Anthony Mason, head of the housing team at consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers, said the pressure to have long-term spending plans drawn up by the end of this year was hampering innovation.
The government is due to approve all plans by next March and, as yet, only the Manchester pathfinder has submitted its proposals.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has been advising five out of the nine pathfinders: Merseyside, East Lancashire, Hull, Tyneside and Birmingham/Sandwell. Together they involve almost 400,000 homes – roughly half the total for all nine pathfinders, for which £500m has been earmarked over the next three years.
Mason said: "The abridged timetable means that they [the pathfinders] haven't the time to weigh up all the options open to them. As a result, there doesn't seem to be as much innovation as there should be. Pathfinders were intended to be new instruments for intervention, but some won't have enough time to come up with creative solutions."
He added that "elements of what had gone before" – such as clearance and renewal strategies and environmental improvement programmes – were likely to be included in many of the plans. These, he said, had failed to counter low demand in the past.
But Brendan Nevin, director of the North Staffordshire pathfinder, said: "It's inevitable some of the same techniques and tools will be used again but, given the pathfinders' 15-year period, innovation is possible over time. The plans shouldn't be thought of as set in stone."
He added that the same level of innovation could not be expected across all the pathfinders, because some areas had a longer history of recognising the problems posed by low demand.
A spokesperson from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister said: "Each pathfinder is working to a different timescale. These timescales were not prescribed by the ODPM, but were set by the pathfinders."
Source
Housing Today
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