The Single Regeneration Budget

The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) ran from 1995-2001. It pulled together different government programmes and funding streams to try and simplify funding and better support local regeneration projects. According to a 2007 assessment by the Cambridge Department of Land Economy about £26 billion was spent in total with £5.7 billion from the SRB itself – the remainder coming from bodies such as local authorities, European funds and voluntary and private sectors.

Evaluation after the programme was finished used the Indices of Deprivation 2000 (not available during the course of the programme) and found that it had been responsive to deprived local authorities:

• Around a third of all SRB expenditure was targeted towards the top twenty most deprived local authority districts (around 15 per cent of the population).

• The top 56 most deprived districts (including the top twenty) had almost two thirds of all SRB expenditure.

• The top 99 most deprived districts received around 80 per cent of SRB funding

This shows how the IMD is useful in evaluating the social value of large spending programmes, as it is a simple and comparable way of ranking areas by relative deprivation.