Regeneration should be addressed at a local level, says Shapps

Shapps said that regeneration strategies should be addressed at a local level.

A regeneration toolkit has been published alongside the Cross-Government response to the Committee's regeneration report. The toolkit reviews the powers devolved from Government to locals to enable regeneration to be promoted at a local level.

The Government has disagreed with the CLG Committee's recommendation that it should produce a strategy to deal with regeneration problems and set measures to tackle them.

"Government has no plans to publish a national regeneration strategy," the Government response said. "A national regeneration strategy – prescribing outcomes, targets and measures, methods or roles – would be inconsistent with our localist approach to regeneration."

The Government has instead produced a toolkit  which aims to outline the options available to local partners to develop their own regeneration strategy and address their own priorities. In this way, there will be different strategies in different places to address different problems.

"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," said Shapps.

The Government supports the "town centres first" policy and agrees that is plays a role in regeneration. "Sites of the lowest environmental value, including so-called brownfield land, should be used as a priority," the response said.

In its response the Government acknowledged the Committee's concerns that it takes too long to get a planning decision. The Government has agreed launch a consultation shortly on the "planning guarantee", which would put a long-stop date of 12 months on all planning decisions.

In its response, the Government rejected the CLG Committee's recommendation that is should carry out a review of the various regeneration programmes and produce a lessons learned document.

"It is for local partners to draw their own conclusions, apply the relevant lessons to their particular circumstances, and to define the nature of future regeneration schemes locally," the response said.

The toolkit produced by the Government collates details and updates on various initiatives aimed at boosting regeneration, including, the recent "City Deals", the "Get Britain Building" scheme, various growth funds and the Localism Act.