Hat’s the way to do it

Housing Action Trusts were launched by the Conservatives in the Housing Act 1988 to regenerate England’s most deprived estates. There were originally six: Liverpool; Castle Vale in Birmingham; Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets, and Brent in London; and North Hull (which closed in 1999).

They each took over stock transferred from local authorities, assuming responsibility for repairing, improving and managing housing, “encouraging diversity of tenure” and improving “social, environmental and living conditions” according to the act. They did this by refurbishing and rebuilding estates, building community centres, setting up community groups, and employment and crime-fighting initiatives. They popularised the now-familiar idea of housing organisations working closely with health, education and law enforcement agencies.

Chris Buchanan was corporate strategy manager for Castle Vale HAT in Birmingham. This trust was set up in 1993 and has since demolished 2275 homes, built 1486 and improved 1333.

It closed on 31 March this year.

You need to decide what what organisation will take over your work when you stop.

From the word go, HAT board members worked on what would happen when the HAT ended: we set up Castle Vale Community Housing Association in 1996, a development trust in 1998 and a neighbourhood partnership board in 2002. The association had already begun winning awards by the time the tenants had to decide whether they wanted to transfer.

Every market renewal pathfinder and New Deal for Communities area should have a good idea of who’s going to take over their work when they finish.

Our research showed that local employers threw away applications from people with a Castle Vale postcode. When we approached the local business group, which was meant to represent local employers, we found it had only 20 members. We invited more employers, including national groups, to join up and linked the group to our training initiatives and encouraged them to discuss their employment needs. There are about 120 members now and they are happy to consider applications with a B35 postcode.

You need a permanent press officer if you want to keep properties let. Until recently Castle Vale suffered from an outdated image. We put a lot of work into telling people what we were doing.

Two years ago, a MORI report said it would take 30 years to transform local people’s image of the area. Last year they found something very different: that people five to 15 miles away said Castle Vale was no different to any other area of Birmingham. We don’t have hard-to-shift properties any more.

Gary De Ferry was housing director of Waltham Forest HAT until it closed in 2002. When it was set up in 1992, this trust demolished 2500 homes in tower blocks and medium-rise estates in north London and replaced them with 1600 low-rise homes. De Ferry is now chief executive at Waltham Forest Community-Based Housing Association, which the HAT set up in partnership with the Peabody Trust to manage the homes long-term.

You earn residents’ confidence by improving services in the blocks you plan to demolish before they move into new ones. It’s easy to concentrate on the new and hope people will put up with the old, but we realised a lot of our properties would be there for 10 years before we demolished them.

We brought repairs up to a good level and demolished underground car parks that had been attracting antisocial behaviour. It may have been for only 10 years but it was worth it.

Once we’d started, people stopped leaving the estate but this meant our original projections for how many homes we needed were wrong. Once people saw regeneration was going to happen, turnover slowed from 10% a year to almost zero. It was a big problem – we needed more money and land to build more homes. We coped by buying some street properties to decant people into and by giving people grants to buy their own property or by finding a house which a housing association could buy and rent to them. When we transferred our stock to a housing association, it was able to borrow money to build more homes.

Tenants benefited from our changes to estate and road names. One tenant said she had never been able to order pizza delivery before because of her address in one of the old blocks. Now her address is on a new road and she can order pizza for the first time.

Ian McDermott was chief executive of Stonebridge HAT. The trust was set up in 1994 to demolish 1775 medium and high-rise units in Brent, north London. It will have provided 1145 new homes by the time it winds down in 2007.

Two things really upset residents. If you mess up their TV reception – for example, by sticking up a tower crane – or if you starve them of places to park their cars. You need to be aware these are really emotive issues.

People dropped out of our job skills training because they found going to a college intimidating. People didn’t want to go to big institutions, so we brought a tutor to Stonebridge, and now 80% to 100% of those who start our courses stay on them.

We found even the most disaffected youth would turn up on time to run our radio project, which let them do internet broadcasting. Almost half the population of Stonebridge is aged below 24 and 39% are under 16. We have a strategy to engage young people with whatever turns them on – like our radio project. Several people are now on college courses learning technical skills for working in radio. We’ve got them into education because they’re doing something they want to.

You need to work out the phasing of your development at the same time as putting together the masterplan. Designers often draw a finished scheme and then work out how to get there. But thinking about phasing from the start will save you a lot of money and aggravation.

For example, you’d be surprised how many masterplans build one side of a street before another. This leads to problems with services because they usually go down the middle of the street. That means either you don’t finish the street, or you dig up the road twice.

Simon James was deputy chief executive of Tower Hamlets HAT. This trust was set up in 1993 to replace about 1400 1970s homes in Bow, east London. It closed in June 2004 and its work is being continued by Old Ford Housing Association.

Simon James and is now neighbourhood housing contract manager for Hackney council.

In a scheme that could take 10 years to complete, you need a lot of quick wins. Other long-term projects have made the mistake of disappointing residents when changes don’t happen quickly. You’ve got to make it clear from the start that it’s a long-term process and begin community regeneration work straight away. We started the Bow festival, an arts festival involving the whole community, which has become very popular. These types of events can be relatively cheap to put on but make people feel good about their communities.

The fact that money was concentrated in small areas made residents outside feel excluded at first. To counter this, Tower Hamlets formed a development trust to make sure some of the benefits went to the area in general by organising things like IT training, community festivals, a job brokerage scheme and youth clubs.

Because we had residents on the panels that appointed architects, we tended to get resident-friendly architects who could translate their wishes well. We found that architects’ processes became a lot more resident-focused and they did excellent work.

If you give residents real financial power, they will be careful about what they ask you to do. Put residents in controlling positions, such as chair of a board, and make them aware of caps on spending, and they will be decisive about what is affordable.

David Green was chief executive of Liverpool HAT. This trust was set up in 1993 and started with 5300 properties in 67 tower blocks. It is in the process of demolishing 4414 units in 52 of these blocks, and refurbishing 11 blocks (786 units) for rent and another four (246 units) for sale. It is also building 1544 low-rise homes. It will close in September when its work is complete.

You must be prepared to challenge residents’ views. Even though most tenants who voted for transfer to our HAT wanted their homes improved, we decided to demolish 52 blocks. It was difficult, but it would have been madness to improve 67 tower blocks in poor condition and in a city where demand for social housing had dropped. We spent a lot of time and effort going through the options with residents and explaining why we wanted to demolish.

Once we had a few demonstration projects and could show people what could be done, they were happier.

It’s very hard to tell someone that you’re going to knock their home down – and it’s even harder when they have serious alcohol problems. We had a number of isolated unemployed males with alcohol problems.

It was sometimes almost impossible to contact residents, let alone talk to them.

We tackled this by putting together a “community support team” of specialists seconded from different agencies: three social workers, two occupational therapists and two mental health people. They had the skills to deal with people like this.

Going behind closed doors to talk to residents provides an opportunity to update council records about their support needs. Our community support team knocked on every tenant’s door, rather than leafleting, and connected many elderly people with services they should have been getting already, but weren’t.

Seventy per cent of our residents were elderly, so care and support of the elderly was higher on the agenda than other housing action trusts.

Up to 30% of these people will have some adaptations in their new homes – we’ve delivered four state-of-the-art supported housing centres for older people.