ABSTRACT
Upon coming to power in 1997, the New Labour Government in the UK set in motion a host of different initiatives to renew the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and to encourage community-led regeneration. New Deal for Communities (NDC) was seen as the flagship area-based regeneration initiative of this era, with an emphasis on addressing (individual) poverty or (geographical) deprivation. NDC drew on the Labour Government’s early interest in this area, expressed initially through the inception of a new Social Exclusion Unit, reporting directly to the prime minister. In particular, concerns about the apparent ineffectiveness of prior urban policy informed the context into which the NDC programme was launched in 1998. NDC symbolised a shift in the direction of urban policy, moving away from the narrow land-and propertyfocused concerns of much of policy in the 1980s, and giving more emphasis to the wider social and distributional concerns (Coaffee and Deas, 2008).
