---

Regeneration

The point I am making is that the Government say they are spending £3.8 billion to £3.9 billion on regeneration, whereas in reality they are spending a fraction of that on market failure and areas in desperate need. That is a problem for communities—and that brings me to my point about housing market renewal and the abrupt axing of that programme. It was considered to be a long-term initiative, and was achieving success—the National Housing Federation said it had generated £5.8 billion of economic activity, created 19,000 jobs and maintained 2,600 jobs in construction each year. It was a success, but, setting aside all the statistics, it was creating new homes for people, giving hope to some of the people in our most deprived communities, and putting pride back into communities. Its abrupt ending is probably best described by Ros Groves, a Liverpool resident who gave evidence to the Select Committee, when she said,"““we have kids in schools; you ask them to draw a house and they will draw you a house with boarded-up windows, not fancy little curtains or anything else. To me, that is not a future that we can build on, which is criminal. We have a right to have a decent life””." The Government should have used the present opportunity to frame post-recession regeneration in a different way. I readily accept that money is tight, banks are reluctant to lend, and developers are risk-averse. The challenge for the Government was to capitalise on that new landscape. They could have learned lessons from good and bad regeneration and disseminated the findings so that areas could regenerate better. They could have made areas more accountable for how regeneration money is spent—I admit that. They could have increased the skills of regeneration staff, so that they could leverage in more money from the private sector. Most of all, they could have concentrated their efforts and limited resources on the most desperate areas.