Child Poverty

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bird for introducing this important debate.

I grew up in Bradford, delivering milk in the early morning with my father, who was a milkman on the Thorpe Edge housing estate—one of the largest housing estates in the city, with all the high statistics you would expect in one of the most challenging communities in this country. As a young person I got a nose for what poverty was about—I could smell it, often literally. Over the last 30-plus years, I have been working with challenging families in East End housing estates and, now, in towns and cities across the north of England, where we have had some success in addressing the causes of child poverty and creating an entrepreneurial culture within which families embrace the world of work and take more personal ownership of their situation. From within an entrepreneurial culture focused around activity and practical action, not policy discussion and political agitation, wealth creation has begun to take root.

We have taken the long view. Change takes time. These families are not our clients; they are our friends—people with names, addresses and family histories. It has been about growing a can-do culture and building relationships. We have broken open the traditional silos of government, which, from where we stand, seem incapable of ever learning anything from experience. When you stand in a housing estate and look down the telescope at yet another government policy and programme coming down on these children and challenging families, and if you stay around long enough to gain perspective and watch the cumulative effect of all this political and government activity, what you see is a winding snake.

We have lived through Mrs Thatcher’s policies coming down upon us, as well as John Major’s, Tony Blair’s, Gordon Brown’s, Dave’s and Nick’s, Dave’s and, now, Theresa’s. When you watch carefully, you see the latest well-meaning politician with their policy advisers, often with little practical experience, and their latest bright idea coming down from above with all the unintended consequences. No one stays around long enough to watch the cumulative effect over many years, as we have done. People become trapped in a dependency culture created often by the well-meaning state with all its attendant theoretical “liberal” ideas, often based upon ideology rather than practice.

In the last year I have been asked by the CEO of Public Health England to lead Well North—10 pathfinder projects in challenging communities in the north of England, many of them in housing estates with children and families who have been failed by successive Governments. I have been asked to take our many years of experience in east London and to share it and work with the people there. Of course, I must declare an interest as chairman of Well North. Even after just a year’s engagement in 10 communities, I have found families and individuals who get what we are talking about, and who feel trapped and want to do something very different. They are real people with names and addresses, living in real places called Oldham, Bradford, Skelmersdale, Whitehaven, Bootle, Sheffield, Rotherham, Newcastle and Gateshead, Halton and Widnes. The challenge is: will we be given enough time and space by the system to innovate and build the kinds of long-term relationships with these local families and communities that can be sustainable and make a real difference—relationships within which families can be supported to take hold of their own destinies, escape from a tick-box culture and break open the silos that hold them firmly in their grip?

There is not enough time in this debate to really open up the detail for the Minister of what a more entrepreneurial approach to these challenging issues of poverty means in practice, but I thought I would share some initial radical thoughts to encourage us to think outside the box. Here are three practical, if radical, ideas that challenge the liberal consensus.

First, we should make it a requirement for any programme addressing social issues that 70% of the employees, or self-employed contractors, should live in the wards with the highest unemployment in the area where the programme is working. This would give a real advantage to genuinely locally based and embedded organisations, and a boost to the local economy, and might achieve more than anything else.

Secondly, we should take the “personalised budgets” approach to the next level. We should look at all the money being spent across government on a family or child. We should not, as now, just get government agencies to decide how they might spend the money but co-create something with the family, with a particular emphasis on the children. We frequently forget to listen to children, but in my experience they often have real insights into what is needed. We should be radical. For instance, a place at Eton costs £40,000 a year—a lot less than being in care—and I have found some very talented children on some of these estates.

Thirdly, we should focus on the children themselves. We should learn from the Big Issue and set up enterprise programmes so that the children can start to earn real money themselves. We have done this to some effect. We should support them if the parents try to take the money—for example, parents who have addiction issues with alcohol, drugs, gambling and so on. In this way, the children will become more self-confident and self-reliant in their heads but they will also be helped by having a bit of cash in their pockets. It is simple. I have a good friend who is a very successful business entrepreneur in the north of England and who came from one of these communities. He always tells me that the difference between him and his friends at school was that they had one paper round and he had two. Start ‘em young.

It is time to be radical and to create a learning by doing culture locally that sees the children and families caught in poverty as part of the solution, not just the problem. There is great opportunity awaiting us on our housing estates. There are talented people there—I am meeting them and working with them—who want to be radical and do things differently. They want to take hold of their lives and the life of their community and its future generations. The question is: will we, the well-meaning here in Westminster and Whitehall, allow them to do so? I ask the Minister: what space will be created in the Government’s thinking for innovation in this field that moves beyond the usual structures of government and local authority silos and gets behind local leaders and communities? I would suggest that quite a number of successful entrepreneurs who grew up in these communities want to do more now than just give cheques; they want to use their business skills to help with these issues.

Poverty

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bird for tabling this debate. It is a privilege to speak alongside him because he is a doer, not just a talker. We need more doers in our society. There is too much easy talk about structural solutions to poverty. I want to suggest that one of the generators of poverty in challenging communities across this country is the systems, structures and very processes of government and our continuing inability to encourage joined-up thinking and action in local communities. Let me take noble Lords to one street in a group of housing estates where I have been working for the last 10 years and illustrate what I mean—here, I must declare an interest.

I was asked to intervene in St Paul’s Way, in a challenging housing estate in Tower Hamlets, 10 years ago this year. There had been a murder: a Bengali boy had been set on fire and stories were starting to appear in the press. I was called in by Christine Gilbert, the CEO of Tower Hamlets Council, and asked to spend a day on this street and go back and describe to her what I saw. I arrived to be greeted by a group of West Indian boys with dogs facing up a head teacher behind a very large school fence. The police, with a blue light, had just arrived. The school was in the bottom 10% in the country, the teachers were endlessly playing politics with children’s lives by going on strike, and the 1960s buildings looked a mess. This run-down building stood in the middle of two 1960s housing estates, one with a dominant Bengali community, the other a traditional white East End community, separated by a road, St Paul’s Way. Many teachers in the school had an ideological antipathy towards business; the building was situated 800 yards to the north of Canary Wharf.

Next door to the school was a run-down health centre with 11,000 patients. I quickly suspected, but could not prove at the time, that some dodgy practice was going on, but they were Asian GPs and the MP, George Galloway, was playing politics in the Bengali housing estate across the road, so it might have been seen as insensitive to suggest that all was not well. A politically correct culture, aided and abetted by the public sector, was playing itself out on some of the poorest people in the borough. Opposite the school and health centre was a well-loved local pharmacist, Atul Patel. I discovered that two Bengali girls were going to his shop every Saturday to work with him and he was inspiring them to go on to read pharmacy at university. The teachers in the school opposite, behind three very large fences, knew nothing of this activity and could not see why a successful Asian business entrepreneur, whose life in this country began in poverty, might be of any relevance to a school 73% of whose intake was Bengali.

Local people with rats running through their kitchens had been promised new homes, but 54 schemes later, with £3 million of public money spent, not a home had been built. Every man and his dog had an opinion about what should be built. There was the environment lobby and the disability lobby, and Ken Livingstone wanted 50% social housing, so the business plan would not work. Most of these opinions were held by people who did not live there, with the result that nothing got built; there was just lots of talk and lots of meetings. Christine and I agreed that I should take 16 key players living and working on this street away to a conference centre to try to find a way forward. After two days of relationship building, brilliant facilitation and a joined-up conversation, there was unanimous agreement that none of us could deal with these matters on our own, that we needed to rebuild this community together and create a learning-by-doing culture. We developed a vision to build a campus—a new village—and to connect housing, education and health, business and enterprise. It would be an integrated street, no longer defined by government silos and their attendant dependency culture and mediocrity. We would learn to do it together and encourage aspiration and relationships.

Now, 10 years on, we have worked with local people and built a new £40 million school. Six years ago only 35 families were willing to put their children there. This year 1,200 families have applied. The school was rated outstanding in every regard by Ofsted in 2014 and today has a close working relationship with Atul Patel, who teaches there. Dr Joe Hall has turned around the failing health centre next door with its 11,000 patients. The local housing company is now completing phase 2 of the housing and is building a new primary school for us across the road. In two weeks’ time Professor Brian Cox and I will hold our fifth science summer school at the school, focused on how Britain can become the best place to do science in the world.

I shall give noble Lords a snapshot of what it was like turning around the failing health centre. As we dug into the detail of the GP practice, it came to light that many thousands of patients had been injected with illegal injections over a number of years. Unwittingly, the NHS, in its various manifestations, had followed processes and simply tolerated poor practice for years, without looking too closely at what was really going on. By bringing colleagues together I was able to work with the PCT to remove the failing GPs. Then, against all our advice, Tower Hamlets PCT, because of a new national policy initiative, appointed ATOS to provide GP services. After a couple of years I was called in by the PCT to help this company—good people, but out of their depth—to surrender the contract, having being unable to deliver, for reasons predicted locally at the time but ignored. The PCT then appointed the Bromley-By-Bow GP practice, which the transformation project partners had originally backed, to come in and sort out the mess. Recently it was scored as outstanding by the CQC, the first GP practice in the UK, I think, to achieve this.

Meanwhile, in response to a request by Tower Hamlets PCT, a local housing company built a new £16 million health centre for the GP practice, with agreement from the PCT—because, to be honest, the NHS was just too slow. The PCT then dithered about what it wanted until it was abolished and a national body, NHS Property Services, assumed responsibility for the premises. All local knowledge was lost and with it any understanding as to why we wanted to build an integrated response to health services in the first place. No local memory was involved, and a business plan costing many thousands of pounds was lost in the transfer. We were starting again. NHS Property Services has dithered since this time and the health centre has remained empty for many years, with a mortgage clocking up each month as, all around, new buildings and an aspirational culture has emerged. After a difficult meeting last year in the office of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, at which I encouraged different parts of the NHS to talk to each other, let alone the local community, NHS Property Services finally agreed that the GP practice could move in. I believe that NHS Property Services is currently paying two rents.

Successive Governments have talked about the need for joined-up thinking and action and we all raise our eyes: it is all too difficult. Yet we have done it and demonstrated that it works. I humbly suggest that in this new time, our country can no longer afford to ignore experiences such as this. Our children, who are living in a joined-up, internet age, feel alienated from all these silos. It is time to grasp the nettle. The electorate have given us a clear message to engage with them.

I have a final question for the Minister. As the new Prime Minister seeks to bring the country together, what will the Minister do to bring funding streams together in some of our most fragmented communities? How will he create an organic, learning-by-doing culture?

Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and the Select Committee for their helpful report and for keeping us all focused on the longer term issues that surround the Olympic project. The long-term legacy in east London has been the focus for my work over the past 16 years of involvement with this project. The Olympic project is far from finished; it is a work in progress. If done well, in partnership with the business and social enterprise sectors in east London it will continue to act as a catalyst regenerating an area that stretches across the lower Lea Valley from the O2 in the south, north up through Canning Town, Canary Wharf, Poplar and Stratford to Hackney Marshes.

I thought it might be most helpful this evening, as a director of the London Legacy Development Corporation —here I declare an interest—if I focus my remarks on the legacy and regeneration work being undertaken in east London. I will leave other matters mentioned in the report to those more expert than I in these areas.

The London Legacy Development Corporation is driving the legacy of the London 2012 Games to positively change the lives of east Londoners. By transforming the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park into a vibrant destination, we will develop a dynamic new heart for east London. Opportunities for local people will be created alongside innovation and growth for the rest of the UK. Our 10-year plan is to lead regeneration and create opportunity in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park through a number of routes.

First, we will create a successful and accessible park with world-class venues, leisure space for local people, arenas for thrilling sport, enticing entertainment and an ongoing programme of sporting, cultural and community events to attract visitors. Secondly, we will create opportunities and transformational change for local people, wider access to education and jobs, connecting communities and promoting convergence, bridging this gap between east London and the rest of the capital. Thirdly, we are creating a new heart for east London. We are doing this by securing investment from across London and beyond, by attracting and nurturing talent to create, design and make world-class, 21st century goods and services. The park will be a place where local residents and new arrivals choose to live, work and enjoy themselves, and where businesses choose to locate and invest. The legacy corporation is now working with partners to engage local people and help them to access jobs and business opportunities, and to use the facilities offered. We will make sure that the legacy is one that can be enjoyed by everyone, post-Games.

Since the end of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics Games, huge progress has been made. We have removed temporary venues, improved transport connections across the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and created beautiful parkland areas. The full opening of the park is on 5 April 2014—only weeks away. More than 1 million people have already visited the park since it partially opened in summer 2013. The future of all eight permanent London 2012 venues is now secure. This collectively means that London is further ahead than any other host city in history. Five new neighbourhoods are being created; each has its own distinctive character. Up to 10,000 homes will be built on the park by 2030. Chobham Manor, the first of these neighbourhoods, will start receiving residents in 2015. Demand has resulted in the acceleration of development in the East Wick and Sweetwater neighbourhoods, bringing forward completion from 2029 to 2023.

Approximately one-third of homes on the park developments will be affordable housing. Family homes will make up 70% of the available housing. These homes will be built to the latest sustainability standards: new play areas, schools, nurseries, community spaces, health centres and shops, as well as parkland and open spaces are being created. Alongside East Village, new community facilities have opened, benefiting both existing and new residents. A new school, Chobham Academy, opened in September 2013, offering free schooling for all ages alongside an advanced medical clinic, the Sir Ludwig Guttmann Centre, named after the founder of the Paralympic Games.

The legacy corporation is also working with the borough partners to ensure that training and job brokerage programmes help local people into work, so maintaining the positive work done by the Olympic Delivery Authority prior to the Games. For the current transformation workforce, the legacy corporation set targets that 25% would be from east London, 10% previously unemployed, 25% from black, Asian and minority ethnic groups, 5% women, 3% disabled and 3% apprentices. These targets have been exceeded by a significant margin.

Some 20,000 jobs will be created by 2019, in addition to those already created by Westfield and other regenerated parts of east London, driven by the Games. This figure includes 5,300 jobs created by Here East—formerly iCITY—and a further 2,000 in the ensuing supply chain. The regeneration of Hackney Wick station is under way to kick-start work in the Hackney Wick/Fish Island area following £8.5 million of secured LEP funding. Some 4,421 jobs will result from the creation of housing, shops and other community facilities, and 250-plus jobs will be in the venues and stadium. There will be training and apprenticeship opportunities for the local community.

At a peak there were more than 1,000 workers on-site, and around 40% of the current on-site workforce live in one of the host boroughs. During a survey undertaken of the local workforce, more than 85% had been resident in one of the host boroughs for over a year. The legacy corporation is constantly working with the growth boroughs, partners and contractors to support apprenticeships and programmes to ensure that local employment targets are met.

Here East is located in the former press and broadcast centres on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and will provide a new home with state-of-the-art infrastructure for the creative and digital industries. It will include a range of versatile spaces, bringing together global companies with London’s most innovative start-ups to collaborate and learn from each other. It will feature three main buildings: a 300,000 square foot innovation centre, a 1,045-seat auditorium, and an 850,000 square foot building housing educational space, broadcast studios, office space, and a state-of-the-art data centre.

Here East is being developed by iCITY; it is a joint venture between Delancey, a specialist real estate investment and advisory company, and Infinity SDC, the UK’s leading data centre operator. Here East has already secured a number of tenants and is over 40% pre-let. BT Sport is based at Here East with an 80,000 square foot production hub. That contains three industry-leading studios, 20 edit suites, three main interoperable galleries, four sports galleries, and an audience-holding area for a 160-strong audience. Loughborough University will create a multidisciplinary postgraduate teaching, research and enterprise facility. Hackney Community College will deliver its pioneering digital apprenticeship scheme within a new Tech City Apprenticeship Academy. Infinity SDC will develop one of the largest and most efficient data centres in Europe, featuring a 260,000 square foot gross internal area, fed by multiple power grids and providing 40 MVA of power with exceptional resilience.

On regeneration, in December 2013, plans were announced for the Olympicopolis project, a joint project between the legacy corporation, UCL and the V&A Museum to create an educational and cultural quarter on the park. This is a very exciting development which is expected to deliver an extra 10,000 jobs on the park and an additional £5.25 billion of economic value from the area. UCL is focusing on construction and finance, including what it can afford to contribute to development. The V&A is also exploring other cultural uses, as well as funding scenarios, including what can be funded by private sector development. We may bring in other partners and will determine the scope of our plans by the end of the year. We hope to make planning applications in 2015 subject to funding, and the Chancellor announced his commitment to backing plans for the creation of a major new higher education and cultural district on the park in December’s national infrastructure plan.

So much is happening, and those of us who have worked in east London for many years are delighted with progress to date, but there is still a great deal for all of us to do. There are of course some specific challenges, and I will highlight a few of them. First, we need to make sure that East Village is a “joined-up” community and that the disconnects between housing, education, health and business do not replicate themselves, as we have seen so often in government-led regeneration projects across this country. In my view, public sector bodies and businesses still have a great deal to learn about integration and the creation of joined-up communities. Governments should see the Olympic Park as an opportunity to innovate and learn about new ways in which to build dynamic, joined-up communities. This is still a challenge for large organisations, and we need to be encouraged to learn from and build on the local experience of building integrated communities in east London. Silo working will not get us anywhere.

The second challenge is to ensure that the developments on the park are fully integrated with the surrounding area. This will require focus and determination in the years to come. The third challenge is for the Government to tell a joined-up story about the developments that are happening down the lower Lea Valley, which stretch from those around the O2 and the Royal Docks; the airport, which is expanding; £3.7 billion of development in Canning Town; Canary Wharf, which may double in size in the next 10 years; a £1 billion development programme with local residents in Poplar; and the developments in Stratford and the Olympic Park. This is a new city growing in the East End of London—just join the dots. My colleagues and I will set this out at a major exhibition at ExCel in the Royal Docks from 3 May to 11 May, in partnership with Grand Designs Live, which will be called Walking on Water. Here I must declare a further interest. Noble Lords might like to come and have a look.

The future in east London is full of opportunity, but it still demands hard work, focus and a continuity of purpose.