Who you are

Ben Walker, Regeneration & Renewal, 27 October 2006

Honest: you like to talk about your jobs

Nearly 1,000 of our readers stopped work to spend a few minutes answering our 21 questions: that's about five per cent of our circulation, an excellent response for a voluntary and fairly lengthy survey. In such a broad and diverse sector, perhaps it's no surprise that individual practitioners want their voices heard - but our analysis has revealed some quite surprising facts. 

Furthermore, our respondents proved remarkably representative of our readers and the sector. Our verified 'ABC' reader profile shows that 40 per cent of our audience works for a local authority, and 16 per cent for social enterprises and the voluntary sector; the proportions amongst our survey respondents were 41 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. Responses from the regions seem to match levels of regeneration activity: for example, 16 per cent of respondents are based in the North-West, home to 12 per cent of the population - and a host of regeneration agencies.

The survey paints a fascinating picture of a field of activity that spans three sectors of the economy, and pays from as little as £12,000 a year to more than £120,000. In particular, it exposes the culture of low pay and unpaid work in the charitable sector; shows how working in regeneration in northern England can boost your quality of life; confirms the link between financial rewards and staff retention; and highlights fears over training, funding and voluntary sector staff retention. A big thank you for all your responses to our survey; we hope that you find this portrait of the sector as absorbing as we do.

Charitable concern

Key finding: Voluntary sector workers earn lower salaries on every rung of the regeneration ladder.

It seems that the voluntary sector is well-named. Regeneration employees working in the voluntary and community (or third) sector earn lower wages than their colleagues in the public or private sectors - and they put in more hours of unpaid overtime.

Of the three main market sectors - the public, private and voluntary/community (VCS) - the VCS is probably the most diverse, incorporating charities, community organisations, development trusts, social enterprises, and charitable bodies such as universities. Aggregated results for this sector thus may be less accurate than those for the others - but nonetheless, the overall message is clear. At all tiers of regeneration employment, charitable sector salaries are less generous than their equivalent in the public or private sectors. A manager in a local authority or central government makes around £39,400 in a year on average; a manager in a private developer or consultancy in excess of £47,000. Compare these with managerial salaries in the third sector, which average less than £34,000.

The difference between salaries in the third sector and the other two sectors is even more marked in the upper echelons of regeneration work. Directors of public regeneration agencies or private developers can expect to earn more than £71,000, but in the third sector the average salary for a directorship is barely half that - just under £39,000.

Stephen Bubb, the chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (Acevo), suggests that salaries within those parts of the third sector that focus on regeneration work may be lower than those across the sector as a whole. A forthcoming Acevo report, he says, will reveal that the average salary for third-sector chief executives is £60,000 - but not one respondent to our survey told us that they earn that much.

This concerns Bubb. "We need professional salaries for professional jobs," he says. "The trick to being businesslike is attracting people and retaining the best. We still have people who have spent most of their careers elsewhere, and then
are happy to draw lower salaries in the third
sector. We have got to get away from that and pay people properly."

Our survey also reveals that people working for regeneration charities put in just as many hours as their counterparts in the public and private sectors. While the graph shows that a smaller percentage of voluntary and community sector employees work long hours than in the private and public sectors, those who do give their employers additional time tend to be generous with it. Among third sector respondents, the most common answer (technically known as the 'mode') to our question about the quantity of unpaid overtime was five and a half hours per week, compared with just two and a half hours in the public and private sectors.

Despite the received wisdom that private sector workers put in more working hours than their public sector counterparts, our results suggest that, modally, there is no statistically significant difference between the additional number of unpaid hours worked by a typical public sector regeneration worker and their colleagues in the private sector. "There are absolute extremes in the public sector," says Nigel Smith, chair of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' regeneration panel, and a senior regeneration professional with experience in the public and private sectors. "There are junior local authority workers who have flexitime and leave at 5pm when they have done their time. However, quite frankly, they are not very well-paid, their prospects aren't good, and the only way they will get on is to move [to another employer] anyway."

"But then there are the more senior people who don't have flexitime, and who have to go to evening meetings and listen to Councillor Miggins or whoever. They work all the hours God sends, and they are treated like shit by the members."

It's grand up north

Key finding: Relative to average regional incomes, regeneration salaries are much higher in the North than the South.

It comes as no real surprise that our survey respondents' average salaries are greater than both the average (technically, the 'mean') for all jobs in the UK, and greater too than either the UK's national or regional averages. After all, most of our readers work in professional or managerial roles, and therefore are likely to take home a higher annual wage than the average UK worker.

Yet there is a fascinating finding within our survey - the North may be the best location for regeneration professionals craving affluence anda good quality of life. Regeneration jobs in London pay the highest average wage - in the capital, the average regeneration salary is £42,207. However, this exceeds the mean for all London jobs by just 26 per cent, the lowest differential of any region or nation in the UK. Given the high cost of living in the capital and the excessive price of housing, some regeneration professionals working in London might reasonably consider finding work in Newcastle: the average regeneration salary in North-East England is £35,000, a thumping 77 per cent higher than the £19,795 regional average salary for all jobs. Relative to average salaries for all jobs, the North-East has the best regeneration salaries of any region or nation in the UK.

Indeed, regeneration salaries in the North and Midlands, as a whole, are much better relative to the average for all jobs in these regions than those in the South. This perhaps reflects the extent of the regeneration challenge north of the Watford Gap, compared with that in the relatively affluent South.

In regeneration, poverty and deprivation increase the demand for labour, which in turn boosts salaries. This is the reverse of the situation in most other parts of the economy, where poor areas are typically characterised by a low-skilled workforce, a preponderance of traditional industries and job shortages - all factors that drive down wages.

Across northern England - classified here as the North-East, North-West, East and West Midlands, and Yorkshire and the Humber - pay for regeneration posts is 62 per cent greater than the average wage. In southern England - London, the South-East and the East of England - regeneration work pays only 43 per cent more than the average job.

Tom Riordan, the chief executive of regional development agency Yorkshire Forward, says that regeneration offers fantastic opportunities for graduates who want to build rewarding, well-paid careers outside the Greater South-East. "Regeneration activities here in the North are spread throughout the public, private and third sectors, and offer excellent career opportunities in a variety of disciplines," he says. "We are constantly working to ensure that our graduates stay in
the region, and so the opportunities offered by regeneration activity are welcomed. Young people moving into the field not only have the chance to contribute to the future prosperity of the region, but they also gain a wealth of skills and experience that will benefit their own careers."

Of all the regions, only the South-West bucks the trend: although it is in the geographical South, the economy of some areas has more in common with parts of the North. Average wages are low in the areas where farming and tourism dominate the economy, and some areas are still struggling with post-industrial decline. Not surprisingly, the region contains an abundance of well-paid regeneration jobs, and the average regeneration salary is £34,965 - some 63 per cent higher than the average annual wage for all jobs in the region of just £21,354.

Show us the money

Key finding: Pay growth breeds loyalty

Many regenerators choose to enter the sector for altruistic reasons - it is one of those fields that offers people an opportunity to improve society. But it is pay growth that keeps them in the sector.

In an analysis of data from our survey, we cross-referenced our respondents' pay growth against the percentage of respondents who expect to be working in the sector in five years' time. The strong correlation between good annual pay rises and loyalty to regeneration offers a lesson to those paymasters who believe their employees work in the sector for the love of it alone. This is clearly not true. If you want to keep your cherished staffers, you must ensure their financial circumstances improve significantly year on year.

Across the sector loyalty, on the whole, appears to be good. Only 17 per cent of all respondents say that they expect to leave the sector within the next five years. But it should come as no real surprise that more than half of those who have seen a significant fall in their salary over the past five years have grown weary of the regeneration sector and expect to be working outside it within five years - just 20 per cent of that group expects to stay within the sector. There is a clear progression between this group and those who have seen good pay rises - more than 58 per cent of respondents receiving a pay increase of between 11 and 20 per cent in real terms over the past half decade say they will still be working in regeneration in five years' time, while just 16 per cent say they will have moved on.

Furthermore, where pay growth is particularly good, loyalty is almost assured - of those respondents whose wages increased by between 51 and 100 per cent in real terms over the past half decade, 88 per cent expect to still be regenerating in five years. The six per cent who expect to leave the sector have, presumably, already made their pile and bought their Spanish retirement villa.

Unfortunately, most professionals who've worked in the sector for five years have not seen a real terms increase in their pay over that period. Some 19 per cent have actually seen their wage packet shrink in real terms, while 38 per cent have seen their salary rise only in line with inflation. The remainder, 43 per cent, have seen real terms increases - largely of between five and 50 per cent.

The Olympic Delivery Authority's Alison Nimmo says that, with the increasing prominence of the regeneration sector, salaries among senior regeneration professionals have risen fast. Nimmo came to the fore in regeneration after a successful career in surveying and consultancy in 1996, when she started work on rebuilding Manchester city centre after the IRA explosion, and says that many of her contemporaries from those early years remain within the sector. The deciding factor appears to be opportunities. "If we look at the most senior regeneration jobs in the public sector, they are well paid," she says. "There's almost a whole new tier of jobs now, compared with those that were available earlier on."

A learned profession

Key finding: Most regenerators are satisfied with training, but generic skills training lags behind.

Across the board, some 72 per cent of regeneration professionals say they are happy with the training their employers offer. This approval rating is even higher - at 75 per cent - among regeneration professionals working in central government and, greater still, at 82 per cent, among those working in public regeneration agencies.

Within councils the satisfaction rate is slightly lower, but still high at 68 per cent. Meanwhile, employees within the private sector are the happiest with training provision - 90 per cent of private investors and developers are reported to be satisfied with their training, as are 76 per cent of consultants.

Yet there is a whiff of a problem among those readers charged with providing the research that guides a lot of regeneration policy and work. Respondents working for academic bodies and think-tanks were far less satisfied with on-the-job training than any other group we surveyed: only 57 per cent said they were happy with their training, while 36 per cent stated that they were dissatisfied.

A note of caution: our sample group amongst academics and think-tanks was small, and the results should be taken as a warning rather than proof of a serious problem. Yet Professor Peter Roberts, the academic who is now chair of the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC), the government's national regeneration skills agency, isn't surprised at the finding; he suggests that a lack of specialist training courses might be to blame.

"Most people in regeneration are looking for introductory training or a skills upgrade, but this group has very particular needs," he says. "Think of the academic who writes erudite research on a particular facet of social exclusion - in some cases, the only person who can train him or her is himself or herself."

Furthermore, while the overall picture is a satisfactory one, there seems to be a shortage of training in the particular skills identified as key to regeneration by the Government's Egan review of skills. The report's author, Sir John Egan, found that practitioners often lack a set of "generic", cross-cutting skills in fields such as leadership and partnership working. It is worrying, then, that few respondents have had any training on these key skills over the past 12 months.

One might assume that councils are the most in need of lessons in partnership working - they are charged with establishing local strategic partnerships to bring together stakeholder groups, and with assembling public-private partnerships to develop brownfield sites. Yet less than 14 per cent of local authority respondents told us that they have been trained in partnership working during the past year. There was a similar problem on leadership skills - only a third of chief executives of all types of regeneration organisations have been taught any such skills over the past year.

Roberts warns that many people wrongly believe they do not need to undergo ongoing training in partnership working or leadership. Yet, he says, such lessons should form a regular part of any regeneration job. "Partnership working is one of the targets of the ASC," he says. "And it's not just partnership working in devising strategies that we need to work on, but the resulting partnership operation too - how we roll out the strategy. The cynical view is that a partnership is something we need to build to bid for money, then once we've got the money everyone does their own thing. Actually, that's not the way to get the true value.

"As for leadership, it's fundamental but everybody assumes they know it. Well, I'm not the fittest person in the world, yet I assume I can still run for the bus. But I can't: I need to train."

Funding concerns

Key finding: Fears over funding are greatest in the third sector.

Funding is crucial to everyone involved in regeneration, and concerns over whether there will be enough cash to keep the renewal wagon rolling are as old as the sector itself. "People have always worried about when the money is going to dry up," says Alison Nimmo. "We do have to get more creative about how we bring in private sector finance."

Indeed, it was our private sector respondents who proved to be most relaxed about funding. With land and house prices consistently rising during a sustained economic boom, it is no surprise that property developers, architects and planning consultants are thriving, while the employment of consultants by local and central government has led to huge growth in turnover in that part of the sector. Only around a quarter of respondents working in the private sector said they thought that future reductions in funding would reduce career opportunities over the next 12 months.

There is more concern in the public sector, which is vulnerable to changes in central government spending priorities. The chancellor will undertake a comprehensive spending review in autumn 2007, and the Government has refused to guarantee funding for most regeneration programmes past that point. Around a third of public sector workers responding to our survey said they thought that reductions in funding would compromise their career prospects over the next year.

But it is within the voluntary sector that fears over funding are at their greatest. More than half of respondents working in the charitable sector fear that a lack of funding will reduce career opportunities in the next 12 months. Factors such as the changes to the distribution of lottery funds, and a move from grant funding towards service delivery contracts, have left many employees wary of the future.

If these fears prove well-founded, we may see the expansion of an existing dynamic within the regeneration sector - an exodus of staff from the VCS to the public and private sectors.

Voluntary exodus

Key finding: The voluntary sector is a feeder sector for the public and private sectors.

The third sector is the gateway to regeneration - the field in which many keen regenerators learn their trade and forge ties with local communities, before following the money to the public and private sectors. Our road map of regeneration shows the public and private sectors trading staff fairly evenly with one another. But the voluntary sector is losing workers rapidly to both the public and private sectors.

Rockpools recruitment consultant Balvinder Sangha believes the third sector will forever provide a stepping stone on the path towards work in the higher-paid public and private sectors.

"I'm afraid it's an inevitable consequence," he says. And he ought to know: Sangha spent 19 years in the VCS before jumping ship to the private sector. "I know the talent's there and the skills are transferable, but the salaries?" he says. "Well, let's face it, what tempted me to come into the private sector? Money is a driver."