By Rob Pittam Business Correspondent

As I travel around the UK, one word crops up constantly - regeneration.

It might be a town centre that's economically depressed.

We recently reported on a �400m scheme to put Hastings back on the map.

And Barnsley even wants to reinvent itself as a Tuscan hill village!

But when I told my family and friends we were covering the regeneration of the coalfields on Working Lunch, there was one common reaction - "What regeneration?"

I was brought up in the north Nottinghamshire pit village of Ollerton.

Stark reminder

And as a journalist I worked in Nottinghamshire for several years, covering the closure of the pits and the attempts to replace the lost jobs.

So their remarks came as no surprise.

Some sites will take some time to get the best out of them and to get the best benefit for the local community

Rob Pearson English Partnerships

But it's a stark reminder of the scale of the task facing the agencies in charge of regeneration projects, especially those revitalising the former pit communities.

That's become Europe's biggest regeneration programme, one that involves many different organisations and huge sums of money.

But it's not always easy persuading people who live and work in the coalfields that all this effort will produce concrete results.

The problem may lie in the sheer size of the devastation caused by the collapse of the mining industry.

The East Midlands of England alone is thought to have lost 60,000 jobs in just five years.

The signs of deterioration are clear

Many of the villages in the region were built for one purpose - to serve the local colliery. When that closed there was nothing.

They are often miles away from towns or cities and isolated from the motorway network.

There is a well-made infrastructure of roads and rail, but it's all underground!

To compound the isolation, government and councils for years followed an unwritten policy of discouraging other industries from moving into the region.

Monopoly

It was in the national interest for the coal mines to have a monopoly on the local labour force. So when the demise of coal came, there was nowhere else to turn for work.

When Labour came into power it said it was making the coalfields a priority. But progress still seems to be slow.

Harold Scrimshaw: It can't be done overnight

Take the regeneration of Shirebrook colliery in Derbyshire, for example.

The project is impressive in scale; an entire pit tip being moved, with scope for 2,000 new jobs. It has just begun and will take seven years to complete.

Yet Shirebrook closed in 1994 - it's taken eight years just to get to the stage of clearing the site.

"Some sites will take some time to get the best out of them and to get the best benefit for the local community," says Rob Pearson of English Partnerships.

Jobs created

"What is done in that area will provide many, many opportunities for the people who live in Shirebrook over the years to come and the important thing is to get it right."

At the moment Shirebrook is one of 88 sites being regenerated as part of a 10-year programme.

English Partnerships does get results but it is a slow process - for every six jobs that has gone one has been created.

Local councillor Harold Scrimshaw, who's also with the Coalfield Communities Campaign, understands the frustration residents feel.

"People should know that when you have a colliery site, 200 acres at Shirebrook, and it's closed it cannot be done overnight - it does take time," he says.

Empty sites

"Hopefully we will be able to say to the people that, sooner or later, it will be done."

Meanwhile, for every successful business park or industrial estate you pass, there seem to be four or five pit sites left empty, the villages that surround them clearly in decline with streets of boarded-up houses.

The younger generation has usually managed to find work, but often on half the wages they were earning in the past.

Many of the older men have disabilities from labouring underground which mean they won't work again, but don't show up as unemployed.

Depressing picture

The collapse of coal has taken jobs and money out of the communities and now it's taking people, too.

The Meden Valley in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire is seeing up to a thousand people a year leave to find work elsewhere.

It's a depressing picture on a huge canvas. It's estimated that 5m people in the UK live in former coal mining areas.

They welcome attempts at regeneration, but many believe these projects have only just begun to scratch the surface.

The coal industry supported village and town communities in many parts of the UK where it was the major employer.

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But between 1975 and 1995, almost 300,000 miners lost their jobs, and production went down from 126m tonnes of coal to 53m.

It was all a question of demand and supply: