Housing minister Mark Prisk was in Leeds today to announce a series of measures to encourage more people to build their own homes.

He was visiting LILAC – an inspiring development of strawbale housing in Bramley, West Leeds – which today welcomed its first residents.

You’ll know we’ve been working hard on Leeds Empties for the past year or so. Ultimately, our interest is in ensuring that more Leeds people have access to decent housing. Sorting out empty homes has a big part to play in making that happen. But it clearly doesn’t offer the whole answer. We need to build more homes.

But I can’t be the only person who sees volume house builders as part of the problem. We’re told we need to Get Britain Building. We need to relax planning regulations. We need to make it easier for people to buy new-build homes. Just let the big boys get on with the job – they’ll sort it out.

Really? Now I’m not going to suggest that volume house builders don’t have a role to play – they clearly do. But I’d worry if we were going to rely on them alone to sort out our shortage of decent housing. Don’t their developments, often at scale, often on greenbelt land – keep running into local opposition? Do their estates of identikit housing inspire? Do they help us to make a significant dent in our CO2 emissions – 25% of which come from running our homes? And, perhaps most crucially, are many of their homes affordable, by even the most loose of definitions of affordable?

This is why I’m interested in how we can encourage more self-build. In the UK around 10% of homes are self-build. Across Europe, the figure is around 50%. In Germany and Austria it’s more like 80% (all stats from this programme). So it’s clear there’s scope for more of us to get involved in building our own homes.

What might be the benefits of more of us building our own homes? I’m no expert on this – but from what I’ve seen with my own eyes – in places like this and this – self-built homes can, first and foremost, be beautiful, inspiring places to live. That’s not too much to ask is it?

But they can be much more than that too. Designed well, they can offer opportunities for significant reductions in the environmental impact of our homes – both in the construction and running of the homes. And, when people decide to build together, there can be benefits with regards to a greater sense of community – LILAC, for example, is based on co-housing principles and the development includes a shared house. Might co-housing – much of it self-built – help tackle what’s been called Britain’s loneliness epidemic?

And then there’s affordability. We live in a pretty modest 3 bed semi in Leeds. About £1 in every £3 we earn goes to pay a mortgage on a house that I like, but I’d struggle to say I love. And we, of course, are amongst the luckier ones – the generation below us has got little chance of being able to afford a decent home.

Now there are bigger things at play here – but self-build housing surely has to help. LILAC, for example, has affordability at the heart of its approach and its ownership model. And, particularly where people group together to buy materials and do some work themselves etc you can imagine there are opportunities to do things more cheaply than house builders who are driven primarily by profit.

So how do we make sure that LILAC isn’t the last inspiring self-build community in Leeds? A starting point could be a meeting that’s being organised by Leeds City Council in May. Hopefully that’ll bring a number of people together who are interested in building their own homes. I’ll be going – it might take us four or five years before we’re ready – but I’m keen to start exploring whether our next home could be one we build ourselves – with others.

Getting together in May might also start us thinking about what might need to happen in Leeds to make it easier for people to build their own homes. Clearly access to land is key. Getting your head round planning regulations, I presume, can be a barrier. It’ll be interesting to see what role the Council – and others – could play in this – for example by identifying appropriate parcels of land – perhaps smaller pieces of land that commercial developers aren’t so interested in – and offering them on good terms to self-builders.

Personally, I’d like to see us trial an approach whereby volume house builders are offered planning permission in return for selling – at a fair price – a percentage of their land to self-builders. Might that be a good way to get more decent, green, affordable homes for Leeds people?

We need to make sure LILAC is a starting point to inspire others to do something similar elsewhere in our city, not somewhere we all visit, dreaming of what could be.

Travel is in the news today – as it is every year when rail fares increase above the rate of inflation.

For many of us, getting around is one of our major expenses, and whether you get from A to B in your car, or on public transport, you’re likely to be spending more year on year. And, of course, how much we travel, and how we travel, has implications for the environment too as we call upon natural resources to help us get to where we want to be.

As a family, we decided a while back to try to change how we got around. We began by keeping track of how much we used our car, and over time we got to a stage where we were ready to sell our car. That was in October 2011 – you can read more here, here and here.

2012 was our first full year without owning a car. So how did we get on? I wrote about it in October last year (12 months since we sold the car) so I won’t go over the same arguments again, but I thought it might be useful to focus this time on the cost of not owning a car – and some thoughts on where we go from here.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re a family of three, living in Leeds, on decent bus routes. Both of us can get away with not using a car, most of the time, for work.

I’ve rounded the numbers slightly, but over the year, we spent £4700 on transport. Of that, £1900 was for car hire and car club fees, and we spent just over £600 on fuel. We also spent £1900 on public transport – of which £1300 was bus travel, and £550 was train travel. We spent £100 on taxis and £150 on bikes (servicing etc).

To put that into a bit of context – we hired a car 20 times – for a total of 98 days in 2012 – around one day in four. The majority of hires were for holidays or weekend visits to family & friends. We travelled around 5000 miles – an average of around 50 miles on each day that we hired a car.

I talked more here about how things have gone – so I won’t cover that again now. Instead, I’ll focus on the financial side of things – and then talk about it from a green perspective.

Having a car, when we’ve needed one – just under 100 days in 2012 – cost us £1900. I reckon that’s pretty economical – when you factor in the cost of buying a car (including possible loan costs) plus the other costs that come with car ownership – MOT, servicing, insurance, Vehicle Excise Duty etc.

Obviously, you also need to factor in the cost of the alternatives to car ownership – more spent on the bus, trains etc. That’s a bit harder to analyse – but I don’t think those costs are too high – for two main reasons. One is that most of our weekday journeys (mainly work) were already done by public transport – and weekly/yearly passes mean that extra journeys at the weekend are “free”.

Secondly, we’d already decided – mainly to try to be more green to shift longer journeys, where we could, to the train. So we were happy to absorb those costs (mainly the extra train travel costs). But they are still costs, and need to be taken into account.

You can see a monthly breakdown of our travel costs in this graph – click on it to see it in more detail.

The other thing that I’m keen to focus on is how we’ve used the car, when we’ve hired it. Stats never tell the whole story, but 5000 miles over 100 days suggests we’ve travelled, on average, 50 miles a day in the car.

This is interesting (at least to me) because I’d argue that one of the issues of mass car ownership is that many of the journeys many of us make in the car are sub 5 mile trips – the kind of journey that could, in a good number of cases, be made on public transport, on a bike or on foot.

Why do we many of us make many of those short journeys in a car? Because we’re time-poor, we’re hassled, and we’ve got lots to do. But also because the car is sat there, on the drive. In 2012 we didn’t make those short journeys in a car- because most of the time there wasn’t a car to jump into.

What if more of us chose different ways to make some of the short journeys we make every week? What difference might that make to traffic levels? Pollution? Our health? The sense of our streets being living places, not just thoroughfares for motor vehicles?

So where do we go from here? We’re going to try to cut down on our car use in 2013. If you look at the graph you’ll notice that car hire was pretty erratic – mainly concentrated around school holidays – and it tailed off in the last 3 months of 2012. It tailed off partly because it’s not holiday season – but also because slowly we’re weaning ourselves off having a car. Bit by bit we’ve adapted how we live so we need a car less. But we still know we can easily get one when we need one.

So this year we’d like to cut what we spend on transport by around £700 to £4000 – fewer days car hire and a bit more bike instead of bus. And we’re aiming for 4000 miles in the car instead of 5000. We’ll let you know how we get on this time next year….

It’s been a busy few days. After Monday morning’s inspiring session with Muhammad Yunus I spent the afternoon with 150 others at the Empty Homes Conference.

The highlight for me was listening to Dan from Revolutionary Arts – the man behind the Empty Shops Network who brings a refreshing perspective to the use of empty space. His talk challenged me to think about empty shops – up to now we’ve steered clear of shops and stuck to homes. And I think that focus is still correct – but we should at least look into ways to make the most of empty flats above shops. Which, in some cases, may mean looking at new uses for the shops themselves too. There are people who know much more about this stuff in Leeds than we do – so we’ll be contacting them soon.

From London, on to Bristol for an event at Triodos Bank. The event at Triodos was run by Bristol Together – a social enterprise that’s been up and running for about a year now – and recently won a start-up of the year award. They provide work for ex-offenders by buying, renovating and then selling empty homes.

One of the intriguing things about them is that they’ve managed to raise £1.6 million through a bond issue organised by Triodos. The bond offers a return of 3% to investors – and is repayable in full after 5 years. Investors can also benefit from Community Investment Tax Relief – which turns a 3% return into an 8% return.

There’s a mix of investors in Bristol Together – from institutional investors such as the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation through to so-called High Net Worth Individuals. A couple of the individual investors were there, and spoke about their experience. They were clearly pretty engaged investors – both were on the Board of Bristol Together – and one commented that of all his investments, the Bristol Together Board is the most impressive he’s part of. It made me think I need to widen my network to include a few more thoughtful High Net Worth Individuals…

The £1.6m investment gives Bristol Together the cashflow to act as a cash buyer in the housing market – buying houses at auction and through Estate Agents. They’re also keen to explore a closer relationship with the Council which might see them find a way to buy unwanted properties from them. Clearly part of the return for investors comes from this ability to move quickly to secure a sale.

They reckon around 90% of the work to renovate a home is done by ex-offenders – with usually around 5 or 6 people working on each house. Obviously more difficult tasks – tanking a cellar, sorting out the gas supply– will be done by specialist traders. But much of the rest is done by the people for whom Bristol Together exists.

Each renovation is co-ordinated by a Project Manager. As you can imagine, the Project Manager is key to keeping the job on track and on budget. A big part of their role is juggling the desire to be supportive to people finding their way back into the world of work with the need to get the job done as planned. Not an easy task, but it sounds like they’ve recruited well.

Bristol Together are an ambitious bunch. They plan to scale up their work in Bristol whilst also expanding into other areas. Next up is the Midlands – with a Midlands Together business currently in development. A number of potential partners for the new venture were there – and it sounds like that’ll be something that develops over the coming months – accompanied by a £5 million bond organised by Triodos.

My main reason for making the trip down was to see if there was potential to develop something similar in Leeds. In the short term, I’d think it’s unlikely that Yorkshire Together will happen – as the next step is to develop in the Midlands. But it certainly felt like something we should explore in the medium term – particularly as there appears to be a strong commitment to working to developing each Together with local partners. We’ll be watching the development of Bristol Together and Midlands Together closely, and we’ll obviously do all we can to help them to identify appropriate local partners if they do decide to work in Yorkshire.

Then there’s the investment angle too. If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I’m sceptical about much of what’s happening in the world of social investment. But today it made sense to me. Engaged investors, who have a good relationship with a social business that has a business model which can generate financial returns alongside social returns. The financial return (3% plus tax relief) seemed fair enough to me. And Triodos – well known as a values-driven organisation – felt like a Bank you could do business with.

So could we explore something similar in Leeds? Perhaps with Triodos, or perhaps with another intermediary? What do the investment opportunities look like in Leeds? Could we develop a bond which allowed social ventures in Leeds to act as cash buyers, to do up homes in ways that brought lots of extra social benefits, to ex-offenders, long-term unemployed people or whoever? And could we find a few High Net Worth Individuals of our own?

If you’ve got any thoughts on how to take things further, it’d be great to hear from you.

I’ve been in Nottingham this morning for a breakfast event hosted by Capital One with Professor Muhammad Yunus, the man often described as the Godfather of Social Business.

Prof. Yunus is best known for Grameen – who in turn are best known for offering banking services to poor women in Bangladesh. He’s in the UK for a couple of days – with Friends of Grameen President Liam Black by his side – to talk with a wide range of people – including the UK Government – about social business and, more specifically, the problems the bank is currently facing thanks to the unwelcome intervention of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh.

Prof. Yunus made it clear, with the answer to Liam’s first question at this morning’s event that he didn’t want to “waste time” talking about Grameen’s current problems. Instead he wanted to focus on social business – so that’s what I’ll do here too.

It’s easy to feel a bit starstruck in the presence of someone who has achieved as much as Muhammad Yunus. He’s an interesting mix of zen-like calm and steely determination. This isn’t an ivory-towers academic who’s dipped his toe naively into the world of business. I get the impression you wouldn’t mess with Professor Yunus. But his generosity, warmth and humility are immediately apparent too.

Liam introduced Prof. Yunus as a man who’s “best known for asking questions that turn things on their head.” This for me was the theme of the talk, and something that in my own little way I try to bring to my work too. Many of his questions, of course, concern poverty and its causes. “Poverty isn’t created by poor people. It’s externally imposed. It comes from outside.” A statement such as this challenges – and immediate invites questions. Who/what is imposing poverty? How do we respond?

His social business journey began in 1976, as an academic who, in his words, was “growing tired of teaching theory whilst people died outside.” He looked around in Bangladesh – and saw big problems with high-interest moneylending. So he decided to be begin lending money to the poor – the poor who most people believed (still believe?) aren’t worthy of banking services.

From those humble beginnings, Grameen now runs more than 50 social businesses – many in collaboration with multinationals – Danone, Veolia, Pfizer, Tesco and more – in a range of markets from microcredit to mobile phones to yoghurt. One of the things I find most fascinating about the Grameen approach is that none of the businesses distribute profit – yet many are run in collaboration with some of the world’s most successful profit-generating corporations.

That challenges me in a number of ways – with regards to my attitude towards who our business collaborates with – and some of my thinking about profit. Yet I’m not saying that Professor Yunus’s attitude towards taking dividends from social business (he suggests business is either selfish – profit maximising – or selfless) isn’t problematic either. But it’s a useful challenge….

He talked quite a bit about Grameen’s collaboration with Danone – a relationship I know a fair bit about having spent a couple of days with Danone at an Innovation Lab in Paris a few years ago. Together, Grameen and Danone sell high-nutrition yoghurt – with the double benefits of “health through food” (Danone’s mission) and plenty of jobs for people selling the yoghurts.

He told a story of product development. Execs arrived from Paris with sample products – in, of course, plastic pots. Cue one of Professor Yunus’s questions.

“Why is the pot plastic?”
“Because that’s what we sell yoghurt in around the world.”
“We haven’t set up a social business so that we can litter Bangladesh with plastic pots.”

They went away, and came back three months later – pleased with themselves of course – with a biodegradable, corn-starch pot. Professor Yunus looked at it, and asked another series of killer questions:

“Is it edible?” No? Why is not edible? People are paying good money for this product – why can’t we produce a pot they can eat? We eat ice-cream cones – so why not yoghurt pots?”

That’s innovation in action, right there…..

But is he – and Grameen – being used by multinationals hungry for good CSR stories and access to bottom-of-the-pyramid markets? Markets that are easily accessed by partnering with a social business with the incredible reach that Grameen has in countries like Bangladesh? Yunus responds to this question – which is asked all the time – primarily by journalists – with mock surprise. “They’re using me are they? Well, I never knew. I thought I was using them….” He’s delighted to be “used” – if being used means that a social business is developed that helps people out of poverty. But as I suggested earlier, Yunus is no naive Professor – I doubt you’d get far if your aim in collaborating with Grameen was purely selfish.

Too soon it was all over, and I had to dash to get my train to London, to catch the second half of the Empty Homes Conference and for a series of meetings to help us to develop Leeds Empties – an enterprising, collaborative approach to tackling the waste of empty homes so that more people have somewhere decent to call home. I travel down inspired by Professor Yunus’s indefatigability (to borrow a mis-used term). Fifty social businesses later, he’s still hungry for the next start-up. These final words stick with me:

“Social business is problem-solving business….. Every time I see a social problem, I set up a business to solve it.”

Inspiring stuff for all of us trying to make a difference through social business.

We had some good news last week – our application to Leeds City Council’s Transition Fund was successful – which means we have £10,000 to help us to develop Leeds Empties further over the next few months.

If you’ve read previous posts you may remember that we were initially looking for £50,000, from a range of sources, to develop Leeds Empties. We knew that was always going to be tough, but there’s nothing wrong with thinking big is there? So £10,000 means that – as we have done so far – we’ll be developing things on a shoestring budget. But we’re confident we can make some real progress by next April.

Alongside the £10,000, there’s an important, clear commitment from the Council to continue to work with us to develop Leeds Empties – the idea is that our range of services will sit alongside what the Council currently offers – so that empty home owners are helped in a range of ways to bring their home back into use.

So what will we get up to over the next few months? Basically, we are looking to try out a range of ways in which we can help more people to bring more empty homes back into use in Leeds. To give you an idea, here are a few of the things we’ll be focusing on:

Empty Homes Doctor – we’re aiming to work intensively with at least 15 empty home owners over the next 3 or 4 months to help them to bring their homes back into use. Who they are – and exactly how we’ll help – we don’t know yet. But the idea is that we’ll sit down with people to understand the reasons why they’re currently unable to bring their home back into use. Then we’ll help them to explore a range of options for bringing their home back into use. Options might include working with a local social enterprise to renovate and rent out the home, or they may wish to consider other ways to rent out or sell their home. Our role won’t be to advise – rather to help them to consider options that are available to them – many of which they may not be currently aware.

Support new and existing self-help and social ventures: we’re lucky that we’ve got some great social enterprises working on empty homes in Leeds – people like Canopy, LATCH and Gipsil. We want to do what we can to help them do more of what they do – whilst also encouraging new social ventures to set up in Leeds.

So we’ll be talking to existing social enterprises to see if there are ways we can help – and we’ll also be keeping an eye out for enterprising ways to bring more empty homes back into use. This week I’ll be at the Empty Homes Conference in London on Monday – and from there I’m heading to Triodos in Bristol to find out more about Bristol Together – a social enterprise that works with ex-offenders to bring empty homes back into use. We’re keen to explore lots of ideas – and to find people in Leeds who might wish to take some of these ideas – or things they’ve come up with themselves – further.

Attract funding and investment into empty homes in Leeds: we’ll do what we can to attract more money into Leeds. We’re talking to a range of social investors and funders – people we know who are on the look-out for enterprising approaches to solving this big social problem. So we’re in contact with organisations including Triodos, Key Fund, Ecology Building Society and an intermediary who works with Big Society Capital. We’re also looking into other ways that we could attract investment. Could local people crowd-fund the renovation of a number of empty homes? Or might community share issues work? And how can we make sure Leeds makes the most of the National Empty Homes Loan Fund?

Engage more people in bringing empty homes back into use in Leeds: one of big successes with the Call To Action was that we attracted a wide range of people to the event – including more than 20 local businesses who pledged money, skills and time to bringing more empties back into use.

We want to do far more of this. A new website will give practical information about how to get involved, and we’re also running an event in February with the RSA and Leeds City Council to engage more people in practical ways to bring empties back into use. Then in March, we plan to host a Leeds Empties Week in empty premises in the centre of Leeds – with a range of events to raise awareness of the empty homes issue – and to focus on ways that together we can bring homes back into use.

So it’s going to be a busy few months. Over the next ten days we’ll tidy up the Leeds Empties site so that we can keep you updated and involved. In the meantime I’ll blog here about what we’re up to – including the Empty Homes Conference tomorrow and the Bristol Together event on Wednesday.

As always, if you want to get involved, please get in touch with us.

This one minute video, produced by Tiger Aspect, the people behind George Clarke’s Channel 4 series The Great British Property Scandal – will give you a feel for our Leeds Empties Call To Action:

And let’s not forget we also made it onto BBC Look North – empty homes was the lead story on Look North all day – and I made my debut on the sofa with Harry and Christa:

You can read more about the Call To Action – and what we’ve done since – on this post. This guest post on the Great British Property Scandal site, alongside the Leeds Empties microsite will also give you some background info.

Where are we up to now? We’ve spent the last few months developing some of the ideas that were explored at the Call To Action – and we’ve come up with the ten point plan for bringing more empty homes back into use.

In summary, we want to try out a range of approaches – working alongside the Council’s empty homes team – and working closely with some of the great social enterprises, like LATCH, Canopy and Gipsil who already bring empty homes back into use.

Our main proposed service – an Empty Homes Doctor – will see us working intensively, on a one-to-one basis, with people who find themselves with an empty home (perhaps through an inheritance) but who don’t know what to do with it. We reckon our approach, over time, can help to bring back into use hundreds more Leeds empty homes. And as a result, more Leeds people will have a decent place to call home, and fewer Leeds communities will be blighted by houses that are eyesores and magnets for crime and anti-social behaviour.

Other things we want to do include working with social investors and funders to bring more money into Leeds for empty homes, finding ways to do green retrofits of empties in Leeds, alongside work to make sure that we make the most of job & apprenticeship opportunities in empty homes refurbishment.

It’s not been easy to get funding or investment – and as a result we’ve made slower progress than we’d hoped. But, with a fair wind, we reckon we’ll secure some initial investment in the next few weeks to try out the Empty Homes Doctor service and some of the other ideas we’ve got – such as finding ways to secure further investment for empty homes refurbishment in Leeds. Then, a few months down the line, we’ll have a good idea as to what works – and we’ll look to expand the service across Leeds.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please leave a comment below or get in touch with us – or follow me on Twitter. We reckon Leeds has got what it takes to bring hundreds more empties back into use as homes, and we’d love to have you involved!

We sold our car a year ago last week. It was a bit of an experiment, to see how we’d get on renting cars when we needed them, and getting around on foot, bike and public transport the rest of the time.

So how have we got on? When I’ve got a bit more time I’ll go into some more detail but I thought I’d share a few quick thoughts.

Overall, we’re really pleased we got rid of the car. We live in a big city, on decent bus routes and neither of us needs our car on a regular basis for work. School is a short walk away. So we were confident we’d be fine.

Over the year we’ve kept records of all our journeys and what they’ve cost. It wasn’t just about the money – it was mainly about trying to be more green – and about a slightly more vague change in “lifestyle” – but I was still interested to see how much we’d spend without a car. Here’s a graph (click on it to see it in more detail) showing what we’ve spent – and it’ll give you a bit of an idea of how we’ve got around.

Over the twelve months, we (a family of 3) have spent £4500 getting around. £2250 of that was car hire and fuel, whilst we spent £1200 on buses. Trains accounted for £500, whilst taxis and bike maintenance cost another £100.

How does that compare with what we would have spent if we still had our car? This is where we need to crunch the numbers a little bit more but we estimated that owning a car used to cost us (allowing for depreciation/new car fund) around £3000 a year. So on the face of it we’ve made a bit of a saving on car costs.

But have we spent more on public transport now we haven’t got a car? Yes, but not that much more. That’s mainly because if you have a weekly/yearly pass for the bus for work you can obviously use that for getting around – at no extra cost – at the weekends. And we’d already shifted many of our longer trips – to see family for example – to the train.

The main expense has been car hire for holidays and trips to see family and friends. Partly because of another green pledge – to try not to fly – we’ve been taking more British holidays – and that’s reflected in the car hire costs you can see in the graph.

But that’s where we’ve felt one of the other big benefits of hiring cars rather than owning one. When we’ve needed a big car to go camping for the week, we’ve hired a big car. When we’ve needed a car to run round Leeds for the weekend, we’ve got a small car. How many of us own big cars that are expensive to run for the one journey in ten where we might need a big car?

So money-wise, for us we reckon it makes sense. But I think more importantly it’s made a difference to how we get around, and how we feel about where we live.

It’ll sound a bit hackneyed, but we do more stuff locally now. We walk up and down our street to the bus stop or to the shops – which means we bump into neighbours.

We definitely spend more money locally – because when you don’t have a car the discount you might get from the big shop 5 miles away isn’t readily available to you. But if you’re not spending money running a car so you can make 5-mile trips to the big shop, you’re not necessarily worse off.

And this is where City Car Club has been invaluable too. We haven’t used it loads (maybe 2 to 3 hours a month) but it’s great to know that there’s a car 10 minutes walk away when we need to do a big shop or pick our son up from a party.

For me, one of the main issues with cars is that so much of the traffic on the roads is made up of cars making short journeys that could easily be done on foot or on a bike. Now I know full well that life gets in the way – we’re busy, it’s raining, we’ve got kids, the bus doesn’t turn up or doesn’t run nearby…. But it’s interesting to reflect on how your behaviour changes when you haven’t got a car on the drive. Our local shops are 15 minutes walk away. For other people they’re a five minute drive away. Most of the time I can afford those extra ten (OK, 20 – I need to get back too) minutes – and if I can’t I get the bus. And the walk does me good.

I need to crunch the numbers a bit more – but I estimate that we’ve hired a car for 85 days out of 365 (25% of the year) – and we’ve driven around 5000 miles. So that means that when we’ve hired a car we’ve driven around 60 miles a day on average.

In other words, we’ve used a car when we’ve had to go a fair distance – and we’ve rarely used a car to make short journeys. Compare this to how the majority of us get around – with 69% of car journeys being 5 miles or less. Imagine how much of a difference it could make to traffic levels if we all cut down on at least some of those short journeys.

The other main difference we’ve noticed is that we go into Leeds City Centre a lot more. Mainly because it’s the easiest place to get to. But I think that’s great – and it’s far more fun to wander around a city centre than get stuck in a car park of an identikit shopping mall. So whilst Leeds City Council obsess about making it easier for people to park, I’d be suggesting we make it easier for people to get into town by public transport.

So overall, we’re glad we got rid of our car. We’re not pretending it’s for everyone – it certainly wasn’t viable for us until my son started school. But whilst money is tight, roads are packed, waistlines are getting bigger and the air is getting more polluted, it’s maybe worth more of us asking the question – is owning a car really the best way for me to get around?

I do most of my work these days through Social Business Brokers, a social enterprise I set up a couple of years ago with Gill Coupland to bring people together to find enterprising solutions to some of our big social problems.

We came up with a new way of working this year.  We developed a five-stage process for making progress on whatever social issue we were focusing on:

The first issue we decided to focus on was empty homes in Leeds.  We’d seen George Clarke’s programme on TV talking about empty homes being a scandal.  And, like most of you, we’d wandered around our city’s streets, spotting empty homes and wondering how on earth they could stay empty for so long.  Who owned them?  Why were they empty?  How would we go about getting them back into use?

So we looked for clues and we created a fair bit of buzz – including this full page feature in the Yorkshire Post.  And George Clarke got in touch to say he’d love to come to our Call To Action.  That, as you can imagine, created a lot more buzz – and before we knew it 100 people had signed up to come to our Call To Action.

And what a day it was.  We’d done all of this for free – and countless other people had chipped in with their free time, their venue, their contacts and lots more.  100 people  - including property professionals, senior Council staff (including the Chief Exec), social entrepreneurs, campaigners and people looking to buy their first home – came together for a day to think creatively about how to get more of our empty properties back into use as homes.  It was a brilliant day, which also got tonnes of media coverage, including this in the YEP and this on BBC Look North (my TV debut).

And if you’re still not convinced, have a look at what people said about the Call To Action on Twitter

That was in May.  What happened next? The truth is that whilst I can now confidently point you to our “five stage process” (outlined above) we were, in reality, making things up as we went along.  We knew we needed to do something to help turn the ideas that were explored at the Call To Action into real, live, interventions which would help bring hundreds more empties back into use.  We just didn’t know what that something would look like.

But that’s OK.  If we knew, we – or someone else – would have already done it.  The whole point of our approach – which is essentially about bringing other people together who know far more about an issue than we do, and who are better placed than we are to solve it – is that we don’t know the answers yet.  But together we can find them….

So we’ve spent the last six months talking to people, listening to people, continuing to look for clues and to put some meat on the bare bones of the ideas that were explored on that sunny day at Greenhouse in May.

What we’ve come up with is a plan for prototyping Leeds Empties.  We want to learn by doing – and we want to learn quickly.  We’ve identified ten areas of work that we believe – having talked to a lot of people – could make a real dent in the numbers of empty homes in Leeds.  Here they are:

1. Communicating with the right people
2. Empty Homes Doctor – intensive one to one support for empty home owners
3. Development of business models and investment vehicles
4. Private sector engagement – Civic Enterprise
5. Understand and review current Leeds City Council empty homes processes
6. Opportunities for green retrofit of empty homes
7. Support for new and existing self-help schemes and social ventures
8. Identify and secure funding and investment for Leeds empty homes
9. Identify work, volunteering, training and apprenticeship opportunities
10. Explore how to get involved in Leeds City Council’s locality based approach

It’s probably hard for you to grasp exactly what we mean by all of this.  I’ll try to explain it more over the coming weeks.  But, in essence, we want to get stuck into the detail of each of these areas of work over the next six months, so we can work out what might work best in Leeds.  

And then, six months down the line, we believe we will have a much better sense of what Leeds Empties can be.  Which is when we can go for some serious investment – which we believe will pay huge dividends – more decent homes, more jobs and training opportunities, fewer communities blighted by derelict houses, and much, much more.

For now, we need just over £50,000 to prototype Leeds Empties for six months.  So this is an open call to anyone who can help us to make Leeds Empties work.  We’d love to hear from social investors, philanthropists, Trusts, and whoever else who could invest in our prototype.  Please get in touch if you’re interested. We’d love to tell you more.

In yesterday’s reshuffle one move caught my eye – Chris Grayling moving from the DWP to the Ministry of Justice.

I’ve written a number of times about the problems (to put it mildly) with the implementation of the Work Programme – in particular the problems it has caused for third sector organisations that have formed part of the supply chain that’s headed by Prime Providers like A4E.

Earlier this year I also wrote about how we weren’t sure whether we should get involved in a Payment By Results pilot at Leeds Prison. My concern was – and still is – that social enterprises will end up in a similar position to many of those that got involved in the Work Programme. Having been used as bid-candy, those further down the supply chain end up doing a load of work which destroys their cash-flow, and, in some cases, sees them go under.

So will Chris Grayling arrive at his new desk with a sincere aim of sharing what he’s learnt at the DWP about the difficulties of the Payment By Results model?   Yes, probably – although what he thinks he’s learnt is likely to be a whole lot different from what many observers have been learning.

Time and again, when challenged on the impact that the Prime Provider contracts were having on people further down the supply chain, he failed to acknowledge that there was an issue. Either it was too soon to tell, or it was an operational matter on which he wasn’t able to comment. Or, I’d suggest, like most politicians, most of the time, he’d made up his mind a while ago and wasn’t going to let facts get in the way of ideology.

Personally, I’m not wholly against the idea of Payment By Results. For me, it’s all about the implementation. Trying it out, learning from it, then doing it better. What concerns me here is that the timetable for Payment By Results in Prisons – Ken Clarke had talked about it being rolled out by 2015 – doesn’t give any real time to understand what works and what doesn’t work.

Take, for example, what appears to be happening at my local prison, Leeds Prison.  Apparently, all of the shortlisted Prime Providers pulled out of the original Payment By Results procurement process because they couldn’t make the figures stack up.  I’ve heard that the Ministry of Justice will outline what it will do next at Leeds in the next three or four weeks.  This surely demonstrates that getting this right will take time – and suggests to me that a 2015 deadline will just see lots of people making the same mistakes, all at the same time.

And, as always, we’ll end up paying.  More taxes to pay for a prison system that still doesn’t work.  Not to mention all the social costs of many lost opportunities to make a lasting difference to prisoners’ chances of not re-offending.

You may remember from previous posts that over the last few months we’ve been making a bit of an effort to reduce our gas and electricity usage at home.

We’ve been keeping weekly meter readings – here’s a graph, courtesy of imeasure, showing our energy consumption since November last year (click on the graph to enlarge it):

The graph shows a pretty clear decrease in consumption over the year. I think that’s pretty promising, although I’m not reading too much into it yet.

(In case you’re wondering, the zero figure for gas is when the central heating broke – and the zero figure for electricity is when we got a new meter)

With gas consumption, clearly most of us mainly use gas for central heating – so consumption is bound to drop significantly once winter is over. The pattern with the electricity usage is more interesting. Over the course of the year we’ve been replacing a lot of the bulbs in the house (most replacing spotlights – average 40W each – with LEDs – average 6W each). This will be reflected in the lower consumption levels. We’ve also made an effort to use the tumble drier less – which I’m sure will have had a big impact.

I think at the very least, we’ll soon have a year’s worth of data – which will give us a good baseline for comparing future consumption patterns. It also motivates me to do more in the house – to see if we can get energy use (in particular gas consumption) lower – by doing some of those jobs (like extra draft proofing and putting up thicker curtains) that could make a difference in the winter.

It’s heartening to see that some of the effort (and, of course, expense) we’ve put into reducing energy use seems to be paying off. I’m not pretending our one little household is going to make a big difference when it comes to slowing down climate change. However, I do believe that we need to do a lot more with regards to reducing domestic energy use. And I think our first few months suggest that if you make a bit of an effort, and keep an eye on the energy you’re using, you can make significant (at least at a micro-level) changes. And if more of us were to do this, then all those small reductions in consumption would start to add up.