ABSTRACT
How many of the current regeneration programmes actually make communities better off in the long term? Do they make individual poor people in these areas any less poor? Traditional regeneration schemes face problems when they try to assist people on low incomes. When such physically oriented schemes are assessed, a surprising finding is that the relative position of such excluded groups can actually be made worse. The 1994 Department of the Environment Report on the impact of urban policy (Robson et al. 1994) and the Scottish Office’s recent interim report on the progress of their ten-year regeneration programme, New Life for Urban Scotland (McGregor et al. 1995), both arrive at similar findings. They show that while the quality of the environment was improved for the lower income groups in the regeneration area, and while people obviously appreciated this, any jobs created were, by and large, not filled by these local residents. These jobs were mainly related to the regeneration scheme itself, and tended to require qualifications that local people did not have and could not possibly acquire in the timescale involved. In any case these jobs did not survive long term.
