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Regeneration

I agree that community involvement in regeneration is vital. During my time on Lewisham council, I did huge amounts of work on stimulating genuine community involvement. I go back to the point that I made earlier: with the best will in the world, communities sometimes need other help to get schemes off the ground. Sometimes that involves public money. Sometimes it involves initiating a discussion with private sector partners to get them interested in the area to start off with. Some parts of the country are being hit very hard in the current economic climate. Before coming to the debate today, I looked at the unemployment figures and researched some of the statistics for the constituencies of other members of the Select Committee. In my own constituency, Lewisham East, 29 people are chasing every job, yet in Rugby nearly three people are chasing every job and the position is the same in Welwyn Hatfield.