The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (23 page)

Then you got the Market Square and the Octagon Café which became a social venue; we procured a Farmers’
Market here in the square, bought covered umbrellas – that cost us £3000. I used to have to get up at 6.00 a.m. on a Saturday to put them up, then gradually residents took over and they now do it. Local organic producers came round and created a little fair in the square, then a musician, a fiddler, and suddenly these vital little human ingredients were showing that this experiment of creating a place based on the human scale, providing what people really wanted and not what was imposed by planners and plc house builders was actually beginning to work. There are later milestones, like the opening of the pub. All major brewers said it won’t work, too small a catchment, not standard format, the
Daily Mirror
was running a long story saying no one wants the Prince’s pub. Then someone took it and it worked and met its annual financial targets within six months. Will Hadlow is the youngest publican in England. It’s a thriving business.

One reason the pub has worked is because it’s a mixeduse environment – one of the principles of Poundbury – what towns and villages that grew organically used to be. It’s not a housing estate or residential suburb. With all these employers there are now six hundred people working in Poundbury and 750 people living here. Business people use the pub at lunchtime, residents in the evening – double whammy. It’s the same with village stores which opened six months after the pub. Tesco Metro turned it down, everyone said it wouldn’t work, wouldn’t trade. But it’s busy. Private individuals took it, Budgens are their franchisers, so 80 per cent is Budgens and the rest they select themselves, some of it is Duchy stuff. They now want to open another. It has disproved the major retailers.

Poundbury is about disproving shibboleths that have confounded good design for the last fifty years, it has
confounded the national house builders’ precept that people want detached little boxes all looking the same round a cul-de-sac. Prince Charles deserves a lot of credit for sticking with these ideas through a lot of criticism.

Critics are still sneering at Poundbury – mostly people who haven’t been to see it – but it has had a major impact on planning in this country. Poundbury is listed in PPG3 (Planning Policy Guidance Note 3, to you and me) and council engineers, traffic experts, highways officials, architects, developers and planners – great coach loads of people in the urban development business – come from all over to see this model of urban planning which, without the Prince of Wales, would never have happened.

Despite an absence of street furniture, white lines or stop signs, there has not been a single casualty on the roads in ten years. ‘The Prince didn’t dream all of this up in the bath,’ says Simon Conibear.

He was extremely well advised by people in the know. That’s the great advantage of his position, he can take advice, have a lunch at Highgrove and call in the top people and ask questions. He spoke to a highways engineer called Alan Baxter who has done things round the Tower of London and Trafalgar Square; he says don’t look at roads as things for cars to get round, think of them as spaces between buildings, public space. This myopic view that says ‘get the highway book out – 7.2-metre highway, 2.8-metre footways on either side, then do your houses’ – has been so wrong and so damaging for Britain in the last fifty years and you needed someone like the Prince to challenge those standards and stand up and say some things and stick by those people who were saying those things. I doubt whether
we would have had the success in challenging the highways and planning authorities without the Prince. The fact that he was fronting the challenge made them sit up and listen and work to make it work, particularly on highways.

Some might call that an abuse of power; but if the Prince of Wales hadn’t stood up and challenged the planners, it’s possible that no one would ever have done so, and the remorseless march of identical, soulless housing estates across Britain’s green fields would have continued with no thought about the community needs and the welfare of the people who were buying them. Financially he would have been much better off if he had kept his nose out of it. As Duke of Cornwall, he gets the revenue from the Duchy – that’s what keeps him in his very comfortable lifestyle and the Duchy would almost certainly have got more money for the land if they had sold it to a mass developer who would have built eight thousand boxes.

He put his head on the block for something he believed might make a difference to the quality of people’s lives – and it certainly seems to have done so. It could have gone badly wrong and it is still early days. Not much more than 15 per cent of the whole project has been completed and it is not scheduled to be finished before 2020. But John Prescott, First Secretary of State, is a big fan, has visited several times, and Poundbury is being seen and promoted by government as a blueprint for the future.

His experiment at Poundbury is by no means the first time the Prince of Wales has had an influence on government. The Department of Work and Pensions New Deal for getting the unemployed back into work is straight out of the Prince’s Trust and the work they have been doing for nearly thirty years; the only difference is that the government’s scheme is doomed to failure. It provides money to encourage employers to recruit the long-term unemployed; it doesn’t provide the back-up, the practical help, the mentoring, the team building that the Prince’s Trust provides – essential in giving real help to young people who lack motivation – with the result that most of those who have been given employment under the New Deal don’t turn up on time, don’t have the right attitude and have been swiftly sacked. The government’s Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative is another example; this is pure Business in the Community – and in this instance pure Prince of Wales.

The Prince didn’t found Business in the Community (BITC). It was started by Stephen O’Brien in the early eighties with a simple idea for inner-city regeneration: to involve companies in the communities in which they operate. If you can persuade business to invest, train and recruit from within those communities
then you solve unemployment and improve the whole depressed inner-city environment. O’Brien, aware of the Prince’s Trust’s work in that area, initially asked the Prince for support with a project called Fullemploy, to help unemployed young black people in the inner cities. What followed was a daring event known as the Windsor Conference. For two days the chairmen of sixty major companies in the UK were shut up with a crowd of articulate black people. Racism, the Prince told the assembled gathering, was a failure by the white community to recognize the potential of the black community. It was a brave thing to do, it could have backfired; instead it was widely regarded as one of the most significant advances ever made in race relations, and which people involved in the field still talk about today. Charles felt he had found a man who shared the same ideals and an organization where he could make a difference. He became President a year later and has been passionately and inextricably bound up with the organization ever since – personally initiating several major programmes. Like the Prince’s Trust, BITC is a huge success story. It turns over £22 million, employs four hundred people and has seven hundred member companies – one in five of the private sector workforce and three-quarters of FTSE one hundred companies.

O’Brien’s successor, Julia Cleverdon, an equally dynamic character, is frequently driven to distraction by the Prince.

He’s like an extraordinary campaigning terrier with a memory like an elephant’s – he remembers the detail of every character he’s met on every visit, which is why, when junior ministers start arriving with shiny suits and shoes like conkers and being enthusiastic about inner-city problems, the Prince rolls his eyes to heaven. ‘What do they think I’ve been doing for the last thirty years?’ There’s a lot of
frustration, a lot of here-we-go-again, new policy, new politician, new minister, having to explain all over again, ‘Yes, we know about this; yes, that would be a good idea; no, you’ll never make that happen in Bradford – unless you get the private sector going in Bradford you haven’t got much of a hope …’

She imitates him well but she’s a big fan. ‘He’s always had an extraordinary ability to push the agenda further than most of us thought it could go and spot things that other people haven’t seen,’ she says.

A year before Britain’s rural communities were devastated by the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001, Julia Cleverdon was hit by ‘the first onslaught of black spider memos’ saying that he wanted BITC to look at the issues facing the rural communities. ‘We now know the answers in the inner cities,’ he wrote; ‘we know what to do, the examples and the evidence are there; all we need to do in the inner cities is to make it happen. What no one has a bloody clue about is what you do in the rural communities where the tide has gone out. There is no way in which those Cumbrian hill farmers are going to be able to continue; what is going to happen to large swathes of rural Britain and does the business world not think this matters?’ ‘And the business world on my board,’ says Julia, ‘rolled their eyes slightly and said, “Oh God, we can’t cope with any more and we don’t really know what the answers are and perhaps someone in government can do something about it.” My chairman at the time, Sir Peter Davis from Sainsbury, did his best to keep the Prince in play but the Prince wasn’t having any of it. Absolutely furious he was. He said, “If BITC won’t do this and won’t take an initiative on this, I shall start a new organization called Rural Business in the Community.”’

At that point the board caved in – he had, after all, been
President for nineteen years and his instincts by and large had always been right – and so they set up a feasibility study to discover whether there was a business case for business being involved. The Prince personally took 150 business leaders to Cumbria with him – ten visits with fifteen business people on each – to show them what the issues were and they came back convinced. The situation was chaotic – there was no affordable housing, no jobs, pubs and village shops and post offices were closing, communities dying, and there appeared to be no one in Cumbria who thought it was any part of their job to advise hill farmers on diversification. In one instance they found five generations working on a single farm – and average incomes in the countryside were £5200 per farm, per year. The only hope in this family was the daughter who had started a recycling business, collecting black plastic sacks off everybody’s fields and sending them to a recycling plant in Scotland. One of the chief executives ran a company that owned half the hill farms in Cumbria (but he had never been to talk to the farmers on the ground before). He jumped on the girl’s idea – black plastic was a menace in the waterways, they had been frantically looking for ways of solving the problem, they could fund her business, provide the cash flow …

The case for business to get involved was proven; and then foot and mouth hit. The countryside was closed down, tourism stopped overnight, hotels, pubs and restaurants had no custom, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy animals were slaughtered, farmers faced ruin and the rural community was brought to its knees. But thanks to the Prince of Wales BITC was ahead of the game; the business world already had an understanding of what the problems were, Julia had put together a leadership team and some of the major food retailers were beginning to look seriously at the Prince’s ideas about local sourcing – his belief that the only way that Britain’s
small farmers can survive is if the food retailers, in particular the supermarkets, buy from and thus support their local producers.

And now government has seen the logic – but, as Julia Cleverdon says, ‘Would the government at this moment be making so much fuss about local sourcing by the public sector on public procurement if the Prince of Wales had not written to Margaret Beckett every day for most of the past two years moaning on about it?’

It all arose from a dinner the Prince gave at Highgrove. With all the retailers gathered round the table he asked where they were on local sourcing – he just wanted to go through a few points. Julia takes up the story:

They held their temper very well and were able to produce some quite good examples of where they had been able to improve their performance and change their behaviour in this area and then Sir Peter Davis said as the final coup de grâce, ‘Well, thank you, sir, it’s been a very nice dinner and very good of you to harangue us for three hours on the whole subject and I do hope we have managed to make some points back on what we’re trying to do. But I would just point out that although 50 per cent of all food is, of course, sold through the retailers in the UK, a stonking amount of food is bought by the government of the day for use in the prisons, the hospitals and schools and the local authorities – and I don’t see them sitting round the table.’

‘You’re absolutely right!’ said the Prince; seized a pen, wrote it down, letter off to Margaret Beckett the next morning: ‘What are you doing about public procurement?’ Discovers a bloody example in Wales of the Powys Public Procurement Initiative, rings me up at midnight, says he’s found an amazing initiative being run in Powys, did I know
the man? Of course I didn’t know the man; would I get on to the man at once? Yes, I’d get on to the man at once. They had produced the most amazing thing in the Powys Education Authority which says that the food that is to be served in the schools of Powys is to be dew-fresh, sunrise-plucked, right through the Treaty of Rome with a coach and horses, and all of that food is now being driven as a Welsh food initiative. ‘Why can’t this be done everywhere else? What are the reasons why not? Send me the name of the man, get him into my study; would it be helpful if I went to Powys, would it be useful if I led a Seeing Is Believing trip to Powys to produce other examples for other procurement initiatives … ?’

The Prince is tireless. When I saw Julia she was just back from holiday and by Tuesday had had five ‘black spider memos’, each one four or five pages long, about things that had caught the Prince’s imagination, or concern, or to find out what she was doing about something he had mentioned previously; had she followed up a suggestion he had made, where was she with chasing up a company or an individual? He spends a phenomenal amount of time and interest on causes he thinks are not popular and not listened to and she senses that he is more desperate now than ever before. ‘It’s not that time’s running out exactly, but because he feels he’s been at it so long, he’s got to make more difference than he has already been able to.’

When Michael Peat published a booklet early in 2004 called ‘Working for Charity’, setting out for the first time some facts and figures about the Prince’s charitable activity, Julia, like the chief executives of his other core charities, was astonished by just how huge his charitable empire had grown. An idea, scribbled on the back of an envelope in 1972 that became the
Prince’s Trust, had spawned dozens of similar and sometimes rival charities; and for many years Allen Sheppard, who was chairman of Grand Metropolitan as well as the International Business Leaders’ Forum, the Prince’s Youth Business Trust and BITC, had been telling the Prince that he needed to coordinate all these subsidiary charities. He needed to get them together on a regular basis to make sure that they were singing the same tune and sharing the same brand values. His advice fell on deaf ears; coordination was not a priority for Stephen Lamport and nothing ever happened. ‘Stephen Lamport let go of the tow rope on that,’ says Julia. ‘He wasn’t particularly keen to get too much coordination going because it was going to produce a lot of work for everybody and we were much more concerned about the quick wins in the tabloids than understanding and communicating more clearly what had been achieved and how it had been achieved, and so now you wake up six years on and discover there are seventeen organizations.’ But since Peat’s arrival, the Prince’s charitable house – as well as his domestic house – has been put in order and set out clearly and transparently for all to see.

Having no prescribed role in life was one of the Prince of Wales’s great problems. He and his first Private Secretary, David Checketts, who was with him during most of the seventies, had to feel their way with nothing to go on but the knowledge that the example of the previous Prince of Wales was not the one to follow. The young, sensitive and dutiful Prince wanted to give something back to society, to justify his position in some way, and Checketts, a serviceman at heart rather than a hidebound courtier, encouraged him in this direction. He was a squadron leader in the Air Force who had been equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh and was then persuaded to look after the Prince of Wales in Australia during his school-days and to stay on as his equerry. He became his Private
Secretary when Charles was twenty-one – he was thirty-nine – and his role as Private Secretary was as ill-defined as the Prince’s, but they had a good relationship. And when Charles felt moved to set up some means of helping alienated and disadvantaged young people, he had no qualms about supporting him. The result, from that idea in 1972, was the Prince’s Trust, which today, thanks to its high-profile Parties in the Park, is a brand that is as well known as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme.

It was sparked off by pure chance. Charles happened to hear a radio programme in which a probation officer called George Pratt was talking about a new scheme of community service for young offenders in London. Charles was deeply moved by what he heard, and unaware there were so many people growing up in such deprived conditions and turning to crime because they had no one in their lives to encourage them to do something positive. Spurred on by Checketts, he got in touch with George Pratt and asked what he could do to help. After much discussion with representatives from all the professional groups working with the young, his scribblings evolved into a charitable trust, formed in the spring of 1976 with the Prince’s severance pay of £7500 from the Navy. Its purpose was to help individuals aged between fourteen and twenty-five (now thirty) turn their lives around. Applicants had to write down what they felt would most help them improve their lives and, in the early days, the Prince saw every application and chose which ones the money – usually a maximum of £75 – should be given to. At that time he was paying the grants anonymously out of his naval allowance; and then, as now, there were no strings attached. The Prince hoped it would challenge young people’s sense of responsibility and show troubled teenagers that someone trusted and believed in them.

It worked. Today, the Prince’s Trust is the largest youth charity in the United Kingdom. It employs twelve thousand staff and volunteers, has an annual turnover of nearly £60 million and has helped more than half a million young people. Its activities have mushroomed but the core principles are the same. The facts and figures that drive it are simple. There are nearly 120,000 young people unemployed long term in Britain and many of them have no skills to take up jobs, even if they could find them. Increasing numbers of children are being excluded from school, particularly among the ethnic minorities. Young black men are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts. And according to studies commissioned by the Prince’s Trust, crime committed by unemployed youth costs the nation more than £7 billion a year.