Regeneration

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

I have enjoyed the debate so far. We have heard excellent contributions from hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber. I particularly enjoyed the enthusiasm shown by the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) in talking about the potential of regeneration to unlock the futures of the next generation. That is what we are talking about when we talk about regeneration: how we can improve parts of our towns and cities—our country—for the next generation. I also enjoyed the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk). I agree with all that he said about how funding dedicated to regeneration projects has fallen considerably. No matter how the Government try to dress that up, the facts speak for themselves.

My own view on the regeneration strategy produced by the Government is that it is woefully inadequate. When I first read the document last year, I genuinely thought that pages were missing from the copy that I had been given. The document contains three and a half pages of text and then a series of tables. The tables are primarily about policies and initiatives that have already been announced by the Government. The information has pretty much been cut and pasted from different Departments’ websites and put into those tables. If that is the Government’s strategy, if that is the sum total of the Government’s interest in regeneration—three and a half pages of fresh text—I am concerned about it.

The best description of the strategy was given to the Select Committee by Neil McInroy, chief executive of the centre for local economic strategies:

“If one of our junior members of staff had written this after two weeks, I would be disappointed.”

It is fair to say that we did not really hear anyone speak particularly positively about the document when they gave evidence to the Committee.

To call this “community-led” regeneration and to talk about what the Government are doing to support community-led regeneration adds insult to injury. Giving communities the power to do something is very different from giving them the means to do it. There can be all these fancy initiatives, but if the communities themselves do not have access to land and resources and the know-how, knowledge and skills to make things happen and to work with the myriad different players involved in regeneration—the public sector agencies and the private sector—that will not happen. That is my concern about the strategy that the Government produced.

So I ask myself this: when the Select Committee did its report, was the Government’s response to the Committee’s report any better? I do not think that it was. The Select Committee called for the Government to produce a national strategy for regeneration, and the Government said no. The Select Committee called for the Government to evaluate their new approach to regeneration. The Government talk about giving local authorities a toolkit of options to work from in bringing about regeneration. The Select Committee said, “Can we evaluate this new approach?” The Government said no. The Select Committee suggested that the Government commission a study of stalled regeneration schemes across the country to understand the scale of the problem that the country faces. The Government said, “No, it is for local authorities to identify those schemes that have failed.” I could go on and give a very long list, but I will just say this. We also said to the Government, “Please review how the knowledge and skills that have been built up in the regeneration sector but are ebbing away at the moment can be captured.” We suggested that the Government look into that. They said, “No, that is for the sector itself to do.”

In their response to the Select Committee’s report, the Government talk about a “localist vision for regeneration”. If people want that translated into plain English, I suggest that it is the “washing your hands of the problem” approach to regeneration or the “sink or swim” strategy for regeneration. That is fine if all areas have the same ability to swim, but as we have discussed, some areas suffer from the effects of deindustrialisation. Some areas will not be as advantaged as others in terms of the metropolitan area in which they are located. Perhaps they are areas that provide employment to the main city. Some areas do not have the same ability as others to get on and attract the private sector investment that is necessary.

That is the problem with the Government’s strategy as it stands: it does not give anyone confidence that the Government accept and understand that the country’s current economic problems are affecting different towns and cities and different parts of the country in different ways.

[Jessica Lee (Erewash) (Con)]

On that point, is not the entire purpose of localism that people do respond? Communities have different needs, but setting them free and empowering them through the Localism Act 2011 and other measures means that local decisions can be appropriate to a local community. The Big Brother approach is not the correct one; the state does not always know best. That is a fundamental difference between the response and approach by the current Government and the response of the previous Labour Government.

[Heidi Alexander]

I agree that community involvement in regeneration is vital. During my time on Lewisham council, I did huge amounts of work on stimulating genuine community involvement. I go back to the point that I made earlier: with the best will in the world, communities sometimes need other help to get schemes off the ground. Sometimes that involves public money. Sometimes it involves initiating a discussion with private sector partners to get them interested in the area to start off with.

Some parts of the country are being hit very hard in the current economic climate. Before coming to the debate today, I looked at the unemployment figures and researched some of the statistics for the constituencies of other members of the Select Committee. In my own constituency, Lewisham East, 29 people are chasing every job, yet in Rugby nearly three people are chasing every job and the position is the same in Welwyn Hatfield.

[Grant Shapps]

Given that the hon. Lady is now making a very coherent argument about jobs and how important they are for regeneration, can she explain why the Select Committee takes the view through its Chairman, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), that job generation through the regional growth fund—some 360,000 jobs—is not regeneration?

[Heidi Alexander]

Regeneration is about jobs, decent homes, improving the quality of the environment—so many different things. It is not good enough to look at big infrastructure programmes and assert that the economic impacts of those new bits of infrastructure will somehow trickle down to some of the communities that are excluded most from the labour market. Given that I represent a London constituency, that issue is very close to my heart.

When the riots took place last summer, a group of people massed outside Lewisham police station at the start of the problems in Lewisham. They stood on the site of a stalled regeneration project. Although it would be too simplistic to say that if only the regeneration scheme had gone ahead, we would not have had the riots—there is not a direct correlation between all the places where riots happened and all the places in need of regeneration—areas with significant economic and social problems experienced some of the worst rioting. If we are to give hope and aspiration, jobs and opportunities to the next generation, we must invest in the areas where those people live. It is about so much more than putting up shiny new flats. It is about giving people the skill and opportunity to access jobs and about quality of life and life chances. We know that in some parts of the country hope, determination, confidence and ambition are harder to find than in some other places.

All Governments of different political persuasions over the past three decades have recognised the differences in economic and social capital in different parts of the country. Moreover, they have all had some form of geographically based, area-focused regeneration programme or initiative such as city challenge, the single regeneration budget, new deal for communities, the neighbourhood renewal fund and so on. I am not saying that all of them were perfect or that we should not learn the lessons from them. However, I would say that this Government seem pretty unique in not having any form of geographically based area regeneration scheme in place. They might talk about the regional growth fund and say that that is focused on areas that are more highly reliant on public sector employment and that are experiencing problems with the decline in the public sector work force, but we have already covered that territory. As we know, Lord Heseltine, who chairs the board that considers the bids that come in for the RGF, has basically said that they are not about regeneration. I suggest to the Minister— [Interruption.] Does the Minister want to intervene?

[Grant Shapps]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for allowing me to intervene. The point about the regeneration fund has been made several times and often misleadingly. Although it is not primarily about housing regeneration in housing market renewal areas—I have mentioned two HMR areas that have benefited from RGF funding—it is indeed about regeneration, as the name suggests. It would be quite bizarre to somehow exclude this multi-billion-pound fund.

[Heidi Alexander]

I was quoting Lord Heseltine when he gave evidence to the Select Committee. Let me quote him again. He said:

“I have said quite clearly that we are not about regeneration.”

Perhaps there is some miscommunication between the Minister and Lord Heseltine.

[Mr George Howarth in the Chair]

The Government also suggest that the new homes bonus will help to get the homes built that we all need. That is all very well, but people must be able to afford to live in them. It was interesting that the Prime Minister came to Lewisham to launch the “affordable” mortgage scheme last month. He stood in a development that I, as the cabinet member for regeneration, had promoted. It is a large-scale regeneration scheme with 788 homes, 146 affordable rented properties and 40 shared-ownership properties. That scheme received a grant of £20.5 million from the Homes and Communities Agency. I hesitate to say that the scheme would not have gone ahead had we not got that grant, but I can 100% say that the amount of affordable housing in that scheme would have been less had we not received that grant. When we talk about regeneration, we need to think about giving people the opportunity not just to live next to middle-class people but to live in a decent home and to be able to do well at school, feel good about themselves and to be able to go out there and get a job. I find it ironic that when the Government are launching a scheme about housing, they stand in a development that would not have been so good had it not been for a Government grant, and that that Government grant is a legacy of the previous Labour Government. I am lucky because parts of my constituency are being regenerated, but a number of schemes have stalled.

In conclusion, let me talk briefly about the Milford Towers development in Catford. It is a ’60s block, which looks like a concrete fortress from the outside. There are about 250 flats above a Tesco supermarket and ’60s shopping area. The council is working hard to find a commercially viable regeneration project that will enable people who live in appalling situations to get a new home and move on with their lives.

Earlier, the Chairman of the Select Committee spoke about the lady from Rochdale who talked about being ashamed of bringing people to her home and neighbourhood. I met a lady who works in Tesco and lives in Milford Towers. She said that when her daughter got married, she could not get ready at home because of the state of disrepair of the flats, so she went to somebody else’s house. She did not want to leave on her wedding day from where she lived. That said it all really and shows the need for that regeneration scheme.

We talked earlier about the definition of regeneration. People who live in such an environment are not worried about definitions; they just want their lives to improve and something to change in their communities. It is for that woman and her daughter that I urge the Minister today to look again at some of the Select Committee’s recommendations about the scale of the challenge that exists in some of the hardest-hit areas of our country. Please look again at the ways in which the public sector can work with the private sector to kick-start some of those stalled regeneration schemes, so that we do not lose the knowledge, skills and experience that have been built up in the regeneration sector over the past couple of decades. This is too important to get wrong.

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[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Howarth, and to contribute to this important debate, the topic of which has been the subject of detailed consideration by the Select Committee. It is pleasurable that eight members of the Committee have been able to be here and that other MPs have chosen to participate. I remind Members that we are debating the Select Committee’s report in response to the Government’s published strategy. We have had the opportunity to hear of a great bid for funding for Erewash, and of greater reviews of Northampton and Cleethorpes, but I want to bring us back to the strategy and to what I believe should happen.

A problem in the past has been that with every change of Minister—whatever the Department has been called—there has been a new initiative. In my view, there has never been a proper evaluation of what succeeded and what failed, what was good and what was bad, and whether we could learn lessons. Historically, when Governments have succeeded one another, they also have failed to do that. I am a strong supporter of the Government and of almost everything they do, but I believe that there has been a missed opportunity with the strategy, and I hope that we can persuade my right hon. Friend the Minister that there needs to be much more of a proper strategy for regeneration.

As a veteran of local government, I go back—beyond some others—to the urban programme and the damage that it did, with small amounts of funding that had huge strings attached. It was not really successful, and we still bear the scars across the country. There has been a whole series of schemes, but time does not permit me to go through them all, and I would lose everyone to boredom were I to do so.

The problem is that regeneration is not just about replacing people’s houses. Someone can be given a decent place to live and that will be an improvement, but have they been given a job? Have they been trained to get a job? Has their health been improved? Have the life chances of young people been improved, so that they can get a job in their environment? Has it been ensured that the education system is right and that we have true equality of opportunity, so that people can aspire to be the best they can? Has there been the opportunity for the private sector to invest and create jobs? Without all that, spending on any single strand—whether housing, training or education—is almost wasted money. We need what I call wholesale regeneration of areas, rather than the picking off of little bits and pieces. That is one of my greatest concerns about the position regarding the Government’s strategy.

During the Select Committee inquiry, we considered successful and less successful regeneration schemes, and drawing strengths from the successful ones will start to lead us to what the strategy should be. There are limited resources, and I gently remind Opposition Members that the Government inherited a huge deficit, with one in four of the pounds that they spent having to be borrowed. There is no pot of gold to be handed out willy-nilly. However, it should be clear that if we have a regeneration strategy and Government funding is provided, competition is needed. Ministers should not simply dole out cheques for an area; people should come together as communities in partnership with the private sector and others to compete for the money that is available.

In addition, given the economic position faced by the Government, there is no doubt whatsoever that it will be extremely difficult to make revenue funding available, but the Government gave a commitment before the election to continue to fund the capital programmes and not to cut capital funding in the way that the previous Government planned. My hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) mentioned infrastructure, which is a key point. Often, the private sector wants to invest, but things—blockages—prevent it from doing so, and I well remember an example. On the site of Central Middlesex hospital in the London borough of Brent, 80 acres of prime industrial land were not going to be invested in. By using regeneration money, a new road was created and suddenly huge amounts of investment came in. Hon. Members can go and see that today. That investment dwarfed the amount of public money that came in. Therefore, a relatively small spend on an infrastructure project produced large-scale private sector investment.

[Heidi Alexander]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about the limited availability of money. I should like to ask him the question that he asked us earlier. With limited funds available, does he believe that they should be spent in the areas that are most likely to grow or in areas where the need is greatest?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be able to take part in this debate, which has been an excellent one. We had powerful contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) and from Government Members. The hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) gave us an excellent example of community participation, which we could certainly all learn from and apply in our own areas. All hon. Members were champions for their local areas, although I have some concerns about the policy direction outlined by the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman).

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Select Committee, for a stunning speech, which got to the heart of what is wrong with and absent from the Government’s regeneration strategy. The Communities and Local Government Committee, which is clearly flourishing under my hon. Friend’s chairmanship, has produced another excellent report, deserving of a wide readership.

Let us be clear: the Select Committee has been truly scathing about the Government’s approach—rather, about their lack of a strategic approach—to regeneration. I have read many Select Committee reports while I have been in the House, and I have never read a report that was so uniformly negative in terms of the evidence coming before the Committee about the strategy of the Government. That strategy is outlined in “Regeneration to enable growth: What Government is doing in support of community-led regeneration”, but the report can lead only to one conclusion. What is the Government strategy doing? The answer is obvious and transparent: absolutely nothing. The Select Committee states of the strategy that

“the document gives us little confidence that the Government has a clear strategy for addressing the country’s regeneration needs. It lacks…direction and is unclear about the nature of the problem it is trying to solve.”

That is truly damning. It would be impossible to be more critical of the Government’s approach. Instead, I endorse the report and, in the few minutes that I have, will give the Minister a steer on what I think his Government should be doing if they are serious about regeneration.

The Minister might like to start with a clear definition of his meaning of “regeneration”. The Select Committee has helped enormously, because the report starts with such a definition:

“Regeneration is a long term, comprehensive process which aims to tackle social, economic, physical and environmental issues in places where the market has failed.”

That was not taken on board by the Government, whose response to the report stated:

“Regeneration is an essential element of our approach to building a strong and balanced economy. A strong national economy depends on the strength and vitality of local economies across the country”.

There is no mention of any other regeneration factors that need to be taken into consideration apart from building a balanced economy.

The Minister is probably too young to know, but in the 1990s, after years of Conservative administration, many of our cities and more peripheral areas were languishing, dilapidated and in desperate need of investment and regeneration. That taught us that trickle-down economics do not work, which is an important and painful lesson that “Regeneration to enable growth” seems to have forgotten completely. When Labour came to power in 1997, it helped to regenerate Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Reading and—I could go on—many of our city centres. We also regenerated some of the areas of housing neglect, in particular on the edges of our cities and towns. We inherited from the previous Government a £19 billion backlog in repairs to social housing, so the task was absolutely massive. Labour then introduced a whole range of initiatives although, to be fair, we did not get every single one right. Nevertheless, there was an understanding that some areas in some communities needed more resources and more assistance to improve and to give their citizens opportunities.

Labour’s approach evolved over time. By the time we reached the neighbourhood renewal fund, which was applied effectively in my own area of County Durham, there was a strong partnership-based approach with local communities right at the centre—that was the point that I was making to the hon. Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) earlier. The approach levered in private sector funds on the back of public sector investment, but it did not only concentrate on housing. The key is in the title: it was the neighbourhood renewal fund and not the housing renewal fund. It looked at investing in the environment, social issues, housing, leisure and employment; it brought new training initiatives into the areas; and it was primarily led by the local community.

My point is that what the Government have said in their “Regeneration to enable growth” document—that the new approach is to lift the burden of bureaucracy and to empower local communities to do things their way—is totally wrong, because such communities, which include mine, did not experience the neighbourhood renewal fund as burdening bureaucracy. It was a resource to be used to turn the area round. Indeed, in evidence to the Select Committee, Ros Groves, chair of a Liverpool residents group, said that regeneration “has to be community-led.” She also stressed that “community-led regeneration” was nothing new.

Similarly, Mike Taylor, head of regeneration in Nottingham, said:

“In terms of the ideas and the revitalisation of communities”

there has been a bottom-up approach

“for many, many years.”

The Government are simply wrong to try to suggest that regeneration initiatives that were previously in place and supported by local communities were not also led by them on many occasions. They were certainly involved in them to a great extent.

[Heidi Alexander]

My hon. Friend was talking about the history of the bottom-up approach in regeneration initiatives. Projects such as the neighbourhood renewal fund and the working neighbourhoods fund gave community groups resources to do the work that needed to be done in their local areas. That was not hollow rhetoric about giving power: it was giving money to enable that to happen.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. She said something earlier that I want to touch on. When I was reading the Government’s document on regeneration, I had an image in my head of people washing their hands. I had that image because the words on the paper were telling me that the Government are saying that they will just provide a whole new set of powers, but will not provide support to enable anything to be done. That is a travesty.

More than anything, the previous schemes showed that we need a holistic approach to regeneration. As the Chair of the Select Committee said, we have learned that we need a long-term approach to regeneration. My experience in my area of County Durham, which suffered massively from the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, is that by 2007 those areas were only just starting to be turned around after about 10 years of investment, because it takes a very long time, especially when trying to turn round areas that have gone through years and years of dilapidation, lack of investment and unemployment. It takes a long time to change cultures and to embed new opportunities.

I, for one, think it is a tragedy that when I met my local authority a couple of weeks ago to find out what we were going to do about two areas in Durham whose regeneration has stalled, it said that it had very few resources available, but of course will do what it can with the council’s budget to support community-based regeneration in one or two areas, although the level and scale will not address the issues.

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[Grant Shapps]

The reality of the situation is that more than 10,000 homes were destroyed by the housing market renewal programme and just 1,000 homes were built. That is the reality of the programme. The Chairman of the Select Committee should be aware that I have visited Liverpool, Sefton, Hull and Stoke-on-Trent on numerous occasions. I went to Stoke-on-Trent to launch the £35 million, doubled up by local spending to £70 million, in order for there to be an exit from the housing market renewal programme. I recall that I met a woman there who described the programme: how people had come in from outside, it was called a consultation, but the community hall was so full that the meeting had to be broadcast outdoors. They were told that their streets would be knocked down. They are still suffering to this day from the damage that the housing market renewal programme did. It was a national disgrace, and I was pleased to bring it to a close. The programme was an enormous mistake.

[Heidi Alexander]

The Minister talks about a national scandal. Does he agree that it is a national scandal at the moment that people are living in homes on streets where houses have been knocked down? They are living in blighted communities. Although the Government have put forward a transition programme, it is a drop in the ocean compared with the resources needed to deal with the problems that exist today in those communities.

[Grant Shapps]

Perhaps the hon. Lady is not aware of just how much time I have spent with and energy I have expended in these communities over the five years for which I have been either the shadow or the actual Housing Minister. I appreciate that she is right to say that people were left abandoned and stranded in empty streets after the disastrous demolition and managed decline programme that was housing market renewal. The Government managed to bring in money to close that programme and ensure that anyone who lives in a street that is largely empty will now be rescued from that situation. It was very much a rescue programme for a disastrous Government scheme.

I disagree with the conclusion that some people have drawn that the toolkit of different methods available—now open—to all local areas to manage the problem left by housing market renewal and failed regeneration in the past can be ignored. I am talking about the heart of where these problems exist—places such as Sefton—where at local level people have decided to use programmes such as the new homes bonus so that they can borrow against that money, flatten an area and bring in developers to create new housing there. That is being done not through some enormous Government scheme, with money that we cannot afford, but by using the initiatives that are in place. The initiatives are in the toolkit—initiatives such as TIF 1 and TIF 2.

Another initiative is the regional growth fund, much discussed this afternoon. I noticed that it was entirely dismissed by Opposition Members. That is quite bizarre. We know that, for example, both Hull and Wakefield—housing market renewal areas—have been specifically helped by that funding. It is not true to say that only 20% of that funding has been pledged or allocated; £1.7 billion has been allocated or is under provisional allocation, so that figure is entirely inaccurate.