The Government has shown that it has the courage of its convictions and stuck to their guns on regeneration and localism. Grant Shapps has responded to the Select Committee’s report and reissued a revised and updated toolkit. As he says in the press release:
We can’t go back to the top-down, centralised system of the past which attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to regeneration with little regard for the needs, circumstances and wishes of local people.
There will be some debate around this. There are more top down policies around than this statement acknowledges. And we have long argued that there is an important role for government in understanding and possibly influencing how far the sum of localism, the distribution of funding and the impact of economic change all add up to a real rebalancing of the economy.
More later as we digest the detail of the response and see whether it really offers us a toolkit to make 2012 a year of action.
Paul Evans
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