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TOPIC
TRANSFORMING SOUTH YORKSHIRE
Peter O’Brien highlights the issues arising in this pathfinder area
To many, the image of the nine housing
market renewal pathfinders is one
characterised by streets of abandoned
terraces and an air of dereliction and
decay. During the past 18 months,
Transform South Yorkshire (TSY),
the South Yorkshire pathfinder, has
welcomed a multitude of government
officials, ministers and representatives
from regeneration organisations. The first
part of the tour has occasionally been
accompanied by puzzled looks, as the
streets of abandoned, boarded up houses,
characteristic of many of the other
pathfinders, fail to appear.
South Yorkshire does not conform
to the stereotypical view of the
HMR pathfinders. The area has not
experienced the type of market collapse
evident in other parts of the north and
Midlands; it is characterised by a large
number of pockets of low demand,
especially for social housing, and many
neighbourhoods are at risk of major
decline if action is not taken urgently.
So, as the largest pathfinder,
embracing almost 140,000 homes, a
population of over 306,000 and covering
parts of the Barnsley, Doncaster,
Rotherham and Sheffield local authority
areas, what does low demand and market
failure mean in South Yorkshire, and how
are the issues being addressed?
The headline statistics show 86 per cent of the housing stock
‘at risk’, 43 per cent socially rented, and a mere nine per cent
detached houses. Values averaged less than £46,000 in 2002,
compared with over £80,000 in the remainder of South Yorkshire
– itself hardly a high value area. And the disparity is increasing:
price rises between 1996 and 2002 lagged 13 per cent between
those in the sub-region. Yet paradoxically, overall less than five
per cent of dwellings are vacant, contrasting starkly with the 10
to 15 per cent void rates experienced elsewhere in the northern
cities. The housing market in South Yorkshire is failing, but
crisis point has yet to be reached. This context has provided
the pathfinder with the opportunity to demonstrate that
preventative intervention can be successful, and that a thriving
housing market is an essential ingredient to successful economic
regeneration.
To understand the dynamics of the housing market, an
appreciation of the changing economic and demographic
fortunes of South Yorkshire is essential. In the mid 1980s, the
Dearne Valley had 12 collieries, employing over 11,000 people;
it now has none. A quarter of all jobs in Sheffield were lost. By
1998, GDP in South Yorkshire was only 74 per cent of the UK
average, with levels of economic inactivity reaching 42 per cent
in the pathfinder. In the 10 years after 1991, the population of the
pathfinder fell by 4.4 per cent (and up to 35 per cent in parts of
Doncaster) - with the highest rate of loss amongst the 25-44 age
group.
Yet since those dismal days, a growing range of imaginative
regeneration initiatives, supported by government and by the
European Union has seen over 2,000 net new jobs being created
each year in Sheffield, with unemployment now less than one
per cent above the national rate, and GDP increasing faster
22 | Urban Design | Autumn 2004 | Issue 92