Area-based urban interventions: rationale and outcomes: the new deal for communities programme in England

It is now 40 years since the first area-based initiative (ABI) was launched in England. New Deal for Communities (NDC), announced in 1998, is one of the most ambitious of English ABIs in that it aims, over a period of 10 years, to reduce the gaps between 39 deprived areas and national standards in five outcome areas: crime, education, health, worklessness, and housing and the physical environment. Change data from the 2001-05 national evaluation are used to explore three considerations: change across the programme; drivers of mobility; and change at the partnership level. Barriers operating at the neighbourhood, city-wide and national levels have impacted on the implementation of the programme.</p

Urban governance under neoliberalism: New labour and the restructuring of state-space

In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in-depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs)and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll-out) of neoliberalism. While these "new institutional fixes" are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism