Lessons from a war zone

As the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister tables £22 billion in a three year programme to promote 'Sustainable Communities', Miffa Salter sees a chaotic scramble for aid being administered by armies of regeneration officers. A process she finds reminiscent of scenes on the international news. A version of Miffa's article first appeared in Planning, the magazine of the Royal Town Planning Institute on 4 April 2003, and is kindly reproduced here.

With much international fanfare, the British auxiliary ship the Sir Galahad docked in Iraq's southern city of Umm Qasr. Unfortunately it was many days before the so called 'military planners' actually decided where this cargo of humanitarian aid should go.

There was concern that the distribution of the 200 tonnes on the Sir Galahad would be met with similar scenes to those observed earlier just yards from the Kuwait border. Namely, military guards and camera crews looking on helpless as aid distribution descends into a free for all.

It is these pictures, of people literally clawing their way into the back of trucks, which are perhaps some of the most tragic and evocative to have emerged from Iraq. Rather more pathetic was the so called coverage from some of the major news channels which had anchor men and women querying why such skirmishes were taking place.

Aid of any kind has the potential to be deeply divisive.

Even the most well intentioned and most carefully organized efforts to address need can descend into anarchy. This is not something that happens 'somewhere else'. It is occurring right here and right now in our own backyard.

You only have to get underneath the skin of Britain's own experience in urban regeneration to see communities torn apart by the arrival of the very resources they have worked so hard to achieve.

Ok, there is no lorry, no sacks of food and no bottled water but I could take you to a 'Community Forum' or two where distribution of funds, computer equipment, and training is equally haphazard. Even more depressing is the almost universal sign up to 'competition for assistance' which sees the most able jostling their way to the very front of the queue when the regeneration bandwagon finally roles up in town.

The comparisons do not end here. While we have heard much in the media of the Sir Galahad and its cargo, the coverage given to the World Food Programme which has been getting on with distributing 500,000 tonnes of food a month in Iraq has been minimal. Now why do I keep getting flashbacks to those Government announcements around the New Deal for Communities, the Single Regeneration Budget, and it's forerunner the City Challenge? (See below)

OK, I can hear people launching into that age old argument of '... some aid is better than nothing at all'. That is undoubtedly so. But as Oxfam's spokesman Alex Renton said recently, '... years of experience has shown us that the picture of the soldier with a gun in one hand and a loaf of bread in another in not a happy one'.

Draw your own parallels. Miffa Salter 2 September 2003

The New Deal, SRB and City Challenge

Following Miffa's article we provide some background to the current package of state aid for urban regeneration.

There were 31 City Challenge Partnerships which ran in deprived urban areas between 1992 and 1998. Each Partnership was eligible to bid for £37.5m over five years and, including levered-in funds, spent over £240m on average in each of their targeted areas. The City Challenge was the forerunner to the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), itself having gone through 6 'Rounds' before being replaced.

The SRB, which began in 1994, brought together a number of programmes from several government departments with the aim of simplifying and streamlining the assistance available for regeneration. SRB provided resources to support regeneration initiatives in England, carried out by local regeneration partnerships.

The aim of the SRB was '... to enhance the quality of life of local people in areas of need by reducing the gap between deprived and other areas, and between different groups'. The types of bid supported differ from place to place, according to local circumstances and changes to government objectives.

A total of 1027 bids were approved under Rounds 1 to 6 of the SRB, worth over £5.7 billion in SRB support over their lifetime of up to 7 years. It is estimated that these will have attracted almost £8.6 billion of private sector investment, and are thought to attract other European funding. The SRB is said by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to have involved over £23 billion from all sources of funding since 1994.

In 2001 the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announced a new package of measures for the Regional Development Agencies, including giving RDAs more flexibility in the way they use all available funding. The series of national SRB Rounds ended. RDAs are expected to meet their existing commitments to SRB initiatives from allocated resources, with information about SRB schemes and remaining opportunities for their RDA funding available through www.dti.gov.uk.

John Prescott's £22 bn - 3 year job creation scheme

Further, in 2003, as part of his £22 billion Sustainable Communities package over three years, Prescott announced the New Deal for Communities programme - based on the explicit aim of promoting what are deemed to be 'self-help' schemes - with £850 million to distribute in that time. In addition the RDAs were allocated various sources of funding as regeneration aid, to be clarified through www.odpm.gov.uk.

The chaotic scramble for Prescott's aid, administered by armies of regeneration officers, has been a long time in the making.

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