Treasure hunt

We expected serious money to be announced in the Chancellor's Spending Review 2000 and we got it. Health and education, as predicted, finished just after the race for money started. Transport started late and finished well. Even housing and regeneration did well, even if it started a few furlongs back from the rest. But the spending review is more than just about money. It is little less than a pre-manifesto statement for the expected 2001 general election, and it was marketed as little else.

But just as we've been given some answers, other questions beg answering. Can the vision be delivered? Will the levels of investment be sustained? And where does housing and regeneration fit into it all?

The spending review sets out the government's - or is it just the Treasury's - objectives around the usual suspects: opportunity for all; responsible and secure communities; raising productivity and sustainable growth; and, a modern international role for Britain.

The detail - and the money - comes in the section where each department of state gets a review, with new Public Service Agreements (PSAs) for each. Crudely put, a PSA is "contract" between the Treasury giving the money and the departments offering outputs in return. Each department of state now has a PSA, an initiative started in 1998 as part of the last spending review, soon to be complemented with detailed Service Delivery Agreements. PSAs are important, and soon, some local authorities will be getting them also.

Interesting as all this is, the real innovation can be found in the fifteen cross-cutting reviews. Here, the Treasury has attempted its own bit of joined up thinking. It has recognised - as a "weakness" even - that some problems can't be handled by a single department, and that cross-departmental targets must be treated as important as departmental ones.

This was an important innovation, not least because the government, through the Social Exclusion Unit, is calling for such joined up working from local stakeholders in deprived neighbourhoods. And the cross-cutting review most important to housing and regeneration is that on Government Interventions in Deprived Areas, such as the New Deal for Communities.

In three pages, it crams in a few key principles: "area targeted initiatives play a role that is genuinely additional to main services rather than attempting to compensate for their failings". It further isolates five key PSA targets to tackle deprivation, focusing on education, unemployment, crime, health and... social housing. Whilst this means that social housing will be getting money, it also means that social housing is seen as part of the deprivation problem.

Such concerns shouldn't dilute the good news for housing: the enhanced resources for the Approved Development Programme and the new Starter Homes Initiative. It doesn't look like local authority capital resources for basic repairs and improvements has done well, but then this could be an unsubtle hint to look at transfer alternatives....

Support for the large scale stock transfer programmes remains strong. Substantial resources are made available for both the arms-length management company initiative and the Private Finance Initiative for Housing. But what caught the eye was the new community housing task force. The Treasury is looking to make future housing transfer processes more regeneration focused as a means to getting added value from new and existing investment.

Of interest also is the new Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and the PSA performance fund. The NRF is integrally linked to the Social Exclusion UnitÕs neighbourhood renewal agenda. Whilst the detail has yet to come, funds will be made available to local authority districts in need, providing there is a non-local authority dominated local strategic partnership with a plan to turn round the area.

Whilst the government hasn't issued guidance yet on the NRF, it looks as if this will be allocated using the new Index of Local Deprivation (ILD). If this happens, then northern local authorities will do well, and London ones not. We'll have to wait for the final ILD later this year to be sure.

The PSA performance fund is another one to watch. Again, full guidance is to come, but the idea is that each local PSA will focus on twelve key outcomes (not outputs) which reflect a mix of national and local priorities, particularly where social exclusion exists. In return, the government will offer not just money, but also a package of freedoms and flexibilities as rewards for success. This links into the "well-being" clauses in the new 2000 Local Government Act.

Looking further afield, the New Deal for Communities programme remains intact, with more but smaller schemes to be approved in the future. The Single Regeneration Budget looks like its being wound up in its current form. Hopefully, we can look forward to the newly financed Regional Development Agencies funding urban and housing regeneration companies without the heavy bureaucracy that hampered the SRB programme. The Sure Start Programme, an area initiative for 0-4 year olds was easily one of the biggest winners in the area intervention stakes, doubling its resources. Doubtless, Sure Start was helped by the fact it was a Treasury-sponsored initiative in the first place.

The targets in the SR2000 at times seem breathtakingly ambitious and at others, quite impossible. But it offers us a grandstand view of the Government's plans for the next 3 plus years, and its ambitions for beyond. And the issue of resources is key: will these levels of resources be sustained beyond March 2004? Or is this an old-style "stop-go" approach which will public funding commitments slowed down once inflation starts rising? The beauty of the SR2000 is that we know how much money is available for what, up to March 2004. Beyond that we don't know, at least not for housing and regeneration. We can be sure of one thing: education and health will be considered more important for the foreseeable future.

So what does this mean for those of us in the social housing sector? It's little short of an opportunity without precedence. There's enough to be getting on with on the housing side alone. But the broader agendas of improving employment, health, crime and educational outcomes are not ones that can be delivered by the respective institutions that exist to deliver them. They may be able to deliver the targets in the spending review with a bit of concerted effort and imagination, but the outcomes?

This is where the neighbourhood renewal agenda becomes all important. Because this is where the spending review and the National Strategy will succeed or fail. The all-important outcomes will not be delivered in a job centre, a hospital bed, a prison cell or a classroom - or even in a good quality house for that matter - but in the neighbourhood.

The government's vision is to create places where sustainable employment is a norm, people healthy, crime low and educational attainment high, or at least, all at the national average. To achieve this objective, a combination of effort between agencies, stakeholders and local people will be required in a way that probably hasn't happened before. Underlying all of this, is a view that significant resources are going into places already, they just need to be worked better.

The vision may sound like utopia to some, but social housing providers are not in a position to turn down the opportunity to help deliver it. Because if the neighbourhood renewal agenda succeeds, they'll reap the rewards also. But if they ignore it, will they be given another opportunity? And will they be even in a position to take it 5 years, 10 years from now?