WALTHAM FOREST HOUSING ACTION TRUST: PROGRESS IN REGENERATING
HOUSING ESTATES
| LESSONS LEARNED
|
| |
| Q 77
| 40. Our predecessors asked about the lessons which had been learned from experience with the Housing Action Trusts. The Department explained that they now seek to work more collaboratively with local authorities. A regeneration project of this nature would not get off the ground without local authority support, as was shown with the early attempts to form a Housing Action Trust, which were unsuccessful. The successor initiatives to Housing Action Trusts were the single regeneration budget and the estate renewal challenge fund. The first of these would leave the properties in the hands of the local authority, who would bid for the money. The second aimed to provide a dowry to allow poor grade property to transfer into a local housing company in which the local authority had an interest.
|
| |
| Q 27, 28
| 41. The Department also reported that another difference was the scope for using private finance. Housing Action Trusts began life with the assumption that virtually all the money would come from the Department, but each Housing Action Trust now had a private finance element to help it finish off the work within the budgets the Department had set. In subsequent initiatives and projects the Department now assumed that a proportion of private finance could be attracted. In addition, the concept of challenge funding, whereby prospective projects com- pete for government funding, had not developed at the time of the Housing Action Trusts.
|
| |
| Qs 25-27, 54, 78
| 42. The Committee asked the Department whether they had drawn any lessons about the need for cost controls and the setting of clear budgets from the start. The Department said that later initiatives did not allow the flexibility that had been afforded to the Housing Action Trusts and the total budget was fixed much earlier in the process. However, Housing Association Trusts had a longer life, and were therefore more difficult to cost, than most city challenge and single regeneration budget projects, which lasted for five, at most seven years.
|
| |
| Conclusion |
| |
| 43. We note the lessons which the Department have learned from the experience of the Housing Action Trusts; and we expect that subsequent urban regeneration initiatives involve greater collaboration with local authorities, make greater use of private finance, and have been set lifetime budgets from the outset.
|
|
|
