The company set up to spearhead Bradford’s regeneration bows out today after six years.

In that time Bradford Centre Regeneration (BCR) has polarised opinion as to whether standalone development companies of this nature are a good thing or not.

There are those who argue that regeneration should be firmly in the hands of the Council and controlled by local residents through the ballot box. But the fact is that in Bradford it had always previously been controlled by the Council and the lack of progress was a source of citizens’ complaints and ire for decades.

Those who remember the seemingly endless saga over the planned Forster Square shopping development – billed as Bradford’s own Meadowhall – must surely see the irony in criticising BCR for not having delivered the Broadway scheme, especially as it was the Council which negotiated the Stannifer (later Westfield) scheme long before BCR was born.

Forster Square sank on the rocks of a recession in the early Nineties and the Council, in its panic to fill an enormous empty plot at the heart of the city, opted to allow what is effectively an out-of-town style shopping development with aggressively-limited parking and little or nothing to attract customers to the existing retail heart of the city.

If nothing else, BCR has stirred debate, raised the profile of the city and generated hundreds of millions of pounds in inward investment alongside facilitating some significant successes such as Lister Mills, Eastbrook Hall, Gatehaus and the coming City Park.

We wish the Council’s new regeneration team every success in its efforts to take up the baton while, at the same time, fervently holding on to the hope that history doesn’t repeat itself.