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.

How did it start?

By the end of the 1990s, Deighton and Brackenhall were labouring under a massive stigma. Two hundred council homes stood empty and, says Peter Beck, the neighbourhood housing manager, ‘We couldn’t rent them for love nor money.’

Jean Calvert, who has represented the area since 1992, recalls holding surgeries where people would tell her they were desperate for a council house but there was no way they would move to Brackenhall.

The council was haemorrhaging money in lost rents. Something had to change and the first step on the long road to a new Deighton and Brackenhall was to talk with local people.

Two meetings sparked what would become the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative. The first was held in September 1997 and involved representatives from council services and other agencies such as the police and the NHS. The Deighton ward ‘Getting There’ conference followed at the end of the month, with representation from a wide range of community organisations. Many of them gave presentations on the work they were doing in and around the area.

People attending the conference were invited to give their opinions on what should happen in the area. The word cloud above was created from the notes made during these feedback sessions and gives a sense of the main areas of concern.

Following these two meetings, the DBI was launched. It comprised 10 action groups:

· housing and environment

· multi-agency building projects (including welfare benefits)

· childcare

· employment and training

· crime and drugs

· health

· education

· sport and leisure

· youth

· older people

These groups set up meetings and consultation exercises in order to prepare individual action plans. All the plans were then combined to form the Deighton and Brackenhall Initiative Summary Action Plan.

Interestingly, the word 'houses' is only just visible on the word cloud. But it was the issue of what to do about the area's empty homes that prompted the most drastic action.

The last place you'd want to live in?

If one word could sum up the documentary that the BBC made about the Riddings estate in 1990, that word would be ‘hopelessness’.


Not even a wedding can lift the mood: after capturing a downbeat meal of chicken sandwiches and canned lager, the excerpt finishes with a shot of two little bridesmaids dancing in front of a dilapidated semi, their pink sashes whirling behind them. The message seems clear: when the party’s over and the girls get older, they’ll soon see there’s nothing to celebrate here.


Children feature prominently in the film. Children with cockroach bites, toddlers who eat more chips than green vegetables, a little girl whose heart condition is made worse by the lack of central heating in her house. The viewer feels these are children with bleak lives and worse futures.


Just what those futures might be is suggested by the interviews with older people on the estate. A mother with two small boys, a survivor of domestic abuse, talks of her experiences of prostitution. She’d always go back to it if she needed cash, she says, because ‘the money is just so easy’.


In another interview, a grieving widow describes the difficulty of raising her sons after their father died. We see one of her boys talking to a probation officer about how he has spent five consecutive Christmases in prison. He has a method for ensuring that burglaries go smoothly: throw a brick through the window and if nobody comes to the door you can be sure that everyone’s out.


The issue of money and how to get more of it comes up again and again. ‘If you’ve got no money you’ve got to steal,’ says another young burglar, declaring that it’s not worth getting a job because he’d only earn £10 a week more than he is getting on the dole.


This suggestion that people on the estate are workshy is taken up by a working family who insist they would always prefer to know they had earned their cash and are angry with people who ‘get up at two or three o’clock’ because they don’t have jobs. They are shown eating home-grown vegetables and complain that people call them ‘posh’ because they look after their garden.


Yet even they feel trapped by the system, unable to leave the estate where nobody would live ‘unless you forced them’. The council won’t rehouse them because they don’t have enough points, but getting a mortgage is beyond their wildest dreams.


The documentary closes with a woman surveying the wreckage of her living room. She has come home to find it trashed by burglars. ‘They must have done it for a laugh,’ she says. ‘I haven’t got nowt worth stealing.’


Even now local people remember that documentary as unfair and offensive. What isn’t disputed, though, is that it contributed to a reputation of the area as the worst part of Kirklees - as one local resident told us, a ‘dumping ground’.


That reputation for crime and poverty contrasts with longstanding residents’ memories of Riddings and Brackenhall as close-knit communities. But even the area’s greatest defenders accept that crime was widespread.


In the years after that documentary life got worse rather than better - Brackenhall hit the headlines for disturbances in July 1992 and September 1993, and in 1995 the infamous Maypole pub - already closed once and reopened as the Phoenix - shut for good.


By the time DBI came on the scene, 200 homes in Brackenhall were boarded up and people were leaving the area as fast as they were being housed there. It was clear something drastic needed to happen.