What do the numbers mean?

Regeneration has been the name of the game in development circles since the 1990s when John Gummer, former Conservative environment secretary, halted the greenfield building boom. His 1993 revisions to PPG6, restricting the development of out-of-town retail centres, was a catalyst in encouraging brownfield, inner-city regeneration. Since then, specialist developers such as Urban Splash have shown that healthy profits can be made by developing unpromising brownfield sites. And now, regeneration has become the norm for the industry’s big players – as can be seen in the following pages of this awards supplement.

But although there is a lot of well-intentioned talk about regeneration, establishing the true extent of current activity is sometimes more difficult. Here, Building crunches the numbers …

£3.1bn

Government spending is £3.1bn on regeneration this year, says Keith Hill, former planning minister. This sum includes expenditure on the New Deal for Communities programme, the housing market renewal pathfinders, the Thames Gateway, the regional development agencies, English Partnerships and the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, which funds councils to run social regeneration projects. This figure has seen a considerable jump from £2.4bn since the first year of the Sustainable Communities Plan in 2003/04. And it is set to rise to £3.3bn in 2007/08 when current government spending plans elapse.

65,000 ha of brownfield land are derelict, according to the government’s National Land Use Database. In London and the surrounding regions, it says around 22,000 ha of previously developed land is available for development – much of it in the Thames Gateway, which accounts for a massive 17% of the South-east’s brownfield land. Take-up of previously developed land has averaged about 6500 ha a year in recent years – less than the 7700 ha reckoned needed to hit government targets for brownfield site development. About 32% of the land identified in the NLUD is hard to develop because of regulatory constraints, such as being in a flood plain, and 58% is difficult to bring back into use because it is apparently not attractive to developers. Regeneration agency English Partnerships is currently drawing up a national brownfield land strategy to tackle these so-called “hardcore” sites.

10,000

10,000 homes are planned to be demolished under the government’s housing market renewal programme by the end of March next year, according to housing minister Yvette Cooper. To tackle the problem, 9 pathfinders have been set up , of which Merseyside’s New Heartlands is set to have completed the largest number of demolitions at 2700, followed by Bridging Newcastle Gateshead at 2000. Hull intends to knock down the fewest number of dwellings at just 44. All of the pathfinders are also undertaking extensive refurbishment programmes. There are nine housing market renewal pathfinders in the North and the Midlands.

689, 675

689, 675 homes are lying vacant in England, says the Empty Homes Agency website. This represents a fall of more than 10% since 1999 when there were 772,300 empty dwellings in England. But the number of homes, which have been empty for six months plus has not fallen over the same period. The vast majority of empty homes – 585,569 – belong to private owners. The government is just about to give councils new powers to bring homes that have been empty for six months or more back into use.

67%

According to ODPM statistics, 67% of homes are now being developed on brownfield sites. The government target for building on brownfield, or previously developed sites, is 60%. The Urban Task Force has recently pressed the government to raise this figure on the grounds that the original target was met several years ago.

39

39 dwellings per ha is what the ODPM reckons is the average number of homes in new developments. This figure marks a big rise on the 34 dph being achieved in 2003. And the density of new homes on brownfield sites is higher still at 44 dph. The increase follows the introduction of PPG3, which stipulates that all housing developments should be built at a density of 30-50 dph. Deputy prime minister John Prescott subsequently enforced his department’s guidance by threatening to call in any large development in the South-east below 30 dph.

8

There are 8 “core cities” in England: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle and Sheffield. These eight, which are the biggest cities outside London, have

been earmarked by the government as the hubs of economic development and regeneration in the regions. The Northern Way strategy, which is designed to stimulate higher growth rates in the underperforming north of England, makes the North’s five “city regions” the focus on its efforts. They will also be the focus of communities secretary David Miliband’s New Deal for Cities programme early next year.

120,000

An extra 120,000 new homes is the government’s housing provision aim for the Thames Gateway – a vast wasteland that is widely acknowledged as Western Europe’s greatest brownfield land opportunity. It is also seen by the government as the crucial source of land for remedying the acute shortfall of housing in London and the South-east.