Clause 6
Housing and Regeneration Bill
3:30 pm
Alistair Burt (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; North East Bedfordshire, Conservative)
The debate provides for a short comment from myself and an opportunity for the Minister to give us some sense of how regeneration powers are going to be used. I shall bring to the Committee’s attention some of the briefings that we have had from outside bodies that are concerned that the housing element will dominate the regeneration element of the new agency and worried that, in the pursuit of targets and numbers, other things may be lost. I will mention two or three of those things.
The British Urban Regeneration Association does great work, and I am sure that it is already known to the Minister. It has a particular concern. It says:
“The new agency appears to be only concerned with physical regeneration with only passing aspiration to furthering community development...The primary objective is physical regeneration (housing and infrastructure, including premises necessary to provide social and economic services)...Accordingly, all planning and financial powers are oriented to land assembly, remediation, provision or infrastructure, and development...It seems a missed opportunity for an integrated approach to regeneration, where powers and planning of physical regeneration are joined up community support services and providers.”
Perhaps I could flesh this out a bit. In my own work in regeneration, both in the past with city challenge and more recently in my current role, I have been concerned—as I am sure the Minister and the whole Committee are—with the problem that endemic poverty and difficulties in some of our poorest estates are not necessarily relieved simply by changing the physical infrastructure. Yes, one can create bright, new houses, but a number of the people who have been in the most impoverished housing have all sorts of issues—typically, relationship breakdown, addiction, problems with children, poor educational achievement, low aspiration and a sense of hopelessness. Merely moving them out, reconstructing the housing and moving them back in again will not solve those problems.
I have looked at the work done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith). His work with the Centre for Social Justice has looked at breakdown issues and to what extent some of the things revealed can be tackled through existing regeneration projects. One does not have to accept everything that my right hon. Friend has put forward in his analysis of “Breakdown Britain” and “Breakthrough Britain” to recognise that objective evidence of a series of problems suggests that physical regeneration is not sufficient.
I wanted to task the Minister with the issue raised by BURA. What can he tell us about the clause 6 powers for regeneration being taken in the broadest sense, rather than in the narrowest sense of powers purely for land assembly and dealing with the physical aspects of regeneration? Will the Homes and Communities Agency be able to work in an integrated manner with other—social and community—aspects of regeneration or are the powers and objectives of the agency solely confined to physical regeneration? In the latter case, we would have to look for other mechanisms to work with the agency to tackle the problems that I have just mentioned. BURA is interested in that and thinks that if the agency is not going to do that, it would be a missed opportunity. I am sure that the Minister would not want to miss that opportunity.