Demolition crazy

While Tony Blair was making his valedictory speech to the Labour party conference in Manchester on 27 September, 60-year-old Elizabeth Pascoe was ecstatic. Not because she was impressed by the Prime Minister’s self-composed list of glorious achievements, but because the High Court had just stopped the government from running a bulldozer through her house.

Miss Pascoe’s misfortune had been to live in Adderley Street, Liverpool, in one of 500 homes scheduled for demolition in Liverpool under the so-called Pathfinder scheme. The Liverpool Land Development Company, the quango responsible and misleadingly disguised as a private company, had argued that the area needed to undergo ‘regeneration’ because many homes were lying empty and abandoned. True, many were; but that rather ignored the fact that some of the properties were still used as homes, and that kicking out long-established residents is a pretty perverse way to start the regeneration of a community.

Unfortunately, although the High Court has put a temporary halt on the demolition of Miss Pascoe’s home, it will not necessarily mean the end of the Pathfinder scheme, which blights thousands of homes earmarked in nine different inner-city areas in the Midlands and the North.