With the country facing a record Budget deficit and less money available for investment in regeneration, a new approach is needed to ensure that local economies prosper, parts of the country previously over-reliant on public funding see a resurgence in private sector enterprise and employment, and that everyone gets to share in the resulting growth.

This guide describes a different approach to regeneration which is localist, putting residents, local businesses, civil society organisations and civic leaders in the driving seat and providing them with local rewards and incentives to drive growth and improve the social and physical quality of the area.

The burden of bureaucracy is being lifted so that local areas can be empowered to do things their way. There will also be more local control of public finance, including radical reform of local government finance by de-ringfencing and enabling local pooling of budgets to allow local areas to channel resources more effectively to address their priorities. A system of self-financing for council housing finance is also being considered.

The actions taken and tools employed from this menu will vary from place to place and need to happen at the right spatial level. In disadvantaged neighbourhoods within a larger local authority area, the focus might be very much on the community and neighbourhood-led interventions to connect the neighbourhood to growth and opportunities nearby.

The guide can be downloaded here.