Regeneration

Debate between Bob Blackman and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Thursday 19th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Bob Blackman]

That is a key point in the whole regeneration debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) mentioned the evidence that we received from the London borough of Newham, where investment has been made in regeneration schemes for 30 years. When we forcefully asked the mayor of Newham whether that should continue and when we should stop public sector investment, he said, “We’d all dearly love to see it end, but just not now.” The view seemed to be that we will still invest in Newham for another 30 years and nothing will change. The housing will be nice, but the indices of deprivation will hardly have shifted.

My view is that if there are limited resources, they should be applied where the maximum gain can be achieved. We have to be honest about the situation and say that certain areas will not get funding because we will not get the most gain from them in terms of growth and opportunities. We have to concentrate the resources, as opposed to saying, “We’ll spread it thinly for everyone,” because by doing that nothing is achieved.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the consequence of the policy direction that he is outlining is that some areas will be abandoned altogether or, indeed, will go backwards if no resources are given to them by the private or public sectors?

[Bob Blackman]

The potential consequence is that, yes, areas could be told, “We can’t invest anything in you because we’re not going to get any leverage from the private sector.”

I want briefly to describe three regeneration schemes. I was chairman of the Harlesden city challenge company that was bidding successfully for Government money. We in that regeneration scheme were in direct competition with everyone else. We brought together the private and the voluntary sector. Uniquely, that city challenge project was about promoting economic growth; creating 2,000 new jobs in the west London area on the Park Royal estate; improving the housing stock on the Stonebridge estate, which was a dramatically bad estate at the time; and improving Harlesden town centre. It was a wholesale regeneration project. Some £37.5 million of Government funding produced £200 million of private sector investment. It was a brilliant and highly successful project that was supported by both parties in Brent.

At the end of that project, we evaluated it and asked whether we had succeeded. Against every single criterion that we had agreed with the Government, we had succeeded. However, when we evaluated the project properly, we said, “Well, in this case, has the unemployment rate changed at all? No, not a bit of it.” We evaluated why and found that, as soon as someone got a job, they moved out of the area to somewhere better to be replaced by someone who had not got a job. In many ways, yes, the project had been successful, because it had created jobs and safeguarded existing jobs in the area, but it had not ended the deprivation. I have repeatedly said both here and in the main Chamber that investing money in the areas of greatest deprivation does not solve the problem. We have not yet resolved that key issue.

The second regeneration scheme that I want to mention is one that my right hon. Friend the Minister will remember well: the Chalkhill estate in Wembley, which was a similar type of council estate to the one that we saw in Hulme. High-rise blocks built in the 1960s replaced some lovely family houses and were built as a village in the sky, where no one would need a car and everyone would live in peace and harmony. People had to compete to get into that estate, but it was not long before people were trying to escape. I remember the previous director of housing describing Chalkhill people coming together to form the escape committee to get out of that dreadful estate.

The replacement of all that awful housing—no one in their right mind would want to live in such an area because of its security issues and run-down nature—was funded by selling off a large part of the land to Asda. We used the capital generated to replace the housing in partnership with a private sector developer. We made sure that the housing was replaced in the way that the community wanted. Instead of having architects and planners doing things to people, the project was based on what people wanted. In our visit to Hulme, we saw a very similar type of exercise.

I should like to allude to the situation in the London borough of Harrow, which relates to a much more recent development. The redevelopment of Harrow town centre was going to be promoted by Harrow college moving there.