Evaluating Urban Regeneration Policy

The Policy Exchange has launched a report this week called Cities Unlimited - An Assessment of UK Regeneration Policy, which looks at urban regeneration over the past 10 years.  While it concedes that the Labour government has been committed to improving the prospects of deprived urban communities, it argues that it has failed, in that conditions over a number of indicators have continued to deteriorate against the national average and against high performing urban areas.

I have been involved with regeneration programmes for over 13 years now, and have seen the names change, the conditions change and have evaluated a number to see whether individuals and communities have benefited.  I would agree with the authors of the report that the number of new schemes and ways of allocating money are too numerous to allow for simplicity and would almost go so far as to say that this proliferation has been a nice job opportunity for quasi-civil servants and consultants.

I would also agree at the macro level that the areas that have received huge amounts of funding are still in need of huge amounts of funding.  I would suggest that those areas that have received funding and are now hugely prosperous (parts of Leeds and Canary Wharf spring to mind) are also now fairly devoid of the people and the industries that were there when the money started to flow in.  Sometimes regeneration funding has the perverse effect of displacing the problem, and concentrating the deprived into smaller and more difficult areas.

With most of the target areas for these regeneration funds, the cause of the problem is significant structural change - a hundred years ago that might have been the move from the land to towns, but now that change is from a manufacturing and production base to a services base.  While funds have been pumped into places like the Black Country, North Tyneside, Sheffield and Liverpool from public sources, funds have also flooded into prosperous areas like Milton Keynes, Reading, Swindon and Edinburgh from private sources.

The report might argue that the poor are getting poorer on comparisons to national averages and prosperous areas, but the rich are also getting richer, and the speed of that change is not being assessed in the same way.

If I were trying to look at this scientifically, I suspect I would have compared to the national average, but I would also have tried to compare with a deprived area that didn't receive the big pots of money, to see how they were doing.  For example when I was trying to gain regeneration funds for local areas, it was easy enough to prove that parts of Kidderminster and Bromsgrove were at levels of deprivation comparable with Hillfields in Coventry or New Town in Birmingham, just the numbers were smaller.  How have Rifle Range and Charford fared over the past 12 years?

The other aspect to this is that the causes of the need for regeneration are still there and still influencing need.  Industrial decline and the movement away from manufacturing has not stopped just because funds are being put into community and economic regeneration.  Coventry has seen some spectacular successes in urban regeneration, but at the same time, global pressures have seen the closure of the Peugeot manufacturing plant at Ryton, the collapse of Marconi, ripple effects from the closure of Longbridge and the movement of production of Jaguars away from Browns Lane.  How much worse would conditions be in Coventry if they hadn't received Single Regeneration Budget, Neighbourhood Renewal Funds, Local Economic Growth Initiative and European Regional Development Funding?

Comments

[Jane Holland]

Since I wrote this blog, something has been nagging at me about why the report seemed a bit wrong. Then on Friday evening, I worked out what it was - comparing the performance of these "worst" areas with the national average and not seeing an improvement.

The mean, or in this instance the national average, is affected by changes in all points that contribute to it. Thus if you take say the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and take the average, you get 3.5. If you improve teh lowest number (1) to 2, but keep the biggest teh same, you get a bigger average 3.6, but closer to the lowest number. However if all the numbers increase by 1, the mean is then 4.5, which keeps your lowest improved number the same distance away from the mean. If the best number increases by more than 1, then the mean moves away from the lowest improved number.

There is therefore some flawed logic in the Policy Exchange analysis, in that they needed to look at how much the highly performing areas were improving as well. Are the rich getting richer at a faster rate?

Alternatively, and it would be near impossible to do, you would need a control area that did not benefit from any of the funding regimes - but who would vote or volunteer to be that area?

[frank lee]

I suppose the other way of raising the average is to lower the top end. How about building sink estates and borstals in St John's Wood and Maida Vale, which lowers the average and thus raises the lowest levels to closer to the average?