Regenerating the English Coalfields
Regenerating the English Coalfields

Author: Great Britain. National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780102963359

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Whitehall initiatives to revive former coalfield communities have helped to make them more attractive places to live and work but many remain among the most deprived areas in England and opportunities to help train local people and promote local businesses have been missed. The regeneration effort has three strands: the National Coalfields Programme, to decontaminate and find uses for former coalfield sites; the Coalfield Regeneration Trust, to provide grants to community projects; and the Enterprise fund, to support businesses. The cost for these three schemes is £630 million to date and spending is set to reach almost £1.1 billion. The Programme expects to have treated 90 per cent of land by its target completion date of 2012 and it will take twice the ten-year timescale of the original Programme to achieve its aims for housing and employment space. While the Trust has exceeded most of its targets, because of strict funding cycles for departments it can currently offer support only up to 2011 and so the future of many projects is at risk. The Department took five years to put the Enterprise Fund in place because of delays in meeting state aid requirements and protracted and unsuccessful negotiations with a private bank. The NAO also found there is no overall strategy to coordinate the three initiatives and each reports and accounts for its work in isolation. A forum established in 2007 to co-ordinate efforts across Whitehall has met only six times, is poorly attended and has no substantive actions to date. At the local level the NAO found the Trust and the Fund could work more closely with the National Coalfields Programme to help train people to benefit from jobs created by the regeneration and to promote local business moving onto employment space developed on the sites. In addition, the Homes and Communities Agency and some Regional Development Agencies each claim all the credit for jobs created on coalfield sites, resulting in over-reporting of the benefits

Regenerating the English coalfields
Regenerating the English coalfields

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-03-10

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9780215544520

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Reviving the former English coalfields is one of the largest regeneration challenges over the last 30 years. Between 1981 and 2004 over 190,000 people lost their jobs in coal mining. The speed and extent of pit closures resulted in severe economic, social and environmental deprivation in many communities. In response, the Department for Communities and Local Government developed three specific initiatives to regenerate coalfield areas, involving almost 1.1 billion pounds of public money.As at July 2009, the three initiatives had spent 630 million pounds and had brought 54 former coalfield sites back into working use, and enabled private development of 2,700 houses and 1.1 million square metres of employment space.Thirteen years after the start of the initiatives, the Department still lacks a clear vision and has no overarching strategy for the regeneration of these areas, has not sufficiently coordinated the three strands of the regeneration, and has failed to coordinate wider Government activity. In consequence, training and support to help former coalfield communities find employment has rarely been linked to job opportunities created on coalfield sites.The Committee is concerned about the value for money of these initiatives. The Department does not know what improvement has made to the lives of people in the coalfield areas. It does not have a robust assessment to prove to the true number of additional jobs created nor the business occupancy rates for employment space on the redeveloped sites, or the number of people from former coalfield communities who have benefited. Although progress has been made regeneration has cost the taxpayer much more than originally expected and taken longer than planned. The Department needs to develop more sophisticated benchmarks that take into account the different levels of contamination on a site and allow separate evaluation of the incremental costs to develop housing and employment space.

The Shadow of the Mine
The Shadow of the Mine

Author: Huw Beynon

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-03-19

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1839767987

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No one personified the age of industry more than the miners. The Shadow of the Mine tells the story of King Coal in its heyday – and what happened to mining communities after the last pits closed. The Shadow of the Mine tells the story of King Coal in its heyday, the heroics and betrayals of the Miners’ Strike, and what happened to mining communities after the last pits closed. No one personified the age of industry more than the miners. Coal was central to the British economy, powering its factories and railways. It carried political weight, too. In the eighties the miners risked everything in a year-long strike against Thatcher’s shutdowns. Their defeat doomed a way of life. The lingering sense of abandonment in former mining communities would be difficult to overstate. Yet recent electoral politics has revolved around the coalfield constituencies in Labour’s Red Wall. Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson draw on decades of research to chronicle these momentous changes through the words of the people who lived through them. This edition includes a new postscript on why Thatcher’s war on the miners wasn’t good for green politics. ‘Excellent’ NEW STATESMAN ‘Brilliant’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ‘Enlightening’ GUARDIAN

The Post-Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice
The Post-Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice

Author: Gwen Heeney

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-06-11

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1527513025

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This book brings together experts in the fields of art history, visual arts, music, cultural geography, curatorial practice and landscape architecture to explore the role of material memory in the post-industrial landscape and the ways in which that landscape can act as a site for many forms of creative practice. It examines the role of material memory in the siting of public artworks and politically inspired installation art within the socio-economic post-industrial landscape. The post-industrial ruin as a place for innovation in the curatorial process is also investigated, as are social memory and the complexities of inscribing memory into places. A number of chapters focus on photography and its important role in recording memory as transformation, abandonment and erosion. Artists and musicians present personal case studies examining the siting of permanent and temporary artworks which can invoke memory of both culture and place. The land itself and its associated histories of post-industry are explored in artistic terms investigating dislocation, wasted spaces and extinction. Landscape architects and cultural geographers explore the aesthetic of the urban ruin, its natural and human ecologies and the re-wilding of urban spaces. The volume provokes discussion by a group of diverse experts on a very contemporary subject.

Town and Country Planning in the UK
Town and Country Planning in the UK

Author: Barry Cullingworth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-10-16

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 1134246099

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This revised fourteenth edition reinforces this title's reputation as the bible of British planning. It provides a through explanation of planning processes including the institutions involved, tools, systems, policies and changes to land use.

Urban Regeneration in the UK
Urban Regeneration in the UK

Author: Andrew Tallon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-24

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 1351030280

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This textbook provides an accessible and critical synthesis of urban regeneration in the UK, incorporating key policies, approaches, issues, debates and case studies. The central objective of the textbook is to place the historical and contemporary regeneration agenda in context. Section I sets up the conceptual and policy framework for urban regeneration in the UK. Section II traces policies that have been adopted by central government to influence the social, economic and physical development of cities, including early town and country and housing initiatives, community-focused urban policies of the late 1960s, entrepreneurial property-led regeneration of the 1980s, competition for urban funds in the 1990s, urban renaissance and neighbourhood renewal policies of the late 1990s and 2000s, and new approaches in the age of austerity during the 2010s. Section III illustrates the key thematic policies and strategies that have been pursued by cities themselves, focusing particularly on improving economic competitiveness and tackling social disadvantage. Section IV summarises key issues and debates facing urban regeneration upon entering the 2020s, and speculates over future directions in an era of continued economic uncertainty. The Third Edition of Urban Regeneration in the UK combines the approaches taken by central government and cities themselves to regenerate urban areas. The latest ideas and examples from across disciplines and across the UK's urban areas are illustrated. This textbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis that will be of interest to students, as well as a seminal read for practitioners and researchers.

Shaping Places
Shaping Places

Author: David Adams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0415497965

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Shaping Places explains how towns and cities can turn real estate development to their advantage to create the kind of places where people want to live, work, relax and invest. It contends that the production of quality places which enhance economic prosperity, social cohesion and environmental sustainability require a transformation of market outcomes. The core of the book explores why this is essential, and how it can be delivered, by linking a clear vision for the future with the necessary means to achieve it. Crucially, the book argues that public authorities should seek to shape, regulate and stimulate real estate development so that developers, landowners and funders see real benefit in creating better places. Key to this is seeing planners as market actors, whose potential to shape the built environment depends on their capacity to understand and transform the embedded attitudes and practices of other market actors. This requires planners to be skilled in understanding the political economy of real estate development and successful in changing its outcomes through smart intervention. Drawing on a strong theoretical framework, the book reveals how the future of places will come to be shaped through constant interaction between State and market power. Filled with international examples, essential case studies, color diagrams and photographs, this is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking planning, property, real estate or urban design courses as well as for social science students more widely who wish to know how the shaping of place really occurs.

The sale of the Government's interest in British Energy
The sale of the Government's interest in British Energy

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-03-24

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 9780215545084

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This report, the 22nd from the Public Accounts Committee (HCP 356, session 2009-10, ISBN 9780215545084), looks at the sale of the Government's interest in British Energy. In January 2009, the Government sold its 36 per cent interest in British Energy, as part of EDF's purchase of the Company. The sale had potentially important implications for future energy security as British Energy, though not financially strong enough to invest in new nuclear power stations itself, owned land viewed by industry as being in the most suitable places for them. The Department did not, however, secure a binding commitment from EDF to build new nuclear power stations. The report adds it also failed to establish whether EDF had previously built any new nuclear power stations without public subsidy. A number of factors, including planning decisions, could result in EDF abandoning its plans to build new nuclear powers stations, with or without public subsidy. The Shareholder Executive hired investment bankers UBS at a cost of £4 million, equivalent to a monthly payment of around £400,000, to advise on sale tactics, assist with negotiations and provide valuations of British Energy. The Committee considers it unacceptable that the Shareholder Executive considered it necessary to spend so much on external advice when it is supposed to possess expertise in these areas. The Government was fortunate in selling its interest in British Energy when energy prices were at a peak. The £4.4 billion sale proceeds were allocated to the Nuclear Liabilities Fund, to put towards the future cost of decommissioning British Energy's existing power stations.

Fair Play
Fair Play

Author: Daniel Dorling

Publisher: Policy Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1847428797

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Encompassing an extensive range of print and online media, this reader brings together a selection of highly influential writings by Danny Dorling which look at inequality and social justice.

Support to incapacity benefits claimants through Pathways to Work
Support to incapacity benefits claimants through Pathways to Work

Author: Great Britain: National Audit Office

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-05-28

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13: 9780102965223

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Reports on the Pathways to Work programme's aims to reduce the number of people claiming incapacity benefits and help them into work. This title suggests that it has had a limited impact and has turned out to provide poor value for money.