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There were 481,786 Liverpudlians in 1991 and the projection for this year is 432,200. The government and local authority haven't taken this lying down and have set in motion more than 500 regeneration developments since 2000, worth over £2bn. The six development bodies in the city have spent £343m on the 20 current biggest regeneration schemes and there are a further 200 projects planned worth over £12bn. To date 36.54 ha of land has been regenerated, but this is only 7.8% of the total available. Is it money well spent? All that migration has shrunk primary school classes from 26.8 pupils to 24.8 over the past 10 years, and the number of scholars getting at least five C grade GCSEs in secondary schools has risen from 31% to 54%. The extra GCSEs have helped school leavers to take advantage of an 11% growth in jobs between 1998 and 2005, and benefit claimants have fallen 42% since 1997. All that new work helped all those new workers to push up the price of homes from £46,437 in 1996 to £127,807 today, despite the fact that housing output rose from 1,041 in 2004 to 2,734 in 2006. Not that jobs and houses are completely unrelated. In fact, they’re virtuously circular. So, the number of construction firms increased 15% between 1998 and 2005 and built more than 2 million ft² of commercial property (888,700 ft² of retail and 1.4 million ft² of offices) which are occupied by the well educated people doing all those new jobs …