They totally ruined a community for a dream that hasn't come true

Tucked between rows and rows of terraced homes in Derker, there is a small pocket of wilderness. The overgrown fields on London Road, Abbotsford Road, Evelyn Street and Cromford Street, now covered in brambles, wildflowers and fly-tipped rubbish, once held more than 400 homes for local families.

But for 15 years, the land has been little more than an ‘eyesore’ - and a stark reminder of a once thriving neighbourhood by ‘controversial’ plans to improve the area.

Narinder Kaur, a local shop owner, said the streets used to be a part of a ‘big community’. Losing it was ‘like a bereavement’.

“Everybody felt it. Nobody could believe it,” she said.

The area is just one of many that was left devastated after a contentious scheme gave councils the licence to purchase and demolish homes across northern England and the Midlands. The Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI), introduced by a Labour government in 2002, targeted neighbourhoods that had supposedly ‘failed to keep up’ with the early 2000s housing boom. In Oldham, parts of Derker and Werneth were selected.

Surveys were used to select areas where it was felt higher value homes could be built in place of terraced streets.

The idea was to flatten existing ‘poor quality’ housing and build better, more desirable homes that could be flogged off at a higher price, improving the local economy.

The only problem: the properties condemned were already people’s homes.

“It was bad. It was really bad,” Maureen Walsh, one of the last remaining neighbours, told the MEN. “People here were lovely. Some families had lived here since after the war, brought their kids up here.

“Most people just didn’t know how to deal with it. They didn’t have the money to buy another place.”

Maureen’s house on London Road, which directly overlooks the empty fields, was selected for demolition. The council made an offer to buy her home sometime between 2004 and 2006, she remembers. Her property is one of only three - two on London Road, and one on Cromford Street - that survived the project. Most properties in Derker survived, but the community that existed around London Road was erased from the map.

The local authority, under David Jones, bought the majority of the properties directly from homeowners and social housing providers using a £26m money pot handed to them through HMRI.

But Maureen believes many of her neighbours felt ‘pressured’ into taking up ‘bad’ deals. Because at the same time as offering payments on homes, Oldham Council was preparing a blanket compulsory purchase order on 150 homes and eight commercial buildings in Derker, which would give them the power to force a sale against an owner's will.

“It was naughty. Because they were being told you can take the money or we’ll do it anyway,” Maureen said. “People felt like they didn’t have a choice.

“They ruined the community. It dropped. All we could talk about with each other was this. People were anxious and scared.”

She claimed her neighbour Molly, now deceased, was offered around £30k to move out of her home. The pensioner had no other savings with which to purchase a house and as she was over the benefits allowance, she found herself having to rent privately, Maureen claimed.

"She popped round for a cup of tea [after she moved] and she said to me: ‘when I’ve paid my rent I’ve got two pounds left out of my pension’. She’d worked for the NHS since I’d known her," Maureen claimed.

While the streets around them turned into more and more of a ghost town, Maureen and her husband Terry ‘fought back’. They believed they wouldn’t be able to afford a new home with the money they were offered.

“And I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay here,” Maureen added, with a steely glint in her eye. She described herself as a ‘thorn in the side’ of the HMRI project.

In 2008 and in 2009, the Walsh family took the council to court to oppose the compulsory purchase orders - but in the end, they lost.

Still, the dispute rumbled on for years. Just weeks after the couple finally agreed to settle up and leave their home, which by 2012 faced fields of rubble and rows of empty houses, the government scrapped the scheme.

Maureen was left living in a ‘wasteland’ while coping with the loss of her husband just weeks later. She felt she was left ‘in limbo’ and it was ‘just sad’ looking out at the devastation of the neighbourhood.

HMRI funding was scrapped in 2011 by the new coalition government between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. Grant Shapps, the housing minister at the time, said the programme had created ‘an enormous funding problem’ after demolition and renovation works across the country cost the government £2.2bn. And it had resulted in a monumental loss of affordable housing, according to Shapps.

He made local authorities and enterprises responsible for funding the remaining leg of the project - which many couldn’t afford.

The impact of HMRI on Derker’s community had been devastating, according to Maureen. The lost neighbourhood in Derker was ‘caring’ and ‘close-knit’, the kind of place where parents ‘banded together’ to support families going through tough times, she recalled.

“Now I honestly couldn’t name you more than three neighbours,” Maureen said.

Most areas of the country affected have since made heavy inroads towards recovery. At the Welsh Streets in Liverpool, where almost 500 homes were ‘depopulated’ and left boarded up and abandoned, properties have been renovated and brought back into use.

In Derker, where entire streets were bulldozed, the story is very different.

“It’s still like it was 15 years ago,” Maureen said. “It's even worse. All these areas where they demolished the houses, they haven’t looked after them.”

“Only idiots could have done that,” a neighbour bordering on the abandoned land, who did not wish to be named, added. “What they’ve left is a folly. It’s a mess.”

Speaking on behalf of the council, the decent homes lead and deputy leader Elaine Taylor explained that after the funding was withdrawn by the Coalition government, Oldham’s sites ‘didn’t all progress as quickly as they’d liked’ because of a lack of resources.

Councillor Taylor said: “There was no government funding to build good quality, affordable homes for Oldhamers, we continued to do our best to work with our partners to get decent homes built. But the reality is it’s been an uphill struggle given all financial incentives for developers were pulled when the scheme was cancelled.”

Other developments have taken place in Derker: alongside some smaller developments, 165 new ‘Rent to Buy’ homes were built by Keepmoat Homes on Acre Lane, Derker Street and Afghan Street in 2015. First Choice Homes, from whom the council had ironically bought some of the houses they’d demolished in Derker, also built 49 ‘Rent to Buy’ homes on Acre Lane in 2020.

And Coun Taylor believes the new Labour government will ring in a new era of ‘willingness to have grown up conversations about the housing needs of our communities’.

The council declined to comment on the specific claims made by Maureen about how HMRI was rolled out. Though a spokesperson noted that the staff and teams working on the project are ‘no longer at the council’ to provide further information.

Local councillor Howard Sykes oversaw the later years of the project, but was succeeded by Jim McMahon just before the scheme was scrapped. He described the Derker site as a ‘shambles’ and questioned why ‘new, younger sites’ had been developed while locals were left ‘waiting two decades’ for new homes on the old sites.

Narinder, who’s kept her shop in the neighbourhood for 32 years, said the barren plots of land had a ‘ripple on’ effect as people moved out of the area because they ‘saw no hope’.

“Look at it. This is what you wake up to every day for years,” she said, standing outside her shop, gesturing at the fields. “But there’s hope. It’s time now.”

A planning application was recently approved by Oldham Council for developers Hive to build 132 new ‘low carbon’ homes on the abandoned sites. The plans will see 47 homes built on Abbotsford Road, 29 on Evelyn Street and 28 homes on both London Road and Cromford Street respectively. Around a third of the new-builds will be affordable.

At the time, Royton councillor Steven Bashforth said: “We’ve been waiting for these derelict areas to be developed for years but I think this is probably the best we could ever get. It’s an absolutely belting scheme, this.”

While Maureen is sceptical - and says she will only ‘believe it when she sees it’ - Narinder has a lot of optimism about the development.

“I had tears in my eyes when they told me. It means a lot, not just to me, but for young people in the area. They need hope. Everybody’s desperate for housing.

“I want to be in a nice area. They need to develop it. Hive have said they want to turn it into a really beautiful place.”

The building works are reportedly due to begin at the end of the year. The development will spell the end for the wildflowers and wilderness on the fields of Derker - and hopefully mark a new beginning, for a new community.