English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, in this discussion, there is a lot of confusion between what I call the two Ds: democracy and delivery. I have spent over 40 years working in East End housing estates. Around the time I first arrived, I sat in a room with a youth worker, who asked a group of young people, “What do you want to do?” They said, “Well, miss, we want to go to Walton-on-the-Naze”—which is a seaside resort in Essex—“and we want to go ice-skating and horse-riding”. So I got on an Empress Coach with this youth worker and all these young people, and we did those three things. Then a year later, I returned to the same room with the same well-meaning youth worker, who asked again, “What do you want to do?” They said, “Well, miss, we would like to go to Walton-on-the-Naze and horse-riding and ice-skating”. I said to the youth worker, “You’ve been to university, you’ve been to Australia and you’ve travelled around the world. Why are you asking these young people this ridiculous question?” She said, “This is democracy. This is giving them a real choice”. I said, “Really? Why don’t you suggest we’ll take them across the Sinai Desert in six months’ time?” She replied, “Don’t be ridiculous. They’ve never heard of the Sinai Desert”—precisely.

With a business partner, we ended up taking 200 of those young people, in a programme we developed, across the Sinai Desert with the Bedouin. We climbed Mount Sinai and had an amazing experience. When these bright, sharp, entrepreneurial young people from East End housing estates came back, they raised all sorts of interesting questions. One of them, called Darren, wanted to go off to New York—which he did; he then developed an amazing piece of youth work, which was very entrepreneurial and which the Princess of Wales recently visited.

In the very early days in Bromley-by-Bow, we began to embrace an entrepreneurial programme which was created with local people, including local young people. Some 97 businesses have been involved in that over the last 10 or 12 years. Over the years in Bromley-by-Bow, we must have hosted more than 70 Government Ministers, but I fear that we are still asking the same question in many of these processes. With this kind of legislation, because the granular detail is not understood, I fear that we will spend a lot of time with large infrastructure asking people what they want and where they want to go, without thinking about how we really empower a community, particularly a poor community. That is about jobs and work and, in our experience, about helping them build businesses and enterprises and lifting the game.

I agree that community engagement is really important, but so is the granular detail of how you do it, what it means in practice and how you generate learning-by-doing cultures on the ground in some of our poorest communities. If we do not start to do that, I fear that, once again—I must be on my 14th Government now—we will have some restructuring. We will use all these very fine words, but we will be back in that room with those young people asking them what they want, with no clarity about democracy and delivery. I have found with East Enders that they are interested more in delivery than in talk—that when you promise things, you actually do them, and you transform the opportunities for their children. That will not happen unless we get more into the granularity and create learning-by-doing entrepreneurial cultures. That is what empowerment looks like.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, I feel the need to stress that we should not write off deliberative democracy, where people can access information and ideas and come together to reach new conclusions. Let us also stress that the economy—businesses and jobs—is one part of a much larger whole that is the community. Our society needs resources, education, time and health, so a simplistic, one-directional look at what our communities need will not answer our issues.

It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, who made some very telling points about how this is a seriously half-baked Bill. Your Lordships’ Committee is going to have to add quite a bit of heat to get it anything like ready for the table. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and of the National Association of Local Councils. I too wish the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, well and hope that we can see her back soon.

I start with the noble Baroness’s Amendment 95, as it demonstrates why we need many of the amendments in this group. It sets out in clear terms that the role of local government is to provide “democratic, place-based leadership” and it should not be

“solely a delivery arm of central government”.

Increasingly, that is what local government has been forced into being through the decades-long power grab by Westminster, accompanied by swingeing austerity that has left councils unable to carry out pretty well anything but their statutory responsibilities, which are of course determined by Westminster. That is a major driver of the extremely high disillusionment with politics and why the slogan “Take back control” was so popular in 2016.

I set all that out because my Amendment 9 seeks to add to the list of areas of competence. Most of the amendments in this group, as well as Amendment 95, would take the Government in the direction they say they want this Bill to go. I will focus on Amendment 9, but, regarding Amendment 8 from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on community engagement and empowerment, I have a lot of later amendments on this which are not necessarily contradictory but potentially complementary. I also support the community energy amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. Last night in the Chamber, I spoke about community energy; we are just not seeing the driving force that we need to bring renewables to local communities, which surely has to be a crucial part of the areas of competence of the new strategic authorities.

My Amendment 9 addresses food security and poverty. In terms of local food production, according to a recent report from the CPRE, 1,7 00 farms have disappeared around the edges of towns and cities since 2010. We have seen those peri-urban areas stop being food-producing areas when they should be at the centre of local food systems. We have seen a massive cut in the number of county farms; according to figures from 2019, over a couple of decades they have gone from 426,000 acres to about 200,000 acres. We have seen councils’ control over local food systems hacked away.

We know—this is why poverty and food fit together very well—that we have enormous spatial inequalities, arguably the highest in the OECD. That has been increasing over three decades. There is an understandable feeling in Cumbria, Cornwall, Northumberland and north Devon that Westminster does not understand their poverty problem or the reality of their lives. They are right. We cannot fix the problems of each of those places by making one rule from Westminster; tackling poverty in those places has to be a local responsibility, with power and, importantly, resources to go with it. We have been through regional development agencies, local enterprise partnerships, town groups and the wildly unpopular investment zones. There has been a huge democratic deficit in all those systems, and they all have failed.

I draw on two reports from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. The first is The False Economy of Big Food and the Case for a New Food Economy, which focuses on how what is colloquially known as “big food”—large centralised systems—is making us sick. It is the first report I have seen to have calculated the estimated total cost of our broken food system: £268 billion. A lot of that is the costs of healthcare, welfare support, social care and loss of productivity, all of which are having to be met by local authorities. Those are the costs—surely we need to put the solution and a reduction of those costs together.

We have lots to do here in Westminster. We have an extremely uneven playing field with a handful of big supermarkets and big food manufacturers entirely dominating the markets, throwing their weight around against local communities and farmers. Westminster needs to act, but how are we going to fill in the gaps? What are we going to put in all these different communities up and down the land? There is no one answer. Westminster does not have the answers.

I stress that about 22% of people in the UK are in food poverty. That means people who have a limited opportunity to feed themselves well, often relying on food banks, et cetera. UKRI is funding the Food Systems Equality project, involving systems in local communities to ensure healthy, sustainable food that reflects cultural preferences. We have recognition from one arm of government that the solution to our food issues has to be local—that is what UKRI is doing—but we have to put the power into local and strategic authorities to deal with that.

I pick one example of where something great is happening. An organisation called Growing Kent & Medway is an inspiring effort to create healthy and sustainable food systems in what has traditionally been the garden of England. It is place based, with a huge number of small independent businesses. I have tasted some great cheese and cider here in the House when they have come to visit us. But if we are going to have those kinds of systems all around the country in each area, they have to be supported by the strategic authorities.

Finally, I bring together food and poverty issues, including local food security in the UK. There is an interesting piece of work by the Royal Geographical Society, which carried out a visualisation of what food insecurity looks like in different parts of the country. It is useful to have this as a map, because you can see what different colours come out on the map showing the difference in different places. Food insecurity is variable across the country because of the levels of poverty, but the way in which people’s foodscapes are configured are different in different places. There is no way in which Westminster can find the solution for each place, because the solution in each place is different. There is nothing more fundamental for government to ensure that people are fed, but the Government in Westminster have to let go and let local communities find their own solutions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I understand why the noble Baroness is pushing her point strongly, but I will stick to the answer I gave: those areas of competence already enable a very wide framework to tackle poverty and socioeconomic inequality—including food production, if that is where the mayor chooses to go in a particular area. The issues raised by the noble Baroness are cross-cutting aspects so putting them into one of the competences would mean that you would not be able to work so effectively across those competences, including on things such as skills and health inequalities. It is right to leave the framework of competences as broad as possible to allow people to determine the best way forward at a local level.

There is other work going on in Defra, as the noble Baroness will be well aware, in relation to land use frameworks—as well as all of the other issues around how we account for local food production—but, from the point of view of this Bill, the competences and the broad framework that they offer give the widest framework for local authorities to tackle needs in their areas.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I know that the Minister cares a lot about these issues around community engagement, which is always encouraging to people such as me. As a social entrepreneur, I have spent my life at the other end of this telescope. I now operate with a team across this country, in some of the poorest communities, grappling with local authorities and the machinery of the state.

To be honest, we and some of our business partners find a lot of this state machinery very broken indeed; it is very difficult to make it work in practice. What people such as me are trying to suggest is that there needs to be some humility. It is difficult. I am aware that lots of colleagues in this Room have spent a lot of their lives in the public sector—I get all that; it has been my privilege to work with some rather excellent CEOs of local authorities and in the health service, as well as some who have not been so good, if I can put it like that—but there are real challenges with this machinery, whatever we say. I am experiencing them at the moment in one town in the north, where our Civil Service is not understanding the granular, practical detail of transformation and innovation—or what those things look like—and is in danger of putting old men in new clothes.

So, with the opportunity that appears before us in this legislation, let me explain why we need to create, at a granular, local level and in place, learning-by-doing cultures that pay attention to how we work with the public, local authorities, the health service, charities and the social sector—that is, how those interfaces work in practice to deliver. I suggest that it is because, at the moment, although the words all seem fine and lots of people care about this, when you try to do this stuff—as my colleagues and I do—something quite different starts to appear. I fear that, if we are not careful—and unless we grip some of that difficulty and some of the things that some of us have got a lot of grey hairs from trying to do—there will be lots of meaning well, but very little will change, in some of our poorest communities.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for those additional points. In this Room there are many people from local government, who have spent many years working to make sure that what he called the machinery of state is not interfering with actually delivering at local level. What we are trying to do with the Bill is to make sure that we continue that, but no doubt we will have many discussions about whether or not it is going to work.

It is very important that what we do is driven by local people at local level. The Co-operative Councils’ Innovation Network, which I started with my right honourable colleague from the other end, Steve Reed, about 15 years ago now, sets up pilot projects to show exactly how you start with the impact at local level and then work up to what needs to be done in the machinery to make that work. That is what I want to do but on a national scale, and I hope that the Bill will go a long way towards doing so.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 185, tabled by my noble friend Lady Coffey.

Only about half a dozen noble Lords in the Committee at the moment have previously served as Members of Parliament. From my own experience, there is nothing more annoying as an MP than to find constituents writing to you about some planning development that you know nothing about when other stakeholders have been notified. The Member of Parliament must then ask the council, the Government or the agency what the issues are about before forming a view on it and either supporting the constituents’ concerns or not. Constituents simply do not understand why MPs are not already in the loop. That diminishes their status when it seems that every other Tom, Dick and Harry has been on the stakeholder consultation list.

I appreciate that this amendment is narrowly focused, with a much smaller range of stakeholders. However, the issue here, as my noble friend has said, concerns nationally significant infrastructure projects, where the Secretary of State is the decider. Therefore, while MPs might not be on the general planning consultation list, it would be reasonable for them to be on the list for these nationally significant infrastructure projects. The principle is the same. That is why I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Coffey.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, before I speak to my Amendment 185SG, can I thank colleagues from all parties across the Committee who have supported me, including the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, who is in Birmingham today?

I declare my interests relating to this amendment. I am the chairman of the 360 Degree Society. This is a national social business that is applying the lessons learned from over 40 years of practical work in east London to community developments across the UK. Today, my colleagues and I are focusing on integrated development and placemaking, with business, public and social sector partners. The relevant business partners for this amendment include Barratt Redrow, Kier Group, Morgan Sindall Group, HLM Architects, the NHS and various local authorities.

This amendment is aimed at preparing the ground for and supporting the Secretary State for Health Wes Streeting’s 10-year plan for the future of the health service as he seeks to move services out of hospitals and into the community. It is my view, and that of my colleagues with many years of experience, that the health service needs to get upstream into the prevention agenda and move services out of expensive hospitals and into the community. This Planning and Infrastructure Bill is about not just housing but building truly joined-up places and cultures, where families want to live and where communities can thrive. It is my experience that the built environment and culture are profoundly connected. We really are the places that we live, work and play within.

Many of our inner cities and their fractured communities show the social costs of getting this wrong. This Bill and this amendment provide us with an opportunity to nudge the right direction of travel in a practical way, and it comes at a crucial time. So many previous attempts by government departments to encourage a more joined-up approach to development at a macro level have failed. I suggest that the opportunities to join the dots that make a real-world difference are in the micro, at place.

This amendment seeks both to support the Government’s desire to build 1.5 million homes and to ensure that we learn from the mistakes of the past. We need to create more joined-up services and communities and move beyond rhetoric into practice.

I could take noble Lords to so many places across the country where services are literally hiding behind their own fences and are not joined up, either physically at place or structurally in a co-ordinated operating culture. The main players barely know each other on the same street, yet they all work with the same families. This is an expensive disaster that continues to replicate. It needs to stop.

In new developments, we are still witnessing on the ground a fragmented health and community infrastructure. Not only are they not creating a sense of place but they are in danger of unintentionally repeating many of the same mistakes of large-scale housing developments of the past. We could be in the 1960s or 1970s: soulless housing estates, created by both the private and public sectors, that generate well-documented social and economic problems over time. Local communities need a soul and beating heart at their centre.

In the modern world, health is everybody’s business. It is no longer a matter for just the medical profession. The focus now rightly needs to be on the social determinants of health. We urgently need to build more joined-up social and health developments in local communities and neighbourhoods. In front of us is a real opportunity, as this Government commit themselves to building 1.5 million homes, to rethink the social, health and welfare infrastructure in these communities, and to bring together housing, health, education, welfare, and jobs and skills, truly encouraging innovation and more joined-up approaches.

Lots of research out there gives endless data on why all this makes sense; we just need to start doing it. One housing association’s social prescribing programme supported 277 people and reported a 90.8% change in their well-being. Mixed-use developments that blend residential, commercial, health and recreational spaces stimulate local economies by attracting businesses, creating jobs and prosperity. This research shows that the proximity of services encourages residents to shop and dine locally, creating a self-sustaining economic ecosystem. Siloed housing schemes are not only less effective but more expensive in the long run.

This amendment seeks to encourage closer working relationships between the public, private and social sectors so that, in this next major building phase, we actively encourage innovations, best practice and greater co-operation between these sectors. We cannot force people to work together, but we can actively encourage them to do so. We need to create learning-by-doing cultures across the country, which share best practice, as we set out on this new, exciting journey of housebuilding and infrastructure.

This amendment is a first attempt to find a form of words that encourages greater co-operation at place between the place-makers. The wording is not perfect and I am sure we can improve it, but it allows us to have a cross-party debate about the siloed machinery of the state that is not delivering the change that people want to see and experience. Very good people from different political parties have attempted, over the years, to mend these disconnects at departmental level. I have worked with many of them and this has proved really difficult to do. This amendment offers a simple, practical solution that encourages a direction of travel and a clear steer to practitioners and people of good will on the ground.

In my experience, what really counts when it comes to innovation and change is not diktats from government or more process and strategy, but transparent, joined-up, working relationships between partners involved on the ground. The siloed world of government is increasingly not fit for purpose and is daily hindering the very relationships we now need to bring together and help flourish.

The 360 Degree Society, which I help run, has a proven methodology that is enabling co-operation between major parties involved in place-making from the public, business and social sectors, and residents. There seems to be a consensus around what Wes Streeting is proposing for the future of the health service. We are at a moment where the players in local authorities, the NHS, the social and private sectors and housebuilders want to build a more joined-up world. We have all talked about joining up services and cultures; this amendment provides a practical next step on this journey.

Some of this is about ensuring that community infrastructure is an integrated part of large-scale developments and is created early on, rather than the last element to be built, but also that a much wider range of partners are involved in creating high-quality new places where people are healthy and can thrive and prosper. The 360 Degree Society, which I lead, has created a social value toolkit to explore the practicalities of how to do this. To take just one example, we suggest getting beyond the often confrontational, usually purely transactional approach between developers and local authorities and special interest groups to get to a place where there is a genuine commitment and endeavour to agree a shared vision for the place.

Our experience suggests that this is partly achieved by surprisingly straightforward changes, such as developing human relationships between key players and focusing on them. When we get to know someone, rather than just reading their papers and emails, it is surprising how often a way forward can be found. Relationships with the key players, rather than consulting and engaging absolutely everyone, are part of a way forward we suggest. The purpose of this amendment is to help create the appetite and desire to encourage colleagues to take this approach and encourage innovation in this space.

I was in east London recently, in a multi-million pound development. I was met by an African mother with two rather beautiful children. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent; the health centre is at one end of the estate, the community building at another, the nursery somewhere else and the school somewhere else. She described how her child was already picking up needles in the play area and she showed me a small video of two youths outside the housing association office jumping into a van and stealing the contents. The culture was already starting and I can imagine this mother already wondering—these estates need strong families —whether she was going to stay.

Let me briefly share with you a practical example of what success looks like in practice. My colleagues and I do not like papers; we tend to build practical examples with partners. In 2007, I was asked by Christine Gilbert, then CEO of Tower Hamlets Council, who went on to run Ofsted, to lead what became a multi-million pound development in Tower Hamlets, following a murder and considerable violence between two warring white and Bengali housing estates. The details of this development are in Hansard, because we debated it in the levelling-up Bill, but the basic points are: you had a failing school with a fence; next door, a failing health centre with a fence; attempts to build 600 homes that had spent £3 million on schemes, with not a flat built; and two warring communities, one Bengali and one white.

My colleagues and I spent time building relationships with local residents and with the local authority, the NHS and the housing association—top, middle and front line. We started with no investment and we have rebuilt a £40 million school; a £16 million health centre; 600 homes, with 200 for sale; and now a new primary school. In June, Professor Brian Cox and I did our 13th science summer school, and he led a masterclass at the end of the day; this school had involved 695 children and, at the end of the day, a group of them in a masterclass debated quantum physics—an extraordinary experience.

What were the lessons learned? First, it was not about structure but about people and relationships—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

Order!

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I am just about to finish. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, told us on Tuesday that there is a rising tide in this space. My suggestion is that we all need to grasp the moment or we will lose it yet again. The foundation stones need to be laid now. Let us take the first step together. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and the Committee for jumping ahead of him in speaking to my noble friend’s amendment. I had not clocked that he was due to speak and that it was his amendment. I apologise for my discourtesy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive reply.

The common theme between the amendments is empowering officials to do their job well. I will pick up an example from the noble Lord, Lord Mawson. If an official in the local hospital is only looking up the line to someone in the health department, it is very hard for them to take into account the needs of other aspects of the community.

If there is something in law or secondary legislation—whatever it is, I look forward to seeing it—that the Government produce that says, “You must consult, you must talk to these people and you must take them into account”, that empowers the official to do so. It does not make it happen, but it sets out a structure where we can communicate properly between silos. We can get things done as a community and not in little bits.

I am sure that we can all think of examples of where things would have been done much better if the community had been involved. In fact, we do not need to look much further than our own front door. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, has a lot of experience with construction, but when I took one of my friends who is in the industry through the front door and asked him how much he thought it cost, he was at about a 50th of what it was. We were not involved; the community was not consulted. This has been done to us; we were not part of that decision. The same applies to our “HMP Westminster”-style enclosure. I therefore really encourage the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, to work with my noble friends Lord Hayward and Lord Forsyth to see whether we can get our own mechanisms to be rather better than they are.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I have commented on the door and had conversations with various people around the House, which was very fascinating as a parable of this problem.

Christine Gilbert was a very good local authority leader who understood the limitations of the state and understood that just the processes and systems alone would not get us there. Something else needed to happen in which the local authority, the NHS and the normal players were obviously key partners. It was about the people and relationships; the machinery was not going to get us there, and she understood that as a very capable leader.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I also felt that the Minister’s reply to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was good, but I would be grateful if he could send him and us a link to the guidance that he referred to so that we can check through it and understand how it works before Report. In the case of my amendment, I await the Hillsborough law. If it can do what Amendment 158 is setting out to do and a lot more across government, it will make a huge contribution. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that we have reached Committee, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on having tabled the first amendment for debate. I echo many of her comments and those of my noble friend Lady Scott. I greatly enjoyed the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt; it is great to see him in his new position. We very much enjoyed working with him when he was on the Front Bench, and we look forward to working with him in his new place.

My concern is not that I do not want to see the critical infrastructure and housing that we need—particularly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, in rural areas. In fact, I would propose to add a little “subsection (e)” to her existing Amendment 1, to protect the countryside from overdevelopment, as well as to protect and promote food security; those issues should be at the heart of the Bill.

I was delighted to hear on “Farming Today” this morning—I obviously had an early start—the CPRE mention the protection it would like to see for affordable homes. It mentioned in its briefing that the current definition of affordable homes is not accurate and should be revisited. Can the Minister—with whom I look forward to collaborating through the passage of the Bill—say whether the Government are minded to do that? The plea from the CPRE—which I believe is appropriate to Amendment 1, and particularly to a hypothetical “subsection (e)”, which I may bring forward on Report if the amendment is brought back—is that, to protect the countryside, it would like a commitment from the Government to use brownfield land first. I wonder whether the Minister would agree to that. In the CPRE’s view:

“England has space for 1.2 million homes on previously developed land”.


The benefit of building in this type of area is:

“These homes would: be close to jobs, schools, and transport connections; regenerate town centres and urban communities; protect green spaces and farmland from development”.


My concern is that, without an amendment such as a hypothetical little “subsection (e)” to protect the countryside and food security, we risk trampling over the countryside and greenfield in a mad dash to build houses at pace.

The CPRE also says, quite rightly, that there is a role for planning. As a one-time Member of the other place, if there were a development in my constituency that looked as though it was going to be wildly unpopular with a village or rural community, I would always urge the developers to meet at the earliest opportunity with parish councils before the development got into the public domain. I believe that there should be—this view is also shared by the CPRE—a clear role for local planning committees in the context of the Bill and that the role of parish councils should be cherished and strengthened. Without that, we would remove grass-roots democracy.

I very much enjoyed the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on the environmental recovery programme, which is often at some distance from the damage being done. If Part 3 is to remain, I hope that it will cover the issues that were addressed successfully in the pilot project in rural North Yorkshire—the Slowing the Flow at Pickering flood scheme—where we have effectively protected the development downstream by having not a major reservoir but a small reservoir. The construction of bunds, alongside other projects such as chopping down trees and growing trees in appropriate places, has allowed us to slow the flow. It is that type of imaginative nature solution—working with nature by, for example, planting trees in appropriate places—that can achieve flood resilience and flood defences, while also not contributing to flooding going forward. I hope that the Government might be mindful of protecting the countryside and farmland for the food security that is urgently needed, while also strengthening grass-roots democracy in the way I have suggested.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I am sympathetic to these amendments, but I am also very sympathetic to what the Government are trying to achieve in getting things built.

My colleagues and I have been at the other end of this telescope in communities trying to build things and get things done. We are now at year 41 and probably nearly a thousand projects in—some have been very small; others, such as the Olympics, became quite big. You get a perspective from practice on all that, which might be helpful to this discussion. Many years ago, we came across the challenge of what we call the two Ds: democracy and delivery. What I discovered many years ago with an East End group of people, on a failing group of housing estates where everything was failing constantly, was that local people were fed up to the back teeth with endless chatter and endless promises by councillors, when nothing seemed to happen. We only really became credible in Bromley-by-Bow, and trust began to emerge, when we delivered our first nursery with local parents and their children, which made a difference to their lives, and began to take over a derelict park where people were injecting every day in a completely dysfunctional situation.

It might be just worth me sharing the reasons why we made certain long-term choices. When I arrived in Tower Hamlets in the early 1980s, it was profoundly dysfunctional. The schools did not succeed, and the roads did not get swept. Some 97% of everything was run by the state, and it was a terrible mess. I was a local clergyman arriving in a rundown church; 12 old people sat where they had always sat in a 200-seater church, and it looked as though the dead had been carried out and no one had noticed. I had £400 in the bank. The little problem for me was to ask myself: what on earth can I do about this? The answer was: I do not have the faintest idea. As a Yorkshireman, my initial instinct was to do a runner; it is all too much for me. Phillip, the Jewish headteacher across the road at the primary school, was retiring early because it had become too much for him, so I thought, “This is me in a few years’ time, falling off my trolley”—I was 29 then.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

My amendment is very modest. It is saying two things: first, impose strict deadlines for statutory consultations. We cannot have a situation where regulators do not respond and do what they are expected to do on time. We have to draw a line on that. Secondly, the council recommended international benchmarking. Regular international benchmarking of British project performance on infrastructure as compared with other countries would be very valuable indeed. It would be salutary because we would have it confirmed that, in general, we take longer, we cost more money and we get less outcome. This amendment would be helpful, and I hope noble Lords and the Government will be sympathetic. I beg to move.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I wish to say something about the housing regulator, because it is absolutely as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is saying. As I explained earlier, in our practical experience, we have built a very successful housing company with local residents, which is trying to join the dots between housing, education, health and placemaking. We find that the housing regulator is constantly getting in the way of the innovation that we, with local residents, need to do, which has local support and a serious track record.

This particular regulator—and I have seen it in other areas as well—is a real problem. There needs to be real thought and reflection about whether these regulators are helping us innovate and find new ways of working—or are they just getting in the way? Of course, they need to ask challenging questions on using the money right, I get all of that. We need to address these issues, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is telling us. It is stopping us in east London doing what we now need to do to take our work to the next stage.

[Lord Banner (Con)]

I want to say something about what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said about the default risk aversion, and how there is a significant risk of that with regulators. There is a lot of merit in those comments. Largely, that stems from the application of the precautionary principle in much of the field of law that we are discussing now. Materially diluting the precautionary principle in a substantial way would have all sorts of troublesome consequences, but, in my judgment, some kind of counterbalance, which is what the proportionality principle is seeking to do, would help temper the effects of that. There is a later amendment in the noble Lord’s name which would seek to modify the precautionary principle in quite a sensible way. But I agree that something needs to be done to ensure that that over-precautionism does not infect the application of these provisions.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, it is very difficult to talk about anything of substance in five minutes on a subject so central to this Government. But having talked with colleagues in the industry, I would like to make the following brief points. I declare my interests.

First, my colleagues are reassured by the sense of purpose and drive that the Government are demonstrating in this policy area. We need to help the Bill get on to the statute book soon, so that we can get building.

Secondly, the Bill needs to think more about building communities and place-making, not just about building more soulless housing estates. The Government are rightly committed to addressing a range of different problems: housing, health, crime, education and net zero. The lesson from the history of failed housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s by the public sector, and the worrying signs from too much of what is being built today, is that if we build homes in the wrong way, we will not only fail to help solve these problems but make them worse.

We need to build places and strong, humane cultures and communities, not just homes. If noble Lords are in any doubt what this means for local residents, they should take five minutes and listen to Billy Connolly’s description on YouTube of what happened to him and his family when they were moved out of their home and community in the Gorbals in Glasgow and placed in a soulless housing estate on the edge of town. No one can describe the experience more clearly than Billy.

My colleagues and I are working on addressing precisely these issues in projects across the country with some of our major developers, and we are happy to share with the Minister and her colleagues our 360-degree approach to place-making, which is focused on buildings and culture—maybe she can let me know if there is interest.

We are all very concerned about what happens to bats and newts, but how concerned are we about the young mother I was with a few months ago on a multimillion-pound new housing estate in east London whose two year-old was already picking up needles in the play area? We all need to think very carefully together about how we do not repeat those mistakes in this next phase of development.

Thirdly, it is good news that planning officers will be given greater responsibility to determine smaller applications, reserved matter submissions and schemes on allocated sites through a new proposed national scheme of delegation. This should lead to greater consistency of approach across local planning authorities, plus certainty and timeliness of decisions. The mandatory training of planning committee members should, in theory, also lead to greater consistency and certainty for applications that do not fit into the above national scheme of delegation.

Having sat on a planning committee for many years, I know how flawed these present processes are, and I have watched too many local councillors play political games with these local processes. I think His Majesty’s Opposition need to think more clearly about the connections between democracy and delivery. There needs to be more clarity in their thinking about this matter.

Fourthly, the nature restoration fund, hopefully, will remove the restriction on 160,000 homes stalled by nutrient neutrality restrictions by allowing developers to pay into a nature restoration fund that delivers habitat improvements at a regional scale, rather than requiring site-specific ecological mitigation for every scheme. This should speed up the delivery of sites. There are, however, concerns about Natural England’s ability to deliver a robust scheme on a timely basis.

Fifthly, the proposal in the Bill to speed up the delivery of nationally significant infrastructure projects is also much welcomed and should provide greater clarity and certainty over the delivery of these projects.

Having said all this positive news, I think there remain some challenges for business colleagues in the industry. The introduction of new cross-boundary regional strategic planning could be positive, driving a more joined-up approach towards housing, economic and infrastructure growth across LPAs. However, there are significant concerns about the potential delays to new local plans and housing schemes because of this structural change. LPAs, which remain critically underresourced are undergoing significant change through forthcoming devolution and the abolition of the two-tier authority system, which, when tied in with the need to deliver these regional strategies soon, mean there may be an awful lot of resource tied up in delivering restructuring and not delivering local plans and housing schemes, which are needed in the short term.

I finish with a reality check: the current length of timeframes for securing planning permission will likely not shrink by a significant amount. Bidding on a site now does not realistically generate volume for the large housing businesses until 2028, given the timescales associated with securing planning permission, selling consented land, securing reserve matters, signing Section 106 agreements, site preparation and the build and sale of homes. By and large, the Bill is seen by many in the housing industry as very positive, with several of the changes proposed leading to quicker, more consistent and more certain outcomes. However, this has to be set against the wider context and systematic issues present, which may limit the positive impact these reforms will have.

Local Government Reorganisation

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for his important question. It gives me an opportunity to clarify some of the misunderstanding around the number that has been given. It was in our manifesto that we would pursue a devolution agenda, and for many months after the Government were elected we were pushed to give an optimum number for the size of a council. Of course, when we did so, everyone said, “Not that number; that’s not the right number.” There is some flexibility around it. The important thing in the whole of this process is that the size, geography and demography of the units created make sense for people. We can be flexible around the numbers, but the number of 500,000 was intended to set out what we feel would be around the right size for the economies of scale and to deliver effective services at local level in a way that gives value for money.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister please inform the House of any work the Government have done on what the practical implications might be of this local government reorganisation on their encouraging plans to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament? Will this reorganisation help speed up the delivery of these homes or, in practice, slow the whole process down? Can the Minister give us a clue as to how this will work in practice as public sector staff look for new jobs?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The intention is that this will help with the delivery of both growth and new homes. The intention, as set out quite clearly in the White Paper, is for mayors to have powers over strategic planning—not the local planning that local authorities currently do—so that they can work with the constituent councils in their areas to set out plans for housing. The noble Lord referred to issues of planning. We have put in a significant sum of money to improve the capacity for planning authorities as we take forward the programme of delivering 1.5 million homes.

Impact of Environmental Regulations on Development (Built Environment Committee Report)

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I will not rehearse in this speech the points made in the committee’s report. They are now in the public domain and are clear and have been set out in this debate. I would, however, like to share a few reflections on the process that we have been through and the lessons learned. I thank the committee clerks and Kelvin, our special adviser, for the support they gave us and the production of what I thought was an excellent and timely report. I also thank the chairman of the committee for setting out the issues so clearly in the press briefing and media interviews that he took part in.

I begin by sharing my disappointment at the way the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Intergovernmental Relations, Michael Gove, dealt with the challenging questions that we sent him. They were set out clearly in writing by the clerks when we met with him on 6 February. They were questions that our committee had researched in detail. We are living at a time when there is decreased trust in politicians of all parties and in the machinery of the state and its ability to deliver anything effectively. Members of the public, let alone Peers of the Realm, are sceptical and deserve a grown-up conversation with our politicians on challenging issues and the functions of the state. We all know, and have experienced at first hand, that this machinery is not working for us in so many ways. There is a desperate need for a frank and honest conversation, in which we grapple together with the issues, admit failings and challenges and attempt together to find ways forward.

The Secretary of State arrived at our meeting with 13 civil servants in train, at great cost to the public purse—only two of whom spoke briefly. The two-hour session, I am afraid, was a great example of a clever politician who has been meddling in the systems of state for some time now but who actually told us very little. This was a real opportunity missed, and an example of what is happening on all sides of the political spectrum in our public discourse about serious issues such as the ones we are discussing today. It is a discourse that sheds very little light and, more importantly, produces very little learning.

I raised with the Secretary of State the impression that we had clearly been given in our evidence sessions of the lack of joined-up working in the siloed systems of the state for which his department was responsible. We were told time and again about the fragmentation in many of the processes of those bodies that his department was responsible for, about people not communicating effectively with each other and about the machinery’s lack of fitness for purpose, with questions over whether any real learning was going on between these various bodies dealing with these important issues.

Instead of serious engagement and grown-up discussion about the challenges—which certainly predate Michael Gove—in the systems and processes that sit below him, we were told that all was fine and dandy in the kingdom. I do not believe it for a minute, and our evidence clearly suggests otherwise. If everything is fine with the machinery below the Secretary of State’s office, why were we told, in the recent Public Accounts Committee report on levelling up, that only just over 10% of the promised funds had actually been spent and were making a difference on the ground? That report asks why the Government are unable to provide any compelling examples of what levelling-up funding has delivered so far in one of the Government’s flagship policies.

As a person with direct experience of these issues on the ground, I declare my interest. This all speaks volumes as to the challenges of this department’s machinery—top, middle and on the front line—and accords with the evidence that we heard. Our encounter with the Secretary of State was disappointing, and an opportunity for real, informed dialogue and learning was missed. These machinery issues are not a party-political matter, of course. They will equally apply to, and have to be faced by, any new and incoming Government—they are not going away any time soon.

To move on, I agree with the conclusions of our report and think that their implications are very serious. All parties are promising to solve the housing crisis, but I am afraid that this will not be possible until we are all willing to have hard, honest and grown-up conversations about the challenges that we all face with the top, middle and front line of the machinery of the state, its fitness for purpose and its ability to deliver. Trust in our democracy depends on it. There is a desperate need for innovation, new ways of working and what I call a learning-by-doing culture at all levels of the state apparatus. But what does this look like in practice?

One very interesting piece of innovation that we heard about during our evidence sessions was from the Honourable Justice Brian Preston, Chief Judge of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales. Having done several speaking tours in Australia, I know that Australians can sometimes—given our shared history—unfairly feel a little dependent on the UK and often want to learn about our latest thinking and practice on this small island. In this case, I suspect we may have important lessons to learn from them, and rightly so. Justice Brian told us about the Land and Environment Court in New South Wales, of which he was the Chief Judge. It was established in 1979 by legislation. At that time, we were told that planning and environmental law was quite primitive and even incoherent—sound familiar? The resolution of planning and environmental disputes was dispersed between multiple institutions, not only courts and tribunals but boards and government bodies. If you had one dispute, you could go to six different courts, tribunals or boards. This led to delay, transaction costs, inconsistent decision-making and incoherence in the administration of the legislation. In New South Wales, there was a desire to rationalise this fragmentation process and bring everything into one place to create, in effect, a one-stop shop. The consequence, we were told, has been the much speedier resolution of conflicts.

There is so much more to say about the lessons that we can learn from the Australian approach but, frustratingly, we have not been given the time to have a proper discussion about it. The Secretary of State could learn a lot. This learning-by-doing environment—the 360-degree approach—may not be perfect but I suspect that it has much to teach us all. My question to the Minister is: what are we actually learning about how to resolve the tensions between environmental issues and housing, and how are we applying these lessons to practice?

Local Regeneration: Industrial Areas

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for initiating the debate. I know she cares a great deal about these issues and the local communities they affect, many of which are in very challenged circumstances.

I start with a telling story that encapsulates what happened in one of our former industrial areas. My mother died in Bradford, at 104 years of age, last June. She lived most of her life there, my hometown. Her father ran an ice cream shop in Oak Lane, just below the 27-acre site of what was then Lister Mills. It was originally a sweet shop, but my grandfather was so skilled at making brilliant ice cream, which he sold literally in bucketloads to thousands of workers at the mill, that the sweets and chocolates went the way of the world; he focused on what sold.

Some 150 people, mainly old Bradfordians, turned up at my mother’s 100th birthday party in 2018. She was still well networked from her armchair, through the use of her trusted telephone. The day before the party, I picked up an old brochure in Haworth, Brontë land, about the Bradford festival in 1931. Both my mother and father attended this amazing event in the city when they were at school, but they did not know each other at that time. Everyone was there—the mayor, the council, businesspeople and all the schools. My mother still remembered the excitement of it all.

In the brochure you got a real sense of the dynamic economy in Bradford at that time and a landscape defined by woollen mills and a culture of entrepreneurship. Bradford was described as the second most successful city outside London. I was told that, in 1931, Lister Mills had recently won the order for the velvet curtains for the White House—not bad. In my mother’s lifetime, this former industrial city, largely run by woollen entrepreneurs and successful businesspeople, fell to the position it holds today. What happened in one lifetime?

My colleagues and I have been working in Bradford over the last six years—I declare my interests—and I have returned to have a good look under the carpet. The first thing that strikes you is that there are still some amazing entrepreneurial people in Bradford. Pull back the carpet and you will find the Pakistani-owned cake business, in a back street, which has supplied more than 1 billion fairy cakes to Tesco. This baker then spent more than £1 million trying to restore and maintain a grade 2 listed mill complex of 400,000 square feet—impressive.

Six years ago, I was invited by the dean of Bradford Cathedral to speak at an evening event about our work in the East End of London and the Olympic legacy project, which was focused on the derelict rail and industrial lands in Stratford which I had been involved in from day one for 19 years. I described how in Bromley-by-Bow we had fostered an entrepreneurial culture against the odds in what was originally a failing group of housing estates, opposite what is now the Olympic park. The cathedral was packed. I then invited the massively impressive Bradford architect and business entrepreneur Amir Hussain to join me on stage. Amir had some really inspiring plans for some empty mills in the city, some of them still amazing industrial buildings but derelict. When I had finished my bit, Amir took us all through the list of Bradford’s former lord mayors, an amazing list of successful woollen entrepreneurs who were focused on building high-quality buildings, growing an industry that now had relationships across the world, and making theirs the best city in the country. They were practical Yorkshire people who invested in education, the arts and culture, and improved people’s lives and health. When Titus Salt, the former mayor, died, thousands of Bradfordians turned out for his funeral—again, not bad.

Amir then took us through the list of successful entrepreneurs in the city today, many of them women, many Asian and most of them young. How many of these practical, impressive people who were building and running businesses in the city were on the council today? The answer is none. Amir tells me that they were too busy running their businesses and being practical—very Yorkshire. These are serious questions. Who are we looking to if we want to rebuild our industrial sites and grapple with the broken machinery of the state? It is not the talkers; it has to be the doers. They are committed, practical people and the only ones who understand the real issues, precisely because they have done it. In my experience these people are everywhere, in plain sight, but our systems and processes often do not recognise them and have little understanding of their significance for a city. We need to find them, back them based on their track record and certainly resource them. We need to get interested in people again, not endless processes.

Those who are real doers are often slightly disruptive and, yes, difficult people who ask difficult questions. As a result, they tend not to be the people who are influencing the policies and details of national, regional or local government. As a result, we do not harness those with real skills, innovation and entrepreneurial flair. Therefore, unsurprisingly, government continues to underperform. It is all about people, not structures and policy. It is about those who act.

Amir Hussain, who I mentioned, runs a dynamic and innovative data technology company as one of several businesses in the city. He reflects on Lister Mills today, where an ambitious and incomplete apartment development has done little to stimulate regeneration. Not one new café, office or business can be attributed to the development, and the apartment values have slumped to less than half the original selling price despite many millions of pounds of government grant funding. Yet within this magnificent industrial complex reside sophisticated businesses such as Haddow, run by James Nimmo, producing textile designs for some of the biggest names in the world. Amir relates his shock at finding that there were more than 100 trendy young designers, as he called them, beavering away deep inside the old weaving sheds, in a scene reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but no one had noticed.

Compounding this, he told me, is the fact that our approach to data is inadvertently undermining places such as Bradford. During a collaborative meeting with the credit reference agency Experian, Amir had it analyse his own neighbourhood, just a mile away from Lister Mills. The findings were shocking. According to Experian, no one had any money, all were financially stretched and they predominantly shopped at discount stores, and therefore this area should be avoided by brands such as Nando’s, Costa, PureGym, et cetera. It was obvious to the practitioner Amir that something was very wrong, not least because there were people on his street owning brand-new Rolls-Royces. The fact that the area is 70% Pakistani Muslim had gone unnoticed. The data did not recognise that this demographic has different financial habits such as a greater use of cash, buying second and third houses, and building house extensions. In this community, the prevalence of gold shops and dessert parlours would be a far better indicator of financial capacity than credit card use.

Bradford is a success story because these people are there—I have met them, and they care about the future of their city—but I am afraid that the siloed systems and processes of the state are not fit for purpose. This city is not attracting serious, experienced and talented leadership, and when they come, they do not stay long. Who was the last Cabinet Secretary to visit Bradford who got under the carpet and took a look and an interest in these entrepreneurial people and the implementation issues they are facing as they attempt to make their businesses and their city a success? It is all about people and not process; it is about the quality of people such as Alan Bates, who cared for 20 years and got stuck in. There are people like Alan in Bradford, hiding in plain sight.

This all throws up difficult questions for all our political parties about the calibre and experience of the people they are selecting who claim to represent our cities and communities such as this one. What have many of them built? What have they done? What have they achieved in practice? Are they asking the right questions?

These questions also apply, of course, to your Lordships’ House. It has been suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, that a Peer of the realm should be chosen on “conspicuous merit”—not a bad measure, and a challenge to us all and to our political parties. Is this the benchmark we need for those who would claim to represent us at all levels?

I will finish by taking noble Lords to Fox Valley, in Stocksbridge, on the edge of Sheffield, where the paragon umbrella frame was invented. There, a local family who cared about where they lived—Mark Dransfield and his late wife, Deborah Holmes—took the risk of taking hold of a former derelict steelworks site, put their hard-earned money in, and grappled with the often very unhelpful machinery and infrastructure of the state. Hundreds of new jobs have been created there and many new businesses, new retail space and offices, and 115 new homes, with a thousand more planned. The centre is like a piece of theatre; so many community events happen there. I encourage noble Lords to go and have a look for themselves on the internet at the quality of this development. Go and visit and taste the quality of the food at Ponti’s restaurant—the first outside London. It is a great day out. My mother went, and she loved it.

Someone cared enough, someone took the long view, and someone took risks. It was Mark and Deborah. Joanna Lumley, who opened Fox Valley in 2016, said that she had never seen anything quite like it anywhere in the south of England: the attention to detail; a development that transformed a former steel town; a meeting place where work and leisure engage with high-quality public realm and architecture. Land that had laid derelict for 10 years, deepening the spiralling decline of the town, had become the catalyst for transformation—all down to two practical people who cared about where they lived.

In closing, I ask the Minister: what percentage of levelling-up funding has not actually been spent since its launch in 2020? Why might this be?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

As I have just agreed, I will come back to noble Lords with a response on this, and we can follow up in detail.

I will try to flip through a few points; I will not be able to do them justice, given that we have 45 seconds. The reality here is that there are lots of things going on. On the funding allocation through the towns fund, the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, asked how much has been spent. The towns fund, one of our flagship local growth funds, is on track to be spent by 2026, and the rates at which the projects are being completed is consistent with the delivery timelines we have already set out. We are aware that major regeneration projects take time to deliver, and it is expected that all the funds not spent at this point will be on track to be delivered.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, referred to the long-term plan for towns. Its key features include an allocative rather than a competitive process over a 10-year period, giving local authorities the flexibility to invest in interventions based on evolving local needs and priorities. I hope that helps with that. There were also various comments on transport. With regard to working with others in the community—the right reverend Prelate raised this—we have all sorts of answers we can give noble Lords. I will follow up in writing to many noble Lords.

I will conclude by saying that we recognise the scale of the challenge to regenerate former industrial areas. We believe wholeheartedly in their potential to thrive, not least because of the pride, spirit and resilience that these communities continue to show. I agree with all noble Lords that this is about people. We need to work hand in glove with local communities to make sure we deliver the regeneration they need. I look forward to continuing discussions and working with all noble Lords to deliver for these communities.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

Can I just make a correction? I asked about not the towns fund but the levelling up fund. Maybe the Minister can write to us and just tell us what percentage of money has actually been spent, and what that might tell us about the machinery of the state and its ability to deliver on any of this.

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

As a Minister in the department, I want to know that answer, so I will do that.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Ravensdale’s Amendment 504GG, which is practical and puts some real drive into our town centres.

I want to quote a colleague of mine from the north-west of England about her town centre, the fragmentation that she feels is going on and the opportunity being missed. She said:

“When I look at the 7”


connecting levelling-up schemes,

“what I feel is missing is the coherent and comprehensive consideration of the Old Town as a ‘place’. One ‘place’. A place where people live and have their businesses, not just somewhere people stop by to solely pop into the new health and education hub for an X-ray, or the new Buddhist temple for meditation or the new youth and arts provision or the upgraded theatre to watch a play. What I fear may happen is some lovely new buildings going up in amongst some really run down streets, which will surely only be made to look even worse. I get that the money available isn’t an endless pot. I get that a number of the properties have private landlords, but what I didn’t get is the approach and ambition of aiming to elevate the place as a whole. Many of the shops are vacant and the Council must be taking empty business rates from the landlords. I wonder if there is a strategy to bring those landlords into the debate about”

reconnecting the town,

“so that the 7 schemes aren’t just 7 pieces of a bigger jigsaw where”

the real opportunity

“has been lost!”

As I say, this amendment puts real drive and economic practicality into our town centres. I work a lot across the north of England and see a lot of fragmentation. Individual little schemes will not make a difference. There need to be real practical drivers, and what my noble friend Lord Ravensdale is suggesting is possibly one of them.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 491 in the name of my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage. Currently, most government funding for affordable housing focuses on net additionality of new homes. This is much needed but it can lead to a loss of development potential and a lack of investment in the physical quality of existing communities. Without housing-specific regeneration funding streams, regeneration is virtually impossible to fund in lower-value areas, where there is little scope for cross subsidy from market scaling.

Last week, Homes England published its strategic plan, emphasising a renewed focus on regeneration. It was welcome to see this plan recognise the key role that housing associations should play in place-making, as well as the importance of sustainability in new communities. However, there is a lack of clarity about whether this would be accompanied by new regeneration funding or a flexibility around the use of AHP funds to deliver regeneration. This amendment, which also seeks clarity over the Government’s regeneration proposals, would be a step in the right direction. At present, there is a lack of strategic direction in the Government’s plans to deliver housing-led regeneration, yet regeneration is crucial if the Government are serious about delivering their economic and skills agenda while also helping to deliver quality and sustainable affordable homes across the country.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, my colleagues and I have spent the last 14 months operating at the sharp end in challenging communities across the country. We can see in detail what is happening outside the Chamber. We have been taking the principles and learning from the last 36 years of practical work in challenging communities in east London, and in the Olympic Park, into challenging communities initially in the north of England, and now nationally, through the Well North programme. With local people and public and business sector partners, we have created innovation platforms in towns and cities across the country, which focus on practice at the front edge of the issues that this Queen’s Speech addresses. I declare my interests.

I welcome the focus in the Queen’s Speech on levelling up in health, innovation, skills and infrastructure, and the attempt to bring together funding streams and create a more integrated approach. This is the right direction of travel. However, some of us have been here before and the proof of the pudding will be in the detail and implementation. The UK has not always had a good track record of translating Bills into effective, transformational programmes. My colleagues and I have the grey hairs to prove it. We have tried before to bend other funding schemes developed by our Civil Service, which has often failed to grasp the practical realities at the front end.

Looking at the levelling-up fund and more broadly, I ask the Minister the following questions, in a spirit of willingness to help him and his colleagues learn from real, practical experience on the ground, gained over many years. First, are the Government going to be a learning organisation? Have they looked at what has worked well and what has not in previous regeneration programmes? Can the Minister share the insights that his department has learned from its experience of running previous programmes, when putting together the levelling-up fund and other build back better programmes? We all now need to get very interested in practitioners, not talkers and commentators.

Secondly, is there sufficient focus on joining the dots in the integration of funding streams and services, and bringing together other partners, for example from health, education, and the private and social sectors? Are we willing to learn from best practice in the place-making space? My colleagues and I are working with some of the largest businesses in the country, and the public sector, in precisely this space. We are happy to share our practical learning and point to the blockages that are preventing real change in some of our most challenged communities.

Thirdly, is there sufficient focus on change and innovation, and entrepreneurial approaches to transformation, in projects that deliver quality and excellence in our most challenged communities? Many Civil Service processes, we have noticed over the years, are great at putting old men in new clothes. Little changes: real learning and transformation rarely happen. Our inner cities are littered with previous short-term three-year government and lottery-funded programmes that came to very little because they were not built on and did not take the long view. Does government understand that pumping money into some situations can drive perverse decision-making? Are this Government serious about moving beyond business as usual? It is a sign of madness to repeat the same processes and expect different results.

Fourthly, as the taps are turned on and money is spent, is government going to be interested in the people question this time? Will we be looking at the leaders, backers and bidders and their practical track records? Will we learn from the best? Will we be concerned about the individuals who will be responsible for these programmes and plans—not just process, strategy and plan? The modern entrepreneurial world is all about people and relationships before structures; does our Civil Service understand this? Can we learn from the UK’s Covid vaccine programme—the best in the world, because key people with key skills and experience were empowered to get on with it? How can we learn that lesson?

I ask the Minister to consider all of these points when considering the large shared prosperity fund, which will replace the EU structural funds. Could he ensure that the voluntary and social enterprise sectors are not precluded from being invited to bid for these large-scale government programmes, as well as public bodies? In some parts of the country, the Government might want to ask themselves: are the public sector and local government actually up to the task? Do they have the necessary skills and insights to do transformation—or are the limitations of local government and the public sector, and the calibre of their people and their limited insights and skills, actually preventing transformation and the development of a more entrepreneurial culture?

There is a lot to play for. My colleagues and I want to support this Government at this important time, but the devil in the detail really matters.