The Government has flatly rejected most of the criticisms of its regeneration policies made by the Commons Communities and Local Government Committee in November and says it is for local partners to work out local solutions for local challenges.
Its response to the Committee's report and rejection of most of its trenchant criticism was accompanied by publication of Regeneration to Enable Growth: A Toolkit Supporting Community-Led Regeneration which lists existing policies.
The theme throughout is that economic regeneration is the over-riding objective.
"The reality of the fiscal deficit and the global economic crisis means that the Government has had to take tough decisions, and focus our limited resources on deficit reduction and growing the economy," says the response.
Instead, it says, the Government is committed to localism and claims previous regeneration approaches failed to deliver much improvement.
Results were modest, local peoples' aspirations were ignored, it was hugely expensive and created public sector dependency.
And it proposes yet another phrase - "sites of lowest environmental value" - as DCLG struggles to avoid readopting what it calls "so-called brownfield" policies.
"The Government agrees with the Select Committee that the ‘town centres first' policy plays a role in promoting regeneration," says the response.
"The Draft Framework proposes to retain ‘town centres first' and in particular the sequential test, primarily in relation to retail and leisure development (rather than offices), and that sites of the lowest environmental value, including so-called brownfield land, should be used as a priority."
It says it expects councils will want a very significant proportion of development to take place on previously developed land and Land Remediation Relief, which it admits is often a critical element for brownfield developers, is now being retained.
It says the Homes & Communities Agency is continuing to release the potential of some of the country's most challenging brownfield sites by levering in private investment and supporting councils.
The response and the Toolkit list current Government initiatives and continually stress its commitment to localism.
It says regeneration is about concerted action to address particular communities' problems and challenges.
"It's about widening opportunities, growing the local economy and improving people's lives," says the response.
"But beyond that high-level definition, it is not for Government to define what regeneration is, what it should look like, or what measures should be used to drive it. That will depend on the place."
It then goes on to list measures and cite initiatives which it says should be replicated to drive regeneration and to say large cities should have elected mayors.
