For many years regeneration experts railed at government for imposing bureaucratic targets, overbearing monitoring regimes and  box-ticking methodologies. Be careful what you wish for. The fairy godmother has arrived, and all those burdensome regulations have gone.

With them has gone most of the money targeted at England’s poorest communities. Instead they will be able to enjoy their new-found freedom to do what they want with what they haven’t got.

On Monday the government issued a new guide to ‘community-led regeneration’ (download link here). The word ‘guide’ is a misnomer, as what it says is that communities should find their own solutions. Residents, businesses and civic leaders are in the driving seat now, and a very crowded and uncushioned driving seat it is likely to prove.

UK Regeneration, the group that has emerged from the meltdown of the British Urban Regeneration Association, has welcomed the guide. It has also set out some action points it believes are required to turn the ambition into a reality, which are worth reading.

My concern is that, if we still believe that regeneration is about tackling disadvantage, and if the government is at all serious about its intention of ‘rebalancing’ the economy away from an over-dependence on London and the southeast, the new approach will move us in the opposite direction.

On the positive side, the idea that local residents should determine regeneration priorities and use their knowledge to shape services, programmes and interventions is sound. There is a wealth of literature about the need to build local capacity to steer regeneration programmes and the importance of ensuring the benefits stick within local communities.

But it helps to have an idea of why regeneration is needed, what its goals are, how they are to be achieved locally, and how we’ll know what works (and what to do if it doesn’t work). All this is missing from the coalition government’s approach.

There is no definition of regeneration. Parts of the document appear to elide it with housing development; others talk glibly about economic growth without any indication that its authors have thought about what kind of economy we’re trying to create.

There is no analysis of the rationale for regeneration. Why have some places failed? And why intervene rather than walk away? Are the failings in the markets, in social policies, or in the people themselves? The government appears to have no view on this. But without an understanding of the causes of decline, all you can ever hope to do is create sticking plasters for the symptoms.

Similarly, there is no appreciation of what works and why, and no acknowledgement that learning needs to be shared if we are not to keep reinventing wheels. The guide asserts that local people know best and that previous approaches have failed. Grant Shapps, the local government minister, declared on Monday: ‘I want to see an end to the centrally-imposed regeneration regime which pitted neighbour against neighbour and forced developments on communities that did not want them.’

Where did this critique of the failures of regeneration come from? Not from the wealth of academic literature, which is much more measured in its assessment of the difficulties. It might stem from the particular problems of the housing market renewal programme,  although it was demolition rather than development that raised most of the passions there. If the argument is that methods for allocating investment pitted neighbour against neighbour - which the Cantle report into the 2001 riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford suggested - then the solution is hardly to withdraw investment wholesale.

If the guide is short on analysis, it’s shorter still on methodology. It suggests investment in communities will come from the ‘new homes bonus’ - a reward for giving planning permission for new housing - and from mechanisms such as tax increment financing. But these are devices that favour areas where the markets are strong and there is pressure for development, not places that have been neglected by businesses or are considered too risky by investors. To increase reliance on such approaches will inevitably widen the divide between rich and poor neighbourhoods rather than narrow it.

The paper is highly disingenuous about the effects of spending cuts , repeating claims about the scale of reductions in local government finance that bear little relation to the reality of the cuts now being imposed by councils such as Manchester or Barnsley. And - in a tactic borrowed from the last government - it responds to each problem by announcing a pot of money, without reference to the scale of the issue it is intended to tackle or the net impact of the money offered less the money taken away.

All in all, it’s neither a guide to regeneration nor a strategy for the future. Without analysis, without methodology, without goals and without evaluation, it’s not so much a vision as an abdication of responsibility.