Anne Power Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Building Homes, Communities and Neighbourhoods Policy Press, 2025

Paul Watt Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London. Policy Press, 2021

It seems that, after a long period on the margins of government policy, neighbourhood and estate regeneration is back. In this review essay, I will consider whether this revival should be warmly welcomed or perhaps viewed more cautiously. I will reflect on this question by reference to two wide-ranging books which assess in very different ways the aims, processes and outcome of previous regeneration programmes, with one account focused solely on London and the other ostensibly covering a wider terrain but taking much of its case study material from London anyway. The authors – Anne Power and Paul Watt – have written extensively on estate renewal, community change and urban and housing policy over the past thirty years and more.

What accounts for this renewed policy interest in regeneration and housing renewal by the current government? When first elected in 2024, the Starmer administration’s housing agenda had two dominant components – one looking forward and one looking back. The forward plan a single-minded objective. It boiled down to a number – 1.5 million – and an injunction – a ‘call to arms’ to the sector from the Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government, Steve Reed. His mantra was clear enough: ‘build, baby, build’. Here we were, right back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, when future housing numbers were batted back and forth between political parties in arguments about who could meet the housing shortage most quickly. This figure of 1.5 million new homes in the lifetime of the Starmer Government seemed rather optimistic when first announced. It now seems positively utopian, and the general assessment is that the actual outturn will be considerably lower than this.¹ As yet, there has not been any rowing back from this figure -it remains an ‘aspirational’ target, even as it disappears into the distance.

In terms of ‘looking back’, one object loomed especially large in the Government’s rearview mirror – the burnt-out shell of Grenfell Tower. The Government took further measures in the wake of the appalling tragedy of June 2017, when 72 people died, a further 70 people were injured and 223 managed to escape from the inferno².  The Fire Safety Act 2021 and Building Safety Act 2022 had been introduced by the previous Conservative administration following on from Grenfell, but the Starmer government was committed to accelerating the ensuing building safety programme. It accepted all 58 recommendations from the final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry published in September 2024 and increased funding for the remediation of unsafe housing to over £1 billion for 2025-6, specifically targeting social housing. The Building Safety Regulator was established as a formal legal entity and the Building Safety Levy will come into effect in England in October 2026, as a tax on new residential buildings.³

This immediate twin track response to two very different housing crises has subsequently broadened, to encompass significant reforms in the private rented sector, enacting Awaab’s law, new legislation on leasehold reform, plans for land value capture, and the publication of a National Plan for Ending Homelessness. Investment in the quality of the housing stock through the Decent Homes Programme has been continued, with a more comprehensive standard introduced, which will be extended to the private rented sector in 2035.⁴ Government has also launched an ambitious ten year £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes programme (SAHP).⁵  This aims to provide 300,000 social and affordable homes over the next decade, including 180,000 explicitly for social rent. This was a significant uplift from the plan originally set out in the 2024 Budget.⁶

As part of this programme, housing and neighbourhood renewal has re-emerged as a central plank of government policy, after years in cold storage, due to a combination of reduced funding and institutional retreat.  SAHP funding can be used to support the regeneration of social housing estates and support ‘the delivery of replacement social and affordable homes’. A National Housing Bank (NHB) has been established, aiming to invest up to £16 billion ‘stepping in where the market cannot’ to help reach that building target and hoping to lever in over £50 billion of additional private capital in the process. As a ‘purposeful’ investor, the functions of the NHB include financing SMEs through providing tailored, affordable development loans, unlocking private capital to create ‘lending alliances’ to attract more institutional investment into housing, providing low interest loans to housing associations and other registered providers, and working with combined authorities and city mayors to facilitate ‘place shaping’ in towns and cities.  This is undoubtedly an ambitious agenda by any standard, but much remains to be fleshed out about how such ambitions are to be translated into practice, the priorities for delivery, and the likely challenges to be met along the way.

In that light, what can be taken from these assessments by Anne Power and Paul Watt of previous estate regeneration programmes, and their impact on tenants in the neighbourhoods subject to intervention?  Now, a nominalist might be tempted to assume that there would be a close relationship between Watt and Power. That would be mistaken. There are a few points of commonality, but on the whole there is probably closer synergy between cheese and chalk.  These two books are very different in focus, tone and prognosis. Nevertheless, both provide notes of caution that would chasten anyone getting too giddy about the likely impact of these significant increases in investment in regeneration after fifteen years in the shadows.

In the early sections of Beyond Bricks and Mortar, Anne Power charts the development of her professional career alongside the different phases of government policy in community regeneration and local housing management. Power was initially active in the tenants’ movement in Islington in the 1970s and her facility for forceful advocacy, her relentless energy and her strong personal commitment to looking beyond ‘bricks and mortar’ solutions to include the impact on social dynamics and the need for community development was put to good effect in gaining the ear of national and local politicians and, especially, senior civil servants.

Anne Power always had a direct ‘no nonsense’ approach and this quality is reflected in the historical account that forms the first part of the book.  She covers a vast terrain. She starts with her own personal housing history, being resettled with her two sisters in the Cotswolds during the second world war, then back to the family home in Bolton and then Cheshire, before eventually settling in London. She charts the development of housing policy since the late 19^th century, marking clear her debt en passant to Robert Owen and Octavia Hill (‘a practical and hardworking woman dedicated to help poor families survive’). Power then charges through the early days of council housing, homes for heroes, Aneurin Bevan’s tragically short-lived universalist vision of council housing, the move towards mass housing and the high-rise booms of the 1950s to mid 70s. This quick canter through the ages will be a useful enough guide to anyone coming to this history for the first time, but one suspects it will be very familiar, and rather one-dimensional, for many readers.

Where the account carries more force is the period from 1979 onwards. This is when Anne Power really came to prominence as a national housing figure, in her instigation and subsequent promotion of the government’s Priority Estates Project, targeted initially on three council estates⁷ with ‘difficult to let’ housing. The remedy of local offices, decentralised estate budgets, tenant participation and multi-skilled housing teams who could get the repairs done was nurtured through these demonstration projects. It was subsequently writ large as the way forward for managing social housing estates through more generic programmes such as Estate Action and it acted as a challenge to those councils scurrying in the opposite direction down a more centralised and corporate route to housing and estate management.

Power then moves on to assess the string of place-based programmes introduced under New Labour after 1997 – the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, the New Deal for Communities programme, and, beyond housing, the Urban Task Force, the Sustainable Communities Plan, the Mixed Communities initiative, and so on. Anne Power played an important role in some of these initiatives. The emphasis throughout is on the tangible, the personal and the practical, on how committed people make change happen. She does not stray too far into the realm of underlying ideas, structural constraints on local housing markets or the ongoing stigmatisation of both council housing and the tenants who lived in the neighbourhoods. The constant refrain is to keep it local, keep it small-scale, involve tenants from the start and don’t let landlords get too distracted from the hard graft of housing management by the excitement of doing other things like building new housing developments.

Much of this is written in an up-beat, roll-up-our-sleeves tone.  Personally, I think there is a lot to be said for maintaining such optimism in the face of the continual challenges that any estate renewal programme will inevitably bring. It is preferable to a hyper-critical approach, where the best is forever the enemy of the good and which can culminate too readily in a paralysis of action.  But this underlying mood of positivity changes to withering contempt when it comes to Power’s assessment of her bête noire – the Housing Market Renewal (HMR) programme. This became one of the showpiece elements of the New Labour Government’s approach to neighbourhood renewal, alongside the New Deal for Communities and the Decent Homes Programme. HMR ran from 2002 to 2010 and was premised on the need for radical measures to combat perceived problems of falling house prices, high vacancy rates and housing abandonment, focused on six ‘Pathfinder’ areas in the North of England and a seventh in the Midlands.⁸ But it was everything that is anathema to the Anne Power worldview: top-down; prescriptive rather than open-ended about interventions; and founded on a structural analysis of housing market dynamics rather than the more organic ’feel’ of a neighbourhood.

Above all, HMR re-introduced the potent D word – demolition – back into the housing policy lexicon.  To Power, every home could and should be saved; to proponents of HMR, some low demand housing was beyond redemption and radical restructuring was needed to restore the popularity of a neighbourhood and hence the longer-term health of the wider community. In practice just over 30,000 properties were demolished in the HMR programme from 2002 to 2011, compared to nearly 100,000 property refurbishments and over 15,000 new homes directly attributable to the Programme, with a further 30,000 new homes in the Pathfinder areas due to ancillary market activity.  Nevertheless, demolition drew the sting of those critics in the 2010 Coalition government wishing to close such a dirigiste programme, with the then Housing Secretary Mark Prisk providing the obituary, in that ‘the obsession with demolition over refurbishment was both economically and environmentally wasteful’.⁹

It is doubtless difficult to see the case for demolishing any form of housing from the perspective of a very tight London market, but the long-term nature of housing market distress in many economically weak areas – such as some former coalfield communities or isolated manufacturing towns – suggested that far more than a few smiling faces in neighbourhood offices would be required to turn things round. As it turned out, the potency of the D word meant that HMR Pathfinders were always on the defensive, and did not have the scale of resources to deliver positive gains for local residents, by investing in high quality homes for social rent from the start, rather than focusing on what some might lose: their existing homes.

Power’s chronological precis of all the twists and turns in government housing and neighbourhood renewal policy tends to take precedence over standing back from the fray, taking a deep breath and differentiating more readily between transient enthusiasms and more persistent, deeper-seated challenges that face estate regeneration programme. So, what can present-day regeneration revivalists take from Beyond Bricks and Mortar? Power’s own answer is three-fold. First, that government support for genuine social housing (not the mutant ‘affordable’ version) is the most effective way to help people who cannot afford a decent and secure home. Second, tenants and landlords both have a key role in sustaining communities and ‘housing plus’ is the key to this. Third, services need to stay local, with housing organisations giving housing management due priority rather than being marginalised by an over-emphasis on the development function.

What are the threats to achieving this state of grace in estate renewal? Anne Power recognises some of the counter-vailing trends, but in my view dismisses them too readily. The social housing sector is far more of a patchwork quilt now than it was back in 1979, when council housing constituted a third of the national housing market. The Right to Buy (RTB) has created distinctions between owners and tenants, and around 40 per cent of RTB homes have been sold on subsequently for private renting. In the social sector, housing associations are much more prominent. While many associations began life as small local landlords, the past thirty years have witnessed the steady onset of rationalisation, consolidation and merger.

A new subset of large social landlords has emerged.  This has in turn been driven by the increased reliance of housing associations on private finance, and the need to meet viability tests to satisfy both the Social Housing Regulator and financial markets, and to ensure capital adequacy.  This financial pressure has also encouraged a shift in working processes towards more digital communication rather than face-to-face contact.  Most housing associations are searching for economies of scale to moderate costs, especially given increased pressure on revenue budgets, in part due to the need to service high borrowing costs. None of these trends sit easily with Anne Power’s prescription for high quality, local, well-resourced housing services, sensitive to the concerns of their tenants. It will be very difficult for many social landlords to maintain localised and intensive management in the next phase of estate regeneration, no matter how desirable that might be in theory.

If Anne Power’s book is a summary reflecting the breadth of her involvement in tenant participation, community development and estate renewal for more than forty years, Paul Watt’s is a distillation of his research on gentrification, displacement and neighbourhood change that he has been pursuing for more than thirty years.  It is more concentrated in both space and time. While Anne Power has roamed around council estates across England, albeit with a default emphasis on London, Watt has focused his research and active engagement on London, specifically inner east London Boroughs.¹⁰ Estate Regeneration and its Discontents is in part the culmination of this long-standing involvement with the area. A very impressive piece of work has resulted from all this experience. It is impossible to do justice to the depth and range of Watt’s analysis here, but I will try to summarise some of the essential points.

Watt suggests that some of the ‘critical urbanists’ who have provided accounts about the negative displacement and marginalisation effects of gentrification in estate regeneration have tended to do so in the absence of voices from those who actually live in these areas. I think this is a crucial point. Residents often make an appearance as passive victims of global forces and financial processes which are out of sight and well beyond their control. This emphasis has allowed little opportunity to account for different responses to regeneration among those who live in these communities, to give space to contradictory or conflicting experiences, or for divisions within the communities to be probed. Watt seeks to remedy this deficit. He undertook over 170 interviews with residents on various estates in East London and supplemented this with participant observation, documentary research, wide-ranging ‘stakeholder’ interviews, statistical data…and some great photographs. The views and experiences of residents are therefore prominent throughout his account and that gives his analysis a force that other academic critiques have often lacked.

Watt claims that critical accounts of gentrification¹¹ have tended to emphasise the displacement of existing residents to elsewhere as those with a higher income and higher social status are ushered in – a process deftly summarised by Michael, one of Watt’s respondents, as ‘the money’s coming in and the community’s going out.’ Watt however looks at the impact on residents who stay put and live through the whole process of regeneration. In his analysis, estate regeneration in London has been recast as estate densification – in which ‘under-used’ land on former council estates is reshaped, so that new private developments can be built that will bring more value into the neighbourhood. These enclaves are targeted at higher income households, including the ‘elite rich’, who are seeking a convenient foothold near the centre of the capital. The stated aim of such comprehensive redevelopment is usually to promote a more mixed community. However, Watt claims, evidence of cross- cutting sociability between new arrivals and existing residents is rare indeed, and the result is a more fragmented and segmented community.

Watt draws a telling distinction between ‘valued’ and ‘devalued’ places.  Rather than conforming to the short-hand epithet of a ‘sink estate’, Watt shows how much residents appreciate where they live, the extent to which they invest in their existing homes, and the enduring strength of place belonging and attachment. Those who have exercised the right to buy have often done so as a strategy to stay put, not to move onward and upward through the housing market. These households are seeking long-term financial security and are therefore strongly opposed to demolition. Watt sets these actions and experiences against the notion of ‘devalued’ places, which can result from long-term blight and neglect. Here, RTB can have a more insidious effect, if properties that are bought are subsequently sold on to absentee investor landlords who have little commitment to the neighbourhood as place. This can in turn be associated with the arrival of a more transient population and a further decline in the quality of local services.

Watt has a very rich source of material to draw on for his analysis, and he has been involved in assessing how these areas have changed over many years. Many regeneration schemes are announced with a fanfare, only to be halted in mid-stream, as the funding runs out or priorities change. The same can be true of research. There is considerable interest in evaluation in the early stages, when all is bright and bushy-tailed, but it is often difficult to sustain longer term analysis.  But Paul Watt has stayed the course. This enables him to write a chapter called Aftermaths. Advocates of ‘mixed communities’ better look away now. One resident in the remodelled West Hendon captured it well: ‘It’s rich and poor, mate. Rich are the gated people. They’ve got flowers, we’ve got bushes.’ They also have the outlook over the waterside, the gym and the concierge. He writes about a similar ‘two worlds’ syndrome in Woodberry Down in Hackney. Of course, what often happens in estate redevelopment once demolition plans are announced is… nothing. Sometimes for an awfully long while: 15 years in the case of The Carpenters estate in Hackney. As one resident says: ‘your life is put on indefinite hold’.

It’s not all doom and gloom, a counterpoint to Anne Power’ s undimmed enthusiasm and positivity.  Watt accepts that he has concentrated on the ‘discontents’ because they are often air-brushed out of official accounts, which concentrate on the ‘winners’. But Watt does not allow his critique to develop a momentum beyond his research evidence and to imply that the experience of living through regeneration is of necessity negative.  For example, Watt talks about the varied responses of families returning to their neighbourhood, and to their newly minted homes.  For some he suggests that it is ‘rehousing as bereavement’, but for others it is ‘rehousing as liberation’ – some residents feel that they have lost, while others feel they have gained. Watt’s book is a long way from glossy brochure territory about the glories of regeneration; instead, he has written a powerful, well referenced and very detailed account of neighbourhood change in this part of London.

In the process of developing his structure-action dialectic to make sense of the opportunities and constraints that face those who are subject to comprehensive redevelopment, Paul Watt interrogates an extraordinarily wide range of ideas and perspectives from urban sociology and policy analysis. I think Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents is a first-rate work of scholarship, grounded in the experiences of those living in the neighbourhoods he has studied over a long period. In my view, it constitutes an outstanding addition to the literature on housing and urban change in Britain in the 2000s.

What does Paul Watt’s analysis portend for the current renewal of enthusiasm about estate regeneration? It is a case study of the potential perils of relying too heavily on private finance to remodel areas of social housing. But London is, of course, unique. Private investors may e straining at the leash to grab access to that most precious commodity – a slice of land in the capital city – in order to reshape as an attractive foothold for the rich and mobile. But in Grimsby… or Grimethorpe? Or Rotherham and Rochdale? Is this where the new National Housing Bank will come in, reaching the parts that other investors will not touch to get the wheels of regeneration moving? We will see. But it may take a lot more than the incentive of low interest loans to tempt them in.

A recent review of the regeneration landscape (Brown and McCulloch, 2026) has suggested that one of the essential ingredients required to kickstart the next phase of regeneration, not just in housing, was ‘patient capital’. Is that an oxymoron?  It may certainly prove as elusive to find as a large tract of developable land in central London.  Patience may be a virtue, but it is one that is often lost on private equity companies, whose role is becoming ever more pervasive in the financialised housing sector (Blasdel, 2026). As just one example, consider two of the larger housebuilders Britain – Cala Homes and Miller Homes. Cala Homes was bought by a consortium of US investment companies, specifically Sixth Street Partners and Patron Capital for £1.35billion in September 2024. Sixth Street is a US based company with more than $125 billion of assets under management. Patron Capital is European focused, with around $5 billion assets under management. Miller Homes was acquired by Apollo Global Management in 2021 for c£1.2billion. AGM is an asset management and investment company based in New York with a revenue in 2025 of $32 billion. What kind of new housing investments will these companies be looking out for, to add to their current portfolios?¹²

It is not difficult to see the potential appeal to the government of mixed funding for knotty long-term investments like estate regeneration – it makes public money stretch further, and offers the prospect of doing more with less, with payment further down the line. But are private equity companies and their ilk going to show much interest in backing, say, a 15-year programme of regeneration in an area of chronic under-investment and low land values? For those local agencies and residents hoping for support from the new National Housing Bank to improve housing in their neighbourhoods, it might prove to be rather less of a ‘strategic alliance’ with international investors… and rather more of a hollow pipe dream.