High Streets

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Wednesday 16th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend is right. We know that once there is a proliferation of payday loan companies and the like on our high streets, other retailers are put off coming to the area.

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend said there is no clamour out there in the country for more betting shops, fast food takeaways and payday loan companies, but there is a clamour for communities and planning authorities to have more control over these changes. Does she agree that the recent changes make a complete mockery of the rhetoric coming from the Government about giving more power to communities? It is simply not true.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

Indeed. I agree with my hon. Friend, and what we are currently seeing from the Government is very anti-localist; it is the opposite of what they say they are doing.

Regeneration

Debate between Heidi Alexander and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Thursday 19th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[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.