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Social exclusion minister Barbara Roche announced a shake-up of the funding of regeneration and anti-poverty schemes last week to try to reduce bureaucracy and improve effectiveness.

The decision follows an 11-month review of area-based initiatives by the regional co-ordination unit.

Roche said: "We are stripping out unnecessary bureaucracy and giving local people a voice to speed up the pace of change."

Under the changes, three schemes including street crime will be merged into the wardens funding stream. Five schemes, including the Community Empowerment Fund and Community Chests, will share the new ventures fund. Five others, including Communities Against Drugs, will be supported by the crime initiatives funding channel.


Schemes including the crime reduction programme, home zones, health action zones, education action zones and the single regeneration budget will cease to exist as a result of merger, mainstreaming or the ending of funding.

Urban Forum chief executive John Routledge welcomed the move to rationalise regeneration initiatives and said local groups found it confusing and time-consuming to apply to separate funding streams.

But he warned that the government had to be careful not to reduce the diversity of the schemes it financed. He said: "There is a tension between having a diversity of activities or heading towards a monoculture. One way to safeguard against this is to have different people with different expertise dishing out the money."


Neil McInroy, policy director of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, said the government's decision was a move towards theme-based regeneration that targeted individuals.

"As a principle this is a good one because these initiatives can pick up on problems pertaining to people rather than to places," he said.

McInroy added that there was still a place in regeneration for area-based initiatives that were successful, particularly in smaller towns.