Citizens' Forum on Key Council Services:
The 15 Year Plan for Tameside

Report on proceedings prepared by Opinion Leader Research, April 2006

The aim of the Citizens' Forum was to engage members of the Council's Citizens' Panel in a more interactive and deliberative debate about key Council services than had previously been undertaken in the Borough. The Council identified a number of key service and policy areas that would benefit from citizen consideration and feedback. A half-day session was chosen for the Citizens' Forum: it constituted the minimum length of time in which such a deliberative exercise could be undertaken. The Forum brought together 40 members of the Citizens' Panel to discuss four areas of Council service provision. One of these areas was title "The 15 Year Plan for Tameside".

Findings from the discussion on the 15 Year Plan form part of the evidence-base that will inform the production of the Core Strategy. Please follow the links below for details of the session and its findings.

• Summary of findings
• Presentation to the forum
• Detailed findings: town centres and retailing
• Detailed findings: jobs and the economy
• Detailed findings: housing in the borough
• Detailed findings: transport connections
• Consideration of options

Summary of Findings

Participants had strong and enthusiastic views on all areas covered in the discussion. They were clearly keen to see the Council get its long-term priorities for the future of housing, the town centres, the economy and transport right. They engaged well with the challenges described to them and accepted that this was a difficult area for the Council to plan for.

Participants were keen to see the Council act to safeguard all of the major town centres in the borough. They accepted that people would continue to shop in large out-of-town supermarkets, but stressed that a balance between in and out-of-town shopping was crucial.

The group was in clear agreement with the Council on the state of the economy and how there was a real need over the coming years to generate higher wage jobs and develop a high value industry sector. They saw raising the skills sets of school leavers as key to achieving this.

On the issue of housing in the area, participants felt less comfortable discussing options for where new housing should be built, but were in basic agreement that more and higher quality housing should be encouraged. The priority for members of the group was less where houses should be situated, and more that the focus should be on quality of life issues and building sustainable communities.

Finally, participants felt that transport was a major concern for the borough. Bringing the Metrolink to Tameside needed to continue to be the number one priority. They were sympathetic to some discussions about reducing car use, but they remained to be convinced that bus priority lanes alone would achieve this to the satisfaction of everyone who needed to get around.

Presentation

Peter Mowbray, Policy and Plans Co-ordinator in the Council's Planning and Building Control Service explained that the Council is required to develop a 15-year strategic plan. He explained that the Council would be producing a document that will be consulted on, and were interested to hear the views of Participants. The Plan looks at how the Council will use physical space in the area to address some of the big, strategic challenges facing the community over the next decade and a half. In particular, the Council is required to state how it will meet the long-term challenges for the area in terms of creating jobs, building new houses, improving the transport infrastructure, improving shops and town centres in the area, and using land for new industry. Peter explained that the Planning department was interested in hearing Participants' aspirations for the future of the Borough in these specific areas, and that he was interested to hear which the most important strategic problems were, that such a Plan could seek to address.

Detailed Findings: Town centres & retailing

Most Participants shopped in town centres and in the large supermarkets and only a few in the group travelled to Manchester to go shopping with any frequency. Participants had strong views regarding the type and style of the shops they would ideally like to see in the area. Many felt that independent shops offered a better quality experience to the larger shops and often, better produce. They suggested that these shops had been forced out of business at the expense of bland high street chains in the town centres or large supermarkets on the edges of towns. Some also raised the issue that elderly people, or people with disabilities often relied more on town centres than other residents, and that this was also a reason to ensure the future quality of the shopping facilities. Some also felt that Ashton Market had been allowed to decline and that effort should be given to developing it into high quality market again.

Some members of the group defended the development of supermarkets, arguing that supermarkets were often derided, but actually everyone used them and benefited from the lower prices and greater convenience. After some discussion, significant differences in opinion remained about the kind of shops they would like to see developed across the area. Agreement however, was reached, that a mixture of supermarkets and small independent shops across the area was probably in everyone's best interests.

Independent shops, participants felt, relied on people being able to access the town centres easily, and for the Council to control, to some extent at least, the amount of large out-of-town supermarkets and similar large shops which were allowed to develop.

Agreement was also easily reached on the issue of where to locate shops across the Borough. Participants were not supportive of a proposal to invest in Ashton in order to develop this as the Borough's primary town centre. The group felt strongly that all town centres should be developed, or encouraged to develop, evenly.

The high cost of parking in the town centres and congestion on the roads act as huge disincentives to use the town centres. The group was uncertain how to resolve the tension between wishing to encourage use of the town centres and solving traffic congestion issues. Some felt that larger car parks should be built, as the supermarkets had done to encourage shoppers. Others felt the Council should look to address parking and congestion issues in town centres by developing a park and ride facility. While Participants were not unsympathetic to the idea of investing in the public transport infrastructure more, most were not clear how buses would avoid the same congestion cars suffered. While suggestions that bus priority lanes could help public buses at congested points, participants, although not against the idea, remained to be convinced that it would work.

Detailed Findings: Jobs and the economy

Concern was raised by some in the group that the Council was not doing enough to support small businesses. While views were being sought about how to encourage larger businesses to relocate to the area, the position of small businesses which had developed in the area was largely ignored by the Council. One participant described concern that pressure on the property his business was located in from housing developers was making it difficult to sustain his business and that he knew of similar businesses which had been forced to relocate. He felt the Council should do more to safeguard the premises in which small businesses were located, particularly for high value, high skills businesses such as his.

The group expressed a range of opinions on the issue of which kinds (sectors) of industry the area needed. Some felt there was an over-reliance on service sector jobs, and that it was specifically these jobs which were low skill and low wage. The view here was that more should be done to develop the manufacturing base of the area. Others seemed more relaxed about manufacturing, suggesting that although this very much reflected the history of the area, times had changed, and that high wage jobs would not necessarily be found through developing the manufacturing sector in the Borough.

Participants were in strong agreement that the main focus for the Council over the coming years was to develop the skills level of the workforce. The group was aware that although unemployment was low in the area, the kinds of jobs on offer to local people were mostly low-wage jobs. Some described first hand experience of companies in the area recruiting from outside Tameside in order to find employees with the appropriate skills. It was the strong feeling of the group that schools needed to invest more in developing the skills sets of school leavers and particularly in the area of computer and Information Technology.

"I've advertised in Jobcentres and we state that they start on the basic minimum wage and it's quite a complicated job to learn, so their scale of pay goes up, the more they learn the more they get paid. And we ask people simple questions on measuring. We've got kids coming straight out of school who can't measure a six inch piece of wire, either in metric or imperial."

"We want to start educating the kids to the level that they can take these jobs."

"Yeah, IT where we've got some good brains developing things in this country. They need encouraging and let's sell these products."

Detailed Findings: Housing in the Borough

The views of the group around the issue of housing quality and where to locate new housing, varied. Their views were generally influenced by where they themselves lived, and the specific issues in their area. For some, lack of quality amenities close to their homes and new housing developments was at the forefront of many Participants' minds. For others, pollution from nearby industry was more important, and for others crime and anti-social behaviour dominated their perspective about the area where they lived.

Participants were, broadly speaking, comfortable with the proposition that more houses would need to be built in the area. Many were also sympathetic with the suggestion that some sections of the Borough's housing stock were of a low or inadequate quality. Many Participants were relaxed with the notion of an increase in the population, and thought there was probably enough room to accommodate people. The group managed to find most common ground around the broad issue of quality of life as it related to housing. It was quality of life issues which should be a high priority in terms of decisions relating to new housing developments.

Participants were concerned that new housing should be built with greater thought for the infrastructure in the area in terms of schools, and that thought should be given to developing real and sustainable communities in and around new housing developments. The quality of new houses themselves was also raised, as participants raised concerns that although some older houses clearly needed demolishing, the new replacements did not always look as if they were built to last.

Relating back to general concerns about the transport infrastructure in the areas, there was concern that developments did not give great enough consideration to how the new population of that area would get around. There was concern for instance that houses were being built along the Manchester Road without enough consideration for road congestion issues.

Participants, on balance, found it difficult to respond to questions about locating new housing developments. Their feeling was that green belt land should be preserved. There was also, however, strong feeling that too much former industrial land was now being used for housing, and that this conflicted with their desire to see more high-skill jobs created in the area. Some suggested that green field sites could be used for new housing, but only on a case-by-case basis and in small quantities. One member suggested that green field sites could be used, but only if new green field areas were created elsewhere. The suggestion focused again on the quality of life issue and to improve this for all residents, the Council could create more parks in dense communities, and give people bigger gardens in new housing developments. In this way, the overall green land in the area would not decrease, but it would be better distributed.

The group were relaxed in principle about the notion that areas of low quality housing could be demolished to make way for new, but found it difficult to have a strong opinion about the subject in the absence of a specific example of which area would be demolished. They chose instead to return to quality of life issues and the development of sustainable communities.

"The Manchester Road area is going down: the amount of development down there on housing and they're putting it on basically a B road, Manchester Road is basically a B road, not an A road, and the congestion there is unbelievable."

"In the future, more, yeah maybe even terraced houses with more gardens in the back and more community centres and a community feeling to places. A bit more integration."

"Amenities, schools: and if it's a new development, you're going to get younger people there so you need schools."

"I wouldn't be absolutely against building on Greenfield if there was, how shall we say... I'm looking at it in terms of putting more green back into Tameside. As Tameside goes out into Greenfield so you replace the green that you're taking from outside with something inside. So communities are less overcrowded, more spread out and have got more plants, trees, gardens, community built back into them rather than just crammed together in sprawling estates."

Detailed Findings: Transport connections

Discussions around transport in the area had already touched on the issue of the Metrolink extension during the presentation. Participants were glad to hear reassurances that the extension would be built and indicated in their discussions that this should remain a major priority for the Borough.

As discussions around the earlier issues indicated, Participants were troubled by congestion issues in the area. Getting in and out of town centres and commuting into the centre of Manchester were the most commonly cited issues of concern. Participants were sympathetic to the principle of improving public transport in the area, but struggled to see how many of the suggested improvements could work in the context of their day-to-day lives. The important principle was that public transport needed to be seen to be a better option before much enthusiasm would be generated for the notion of encouraging people to leave their cars at home. As suggested earlier, participants could see in principle that bus priority lanes might work on some major arteries (such as the main road into Manchester), but when asked whether greater use could be made of these going into town centres within Tameside, they felt this would simply make congestion for cars even worse. Similarly, they were not receptive to the idea of traffic reduction schemes in town centres as they felt these would just make congestion worse.

"Our main roads are not wide enough to have all these lanes."

"But I must comment that where I go to work in Chorlton, they have got this new development of purely having a bus lane on Manchester Road going into the centre of Chorlton and the traffic queues have diminished completely because the buses are kept free and the traffic can flow very freely and it's been an asset to the place."

Consideration of Options

Participants were asked to focus their discussions on a range of solutions to some of the issues they had been dealing with in their conversations.

Question One - Town centres and retailing

How can we improve the trading health of our town centres?

1. The council could focus on improving the existing town centres but at the same time encourage more specialist shops to develop in the centres which are in decline. Attention would be given to improving the design and quality of the shopping environment (the look and feel of the area, and the state of the shop buildings).
2. The council could focus on improving the ground floor space in the main shopping streets. At the same time, the council would encourage shops on the secondary shopping streets (streets near the main ones) to use their upper floors more for business, leisure and residential use.
3. The council could focus on making Ashton under Lyne the Borough's main shopping centre. This may encourage a greater concentration of shopping in one area, which may encourage bigger national chains to locate to the area.
4. The council could try and encourage more limited growth, evenly across the 5 main shopping centres.

Question Two - The economy

How do we ensure there is enough land to be able to create new jobs?

1. Should the council simply focus on supplying small amounts of land for development by local companies, with only a bit of investment coming from outside the borough?
2. As the present Strategic Employment Site (at Ashton Moss and Denton ?) is running out of land, should the council make it a priority to identify a new site for employment investment?
3. Should pieces of land which are currently intended for industrial use, but which companies don't want to use, be reclassified so other types of (non-industrial) development can happen on them?

Question Three - Housing in the Borough

How can we meet the need for new housing in the Borough?

1. The council could decide just to leave it to housing developers to find new areas for developing
2. The council could focus on building new houses mainly on 'brownfield' sites, and allow very little on 'greenfield' sites
3. The council could allow some building in specially chosen 'greenfield' sites, but try and use 'brownfield' sites first, and whenever possible
4. The council could focus on building in and around the urban centres that already exist
5. The council could make housing developers provide some special needs and affordable houses every time they build larger developments

A fourth set of options on transport was proposed, but participants ran out of time to give any consideration to them.

Response to options

Participants spent only a short period of time considering the options on this theme. They had considered the issues raised in the options in much greater detail in the earlier conversations, and so largely only chose to vote on each question.

Question One

On question one, participants chose Option 4. The overwhelming response of the group was that was that while they wanted their town centres to stay healthy and attractive places to shop, they wanted to see any development or investment done evenly across the various towns in the borough. They did not want Ashton to prioritised at the expense of the others.

Question Two

Throughout the discussions the group found consideration of land use categories and policy regarding the most appropriate use of one kind of land over another quite difficult to grapple with. The group thus found question two very difficult to come to a common view on. The response of the group to question two was ultimately that Option 3 was preferable, though some disagreed and others struggled to come to any conclusion.

Question Three

On question three, the group thought that option 3 was preferable. Again, as the options related to questions of land use categories, they struggled with options available. They were keen to return to their conclusions from the general discussion, which were that they were more concerned with ensuring that quality of life issues were taken into consideration in future housing developments and effort should be given to build sustainable and vibrant communities over mass, soulless housing estates.

Contact Information
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