If the Sustainable Communities Plan reinforced by the Barker Review of Housing reads like a house builders’ bonanza, it has made many existing communities shudder. People not only worry about growth pressures and the threat of swamping every outlying village with new estates; they worry if they live in older areas about general decay and the renewed threat of the bulldozer. In the year after the plan came out, the government suggested that over the period of the plan up to 400,000 demolitions might eventually be required to ‘modernise’ and ‘revitalise’ our declining cities – the very opposite of community renewal.

Growing gap within cities

In 1998, five years before the Sustainable Communities Plan, New Labour pledged to close the gap between the poorest areas and typical neighbourhoods. Two years later, it announced a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, setting out the government's long-term plan for ensuring that no one would be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived. The 3,000 deprived neighbourhoods it targeted were dominated by run-down private housing and low-demand, poorly managed council estates, in every city and most towns too, the majority in older, inner-city areas, including inner London. Over time these neighbourhoods became enclaves of need, remote from the general rise in prosperity and struggling to deal with the multiple problems of crime, housing decay, economic inactivity, neglected public spaces and failing public services. Not enough has yet been done to reintegrate these vulnerable places into the bigger picture of cities. The majority of these neighbourhoods have high levels of council housing, much of which fails to meet the government's minimal decency standard.