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Nicholas Werran looks at the changing architecture of regional and local development organisations under the new government. Urban regeneration companies (URCs), are at the top of the endangered species list of quangos. In the past 12 months, a series of them have closed down. If they were on the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) endangered species list, they would be up there with the panda, only with even slimmer chances of reproduction in captivity. Cast aside: Bradford City Regeneration is among regional quangos which have been abolished The signs looked ominous, even before May's general election, when Regenco, the body responsible for representing the interests of Sandwell, closed its doors in December 2009. This has been swiftly followed by the closure of, among others: Wolverhampton Development Company Walsall Regeneration Company Derby Cityscape Bradford City Regeneration Economic development companies (EDCs), which provide a similar role to URCs but have a slightly different legal set-up, have also been in the firing line, with the disappearance of Plymouth Development Company and Hull Forward. The last month alone has seen the departure of the North Staffordshire Regeneration Partnership, and the all-but disintegration of the Croydon Economic Development Company. URCs, such as regional development agencies (RDAs) with which they often shared funding, were very much a New Labour initiative, albeit a model based on the London Docklands Development Corporation in transforming the fortunes of London's Canary Wharf during the 1980s and 1990s. The idea was to create a series of organisations to focus and co-ordinate development in areas of priority regeneration. As such, they typically received funding from several tiers of the public sector, including local authorities, RDAs, the Homes and Communities Agency – and before that, English Partnerships – and every once in a while direct grants from HM Treasury via the CLG. They are run very much on private sector lines, which one would normally assume would place them in good favour within the new coalition. So what went wrong? John Parmiter, of Tym and Partners, which specialises in planning and regeneration projects, believes it was a combination of being starved of funds and political considerations. ‘The short answer to their demise has been being starved of funds, particularly on a local basis,' he says. However, wider, mainly political, considerations were equally fatal. He explains: ‘They were viewed as being undemocratic, and tarred with the same brush as what was happening at a regional level with the RDAs – perhaps a little unfair, when the majority were well representative of the varying local interests.' Another key problem was that they were viewed as being ‘stakeholder' animals, which is a very unpopular term with the current Government. The task of filling the void left by the exodus of URCs will seemingly be the task of the new local enterprise partnerships. The difference is that these will be joint venture approaches between local authorities, where the economic benefit appears to be mutual. This would satisfy both the new localism agenda and the current appetite to visibly clamp down on undemocratic quangos. Asked what lessons could be gleaned from the past in setting up these new bodies, Mr Parmiter suggests looking to the reason why the URCs were established in the first place. He says: ‘They were set up because local government was too ineffective at the time in delivering regeneration and economic development. The URCs were created to provide regeneration with decisive and effective bodies which could provide co-ordination in this area.' Commenting on the longer-term future of the remaining URCs, a Homes and Communities spokesperson says that ‘all delivery vehicles must adapt to the changes in the political circumstances'. Nicholas Werran is director of GovernetzPublicProperty.

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WHITEHALL

The axe comes to local quangos

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