The Old Quaker Workhouse (right) and Central Friends Meeting House in Bristol. Photo: Jon Long
A thwarted vision
Kester Ratcliff writes about a Quaker housing project in Bristol
Over the summer, I was heavily involved in trying to set up Bristol Friends Housing Co-operative. For me, it’s inspired by my Quaker faith, especially the testimonies to social justice and sustainability. My most active partner in working to set up the co-operative is Jon Long; both of us are attached to Redland Meeting. This article is partly doing what Ben Goldacre says is so important in science – reporting negative results. I’ll explain what we did and why it didn’t work. There’s still a slight hairsbreadth of a chance that we might get a Judicial Review hearing against Bristol City Council and still win the building, but I think it may be more useful at this point to explain what went wrong. I hope it may be helpful for other Friends and Meetings to learn from our mistakes.
The Old Quaker Workhouse
Our most important bid (headed by Bristol Community Land Trust, in collaboration with other organisations) was for the Old Quaker Workhouse in Bristol, adjoining Central Friends Meeting House. This is the last original Quaker building in Bristol, and probably the oldest surviving building anywhere tangibly representing the Quaker heritage of social justice activism. It was dedicated social housing, since the seventeenth century, until it was compulsorily purchased by the council in 2007 from the last Housing Association that owned it. It was then allowed to become derelict and earmarked for demolition. The site is within a hundred metres of the new Cabot Circus shopping complex, so the empty land would be far more valuable commercially than it is with a Grade 2 listed building on it. The current site of the Central Friends Meeting House was originally the graveyard of the Quaker workhouse. The demolition proposal was defeated by Area Meeting’s Trustees successfully getting it registered as a Heritage Listed building in 2009, but that heritage status only protects the external façade of the building, not its use or purposes.
Our vision
This is the first point at which the opportunity to do something with long-term vision in enough time to have a good chance of success was missed. I really appreciate the principles of the Quaker business method; however, I also feel that sometimes too much emphasis on technically correct procedure and the years-long processes it entails can obstruct other principles that are as important and more urgent… ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’.
Our vision was to buy back the building and restore it to its original use as social housing and a recovery community. This would create a mixed community with roughly half the members being referred by Independent Living Services (ILS) – a mutual support social enterprise for people just entering recovery from drug and alcohol addiction by people who have mostly recovered or are securely in recovery, mainly through running midway rehab houses.
The ordinary members would be people who positively choose to live in solidarity with people in recovery, like Camphill Communities. This vision is supported by the National Treatment Agency, as this kind of mixed community model has repeatedly proved to be the most cost-effective way to improve the chances of long-term recovery for people coming out of in-patient mental health care without a supportive family to go back to.
We also planned to run a SLOW Food Café-Restaurant-Bakery downstairs, using the courtyard garden during the daytime, with catered meeting space available to hire, rather like at Friends House in London, but also partly staffed by members of the Housing Co-op in need of an understanding employer to initially get back into work. Another aspect of our plan was for the area within the outer garden wall of the Old Quaker Workhouse to be an agreed Sober Campus.
What went wrong
We missed the opportunity of applying under the Community Asset Transfer (CAT) policy because the council didn’t tell us we could, and verbally promised that a process amounting to what we now know is called the CAT policy would be applied. In fact, they never applied that assessment and have officially denied in a Freedom of Information response having ever promised it. Without that consideration, our bid never stood a chance.
CAT is a policy most councils have adopted, in theory, so it’s worth knowing about if you’re involved in a community bid for a publicly owned building.
The gist of the CAT policy is that, when leasing or selling public buildings to community organisations that provide public services, the long-term social value of the community use of the building should be taken into account in comparison to the one-off value that would be offered by a commercial bidder. There is a detailed methodology in the CAT policy for quantitatively assessing the long-term social value.
In August, two council officers and Anthony Negus, a local councillor, decided against the joint bid by Bristol Community Land Trust and ILS in favour of the highest commercial bidder.
Where I live, I often pass the old Catholic Cathedral, deconsecrated and derelict, which was also sold off to a commercial developer four years ago. The commercial developer went bust when the property bubble burst in 2008 and the building has been left rotting and waiting for its roof to cave in ever since. Bristol North Pool is another similar story.
The government, and all the political parties, have acknowledged that there is a desperate shortage of affordable housing. However, under the previous government, Bristol was only managing to create about seven percent of its annual target for designated ‘affordable’ housing. Now the current government has cut sixty percent of the previous ‘affordable housing’ budget and lifted the limit on ‘social housing’ rents to eighty percent of market price. This means they have just shifted the financial burden onto future governments’ budgets by massively increasing the ongoing cost of housing benefit for those in ‘social housing’, whilst cutting capital investment in making more affordable housing.
The housing issue
The shortage of affordable housing to buy, and extortionately overpriced rents, doesn’t just affect ‘the poor’ or working classes. It affects most of my generation. The only way my fiancée and I have been able to buy a house was because we were ‘lucky’ to have enough ‘liquidated’ older relatives. There are a lot of lonely older people living in comparatively vast houses and a lot of younger people at fertile, productive age who can only dream of being able to afford a home fit for a family by their mid-thirties, if ever. In the most basic biological sense this is literally unsustainable.
I think that looking to government to help us is hopeless, we have to bypass government as much as possible and work independently and co-operatively to make the dysfunctional and unjust monetary system – and the government that is so completely captured by the rogue financial sector – irrelevant.
For more information please go to: http://groupspaces.com/BristolFriendsHousingCoop
Comments
Perhaps closer, more careful attention to Quaker business method, council funding and CAT policies and planning/listed building procedures would actually have helped.It would be great if the housing co-op project can get off the ground and the Friends involved keep their enthusiasm intact. The final paragraph seems very negative and contentious except for the intention to work co-operatively; hopefully that will be together with local government, since that is surely going to be necessary.
By unsure on 17th November 2011 - 22:37
I sympathise with the sentiments of the last paragraph. Working co-operatively with local government finance, legal and property managers is only possible if they will co-operate. Sometimes their hands are genuinely tied by rules set in place by central government, but in my experience this is not always the case. Rather, there is a reluctance to acknowledge the problem that is being tackled, and a fear of the disruption a different approach will require of them. At central government level, I think the despair is equally well-placed, if we consider the total lack of connection between the kind of economy that successive governments have pursued (debt-based growth)with the genuine needs of the planet and people. How can the City of London be said to generate wealth when the planet is depleting, except by ever-increasing exploitation of the poorest and the planet? Ridiculous land values distort planning policy, house purchase costs, rents etc. (They also make putting a foot wrong perilous for local govermment officers: the barristers employed by major developers cost more than many LAs can afford.) Community land trust Co-housing (Quaker-supported or otherwise)is one means of righting the injustice: the challenge now to those of us with significant means is to set up or work with suitable trusts and to transfer assets. The elaboration of bureaucracy - in local government and amongst Quakers - can be a good protection from rushing into ill-thought-through plans before the longterm implications have been examined. But it can also be a method of deferring facing up to changes we need to make. We need to be very sure - as wealthier, well-housed Quakers - that we are not complicit in this thwarting.
By Frances V on 22nd November 2011 - 18:42
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