Industrial Strategy

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree entirely with the last sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, about implementation. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will forgive me if I steal something he has already said in your Lordships’ House. He quite rightly pointed out that this is the ninth industrial strategy in his lifetime. In fact he said it was the eighth, but the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, phoned him up and said that he had omitted his strategy of 20 years ago. The lesson from all these nine strategies, not all of which have been successful, is that implementation does not just happen. The Government’s Industrial Strategy that we are now considering lays out important implementation mechanisms: continued chairmanship by the PM of the Economy and Industrial Strategy Cabinet Committee and the creation of an independent industrial strategy council. I take seriously some of the reservations about the industrial strategy council that have been made. However, the overwhelming message is that these mechanisms must be designed to persist over many years to ensure that the strategy is delivered not just over an electoral cycle but over a decade and longer.

I am sure that the Minister will assure us that a wide range of other players will also shoulder the burden of implementation. Sector deals gave a key role to business players but are no substitute for sustained government leadership. Can the Minister also assure the House that sector deals will not overly rely on the established technologies of major incumbent firms but will support disruptive innovation which can create the industries of tomorrow?

I did not intend to talk about the work that the Select Committee on Science and Technology is doing on the examination of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and sector deal. However, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, say that he was reassured by the evidence taken in the Select Committee hearings, I will take a contrary view and say that I am unutterably miserable about it. We are in a position where both nationally and internationally the National Health Service is seen as a huge asset to this country for driving innovation and its uptake and for the concomitant benefit to businesses in a global sense in the life sciences. However, in reality, the evidence given by witness after witness has been totally dispiriting, both from the private company and quoted company point of view, and from the point of view of the NHS itself, about the ability to ensure that the NHS uptakes innovation, implements best practice and reaps the benefits of substantial cost savings that many of these innovations would bring. It is dispiriting, and I hope that the Government can bite the bullet.

I know that I am probably at the radical end of the spectrum on the solutions which seem to me to be sensible but I have led health services for 20 years and been the chief executive of Diabetes UK, a major research-based patient group, and it seems that we have now reached the point when 1,000 flowers blooming is no longer the name of the game but mandation of uptake of best practice, which happens regularly in America through the insurance companies, has to happen.

However, I wanted to talk not about the NHS but about infrastructure. I very much welcome the more strategic approach to housing and transport that the Industrial Strategy White Paper talks about, but the reality on the ground is not hugely encouraging at the moment. Rather than recognising the need for the right housing in the right place, the dash for housing is causing real problems at a local level.

First, on housing quality and the quality of place, we are now building the smallest houses in Europe. I used to dread going to stay with my friends in Holland because they lived in a rather small, boxy house. I used to get severe claustrophobia and had to break out after a very short time. However, the reality is that we are now building houses even smaller than those built by the Dutch. Many housing developments lack amenities such as transport infrastructure and there are insufficient green spaces, with all the benefits for health and the environment that these bring.

I was privileged to sit on the ad hoc Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, and I commend its report to your Lordships—it still stands. We are very much at risk of building the slums of the future if we do not take up the recommendations of that report. Also, insufficient affordable housing in a range of tenures is being built, and that will have an inevitable impact on the supply of workers who are vital to the industrial strategy.

There is not enough long-term planning to ensure that housing is for life and can cope with the stages of family growth through empty-nesting to, ultimately, older age. That is an important point in view of the fact that one of the four great challenges of the industrial strategy is ageing—a challenge which I am sure, as previous speakers have said, is of interest to your Lordships’ House.

Regarding transport infrastructure, which is fundamental to the industrial strategy, the White Paper focuses primarily on major strategic rail and road routes and ignores the smaller feeder systems, which are underinvested and congested but which will nevertheless still have the power to gum up the works in terms of industrial strategy development.

So where does the problem lie? There are a number of issues. One is that the dash for housing and the streamlining of the planning system, which we debated during the passage of successive planning Bills in your Lordships’ House, have had some serious repercussions. Planning authorities are now so driven by housing targets and by a fear of the sanctions that the Government can apply if an agreed local plan that both meets and delivers the housing targets is not in place that they are approving plans which are about not the right houses in the right places but the wrong houses in the wrong places. If local authorities fail to deliver a plan or the subsequent housing, developers can have a free run through to put things wherever they like, and government can take away planning powers and make decisions on behalf of local authorities. Local authorities simply do not wish that to happen.

In addition to local authorities making decisions on the run to avoid those sanctions, they are also very much weakened as planning authorities as a result of financial cuts and they are denuded of specialist staff. That, again, was a finding of the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. As a result, in working out the plans, they are hugely dependent on the analyses undertaken by the developers. Similarly, developers have the whip hand where viability assessments are used to challenge agreements made with them about their contribution to infrastructure and their commitment to affordable housing. In many cases, it is very much a David and Goliath situation. The chaps with sharp suits and sharp elbows—the planning consultants to major developers—roll in and put forward detailed cases demonstrating that it is simply no longer possible for developers to deliver on the infrastructure contributions and affordable housing numbers that they originally promised, and quite frankly the local authority has no means of seriously challenging that.

To make matters worse, these viability assessments are not in the public domain, being regarded as commercially confidential, so local people and local interest groups are unable to judge the calculations that underlie the decisions to short-change infrastructure contributions and affordable housing numbers. Therefore, I urge the Minister to consider how viability assessments can be routinely published in the future so that local people can judge whether their local authority is being robust in reflecting their interests. If that does not happen, we will have a backlash from many unhappy local communities across the country which see the reality of what is happening in the dash for housing.

The Industrial Strategy White Paper says:

“We want to support greater collaboration between councils, a more strategic approach to planning housing and infrastructure, more innovation and high quality design in new homes”.


I agree entirely with that sentiment but how will government shift the planning system from the sorry position it has been driven to, which certainly is not delivering the Government’s vital aspirations for housing and transport infrastructure at the heart of the industrial strategy