Hope Street 2: The end of an era for regeneration

John P. Houghton, a consultant and former policymaker, has written a series of essays on the past, present and future of regeneration. Here he surveys the current landscape.

The end of an era

The election of the coalition government in 2010 brought to an official end the era of regeneration in England. In the run-up to the election, Eric Pickles had promised to help ‘those run-down estates, those children in sink schools, the unemployed. Those communities forgotten and neglected by Labour’.

In power, however, the coalition developed no programme for addressing this apparent abandonment. There was only one mention of deprived areas in the coalition agreement, and this was a very specific pledge to train up a new generation of community organisers.

Meanwhile, the area-based grant, which funnelled money toward areas with higher levels of deprivation, was subject to deep cuts, and dedicated regeneration funds were reduced ‘much more severely than other parts of the public sector’ according to the CLG regeneration select committee.

Most significantly of all, England had no national regeneration framework for the first time since the introduction of the urban Ppogramme in 1968. The National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal was closed down along with its architecture of floor targets and public service agreements. The Housing Market Renewal Programme was abolished, to great relief in many places. Smaller-scale area-based initiatives (ABIs) were similarly shuttered or left to lapse without replacement. The only exceptions were Big Society projects, like the community organisers mentioned above.

The landscape of urban England was littered by unintended monuments to the failure of regeneration. Anfield was left abandoned. My old house stood as a painful symbol of continued housing market dysfunction. The most notorious was the Bradford Hole; an undeveloped eyesore that should have been a Westfield shopping centre until the developer pulled out, leaving a crater in the middle of the city. Into its maw slipped a chunk of Bradford’s civic pride and the old funding model for regeneration.

Shortly after the election, the British Urban Regeneration Association entered voluntary liquidation. The news came as a shock, but not a surprise. There had been talk two years earlier of ‘regeneration turning 40’, but there was no sense of birthday celebration. People spoke instead in hushed tones, as if discussing a patient whose prospects darkened with every passing day.

A deal, not a framework

Instead of a regeneration framework, the government in its various post-2010 incarnations has proceeded in a more market-driven and growth-focused fashion. It is looking to strike deals with places; offering new investment alongside operational and fiscal freedoms in exchange for commitments to deliver new jobs and homes and more delivery-focused, city-region type governance arrangements.

So instead of a fixed framework of funding against targets, we have an ongoing (if sometimes dysfunctional) dialogue around devolution, with punctuation points at which growth deals are struck by national and local partners.

The re-development of deprived areas, funded by the Treasury’s Regional Growth Fund, forms part of the deal in certain places. It is important, however, to keep in mind Michael Heseltine’s clear testimony to the House of Commons Regeneration Select Committee that ‘the Regional Growth Fund is not about regeneration’.

Where does all this leave the places that were the focus of regeneration in the past?

Where are we now?

London’s housing crisis grows worse every year, yet the development market is so predatory and so many promises have been broken, that any suggestion of change is met with hostility and suspicion.

Seaside towns continue to suffer, as they have for many decades. The current government has followed the previous pattern of announcing dollops of additional funding, without really getting to grips with the ensnarled complexity of the social, economic, and housing market problems in these places. We need much more than money to solve the riddle of the sands.

The fortunes of the core cities and their now formally attached regions have varied. Manchester’s ‘devo-Manc’ deal reflects its civic confidence and solid economic growth, while Liverpool’s resurgence continues. Even while both cities have had to manage significant funding reductions. On the other side of the Pennines, the South Yorkshire devo deal has stalled.

Everywhere, austerity has bitten, but it has not had the devastating effects that some predicted. I took issue back in 2011 with David Blunkett’s ‘warning’ that the cuts to the area-based grant described above would trigger a ‘post-Soviet’ breakdown of social order. The utterly wrong-headed and patronising assumption underpinning this thinking is that people living in poverty are hopelessly dependent on the imaginary largesse of the state and have no resourcefulness or resilience of their own.

Overall, the geography of deprivation in England has not changed. The 2015 edition of the Index of Multiple Deprivation revealed a depressingly similar pattern of entrenched poverty in the places we are used to seeing at the ‘top’ of these lists. As the statistical release accompanying the new data put it, ‘in relative terms at least, the most deprived and least deprived areas have tended to remain the same’.

The path ahead

The immediate response to the end of the era of regeneration was a sense of paralysis. Regeneration had become an industry. The familiar cycle of bid-making, project monitoring and spend reporting was suddenly and completely disrupted.

Few mourned this development with unqualified sadness. Without repeating too much of my earlier Hope Street piece, the industry had been operating for a long time against the interests of the poorest communities. The focus on short-term, top-down, outputs missed the need for long-term, community-driven, sustained and sustainable change.

Once the initial shock subsided, people began to take matters into their own hands. A handful of activists in Anfield re-opened the old Mitchell’s bakery and launched the Homebaked initiative. Local authorities used the challenge of austerity to fundamentally re-think how they can better serve their citizens. Housing associations stepped into the space previously occupied by state agencies and began to develop ambitious and long-lasting neighbourhood renewal programmes of their own. Just this week, the National Federation of Housing has launched a challenge fund to support its members to develop and implement initiatives that will ‘change lives at a national scale’.

These efforts take us to the questions of what comes next.

The atavistic response to the end of the era of regeneration is to try to get back to the good old days. To campaign for another round of multi-billion pound programmes, for another set of national targets, and for the restoration of the public sector bureaucracy that comes with such developments.

Not only does this approach ignore the weight of evidence about why regeneration failed in so many places, it simply wouldn’t wash. The people living in the poorest places have been promised pots of money and lasting change time and time and time again. We need something much more subtle, more attuned to local conditions and potential, and more appreciative of local assets.

So the bottom-up developments describe earlier are welcome, but community is not enough. It is the essential but not the only element of lasting change. We can’t praise the poorest for their gumption and then leave them to struggle on alone. As Julian Dobson argued, ‘real localism is about giving people the ability and resources to take action. There is a huge difference between delegating responsibility and abdicating it’. There remains a certain role for the state in nurturing the conditions for sustained change.

The way to Hope Street can only be delivered by assertive communities using assets at their disposal to shape their own futures. And these efforts need to be matched by policies that support resilience at local level and provide a framework for reconnection at the metropolitan and sub-regional scale.

In the next piece for New Start, I will expand on what that means in more detail.

• To read the first part of this series, click here.