Assessing the performance of Urban Development Corporations: how reliable are the official government output measures?

As UK Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) come to the end of their expected lifetimes it is now appropriate to embark upon an independent and comprehensive assessment of their overall impact. The article will seriously question whether the present system of DoE monitoring of specific UDC output measures has allowed for the provision of full and accurate information. It will be argued that the inconsistencies and definitional problems associated with the interpretation of output measures by individual UDCs has been compounded by the unclear, confusing and often quite bizarre presentation of such output figures by the UDCs and DoE. Such a state of affairs seriously undermines the quality of parliamentary and public accountability and fails to provide the basis on which a meaningful comparative evaluation of UDC performance can be derived.