Physician, heal thyself

Regeneration & Renewal, 6 November 2007

But while the regeneration workforce - about a million strong, according to this year's milestone Academy for Sustainable Communities' skills report - has been trying to tackle this stratification within society, a parallel divide has been growing within the sector itself.

If you're a regeneration professional in London and the South-East, the ASC report found, your value is set to rise as staff shortages increase - and, according to our own major Careers and Salary Survey (see p4), you're already earning the highest regeneration salaries in the country. If you're a landscape architect, urban designer, planning consultant or sustainability specialist, says the ASC, demand for your skills will grow dramatically over the coming years - and our survey found that even now the modal annual salary rise (the most common response) given by these groups stands at 10 to 15 per cent.

On the other hand, if you work in the Midlands and North of England, or your role concentrates on housing or community development, the ASC report anticipates staff surpluses by 2012. And most public sector regeneration professionals are already facing hard times: our survey found that 21 per cent of local authority staff had their pay frozen last year, and the modal pay rise was just 2-3 per cent. We are, says the ASC, facing severe shortages of public sector planners, economic development workers and regeneration professionals. Yet our survey found that those working for the organisations employing these groups, such as regeneration agencies and public-private partnerships, are extremely - and increasingly - worried that funding cuts are threatening their career prospects.

So public regeneration funds and local authority budgets are being squeezed while the property market booms, creating a growing imbalance within the regeneration sector. This is clearly bad news for public sector regeneration professionals, who increasingly find themselves the poor relations of their developer and consultant counterparts. But it's also awkward for private investors, who need their public partners to be well-resourced, highly-skilled and personally motivated enough to foster local economic growth, create the right environment for development and run efficient planning departments. Unfortunately, the widening pay gap is likely to exacerbate this imbalance, as workers desert the public sector to take up highly-paid consultancy roles. The optimistic may hope that such movements will help to rebalance salary levels - but in the short term, at least, they will also further reduce the public sector's capacity to manage regeneration effectively.

Addressing these imbalances within the sector will mean putting more resources into the public sector roles so crucial to making investment work for the community - to ensuring that development fosters regeneration - and encouraging a shift of manpower from areas where we anticipate a surplus of skills to those where we're facing a shortage. How exactly that is done, of course, is a much bigger question. But one thing is clear: the regeneration sector is increasingly suffering from its own version of the inequalities in wealth and opportunities that it works to tackle in wider society - and unless action is taken, its ability to deliver regeneration will suffer.

Matt Ross
Features editor, Regeneration & Renewal

Mind the Skills Gap is available by clicking here http://www.ascskills.org.uk/pages/research/mind-the-skills-gap