Recently in Urban Development Companies (UDC's) Category

The quangos have started to come tumbling down in the West Midlands. With Advantage West Midlands (AWM) fatally wounded with funding slashes, it was almost inevitable that dependant organisations would not survive. So the recent announcements that Walsall Regeneration Company and Wolverhampton Development Company  are to be wound up were hardly surprising.

Measuring the real outputs of such bodies is always tricky and was an issue that dogged the Urban Development Corporations (remember them?) of the 1980s. It's ironic that the political party which introduced these predecessors of the agencies now facing oblivion has led the charge for the cull. After all, the UDCs oversaw large swathes of commercial property development and helped cement the fortunes of a generation of property professionals. Walsall and Wolverhampton's companies were of a smaller scale, of course, yet Walsall in particular had won substantial praise within the property sector (no mean feat in itself).

Governments by nature appear to be unable to tell it how it really is. Yesterday's announcement by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on the future of the West Northamptonshire Development Corporation (WNDC) is a classic example.

The news that WNDC will, from April 2011, lose the wide-ranging planning powers it was granted as recently as 2006, and be required to work more closely with with development partners was headlined by DCLG as "Strengthened delivery arrangements will drive regeneration in ... West Northamptonshire".

Incredibly DCLG goes on to explain that WNDC: "will now concentrate on strategic delivery of key projects". Hang on a sec, wasn't that the development corporation's remit when it was set up back in those halcyon, pre-recession days of 2004?

And the comment from regeneration minister Ian Austin follows in the same vein; the area, he says, will "benefit from a stronger, more focussed UDC working closely with local authorities and communities". Shouldn't it have been working closely from the start and isn't the whole point of a UDC to be exceptionally focussed from the outset?

Well, yes, but you won't hear the government saying it in public. Still, WNDC got off rather lightly, compared to Thurrock Thames Gateway Development Corporation, which, according to DCLG, will also benefit from "strengthened delivery arrangements". Or, in English, will be subsumed into the Homes & Communities Agency.

Meanwhile, local authorities in Northamptonshire, somewhat miffed at having their planning powers removed, could hardly contain their glee at regaining control of their patches. Within hours of the DCLG announcement, Northampton Borough Council had zapped out a media release asking for planning to be handed back asap please.

Whether any of this will ultimately further regeneration in Northamptonshire is, of course, another matter entirely...