Executive Summary
National Audit Office Value for Money Report
The Thames Gateway is Western Europes most ambitious
regeneration programme. The legacy of the last two hundred years
has been one of relative decline in the Thames Estuary and East
London. Through the programme the Government aspires to reverse
this decline and to make the Thames Gateway into a world-class
region with unrivalled locations for working and living. The
Government wants this regeneration to lead the world in terms of
environmental sustainability and low carbon footprint growth.
Turning the Governments vision for the Thames Gateway into
reality requires a step change in how central government
departments work together with regional and local agencies to plan
and deliver the high quality transport, housing, green space,
health, education, leisure and employment opportunities the region
needs.
Although there has previously been governmental intervention in
some areas of the Gateway, it was not until 1995 that the Thames
Gateway Planning Guidance Framework (Regional Planning Guidance 9a)
identified the whole of the Thames Gateway as a priority area for
change. In 2003, for the first time, the Sustainable Communities
Plan allocated a dedicated, funded, structured programme to help
accelerate the regeneration and development of the Thames
Gateway.
The Department for Communities and Local Government (the
Department)[Footnote 1] leads the programme on
behalf of central government and is providing 672 million
(2003-2008) to help accelerate the speed of housing delivery and
the creation of places where people want to live. Local authorities
within the Gateway have the statutory responsibility for planning
the regeneration and working in partnership with other public
agencies to facilitate public and private investment.
The Governments aspirations for the Thames Gateway will take at
least thirty years to achieve. We intend to review progress and
achievement in later reports as the programme develops. Decisions
and action taken over the next few years will play a large part in
determining whether it is successful. This report examines whether
central government has laid solid foundations for delivering its
ambitions for the Gateway and in particular whether the risks to
success have been identified by the Department and are being
actively managed. We assessed the programme against a framework of
best practice for successful regeneration (Appendix 1), based on
our own research and that of the Bartlett Faculty of the Built
Environment.
The Thames Gateway Programme has a high degree of support from
local and sub-regional partners. Considerable investment has
already gone into the Thames Gateway, helping to deliver some
24,000 homes between 2001 and 2005 and job growth of six per cent,
more than twice the national average. Transport investment has
included extensions and new stations on the Docklands Light
Railway, the first phases of the East London Transit and Greenwich
Waterfront Transit and the Fastrack bus-based transit system in
north Kent. Examples of other notable investment in the Thames
Gateway are shown in Figure 2 on pages 9 to 11.
Value for money statement
Efficient and effective delivery of the Governments high
aspirations for the Thames Gateway requires effective programme
management to ensure investment is integrated and coordinated as a
whole.
Government investment has helped to bring about a number of
successful initiatives and projects across the Thames Gateway. This
investment has helped local partners to accelerate the regeneration
of the region and some considerable change can already be seen. The
Department has largely directed its investment to key strategic
locations and to support key strategic priorities such as land
remediation and assembly.
But the Departments programme management is not yet capable of
demonstrating that resources have always been directed to the most
transformational and critical path projects, or that the
Departmental management of the programme so far has helped to
deliver more than the projects would have done alone.
Stronger Departmental management of the programme is required to
ensure plans are more coherent, that investment is more integrated
and targeted and risks better identified and managed:
- The Department has encouraged the development of several forms
of partnership at regional, sub-regional and local level to help
co-ordinate investment across the Gateway. This has allowed local
ownership, accountability and flexibility to adapt to local
circumstances. But the complexity of the decision-making and
delivery chains makes it difficult for potential investors,
developers and Government itself to understand the programme and
integrate investment as a whole (Figure 1
overleaf).
- Although it is right for local partners to take the lead on
detailed planning, the Department has yet to bring these detailed
plans together into a single programme plan. Without such a plan it
is difficult for central government to set an overall budget for
the additional investment needed, direct resources to critical path
projects and give an overall picture of what needs to be done
where. The Department plans to publish a costed delivery plan with
scheduling of projects later in 2007, after the conclusion of the
Comprehensive Spending Review.
- The Governments vision for high quality, low carbon footprint
and sustainable development has helped to ramp up expectations but
there remains a great deal to do to translate many of the
aspirations into clear and quantifiable objectives against which
progress can be measured and to develop appropriate levers to
achieve them.
- The Department for Communities and Local Government is not yet
perceived by local stakeholders to have sufficient strategic
influence to solve problems within Whitehall that are creating
obstacles to success.
- There is no overall joint risk management strategy in the
Thames Gateway. Without joint risk management it is difficult for
the many public bodies helping to deliver the programme to work
together to manage the shared risks to their shared
objectives.
The Department has recognised the need to strengthen its
management of the Thames Gateway programme if it is to achieve the
step change required. It has recently appointed Judith Armitt as
Chief Executive at Director General level within the Department to
lead the programme and achieve greater cross government influence.
It has published an Interim Plan, Base Line Report and Development
Prospectus for the Thames Gateway which set out more than thirty
initiatives designed to take the programme forward [Footnote 2]. It also intends to
publish a fuller plan to integrate economic, public service and
housing development later this year.
Figure 1 ("Map of the sectors involved in the Thames
Gateway regeneration.") is unavailable in this version of the
executive summary.
Recommendations
Key to success is a strategic framework which steers the
programme and guides local agencies and partnerships in delivering
the Governments aspirations. But it also needs sufficient
flexibility to allow local agencies and partnerships to react to
local conditions and to encourage innovation and investment from
the private sector, rather than deter it with too much
bureaucracy.
Below we make eight key recommendations intended to enable the
Department to better address the key risks, improve its management
and to strengthen the coherence of the overall programme:
1 Create stronger leadership of the programme across central
government by establishing a cross-government board of senior
officials
A cross-government board can increase stakeholder confidence
that the Governments vision and objectives are shared across
government and that central government is working together to
overcome obstacles to local delivery.
- The board should direct the overall programme and the chief
executive and provide overall strategic management;
- Membership should include government departments with an
important role in the delivery of the Thames Gateway objectives,
such as Communities and Local Government; the Department for the
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Department for Transport;
the Department for Education and Skills; the Department of Health;
and HM Treasury;
- Non-executives would provide expert knowledge on programme
management and creating sustainable communities;
- The Department and its Accounting Officer should retain
responsibility for the overall programme, with other named
Accounting Officers also accountable for their part of the
programme;
- The board should have oversight of sector and thematic
committees focusing on specific issues, such as the environment,
green spaces, transport, education, utility provision, inward
investment, marketing and job creation. These should draw on
appropriate members from departments, executive agencies, local
government, the private sector and the third sector.
During the drafting of this report the Department has worked
with other government departments to establish such a
cross-government board, which held its first meeting on 27 March
2007.
2 Establish a joint risk management strategy for the
programme
The Department needs to do more to coordinate the management of
risk.
- Coordinate a cross-government programme risk management
strategy with a central risk register;
- Assign responsibility for individual risks to the appropriate
departmental representative on the programme board;
- Establish a shared protocol to monitor and manage risks, issues
and opportunities as they arise.
3 Establish better performance criteria, and assign
responsibility for achievement across government
The Department needs to develop better ways to report on its
progress and assess whether it is achieving the outcomes it
wants.
- Use a balanced scorecard of performance indicators that address
each of the Governments aims for the Thames Gateway;
- Assign responsibility for individual performance indicators to
appropriate departmental members of the programme board;
- Report annually on the delivery and performance of the Thames
Gateway programme, against the scorecard, showing the use of
resources and highlighting successes.
4 Establish an overall programme plan to coordinate projects
and present a live picture of progress
The Department needs to bring together all the key project plans
for the Thames Gateway into a single costed coordinating plan to
show the interdependencies between projects and a live picture of
what has been achieved and what still needs to be done.
- Develop and publish a clear delivery plan for the Thames
Gateway;
- Include clear scheduling and interdependencies of all
projects;
- Maintain the plan as a live document available to all partners
and the public;
- Provide separate plans for cross-Thames Gateway issues that fit
into the overall plan, such as transport provision, utility
provision, managing the environmental impact, education and skills,
health, managing the waterways, inward investment, marketing and
job creation;
- Calculate and publish the total public sector costs for
achieving each of the projects in the overall plan, allowing for
risk and uncertainty in the estimate of costs especially for
projects not scheduled to start for a few years;
- Map cross-government capital spending to show the spatial
alignment of investment and how investment in each sector is and
will be supported by investment from the other sectors, e.g. how
investment in transport will be supported by investment in health
and education facilities at a local level.
The Department is working on producing an overall programme plan
based on its Interim Plan and Development Prospectus which
identified the major development projects in the Thames Gateway. It
expects to publish this in November 2007, after the conclusion of
the Comprehensive Spending Review.
5 Emphasise central support towards sponsorship of local
delivery vehicles
Partners need to be clear on the role and responsibilities of
each body involved in planning and delivering the Thames Gateway.
The Department should focus its attention on managing the whole
programme and supporting its partners in delivery.
- Set out in a single public document a clear rationale for the
roles and responsibilities of each layer of government in the
Thames Gateway programme, ensuring minimal overlap and
duplication;
- Strengthen the programme management functions at the
Department, including the programme monitoring and coordination
functions;
- Work with the Shareholders Executive, 4Ps, and Partnerships UK
to identify how best to help local public partners set up
appropriate partnering arrangements with the private sector, and
what support they need from central government;
- Establish a clear framework of performance criteria to help
monitor the performance and capacity of local partners;
6 Help and encourage other government departments agencies to
better integrate their work into the spatial planning of Local
Authorities and Regional Assemblies
Public bodies responsible for delivering infrastructure need to
be more proactive in engaging with regional and local spatial
planning, so that they raise issues of potential concern as early
as possible and can plan their contribution to delivery. The
Department should:
- Encourage other government departments agencies to be proactive
about providing advice at master planning stage, rather than
waiting to be consulted on individual planning applications;
- Encourage Local Authorities and Regional Assemblies to invite
other government departments agencies to comment on spatial
plans;
- Areas of likely contention should be identified for major sites
at the spatial planning stage before planning applications are
made.
7 Develop a cross-government communication and marketing
strategy for the Thames Gateway
The Department needs to do more to attract investors into the
Thames Gateway.
- Adopt a cross-government communication and marketing strategy
to promote the Thames Gateway to potential investors and
residents;
- Establish a clear protocol between local, regional and central
government for the promotion of the Thames Gateway.
8 Make the partnership network more investment friendly
The Department has established a network of partnerships that
bring together the fragmented bodies responsible for planning and
delivery of infrastructure in the Thames Gateway. But the
Department needs to do more to prevent the complexity of the
network deterring investors from engaging with the programme.
- Provide a physical and virtual one stop shop for information on
what each partner is doing in the Thames Gateway.
Figure 2 ("Examples of the publicly funded projects
enabling regeneration and development of the Thames Gateway -
Transport") is unavailable on this version of the executive
summary.
- [back from footnote 1] Since the
identification of the Thames Gateway as a priority growth area the
department which manages the programme has changed its name a
number of times as its overall remit changed: Department for the
Environment (1995-1997), Department for Environment, Transport, and
the Regions (1997-2002), the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister
(2002-2006) and the Department for Communities and Local Government
(2006-). Where in this report we refer to the Department we refer
to all of these departments.
- [back from footnote 2] These
initiatives are listed in Appendix 3.