Unfortunately, I cannot give as full a response as Mr Stewart might like. Of course, jobs are key to all of this, so we have to examine how we can generate more jobs as we emerge from recession. Community planning partnerships, which involve councils, play a key role in addressing situations in such areas, and social regeneration is very much required. However, there is real concern that welfare reforms will have a fairly serious effect on areas of severe deprivation. Although there is not a great deal of money for that sort of work, our pilot sites, particularly for our joint work with the health board on “Equally Well: Report of the Ministerial Task Force on Health Inequalities”, are having great benefits for community regeneration. The second level of regeneration is social or community regeneration. A lot of physical development is now going ahead through public sector agencies, by which I mean not just the local authority but the national health service and so on, and in Dundee that has led to the central waterfront development and our joint developments with NHS Tayside. You can draw your own conclusions as to why that might be, but in Dundee there have been a number of occasions when we have negotiated a deal for the sale of development land and the developer has pulled out at the last minute simply because of funding. The real crisis, though, is that the private sector has gone absolutely cold on housing developments it is proving to be very difficult to stimulate that area. Over the past two or three years, we would not have been able to develop some of the regeneration areas in our city in the way we have but for Scottish Government help. First, on the physical regeneration of areas, I agree with Ian Manson’s comments. In some of Scotland’s regeneration areas, good groundwork has been carried out to take advantage of the next period of recovery. More important, though, is that we have been doing the groundwork for economic recovery to ensure that when the investment and jobs come back, our areas will be ready to take advantage rather than-as has happened historically-be bypassed. Over the past few years, things have been very difficult, but we have been grabbing what investment we can for our areas. My view of regeneration, which has had to be pushed by the urban regeneration companies in Scotland, is that the private sector must ultimately have confidence to invest in our areas and to create the jobs and opportunities that our people demand from us. Our regeneration work has been made doubly difficult over the past three years and anything that has been achieved in that period-there have been some notable achievements-has been achieved in the face of unprecedented difficulties in the property market. In areas of regeneration, our brief has been to deal with market failure however, in Scotland, there has been market failure even in property hotspots. The property industry in particular has been going backwards, not forwards. Because of it, we have been pushing things uphill for three years now with regard to investment and confidence. I am happy to say some of the obvious things about the recession.
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