Over the next few years we are planning significant improvements in all our town centres. Specifically we are planning:
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new shops including a large foodstore, a new Community Centre and Health Centre in Stenhousemuir
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further investment in Grangemouth town centre to ensure it is fit for the 21st century, including plans for a 40,000 sq ft supermarket
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a dramatic redevelopment of Denny town centre around Church Walk to enable further residential and retail development to take place
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to create a marina at Bo’ness for leisure craft using the Forth Estuary and the Millennium Link canals, waterside restaurants, cafés and bars, new shops and other facilities. The Heritage Lottery Town Centre Heritage Initiative will amount to £5 million in funding from public and private sources and is key to the success for the regeneration of Bo’ness. The key project is to restore Scotland’s first purpose-built cinema, the Hippodrome, as well as five other priority projects.
We also plan to improve the quality of our housing stock so that we achieve national housing priorities covering the Scottish Housing Standard, homelessness, fuel poverty, energy efficiency and housing below tolerable standards. This will be achieved within our Local Housing Strategy.
There is a close alignment between the priority housing areas within the Local Housing Strategy and our priority areas for community regeneration. The success that we have achieved in integrating physical, social and economic regeneration within the Dawson Initiative will be replicated within other areas of the Falkirk Council area.
Our approach is to tackle disadvantage across the whole of the Falkirk Council area, however, certain communities have been identified as being at most risk and having multiple issues. These priority areas for Community Regeneration have been identified through local and national multiple deprivation analysis. Areas include parts of:
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Camelon
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Bo’ness
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Dawson (Bainsford and Langlees)
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Denny
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Grangemouth
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Hallglen
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High Flats, Callendar Park
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Maddiston
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Stenhousemuir
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Thornhill Road, Falkirk
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Westquarter.
Common features of most of our areas of need include high unemployment, poor health, low demand housing and higher crime rates.
We have developed a Regeneration Outcome Agreement, which sets out the steps we are to take to improve the outcomes for the residents of these communities. Scottish Executive Regeneration Funding and our own resources will be particularly focused on the achievement of these outcomes.