The local effect: Darren’s story

When Fresh Horizons managing director Mike McCusker first drove into Brackenhall, he thought: ‘Bloody hell, it’s all boarded up.’

At the time much of the estate was about to be demolished. Since then, he has witnessed a ‘radical transformation’ of the area. The transformation might be most obvious in the buildings and environment, but for Mike there has also been a dramatic change in opportunities for local people.

It wasn’t just the negative things that struck him. The other thing that leapt out was the strong sense of community. ‘You’re driving down the road, there’s a car in front of you, all of a sudden he sees someone he knows driving the other way, so they stop, wind down the windows and have a chat,’ he said. ‘There is constant beeping as people see people they know even if they’ve seen each other 20 times that day.’

The community was far more close-knit than any Mike had experienced previously and it strengthened his determination that Fresh Horizons should make a genuine difference in people’s lives. ‘This isn’t playing around, this is local people,’ he said. ‘If we can get local people to identify local issues and address them, then that’s something really powerful.’

A friendly space: the Chestnut Centre library

As described in this post, Fresh Horizons has gone from employing two people in 2002 to a staff of almost 70. Nearly all these employees live locally: 85 per cent of them even live and work in the same postcode.

The result is that people in Deighton and Brackenhall are getting the opportunity not just to work, but also to develop and move on in their jobs. A case in point is Darren Thomas, whose career at the Fresh Horizons base in the Chestnut Centre parallels an important change in attitude among council employees from outside the area.

Darren is now the senior customer information adviser at the Chestnut Centre and manages all the front of house staff. However, he started out as what Mike calls ‘basically a bouncer’.

He was taken on when Kirklees Council’s neighbourhood housing office moved into the centre. ‘They’d come from a fortress and wanted to try to replicate that fortress but that didn’t fit with the ethos of the building,’ says Mike.

‘So we said no, you can’t have bulletproof screens, no you can’t have wire cages, you’re just going to work out of an office because no-one will shame themselves in front of kids and neighbours, you’ll have a different experience here.

‘However Unison argued that they wanted some security so we had poor old Darren, bored out of his brain waiting for nothing to happen, until it clocked with them that this was an expense they didn’t need, and Darren moved to be a customer information adviser, went through all the training, then took on a deputy role.

‘So you have a local person, in a relatively short time, moving into a management role and on the management team of Fresh Horizons. And everyone knows who Darren is, knows his background and where he’s come from, and I think that sends a powerful message to local people.’

And as Darren points out, the effects extend beyond the walls of the Chestnut Centre. ‘When I was younger places like this wouldn’t have existed because they would have got broken into and vandalised,’ he says. ‘When I was younger strangers wouldn’t be able to walk up and down. It’s a lot safer than it was when I was growing up.’

Fresh Horizons - a case of local empathy

Men in black: Fresh Horizons makes a point of employing locals

Allowing local social enterprise Fresh Horizons to run the Chestnut Centre has been a crucial factor in changing Deighton and Brackenhall for the better.

Not everybody was happy with the idea in the early days. There was an assumption that public services would and should be delivered directly by Kirklees Council.

DBI chief officer Andi Briggs remembers the challenge of changing people’s opinions. ‘At the time it was very difficult to get the wider political approval because it was seen as a big risk,’ he says. ‘There were also some issues with unions and others – it was seen as the slippery slope to undermining public sector jobs.’

The fact that European money was being used to fund the centre’s construction gave DBI some leverage and when it opened in 2005 Fresh Horizons took on the management of the facility. Fresh Horizons has a wide remit but its key role is to provide sustainable employment, mainly through contracts to deliver public services. It achieves this by working in partnership with Kirklees Council and other voluntary and private sector organisations.

Andi Briggs believes this commitment to giving responsibility to local people is crucial to the long term success of a regeneration initiative. ‘There has to be real engagement and investment in local people,’ he says. ‘You have to give them real, proper assets and buildings to manage that are of significant value and status so they’re not the fringe things – they are real empowerment.

‘At the same time you have to support them in such a way that they stand or fall independently of us. In that sense they are not part of the programme directly because otherwise the risk is they go when the programme ends.’

When it was launched in 2002, Fresh Horizons had just two employees. The credibility it has gained through successfully running the Chestnut Centre has enabled it to expand to the point where it employs almost 70 local people and last year had a turnover of £1.3m.

One of Fresh Horizons’ first ventures, which still continues today, was to recruit and train local people to deliver research projects for the public sector. The approach has been cited by Ofsted as an example of best practice in using adult education to boost community renewal.

Fresh Horizons also runs a building maintenance company, covering all aspects of the building trade, from repairs to refurbishment, and is recognised by industry accreditation bodies to help experienced workers gain recognised qualifications in their trades.

It has won Ministry of Justice funding for a project to reduce the number of burglaries against vulnerable people, and is working with the police, Kirklees Council and Victim Support to fit security equipment to 1,000 houses and flats across the area each year.

In recent years Fresh Horizons has extended its work to focus on empty private properties, seeking to bring clusters of empty homes back into use to prevent areas falling into decline and turning problem properties into opportunities for housing, employment and training.

As Fresh Horizons managing director Mike McCusker says, though, this is more than just a series of projects.

‘If you take the library and information centre that’s a contracted service from the local authority. But if you look at the way we deliver it, it’s local people delivering a service to other local people. It’s about the empathy you get.’

A new approach: The Chestnut Centre

From carnivals to community centres, the range of benefits that have sprung from the community dividend and DBI’s work in attracting investment are impressive.

If anything could be said to embody those benefits, it is probably the Chestnut Centre. Built with capital grants from the European Union and the Government, it opened in 2005 on the site of the former Christchurch Woodhouse school and is home to a range of facilities whose benefits ripple out into the surrounding community.

The Chestnut Centre houses a library and information centre, a neighbourhood housing office, an IT centre, a credit union, a children’s centre, a nursery and a café. There are health clinics and training courses, meeting rooms to hire and secure, affordable units for new businesses to rent. Staff from different organisations work together under the same roof, so local people are no longer pushed from pillar to post to sort out problems.

These tangible features are vital, but perhaps even more important is the sense of ownership and trust that has built up around the centre. DBI chief officer Andi Briggs describes this as ‘the bedrock of the DBI achievements’.

Prior to the initiative, there was a strong sense of hostility and resentment towards public services in the area. Housing officers, for example, dealt with the public behind reinforced screens, making it obvious that local people were regarded with fear and suspicion.

Much of that has changed now. Darren Thomas, the Chestnut Centre’s senior customer information officer, says: ‘This building is seven years old and it still looks brand new. I’ve told the children in the library, if you’re smashing up the library you’re smashing up your library... They understand that and they look after the books and the library.’

Andi Briggs says the need to bring in services that were accessible and appropriate was identified very early on. The key factor was to make sure local people were engaged and involved at every level of provision.

For this reason, the building is managed not by the council but by the social enterprise Fresh Horizons, which makes a point of employing local people wherever possible. ‘This sent a very clear message,’ says Andi. ‘It said, we’re investing in local people. It wasn’t a shiny new council building where we bussed everyone in from the leafy suburbs to run it.’

The community dividend: how did it work?

New homes helped to finance the community dividend

For some, the demolition of homes on the Brackenhall estate was a traumatic experience, involving the loss of neighbours and memories. For others, it was a chance for a new start.


Essential to that new start in Deighton and Brackenhall was a pot of money known as the community dividend. Instead of putting the money from the land deal with Southdale Homes back into Kirklees Council’s coffers, the value of the land would be earmarked for the local community. On top of that, if the sales values on each phase of the development were higher than forecast, half the additional profits would go into the community pot.


When the original deal was done in 2002, it was expected that the community dividend would amount to £4m over the lifetime of the development. In the end, because the development was mainly done at a time of rising property prices, DBI gained nearly twice that.


Chris Harris, chairman and former managing director of Southdale Homes, explains, ‘We did the development in four stages and every time we went to acquire a piece of land from the council the valuations were based on the prices we’d achieved in the previous phase, so over time the price of the land was staircasing upwards. 


‘If we did better than the sales forecast the council gained 50% and we gained 50% on an “overage agreement”, so there was an incentive for all parties to do the best we could in terms of sales value.’


At the start there was no guarantee the new homes would sell. Southdale insisted on selling the first homes, built near the Asda superstore at the entrance to the site, at low prices - only £70,000 each. That created the momentum for the rest of the scheme.


The community dividend was a novel idea at the time, but was approved by central government ‘on the understanding that the focus is firmly on providing the community the opportunity to become involved in the regeneration of their communities and neighbourhoods’. Guidelines were drawn up by Kirklees Council to ensure the dividend was matched by funds from other sources.


The dividend helped fund activities such as Deighton Carnival and the creation of the Chestnut Centre in Sheepridge. But DBI and the council recognised it would never be enough to change the area on its own.


As DBI chief officer Andi Briggs, says: ‘We haven’t just sat on that pot, we’ve used it to bring in other investment into the neighbourhood. We’ve been very clear it should always be enhancing mainstream provision, not replacing it.’

Addressing local concerns

Once the demolition plans were agreed, there was no going back, as far as the council was concerned. As neighbourhood housing manager Peter Beck put it: ‘We had a vision of the estate being radically different to what it was then. The only way we could see of doing that was to go forward with the plans.’

That was the bottom line, but everything else could be negotiated. Local councillor Jean Calvert asked that every resident could have an ‘individual care package’. Whatever they wanted in terms of making the move easier should, as far as possible, be done.

Despite the huge opposition to the plans, in the end not one tenant was served with an eviction notice. In fact, Mr Beck remembers writing just one warning letter – something that he puts down to letting every individual have their say and then responding.

‘We moved people to Wales, to Barnsley and to Bridlington,’ he said. ‘We even had one person saying he didn’t want to move because he didn’t want grass in his front garden, so I flagged it for him.’

A key character in the success of this scheme was caretaker Mick Lockwood. So impressed were the tenants with his willingness to help them that they gave him a special ‘thank you’ present of £100 in gift vouchers.

A report in the Huddersfield Examiner in August 2003 sung Mr Lockwood’s praises. ‘He helps tenants on the day they move out of their old homes and into their new ones,’ wrote reporter Jane Yelland. ‘He takes off internal doors if they belong to the tenants, digs up plants they want to take with them and makes sure plumbers, electricians and joiners are there when needed.’

The idea for the gift had come from a group of elderly people who had had to move as a result of the plans. Mostly in their 90s, they had been rehoused in purpose-built bungalows and were overwhelmed by Mr Lockwood’s exceptional helpfulness.

Looking back at the days of demolition, Cllr Calvert believes this kind of responsiveness was what ensured the scheme’s success. ‘We have worked with tenants rather than at them and I think that’s been the beauty of it all,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t about dumping people - it was about giving people what they wanted as much as possible.’

Read the Huddersfield Examiner report here

Some of the new bungalows built for elderly Brackenhall residents

A campaign of opposition

Demolition underway

Once tenants began to realise the scale of the proposed demolition, they were quick to react. They formed a group called Brackenhall Community Action Group and carried out their own survey of residents. This, they claimed, showed that the majority of people who would lose their homes in phase one of the demolition plans actually wanted to stay there. 

The group called a public meeting and more than 200 people squeezed into Brackenhall Community Centre, where representatives of Southdale Homes and Kirklees Council were repeatedly booed and heckled.

When the plans came up for approval at Kirklees council, more than 100 protestors marched to the town hall and packed into the council meeting room.

Action group members handed a petition to the housing chair, Graham Simpson, calling for the demolition to be scrapped, but the plans were approved unanimously.

Much of the opposition to the plans focused on the fact that some of the most popular homes were due to be demolished, rather than just the vacant houses. However, Southdale Homes said this approach was necessary in order to build houses that would be attractive to private buyers. 

Peter Beck, the council's neighbourhood housing regeneration manager, has vivid memories of the opposition. ‘They actually used to hang effigies of me from lampposts,’ he said.

The bulldozers moved onto the estate in October 2002, after months of delays. They were met by angry residents waving placards. The anger was fuelled by the number of times some tenants had had to move while waiting for permanent rehousing. Others were furious at the poor condition of their temporary housing, and there was particular concern for elderly residents, some of whom had lived on the estate for decades.

‘It wasn’t what they were doing but the way they were doing it,’ said Margaret Lees, who led the action group. Mrs Lees claims the council was not clear about the number of homes they were planning to demolish. She had thought it was only the empty homes that would come down, not ones that people were still living in. ‘We didn’t want to lose our homes just so they could build posh houses,’ she said.

In total, 600 houses came down. Peter Beck is adamant that this large-scale demolition was the only way to enable DBI to achieve what it did. Without the deal with Southdale Homes, there would have been no money for the improvements the estate desperately needed.

‘I can still walk round Brackenhall and no-one gobs me because we were determined to get the best results for the local people,’ he says. ‘ I can hold my head up high because I know we’ve done a bloody good job here.’

Despite the strength of feeling on the estate, in the end not one person had to be evicted. This may have been due to the very careful attention that was given to each individual tenant.

A drastic proposal

Bleak outlook: the estate before demolition

With the action plan in place, DBI faced its biggest challenge: how to redevelop the area’s housing stock. Meeting the challenge would lead to a massive and controversial programme of demolition.

The Brackenhall estate had a huge over-supply of two-bedroom houses which were even more difficult to let than the rest. In addition, the council wanted to create a greater mix of tenures, with more homes for private ownership. At the end of the 1990s, only 17 homes had been bought by their tenants, a figure well below the national average.

In 1999, a development brief was produced and potential development partners were invited to submit proposals for a partnership arrangement to ‘remodel areas of void housing, develop land sites, carry out environmental improvements and provide some of the community facilities’.

Eventually, Kirklees council struck a deal with developer Southdale Homes, whereby much of the Brackenhall estate would be demolished and the land used to build new private housing. The land would be transferred to Southdale and as homes were sold, a portion of the profits would be kept to reinvest in the local area - a ‘community dividend’ that would eventually be worth £8m.

Once again local people were asked for their views. In October 2000, Kirklees Housing Services carried out a house to house survey of the Brackenhall estate. They interviewed 393 residents out of a possible 500, asking them how they felt about the possible demolition of some of the houses.

The result was overwhelmingly in favour of some level of demolition. Only 7 per cent thought things should stay as they were, while 48 per cent thought at least half the estate should be knocked down.

Southdale Homes, on the other hand, wanted something more radical. Their original proposal was to demolish the entire estate, replacing it with a mix of private homes and commercial premises. The eventual agreement, signed in December 2001, was to demolish 600 homes, beginning with those nearest the upmarket area of Fixby on the other side of Bradford Road. The idea, Southdale said, was to ‘borrow value’ from more affluent areas to attract private buyers.

But even at this stage it was clear that a substantial number of local residents wanted to stay put. So Southdale dropped its plans for commercial premises, leaving an enclave of 180 council homes in the new development.

This wasn’t enough for the scheme’s opponents. ‘People said we should knock some houses down but they didn’t like it when it was their house,’ recalls Peter Beck, neighbourhood housing regeneration manager.