As this is allegedly warblers professional area of expertise (well it least for a few more months anyway) I thought I'd chip in.
The 'core cities' of the UK have done pretty well in truth in the last few years and have been the beneficiaries of regen money. Places like Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester and yes despite what the policy exchange say, even Liverpool have comparatively prospered. The places that were traditionally left behind in this first generation were what I'll crudely call the 'second division' regional centres, Leicester, Coventry, Sunderland, Bradford, and Hull. Recent evidence however suggests that even these places are not without progress, although the gap between them and their more dominant regional K2 city has widened. The places that continue to suffer are those which I'll call 'third division' and these are largely 'towns' or captured towns of metropolitan areas such as Dewsbury, Rotherham, Preston, Huddesfield, Sandwell, Grimsby, Middlesborough, Oldham, Salford or Blackburn.
There is another important distinction to make which has guided what this self-styled "I'm an academic" wally, responsible for the report, has totally failed to pick up on.
In the 1980's the alleged regeneration of the UK urban areas was centred on what we call 'top down, physical regen'. Essentially this involved under-writing development with property led interventions. Inevitably it meant that certain parts of the country benefited to the detriment of others. Such policy initiatives involved things like the 'Garden Cities' (remember them?) - Liverpool, Stoke, Glasgow, Gateshead and Ebbw Vale for those of you interested. By and large they failed, but were flawed in concept anyway. They did have the effect of raising awareness though, but it was an expensive way of doing it.
Other 'physical regen' programmes involved things like 'City Challenge' which set cities against each in a bidding war, often dubbed "The Regeneration Game". These were essentially property led interventions again, designed to facilitate a physical upgrade of an area. For the most part they worked, although they fell short of the brave new world they were supposed to herald in, as they were under-written by a speculative bubble around the price of property investment. For such time as the market was confident spec builders would engage. However, as the bubble burst in the early 90's (Tory led recession) alot of developers scaled back their ambitions and sought sanctuary in less risky 'mixed developments' with 'pre-let anchors' before they'd do anything.
The next round of UK government led regen came from the SRB (Single Regeneration Budget). The first round was again property led and had similar aspects to it to City Challenge, but usually involved targeting a discreet pocket of decay. Unfortunately, just at the time that the decision was due to be made as to who had won, Michael Heseltine panicked a bit under severe pressure and criticsm at having closed down the Nottinghamshire coalfields. He duly got up in parliament and announced that new money would be made available for regen purposes, (which had people scratching their heads) suffice to say the civil servants were somewhat 'bushwhacked' into turning SRB1 into a coalfield retrieval fund.
SRB2 was a much more conventional top down property led programme, and SRB3 was focused on housing, as the idea of "thematic regen" started to be born. A legacy of this is that most LA's have a 'community safety' team today, as this was another themed response.
In terms of industrial regen the Tories introduced things like Enterprise Zones which were heavily subsidised and benefited from a 10 year rate holiday. I never had much problem with it, even though I could see the complete hypocrisy of it. They also introduced a whole raft of UDC's which were undemocratic qangos who assumed repsonsibility off local authorities for development, and I can certainly think of at least one CEO who got caught with his fingers in the till.
The level of spend should also make some concession to European Objective's 1 and 2 as well as match funded ESF Objectives 3 and 4. Merseyside, The Highlands and Islands and Northern Ireland were all Objective 1 areas at some point allowing them to access huge pots of ERDF funding from Brussels (I seem to think Cornwall might have been briefly too). Most industrial areas of the north and major cities could also access ERDF objective 2. Depending on the funds specifics a degree of match funding was needed to access European Structure Funds, as I seem to recall they were for some European Regional Development Funds too. European funding was a science in its own right, but I suspect that the success that some local authorities had in levering in non-governmental money has been lost to the authors, (although strictly speaking you might say it's still government money given that it comes from Brussels).
This traditional 'physical' regen of visible sites is the limit as to what i think the Policy exchange understand by Regeneration.
In 1997 the game changed. UDC's were replaced by RDA's which were slightly more accountable. In truth UDC's have made a kind of come back under new Labour despite what Prescott says, although the word Company has replaced Corporation, and they have nothing like the amount of funding available to them now, nor do they have responsibility for whole swathes of an area. They are seen much more as a 'facilitator' than a 'lead drive'.
The biggest change though concerned the shift to what we now call 'bottom up, social regen', which the Policy exchange seems to have missed completely, as they're still marrooned in the old idea of property led physical regen. Social regen involves addressing issues such as housing, poor educational attainment, training, job creation, poor health, child poverty, income levels etc. It prompted the government to set up the 'Social Exclusion Unit' who produced a whole series of reports ranging from access to shops right up to employment. In many respects it was a statement of the blindingly obvious, but had the effect of re-focusing activity directly at the point of delivery (usually deprived council estates, or inner city area sof transitory populations).
The bottom up angle also meant that we had to engage in protracted consulatation exercises that frequently yielded nothing that we didn't know already. Similarly, we were required to engage communities and invite them to become part of their own solutions in partnership together. The problem being, is there was very little capacity or appetite within the communities to engage, and yet without their active involvement we couldn't access funding, as we wouldn't be able to demonstrate their participation. It also led to the creation of unwieldy multi-disciplined so called 'strategic partnerships' to direct regenertaion work. In a lot of cases though, such partnerships provide a convenient collective camoflauge to abrogate responsibility for non-delivery and share it out equally, thus making it very difficult to isolate a specific fault line. In practical terms a lot of them corrupt themselves and become nothing more productive than a 'talk shop' and far from becoming part of the solution, they actually become part of the problem. This is further compounded when the partnership begins to believe it's actually working. In a lot cases they increasingly exist largely for the benefit of the people who attend them, and given that they're naturally given towards brokering compromises, they spawn very little by way of creative thinking, and will normally shy away from brave decisions for fear of being held accountable for them.
Anyway, the SRB programme continued for four more year under new labour but was focused on social regen (which I promise you is a damned sight harder to deliver). Many of the problems that regen strategies now address are deeply engrained and almost intractable, and perhaps this needs to be acknowledged. The policy exchange of totally missed this though, and haven't made the link that regen can be equally about people, as it can place.
Other policy initiatives launched by Labour in the name of regen would include something like the New Deal for the Communities, (NDC). these have by and large failed and degenerated into serious acrimony in a lot cases as the community either wasn't interested, or started to fight within itself. It led me to observe that if you want to unite a community, give them nothing. If you want to divide them, tell them they can have £50M. The other aspect of social regen that the report misses concerns people tracking. Anyone who lives in area that has been the subject of a social regen programme will know that there is a reason it attracted such support in the first place!!! The first thing that any one who benefits from the programme aspires to do, (as soon as they can afford it) is leave, and go and live elsewhere. For this reason the baseline figures (sorry indicies of multiple deprivation) that define an area, tend to look no different 10 years after an area first received assistance. Essentially, what we get is 'churn' as those people who benefit from social intervention move on, and are replaced by the next generation of.......?
There is another aspect that's worth considering and that concerns what i'll call 'back door' regen. One city that has benefited from this would be Manchester, who has a lot of the BBC relocating there to help under-write their media employment cluster as an apex commissioner. They also got the Commonwealth Games of course (credit to them) they even got awarded the Super Casino in defiance of all logic. In fact, that particularly flawed decision kind of underlines perfectly what i said earlier about the major K2 cities prospering to the detriment of more deserving (in this case) K4's like Blackpool. On top of that Manchester has farmed the European pot, been awarded NDC money, a host of successive SRB monies, as well as levering a tram system (like Sheffield and Nottingham) during the last 15 years. There's other areas where it's succeeded too, but they're too numerous to go into.
Leeds is often held up as an example of good regen especially given the predicament it faced in the early 80's. What they did was specifically target financial services building on a base of 'mutal and friendly societies'. They are an example of what can be achieved with dynamic local leadership, and when the right people are brought together with a genuine appetite.
Just as a sign off...which I'm sure the policy exchange missed the educational attainment scores (5 grades at A* to C including English and Maths) is higher in Liverpool, and Hull for that matter, than it is in Oxford
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