Introduction

This chapter is about New Labour's efforts to reverse the long-running negative impact on urban conditions of concentrated poverty within deprived areas and to break the connection between poor social and physical conditions. It comprises three parts:

• 1.the situation New Labour inherited and the development of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal;

• 2.the measurable results of the strategy; and

• 3.the relationship between wider urban, regional and housing policies and the more focused neighbourhood renewal agenda.

We conclude by assessing the likelihood of future progress.

Neighbourhood problems and the New Labour response

The multiple problems of poor neighbourhoods are nothing new and have been the focus of urban policy interventions in the UK since the turn of the 20th century (Atkinson and Moon, 1994; Hill, 2000). However, by 1997, there was evidence that some of these problems were getting worse. Divisions between declining cities and industrial areas and small towns and cities and rural areas had been widening for several decades, while the 1980s saw a particular increase in intra-urban polarisation, with growing contrasts between poorer and more affluent electoral wards within cities (Hills, 1995). There was increasing concern about so-called ‘worst neighbourhoods’, with concentrations of poverty and worklessness and the associated problems of high crime and disorder, diminishing and dysfunctional services, empty housing and environmental decay.

New Labour responded in 1997, asking its newly formed Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) to produce a report on neighbourhood problems. The report, Bringing Britain together (SEU, 1998c), identified approximately 3,000 neighbourhoods with common problems of poverty, unemployment, poor health and crime. Public services in these neighbourhoods tended to be less good, with a higher proportion of schools failing their OFSTED inspection and fewer general practitioners (GPs), many of them in substandard premises. Many neighbourhoods suffered from litter, vandalism and a lack of shops and other facilities. Neighbourhood-level data was limited, but the SEU's analysis revealed a wide gap between the most deprived local authority districts and others. The 44 most deprived districts had nearly two thirds more unemployment than average, one-and-a-half times more lone parents, mortality ratios 30% higher, a quarter more adults with poor literacy and numeracy and two to three times the levels of poor housing, vandalism and dereliction.