Estates `need community spirit boost'

Housing associations should do more to stop new estates becoming stigmatised by crime and other social problems, according to a study of residents' views.

Residents want more energy put into building community spirit, it found. Researchers from Sheffield Hallam University interviewed residents and housing professionals on four new estates in Yorkshire.

The study's author, David Page, warned housing associations in 1993 that they risked repeating past mistakes by building large estates with high child densities and concentrations of the poorest, most vulnerable, tenants.