The Distribution of SRB Challenge Fund Expenditure in Relation to Local-area Need in England

During the 1980s and the 1990s there were a number of policy initiatives designed to tackle the problems of the urban areas in the UK. By the early 1990s these initiatives represented the commitment of over £1 billion of public expenditure each year. The initiatives encompassed 'area'-based approaches like Enterprise Zones and Urban Development Corporations at one extreme through to more 'people'-orientated, project-led approaches as in the case of the Task Force Initiative. In 1994 the organisation of local-area regeneration policy was changed radically. Some 20 independently operated regeneration programmes were brought together into a Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) to be run by a single government department. A critical feature of the SRB approach to urban regeneration is its competitive nature whereby local partnerships bid for funds from government. Whatever the merits of such an approach in terms of local involvement and value for money turn out to be, there could be drawbacks from a competitive system since there is no automatic presumption that the allocation of regeneration resources will reflect the distribution of deprivation and thus the relative needs of local areas across England. The aim of the research has been to assess how well the allocation of regeneration funds under a competitive approach has, in practice, gone to meet relative needs and what the implications are for the evolution of local-area regeneration initiatives.