BLOG: “I’m proud to have been there at the beginning.”

As Secretary of State for the Environment in the early 1980s the experience of confronting the challenges of urban deprivation proved to be one of the most transformative of my life.

The temptation for a new Secretary of State is to sweep with a new broom to demonstrate change and stamp one’s own imprint on policy. If this generalisation has truth it was particularly so in 1979 when my party came back into power after the social disintegration of the winter of discontent.

Let me pay tribute to my Labour predecessor, Peter Shore. He had devised that such were the challenges of urban deprivation that their solution required a shared experience between national and local government in the form of the partnership he created between one of his ministers and those areas with significant urban stress. He chose to partner with Liverpool. I was asked on my first day in post if I wished to continue this arrangement and, by agreeing, I made one of the wisest decisions of my life.

The concept of partnership was to become central to my Ministry and the policies I evolved from that time on. My first initiative to intensify that concept was to deepen and widen it to embrace the private sector. I introduced a grant mechanism to clear toxic urban sites hitherto used to clear the debris of coal and iron ore extraction in the countryside. However, I made government grant conditional on private sector additional contribution.  At its simplest the public sector would clear up the pollution if the private sector would build houses on the site. There were two consequences. Public expenditure led directly to private investment thus creating the concept of gearing. More profound was the change in personal relationships as the experience of working together created friendships across the divide of public and private sectors.

Two years into my relationship with Liverpool during which I had created the Development Corporation, listed the Albert Dock and preposed the Garden Festival, the riots sent shock waves through the political system. I walked the streets, listened and thought as I was asked what was I going to do. I drew up a list of some thirty projects but there was a missing but essential ingredient – leadership. On that list was the Groundwork project. I remember my visit to St Helens where a committee of well-intended representatives of the public sector were gathered to seek my support for their plans to tackle the detritus that characterised the urban fringe. I told them to redesign the concept to embrace a partnership with the private sector and volunteer involvement.

The rest is history. Groundwork today employs about 1200 people in fifteen trusts, raising about ninety million pounds from a variety of sources across the public and private sectors and the lottery to support disadvantaged communities and environmental improvement.

I am proud to have been there at the beginning.

Lord Heseltine