Getting it right on regeneration

Some of these victims are highlighted in a new report by MPs, which points out that the sudden ending of Labour’s Pathfinder regeneration programme has left many elderly and vulnerable people trapped in abandoned streets, surrounded by boarded-up houses waiting for bulldozers that may never arrive.

However, while there was certainly a lack of forethought in the peremptory way in which funding was withdrawn, the nostalgia for Pathfinder expressed by Sheffield MP Clive Betts, Labour chairman of the Commons Communities and Local Government Committee, is woefully misplaced.

Even during its lifetime, Pathfinder was condemned across the political spectrum as an appalling waste of public money. Indeed, in 2007 the National Audit Office said that £2bn had been squandered on demolishing thousands of homes without anything being achieved in terms of higher house prices or quality of life for the communities involved.

This disastrous piece of top-down social engineering stands as a prime example of how not to manage regeneration projects. Nor is it just Labour at fault in this way: Michael Heseltine’s City Challenge initiative, under John Major’s premiership, failed in many areas because it took the view that central government knew best, did not take local opinion into account and therefore lacked the support of the very communities it was supposed to be benefiting.

There are important lessons here for David Cameron as he confronts the urgent task of regenerating deprived communities. First, that his much-vaunted commitment to localism has to be more than mere lip service. And second, that the amount of money spent is unimportant compared with how well it is targeted. The coalition never tires of reminding the public that money is scarce. That is no reason, however, why good ideas should be thin on the ground as well.