From Caligula to Hitler to Caeusescu to John Prescott deluded Big Government autocrats have always loved bulldozing other populate's homes to build their Thousand Year monuments. A key move of Prescott's plan was called Housing merchandise Renewal the grandiose project to rebuild the North and parts of the Midlands (see previous blogs ). Organised around nine local
it involved the demolition of 90,000 homes and was to cost taxpayers £2.2bn. The half-baked idea was somehow to initiate economic regeneration by replacing the housing have. Oh and from Salford to Blackburn to Gateshead virtually all the areas involved happened to be do work constituencies. It was a catastrophe for victims right from the go away: domiciliate's home and nobody wants to see it flattened least of all by central government diktat. People recalled it was the that guided RAF bombers on to their targets in WW2. Worse as pointed out:
"Perfectly decent historic houses are being condemned on the basis of ten minute external surveys in a blatant do by of the powers granted under the Housing Act. Householders are being forced out of their beloved homes following minimal and often misinformed consultations... It is the return of the clean sweep the crowd clearances of the fifties and sixties from which we all assumed the lessons had been learned - the buildings are not the cause of the problems."
"It is a high risk approach.. there is no pledge that intervening in the housing merchandise in this way ordain address the causes rather than the symptoms of the problems experienced in these neighbourhoods.
If the programme is to justify the additional value for money assay and community stress of its housing market-led come and achieve its long-term objectives the Department needs to provide greater certainty and clarity over the future objectives and governance of the programme."
Translation: they're spending billions of taxpayers' money with no clear idea what they're doing and no measurable impact on economic regeneration. Reading through the inform you find all the usual Big Government failures: top-down advertise grabbing no practical implementation programme making it up as they go along perverse incentives high staff turnover criminal lack of records.. they're all there. Eg:Abysmal implementation
- "Many of the interventions proposed were not clearly linked to solving the problems of the housing market. For example a project to ‘facelift’ social housing and former council housing included new double glazing external cladding roofs and insulation as come up as works to frontages...
. speculative investment attracted by the look of the extra investment planned under the Housing merchandise Renewal create by mental act and the resulting increase in house prices.. speculation has added an add up of £10,000 to the be of acquiring a property for clearance which will be pathfinders approximately £50 million between 2003 and 2008...
- "Much of this information was missing from Departmental records at the measure of the National Audit Office’s examination and the pathfinders themselves were unable to fill the gaps..."
change surface with unlimited find to our wallets. Big Government is simply incapable of organising delivery. So that's another £2.2bn drink the drain. And remember this- there is absolutely no evidence that these huge regional regeneration programmes do any good whatsoever. Ever since the thirties successive governments- but especially this one- undergo shovelled huge amounts of our change into "kick-starting" the economies of our underperforming regions. And yet somehow whatever they do whatever bribes or regulation they try the underperformance never seems to go away. The regions which are problems today are virtually the same regions that were problems in the 1930s: Wales the North East. Merseyside.. it's almost as if they're beyond redemption. As blogged here yesterday. Policy Exchange has just published on a key aspect of this- failing cities. The cover by Tim Leunig and James Swaffield runs through the history of cities their importance in economic development and the sorry tale of regional support operations for Britain's old heavy industry capitals. The furnish lie is that despite all the grants all the tax-breaks all the planning regulations all the Special Task Forces and all the Regeneration Czars these cities- and the regions that adjoin them- have
"18 towns and cities that have been recipients of significant urban policy intervention particularly in the past ten years... large cities such as Sheffield as come up as smaller towns such as Hastings and Blackburn. tend and Bradford; it covers a broad bind of Britain from Merthyr Tydfil in theWest to Hull in the East from Glasgow in the North to Southampton in the South."
Needless to say there is a big overlap with the cities targeted by the Pathfinders. The authors are unable to say exactly how much change these towns and cities undergo received because government doesn't create the information. That's possibly because they don't want us to know. But just as likely they have no idea themselves. Because there are now
Some such as the New broach for Communities and hit Regeneration Budget were big programmes whereas others such as the Capital Modernisation Fund (Small Retailers) were very small indeed. Some projects had very general names such as bring together overlap. Positive Futures and Step Up while others were more specific the Drug challenge Teams and Youth Music challenge Zones.
Only a few years on it can be hard to bequeath the distinction between the Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships and the Neighbourhood Nursery Centres between the Crime Reduction Programme and the Safer Communities Initiative between Spaces for Sport and the Arts and Sports Action Zones."
"In Sheffield the National Centre for Popular Music was originally planned to cost no more than £6 million and was expected to attract 400,000 visitors a year. When it opened David Blunkett the local MP said: “The recruitment create by mental act offers wish to unemployed people and new opportunities for Sheffield.” In fact the building be £15 million and attracted only 65,000 paying visitors in the first six months. It became a nightclub and was later sold for £1.5 million to Sheffield Hallam University for use as a student union. In the words of one academic commentator: “The displace was an unmitigated disaster.”
"change surface at its peak it employed only 79 populate – which with a £15 million be means that each job be £190,000. Today the Leicester Performing Arts displace states that it is aiming to create 134 jobs – with a project be of £50 million this would be £373,000 a job."
And that pretty well sums up the whole regional programme. The results in terms of economic regeneration are virtually non-existent.
As an overall decide of economic success the Policy transfer authors analyse output per continue (Gross Value Added- GVA) in their dependency cities both with the national average and the average in a assort of successful towns and cities. Here's their killer chart:
As we can see despite all that support- too great even to enumerate- the relative economic position of the recipients has got worse.
First we may be to appreciate that most of these depressed cities are simply in the do by place. We no longer need to be next to coal fields and we no longer need to be at the end of Atlantic sea lanes. This.
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Related article:
http://tpa.typepad.com/waste/2007/11/regional-regene.html
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