By David Williams
10 March 2010
Efforts to regenerate former coalmining towns in England have had little effect despite a £1.1bn cost to the taxpayer, MPs have found.
A Public Accounts Committee report, published today, reveals that the Department for Communities and Local Government has spent £630m since 1997 but cannot account for the impact it has had on jobs or private investment.
The report calls on the government to ‘start afresh’ with the remaining £450m of earmarked funding.
Chair Edward Leigh said it was ‘extremely doubtful’ whether the spending represented good value for money.
‘The department still does not really know what improvement it has made to the lives of the people living in these areas.
‘Taxpayers will want to know how the department could spend many hundreds of millions of pounds without having sophisticated measures of the direct effects of that expenditure.’
He called for the DCLG to fully assess the current needs of the former coalmining communities and draw up clear objectives, with deadlines.
‘It must also start to do what it has failed to do so far and take the lead in co-ordinating the efforts of all government departments to ensure a concerted approach to revitalising coalfield communities,’ he added.
Between 1981 and 2004, 124 coalmines were closed, resulting in the loss of around 190,000 jobs.
The department’s regeneration strategy, built around the National Coalfields Programme, the Coalfield Regeneration Trust and the Coalfield Enterprise Fund, has brought the sites of 54 former coalfields back into working use, the PAC found. This had led to the building of 2,700 houses, the development of 1.1 million square metres of office space and the creation of between 8,000 and 16,000 jobs.
However, the PAC expressed concerns that the department could not show whether those job opportunities would have been created anyway.
