New Labour's Evolving Regeneration Policy: The Transition from the Single Regeneration Budget to the Single Pot in Oxford

Abstract

Regeneration policy under New Labour has been subject to a constant restlessness, evolving over time into a complex and diverse landscape. This paper explores how these policy changes have played themselves out in one city, Oxford, focusing on the transition from the Single Regeneration Budget initiative to the more regionally focused ‘single-pot’. In doing this it charts the continuing complexities in policy focusing on the tensions between the competitiveness and social inclusion agendas and around changed governance arrangements. It identifies the restructuring of activity around social inclusion towards more economic outcomes and the difficulties of retaining community voices within regeneration activity at the subregional level as two particular outcomes of these changes which require further responses from all sectors involved. The paper concludes that it is unhelpful to typify such changes as a shift from one policy era to another and instead argues for a focus on the complexities, continuities and contradictions that such change reveals.