Getting it right on regeneration

THE sudden transition between a government which spent money as if it was going out of fashion, and one forced to come to terms with the fact that there was no money left to spend, was always going to create casualties.

Some of these victims are highlighted in a new report by MPs, which points out that the sudden ending of Labour’s Pathfinder regeneration programme has left many elderly and vulnerable people trapped in abandoned streets, surrounded by boarded-up houses waiting for bulldozers that may never arrive.

However, while there was certainly a lack of forethought in the peremptory way in which funding was withdrawn, the nostalgia for Pathfinder expressed by Sheffield MP Clive Betts, Labour chairman of the Commons Communities and Local Government Committee, is woefully misplaced.