THREE weeks ago, I wrote about Craigmillar - for the think tank, Enlighten (here).
For the past year and a bit, I’ve been doing a bit of pro bono work there.
As I remarked, it’s been a life-enriching experience, and I’ve genuinely found the people and the place to be inspiring.
As a child, I’d be driven through Craigmillar with dad to visit ‘granny’ in Newcraighall.
Even then, with Craigmillar a relatively new entity, it looked tired. Meanwhile, visiting Newcraighall was like stepping back in time.
Roll forward to 1999 and I was the city council leader, and the regeneration of Craigmillar was a huge challenge.
The council had already been working with the local community to establish the Craigmillar Partnership and a formal delivery body, PARC (Promoting and Regenerating Craigmillar) was established in 2001.
PARC worked with the local community to create a masterplan that became one of Scotland’s largest regeneration projects.
The early work of PARC was run by one of the smartest and most consequential figures in Edinburgh’s modern economic renaissance, Ian Wall.
Ian was chief executive of the council’s property development company, EDI.
Importantly, the investment had extensive input from the local community. That masterplan formed the basis of around £200million of investment that has proven to be transformational.
For the article - and indeed also for a column I penned for the Edinburgh Evening News newspaper - I rattled off several statistics to make the case that Craigmillar is no longer the place of depressed and depressing mythology.
By any measure - including unemployment, educational attainment, home and car ownership, life expectancy, drug and alcohol misuse, average income and, importantly, crime - Craigmillar is a ‘good’ place to live, getting ‘better’ all the time.
That’s due, in no small part, by the local committed volunteers who have worked tirelessly to restore the area, such as the Craigmillar and Niddrie Litterbusters group, whose inspiring leader, Miranda Baird, was specifically praised by Prime Minister Keir Starmer when he last year launched the UK Government’s Pride in Place funding.
Organisations like Lyra, which is Scotland’s only performing arts venue for teenagers, is an amazing success.
Sandy’s Community Centre has been at the centre of huge success in tackling the anti-social behaviour that arose in the community on November 5.
And the Venchie is an adventure play facility where kids can be active in a safe and secure environment and can have some of the best experiences of their young lives.
Of course, Craigmillar still has its challenges, but - little by little - it is getting there.
But, in compiling my statistics, in trying to both verify and add to them, I couldn’t believe the ‘evidence minefield’ I was soon about to enter: using sources of information I already knew and also Artificial Intelligence (AI).
My first port of call was the Craigmillar Community Council boundary as set out on the city council’s website (here).
Depending on which source of information you use, or AI, it is possible to come up with several divergent statistics: for instance average household income for Craigmillar at £41,765 which seems to be at odds with the average for Scotland and the UK.
Meanwhile, the unemployment figure was given as 2.67 per cent for the Community Council area, which is difficult to reconcile with a Portobello/Craigmillar council ward figure of over five per cent in separate analysis of the same site.
Unemployment stats from the 1980s were easier to pin down and for that I am grateful to Ian Wall, for a copy of a District Council leaflet from the mid-1980s.
That showed the unemployment rate in Craigmillar and Niddrie was 25.3 and 24.1 per cent respectively, and describes the proportion of ‘long-term unemployed’ as 54.4 per cent and 53.3 per cent - much higher than the figure AI gave me.
When Ian handed me the leaflet my heart both sank (at how ‘bad’ it was all these years ago) and swelled with pride (at how far things have got so much better).
Population figures were similarly tricky to detail, with the Edinburgh council website figure of 22,939 much higher than the 16,500 figure I ended up using.
The difference is most likely the relatively new housing on the Edmonstone Ridge, which might be technically within the Community Council area, but is not what anyone thinks of as Craigmillar.
Some figures, however, were to tally between sources and AI calculation: especially higher education qualifications and car ownership.
The crime statistics were probably the hardest to get. To source police statistics, you must formally submit a Freedom of Information request. Especially hard to get are figures compiled before the relatively recent creation of Police Scotland.
And while the council does record crime figures per thousand residents by ward (and the figures for Portobello/Craigmillar show a drop by 23 per cent since 2018), there appears to be no long-term data to support what one hears anecdotally: that there’s been a huge reduction in crime and anti-social behaviour since the 1990s.
Which leads me to a single, over-arching conclusion: getting easily-accessible statistics on what is happening in our regeneration areas is tortuously difficult.
I remember once speaking at an European Mayors conference in London the secretariat for which was provided by the London School of Economics. I did wonder then why we couldn’t have such strong partnership links with universities and I still wonder it today.
Anyone seeking to understand the full impact of any regeneration effort in Craigmillar, and Scotland more widely, faces a patchwork of statistics - from various sources - that are just very hard to pin down.
We know the intricate details of microscopic processes in human cells, and we’ve studied the farthest reaches of the universe, but our knowledge of what goes on in our poorest communities is vanishingly small.
Our universities should be queuing up to help analyse and learn the lessons from such areas.
Regeneration costs money, often lots of money. If we aren’t able to measure exactly whether we are getting good value for that money, we are all losing out.
Donald Anderson is a former leader of Edinburgh’s city council and is a director of Playfair Scotland public affairs company.
Image details: White House, Craigmillar; copyright Mike Wilson
You are highlighting an overlooked and important issue. Much publicly funded policy making and evaluation rests on assumptions that valid data exists, measures what matters to local people, is accessible and that the ways we analyse it are capable of capturing the dynamics of change.