Case Studies   The Glasgow Case Study. The Gorbals

Regeneration in the Gorbals – Key Partners and Partnerships

In the 1990s, in response to the scale of the challenge and in recognition of the strategic importance of the Gorbals, the local authority and the local enterprise company created a vision for the area's redevelopment.

Making partnerships work at a city level

The key national and city wide agencies that work in partnership to regenerate local neighbourhoods in Glasgow are:

•  Glasgow City Council

•  Communities Scotland

•  Scottish Enterprise Glasgow

•  The Glasgow Alliance

•  The Glasgow Housing Association

Each of them has relationship with the Scottish Executive (the devolved Government of Scotland ). This was established in July 1999 after the first elections to the Scottish Parliament in May 1999. The Parliament has devolved responsibility for a range of home affairs including education, health, enterprise, transport and planning. It has some financial powers including the capacity to vary the UK rate of income tax by three per cent, but the major aspects of fiscal policy as well as foreign and defence policy are reserved powers of the Westminster Parliament.

The Scottish Executive Development Department (SEDD) is the main department concerned with city development and neighbourhood renewal issues. Its responsibilities include social justice, housing and area regeneration, local government and finance, land use planning, building control, European Structural Funds Management, roads and transport and planning and building control.

In July 2002, the Department launched a policy statement on neighbourhood renewal - Better Communities in Scotland - Closing the Gap . The statement outlines plans for new institutional arrangements for neighbourhood renewal - local authority- wide Community Planning Partnerships and a series of neighbourhood level local community planning partnerships. It also places a new emphasis on the importance of mainstream public services for neighbourhood regeneration and appears to suggest a central role for local residents in the process of change.

Glasgow City Council is the municipal or local government for the core of the Greater Glasgow conurbation. This core is home to about 35 per cent of the population of the conurbation and, because the boundary excludes many of the city's wealthier suburbs, its population base is disproportionately poor.

The main functions of GCC are to develop and deliver a range of services such as schools, social work and so on and, its mission statement states, "to sustain the physical, social, economic, cultural and environmental development and regeneration of Glasgow ". It employs around 30,000 people in the city and in 2000/1 had an annual budget of approximately £1,126m.

The key department responsible for neighbourhood renewal is Development and Regeneration Services which spends approximately 4% of the council's budget each year. It develops and implements a number of strategies, programmes and initiatives concerned with promoting social inclusion, place marketing and planning. It is responsible for leading and managing the Council's inputs into city wide and neighbourhood partnerships.

Glasgow citizens can potentially influence the priorities and activities of GCC through the electoral process - i.e. electing their ward councillor every four years - or through a limited range of public participation opportunities with respect to individual services.

Unlike other countries, the City Council is not responsible for the delivery of all services. Scotland operates a system of Government Agencies; the two most important ones that have a responsibility for regeneration are Communities Scotland and Scottish Enterprise.

Communities Scotland is an executive agency directly accountable to Scottish Ministers and through them to the Scottish Parliament. It was established in November 2001. Its focus is on community regeneration through neighbourhood renewal, community empowerment and housing investment. It replaces a previous agency - Scottish Homes - which was focused primarily on housing investment. Part of the rationale for the change is that effective community regeneration requires substantial strategic links to be made between housing investment, education, employment and so on.

Communities Scotland will be responsible for implementing the Scottish Executive's Community Renewal Statement. This will include: establishing a Neighbourhood Renewal Centre as a centre of excellence to encourage innovation and promote good practice; promoting the development of the social economy; and building the capacity of communities to influence the regeneration of their areas. It also regulates and monitors the work of community based housing associations and Social Inclusion Partnerships (SIPs). Its investment programme in 2002/3 was £344m, of which £226m was spent on housing investment – mainly through housing associations - and approximately £90m on other regeneration activities.

The Scottish Enterprise Network comprises of Scottish Enterprise National (SEN), based in Glasgow, and 12 Local Enterprise Companies (LECs). Scottish Enterprise Board is appointed by Scottish ministers, who also provide the bulk of the Network's funding of some £500m per annum. The Network has offices in North America, Germany , France , Italy , Japan , Taiwan , South Korea and Singapore as part of its mission to heighten Scotland 's profile overseas.

Scottish Enterprise is the main economic development agency for Scotland covering 93% of the population - it excludes the Highlands and Islands which are covered by another economic development agency. It aims to secure the long-term future of the Scottish economy by making its industries more competitive, and works in partnership with the private and public sectors.

It helps business start-ups and existing companies to grow; promotes and encourages exporting; attracts inward investment and develops skills. Its priorities include commercialisation of academic ideas into good business opportunities, e-business, globalisation and economic inclusion. The 12 LECs are located across the southern half of Scotland , from the Grampians to the Borders. These organisations are one of the main ways that businesses and people access the range of services provided by Scottish Enterprise and its partners.

As a result of its activities the Network estimates that it helps to add approximately £900 million a year to the output of the Scottish economy, thereby creating or securing around 25,000 jobs.

Scottish Enterprise Glasgow (SEG) is the LEC with responsibility for economic development within the city of Glasgow . SEG's mission is “ to work with others to make Glasgow one of the great cities of Europe for the benefit of all its citizens, businesses and institutions.” Its core values are integrity, professionalism and excellence, partnership and collaboration, customer primacy and innovation. SEG is the largest LEC in Scotland , with a budget of some £57 million per annum. Some £50m of this come from SEN and £7m from European Structural Funds.

SEG has three over-arching priorities:

(i) to make Glasgow a more competitive place (by developing strategic sites, improving the public realm of the city centre and promoting major projects such as the Glasgow Science Centre, the Millennium Link and the Crown Street regeneration Project);

(ii) to promote a more inclusive economy (including local skills, qualifications, all-round employability and temporary jobs); and

(iii) to strengthen the base of businesses in the city.

SEG is an important supporter of the SIPs and Local Economic Development Companies, both in financial terms and through policy direction.

At a citywide level Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise Glasgow have collaborated to develop a Joint Economic Strategy for the city. This forms the economic development section of the Glasgow Alliance's plan for Glasgow – Creating Tomorrow's Glasgow

The Glasgow Alliance (GA) is the city wide strategic partnership for city development and neighbourhood renewal. Its focus is also on the core city, and it has minimal capacity to influence issues which relate to the wealthier suburbs of the city. Glasgow Alliance involves senior level representatives from a range of public agencies concerned with health, policing, economic development and neighbourhood renewal (including Communities Scotland and Scottish Enterprise Glasgow). It also involves a large voluntary organisation, as well as a forum which brings together business interests in the city. It is chaired by the deputy leader of Glasgow City Council.

GA has three main areas of activity. First, it aims to be a mechanism by which the main organisations in the city can come together to develop partnership working on a range of issues. Second, it produces, implements and monitors "an overarching, integrated strategy for the regeneration of Glasgow " which identifies activities and targets for the main organisations. Finally, it is also responsible for managing and developing added value from the SIPs. It had an income of around £3.6m in 2000/1, most of it from the Scottish Executive, and the remainder from its partners and other sources. The relatively small scale of its resources signals that GA is intended as a mechanism to integrate and add value to the expenditure of the main agencies in the city, rather than to be a major investor itself.

Citizens of Glasgow are not directly involved in GA at Board level. They can choose to influence its activities through public participation initiatives such as surveys, People's Panels and Citizens Juries. The future of GA is currently under consideration on the basis that the city council may itself take over the functions.

The Glasgow Housing Association is the newest of the city's regeneration agencies. It took over the ownership of the city council housing stock in March 2003 after a close run ballot of tenants. It has considerably more flexibility than the Council to raise private capital to fund the physical and environmental improvements desperately needed in the city's public housing estates. The stock will be managed on a neighbourhood basis by tenant-led organisations (known as Local Housing Organisations – LHOs). The idea is that such organisations will eventually take on the ownership of the stock (on the model of the community based housing associations described below) and that there will be substantial local control of social housing throughout the city. GHA also has a 'Wider Action' remit which means it should attempt to maximise the wider benefits to the city of the stock transfer process - such as the number of local jobs created.

Making partnerships work in Gorbals

At a neighbourhood level these players operate through local organisations. There are three key local organisations in Gorbals

•  Gorbals Initiative

•  New Gorbals Housing Association

•  Gorbals Social Inclusion Partnership

Gorbals Initiative (GI) was created in 1991 to ensure that the economic regeneration of the area progressed alongside the area's physical regeneration. Gorbals Initiative's stakeholders included the local community, employment services, Glasgow Development Agency, Glasgow District Council, Strathclyde Regional Council and Scottish Homes (now Communities Scotland).

Gorbals Initiative is one of eight local economic development companies operating in the city's disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Glasgow . These neighbourhood level organisations are, as their name suggests, focused on local economic issues and are unique to Glasgow . There is considerable overlap, although not a neat fit, between their areas of operation and those of the SIPs. They are structured as multi-sectoral partnerships and involve the City Council, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, local community members and private sector interests on their Boards. They receive core funding from GCC and SEG, although the most substantial part of their income comes from other sources such as the private sector, Strathclyde European Partnership and charitable funds. Whilst each of them has developed differently, they all aim to take the lead in economic development issues locally including helping with business start ups, developing the social economy and providing gateways to skills and training. Some of the more established LDCs are involved in more ambitious economic development activities and contribute to other aspects of regeneration.

Gorbals Initiative was highlighted in a recent OECD report as being:

‘…a very sophisticated and highly effective instrument to turn policy into practice.'

The report goes on to say

‘….The Gorbals and Govan Initiative are important examples which demonstrate how to deliver sustainable outcomes. In effect they are in advance of some of the policy debates with respect to sustainability. The Initiatives have operated under two different governments in the UK with varying policy approaches to social, economic and physical regeneration; learning from their experience is essential.'

Also, around this time New Gorbals Housing Association , the community-based housing association (CBHA), was established . Whilst there are many examples of CBHAs across Scotland , they emerged first in Glasgow , are disproportionately concentrated in Glasgow and are key to understanding the history of Glasgow 's renewal. The first CBHAs were established in the 1970s in mixed tenure, inner city tenemental areas in severe decline. These areas were often home to established communities, many of whom were keen to continue living locally. The model established then has continued with a few minor modifications.

Like other CBHAs, New Gorbals is governed by a Management Committee elected from its shareholders, who are mainly local residents. The Committee plans and oversees the development and renovation of the houses, and their long term management. The Committee is responsible for choosing the design team and are the employers under the building contract. They employ staff who are based in a local office. Initially, CBHAs were financed wholly by central government, but are now funded by a mixture of commercial loans and government grants (through Communities Scotland to ensure that the rents are affordable).The association's policies and investments are regulated by Communities Scotland.

New Gorbals is also acting as a LHO for GHA, and therefore is now the largest landlord in the area – responsible for managing some xx% of the total housing stock.

In 1999 the Gorbals was designated as a Social Inclusion Partnership (SIP) area, which was a recognition that a large proportion of the local population were unable to participate in the sort of social and economic activity that most of us take for granted. A Partnership Board, made up local agencies and members of the local community, manages the SIP and makes decisions on how SIP funds are allocated to local agencies and groups. The local councillor chairs the Board. A Community Forum was established in 2001.

There are 10 neighbourhood SIPs in Glasgow (out of 34 in Scotland ), and three (out of 14) thematic based SIPs (care leavers, routes out of prostitution and anti racist) which benefit from additional funding. Approximately 60% of Glasgow 's population live in SIP areas.

The SIPs are the current Scottish example of the UK 's long established approach to addressing concentrated disadvantage and neighbourhood decline through time-limited, area targeted initiatives. The main focus of the SIPs is on social and economic inclusion rather than physical renewal. Their resources are spent on a variety of strategies and projects. Local groups often provide the ideas for projects and may be involved in strategic development.

The Gorbals SIP receives approximately Euro 1,300,000 per annum to spend on locally based projects.

Partnership at work in Gorbals

These three local organisations work closely with residents, local businesses, the local college of further education, voluntary organisations, the City Council and with each other. There is no one overall body co-ordinating the various activities – overall co-ordination happens through more informal processes that include key personnel from each organisation (mainly senior staff) sitting on each other's boards! At one time, the City Council organised a more formal ‘officer's meeting' to co-ordinate activities, but this has not met for some time.

Community Involvement

Each of these three organisations involves the community in its activities. All three have resident representatives on their governing boards; in the case of the housing association tenants are in the majority; in the SIP residents play a key role in determining how the funds are distributed. There is also a main link to the City Council in that the elected member for the neighbourhood sits on each board.

The ‘community' is a term that hides a diversity of interests and roles. The community includes not only residents – both owner/occupiers and tenants – but others who work in the neighbourhood or who use the area for leisure. Different people want different levels of involvement – some to be kept informed of developments with the opportunity to be consulted, others who want to share in the decision making processes.

Public/private partnerships

There are a large number of public/private partnerships in Gorbals. Defining the private is important in understanding what these partnerships look like.

The ‘private sector' is as diverse as the ‘community'. The largest private sector investor in Gorbals is the not-for-profit New Gorbals Housing Associations, which in UK terms is a private organisation. It may be regulated by Communities Scotland, but private individuals as committee members are responsible for the organisation, even if they do not get any financial gain. It has to borrow most of its funding from commercial banks although it may still require public sector financial support (grants or low interest loans) to keep their rents ‘affordable'.

Elsewhere, the non profit or ‘voluntary' (indicating that the directors receive no financial remuneration) sector is providing a range of social and economic development services in areas targeted for regeneration.

Involving the ‘for profit' sector has proved to be more difficult. In Scotland, developers producing housing for sale have been encouraged into regeneration areas by public sector grant, provided on a reducing basis as the market grows in strength (see below for Crown Street example). Getting businesses involved has been more difficult. Few have seen regeneration areas as areas of opportunity, although the national Welfare to Work programme (the New Deal) has made a number of employers look to regeneration areas for employees and organisations such as Gorbals Initiative have helped to prepare people for work. So in that sense, private sector employers have contributed to the regeneration of the neighbourhood by simply providing jobs. Getting business leaders involved in operational neighbourhood planning and implementation has been much more difficult – they have little patience with ‘talking shops', and can find the processes of consultation and decision making tedious and non-productive.

Some public/private partnerships involve the separation of service provision from facilities, e.g. where a programme of school building is not only built by, but financed and managed for a fixed period by a ‘for profit' private company, while the public sector concentrates on the education curriculum.

The Crown Street Regeneration Project was established to masterplan and manage the physical redevelopment of the central part of the Gorbals. This was instigated by the local enterprise company (formally Glasgow Development Agency, now Scottish Enterprise Glasgow), working with the City Council and Scottish Homes (now Communities Scotland). GDA committed a significant resource to the masterplan approach to neighbourhood development – a new one for Scotland . A major factor to the success of this approach was that the Project Director was based locally and the local community was involved.

Crown Street has a mixture of housing – both owner/occupation and social rent (through New Gorbals Housing Association). Crown Street represents the first newly built owner-occupation in Gorbals. (There were some Right to Buy sales) Private developers were encouraged to build in an area that they would never have considered partly because of the masterplan approach and partly because of the grants that were available through Scottish Homes. These grants have been withdrawn as private sector confidence increased – both buyers and sellers.

When the first new private housing went on the market in 1993, local residents were offered a 10% reduction on the purchase price of the new flats. The sales office opened on day one to find a queue of local residents outside the door!

Crown Street has also acted as a catalyst for other developments involving the private sector. An hotel (was the Days Inn – now the Tulip Inn) was attracted in. Gorbals Initiative partnered with Spacia (the property arm of Railtrack) to pull down EU funding to refurbish the arches as workspaces under a railway line. This was important as the arches are adjacent to the hotel. Railtrack would not have considered the refurbishment without the GI involvement and EU funds

The recent OECD Report on Glasgow 's Urban Renaissance highlighted the Crown Street Project as being

‘….a highly commended urban renewal project which drew inspiration from the positive aspects of Glasgow 's urban form and combined them with a sound approach to urban design. The end result is an excellent example of urban regeneration which was focussed and explored existing assets.'

Gorbals - history    Vision for the Gorbals