned, and things like interactive online debates. Those things are happening and some local authorities are developing fantastic ways of engaging people in complex processes. However, in a vast majority of instances, informal networks still dominate.

With something as terribly complex and difficult as sustainability, and to be quite frank I don't know what it means, the issues are over looked or over simplified because as professionals we are not collectively taking responsibility to work out the meaning. We are really clear about whether we are going use surveys or citizen juries and how we are going to ask people, but we are rather unclear on what or why we are asking them. It is very easy for me to criticise. In terms of something as nebulous as sustainability or revitalisation you need to concentrate on practical concerns rather than abstract issues. That means getting rid of every single word that doesn't clearly mean something to people you meet independently on the street.

Is it actually fair to ask people to comment on these nebulous questions? You have to be very realistic, and if you ask people to engage with urban renaissance or sustainability, you are asking for much more than an informed comment on the physical environment. If you want to talk to people in the street about sustainability you must change vocabulary. Very hard for 'Joe Public' to "…talk about green issues". To anyone green issues are as much to do with health as a lot of the things that concern the construction industry.

There is also an issue here about the enormous backlog. 1 in 5 houses is facing urgent repair costs in excess of £1,000. We are spending less of our GDP on the physical environment than any other country in Europe. Is it fair to say to people "…so what would you like improved?" Quite rightly you know they are going to come back with not necessarily the most imaginative solutions in the world because they have been living in atrocious conditions for so long.

According to Tony Blair it is not only realistic but consultation is going to be the magic ingredient that makes all the difference. Listening to people and making the most of social capital. Another bit of nonsense - social capital - what on earth is that? Anyway we are going to make the most of it, so what we have got to do is engage with people and they will somehow be a solution to their own problems.

Participation rates nationally are half the average amongst the poorest members of society and yet arguably that is where change needs to happen most immediately. People fundamentally have better things to do and more important things to worry out. Just because there are problems that need solving, it doesn't necessary mean people feel empowered to anything about it. Are we asking people to manage their solution or actually own their solution? They are very different things.

Finally I want to say what I think should be a key direction for the future, which is the ethics of social accounting and environmental reporting. I am talking about the socially responsible organisation, and I want to build on previous presentations. How are we going to make organisations socially responsible so that they do not delegate responsibility to the public?

A lot of the work that I am doing at the moment is with the Body Shop, renowned for taking the agenda of stakeholder capitalism forward. Anita Roddick has said, "…The word is stake holding. The style is integrity. The profession is business". That is the critical link because Body Shop does not act because there is a code of practice to follow. The Body Shop acts as it does it because it sells more peppermint foot balm lotions to act that way. They understand the commercial benefits of being a stakeholder corporation.

At the Dti, for first time ever, we have a minister responsible for corporate responsibility. We have universities in this country setting set up social accounting courses where financial accounts are audited on social criteria. If you look at the states, social accounting is big, big business. I think it interesting that the vote for the most socially responsible company in the states last year was McDonald's. I don't know what that says about social accountability!

To finish, I am saying that in the sustainability or regeneration agenda it is appropriate for corporations to decide where the real power lies. We should only be asking Mr and Mrs Smith what they want to happen on their street. Thanks very much.

James Heartfield Thankyou Miffa. There is now so much on the table that we will move straight into the discussion of the theme Standing up for ourselves.

Welcome / What's New? / Activity / Services / Books / Shop / Links / Contact /

This website is maintained by abley@audacity.org and all material is Copyright © 2002 Audacity Limited where not copyright of the originator.