Housing Market Renewal

Iain Wright Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gale. I remember with fond affection that you had to endure my ramblings in Committee during the passage of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008, alongside your co-Chairman at that time, my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Mr Benton), whose constituency, like mine, is a recipient of housing market renewal funding. I feel like we are all back together for a nice reunion.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) on securing this important debate on an issue that affects many thousands of decent residents in the north and in the midlands. I have a pathfinder project in my constituency. It extends throughout the Teesside area and incorporates sites not only in Hartlepool, but in Gresham, Middlesbrough and South Bank, which is in the borough of Redcar and Cleveland.

Between 2007 and 2009, I was the Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government responsible for housing market renewal. I travelled across all the HMR areas when I was a Minister. I met residents in Stoke-on-Trent, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sandwell, and I was struck by their enormous enthusiasm and ambition. They were determined to see a reversal of the slow and painful decline in their neighbourhoods.

[Robert Flello]

My hon. Friend will no doubt recall walking down the high street of what was Coalville and is now Weston Heights in Stoke-on-Trent and seeing the phenomenal transformation that was taking place to turn what was a very run-down estate into one where people are still flocking to buy and rent properties. What a transformation that was, especially when combined with the other transformations in Stoke-on-Trent, such as the brand new hospital and the fantastic regeneration of our schools, and what a damn shame that it has ended.

[Mr Wright]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Alongside our hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), we are pushing on behalf of north Staffordshire. I remember seeing the huge ambition in that area, among others.

It is worth going back to the basics of what HMR was trying to achieve. It was trying to stem and reverse long-standing decline in areas characterised by acute housing market failure. In many respects, that was due to an imbalance of one particular type of property in an area. For example, about 37% of all the housing stock in the entire borough of Hartlepool—14,500 properties—is terraced housing. On any measure, that is too much of one particular type of stock, so there is a need to rebalance the stock the town provides to residents—both now and in the future. That was true of other HMR areas.

What struck me most when I had responsibility for this matter—more fundamentally than acute housing market failure—was the disconnect between those areas and economic activity. The areas were blighted by low skills and, often, virtually no employment. To succeed, I felt that housing market renewal had to be linked explicitly to economic success, and that was why, when I was able to announce in 2008-09 an extra £1 billion of funding for housing market renewal, I wanted to link it explicitly with the possibility of securing extra funding and with injecting skills and employment into those areas, with a particular emphasis on apprenticeships for young people.

It is also important to recognise that this was deliberately a long-term programme. Those areas in the north and the midlands were built in the Victorian era to house workers in heavy manufacturing industries. When those industries declined in the post-war era, their economic raison d’être was often lost, and areas have struggled to adapt. Those big social and economic changes cannot be solved overnight, so HMR was deliberately a 15-year programme to put those areas back on a sustainable footing. The abrupt cancellation of the programme, without any other suitable replacement, undoes all the good work that has been done, and sets those neighbourhoods back decades, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree so eloquently said. More taxpayers’ money than was originally planned for HMR will be needed to sort out the social and economic problems caused by the cancellation of the programme.

Since 2006, for every pound of HMR funding in Teesside, we have levered in an additional £1.06 of other public sector investment and 61p of private sector investment. For Hartlepool in particular, the figures are actually much better. Hartlepool has received about £4.5 million of HMR funding between 2006 and 2011, but that has been complemented by £13.7 million of other public funding and an astonishing £20 million of funding from the private sector, so that is more money coming in from private companies as a result of public sector investment. As many as 2,500 private sector jobs in the construction industry have been created or safeguarded as a result of that initiative. If private companies see the Government losing faith in those areas and failing to maintain investment, it is difficult to envisage how private sector money will stay and grow there.

That is frustrating, because Hartlepool has shown how good progress can be made. We have seen the complete redevelopment of Trinity square by a good Hartlepool house builder, Yuill Homes, and it is now a thriving and welcoming area in the centre of town. At the Headway site close to Chester road, 280 terraced properties have been demolished and work on 170 high-quality, mixed-tenure homes has begun. A second of four planned phases is now progressing. The development agreement for the Headway site made provision for raising employment, skills levels and training opportunities, including the provision of apprenticeship places.

Last month, alongside Bob Farrow, a long-standing tenant of the Belle Vue area, I opened the first modern homes in the area, which replace 50 pre-fab and terraced properties. Bob has lived his entire life in the Belle Vue area, having been born in Borrowdale street. With other residents, he has been closely involved in the planning of the new development. It is a myth—if the Minister is going to suggest this—that the programme has had a top-down approach. It has been bottom-up, with residents actively involved in planning the future of the areas. At the opening of the new homes, Bob said:

“I knew when I first saw Housing Hartlepool’s plans for the new Belle Vue estate that it was going to be wonderful, but these fantastic homes have exceeded expectations. Hartlepool residents have been closely following the progress of the new homes and it is great to see them become a reality.”

In the Perth, Hurworth and Grainger streets part of Dyke House, a compulsory purchase order is in process, meaning that several hundred residents, who have been living with uncertainty, are now seeing some progress. Credit for that must be given to Damien Wilson, Hartlepool borough council’s assistant director of regeneration, who alongside me, the three ward councillors—Mary Fleet, Stephen Thomas and Linda Shields—and officers, Amy Waller from the council and Helen Rooney from Housing Hartlepool, have been going to the Hartlepool Rovers quoit club every Friday at 5 o’clock to keep residents up to date with developments.

However, I am concerned that this progress of breathing new life into disadvantaged areas is incomplete, and that people will be left in limbo for years. As the Audit Commission stated in its review of HMR in Teesside:

“This is a particular risk…where so many schemes are at a relatively early stage. There are a number of areas where a large number of properties have been acquired that are awaiting demolition. This has the potential to leave communities living in a very poor quality environment…The slowing down or stopping of interventions will undermine commitments made to communities and damage community confidence in neighbourhoods.”

Through all their policies, the Government are damaging the communities in my constituency and the wider north-east. Economic policy, social and welfare initiatives, and public sector cuts all disproportionately affect my area and focus on neighbourhoods that least have the tools to battle those challenges. Areas such as Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland are less likely than anywhere in the country to be able to withstand economic recession and public sector cuts. HMR was starting to turn round decades of neglect, economic inactivity and housing failure to provide neighbourhoods with the housing and hope that they deserve. The Government have taken that away without putting anything in its place. For the first time in many years in this country, we have no dedicated urban regeneration funding programme. I hope that the Minister will reflect on what his Department has done, and do something for my constituents and other decent residents across the midlands and the north of England.