Recently in Regional Development Agency Category
This simply allowed me to be, as the press office of Tower Hamlets would have it "sweeping and opinionated" and "bilious" in respect of the future of our town centres and high streets.
The
debate around "Generation Rent" continues to ramp up. My recent blog (29
May) on the private rented sector seems to have met with some approval; I got
several approbatory Tweets and regular readers will have already seen the
comment posted by the eminent Kevin Leigh of No 5 Chambers (so big sigh of
relief there!)
Last week, alongside some rather scary statistics on what they call
"rental-spend", Rightmove published a report that said that those "happy to
rent" are on the increase; although most remain what is termed "trapped
renters" (56%), that is, those who would like to buy but cannot afford to
(incidentally you can see a whole new array of quasi-technical terms growing up
around this debate. Just what are we like? It's depressing, to say
the least).
And we are only just beginning to catch up with a few things snuck out on press releases by CLG just before Christmas. Honestly, anyone would think that the department was trying to bury bad news. And actually, most of it seems like pretty good news.
One of the releases (put out on 21 December) is that a Peter Schofield has been appointed to be CLG director-general for neighbourhoods. A quick straw poll around the regeneration lags quickly confirmed that none of us know him. And, sure enough, he joins CLG from HM Treasury, where he was director of the enterprise and growth unit.
I am seriously glad we are embarked on this course, we've all seen there was more bad news yesterday with the banner headlines on the million young people unemployed, and there isn't a moment to lose.
And this is the week that Greg Clark's (in my view, splendid) Localism Bill became law. Technically, he may have given the Commission the exact tools to do its job.
