Part 2: Justification Shock: From Stock Rationalisation to Repopulation

Part one discussed the first three of the reports in CURS‘ research programme (listed in figure 5.5). This work was carried out in response to a brief which justified widespread clearance with the argument that a programme of stock rationalisation was needed. This would achieve equilibrium by matching the aggregate supply of housing in the city more closely to the available demand. However, identification of links between proposals to repopulate the city centre and housing vacancy in the Inner Core threatened to undermine this justification. It would be unlikely that external funding could be secured to reduce the housing stock while new housing was increasing the supply less than a mile away: it would look like different Council policies were working against each other. Consequently, a need arose for a narrative which would explain the differentials in development pressure in the city while supporting both clearance and an increase in the supply of housing through new development. The construction of such a narrative would clear the way for the extension of the city centre repopulation strategy into the Inner Core itself.

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Figure 5.5: How housing market research in Liverpool contributed to building the HMRI network

b

135 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY The original justification for intervention located the cause of housing vacancy in the overall loss of population from the city: a factor which is largely external to the problematised neighbourhoods. From this way of looking at the problem, it did not matter that renewal intervention would treat only the symptoms of wider processes of population loss, because the wider processes at work were themselves viewed as insuperable, and therefore largely immaterial to the proposed intervention. The new justification, however, claimed that population loss could be reversed. This claim threatened the credibility of the researchers because it brought with it the possibility that neighbourhoods problematised under the original justification (the symptoms of decline), would not match with the features problematised by the new justification (causes of decline). By this time, considerable effort had been spent arriving at an early consensus with housing providers on the principles of where to direct and where to withhold housing investment. If the research went on to discover that the causes of housing vacancy were different to the symptoms they would have to renegotiate this consensus and simultaneously challenge the shared interest held by key actors in achieving financially healthy housing associations.

There were three components to the new argument, which would reconcile demolition with repopulation. The first was a new justification, which argued that repopulating the Inner Core would bring economic benefits for the city. Alongside this, two new arguments professed to explain concentrations of low demand. These narratives, recorded mainly in reports three and five of the research programme (see figure 5.5), located the causes of vacant properties in features internal to the neighbourhoods that had already been problematised by earlier research. The consequence of doing this is that new housing in the city centre becomes portrayed as part of the consumer‘s quest for a better quality (more modern) housing product, rather than as the result of speculative over-investment, which undermines demand for existing housing. Similarly, low demand in central locations became explained by consumers‘ flight to better suburban products, an explanation that purposefully ignores the substantial roles of the planning system, and the clearance and re-housing programmes of the post-war period. The evidence for the new justification and the internalising narratives are considered here in turn.

136 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY 5.3.2 A new economic justification for intervention

The fifth report of the research programme presents the following calculation which is intended to provide evidential support for a new way of justifying housing market intervention by stressing the economic benefits that would be gained if Liverpool was to be repopulated.

(Our figures show) a cumulative impact derived from persistent population loss.

Therefore on average, housing investment would have been around £100million per annum lower at 1999 prices, and there were just over 500 jobs less on average each year over the thirty year period. It is likely, therefore, that any reversal of these trends should also aim to be cumulative, persistent and based around a long-term and realistic time frame. (Nevin et al, 2001d, paragraph 2.23, emphasis added)

The striking thing about the argument above is the way in which the generally accepted explanation for post-industrial decline has had a number of its causal features reversed. For most people, including one of the foremost authors of the Liverpool research, the story of decline in the city, and other post-industrial locations in the UK, is first and foremost about the decline of manufacturing employment (Loftman and Nevin, 1996; Couch, 2003). This is usually attributed, in the first half of the Twentieth Century, to the dwindling influence of the British Empire and, in the second half, to the use of information and travel technologies to relocate industrial production to places like the Far East. In CURS‘ quote above, however, the causality in this story is reversed. Lost jobs and investment are said to be ‗derived from‘

population loss.

The context in which the HMRI is being justified largely defines whether or not the emphasis is placed on the traditional story of post-industrial decline or moved to the new account, that decline is the result of neighbourhood attributes. In the context above, CURS is keen to emphasise that the HMRI would be an effective way of repopulating Liverpool; as a result their argument strongly implies that population loss is responsible for loss of jobs. The power of conventional understandings of post-industrial decline, however, means that this narrative is of limited persuasiveness in a more general context. Therefore, the idea that neighbourhood attributes cause decline is usually positioned beneath the global explanation of events. It is usually claimed that the attributes of neighbourhoods exacerbate the consequences of wider processes for these neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, the decision to present these two narratives as being of equal importance in an explanation of decline is a decision to apportion

137 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY a substantial amount of blame for the causes of population loss to the neighbourhoods that were problematised at the beginning of the research programme.

This discursive shift makes it possible to assert two things. The first is that it is possible to use housing policy to achieve population growth in a declining, post-industrial city. The insistence that this is the case is a political act in itself because it curtails any debate about the potential risks associated with instigating a housing policy that does not achieve these ends. If the policies are implemented and do not seem to be effective, the discussion is removed from the democratic arena and is instead framed as a technical matter: how can we more effectively deliver our policies? The second assertion is that the consequences of the policy intervention being advocated can be likened to the consequences of post-industrial decline, but running in the opposite direction. The researchers thus invoke the discourse of urban regeneration, but it is not difficult to see how policies which pursue the eradication of a complex land use pattern, containing housing, community sector organisations and local businesses, and its replacement with large zones of housing and other uses with relatively high rents, might lead to economic degradation rather than growth (cf. Jacobs, 1961). None of these problems are considered, though, because the dominant arguments here are framed as part of a research programme and, unlike in a statutory planning process, no opportunity is provided for critical scrutiny.

The new claim, that redeveloping housing will lead to a more populous and affluent city, allows the researchers to maintain the substance of the policy directions they had recommended up until this point as well as, superficially at least, to maintain a coherent supporting justification. It also has the effect of dramatically increasing the level of ambition of the proposed policies. The promise that housing policy action can be used to holistically manage the future population trajectory of the city implies state intervention on a level that has not been seen since the post-war period of continuous economic growth. It is possible that the shift to the new goal of re-population was not just an attempt to reconcile new build with demolition, but a calculated decision arising from the relationship between local and central government. Having already tapped into a groundswell of institutional support in the city, and with local authorities in other parts of the north dealing with their own vacancy issues, it was an opportune time to market the emerging scheme as an urban panacea. A key advantage of doing this was that, while the benefits of housing market policies were not scheduled to occur until fifteen or twenty year‘s time, the benefits of claiming to have found a panacea were

138 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY immediate. Those actors, such as local authorities, housing associations and developers, with vested interests in the housing policy approach, had no reason to query the researcher‘s claims. Those who would later lobby for the initiative in government could make grand claims about the benefits it would bring, and could support this with academic research and a body of institutional opinion.