Power to the people

Empowerment, bottom up decision making, community control. The government's New Deal for Communities promised £2 billion for 39 deprived areas.

Aston in Birmingham, where last New Year, two friends Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis were caught in the middle of a gang battle and killed, is one New Deal area.

But three years after receiving more than 54 million pounds Aston is still trying to work out how to spend it. The community group which should have been running the scheme has been replaced, it hasn't found a chief executive and until recently it didn't even have a bank account.

David Sillito reported.

DAVID SILLITO:
Aston's history is a history of making things, from machine parts to brown sauce. But Aston's road trip to prosperity hasn't just broken down, the group sent to rescue it seems to have got lost and the people are running out of patience.

Shakoor Choudhry grew up round here and he knows what the problems are. We took a walk in his neighbourhood. The locals know Shakoor. They've just voted him onto the board of Aston Pride, a regeneration scheme with £54 million to spend. Within minutes we were interrupted.

What are you being asked to do here?

SHAKOOR CHOUDHRY:
(Aston Pride Board Member)
We are being asked to... She says for four years she's been waiting for repairs to be carried out on her home. They haven't been done. Her husband's disabled and things are in a bad way. They voted for me and they expect me to deliver. They expect me to do it straight away.

SILLITO:
Can you?

CHOUDHRY:
No.

SILLITO:
Aston Pride has spent some money, on CCTV cameras, for instance, not that all of them are still in working order. But it's not spent much. In its first two years, it spent around £2.5 million. Since then, the Government has scrapped the board. The new one has yet to meet.

So, Aston has been waiting, waiting, waiting for the regeneration to come and expectations are pretty high. But when you work out the figures, £54 million, 26,000 people, that is, per person, £2,000 in ten years. Expectations for most people are rather higher. But while the amounts may be modest and the spending in Aston very slow, the New Deal scheme was never intended to be a quick fix. So, what's gone wrong?

Well, few disagree with the theory. Around Aston are the ghosts of previous well-intentioned regeneration programmes. The New Deal, though, was going to be different. The community was going to spend the money.

PAUL LAWLESS:
(Centre, Regional Economic & Social Research Sheffield Hallam University)
It was intended to be very much community-based. Local residents were to be involved in pulling together and running strategies. It was also a ten-year programme. That's a very important thing to stress. Many earlier initiatives have not lasted for anything like that time and one of the lessons we have learned is regeneration does take a long time.

SILLITO:
The problem lay in how it's been carried out, or rather how it hasn't been carried out. In Birmingham City Council's report on Aston Pride, certain things one would expect of a company spending £54 million seem to have been missing. There was, for instance, no agreement with the City Council over what Aston Pride's exact role was. No employment contracts, no registration with Customs and Excise. It didn't even have a bank account.

But Sham Hussain, the now former Chairman of Aston Pride, feels hard done by. By the end of his three years in charge, £5 million had at least been earmarked. Not enough for government, but anything more he feels would have been too much too soon.

SHAM HUSSAIN:
(Former Aston Pride Chairman)
CCTV which is across there, we approved that.

SILLITO:
So you were spending money?

HUSSAIN:
Of course we were spending it. We had a CCTV programme. We had the environmental task force.

SILLITO:
But it was £5 million of the £54 million. Was that good enough, do you think?

HUSSAIN:
Well, it was good enough, but you have to consult the community on what needs to be done. If the community say we need to take time to make sure that we spend this money wisely, this is public money. We don't want people to say, "You need to spend it because you haven't spent your targets." We want to make sure it fits our community.

SILLITO:
But the official evaluation by Sheffield Hallam University concluded that community engagement had been "weak". The board had shown itself "incapable of working together" beset by a "lack of trust".

Take the experience of Glen Blackwood. He runs the local chemist's. A man with first hand knowledge of local health problems and local drug users. He was keen to work with Aston Pride. He didn't feel they were quite so keen to work with him.

GLEN BLACKWOOD:
(Chemist)
When they initially started, we attended some of the meetings, because we thought there was an opportunity to set up a diabetes clinic, where people can come in and get a bit of help. So we were enquiring about that, trying to find out what their priorities were with regards to health. That was one of the areas they were going to look into. But everything seems to have shut down. When you try to phone through, you're not getting through to the right person, or you're told, "There are no finances."

SILLITO:
There's £50 million!

BLACKWOOD:
Well, that's what I was told. Obviously then there's been a re-election now, so we don't know what's happening. But we're still trying.

SILLITO:
But some things have begun to change. Aston's gang-related shootings have led to a big increase in police patrols, and given these local concerns about crime, Aston Pride is now setting up a new community safety team.

Meanwhile, there's a new chairman. Simon Topman, a local manufacturer, has agreed to help and he wants to get things done. But he knows it will be a struggle. The Government wants results. He hasn't had his first board meeting yet.

SIMON TOPMAN:
(Chairman, Aston Pride)
They need to see things happening in their area.

SILLITO:
Build things, objects, stuff like that?

TOPMAN:
Yes, initially. The so-called quick wins.

SILLITO:
What do you mean "quick wins"?

TOPMAN:
Well, the easy things to do are clean the environment. Anyone can have a street-cleaning campaign, but far more important is that we do the sustainable things that are still going to be there long after Aston Pride has gone. For instance, creating jobs is probably the single most important thing for the people here. 70% of everybody under the age of 24 in this area has never worked.

SILLITO:
Even if they can create jobs, it will take time. But one thing may speed up delivery and reduce arguments. They've almost halved the number of residents on the Aston Pride board.

Edward Furness, a local vicar, believes though that there needs to be more, a change of heart. His advice centre works in eight languages, evidence of a very diverse community.

EDWARD FURNESS:
(Vicar, St James Church - Aston)
I suppose if you offer any group of people £50 million, we're always going to say, "I want my bit." When we realised that the Government's not going to release the money on that basis, we've got to look again and say, "We want our community to benefit from this money, not just my bit." Maybe we've reached the point where we realise that's got to happen.

SILLITO:
Getting everyone to work together was always going to take time, and while Aston has been the slowest New Deal community, its problems haven't been unique.

LAWLESS:
I think, initially, the intention was to divide the £2 billion by ten and to come out with the magic figure of about £200 million a year. I think that was always somewhat naïve, in that partnerships take time to develop, to build up the community infrastructure and then to create and to deliver their programmes. So expenditure will increase over the ten years, and in the re-profiled expenditure patterns, partnerships are spending what has been assumed.

SILLITO:
This then, is an example of what this Government is all about. Community-based solutions and delivery. The problem in Aston seems to be the more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.