The government’s new strategy for regeneration released last week offers a useful insight for local authorities
Regeneration is hugely important to the future of our cities and communities, but its chequered past has led to a lack of confidence among local authorities, registered providers and contractors. Confidence can also be affected by perceived resentment from residents and communities with longer local memories to those seen to be trying to regenerate where they live.
With the new released by DCLG last week, it looks like government has come to the same conclusion and has produced a wide-ranging piece of work that recognises the stop-start and repeat approach that has blighted regeneration around the country for some time. Hopefully now we will have the impetus needed to move past that stage.
The strategy is a significant intervention for a number of reasons – not least because for the first time it sets out, across the entire country, guidance and expectations that councils can cleave to. Experienced regeneration professionals may learn nothing new from the strategy document, but there’s much larger group of interested parties who will find this valuable.
Now one feels that a local authority without substantial regeneration experience will be helped to move projects out of the ‘too difficult to do’ pile and into the ‘let’s have a look’ pile