Awards
The Deputy Prime Minister's Award for Sustainable Communities
Creating sustainable communities is not just about bricks and mortar, it calls for creative partnership and an integrated approach to delivering communities that people want to live and work in. The Award for Sustainable Communities underlines the Government's commitment to delivering sustainable communities and also helps to identify best practice examples that others can learn from. These examples of best practice will be widely disseminated.
This year the criteria has been revised in alignment with those components, identified in the Egan Review, published in April 2004, which go towards the creation and maintenance of sustainable communities.
All projects and initiatives must demonstrate active involvement of the community including business and/or residents. They should also be advanced to a state where there is a record of success with demonstrable results, and should meet some, or all, of the following criteria:-
Social And Cultural: Creating vibrant, harmonious and inclusive communities.
Governance: Creating effective and inclusive participation, representation and leadership.
Environmental: Creating places for people to live in an environmentally friendly way.
Housing And The Built Environment: Creating a good quality built and natural environment.
Transport And Connectivity: Creating good transport services and communication linking people to jobs, schools, health and other services.
Economy: Creating a flourishing and diverse local economy.
Services: Creating a full range of appropriate, accessible public, private, community and voluntary services.
An award ceremony, acknowledging the achievements of the finalists, will be held at the Sustainable Communities Summit to be held in Manchester on 31 January - 2 February 2005.
2004 Winner of the Deputy Prime Minister's Award for Sustainable Communities
Grange Park Estate - Blackpool
It is a Council built estate and comprises of approximately 1800 dwellings with 1940's and 1970's housing stock. It is located in one of the most deprived wards in the country.
The project has been running since 1997, and has addressed all the major issues including poor image, poor educational standards, high unemployment rates, a range of social and behavioural problems and environmental dereliction.
Housing Associations and contractors have engaged the community to deliver impressive results. These include development of the community learning centre, a crèche, open space and public space, new and refurbished housing, energy efficiency initiatives, provision of public transport facilities, training and social enterprise projects.
Crime has reduced by 70% and the use of public transport has increased by 40%.
2004 Finalists
Chatham Maritime & Historic Dockyard - Kent
South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) and the Clatham Historic Dockyard Trust (CHDT) each took over land (345 acres and 79 acres respectively) from Clatham Dockyard after many industrial closures. This area included the UK's highest concentration of listed buildings and scheduled monuments.
Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust (CHDT) has renovated and found new uses for these historic buildings, while SEEDA has created a host of new office buildings, homes and universities on their site.
The Historic Dockyard now provides homes for 400 people, jobs for 1,000 in approximately 100 small businesses and organisations and receives 15,000 volunteer hours support each year. Meanwhile 3,500 people and 2,000 residents already work and live at Chatham Maritime.
Joining Up Northumberland Park - Tottenham, London
The two wards of Northumberland Park and Tottenham Hale are amongst the nation's top 5% most deprived wards by the Index of Deprivation. Local residents and all key agencies formed a partnership board to tackle the problems in these areas.
Local projects focused on improving the physical environment - cleaning up the area, designing out crime and designing in lighting, green spaces, improved play and sports areas, and improvements to private sector housing. Young people were fully involved in the programme, establishing their own social enterprises and priorities.
Current projects working in the area include a teenage pregnancy project; the North London Partnership Consortium assisting refugees and asylum seekers to find work; Learn Direct; a service that provides free legal advice; a local job search club; a wide range of youth activities; Sure Start; and a specialised employment project to support recovering alcoholics.
Urban & Rural Renaissance - County Durham
A strategy and action programme to address the long-term sustainability of County Durham's many settlements.
The key elements are physical regeneration and transport projects, community engagement and capacity building - all set in Durham's distinctive settlement pattern - which has few large settlements, but rather a network of smaller, post-mining 'urban' communities spread across a wide area - often with limited services and some very high levels of deprivation.
This 5-year programme involves a wide-ranging stakeholder group with representation including all District Councils in the County, Groundwork Trusts, One NorthEast, community and voluntary groups and private sector companies. 40 organisations are part of the stakeholder group with a further 200 organisations and individuals, such as community-based groups comprising residents, traders and specifically young people, actively involved.
Further information
Further information can be obtained by contacting:
| BURA Tara Burton or Vicki Willis: Telephone: 0207 539 4030 Fax: 0207 404 9614 E-mail: awards@bura.org.uk | ODPM Awards Team E-mail: awards@odpm.gsi.gov.uk |
Information is also available from the Sustainable Communities website.
Last update: Tuesday, July 22, 2008