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Back after a week off and the cuts/savings (delete as appropriate) agenda is moving on apace.

Indeed as one of my colleagues in the put it, "it's all a bit miserable at the moment."

We've had more detail on the end of regional development agencies.

The new appears to have eaten up the vast amount of the funding for RDAs.

That means the set to replace them look like they'll have to be financed from existing council budgets.

But the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles believed he had some good news to impart today.

He announced the killing of the previous government's regional planning regime.

The snappily-named have been dispatched with immediate effect. They took years to draw up, but just one pronouncement from Mr Pickles has seen them off.

He's described their regional housing targets as "Soviet-style" and blamed them for a shortage of new homes.

The Government says the scrapping of regional agencies and planning, will give our councils more clout. .

But probably the most striking development has been the scale of .

and have found 70 schools across the North East and Cumbria who've had their plans for refurbishment or rebuilding halted.

They include six in Cumbria, seven in Darlington, three in Durham, five in Hartlepool, nine in North Tyneside, one in Northumberland, eight in Redcar and Cleveland, four in South Tyneside and Gateshead, 13 in Stockton, and 14 in Sunderland.

All are listed as "Stopped". A further four projects are described as being "for discussion" so may well get added to the list.

The Department for Education and Skills insist though the schools shouldn't abandon all hope of investment in the future.

They say it won't now happen under the Building Schools for the Future banner, but there will inevitably need to be some way of investing in school buildings in the years to come.

But they don't yet know what that method will be.

A review panel of the great and good - headed by Tesco's Head of Property Services - has been put together to try and come up with a plan, presumably ahead of this autumn's Comprehensive Spending Review.

So the schools who've seen their plans stymied will now have to wait some months before finding out what might happen next.

I think you can be fairly certain though that any new scheme won't be as generous as Building Schools for the Future.

The news will be a body blow to schools like Hurworth, near Darlington, which the visited a few weeks ago.

Given the state of their buildings, it was hard to argue against some sort of investment, but for now any hope of refurbishment is in limbo.

Were they given false hope by a spendthrift Labour government? Is this a price worth paying to eliminate the deficit? Or is this a cut too far which will damage the education of thousands of pupils?

You tell me...

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