Housing and Transport take centre stage at Insider's Opportunity Bath and NE Somerset breakfast

Insider Media

Insider's Remy Greasley speaks to Paul Harris, chief customer officer at Curo Group and Annie Legge, co-founder of Tech4Good South West after Insider's Opportunity Bath and North East Somerset Breakfast.

Transcript

00:00I'm Paul Harris, I'm the Chief Customer Officer for Curo, the social housing organisation based

00:14in Bath. Well so lots of discussion around how we need to innovate, how we need to grow our economy

00:19but also some of the barriers to that which were mainly transport and housing. It's difficult to

00:24live in Bath and if you want to live further out into North East Somerset the transport

00:29infrastructure is not great so I think those points kept coming up again and again through the whole

00:34discussion. I think it's a long-term plan that needs to be in place to change and really it's

00:39about changing the system so tinkering at the edges by making planning better or making this better or

00:44that better tends to have unintended consequences and we've seen that over decades. Really I think

00:50what we need is a system-wide plan to entirely change the way we think about housing and that

00:55needs to start with it being about purpose like what is the right purpose for housing, what is the

00:59right need for housing, where does it need to be and at that point to then start thinking about how

01:05we're going to finance it with the land etc. The problem at the moment is housing is only built

01:10when it's viable for developers because they can make a profit on a particular slice of land by building

01:15a particular sort of house. That doesn't meet need and we've ended up with an ever widening gap between

01:20what people need particularly in terms of affordable housing and what's available. That's why in Baines

01:26there are 6,700 households on the waiting list looking for somewhere to live. It definitely

01:31definitely goes under the radar when most people who don't live here think of Bath they think of

01:36beautiful buildings and tourism and those sorts of things which are you know all true but

01:41the city and the wider district hides a lot of inequity and a lot of poverty. Bath of North East

01:48Somerset was the only local authority area in England last year, not sure if it's still true

01:52this year, to have lower than average wages and higher than average house prices. So there's a

01:57structural inequity in where we all live here which needs to be thought about. So we've set up a group

02:03called the Housing Mission Delivery Board and its responsibility is to try and deliver the affordable

02:08housing pillar of the economic strategy for the district. So we've got people from all aspects of

02:13the system there and what we have done is create a vision and by 2050 everybody will have the right

02:19place to live and be able to live and work where they where they please. But also we've created a

02:24systems map which is about how to do things differently in housing because only by changing the whole system

02:29can we solve the problem. So it's going to take a lot of time. The first thing that we're going to do

02:34is we've got three or four trailblazer projects we're calling them where we want to try and test the new

02:39system and prove that it works. So we're trying to find the right ways of doing that across Bath and

02:44North East Somerset in the next couple of years. If we can make those pilot projects work and prove

02:49the system we can then try and roll it out across the whole of the district for everything. Sure I'm

02:53Annie Legg and I'm co-founder of Tech for Good Southwest. Yeah it's super interesting, a lot of very

02:58different conversations around obviously the opportunities and challenges for running businesses

03:03here in Bath and North East Somerset. Yeah I suppose we're really passionate about firstly digital

03:10skills so making sure that organizations have the skills they need to thrive in society but

03:14we're particularly thinking about charity sector and social enterprises so businesses that are not

03:20just thinking about economic growth they're also thinking about actually the impact that they can have

03:24in our communities as well. Yeah I guess what we're kind of engaging with is obviously kind of

03:30third sector organizations but also particularly within the tech sector businesses that are either

03:35designing technology that's going to have an impact in the world itself or businesses that really also

03:41want to engage staff in getting involved in volunteering around skills but also those that are

03:46just generally conscious about actually okay we're doing well in our business but actually what impact

03:52can we have in our local communities as well. We had a couple of businesses here today so Maiden

03:57obviously a really prime example of that they get involved in so much in the community as well.

04:02Runway East who just opened a new workspace here in Bath actually they've given us some access to

04:07space so that we can actually bring some of our members together and that just kind of really shows a

04:12bit more of a social conscious in the city as well. Yeah yeah definitely but it's hard like I think you have to

04:17also be quite open to just show up and turn up in different spaces because actually it's quite hard to see

04:24it's not very visible who's actually here in terms of businesses in terms of opportunities

04:29and so I think it does also take quite a lot of extra effort than perhaps in some other places that

04:34can be challenging. Yeah I suppose I'm thinking more about things like convening spaces and ways in which

04:40to kind of bring particularly one of our kind of real focuses is acting as that kind of bridge between

04:45sectors and actually how do we have the opportunities to do that quite often we end up more physically in

04:50Bristol because a that's where people are kind of congregating but there are also a lot more kind

04:56of opportunities in terms of space there and actually that's kind of more convenient for people

05:01to kind of come to but I think you know really hopefully we've got a lot we've got a lot of new

05:05great spaces opening up in in Bath as well and hopefully that means that we'll start to see people

05:10being more visible and then there's opportunities for collaboration and community and we're only going to grow

05:14a lot of new ways from there.

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