Confused? you will be …

As regeneration manager for the town of Workington in Allerdale, west Cumbria, Rimmer is responsible for an overhaul of the town centre precinct and raising funding of about £45m. He has applied to four different funding streams and says the number of bids and the complexity of coordinating them has been an "absolute nightmare".

Rimmer's problems illustrate what the Audit Commission meant two weeks ago when it said the delivery of the government's regeneration and housing schemes is being threatened by the complex web of programmes and initiatives set up to carry it out (HT 25 June, page 8).

In fact, the commission took Allerdale as a case study and the diagram on the right, showing just some of the main funding sources, initiatives and implementing bodies, shows how tangled the situation is.

The North-west Development Agency sets economic strategy for the region, as well as overseeing a number of different funding streams, but the urban and rural regeneration companies carry out sub-regional strategies. Meanwhile, regional housing strategy is set by a regional housing board, while local strategic partnerships for Cumbria and West Cumbria set their own, community-based regeneration plans for the county and borough respectively.

Rimmer's scheme – to give the 1970s precinct in the centre of Workington a desperately needed facelift – has so far secured £1m from the NWDA's single regeneration budget, and has bids in for about £4m from the NWDA's single pot fund, the urban regeneration company West Lakes Regeneration and the European Regional Development Fund.

As if it wasn't time-consuming enough to compile separate bids for separate funds, it's also difficult making sure no rules are broken, says Rimmer. The NWDA is cautious about funding a single project from too many of its different streams and European state aid rules stipulate that no more than 10% of public funding can go into a private sector development.

"This is ridiculously complex and a huge turn-off to engaging the private sector," says Rimmer, whose town centre scheme involves £36m from a private developer. "In an area where confidence is low, 10% isn't enough to remove the risk for the private sector."

Meanwhile, Allerdale has three "market town initiatives" to deliver regeneration projects with local people, as well as housing providers including Impact Housing, Home Housing and Derwent & Solway Housing Association, all charged with implementing regeneration in their own ways. Also taking charge of regeneration in Allerdale are the council itself and organisations such as Rimmer's Workington Regeneration Agency, set up by NWDA to focus on a specific area. National agencies such as the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, Forestry Commission, Learning and Skills Council and English Partnerships will also get involved with individual projects.

Mike Muir, chief executive of Impact Housing, agrees that the number of different agencies makes things complicated. "The difficulty is not just knowing where the money's coming from but who's going to take the strategic lead," he says. "We've got, for example, the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund in much of West Cumbria, the SRB and housing investment through the Housing Corporation. In theory, [leadership] should come through local strategic partnerships, but there are two LSPs for West Cumbria housing plus a county-wide one, the Cumbria Strategic Partnership, for economic issues."

David Martin, Allerdale council's head of regeneration, adds: "Sometimes what one agency is doing opposes another."

As for solutions, Rimmer and Muir suggest a unitary local authority would help – something that may become possible after this autumn's referendum on a new regional assembly for the North-west. Muir even says Cumbria needs its own mini-economic strategy – something being developed at the moment by Cumbria Vision, a partnership including the Rural Regeneration Company, the URC West Lakes Renaissance and councils, funded by the NWDA.

Kate Willard, acting chief executive of the RRC's Rural Regeneration Cumbria, believes partnership forums such as the Cumbria Strategic Partnership, which includes government representatives, NWDA, LSPs and councils, can bring agencies together.

For now, all Allerdale's stakeholders can do is make relationships between organisations as strong as possible, both formally, through meetings and partnerships, and informally. Rimmer speaks to the NWDA's manager for Cumbria every week and Muir points out that many of the same people pop up on different strategic groups, making it slightly easier to build informal links.

But he warns that there may in fact be no way to solve the problem: "It's not a straightforward process and I don't know if it could be more simple. I don't know if a single body to oversee all regeneration is possible."

Stewart Swift, the NWDA's area manager for Cumbria, agrees. "The Audit Commission is probably right in saying it's complicated, but the complexities of what we deal with means we have to have a complex solution. There's no easy answer to urban regeneration and if we get it wrong, it's wrong for a long time."