Government plans announced this week for £140m in funding for the regeneration of Britain’s worst sink estates have been met with scepticism by many in the industry.
Estate regeneration is one of the ways the Conservative government hopes to address the housing crisis.
Prime minister David Cameron said he wanted to see the “brutal high-rise towers” and “dark alleyways” of post-war housing estates demolished and rebuilt with better layouts or upgraded facilities, using funding from the private sector.
An accompanying report from Savills, Completing London’s Streets, stated that between 54,000 and 360,000 homes could be supplied in London through this regeneration via infill rather than replacement.
However, Chris Brown, chief executive at Igloo Regeneration, said the three issues of land assembly, viability and politics meant that the comprehensive regeneration of estates such as Woodberry Down, N4, would take 40 years from the first local authority action to final developer completion.
Mark Farmer, chief executive of Cast Consultancy, also questioned the scheme. “The so-called low-density ‘complete streets’ concept that apparently has informed government thinking is laudable, but is it bankable? Institutional finance is queuing up to enter the UK residential sector at the moment, but it is seeking long-term steady returns and not necessarily looking to go up the risk curve,” he said.
An advisory panel, chaired by Lord Heseltine, has been appointed to decide which estates will be targeted first, with high land-value areas taking priority.
However, Gerry Hughes, senior director at Bilfinger GVA, said: “To think that the private sector can fund these solutions in isolation – even in higher-value locations – is wishful thinking and totally out of the question in many parts of the North.
“The government’s own right-to-buy policy has made the problem worse, as the resultant resident and non-resident leaseholders will have to be bought out at significant up-front cost to enable knocking down and starting again.”
Click here to read Jackie Sadek’s take on the Conservatives’ plan
