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Regeneration

I accept that there are pockets—indeed, substantial areas—of deprivation, particularly in parts of London, but in towns and cities in the south as well. That is not something that we want to obscure. I was making the generalisation that house prices are generally more expensive in the south, where we would probably not find houses changing hands for £2,000 in the pub. However, the point about life expectancy is well made. Indeed, I think that at some point the Committee will consider the whole issue of public health and the new health and wellbeing boards in councils. I think that one of their priorities will be to address that issue. Those properties were changing hands, and landlords who had little interest in their management were buying and letting them, often to people on housing benefit, with little attempt to control antisocial behaviour. Owner-occupiers who had previously spent their money—often their life savings—on their properties abandoned them. They walked out because they could not cope with the area any more. The whole area was therefore in a spiral of decay and decline. Clearly, there was population loss, and there were job losses, too. The relative isolation of some ex-mill towns in those parts of Lancashire was an issue, and one repeated in other parts of northern cities, too. We saw an area that was almost suffering death by a thousand cuts—a decline that was not being managed, because there was no effective public intervention. It was simply a matter of complete and utter market failure. There was no question of the private sector coming in with private investment, because the houses were simply regarded as not having any real value. As a result of that experience and the report from the Select Committee, the Government set up the housing market renewal areas—pathfinders—and put in substantial amounts of public money. The Select Committee then published another report in 2005, which is interesting because it considered some of the same themes as the new report. One of the recommendations of the 2005 report, in paragraph 19, stated:"““The Government acknowledges that it will take up to 15 years to tackle failing housing markets or undertake market restructuring and many of the mechanisms such as compulsory purchase orders have a long lead-in time before taking effect.””" Setting up the housing market renewal areas and the indication of the need for a long-term programme was absolutely right. One criticism that the Minister has made of the Government at that time, which I accept, is that they should have done then what they did for the new deal community areas and actually made a commitment from the very beginning to 15-year funding. It is difficult for one Government to commit another, but the reality is that these areas have failed so much and the needs are so great and so long term—a theme that came out very strongly in our evidence—that Governments must be prepared to commit for that period. There were other interesting recommendations in the 2005 report, and the Committee clearly heard conflicting evidence about the benefits of refurbishing homes or demolishing them and the whole issue of heritage. Paragraph 24 stated:"““The potential heritage value of the housing and its contribution to regenerating neighbourhoods should be considered an important part of any appraisal but houses should not be preserved for the sake of heritage if there is not the demand for them.””" That is a real issue. It is no surprise that many of those areas have failed markets with failed demand. Demolition has been the right solution locally, providing that it has been done in conjunction, consultation and agreement with local communities. As part of collecting evidence for the current report that we are debating today, the Committee went to Manchester and Rochdale, and I went to Liverpool and Bootle. We saw streets of old properties that were in the process of being demolished. We talked to residents there, and to residents who had moved into new homes. Overwhelmingly, people said to us that the right decisions had been made. Some of the houses had been subject to housing action areas. I do not know how many people in the Chamber are old enough to remember housing action areas and to have been involved in them. The hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley) is nodding from across the Chamber. Homes in those areas have been through one process of regeneration in an attempt to keep them going for 30 years. Those 30 years have now come to an end, and there was little point in trying to do them up once again. I went to a home in Bootle—I remember it very well—where the property was right out on to the street. The backyard had two wheelie bins in it. They took up half the space, which illustrates how big the backyard was. I could hear water rushing underneath the property through the cellars and water coming through the roof. It is right that there should be local decisions about the future of those areas. In the vast majority of housing market renewal areas, there was full and proper consultation with local residents about what the future held for them and their properties, how they were moved on and decanted into properties nearby and an attempt to keep communities together. That was the right approach. Of course, some properties were capable of refurbishment—perhaps bigger and more substantial properties with the potential to be family homes when they were done up—but local decisions were the right ones to take. Ros Groves lives in the Anfield area of Liverpool and gave evidence to the Committee. I remember her saying to me that it took a long time for communities to work through the order in which demolition and refurbishment took place. Someone had to be at the end of the queue; but even if they were, the promise was always that their home would eventually be dealt with. Everyone would have the same treatment as their neighbours. She said that the most demoralising thing as an elected local representative—someone who had been just a local resident and was elected by her colleagues as chair of the residents' group and eventually chair of the collection of residents' groups for the whole housing market renewal area—stood up at a meeting and said, ““I'm sorry; we made promises in good faith that your home eventually would be subject to this renewal programme, either by demolition or refurbishment, and now the money has stopped.”” She said, ““I felt responsible for telling my neighbours that what was being promised them was not going to happen.””