Report focuses on HMR ‘wastelands’

HALTING housing renewal mid-stream has left vulnerable residents “trapped in half-abandoned streets” surrounded by boarded-up homes, say MPs.

The Chronicle reported how Derker pensioners Maureen and Terry Walsh are threatening Oldham Council with High Court legal action after being abandoned in a “wasteland” community when Housing Market Renewal (HMR) funding was cut.

Cuts
The couple had reluctantly agreed to sell their London Road home to allow for housing regeneration before the deal was pulled due to £2million cuts to the HMR programme.

Now, a report by the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee has warned that the Government does not have an adequate strategy for the regeneration of England’s most deprived communities.

HMR was announced in 2004 and included demolishing or renovating houses in Derker and Werneth. According to figures in February, Oldham Council had acquired 785 properties in the two areas with 530 demolished to create development sites.

But the report states that the collapse in state and private-sector investment in regeneration since the financial crisis of 2008 has left projects across the country “stalled”.

The cross-party committee highlighted the sudden withdrawal of funding in last year’s budget for the multi-million pound HMR Pathfinder programme to revive run-down areas by tearing down old terraces and building new homes. The committee called for urgent Government action to help those affected, warning: “The decision to end funding so suddenly has had a profound impact on the lives of people in towns and cities throughout the North and Midlands.

“Many of those left in the mainly cleared areas are owner-occupiers, often elderly and vulnerable people, who have no alternatives.”

The Government’s regeneration strategy, published in January, provides “little confidence” that ministers have a clear plan for addressing the country’s regeneration needs, said the committee.

“It lacks strategic direction and is unclear about the nature of the problem it is trying to solve. It focuses overwhelmingly upon the achievement of economic growth, giving little emphasis to the specific issues faced by deprived communities and areas of market failure.”

Government plans were “unlikely to bring in sufficient resources”, including from private-sector sources and neglect of deprived areas risked storing up problems for the future.

They called on ministers to develop a new national regeneration strategy which would set out “a coherent approach to tackling deprivation and market failure in the country’s most disadvantaged areas.”

The committee’s Labour chairman, Clive Betts, said: “People have been left stranded in appalling conditions. Many are owner-occupiers, often vulnerable people with no other options. The Government must act to help these people and to eradicate the blight that has been left in so many neighbourhoods.”

Mr and Mrs Walsh, who opposed HMR, say they have been left in no-man’s-land with only themselves, a neighbour and a shop to be left following demolition.