The coalition government has jettisoned Labour’s regeneration programmes, leaving many deprived communities high and dry as a result
The report from the Communities and Local Government Committee on the government’s regeneration policies is a voice in the wilderness on a neglected issue. The report is, of course, about the lack of regeneration policies, since the coalition government has wound down programmes such as the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders and left little in their place.
In fact, regeneration is a bit like a punchbag that’s been hit so often all the stuffing has been knocked out of it. Ministers joined in the rather facile media attacks on aspects of the market renewal programme (notably the planned demolition of Ringo Starr's old house in Liverpool). It would have been much better if they’d taken the time – as I did a couple of years ago – to visit the majority of the pathfinders and see what they were actually doing.
Despite the brickbats they got for knocking houses down, most of their work was old-fashioned renewal of terraced streets in otherwise neglected neighbourhoods, continuing programmes that were in their heyday under the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. They combined this with much more understanding about local housing markets and many innovative ways to engage residents.
The nine pathfinder areas were undoubtedly some of the most deprived parts of the North and the Midlands, and the demise of the programme has simply left them in limbo, with half-renovated and – worse – half demolished streets, and incomplete rebuilding schemes. No programme is beyond criticism, and the pathfinders made some mistakes. But that wasn’t the fault of the communities in which they were working, which have been left high and dry.
Ministers have retorted that councils now have more freedom to respond to community priorities, and Local Enterprise Partnerships have been set up to revive local economies. But they do not provide the resources and, as readers of Public Finance are well aware, it is on the housing and regeneration work in councils’ General Funds that the cuts have often fallen hardest.
In the early years of the Labour government, it was a frequent criticism that ministers were inventing new area-based initiatives every five minutes and many of these overlapped. But, in the end, programmes like New Deal for Communities did lead to real change in the areas they covered, as the independent evaluation of the programme showed.
Importantly, the NDC and the housing market pathfinders were long-term programmes, recognising that change in deprived areas doesn’t happen overnight. Indeed, and depressingly, housing market renewal was due to last until 2018, not 2011.
If it was only the withdrawal of capital investment in regeneration that was affecting inner cities, it would be bad enough. But these are also the areas suffering worst from the combined effects of the recession and the cuts in other government programmes.
They also include many of the neighbourhoods with houses at the poorer end of the private rental market – precisely the market now being simultaneously affected by the housing benefit cuts and by the Localism Bill’s promise to make more use of private lettings to house homeless families.
If you live in a former regeneration area, especially in the parts of England from the West Midlands northwards, you must be starting to feel that whatever help reached you from government in the past has started to disappear rapidly.
The last government set a target – which it never really followed through – that ‘within ten to 20 years, no one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live’. Would today’s government even see why such a promise might be relevant?
