Urban therapist

His precise role at each of these gatherings? The DTLR adviser, Prime Focus strategy director, researcher and lobbyist seems himself slightly confused about this. "When I'm sitting in a meeting, I never know which hat I'm wearing," he jokes. "But so far, no one's had to remind me who I work for."

Nevin is a man with multiple personalities, but he is single-minded about one thing: the proposed Housing Market Renewal Fund. "It's the biggest urban renewal project for a generation," he says. "It's a vision to give places a 40-year lease of life."

The Housing Market Renewal Fund is designed as long-term therapy for nine English regions sitting on the fault lines of deprivation, rising affluence and population shifts. The hope is that intervention can save large tracts of the Midlands and the North from abandonment, and thus restore some hope to the tattered communities there.

Integrated approach
Nevin helped to conceive the idea of the £8bn fund, to nurture it and send it on its first steps in the real world, and he's as proud as any new father of its achievements so far: it's the first policy to address the social and owner-occupied sectors as a mutually influential whole; the first to take an integrated sub-regional approach; the first to truly link housing and planning policy.

Although the housing sector in the Midlands and North must wait until July, and the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review, before it can crack open a brown ale in celebration, Nevin is confident there will be good news. "Everyone at the DTLR talks in coded language in front of me," he says, "but there seems to be a serious intention on the government's behalf to see this through. And if not, Eamonn Boylan [director of regeneration at Manchester City Council] said he'd buy the biggest round in history."

Fittingly, the idea for the fund emerged from the kind of inter-agency working Nevin now personifies. He traces it back to his 1996/97 role as assistant housing director at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, in the West Midlands, where "we were knocking down 600 properties a year but our void rates never changed". Once Nevin moved to the University of Birmingham's Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, he realised that the same phenomena of low demand and market failure were widespread and getting worse.

A four-strong CURS research nucleus, comprising Nevin, his former Sandwell boss Ged Lucas, Jim Battle, head of the National Housing Federation's northern region and Max Steinberg, the Housing Corporation's director of investment and regeneration for the North, catalysed the interest and financial support of 42 housing organisations.

This broad-based coalition funded a ground-breaking M62 study and satellite research projects, which together built up a cumulative, persuasive picture of the problem. "It's not simply low demand, but a process of urban disintegration," says Nevin. "Areas were emerging from 20 years of high unemployment, and suddenly people had the ability to move away."

This is a vision to give places a 40-year lease of life

The studies stimulated a round of brainstorming sessions among coalition members, which sparked the idea for the fund. "The problem was on such a scale that the idea that you could deal with a few streets at a time, or as a New Deal for Communities project, was a nonsense," Nevin recalls.

Things started to happen fast. In January, the coalition backed a submission for the Comprehensive Spending Review, drafted by Nevin. In April, he was seconded to the DTLR to advise on the Housing Market Renewal Fund. In May, the government announced £25m of pump-priming money to prepare the ground for further investment. In fact, events have passed so many milestones so quickly that Nevin has to pause for thought when asked to give a chronological account.

A 38-year-old father of two, Nevin is of Irish descent and lists "talking" as one of his main hobbies. He began his career in 1985 as a housing advice worker in Handsworth, West Midlands, before starting a cycle of switching between housing management and university research.

"There shouldn't be a distinction between policy, practice and academia, it should be seamless," he comments. "Some people question what an academic can tell them that they don't already know. But I think the key is to make the research relevant to the people who are going to use it."

Renewal alliance
The fund will be highly relevant to the families living in the 720,000 "low-demand" homes in the targeted regions. But with a 10-15 year timeframe, Nevin predicts that there will be more consultation and alliance-building than physical results in the first two or three years, with "the real transformational impact in years four, five and six". Nevertheless, he hopes for some "early wins" on suitable sites.

The fund will also have profound implications for housing associations in the nine areas. "Some will lose stock, and not all registered social landlords will survive in their current form. Where you've got 30 to 40 in a given area, some are small and vulnerable."

Nevin concedes that one outstanding issue for the DTLR is creating a compensation framework for associations. But, he points out, "there are opportunities and threats in equal proportion" and RSLs will be key in achieving regeneration.

For now, Nevin will continue shuttling between different roles and different cities, strengthening the alliance between the government, practitioners' and academic interests that both he and the fund represent.