Understanding community empowerment in urban regeneration and planning in England: putting policy and practice in context

Community involvement in the fields of town planning and urban regeneration includes a wide range of opportunities for residents and service users to engage with networks, partnerships and centres of power. Both the terminology and degree of the transfer of power to citizens varies in different policy areas and contexts but five core objectives can be identified. This article approaches the subject of community empowerment by exploring the theoretical literature; reviewing recent policy pronouncements relating to community involvement in England and by discussing a recent case study of an Urban II project in London. The conclusions suggest that community empowerment is always likely to be partial and contingent on local circumstances and the wider context

Development viability assessment and the provision of affordable housing. A game of “pass the parcel”?

This paper constructs a hypothetical case study based around the Benchmark Land Value assessments within the landmark Parkhurst Road, London case decided in the High Court in April 2018. It attempts to illustrate how developers were gaming the system and how the 2014 Planning Practice Guidance aided them to do that. The discussion centres on the extent to which new 2018 National Planning Guidance has addressed the identified flaws and what additional changes might be needed to that guidance to solve any outstanding problems

Housing and credit crunch: follow-up

Eight Report of Session 2008-200

Chalk and Cheese: A comparison of England and Scotland’s emerging approaches to regeneration

To suggest that the Department for Communities and Local Government’s (DCLG’s) publication Regeneration to Enable Growth: What Government Is Doing in Support of Community-Led Regeneration, issued in early 2011, was a disappointment to many is something of an understatement. Consequently, the House of Commons Communities and Local Government (CLG) Select Committee’s verdict on the Coalition Government’s regeneration strategy for England was keenly awaited by commentators and practitioners alike. Regeneration, the CLG Select Committee’s report published on 3 November 2011, certainly did not pull any punches, focusing in particular on the Government’s ‘different approach’ to regeneration and its likely effectiveness. This article reviews the current condition of regeneration policy in England – set against the views of the Select Committee and those submitting evidence to it and the Government’s response to its findings, and in comparison with the Scottish Government’s new regeneration strategy, set out in Achieving a Sustainable Future – and considers whether it is fit for purpose

Certified Local Government Program

The Certified Local Government Program is a preservation partnership between local, state and national governments focused on promoting historic preservation at the grass roots level. The City of Beaufort was approved as a Certified Local Government in 1993 and was South Carolina’s 11th city to be certified. Annually, Beaufort’s Historic District Review Board evaluates approximately 175 projects for appropriateness within their Preservation Districts and Conservation District

The Role Of Local Authorities In Health Issues: A Policy Document Analysis

Prior to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 the Communities and Local Government (CLG) Select Committee conducted an investigation into the proposed changes to the Public Health System in England. The Committee considered 40 written submissions and heard oral evidence from 26 expert witnesses. Their report, which included complete transcripts of both oral and written submissions, provided a rich and informed data on which to base an analysis of the proposed new public health system. This report analyses the main themes that emerged from the evidence submissions and forms part of our preliminary work for PRUComm’s PHOENIX project examining the development of the new public health system

Life after Regions? The Evolution of City-regionalism in England

This item was accepted for publication in the journal, Regional Studies [© Regional Studies Association]. The definitive version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2010.521148].This paper examines the evolving pattern of city-regional governance in England. Following the demise of English regional policy in 2004, city-regions have come to represent the in vogue spatial scale amongst policy elites. The result has been a proliferation of actual and proposed policies and institutions designed to operate at a, variously defined, city-regional scale in England. Nevertheless, attempts to build a city-regional tier of governance have been tentative and lacking coherence. Alongside this city-regions are to be found emerging alongside existing tiers of economic governance and spatial planning. Arguing that what we are witnessing is not ‘life after regions’ but life with (or alongside) regions, the analysis presented argues that to understand why contemporary state reorganisation results in a multiplication of the scales economic governance and spatial planning we must recognise how the state shapes policies in such a way as to protect its legitimacy for maintain regulatory control and management of the economy. The final section relates these findings to wider debates on state rescaling and speculates on the future role of transition models in sociospatial theory

The government's review of sub-national economic development and regeneration: key issues

We are now in the midst of another concerted attempt by Government to make sense of and tidy up the sub-national governance of economic development and regeneration. This is a challenging task made all the more difficult by being undertaken in a UK context following a period of uneven devolutionary change and cross-cut by new and existing scales of institutions and spatial policies at the sub-regional, city-regional, regional and pan-regional levels as well as the economic slowdown. The current endeavour has taken the form of the Review of Sub-National Economic Development and Regeneration led by HM Treasury, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Communities and Local Government department and the consultation Prosperous Places: Taking Forward the Review of Sub National Economic Development and Regeneration (hereafter SNR). We recognise that SNR is emergent 'policy-in-the-making', containing some potentially radical steps for government across a range of geographical levels, and represents a laudable attempt to establish a clearer framework replete with challenging opportunities for RDAs, local authorities and other existing and emergent spatial institutions. Our purpose here is to raise some key issues for debate and reflection as part of the process of addressing sub-national economic development and regeneration policy and governance

Capitalization of Central Government Grants into Local House Prices

We explore the impact of central government grants on local house prices in England using a panel data set of local authorities (LAs) from 2001 to 2008. Electoral targeting of grants to LAs by the incumbent national government provides an exogenous source of variation in grants that we exploit to identify their causal effect on house prices. Our results indicate substantial or even full capitalization. We also find that house prices respond more strongly in locations in which new construction is constrained by physical barriers. Our results imply that (i) during our sample period grants were largely used in a way that is valued by the marginal homebuyer and (ii) increases in grants to a LA may mainly benefit the typically better off property owners (homeowners and absentee landlords) in that LA.