Recently in Not the White Paper Category

This afternoon we were given the ministerial statement about regeneration; Grant Shapps and Andrew Stunell were in Salford today and have been explaining how the coalition government's policies create a framework for action.
 
I was about to get a bit angsty about the fact that the statement is the shortest statement we've seen in 30 years, until some smarty-pants pointed out that the regeneration sector is rather used to screeds of verbiage and policy guidance but it hasn't actually always inculcated a culture of real action or delivery. So that put me back in my box.

And, certainly, when UKR began calling for the government to set out its plans for regeneration, we had in mind something like the old-fashioned government white papers (we even wrote our own "Not the white paper" - see blog 11 October 2011 - and jolly good it was too) but we now realise that we were still partly stuck in the remains of our top-down mindset. 

So it is action, not words. Dr Clever-Knickers Evans has a new word for this government: WYSIWYAG (or What You Saw Is What You Are Getting) and it has to be said that the regeneration statement is simply a pulling-together of all the relevant strands from the recent suite of white papers and putting them into a one-stop (forgive me coining one of our old terms) document.

No surprises, no rabbits out of hats (well almost none), no bells and whistles; the statement is a simple laying out of the basic tools that we now have and the resources available. Yes, we would have preferred to see a doubling of the Regional Growth Fund but we didn't really expect it to happen (and nor should anyone else have done so if they had been listening to ministerial pronouncements for the last nine months). And we are still expecting some further hooks in the Budget for Growth on 23 March (note to chancellor: may we have EZ-TIF? Pretty please).

It's nothing short of rabbit-in-the-headlights about next week's CSR now.

All normal endeavours seem to have ground to a halt as we await the dread report on Black Wednesday. What's the betting it will be a massive anticlimax, then?

Journalists and pundits keep asking me what will it all mean for the property (and regeneration) industry. What do I know?

I don't have a crystal ball but my army of armchair analysts seem to fall into roughly two camps as to their views.

The first camp are the pessimists who warn that much more of the property industry is geared off public spending than we had thought; sardonic mutterings about all being doomed, "slash and burn" and "double dips".

The second lot are a little cheerier and express the view that private sector development is still large in size (as a sector), depends on the health of the overall economy (and not simply on public contracts), and will recover as the economy recovers.

The crunch question is this: do we think that reducing the deficit will liberate some growth?

I am very excited. Today, we at UK Regeneration issue our consultative draft Not the White Paper  (NTWP) with some very practical measures to get regeneration in the UK resuscitated.

It is a bold document (and you can get it by just clicking on the draft's title above) so please - everyone - come back to us with all your comments and ideas by 20 October.

We need your contributions by then because we will be sending them along with the NTWP to the minister directly after he delivers the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR).

We are saying, first and foremost, that we must learn from our mistakes: UKR accepts entirely that the top-down apparatus that has evolved around the regeneration field over the past 15 years has led to paralysis and sclerosis (sadly, as regular readers of this blog know, we speak from direct first-hand experience of this!).

We find ourselves in the untenable position of supporting an unnecessarily heavy bureaucratic structure, where six people monitor a project for every one person delivering it.

To say that this state of affairs was unaffordable and unsustainable would be a bit like saying that Oliver Reed really ought to have cut back a bit on his drinking. As I never tire of saying, regeneration had, in itself, become the perfect metaphor for big government.