Workshop F: Under One Roof Is there scope to develop multi-use buildings in Bedfordshire?   (Workshop report by Alex Francis – Beds & Luton Economic Development Partnership)

I want you to picture a typical village – the church on the village green; the pub; the village hall; the school if you are lucky; the shop and post office if you are even luckier….all very idyllic.

It’s Tuesday morning at 10.00 am. The church is empty; the pub is closed; the village hall has a pre-school playgroup in the main hall but the smaller room is empty; the shop has two people in it, both buying stamps. Mrs Jones is at the bus stop talking to Mr Smith and Mrs Brown. Mrs Jones is catching the bus into the nearest town for a chiropody appointment; Mrs Brown is going into town to call into the Town Hall to pay her rent and Mr Smith has decided to visit the market. Mr Thompson stops in his car to have a chat and offers them all a lift in. The bus goes into town empty.

Now think about the social events in that village. On Friday evening there is a fund raising quiz for the village hall. On Saturday there is a fun run raising fund towards a new church roof. On Sunday lunchtime there is a barbecue being organised by the PTA to raise funds for the school.

So – we have buildings which are often empty for large parts of the week; we have lots of volunteers all raising funds to maintain those buildings and we have people all decamping to the nearest town to access basic services.

In 2000, the White Paper ‘Our Countryside: the future – a fair deal for rural England’ advocated (and not for the first time) the joint use of a wide range of premises. It gives the example of the role of churches – it points out that there are 9,000 parish churches in rural areas which are listed buildings for which the repair costs are largely borne by the congregation and suggests that:

could all use the church. This was 7 years ago and I can trace documents that go much further back than that suggesting the same thing. More recently, the Countryside Agency’s ‘The Pub is the Hub’ is another example of an initiative that is designed to encourage the joint use of buildings, in this case pubs!

We can all see that the joint use of building makes sense, particularly when combined with a profit-making element. However, THERE HAS TO BE A CATALYST TO MAKE THAT FIRST STEP TOWARDS FIRST PROVISION. We are talking in many cases about the possibility of combining statutory, voluntary and privately run organisations.

Taking the idea a step further, there are a couple of initiatives at the moment that could actually lead towards a community setting up a multi-use centre from scratch.

The first, which I will mention in passing, is the £30 million fund set up by government to encourage and enable local authorities to pass over capital assets such as land and buildings to local communities. We know unfortunately that most publicly owned buildings are NOT in our small rural communities, but there are some library buildings, for example, and land, that might make this a possibility.

More immediately, EEDA has recently launched its Building Communities Fund, which is a fund for communities to purchase and develop buildings and land. The Fund is worth £3 million a year for two years commencing April 2007. It will provide capital grants of between £250,000 and £750,000 for community owned organisations within the counties of the East of England to purchase assets.

The Fund will focus on the development of sustainable, catalytic community assets. It aims to support genuinely transformational projects with an ability to achieve financial sustainability rather than small scale local projects with limited potential.

SO – are Bedfordshire’s rural communities ready for a radical change in approach to service delivery? What are the barriers? How does this need to progress?? Is it a non-starter?

Workshop discussion summary

What’s going on already?

Children’s Centres
 Mixture of new builds & using existing facilities. Bringing different services for families eg health, Job Centre Plus, administration, information together. Different phases of programme – moving into more rural areas. Provision based on how many Super Output Areas in Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) top 50-70%. Transport is a reoccurring issue – had not talked to BRCC re community transport brokerage so opportunity there.

Libraries
Services provided through a balance of static and mobile, includes touring & events, training, business advice and information services.

Rural Business Advice
 New Business Link services covering East of England region. Access points for Bedfordshire will be Bedford and Luton, so rural areas to be covered by outreach / roaming advisors. Not much information at present on workshops or training to be available.

Other potential uses

• Banking
• Citizen’s Advice
• IAG
• Tourist information
• Exhibitions
• Arts, events
• Public administration
• GP services / Health – PCT needs to look at multi-use new builds
• Adult education, training
• Enterprise – meeting, storage, display space, networking
• Sports facilities.

Under-used Resources

Opportunities

• £30m fund mentioned in govt White Paper for community land and buildings
• £3m Building Communities Fund
• EEDA Capital Asset development programme
• Parish planning

Could carbon neutrality be the hook to bring all this together?

Issues / barriers

• Lack of joined-up thinking
• Services wanting (or needing) exclusive use of premises
• Readiness to attempt this
• Services limiting need to travel
• Current demand v potential / imagined demand – hard to calculate
• Can buildings be extended or refurbished – English Heritage / conservation issues
• Ongoing overheads & maintenance costs – sustainability.

Actions

Mechanisms for developing multi-use facilities
Need to find ways of improving representation and communication, perhaps through;

• Local Area Agreements
• Local Strategic Partnerships
• Parish Plans.

Issue – how does the findings and proposed actions from the latter feed into the former for strategy & policy development?

Children Centres are meeting with a variety of agencies and mapping needs. RCC sends news out to Parish Councils – use as the lynchpin.

Immediate solutions
Individual partners can begin dialogues with one another eg., Children’s Centres and RCC. Propose RCC & BLEDP (IiC) workshop in 2-3 months time.

Key issues to feed back to plenary session:
•	Communication between organisations operating separately inadequate
•	Representation, feeding in local needs to LSP / LAA level
•	Practical barriers of modernising buildings.