Housing renewal in England: Where do we go from here?

This paper discusses options for the future of housing renewal in England. In March 2011, the Government cut short the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) initiative which began in 2003 and was due to finish in 2018. This move left local authorities with uncompleted schemes, and a number of uncertainties as to how to proceed. While there have been immediate decisions to be made, there are also questions to be asked about how to continue housing renewal in the medium term in the context of much reduced public funding availability and an ongoing economic crisis. This paper discusses the HMR programme’s activities to date, and then presents the results of a Delphi study with a group of experts based in the Liverpool conurbation. The Delphi technique involves a series of questionnaires and feedback, in order to gain expert opinion on a particular topic. Experts were asked for their views on the future of housing renewal in the conurbation. While establishing a consensus was not necessary an aim of the exercise, a degree of consensus was nevertheless arrived at on a potential future strategy. It was concluded that a piecemeal approach is necessary in the current climate. Strong planning policies remain important in supporting neighbourhood regeneration, which should be holistic and community led, rather than undertaken through imposing top-down attempts at housing market restructuring.