Battle grounds

It is a crisp winter day in the Smethwick area of Birmingham and Lord Rooker, minister for regeneration and regional development, is standing on a pile of rubble. This is the site of the old Cape Hill brewery, one of the first targets for demolition by Birmingham and Sandwell’s housing renewal pathfinder, dubbed Urban Living. The £75m development will include 900 new homes, 30% of them affordable, and the first will go on sale in December.

For Rooker, this is one of the ODPM’s success stories. “It’s excellent,” he says. “Nine hundred new homes is a tremendous prospect to look forward to – it’s a good example and it fits exactly with what the pathfinders are all about.”

This is the kind of project Labour hopes will woo voters in the forthcoming general election, expected on 5 May. Over the next four months, we can expect to see more ministers standing on building sites in an attempt to draw the electorate’s attention to projects that have resulted from the first tranches of spending laid out in February 2003’s Communities Plan.

But not everywhere has it been plain sailing. Deputy prime minister John Prescott’s ambitious plan for addressing the failures of successive governments to balance the housing market was branded by some as a strategy to concrete over the South while indiscriminately wielding a wrecking ball over the North. As work gets under way, a groundswell of local opposition may mean that ministers get more than they bargain for when they return to their constituencies to promote the work of the plan.

Today in Cape Hill, it’s more a matter of glad-handling representatives of Birmingham and Sandwell councils, the pathfinder and the developer, but there could be a storm brewing. The £50m programme includes the demolition of 590 properties by March 2006. Vicky Ford, Conservative candidate for Birmingham Northfield, an area covered by the pathfinder, says it could be a decisive issue even before the clearance programme begins in earnest. “The pathfinder doesn’t have money for local X repairs. In Northfield there is a large amount of council-owned property where there has been huge underinvestment. I was on an estate this morning where no money has been spent properly for 15 years. There were windows falling out. It will be a huge election issue. A lot of people will vote Conservative for the first time as Labour has failed to deliver on promises.”

In other pathfinder areas where the demolition is further advanced, rival factions are already rushing to capitalise. In East Lancashire, Urban Living’s counterpart Elevate has been the subject of fierce local criticism as its £32m programme, which includes knocking down 800 homes across five local authorities, kicks in.

Campaign group Save Britain’s Heritage is determined to make Elevate’s demolition plans a key political battleground and points to the 2004 council elections as evidence of the influence such programmes can have. “You only have to look at Newcastle, where the Labour administration was kicked out and the Liberals were elected on a pledge to end the pathfinders,” Wilkinson says.

But Peter Pike, Labour MP for Burnley, is determined that his party will not lose ground over the issue. “There are 4500 homes in Burnley in which no one wanted to live,” he says. “I’d ask anyone who wants to save the homes, would you live in them?” In fact, Labour hopeful Kitty Ussher has made housing one of her key campaign areas, last autumn promising that her mission would be “to restore the pride to our communities, and we need new housing to do that”.

Pike does concede that the demolition programme has caused controversy but he says that the opposition has decreased since the government increased the level of compensation going to tenants whose houses are due for demolition.

In the London–Cambridge–Peterborough growth area, the story is the same, although the programme is different. The regional spatial strategy for the area, which is out for public consultation, proposes 478,000 new homes for the area by 2021. Critics of the proposals say the region does not have the infrastructure to support such growth.

“It’s the most politically contentious area,” says Roger Humber, chair of Anglia Housing Group and a member of the East of England regional assembly. “The Tories are revving up to oppose housing and campaign on a lack of infrastructure – they’ll go hard on this issue as they are short of issues to put clear water between them and Labour.”

The issue reached fever pitch in December last year when the national papers splashed local concerns across their front pages. There have been vociferous campaigns against the housebuilding plans and political hopefuls are already capitalising on this.

Government plans to increase the area’s new homes target by a further 18,000 have added to the controversy. Andrew Lansley, shadow secretary of state for health and Conservative MP for South Cambridgeshire, has already waded into the debate. In October he wrote to the regional assembly denying there was a need for the homes locally and he will be campaigning on this issue in the run-up to the general election.

At East Hertforshire council, Deborah Clarke, executive member for economic and regional development, also anticipates housebuilding plans will be a key motivation for voters. “We have a shortage of affordable housing but this goes goes way beyond the needs of local people – double, in fact,” she says. Clarke sites the example of Harlow, where 10,000 homes are to be built to the north of the town. “I can’t see how it can’t be a political issue for local people.”

But it’s not always clear which way the floating voters of middle England will swing. It is notoriously difficult to predict the whims of the electorate, and for every environmentalist or NIMBY, there could be someone else wondering whether their children will ever be able to afford a home of their own. One thing is certain though; as the election looms, housing and regeneration plans will be under ever closer scrutiny.