The Carpenter’s Estate
Wired Communities Application – A Summary
The Government’s Wired Communities programme
Earlier this year the Government announced a £10 million programme to explore how individual access to the Internet could transform opportunities for people living in the most disadvantaged communities by developing new ways of using education, work and leisure services. The Government invited communities to say whether they would like to be a trial area and then challenged the private sector to come up with proposals to assist. The Government’s favoured approach was that the communities should apply with named private sector partners.
The Carpenter’s Estate
The Carpenters Estate consists of 750 homes, 434 are tower blocked accommodation, 130 are in low rise and the rest are houses, 65 of which are owned by the TMO. The Carpenters Tenant Management Organisation decided that they wanted to bid to be a pilot area. The Estate is in Stratford Ward which is amongst the 2.45% of most deprived wards in the country. 73% of Carpenters Estate council tenants are receiving housing benefit and 49% of tenants receive Income Support. The Estate population is culturally and ethnically diverse. The most recent official figures are provided in the ’91 census which showed 44.3% of the estate being from ethnic minorities mainly black African (16.6%) and black Caribbean (14.1%) however these figures are now greatly out of date due to the turnover of property and the Carpenters Road TMO estimate that ethnic minority groups make up almost 80% of the total estate population.
The project will connect the 639 flats and 65 TMO managed houses on the Carpenters Estate to the Newham Extranet and Internet at Broadband speeds along with Carpenters College, Carpenters School, the Carpenters TMO and Learn Direct Centre and the Carpenters and Docklands Community Centre. It will also provide the service to owner occupiers on a subsidised basis. It will provide access via a set top box in every home or alternatively, and where appropriate, connect an existing computer. It will provide on site and in the home user support funded through the Tomorrows City SRB, provide online learning materials for children and adult learners, support the development of an online learning community consisting of parents, children and teachers, provide an integrated means for accessing locally and nationally sourced online learning materials and enable delivery of digital TV based content covering health, maintenance, local services, democracy and careers advice.The Bid
Newham Council is leading the £917,000 bid to the DfEE on behalf of the Carpenters Estate Wired communities Partnership. Four Council Departments have agreed to support the
project these being Computer Services, Finance, Leisure Services (Libraries) and Education. The partner organisation in the bid are the Carpenters Road Tenant Management Organisation (which will manage the staff), Inter Digital Networks (which will provide connectivity), Newham.net Ltd.(which will own the infrastructure) , Newham College of Further Education (which will manage the Learn Direct Centre which will act as the local focus for the project), Mase (which will provide and install the infrastructure) and the University of East London (which will provide on and offline services to the project at Duncan house which is in the edge of the estate)We will know at the end of Jan 2001 if the bid has been successful and the service would be operational by July 2001.