Eastern promise

Drugs are just one of the many problems facing Tower Hamlets. Unemployment, especially among young people, runs as high as 40% on some estates. Overcrowding, a particular problem for the Bengali population, is another key issue. Meanwhile, turf wars rage among the seven or eight street gangs whose "patches" are in the Tower Hamlets area.

Although the area is dominated by the gleaming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, all of Tower Hamlets' 17 wards are among the 10% most deprived in the UK. The council's response to this appalling poverty is to single out the worst-affected estates and bombard them with regeneration initiatives, addressing everything from how they look to their underlying socioeconomic needs.

The starting point is the borough's community plan, launched last year. The point of this was to get different council departments – everything from housing to education – to work with each other and with voluntary and community organisations. Many councils aim for this kind of joined-up working, but in Tower Hamlets this approach is essential given the links between drugs, crime and youth unemployment on the estates.

Strategic plan
The community plan's objectives, including reducing crime, improving the condition of housing and stimulating the local economy, are set by the council's strategic plan.

This plan sits alongside a neighbourhood renewal strategy, launched last year with the aim of focusing £27m on regenerating the hitlist of deprived estates using one holistic approach, rather than funding different projects piecemeal. Deprivation profiles of different parts of Tower Hamlets are being compiled to see where best to place resources targeting antisocial behaviour and crime.

Meanwhile, the undeniably deprived Ocean Estate, home to an estimated 6500 people, is set to benefit from the New Deal for Communities programme, which intends to spend £56m on community and health projects during the next 10 years.

The potential for confusion between these various strategies is reduced by a local strategic partnership, which oversees them all and coordinates all services and council departments. This partnership includes representatives from businesses, the health authority, council, police and community.

To reflect local differences in need, the partnership is broken down into eight "local area partnerships", which provide a forum for consultation with community groups, five "community plan action groups" which are designed to take forward ideas on a smaller, area-focused basis, and a coordinating "partnership management group".

New Deal for Ocean Estate
The New Deal has so far instigated a number of community projects, ranging from a neighbourhood warden scheme to breast-cancer screening for Bengali women.

Misbahur Khan is manager of the St Dunstan's Bengali community resource centre on the Ocean Estate. He says the New Deal fits well with the other initiatives on the estate because it's underpinned by holistic, joined-up thinking and relishes the importance of housing. He sees good design as integral to the life of an estate: "When these homes were built in the 1950s and 1960s there was no drugs issue. The design here means that young people taking drugs can hide very easily." Hidden stairwells and alleyways are attractive to drug-users and dealers alike, he says.

The New Deal solution is to demolish 25 buildings,a total of 750 units, and rebuild around 1000 units. Funding is a problem, though: the scheme will cost around £400m. "If we don't get this funding we can't put the plan into action. If we can't get our housing right it is impossible to do anything with drugs and unemployment," Khan says.

Despite the majority Bengali population, resident involvement is dominated by white women

It is hoped that the money will come from stock transfer across the borough, currently under serious consideration by the council. Each estate is in discussions with potential registered social landlords and the prevailing opinion is that transfer is likely to go ahead, although there is no timetable yet.

Problems
Despite the careful coordination, the sheer number of plans, programmes and strategies in action in Tower Hamlets can create problems. For example, the New Deal's outcomes, outputs and expenditure are reported on every quarter and a review with government takes place every six months. This means it's harder to get funding, as Alec Lockhart, a community worker and resident on the Balfron Towers Estate, says: "Previously you had to go to the council and ask for a small grant," he explains. "There were no guarantees, but you could get it. Now, you have to attract private finance, draw up a business plan and essentially form your own company."

Liz Ormston, the council's new partnerships and initiatives manager, says her task is far from straightforward. "The hoops we have to jump through are getting more and more complicated. It looks elaborate and I wouldn't like to say it couldn't be simplified. If you are one of the 85 local authorities in receipt of neighbourhood renewal fund money that's what you have to do. A lot of our time is spent in meetings."

Steve Richardson, performance review manager at the council, says: "We're swamped with plans and initiatives and consultation papers. It's to give the impression that lots and lots of different things are being done but it in reality it enables central government to exercise more control over local authorities. I wish it wasn't so process-orientated."

Another problem with having so many community plans is that they all require a great deal of involvement from tenants. Ormston says: "For some residents it's an imposition to be involved – they don't want to be at meetings every night." One consequence of this is that despite the majority Bengali population, the ethnic community network tends to be hard to break into and resident involvement tends to be dominated by white, older, women.

This situation has to change in a borough which famously elected a BNP councillor 10 years ago. Racism is an issue with many older residents. One pensioner tells Housing Today: "The people we've got are not the people we want and the shops no longer belong to our people." The council is using translators to make Bengali residents feel more comfortable in meetings and Bangladeshi council leader Helal Abbas is doing much to pull the community together.

Success stories
Despite all the hurdles the council faces, there are numerous examples of innovative inter-agency projects making progress. One is the rapid-response caretaking unit that works with the police and drug action team to minimise the impact of drug paraphenalia by cleaning up drug-taking "hot spots".

Meanwhile a fire service project which started in June, is seeing success in its work with antisocial youths. It takes referrals from the youth offending team, pupil referral unit and a multi-agency street project targeting anti-social behaviour and places the youths on fire service training courses. So far, two courses have been completed successfully and a number of young people are applying to join the fire service. The project will work with 100 young people over the next 10 months. Numerous plaudits have also been garnered by the council's graffiti cleaning youth project. Squads of local volunteers go out cleaning graffiti, which costs far less than contract cleaners. The money saved is then used for weekend activities or buying equipment.

It's too soon to tell whether Tower Hamlets' strategy will work but so far, morale at the housing department seems high. Housing officers in every field, from maintenance to regeneration, are honest about the problems they face but all are hopeful that progress is being made.

The impression that emerges is of an embattled local authority feeling proud of at least some of its achievements in one of the most challenging parts of the country. As Steve Richardson says: "We've got problems, but we've also got so much to offer. We're close to the City, we've got Docklands and we've got the river.