The Balancing Act: Regeneration by the community, for the community

David Meecham: Hi there and welcome back to The Balancing Act, the podcast focused on the realities of delivering regeneration in the real world. Today we're looking at how community-led regeneration can be delivered at scale, combining local ownership, aligned capital and strong governance to create ambitious, inclusive town centre regeneration.

I'm thrilled to be joined by Paul Oster, who is part of Mayday Saxonvale and helping lead what is set to become the UK's largest community led town centre development in Frome. Paul plays a central role in shaping the development vision and leading the fundraising strategy. He lives in Frome and is passionate about the potential of social enterprise to deliver far greater long-term value than conventional regeneration models. So Paul, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Oster: Thank you. Great to be here.

David: So if we dive into Mayday Saxonvale for people who are listening, who won't be familiar with it, can you start by explaining what Mayday Saxonvale is and what you mean when you describe it as a community-led regeneration scheme?

Paul: Sure. So Mayday Saxonvale is now kind of constituted as a community benefit society.

It's probably worth just giving a bit of context as to what Mayday Saxonvale is a kind of response to the context in which it emerged. So Saxonvale itself, which is obviously part of our name, is a 12-acre site in the centre of Frome. And it's an ex-industrial site and it's really been the centre of employment in the town centre for centuries. But it has fallen into dereliction over recent decades - a really key development site in the town. It's the last chance to expand the town center in a town where recently another 1700 homes/development in the south of town has just been approved and many others. So it's a growing town and this is the last chance to expand that place where we come together to work, to play, to be together and so on. So the local authority had bought the site and then had sold it to another private developer and the town didn’t respond well to those plans that were brought forward. And so we therefore decided to kind of step into that void, so to speak, and to bring forward plans that we thought better represented what the community were looking for. And most importantly, delivering that through a different model of development than is traditional. So what do we describe that as, I guess is community led, which means we're trying to put the community in the driving seat of what happens, that the community owns the site, that the community develops the site. And we can talk a bit in a moment about the structures that enable that to happen and that the benefits, the value get retained within the site, within the community and deliver the best possible regeneration outcomes as a result.

David: For the community. So it is as you say, driven by the community for the community. So one observation from me in the way that you summarised that was you decided that the community would come together. How did those conversations come about?

Paul: It emerged from a small group of us developing the plans and indeed the owner of the, Siltman in the site, Damon Moore had started to develop those plans and we then developed them further. Then we put it out to public consultation and gathered a lot of views and then we took that forward into a full outline planning application and we really built the support gradually from the ground up. People started to believe that this is actually possible and that these are these kinds of plans that really deliver what the community needs are possible. That’s centered on affordable homes, workspace, which is desperately needed in Frome and also community owned assets and community centric public realm.

David: When you say consultation, what did that look like for you? What did that look like for the community? How did he go about generating that interest and that buy-in and that support?

Paul: So we had a formal consultation event and this was before we then finalised the plan. So it wasn't at the last stage that we ran that consultation event. And then just lots of other informal conversations across town about what people were looking for. The result was that whilst all the main groups and the people submitting objections, the previous application was flipped on its head and our application received overwhelming support. Over 1500 supportive comments for a planning application is kind of unheard of. A lot of the town watched the planning committee when it was approved online. I think it was one of the most exciting planning committees there has been, which is maybe not against the high benchmark.

David: In terms of the community, so thinking about the fact you've gone through planning committee, you've got the support. The community presumably is made up of a number of different types of individuals all seeking maybe a different aim or have different objectives. So how do you go about corralling all of that together? Cause it sounds like that's quite a task. You’ve talked about a consultation process, but presumably you've got Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who may have a particular view. Perhaps you could talk about that for a bit.

Paul: Yeah. So that's so first of all, we just need to acknowledge that's no simple thing. And community is a really diverse group of people with different desires and needs. If we're successful and we have to revise our outline planning, we would go through detailed planning. If we were doing that, we haven't have an intention to run a kind of co-design process where we'll have multiple ways that people can interact with the design, the final design process so that we can really benefit from all of that expertise from across the community as to what should take place. So I think that's one of the key ways of taking it forward. And I think it's also recognising that there are lots of people who always kind of come forward in a community and share their views very robustly. And so we are going to need to be mindful that we need to go out into the community and actually seek people to use more than simply wait for them to come to us. Also to create an environment in which they believe that if they actually come forward, that they're actually going to get listened to. The other way that, from a governance perspective, the other way to do this is that we set ourselves up as a community benefit society. So if we can become a member and it's a democratic organisation. So it gives a mechanism for a democratic process to sit within this organisation. So it can be more representative of the community it's serving.

David: It sounds like such a different approach to regeneration than we've considered in the conversations that we've had on this particular podcast over the last few weeks. I'm fascinated to learn how will this develop over time because it sounds really complicated. We all know how opinionated some people can be. As you said, you've got some people who are coming forward with very robust ideas and I'm struck by the challenge associated with you and your colleagues in weaving your way through that to end up with an end scheme. I think one of the things that has really struck me and you've spoken about the setting up of a community benefit society is the alternative way in which you are seeking funding.

Paul: Yeah. And I think it's important to say the stage that we're at, which is that we've not gone through to a final detailed planning application. And we've got some quite strong indicative interest from various institutions investing at that stage with kind of development equity to unlock the actual development. And we find ourselves in a position which I think a lot of community groups of such as us find ourselves, which is that getting through the hurdle to that stage and to the access of that capital. So we need to get from kind of where we are now pre-planning to that stage. and we did have a previous committed funding partner last year which unfortunately fell through. And so it is definitely challenging to get through this point of the funding cycle, this stage. The approach we're now taking after pivoting is that we've got a £1.2 million loan secured from Resonance who are community builders fund, that's the only funding package kind of coming from central government for community led development. And I think it's the largest they've given out to any one organisation. And then on top of that, we're going to run a community share sale very shortly and taking those two amounts together, we would then make an offer to the council alongside others that may be on making offers to buy the site to take us through planning and then to bring in new investments.

David: And how much do you think that share sale is going to raise?

Paul: Our target will be £1.5 million. So it's an ambitious target and that reflects the scale of what we're doing. The community benefits society model of acquiring things for the community like pubs or community centres or a collection of homes, is a tried and tested model. And what we're doing is taking that massively up a notch to this kind of scale of regeneration of an area that is instrumental in the future of the town and its town centre. And so reflective of that is that we're going to need to raise more money than maybe a traditional share sale. Although there have been quite substantial ones.

David: Indeed. That community led regeneration by the community for the community means so much more when the community actually has a financial stake in the thing that is going to ultimately be delivered.

Paul: It is kind of the perfect expression of community led development. we have, politicians up and down the country saying we want communities to take pride in their place, to take control of their place. I think it'd be quite an amazing thing if the community bought its own town centre, developed its own town centre. What would that mean both for that site itself, but also for what it would mean for the psychology of the town for that sense of empowerment and “what can we do”? Well, if you can do that, what else can a community do to look after itself and take control of its own destiny?

David: Yeah, well, exactly. Filling the community with what the community wants for the future and really thinking about the legacy of the community. In other conversations that we've been having with guests, it's been very much around collaboration between the public sector as an amorphous blob and the private sector as an amorphous blob. And we've been talking about it in theoretical terms. Whereas the interesting bit to this conversation is that we're talking about a real-life community and we're talking about potentially real-life community led regeneration which has to be championed.

Paul: And I think regeneration it is by definition, a real act of long-term thinking. It's regenerating a place that is supposed to last for generations. And who's better to take control of that long-term thinking than the actual community within which it sits, that lives and breathes that place that knows that place intimately.

David: Very interesting point actually. in our first episode, I had a conversation with Nicola Mathers, the CEO of Future of London, an organisation that shares best practice across London boroughs. And one of the concepts that we have been talking to her about is around regenerative partnerships and what they're intended to be are partnerships that are contractually regenerating themselves over very long periods of time involving legacy individuals within that partnership. And particularly from a community perspective, thinking about succession within that community to ensure that the partnership ethos continues, but the partnership itself regenerates itself in order to continue the delivery of the ultimate objective of what that partnership is. And I think the way that you just described regeneration really sits quite well within that concept that Nicola has been championing.

One of the things that we've spoken about, as I've said previously, is collaboration between public sector and private sector as amorphous blobs. Talk to us a bit about your experience of where you are with Mayday Saxonvale and the council and how that's going.

Paul: I think our perspective has been that a private developer sitting on its own trying to develop a piece of land as regeneration is not going to be a successful model because ultimately that private developer is looking to make the highest returns for its investors and shareholders. That's perfectly natural and normal. And to do that, private housing is what's going to deliver that. And typically regeneration outcomes, commercial space, other community space, community outcome, run contrary to that. So there's that tension between what they're trying to achieve. And now that can be unlocked if you have a partnership, a joint venture between a local authority and the council where there's a commercial dynamic that's being set up to ensure that the private developer does deliver those regeneration outcomes. At the moment, what the council in our area, Somerset Council, is doing is they're going to put the site on the market. They just have done. And so they'll be opening up to the highest bidder to take the site. And then it's over to them to deliver those regeneration outcomes. We suggested, carefully, we think that's not going to be successful. So we're an organisation like a local authority who holds those regeneration objectives absolutely at the core of our organisation. It's our mission. We have a constitution and asset lock that stops us from even conceivably deviating from that mission. So we think there's a few different paths to deliver regeneration. One of them is a joint venture between, a private company, private developer and the local authority or the local authority delivers it themselves, or we as an organisation, similar to a local authority, deliver a site because we as a community led developer again, are holding those objectives front and centre. And we've also said to the council that we're entirely open to collaborations between ourselves and them to deliver and that could be a structured contract that gives them a level of protection, but also enables us to unlock the movement from where we are now to completing detailed planning. Or indeed a more formal joint venture if that's appropriate. Something has to be architected. Put those regeneration objectives front and centre. It’s not just down to us to answer that question. The local authority needs to answer that question to themselves and everyone has to be asking themselves, “is this approach that's now being taken forward going to kind of achieve that?”

David: My statement on that would be that you as an organisation presumably therefore need to get yourself in the best possible place that you can in order to be able to submit the most compelling bid to the authority on the basis that they've put the site on the market and have opened it up to best bids or potentially working with another bidder possibly?

Paul: Yeah. that's a tough one because I think there would naturally be a tension between that because a private developer is going to look to essentially extract value for quite normal reasons from the site and that is going to run contrary to our objectives to recycle profits. And I think we also, to be honest, that right now we're in a very tough market with construction costs at relatively stagnant values. This is not an environment in which there's a lot of value to be divvying up. If this is going to be a successful scheme, it's going to need to retain the absolute maximum possible value within the scheme and position itself to bring in additional grant as well, which we can do and others can't, to make sure this is the best possible scheme for Frome in its future.

David: It does strike me that, yes, I hear what you're saying about the private sector potentially taking too much value out of the scheme. But isn't there another way of thinking that in that, in fact, it would benefit the private sector to have you on board as the community voice and helping them with co-design to achieve a scheme that the private sector would be able to convince the local authority is going to be delivered through discussions with the council that they may be able to help you with.

Paul: I think the challenge is that if we walk through a process like that with a private developer, we would, quite naturally be suggesting things, which would just run contrary to their objectives over and over again, We'd be saying, well, actually let's increase the affordable housing. That challenge is going to play out.  Maybe now just responding to one of your earlier points about, we've got to position ourselves as best we can. I think that's absolutely true. And I think, we’re already demonstrating through this money from Resonance that we can bring in additional value into this site that no other developer can by securing this money from central government. We've absolutely got to succeed with this share sale so that we could put forward a more compelling offer. But I think we've also got a track record and the work to date which means we're very well positioned to actually get this site going and get this site delivered. We’ve already got an outline planning application, which we're building upon. We have all of the technical team, the architectural team in place to ready to go and most importantly, and I think this is really important when you're looking at how community led development like this can actually work is we've also got, Stories, who are a purpose led developer. And I think you had one of the founders, Paul Clark on this show before, and they're in place to act as development manager to help us run the actual development. And I think it's important to say that whilst we've got, and we often kind of phrase it like this, we've got quite an unconventional objective, which is we're trying to achieve maximised community outcomes. As an actual process, there's nothing particularly unconventional about how we're going to bring the site forward from planning, residential sales, using that money to fund other phases. We’re not revolutionaries in that sense. So I think we can put forward something to the council, which is really credible in terms of simply delivery, giving them their land receipt and delivering what they actually want to see on that site.

David: I've just latched onto something you said about, you feel that your objectives and drivers are perhaps less traditional or more novel on the basis that you are community first. Wouldn't it be great if actually every regeneration scheme was actually community first and that what was delivered was what the community actually needed and wanted as opposed to what somebody in an ivory tower may think is what the community wants? That's probably aspirational.

You’ve just talked about recycling of profits. Could you tell us a bit more about how that operates?

Paul: So the intention is, I guess this scheme, it's not going to be by its nature by scale, a multi-phase scheme, is that we would certainly need external investment into that first one or two phases. But as we take our share of the profits from those phases, that forms our investment in the subsequent phase. And so we're quite open with potential funders that we're looking to exit them as soon as possible so that we are now taking a hundred percent of the profits from later residential sales. And therefore, again, just retaining as much as possible of the value that's generated from the scheme in the scheme to deliver those outcomes that we're looking for.

David: If I was to say to you “there is another community somewhere else in the country that's starting on their journey to community-led regeneration”, are there any lessons that you feel that you've learned that you think you could share with them?

Paul: That's a really good question. we haven't actually bought the site yet. We're still early in this journey. We've got virtually no precedents. We've got Coin Street in London, there's Hastings Commons in Hastings. They're great inspirations for us, especially Hastings, which is more recent. But other than that, there is a level of making it up as we go along and being the first makes it just all the more challenging trying to do this. The funding and the investment institutions in this country are not really set up for us perfectly. We think they're quite well set up for when we're at post-detail planning, but this first stage, it's very challenging. If I was talking to central government politicians at this moment, I think there needs to be some thought about: how can you enable this model to take root and to take life at an earlier stage and compete and what do you need to put in place to do that? One of the things is maybe when a site comes on the market, there has to be - given some time, maybe six months or something - to enable the community to mobilise because they're not sitting there ready as a development company. They need to get themselves in order and get themselves, get themselves ready. And then I think also just more funding available to specifically fund these kinds of projects. Because ultimately we believe this model essentially unlocks a sort of value that can't be unlocked otherwise. When a social enterprise model is given the kickstart funding to start it, it can then deliver far greater outcomes because it is so laser focused and aligned on those objectives and it's not distracted by anything else. I think there's something to unlock here. We’re the first coming forward at this kind of scale recently. So we're having to try and put in place those things that unlock it. But we think there's huge amounts of opportunities for communities up and down the country to take this model. We just need to make it maybe a bit easier for them to do so.

David: I'm sure there is a lot to learn for other communities from what you're going through. And I'm sure that people will be noticing with interest how things develop over time. Won't they? I would hope.  And one of the things we've mentioned elsewhere is, is talking about whether there is some form of playbook that can be generated to share knowledge and that was in relation to the operation of partnerships, but there's something around community-led regeneration and potentially some kind of playbook for communities looking at a similar type of proposal. Of course, every scheme is different. Every scheme is site-specific. Every scheme depends upon who the authority is, who owns the land, all that kind of stuff.

So Paul, We've obviously just gone through a number of local elections. There's been a fair amount in the press about change of hands of some of those, that local government. Has that impacted you in any way?

Paul: So interestingly, we didn't have local elections this year, I think, because the formation of the Somerset Unitary Authority thy are actually going to be next year. So on this occasion, it didn't impact us.

David: Something to look forward to that. Before we wrap up, let's just rewind a bit. Each guest, I'd been asking how it is that we come to talk to them now. Why is it that you're at the table talking about Mayday Saxonvale? What's your journey been?

Paul: I’d not long moved to Frome and Mayday Savonvale had already been formed, so I was definitely, joining something that had already started. I suppose just in a moment, it just hit me as kind of crazy that this incredibly important site was going to be taken forward in a way that no one seems to want it to happen. And another group had come up with some indicative plans as to what that could be but it just seemed crazy and it just seemed like something that had to be explored. And once you start exploring something like this, you kind of get on the train and off you go. And then it just evolves from there. And I think if we think back actually to what we were talking about, what would you say to other community group, I think unfortunately, it's just really hard and you've just got to start and then just navigate as you go and just keep going and move to the next step. And I think that's the only way things like this happen.

David: Just using your analogy of getting on the regeneration train. Are you the driver of the regeneration train? Are you the conductor of the regeneration train?

Paul: I'm definitely one of the key drivers, the train. So we've got a board of nine individuals across the Frome. Myself and Holly Lawton are the two executive directors and we're definitely driving it forward. But yes, I suppose I am the driver of the train, but with a great team around us.

David: The one final question is... Is there somebody in the regeneration sector who you particularly look at as aspirational or inspirational? You've obviously mentioned Hastings and Coin Street.

Paul: I probably would use Jess Steele who with a team that led Hastings Common. I think she's definitely probably our number one inspiration because she just kept going and I think when we went to visit them, what really struck us was just the real entrepreneurial spirit that coursed through that organisation and how they did it. And I think that's what we really want to bring to this. So it's we don't want to become some heavily bureaucratic organisation. It should be part of the community. Should be quite organic and entrepreneurial. And that's really how you get great things. And I think that's trying to take something from the private sector and say, well, you can be entrepreneurial and you can be commercial, but you can do it in a social enterprise, in a community container or vehicle. And I think she's a massive inspiration in that regard.

David: Thank you. Well, thanks very much for coming on the podcast today.

Paul: Yeah, it's been a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

David: Thanks for listening to The Balancing Act. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your usual podcast platform. To hear more conversations about shaping NextGen cities, visit TLT.com or follow us on LinkedIn.