The photo below was taken on December 30th 2010. It’s the kind of image that most of us in the world of urban renewal are using to seeing. Yet this picture has a special resonance for me because it’s the house in Kirkby where I grew up.
It didn’t look like that when my family moved in, in 1985, or when we left in 1996. Fifteen years later, and after a period of investment in new housebuilding, neighbourhood renewal and frontline public services in places like Kirkby, it looks like the clichéd front-cover of a grim report about urban decay.
For readers who aren’t familiar with Kirkby, much of the town was planned and built in the 1960s to accommodate families displaced by reconstruction in Liverpool and workers in the newly built industrial estate and nearby factories. Many of the new jobs didn’t materialise, some of the old ones disappeared and instead of housing 70,000 people as originally planned, there are just over 40,000 people today.
According to the 2000 Index of Multiple Deprivation, Knowsley Borough Council was the 6th most deprived local authority in England. Despite these problems, Kirkby has always had a strong sense of community. The housing stock has been improved over many years and the council has won a number of beacon awards in areas like regeneration through culture and sport, supporting business growth and removing barriers to work. The Future Schooling in Knowsley programme has attracted national attention.
Seeing my old house made me ask some questions. What happened to the place? What’s the council doing about it, and places like it? And is it an isolated problem, or the sign of incipient decline, as the promised economic recovery continues to falter and funding cuts start to bite?
The answer to the first question will be familiar to many readers. A private owner bought the house, but left it unoccupied. Empty and unloved, it was vandalised to the point where the owner couldn’t put it back on the market without significant improvement.
In response, and in reply to the second question, the council intervened to tidy up the property and work with the owner on a solution. Ideally, the landlord pays for the refurbishment and puts it back on the market, although the council has reserve powers of compulsory purchase or forced sale if this doesn’t happen.
The house has been on the council’s radar since October, less than the period of six months after which it can use its powers to deal with empty homes. Even with the promised exemption for houses that are a cause of blight, it’s hard to see how anyone living in Kirkby will benefit from the government’s promise to increase the waiting period to take action on empty homes to two years.
The answer to the third question is much less clear, and one that I’d like to return to in future articles. As a whole, Kirkby’s economy is more robust than it was a decade ago. And yet, like many other authorities in the north, the council has to make cuts of £30m and up to 400 redundancies. The government insists that the ‘frontline’ shouldn’t be affected, but it’s hard to square this with front-loading of cuts and the termination of the area-based funds which councils used to support services like neighbourhood management.
Some of those cuts will fall on services which were already struggling to deliver decent results. In December 2010, the Audit Commission awarded Knowsley’s strategic housing services ‘1 star’ out of 4, albeit with ‘promising’ prospects for improvement. The abrupt end of Knowsley’s deal to share its regeneration chief with Liverpool City Council has also come at a very bad moment.
Is my old house a one-off bad case, or a worrying sign of things to come? We don’t know yet. The conclusion to this story hasn’t been written, but I’ll report back as it develops.