By Richard Johnstone
10 May 2011
The government’s regeneration strategy is ‘weak and disappointing’ and could lead to public money being wasted, MPs were told yesterday.
The Commons communities and local government select committee was hearing evidence on the Regenerationto enable growth policy paper, published in January.
Neil McInroy, chief executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, told the MPs that there was a lack of strategic direction in the policy, and poor explanation of how it would be put into practice.
Another witness, Katie Schmuecker, senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research North, said that the policy focused on places with the greatest potential for growth with no strategy for other areas.
‘If the document is meant as a strategy, it is weak. It reads rather more like a collection of government policies and the way they may apply to some deprived places,’ she said.
The government’s paper outlined a role for Local Enterprise Partnerships in regeneration by allowing local communities to decide how best to stimulate local economic growth.
However, McInroy said that there had not been a detailed enough consideration of the new role of LEPs or of how the Local Government Resources Review, currently out for consultation, would tie in.
He said that LEPs would need to move quickly to gain more powers, in partnership with councils, and to provide direction to ongoing regeneration projects.
Michael Gahagan, chair of Transform South Yorkshire, who was also giving evidence to the committee, said that the abolition of the £260m Housing Market Renewal fund following last year’s Comprehensive Spending Reviewcould affect regeneration projects.
‘Everybody expected cuts, but last year HMR was £260m, this year it’s nothing. In some areas, in the worst-case scenario, we’ve left families with housing boarded up next door to them, vandalism and antisocial behaviour. We shouldn’t leave families like that,’ he said.
‘Some of those areas were really starting to take off, and there’s a real danger they will now go backwards, and there’s a cost associated with that.’
David Orr, the chief executive of the National Housing Federation, told the MPs that there was a ‘very severe danger’ that money spent on the HMR fund could be wasted.
He said: ‘One of the things we felt was absolutely right about the Housing Market Renewal idea was that it was going to require investment over a sustained period of time. We have lots of examples [in the past] of where public money has been spent but it has not been sustained to the point at which the communities in question are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable, and the money has in practice been wasted. There’s a very severe danger that that’s going to happen here.’
As the committee was taking evidence, housing minister Grant Shapps announced a £30m fund to tackle ‘blight’ caused by the unfinished work of the Housing Market Renewal scheme. Its large-scale demolition programme aimed to clear space to build new homes but in some areas this has left pockets of residents living in otherwise derelict areas.
