Out of Whitehall A policy briefing on the government's plans for regeneration

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As the new year began, the housebuilding industry was still absorbing the welter of documents that emerged from Whitehall before Christmas. Gordon Brown's pre-Budget report, with the long-awaited response to Kate Barker's review of housing supply, triggered a plethora of consultation documents and research papers.

The consultation documents on the Planning Gain Supplement, PPS3 and the Code for Sustainable Homes all feature prominently elsewhere in this issue of Regenerate, but they weren't the only documents appearing on the ODPM website in the first week of December. Alongside them came the draft PPS25, covering development and flood risk, and a number of supporting research and analysis papers showing how the government had reached its conclusions in its Barker response.

The release of so many consultation documents at one time will give developers and consultants a busy time over the next five weeks as they formulate their responses. Deadlines for consultation are concentrated within an eight-day period with the deadlines for consultation on the Planning Gain Supplement and PPS3 being 27 February, PPS25's deadline just a day later and the Code for Sustainable Homes on 6 March.

Having dealt with the built fabric, the government has turned its attention to the people who live in the homes with the launch of its respect action plan earlier this month. The plan is one of Labour's big ideas, as evidenced by Tony Blair's display of graffiti-cleaning in Swindon to launch it. It is aimed at tackling bad behaviour within communities, through such weapons as cutting housing benefit to households that have been evicted for antisocial behaviour and banning offending residents from their homes. Those who have to deal with the country's less advantaged communities were unimpressed.

Shelter director Adam Sampson said the government's measures would just move problems from one set of neighbours to another.

National Housing Federation chief executive David Orr called the measures "clumsy" adding that it "unfairly targets social housing tenants as either victims or villains". Orr warned that docking housing benefit could simply increase homelessness; it wasn't what the ODPM wanted to hear.

The ODPM's focus will now move to the cities. In the run up to Christmas, communities minister David Miliband toured the core cities to participate in a series of city summits. The findings of those summits will inform the next state of the cities update report, due for publication within weeks.

The research, led by Professor Michael Parkinson of the European Institute of Urban Affairs at Liverpool John Moores University, is looking at the impact of government policy on city prosperity. It will be a key document in shaping a new approach to the way cities are run and which is likely to emerge later this year.

Not to be outdone, some cities outside of the big eight core cities have been showing the initiative and working up their case for government investment and promotion to the premiership. A group of cities in the east of England have presented their case to David Miliband, and have now been invited by the government minister to prepare a business case for their region.