Single regeneration budget

Single regeneration budget

The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) came into op¬ eration in April with the implicit intention of answering some of the criticisms incurred by the large number of disparate policy initiatives which loosely passed for «urban policy» in the previous fifteen years or blogger.com: David Whitney, Stephen Littlewood  · The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Challenge Fund aims not only to achieve its substantive aim of local economic regeneration, but also to change the way local partners operate. Strategy is crucial to both of these blogger.com by: 18 The potential of the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) to enable more people to undertake effective learning in a range of different contexts has long been accepted. This study brings together real examples and activities within the framework of lifelong learning for the first time. It draws together valuable strategic and process

Single Regeneration Budget (Hansard, 21 July )

Whitney David, Littlewood Stephen. The Single Regeneration Budget : reflections on the operation of the Challenge Fund in Yorkshire and Humberside : Rounds I and II. Les politiques urbaines en France et au Royaume-Uni. After the 1 s, when fragmented urban regeneration policies in Britain were dominated by triple themes of physical regeneration, a range of new institutions and an enhanced role for private developers, the s saw the emergence of a single regeneration budget holistic approach based upon local partnerships.

This has been characterised most recently by the Single Regeneration Budget, ostensibly a means of providing local solutions to local needs, but only available to the winners of annual bidding competitions. En Grande-Bretagne, le principe de compétition devient un moyen de plus en plus utilisé pour allouer des financements dans le cadre des politiques urbaines. Compétition entre les projets, les villes, cela signifie qu'il y aura des gagnants et des perdants.

Cela interpelle également sur la signification réelle des besoins exprimés dans les projets retenus par rapport aux critères de choix définis dans le cadre de la compétition. Les règles du jeu ont été le mieux comprises? Dans cet article, l'auteur analyse les réponses d'une région, le Yorkshire-Humberside dans cette course aux financements qu'est S. Il analyse aussi bien les profits qu'en tirent les bénéficiaires que les implications pour les perdants de cette loterie urbaine d'un genre particulier.

The Single Regeneration Budget:. Reflections on the operation of the Challenge Fund in Yorkshire and Humberside: Rounds I and II. Head of Department single regeneration budget Planning and Housing. Researcher in the Centre for Urban Development and Environmental Management CUDEM, single regeneration budget. The emergence of the Single Regeneration Budget.

During the s a radical shift occurred in the way urban regeneration in England was managed and resourced. Single regeneration budget s and the s saw local authorities taking the lead in urban policy and ex¬ penditure in the context of a policy and funding framework set by central government and informed by deprivation indices.

Resources were targeted on designated Urban Single regeneration budget areas where local au¬ thorities developed policy programmes in consulta¬ tion with local interests, and worked in partnership with central government in pre-defined priority ar¬ single regeneration budget. The Single Regeneration Budget SRB came into op¬ eration in April with the implicit intention of answering some of the criticisms incurred by the large number of disparate policy initiatives which loosely passed for «urban policy» in the previous fifteen years or so.

Extensive critical commentary Haughton and LawlessStewartRobinson and Shawsingle regeneration budget, DoE noted, inter alia, how regeneration programmes were frequently poorly co-ordinated, lacked evident regional dimensions, were insensitive to needs of local communities, lacked long-term strat¬ egy and marginalised the role of elected local au¬ thorities, single regeneration budget.

The SRB was an approach to regeneration which purported to be more sensitive to both urban and rural areas, to offer flexibility for local partners. to prepare strategies appropriate to the nature of local circumstances and problems and to offer cen¬ tral government the flexibility to target resources more responsively to areas in rapid decline. The SRB also embodied from the outset a number of key themes which characterised the rhetoric of the Major government's regeneration policy since 1namely decentralisation, partnership and competition.

In short and in principle government has pursued «a version of local empowerment through the partial reintegration of local governance under the co-ordi¬ nation of local partnerships and the strategies they devise» Collinge and Hall 1 The SRB brought together some twenty previously separate programmes single regeneration budget administered by five different Government departments.

While most of the resources within the integrated budget were ini¬ tially committed to existing initiatives such as Urban Development Corporations, City Challenge and Es¬ tate Action an increasing proportion of the budget was to be allocated through an annual competitive bidding cycle which started in April and has become known as the SRB Challenge Fund.

The objective of single regeneration budget ownership and local initiative con¬ stituted a key characteristic from the start and re¬ mains so in the most recent Advice Notes. Partners are encouraged to «come together in a joint ap¬ proach to meet local needs and priorities» DoE The approach is in essence seen as shared, inclusive, participative, locally driven and variously-led with local authorities participating equally with¬ out dominating the process at local level.

The Challenge Fund is managed on a de-centralised. Hommes et Terres du Nord,p. basis by the integrated Government Offices for the regions which were established in November Regional staff of the Departments of the Environ¬ ment, Trade and Industry, Transport and Employ¬ ment are placed under the control of a single Re¬ gional Director, single regeneration budget.

These Regional Offices manage the SRB Challenge Fund together with other economic development land use planning and regional func¬ tions, including administering Regional Assistance and the European Structural Funds. Regional Offices in principle exercise regional discretion but remain strictly accountable to central government. This paper draws on experiences of local partnerships bidding into the SRB in Yorkshire single regeneration budget Humberside, single regeneration budget, to examine some implications of the intrinsic nature of the Challenge Fund process and its management upon partnership bids and to look at what this says about responsive regeneration policy.

We draw upon the reflections of the most recent national study of Round II Hall et al as well as more local voices in the region both in the Government Office and within a sample of winning and losing single regeneration budget ships.

The Single regeneration budget Challenge Fund Process. The process of managing the Challenge Fund by the Regional Offices can be expected to effect both the nature of regeneration strategies which may emerge, and the value of the SRB process itself as a policy regime responsive to locally perceived needs in the regions.

These effects may not only be responses to the detail and clarity of published bidding guidance, or an understanding of the regional financial alloca¬ tions available to potential bidders, but also the timescale against which to work up bids, and the complexity and specificity of outputs and delivery plans required of bids.

Finally, and not least, single regeneration budget, there are the «steers» given to bidders by Regional Offices in the preparation processes, and the feedback given to un-successful partnerships.

What then is the management process? Each Chal¬ lenge Fund bidding round comprises a cycle within each financial year, which starts with the publication of Bidding Guidance DoE together with sup¬ plementary advisory material on financial guidance, project appraisal and approval, monitoring and re¬ view and the preparation of delivery plans DoEand ends with the approval of project deliv¬ ery plans of the successful bids.

At the time of writing there have been two completed cycles and a deadline for the receipt of Round III bids has just passed.

Each Regional Office receives an single regeneration budget Challenge Fund allocation based ostensibly on meas¬ ures of deprivation and population, which was made public in for the first time, although not until June, after the outline bidding stage.

The mandatory submission of outline bids was itself a fresh depar¬ ture in SRB Round II management, single regeneration budget, facilitating the Regional Offices in making supportive or discourag¬ ing «noises» to bids in their formative stage, although all bids may subsequently proceed to formal submis¬ sion stage.

A short pro forma accompanies the out¬ line bids, single regeneration budget, and was also a fresh requirement to Round II bidders, single regeneration budget, responding to earlier criticisms of inter¬ regional inconsistencies. All bids are assessed by the Regional Offices which are required to compile a portfolio of bids within the financial limits of their indicative regional allocation, and recommendations then made to the Cabinet Competitiveness Committee which makes the final decision on funding.

A Focus upon Yorkshire and Humberside. The Yorkshire and Humberside Region Figure 1 is a substantial administrative area in English terms, vary¬ ing enormously in commercial and industrial distribu¬ tion and providing great urban and rural contrasts, single regeneration budget. Its landscape is no less a contrast, ranging from far reaching, often desolate, uplands to dense urban ar¬ eas frequently defined by the legacy of long past and more recent industrial development.

A balance sheet of the region's strengths and weaknesses shows that it has great potential, but also a number of structural weaknesses which need to be addressed in order to release that potential. The Yorkshire and Humberside Partnership, an or¬ ganisation designed to create a strategic focus for the region through providing a forum for local au¬ thorities, industry, commerce, trade unions and the regional Development Association, saw the credit side of the balance sheet as including:.

Against this, the debit side of the balance sheet high¬ lighted:. The Challenge Fund Process in Action. A broad range of issues are raised by the SRB Challenge Fund policy regime and its bidding and assessment processes, a number of which are summarised as fol¬ lows:. Government has continually reiterated its central objec¬ tive that the Challenge Fund should be about local regen¬ eration alliances meeting lo¬ cally perceived problems and that policy priorities should be single regeneration budget ones.

David Curry, Minister for Housing and Local Government, single regeneration budget, in giving evidence to the House of Commons Environment Committee Inquiry into the SRB said:. Figure 1. The Partnership was defining the issues in an attempt to draw down enhanced EC support and to provide a region-wide perspective which could be dealt with strategically, but it might just as easily have been talking in terms of the issues which the SRB was designed to address from a very much more localised perspective.

In national terms, the extent of the region's problems appear to have been recognised in the relative bid¬ ding success of Yorkshire and Humberside in com¬ parison to the rest of the country, single regeneration budget.

Using the value of successful bids as a simple measure of overall suc¬ cess, the table of regional allocations of Round Two Table 1 shows Yorkshire and Humberside in third place with £1 The range and relative scales of local issues in the Region are illustrated by an examination of the projects which bid successfully for SRB funding in Round One Table 2.

It may also be seen from the examples in Table 2 that although all successful applications conformed to the ideal of originating from partnerships formed at a local level, the prior experience, resources and predominantly highly localised spatial focus of the projects meant that local authorities remained domi¬ nant as leaders in the regeneration process in York¬ shire and Humberside. In other words, this is not a top-down paternalistic process; this is one where we are asking the partnerships to define where their own priorities lie what I do not want to do is to give some sort of pre-emptive guidance.

Government has duly declined to set into place any formal national or regional strategic policy frame¬ work for the Challenge Fund, which interestingly is contrary to its initial ideas that each Regional Office should prepare an annual regeneration statement act¬ ing as a regionally-specific framework for the bidding process.

There is clearly no intention to do so now, and indeed it single regeneration budget been very firmly emphasised that existing national, regional and local programmes and plans bearing on regeneration are seen as a sufficient context for bid preparation, single regeneration budget. The single regeneration budget of explicit regional frameworks does, however, give rise to a high degree of uncertainty by bidders concerning the acceptability of the policy content of their bids, and to suspicions about the existence of covert policy agendas.

There has been a continuing request for clearer explicit advice on regional policy priorities. Requests for greater decision-making transparency also extend to the Regional Office's criteria for as¬ sessing bids.

It is evident that the assessment criteria of the current Bidding Guidance DoE, form more a «quality threshold» than a basis for discrimi¬ nating between bids, single regeneration budget. Given the insufficiency of funds to support all bids which meet the stated criteria, however, it is unavoidable that Regional Offices will exercise their judgement and prioritise bids in draw¬ ing up their packages to Cabinet Committee.

Dis¬ cussions with the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Office confirm this point. It is evident, single regeneration budget, therefore, that single regeneration budget the rhetoric of the SRB policy regime is to maximise local ownership and to empower local com. Round 2 SRB -Number and Value of Successful Bids, single regeneration budget.

munities, the reality is to place government in a strong position to exercise choice on local initiatives on cri¬ teria which are unknown. Centralism co-exists in an uneasy tension with local ownership. It is also likely that such judgements become even more opaque where partnership bids are of a multi-faceted kind in terms of sectoral representation, geographical size, funding dimension and so on, and making compari¬ sons between them is a very imprecise process, single regeneration budget.

There is the associated question of the role of Re¬ gional Offices in the bid preparation process. A com¬ mon «steer» in all cases appears to be to give strong encouragement to adhere closely to the bidding guid¬ ance checklist and to avoid influencing the content of the bid. At the same time Regional offices also give advice at outline stage on the merit or otherwise of working up a bid to final submission stage, single regeneration budget.

This process of managing bidders' expectations, given the reality of indicative regional allocations being always over-subscribed, raises questions about the transparency of the crite¬ ria employed in such negotiative interventions.

Again, suspicions arise of alternative and unknown agendas by interests within government. It is evident from discussions with both successful and failed partnerships in Rounds I and II that the imperative of securing scarce funding in a fiercely competitive bidding process is having a number of distorting effects both upon the nature of partner¬ ships and the shape of their bids.

Despite a strong Regional Office predilection that partnerships should have previously been in existence, some clearly were not. Powerful bidding cultures are emerging in lo¬ calities where a partnership's only priority is to secure funding, and equal involvement and ownership by all partners runs second counter.

Some localities are facing issues of how to prioritise multiple bids which reflect different local interests and address different needs. Bradford Congress, for example, encountered such difficulty in prioritising its five bids in Round I. It was eventually pressurised to support the community-led Royds bid after the po¬ litically active and astute Royds Development Com¬ pany lobbied Bradford Council to swing the views of Bradford Congress, the principle strategic body in the area.

Here, therefore, it seemed that the political dimension of regeneration policy was being shaped by the nature of the Challenge Fund process, with key decisions in single regeneration budget being removed from the stra¬ tegic context. This view was only reinforced when a similar process secured funds for the Keighley area of Bradford in the subsequent round of bidding, single regeneration budget.

Local partnerships are faced with issues of short time scales for the preparation of bids as well as the com¬ plexities of determining bid output measures, costings and delivery plans. Questions of capacity and the desirability of capacity building for all sectoral inter¬ ests, single regeneration budget, including smaller local authorities, have surfaced in a number of recent national and local studies.

In one small but deprived urban area of Humberside, Goole, they had few resources to prepare their first bid and failed to secure funds. They had little expec¬ tation of success in the second round, and when they did win funding their resources were wholly occupied with implementation, leaving nobody to bid in Round III the following year. The ability of partnerships to demonstrate their ca¬ pacity to deliver regeneration forms a key criterion of a successful bid, and often seems to single regeneration budget the local significance of need.

The issue of how to better relate limited regeneration resources to pri¬ ority needs will continue so long as more opportunis¬ tic criteria, such as capacity to deliver, single regeneration budget so much importance.

Single Regeneration Budget Challenge Fund In Bangladesh

 · Single Regeneration Budget (Hansard, 21 July ) Search Help. HANSARD – → s → → July → 21 July → Written Answers (Commons) → ENVIRONMENT. Single Regeneration Budget. HC Deb 21 July vol ccW W § Mr. Pike. To ask the Secretary of  · The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Challenge Fund aims not only to achieve its substantive aim of local economic regeneration, but also to change the way local partners operate. Strategy is crucial to both of these blogger.com by: 18  · The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) Challenge Fund aims not only to achieve its substantive aim of local economic regeneration, but also to change the way local partners operate Partnerships for regeneration::The Single Regeneration Budget Challenge Fund round one By Barbara Tilson, John Mawson, Mike Beazley, Alex Burfitt, Christopher singles werlwind Collinge, Stephen