Rede von Mr. Prescott auf dem CEU Kongress am 10. September 2005

(load as PDF-File)

Rede von Dr. Man­fred Stolpe

Thanks to the CEU for mak­ing the DPM and the rest of the ODPM team so wel­come in Berlin! The DPM’s speech is given below.

All the best

Julian

Julian Smith
Speech­writer for the Deputy Prime Min­is­ter
Office of the Deputy Prime Min­is­ter
RB.1.19
26 White­hall
Lon­don SW1A 2WH

Deputy Prime Min­is­ter:
Inter­na­tional Con­gress of the Coun­cil for Euro­pean Urban­ism
Berlin
10 Sep­tem­ber 2005

It’s a great plea­sure to be in Berlin. I want to thank Dr Man­fred Stolpe [Fed­eral Min­is­ter for Trans­port, Hous­ing and Con­struc­tion], for wel­com­ing me to his Min­istry today, espe­cially in the mid­dle of an elec­tion campaign!

Over the first day of this con­fer­ence, you’ve heard how the great city of Berlin — which was cut in two by fear and ide­ol­ogy for 45 years — has become the focus of a remark­able pro­gramme of regen­er­a­tion and renewal.

It’s a reunited cap­i­tal, in a reunited Ger­many, in a reunited Europe.

Berlin shows how superb new archi­tec­ture can lift con­fi­dence in our cities and give peo­ple a real sense of pride in where they live.

I call it the ‘wow fac­tor’ — and I’m delighted that Britain has brought a bit of ‘wow’ to Berlin with our new Embassy build­ing, and I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing the rebuilt Reich­stag with Lord Foster’s amaz­ing spi­ral staircase.

Today, we have a num­ber of Amer­i­can friends with us, and I want to take this oppor­tu­nity to express our sol­i­dar­ity and com­pas­sion after the havoc of Hur­ri­cane Katrina.

As a Euro­pean nego­tia­tor at the Kyoto cli­mate change con­ven­tion, I was fully aware that cli­mate change is chang­ing weather pat­terns and rais­ing sea levels.

The hor­rific flood of New Orleans brings home to us the con­cern of lead­ers of coun­tries like the Mal­dives, whose nations are at risk of dis­ap­pear­ing completely.

I’m proud that Britain has already achieved its Kyoto tar­get on green­house gas emis­sions – 6 years ahead of time, with a grow­ing economy.

There has been resis­tance by the United States Gov­ern­ment to Kyoto — which I believe is wrong.

On a recent visit to the United States, I was delighted to see that city may­ors are tak­ing their own envi­ron­men­tal ini­tia­tive on Kyoto.

This year, 178 may­ors, rep­re­sent­ing over 36 mil­lion Amer­i­cans, have signed up to the goals of Kyoto – along with 60 May­ors from cities like Lon­don, Shang­hai, Moscow and Rio, who have agreed to take 21 prac­ti­cal actions on energy, waste, urban design, health, water and transport.

It’s a truly global ini­tia­tive by cities.

A recent report by the United Nations claimed that cities con­sume 75% of the world’s nat­ural resources and pro­duce 75% of its waste.

50% of all humans will be liv­ing in cities — com­pared to just 15% a hun­dred years ago. In 1950, 83 cities had a pop­u­la­tion of over a mil­lion, and now it’s over 400. This mass urban­i­sa­tion is one of the great­est chal­lenges fac­ing the world today.

Across Europe we have cre­ated superb towns and cities, and not just for the last 30 years.

Despite the slums and poverty, Euro­pean cities offered safety and secu­rity to the peo­ple — and gave rise to an aston­ish­ing expres­sion of human cre­ativ­ity through mag­nif­i­cent art, cul­ture and archi­tec­ture. Old Roman cities like my home town of Chester have been sus­tain­able for over 2,000 years.

Yet some­how we lost our way.

Dur­ing the 20th Cen­tury, mil­lions of peo­ple gave up liv­ing in cities.
They got in their cars and left for the sub­urbs — dri­ven out for a vari­ety of rea­sons includ­ing poor edu­ca­tion, the fear of crime, pol­lu­tion and con­ges­tion and the dom­i­na­tion of the motor car.

Back in 1961, the Amer­i­can urban­ist Jane Jacobs sur­veyed the dis­as­trous results of 20th Cen­tury plan­ning, and urged us all to redis­cover the art of mak­ing places were peo­ple can mix and meet.

She helped define what today I call a sus­tain­able community.

Sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties bal­ance the social, eco­nomic and envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns of their com­mu­nity – meet­ing the needs of exist­ing and future gen­er­a­tions, and respect­ing the needs of oth­ers in diverse communities.

And sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties are envi­ron­men­tally sen­si­tive, with high stan­dards of qual­ity and design.

This is not just about build­ings and pub­lic spaces look­ing good — they’ve got to feel safe, secure, and fam­ily friendly, as well.

Sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties must have good local economies and trans­port ser­vices – pro­vid­ing jobs, schools, health and other ser­vices that are acces­si­ble to all.

Yet in Britain, suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments did exactly the oppo­site, with ter­ri­ble consequences.

Decades of indus­trial change under­mined our major towns and cities.

Peo­ple left the cities for the sub­urbs — and major out of town retail devel­op­ments under­mined many tra­di­tional town centres.

There was major dis­in­vest­ment in schools, hos­pi­tals and trans­port, record unem­ploy­ment, severe home­less­ness, insuf­fi­cient hous­ing, the pub­lic hous­ing stock was in major dis­re­pair, and there was a widen­ing eco­nomic gap between North and South.

For 2 decades before our Gov­ern­ment came into office in 1997, the pre­vail­ing phi­los­o­phy had been a total faith in the oper­a­tion of mar­ket forces, and the belief by Mrs Thatcher that there was no such thing as society.

But our Labour Gov­ern­ment knew that eco­nomic pros­per­ity and social jus­tice are two sides of the same coin – and they are essen­tial to the cre­ation of sus­tain­able towns and cities.

So our first pri­or­ity was to secure eco­nomic stability.

Thanks to our poli­cies over the last 8 years, we’ve achieved the longest recorded period of con­tin­u­ous eco­nomic growth for over 200 years, the low­est infla­tion for 30 years,the low­est rate of unem­ploy­ment for 30 years, and record pub­lic invest­ment in our schools, hos­pi­tals and transport.

Our sec­ond pri­or­ity was to reform governance.

That meant ensur­ing that our struc­tures at the national, regional and local level were capa­ble of deliv­er­ing our pro­grammes — in part­ner­ship with the peo­ple affected by such changes.

We also saw the need to devolve power and resources away from the highly cen­tralised form of gov­ern­ment we inherited.

Our reforms are giv­ing peo­ple in regions, cities, towns and neigh­bour­hoods more say over what hap­pens in their area. It improves their con­fi­dence that they can make a real dif­fer­ence to their own community.

My depart­ment was estab­lished with a bud­get of 78 bil­lion euros a year, to co-ordinate and inte­grate the deci­sion mak­ing process across gov­ern­ment on trans­port, regen­er­a­tion, hous­ing, the envi­ron­ment, plan­ning, local gov­ern­ment, and a new approach to regional gov­er­nance and development.

This in turn led to a long term pro­gramme of new leg­is­la­tion and reform for hous­ing, plan­ning, urban devel­op­ment, neigh­bour­hood renewal, local gov­ern­ment and transport.

For exam­ple, we’re invest­ing 62 bil­lion euros of pub­lic and pri­vate money to over­come the mas­sive dis­in­vest­ment in pub­lic housing.

By 2010, all our pub­licly owned hous­ing will meet a decent stan­dard — com­pared to over 2 mil­lion non decent homes we inher­ited in 1997.

The seri­ous­ness of the chal­lenges fac­ing our cities, in an increas­ingly global econ­omy, meant that we had to develop a more ambi­tious con­sen­sus for change.

We need to pro­mote new ideas, new money and new approaches to cre­ate more suc­cess­ful towns and cities.

Across Europe and the world, cities face dif­fer­ing chal­lenges which need their own solutions.

So I want to con­grat­u­late the Coun­cil for cham­pi­oning Euro­pean Urban­ism and for organ­is­ing this major event at an impor­tant time in the debate on the future of cities in Europe and across the world.

Con­fer­ences such as this, and the ones which I hosted in Birm­ing­ham and Man­ches­ter, dis­sem­i­nate dif­fer­ent ideas and help cre­ate a new agenda for sus­tain­able communities.

In Britain in 2003, I pub­lished the Sus­tain­able Com­mu­ni­ties Plan, which will deliver a long term pro­gramme of 59 bil­lion euros of invest­ment in our towns and cities.

It means dif­fer­ing solu­tions for dif­fer­ent areas – and this is just as true within regions, as it is within nations, or across continents.

For exam­ple, we have old indus­trial areas in the North and Mid­lands, where there are depressed hous­ing mar­kets and col­lapsed house prices.

Here in Ger­many, you have sim­i­lar issues on a much big­ger scale, between East and West.

So we’re also spend­ing over 1½ bil­lion euros to help areas with low demand for homes restruc­ture their hous­ing mar­kets and cre­ate com­mu­ni­ties with the right mix of hous­ing for local needs.

Adding green spaces and rebuild­ing neigh­bour­hoods in a more sus­tain­able way.

Con­versely, in the South of Eng­land, a des­per­ate short­age of hous­ing has cre­ated areas of high demand, which has been wors­ened by resis­tance to the need for growth.

House prices have rock­eted out of the reach of the key pub­lic ser­vice work­ers like nurses and teach­ers, who need to live near where they work and pro­vide our essen­tial pub­lic services.

So we’re spend­ing over 1½ bil­lion euros to give key work­ers and first time buy­ers a chance to own a home, where home­own­er­ship of 70% is amongst the high­est in Europe.

Clearly, we need to use land more effi­ciently, and give pri­or­ity to reusing old indus­trial land and buildings.

Our tough plan­ning con­trols are work­ing to com­bat sprawl and ensure that we build more homes on less land, and in the right places.

In 1997, only 56% of new homes were built on brown­field land.
So we set a tar­get to raise that fig­ure to 60% by 2008 — and I’m delighted to say that we’ve already achieved 67%.

And we’re invest­ing 9 bil­lion euros in the rede­vel­op­ment of the Thames Gate­way and 3 new Growth Areas.

This area of old indus­trial land to the East of Lon­don includes our for­mer dock­lands, and it’s West­ern Europe’s largest brown­field site.

The Thames Gate­way is part of our plans for 1.1 mil­lion new homes in Lon­don and the wider South East, built on the same amount of land as the pre­vi­ous Gov­ern­ment set aside for 900,000 houses.

This means we’re sav­ing an area of green­field land the size of the city of Oxford, sim­ply by using more brown­field land and increas­ing the hous­ing den­sity plan­ning requirements.

Even though we’ve dou­bled invest­ment in social hous­ing, and we’ve unlocked dis­used land for new devel­op­ment, the demand for homes in South East Eng­land is still greater than the supply.

Suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments before us failed to build enough homes, and so house prices have been ris­ing faster than wages for key pub­lic ser­vice work­ers like nurses and teachers.

Ten years ago house prices were 3½ times people’s annual salary. Now they are 6 times the annual salary, and prices have been ris­ing faster than earnings.

I pointed out to our Trea­sury that the pub­lic sec­tor was sell­ing off land for hous­ing at the mar­ket price – only for me to ask the Trea­sury for as much as 120,000 euros to sub­sidise an afford­able home for a nurse, a teacher or another key worker so they can live near where they work.

Since the Gov­ern­ment and the pub­lic sec­tor owns so much land, I asked, instead of sell­ing off the land, why not lease it and offer peo­ple an equity share in the price of the home.

Since then, our national land regen­er­a­tion agency, Eng­lish Part­ner­ships has iden­ti­fied 700 sites of pub­lic sec­tor land that could be used for homes, includ­ing Min­istry of Defence land, sites around Lon­don rail­way sta­tions, and 100 sur­plus NHS sites, which alone have the poten­tial for 15,000 homes in this first stage.

We’ve also suf­fered big increases in con­struc­tion costs in recent years — they’ve gone up three times faster than inflation.

But our con­struc­tion indus­try has also failed to make best use of mod­ern meth­ods of con­struc­tion, which you have done in Ger­many and elsewhere.

Last year, I chal­lenged devel­op­ers to use mod­ern meth­ods of con­struc­tion to show how we can build a qual­ity 2 bed house for 88,000 euros, com­pared to the 370,000 euro price of an aver­age home in the South.

Our first con­tract for 1,000 of these homes is now out for com­pe­ti­tion. Devel­op­ers will build the win­ning designs on pub­licly owned land. We’ll keep the land in pub­lic own­er­ship, and the home buy­ers will only have to pay for the cost of con­struc­tion and services.

I want to empha­sise that our Sus­tain­able Com­mu­ni­ties Plan is more than just a hous­ing pro­gramme in an urban set­ting. It’s about meet­ing the needs of peo­ple for homes, jobs, pub­lic and pri­vate ser­vices, and a decent qual­ity of life.

It involves improv­ing the qual­ity of the pub­lic realm across the coun­try, cre­at­ing cleaner, safer, greener places to live.

An impor­tant part of this is get­ting a bet­ter bal­ance between pub­lic and pri­vate transport.

Back in the Six­ties, the famous British plan­ner Colin Buchanan warned us against cre­at­ing cities for cars, instead of peo­ple, and we ignored him.

We are now pay­ing the price in terms of con­ges­tion and costs to the environment.

In Britain, we gave cities the power to intro­duce con­ges­tion charg­ing for road traf­fic, and the income could only be used for improv­ing city pub­lic transport.

In Lon­don alone, this led to a 30% drop in con­ges­tion in the cen­tral area in the first year alone, plus an increase in the use of buses and the Tube.

We also changed the pri­or­i­ties of trans­port, from a mas­sive road build­ing pro­gramme, to a bal­anced pub­lic trans­port plan with 265 bil­lion euros of invest­ment over 10 years.

This is now deliv­er­ing record lev­els of pas­sen­gers on our rail­ways, buses, and new light rail sys­tems. And in cities like Birm­ing­ham and Bris­tol, we are begin­ning to give our streets back to pedes­tri­ans, mov­ing away from the con­cept of motor­way cities of the 60’s.

I’m pleased to say that our poli­cies of enabling eco­nomic sta­bil­ity and encour­ag­ing pub­lic pri­vate part­ner­ships are working.

We are mak­ing sub­stan­tial progress improv­ing the pros­per­ity and qual­ity of life in many of our urban areas.

There’s been a surge of growth and con­fi­dence in our regional core cities in recent years. Peo­ple are return­ing to our cities.

Across a range of key indi­ca­tors, our core cities are doing bet­ter than the national aver­age. Unem­ploy­ment and crime are falling. Eco­nomic and edu­ca­tional per­for­mance is improv­ing. There’s new invest­ment in qual­ity build­ing, parks and green spaces.

In 1997, we used plan­ning con­trols to stop the huge out of town shop­ping cen­tres which had been under­min­ing our town and city cen­tres. This has resulted in 22% more retail floor­space being built in town centres.

Peo­ple, shops, and busi­nesses are return­ing to our core cities.

Cities are the dri­ving force for growth and sus­tain­able communities.

This con­fer­ence is focus­ing on the Euro­pean city, but there is a lot we can learn from the United States.

I’m pleased that John Norquist and his col­leagues from the Con­gress for the New Urban­ism have joined us today. I’ve seen how the New Urban­ists are work­ing in com­mu­ni­ties like Chicago, Wash­ing­ton, Mil­wau­kee and in new places, like Sea­side in Florida. They’re recon­nect­ing the art of build­ing with the mak­ing of communities.

The New Urban­ism is explained in its Char­ter: strong gov­er­nance, social equity, eco­nomic pros­per­ity and con­cen­trated development.

I believe that sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties brings together two dif­fer­ent approaches – Amer­i­can New Urban­ism and the Euro­pean tradition.

Com­pared to Amer­i­can New Urban­ism, the Euro­pean approach — par­tic­u­larly in Britain – uses a more inter­ven­tion­ist style of Gov­ern­ment to achieve envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, social jus­tice, and eco­nomic progress.

The Eng­lish plan­ning sys­tem was intro­duced in 1947, and it is a pow­er­ful instru­ment for inter­ven­tion — but it became ossi­fied and restric­tive to change.

We’re spend­ing 880 mil­lion euros to improve the effi­ciency of the plan­ning sys­tem — so that we get bet­ter deci­sions faster, we have more effec­tive pub­lic pri­vate part­ner­ships and we fully involve the com­mu­nity in what hap­pens to their area.

We’re imple­ment­ing ideas like design cod­ing, which has been used by the New Urban­ists to pro­duce quicker deci­sions, bet­ter devel­op­ment and stronger com­mu­nity support.

And we want the plan­ning sys­tem to link hous­ing, trans­port and eco­nomic devel­op­ment at the regional and city level, help nar­row the eco­nomic gap, cre­ate mixed com­mu­ni­ties, use land more effi­ciently, pro­tect the coun­try­side, reverse the growth in out of town retail, and encour­age peo­ple and retail­ers back into our city cen­tres through mixed use development.

Our lat­est improve­ment is to intro­duce a new Plan­ning Pol­icy State­ment which makes sus­tain­able devel­op­ment a core prin­ci­ple of the plan­ning system.

In this way, plan­ning is a good exam­ple of how a strong degree of inter­ven­tion, within a demo­c­ra­tic frame­work, can pro­duce respon­si­ble and sus­tain­able growth.

And sus­tain­abil­ity is also about cre­at­ing superb build­ings and open spaces – with their archi­tec­tural ‘wow factor.’

It is also about reusing old indus­trial assets in order to cre­ate homes, jobs and communities.

The canals and water­ways used to be seen by Gov­ern­ments and cities as decay­ing lia­bil­i­ties, but now they’re help­ing to cre­ate new sus­tain­able communities.

So our pol­icy in Britain is based on focused and prag­matic inter­ven­tion by the pub­lic sec­tor to steer the mar­ket towards bet­ter out­comes — revi­tal­is­ing our wast­ing cities, giv­ing peo­ple new oppor­tu­ni­ties to ful­fil their poten­tial, nar­row­ing the eco­nomic divide between regions, work­ing for the ben­e­fit of the many not the few.

We knew that invest­ment by the State was never going to be enough on its own. But leav­ing it all up to the pri­vate sec­tor would repeat the mis­takes of the past. We needed a rad­i­cal new approach, to unlock huge amounts of pri­vate sec­tor invest­ment to work along­side our own pub­lic invest­ment to cre­ate eco­nomic pros­per­ity and social justice.

This is why we pro­moted pub­lic and pri­vate part­ner­ships and pri­vate finance ini­tia­tives to deliver change on the ground. I’m pleased to say that our British Embassy is the first exam­ple of a pri­vate finance ini­tia­tive, here in Berlin.

We have devel­oped pub­lic sec­tor agen­cies like Eng­lish Part­ner­ships to cre­ate pub­lic pri­vate part­ner­ships and pri­vate finance ini­tia­tives. They’ve been con­tro­ver­sial – but they have been very suc­cess­ful, deliv­er­ing over £40 bil­lion of extra invest­ment in pub­lic services.

That means – 30 new hos­pi­tals, over 250 new or refur­bished schools, more than 30 pub­lic trans­port schemes, and over 50 fire sta­tions, police sta­tions and court buildings.

All these pub­lic ser­vices are essen­tial to cre­at­ing sus­tain­able communities.

Just take one exam­ple of what I mean by a suc­cess­ful pub­lic pri­vate partnership.

The North Green­wich penin­sula, the site of the famous Mil­len­nium Dome, used to be one of the most poi­so­nous sites in Lon­don and the pri­vate sec­tor could not afford to decon­t­a­m­i­nate it.

Work­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the pri­vate sec­tor, our pub­lic sec­tor regen­er­a­tion agency Eng­lish Part­ner­ships has reme­di­ated the land and turned this site into a new con­cept of urban renewal, a mil­len­nium village.

They have cut con­struc­tion waste by 30% and improved energy effi­ciency by 65%.

13,000 new homes are on the way, as well as a new school, open spaces and a new sports arena and retail, con­nected to a new Under­ground sys­tem, all in the cen­tre of London.

So our approach has allowed us to har­ness the strengths of the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors, and as a result, we’ve achieved a lot over the last 8 years.

But we know there’s still a long way to go – com­par­i­son with Euro­pean city regions tells us that.

Cities like Liv­er­pool and Man­ches­ter were still well down in the rank­ings of Euro­pean cities by GDP per head in 2001. 5 out of the top 6 Euro­pean cities are in Ger­many – a coun­try which has strong core cities in a strong regional con­text. We have a lot to learn from you, espe­cially as Berlin is indeed a city region.

Indeed, we’ve just heard from Dr Man­fred Stolpe how Ger­many itself is still over­com­ing the chal­lenges of indus­trial change in parts of the for­mer East Ger­many, which echoes some of our own chal­lenges in North­ern England.

The regions of East­ern Ger­many actu­ally have about the same pop­u­la­tion as our 3 North­ern indus­trial regions in Britain – the North West, North East and York­shire and the Hum­ber. They have 15 mil­lion peo­ple and 8 city regions.

Although the chal­lenges faced by East­ern Ger­many are on a dif­fer­ent scale and have dif­fer­ent causes to ours, I am intrigued by what we have in common.

As in Ger­many, we have an his­toric eco­nomic gap, which runs north/ south in Eng­land, not east/ west.

This eco­nomic gap has got wider and wider over the years. There’s – higher unem­ploy­ment in the North, more peo­ple inac­tive and on ben­e­fit, more lower skilled jobs, and fewer busi­ness start ups.

More young peo­ple leave school at 16 in the North than in the rest of the coun­try com­bined. North­ern peo­ple on aver­age have shorter life spans and poorer health.

But the North has huge poten­tial. Bring­ing the 3 North­ern regions up to the national aver­age of eco­nomic growth would mean we would be 43 bil­lion euros a year bet­ter off, and another 80,000 extra busi­nesses up and running.

So we have devel­oped a new approach called the North­ern Way to pro­mote jobs and growth across the 3 North­ern regions and in those cities.

The North­ern Way runs from Liv­er­pool, to Man­ches­ter, Leeds and then to Hull, and Newcastle.

In par­tic­u­lar, the North­ern Way will develop the strengths of their 8 city regions in which 90% of the pop­u­la­tion lives, so that they can co-ordinate pub­lic invest­ment plans across the 3 regions.

In the past, these city regions were the wealth cre­ators of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, but after decades of decline in which they com­peted against each other, now they are real­is­ing the power of pulling together.

The chal­lenge of cop­ing with de-industrialisation is seen across Europe.

In par­tic­u­lar, most of the 10 states which have recently joined the Euro­pean Union are from East­ern Europe, and they are tack­ling a legacy of dis­in­vest­ment in their cities.

And even within cities and coun­tries in West­ern Europe, there are pock­ets of severe depri­va­tion, con­cealed by appar­ently healthy over­all GDP figures.

So I believe that the expan­sion of the Euro­pean Union requires a new approach to urban and regional pol­icy across Europe which is flex­i­ble enough to cope with the com­plex­i­ties and dif­fer­ences of 25 nations.

For two gen­er­a­tions, a line was drawn across Europe, East and West. (We are only 200 metres away from the site of the Berlin Wall).

In the East, there was com­mand and con­trol. Uni­form poli­cies, with no democ­racy resulted in mis­ery for mil­lions of peo­ple. In parts of the West, a widen­ing gap between rich and poor, and decades of boom bust economics.

Now we’re in a new era where East and West are com­ing together, won­der­fully evi­dent here in Berlin. The expan­sion of the Euro­pean Union, to form 25 nations with 450 mil­lion peo­ple, has brought a new polit­i­cal order and a new com­mit­ment to do things differently.

The Euro­pean Union is a major force in the global trad­ing econ­omy. But there are huge chal­lenges in the new Europe, and one of the most impor­tant issues we face is ensur­ing the future pros­per­ity and sus­tain­abil­ity of our towns and cities.

I believe that the time is right to dis­cuss a com­mon approach to sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties, which reflects the rich diver­sity of Europe, and is more capa­ble of direct­ing invest­ment and Euro­pean finance where it can make the biggest impact on jobs, growth and qual­ity of life.

But instead 55% of the Euro­pean bud­get in 2013 will be spent on agri­cul­ture or on sub­si­dies for the rich­est coun­tries of the Euro­pean Union or in a huge abate­ment to com­pen­sate for the main­te­nance of the Com­mon Agri­cul­tural Pol­icy. A mod­ern Europe needs to deliver change rather than con­ser­va­tion, which is what the Com­mon Agri­cul­tural Pol­icy is largely about.

It can’t be right that 3 bil­lion peo­ple in the world live on less than 2 dol­lars a day — while each Euro­pean cow gets a CAP sub­sidy of 2 dol­lars 50 a day.

I’ve got noth­ing against cows, but quite frankly I’d rather spend more of that money on jobs and train­ing, infra­struc­ture and a decent qual­ity of life for peo­ple liv­ing in our most deprived communities.

Europe needs a mod­ern finan­cial frame­work to help our cities com­pete in a rapidly chang­ing global econ­omy — this is espe­cially true for the 10 new mem­ber states of the Euro­pean Union.

Many of these new mem­ber states are sig­nif­i­cantly poorer than the exist­ing mem­bers, and inevitably this means that struc­ture funds should be diverted to the East.

But in the more afflu­ent mem­ber states, there are still pock­ets of depri­va­tion which we need to help.

We’ve got to find ways for the richer coun­tries to spend more of their own money sup­port­ing their poorer com­mu­ni­ties meet­ing indus­trial change with­out it being stopped because the Com­mis­sion says it’s state aid, and it’s in con­flict with the regional struc­ture fund rules.

We’ve got to reform the way Europe spends its money. Europe should be invest­ing in sci­ence, skills and infra­struc­ture to help us cope with global change. That requires a com­pletely new way of look­ing at the pri­or­i­ties of Euro­pean resource expenditure.

That’s why, under the cur­rent UK Pres­i­dency of the Euro­pean Union, we’re devel­op­ing a clear, prac­ti­cal, Euro­pean approach to cre­at­ing sus­tain­able communities.

Our aim is to help nations, regions and cities across Europe deliver hous­ing, eco­nomic growth, social jus­tice and cleaner, safer, greener com­mu­ni­ties. This will require what has already begun – rethink­ing the pri­or­i­ties of the Euro­pean Struc­tural Funds.

So, dur­ing the UK Pres­i­dency of the Euro­pean Union, I’m bring­ing
28 nations together at a Min­is­te­r­ial ‘infor­mal’ meet­ing in Bris­tol in Decem­ber – to begin cre­at­ing an accord for sus­tain­able communities.

But a strange thing hap­pened when I asked my offi­cials to set up this Infor­mal. They said, “Who should we invite? The urban min­is­ters, or the regional min­is­ters, or the hous­ing min­is­ters, or the local gov­ern­ment ministers?”

This is because gov­ern­ments in Europe tend to oper­ate in silos — this is also reflected in the struc­ture of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion itself.

There is usu­ally no com­mon, united approach to urban pol­icy which brings together hous­ing, plan­ning, trans­port, skills, pub­lic ser­vices and regeneration.

And because the con­cept of sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties also applies just as much to the rural as well as urban set­ting, this caused even more dif­fi­culty, because rural min­is­ters are dif­fer­ent to urban or regional ministers.

This silo approach also applies at the Euro­pean level. In the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, there is no com­mit­tee which looks at the needs of cities in total and same goes for the Com­mis­sion, too.

And right now we don’t even have the words to express the idea of sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties across Europe. Indeed, the inter­pre­ta­tion and trans­la­tion of sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties in dif­fer­ent lan­guages causes its own difficulties.

Of course, peo­ple in main­land Europe recog­nise the ingre­di­ents of a sus­tain­able com­mu­nity. They know the impor­tance of a bet­ter qual­ity of life, social jus­tice and eco­nomic pros­per­ity — but they’ve not always pulled them together into a coher­ent, inte­grated approach.

So we are in the early stages of a fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sion about sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties in Europe. This dis­cus­sion will lead to new expres­sions, new poli­cies and new struc­tures to cre­ate stronger and more suc­cess­ful towns and cities – and rural towns and villages.

I believe that we should cre­ate a new Euro­pean Union regional pol­icy to help deliver our recent agree­ments — on eco­nomic pros­per­ity and social invest­ment agreed in the Lis­bon Accord, envi­ron­ment sus­tain­abil­ity in the Gothen­burg Accord, the urban acquis in Rot­ter­dam and effec­tive demo­c­ra­tic gov­er­nance, agreed in the War­saw Accord.

Now hope­fully we will develop a Bris­tol Accord which will put all these agree­ments into a Euro­pean Union sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties framework.

We can only achieve our aims if our poli­cies and struc­tures reflect the com­plex­ity of a Euro­pean Union of 25 states.

The cur­rent regional pol­icy is not designed to cope effec­tively with the diver­sity of nation sizes and the dif­fer­en­tials of wealth and poverty.

A regional pol­icy which is largely based on GDP is not sophis­ti­cated enough to cope with the fact that cities, regions or states which have a high aver­age GDP have within them pock­ets of severe depri­va­tion fac­ing indus­trial change.

So I believe that we need a debate about the future direc­tion of regional pol­icy, its financ­ing and how we can develop the pro­fes­sional skills needed to cre­ate sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties and strengthen eco­nomic pros­per­ity, use nat­ural resources effec­tively, enhance the envi­ron­ment and pro­mote social cohe­sion and inclusion.

To this end, Britain’s new national Acad­emy for Sus­tain­able Com­mu­ni­ties in Leeds will col­lab­o­rate with part­ners across Europe to improve skills and part­ner­ships between the pro­fes­sions to deliver sus­tain­able communities.

And we’ll be work­ing with the Euro­pean Invest­ment Bank to encour­age invest­ment in inno­v­a­tive projects that deliver sus­tain­able communities.

Of course, all Euro­pean mem­ber states face many prac­ti­cal chal­lenges to make sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties more of a real­ity, and we should all learn from our past suc­cesses and mistakes.

Sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties is a big idea for a big­ger Europe, a stronger Europe and a more demo­c­ra­tic Europe. Sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties is a vision which is excit­ing and will ben­e­fit more people.

It’s a belief that we can do things bet­ter. That we can — once again — cre­ate strong and sus­tain­able com­mu­ni­ties. Places that can stand the test of time and reflect the pride of cit­i­zens in their community.

This is a big idea for a big­ger Europe in which cities will be the dri­ving force for change.

As Daniel Burn­ham, the vision­ary plan­ner of Chicago, once said: “Make no lit­tle plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.…Make big plans…aim high in hope and work”.

Let’s make our cities thrive and pros­per. Let’s cre­ate places where peo­ple can aim high in hope and work. Let’s cre­ate sus­tain­able communities.

ENDS
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