Approximately 5 years ago, Elevate (now Pennine Lancashire) took over the control for the Housing Renewal Programme over the 5 Pennine Lancashire Councils.

This changed the way the schemes were managed and run, and most of the work went to larger building companies outside of these local authorities.

Due to the recent changes in government it is inevitable that a lot of the funding for the future will be drastically cut.

I hope that commonsense prevails and what money is given to spend is handed directly to these councils and for them to choose the building companies from their local areas, this keeping ‘local’ people in jobs and the money staying in our '’local’ towns.

The amount of spending could have been greatly reduced over the past five years by keeping to the original ways in which these schemes used to be controlled.

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