Future of Seaside Towns

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and the clerks for a very well-run committee. It was an enjoyable experience. We did some very useful digging into some of the issues faced by our seaside towns. It is one of the better committees that I have sat on. The amount of interest from local communities across the country and in the media was encouraging. The visits programme was particularly useful and instructive.

My colleagues and I have spent 35 years on the inside of the regeneration game. We have lived through and engaged with eight different Governments and tried with them all to be practical and pragmatic, building working relationships and making things work. In committees, we have not sat on top of the machinery, reading papers and looking down; we have purposefully placed ourselves in the middle of the machinery, and tried to join it up and make it work. We have the long view from the inside and the grey hairs to prove it.

We have also stayed focused in one housing estate in east London for all this time, so we have seen first-hand what happens as endless three-year policy initiatives pass through the poorest and most challenged communities in this country, with the latest bright idea from a Minister intent on making their mark. Of course, they never stay around long enough to see the consequences of their actions. We have many successful regeneration projects—some small, some very big—under our belts in the real world. The organic people-focused approach that helped us to get them there looks like the approach taken in the mythical town of Seaminster.

In Bradford we are bringing together with the local community a £22 million, 24/7, health, leisure, enterprise and community cluster development opposite the local teaching hospital in a mainly Pakistani area that has all the challenges we have been looking at in coastal towns. The Seaminster approach, or something similar to it, is one that we are trying to encourage. It starts with people and relationships rather than process, strategy and consultation so favoured by our civil servants.

It is interesting if you move beyond the usual ideological rhetoric that so often in practice undermines communities such as these and initiate an entrepreneurial culture focused on the principles set out in our report how quickly key players in the local community—the teaching hospital, the council, the business community—turn up at your door and start to create what we call a “sticky ball” that money, opportunity and people can start to stick to and connect with. We call that approach communities in business as distinct from a community in committee. I declare my interest as chairman of the Social Business Well North enterprises.

My reflections today are concerned with the inner workings of this regeneration machinery, the inside view. My colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that large parts of this government machinery are fundamentally not fit for purpose in a modern enterprise economy. The noble Lord, Lord Best, illustrated an aspect of this in his helpful presentation on housing. We have seen a lot of evidence that confirms this, yet on the ground in practice it seems that little changes.

The insights given to us by Chris Baron, the resort director of Butlins in Skegness, with his 500,000 visitors a year—the biggest private sector employer in the area—focused our minds. He told us of the key role his business played in supporting local employment, skills and training, and of his ambition for the company to offer more people more work across 52 weeks of the year. Yet recent changes in the national apprenticeship scheme were presenting real challenges. The basics of the scheme the Government had created did not work for him. I have heard this from other business people across the country. The latest national apprenticeship scheme—which could if it worked properly make a massive difference for the employment of young people in the town in an impressive business—was in practice preventing the very relationships that he needed to make it work.

We were also told by the public sector committee that we met in Skegness that there were real challenges working with partners at a national level; that national objectives, frameworks and guidelines did not always fit with local need; that there was a need for recognition of the length of time that development projects take and that those involved need to be able to plan over the long term. They of course failed to tell us, though, that every school in the town was in special measures. These disconnects are serious for the next generation.

A retired and disillusioned chartered engineer from Hornsea told us in his written evidence, which captured his frustration:

“We need our ‘stolen’ infrastructure to be restored before this area can be regenerated. Whilst as individuals we do our best, the local council does not encourage cooperation”.


Just after our report was launched I was rung up by a BBC journalist, Polly Weston, who had been given a brief to choose any postcode in the country and just turn up and see what was happening. She had landed in Ferryside, a small coastal seaside town in Wales. She had been listening online to our committee’s deliberations and was interested in the points I was making about the disconnects that were taking place across siloed governance structures, particularly in this case with regard to the Coastal Communities Fund. When I described our experiences over many years of the disconnects in the machinery she told me that this was exactly what was happening in Ferryside with the Coastal Communities Fund.

An academic who had recently moved locally was good at filling in government grant forms. He played the game and ticked all the boxes and secured a great deal of government funding. The programme, called the Patch, then takes you through the realities of what then happened on the ground as a consequence of this approach: namely, the wastage of money and the unintended consequences—a micro-story that you could replicate a thousand-fold across seaside towns. Polly told me how local people could not understand why money had been given for this rather eccentric project rather than supporting the struggling local school, for example. It turned out that the grant was from the Coastal Communities Fund, a joint initiative between the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Big Lottery to support projects that create new and sustainable—that is, long-lasting—jobs. This programme has spent £174 million on 295 projects UK-wide. It sounds excellent—except that, when Polly dug deeper, she found that it had not been evaluated and that the one and only project that those running the scheme could give as a successful example had already closed.

It is a classic example of the best intentions failing as a result of the assumptions made in the way it was implemented. Was it likely that civil servants and lottery officers would be able to pick successful entrepreneurs they often had not even met, in places they knew little about and probably had not even visited? I am sure that they all had lots of qualifications and degrees—but perhaps very little nous. It is the same mistake we make over and over again. You want to invest in a business in a small seaside town. How about getting experienced entrepreneurs to spend some time in it, get a feel for what is happening, what is what, who is making a real difference, spread the word and then invite people to come and pitch? We say that it is not about structures and processes. It is all about people meeting people and making judgments—on that basis primarily—and not on reports and papers. To me as a Yorkshireman it seems blindingly obvious and very straightforward, and I confess that I struggle to understand why anyone thought the approach taken with this fund—like so many others—would work.

We heard from the northern powerhouse initiative and the confident assertions of the Minister, Jake Berry MP, at the top of government; yet on the ground you hear a different story and real scepticism in our coastal communities that any of these fine words or money will get to them or make any difference, particularly in coastal communities and other communities outside our large northern cities. The LEP structures have clearly been a mixed bag when it comes to their effectiveness. Some say that many of them are neither local, enterprising or a good partner to work with—a mixed bag.

Another sad example is the difficulties the Heritage Lottery has got itself into by backing a charity to run Hastings pier, focusing on process rather than people and skills, I wonder whether the heritage assessors really knew about running a business on a pier. Did they get to know and assess the people who are going to run it or just focus on a business plan—which, as everyone who has ever run a business usually knows, falls apart on about day 10, and then you start again based on your actual experience rather than on assumptions. This is sad because it sets up people to fail and makes it harder it for the people who then have to try to turn things around.

The clues as to what we should do in the macro in our coastal communities are in the micro—in the opportunities we have seen. It is not about strategies, policies and research, so favoured by our civil servants. The modern world is all about people and opportunities. We have seen and met some of these amazing people who are doing this stuff—often despite rather than because of—in our coastal towns. We need to back them. We need to get behind the Lagoon project in Hull long term, or the approach of Hemingway’s multidisciplinary design agency, which told us that it transforms and cares about the detail as much as the big stuff: an important clue here. It believes in the power of culture-led regeneration and it achieves this through an inclusive process that it calls co-design. Wayne Hemingway was born in the coastal town of Morecambe and the Hemingway family home is by the sea. They say they have a stake in the coastline: another clue here.

However, how are these important traits weighted when it comes to government procurement? Very little, I suggest—yet they are in my experience an important key to success. Their passion was clear to the committee. The noble Lord, Lord Grade, rightly commented on it with some amusement. Their work in Boscombe, Margate and Morecambe is impressive. Jan Leandro of the Dreamland Trust said of them:

“It was like trying to paint with fog until Hemingway Design came along”.


There are many others like them. We have met them.

The engineers BuroHappold told us:

“The key thing that we have learned is that good partnership working takes time. Often it is about being on a journey for the long haul. Critical also has been our teams on the ground, working with local people who know the area and who understand the connections”.


More important clues here.

So what is the solution? How do we stop wasting so much taxpayers’ money, spraying resources at problems down these outdated silos with little care for the long term? If as parents we gave up on our children at the age of three, on the basis that three years should be old enough to deliver sustainable transformation, they would not reach adulthood and the evaluation would show that our method of procreation was clearly flawed and that we should stop. Yet the state is getting away with this and none of the present people putting themselves forward to lead this country seems to have even noticed the problem. Maybe because many of our political leaders are living their lives in the Westminster bubble and have little practical experience on the ground, and are aided and abetted by the media, they are asking the wrong questions or no questions at all about these important matters. Thus they are being found out by the electorate, who experience every day these realities.

We have seen clear clues as to what must be done. The 10 principles for successful regeneration are set out in the report and can be applied anywhere. Local leaders need to stop waiting and blindly following central government; they need to be encouraged to be bold and back the stones that roll locally. The clues are in the micro: stop looking upwards, look outwards. The Seaminster story is full of clues. It is organic, it is all about people and relationships and it is about partnerships. It is long term.

Finally, it is time to get practical, generate a culture that learns by doing, dump lots of ideology that does not work in practice and back a new generation of entrepreneurs in our coastal towns. It is time to understand, get inside these communities and let a thousand flowers bloom.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I have just come out of a meeting this afternoon. I chair the regeneration and communities committee on the Olympic Park. I have been involved with the Olympic Park from the very beginning; I think this is year 18. We have been on a very long journey. Along with a colleague I wrote the document for Hazel Blears that eventually led to the setting up of the Olympic Park Legacy Company, which of course now is a corporation. So one has watched and been involved in all the detail of what is now happening in Stratford in east London, which is a very exciting cluster development. This afternoon we have seen a new school at Here East, businesses and housing all coming together.

There are one or two cautionary lessons. First, local authorities can be very good if you have the right leadership in place to drive them, but if you do not then very different things can go on. It is all about the people, not structures. I know from experience that local authorities, if they are not so good, can be warring factors and can play lots of politics around these things that do not deliver the best quality but sometimes undermine that.

Secondly, we have learned that it is important to have the right serious business partners on the board of the corporation who, together with public sector leaders and leaders in the social enterprise sector, buy into a narrative over a long period of time; and that getting the top, middle and bottom of these institutions to buy and act out that narrative is important as well.

Ultimately, it is all about people and relationships. Our experience suggests that giving local control is very important, but I suggest that it is not just about local authorities—it is about the relationships between people in business, the public sector and, particularly, the community sector. Sometimes local authorities can talk as though they represent and understand the local community, but I have found over the years that that might not actually be true. It is about the right relationships, the right people and the right experience around the table.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have participated in the debate on Amendment 2. I thank particularly the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, for moving it, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Best. I thank them both and indeed other noble Lords for their time and commitment on this issue and for the opportunity to discuss this matter. We have discussed it both in Committee and on Report, and I have been heartened to hear the support for the measure from across the Chamber.

This amendment seeks to support the creation of locally led garden towns and villages by enabling the responsibility for any development corporation created under the New Towns Act 1981 to be transferred to a local authority or authorities, covering all or part of the area designated for the new town or village. On the point made by my noble friend Lord Porter, I think the definition is broad enough to include unitary authorities; that is certainly the intention. On a different point about combined authorities that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, of course we can create mayoral development corporations in relation to the new combined authorities—we did so with Teesside a couple of weeks ago—so that could well be part of the deal with the new authority. However, along with other noble Lords, I would want to think carefully in conjunction with the combined authorities as to whether they wanted to take that power on. I think I am right in saying, although I may be wrong, that the designated garden towns and villages do not come within the purview of what at the moment is projected as a combined authority, but it is a point well made. Therefore, I would like to go away to ponder this and give a fuller response to the noble Lord, if I may, copying it to noble Lords who participated in the debate and putting a copy in the Library.

The aim of the amendment is entirely consistent with those of the Bill. The Government certainly support it and I thank in particular the noble Lord, Lord Best, for his pre-emptive congratulations on the Government’s support. The amendment is very consistent with the approach of the Government, the department and the recently published White Paper in relation to the importance of localism.

I take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, about the importance of ensuring that all local authorities have the right attitude to these things. We hope that is accomplished through elections but the broad principle of it being done locally must be right. That has been echoed throughout the contributions on this legislation as it has gone through the House: local is better. We know that a number of local authorities—for example, those in north Essex—are interested in taking advantage of the new opportunity that the amendment would provide to support a new generation of locally led garden towns and villages, the 21st-century heirs to Letchworth and Welwyn.

I also welcome the support of the Local Government Association and the kind words of my noble friend Lord Porter for the principle behind the amendment. I am very pleased that it commands wide support throughout the House. This is a simple principle; making it work in practice will require detailed modifications to the New Towns Act, which my department will develop. We will want to keep in close contact with the noble Lords, Lord Taylor and Lord Best, both of whom I thank very much for the impetus and enthusiasm they have given this and the expertise they bring to the table. I pause at this stage to pay tribute to their work as effective champions of this issue throughout discussions on the Bill.

In conclusion, I am very pleased to support the noble Lord’s amendment, which will help to fulfil an important White Paper commitment.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor]

My Lords, I shall respond very briefly. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Best, for all his support and encouragement, not only on this Bill but previously. I should also thank my noble friend Lady Parminter, who was in the Chamber but has had to go, for moving an amendment for me on Report that enabled this matter to be brought forward.

We have had a promise from the Minister to come back on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. I should make it clear that the intention is absolutely that more than one local authority can be involved. We need to explore the mechanism for that and hear what the Minister has to say, but the ability for more than one authority to come together is here. I therefore imagine that in practice nothing would stand in the way of the point that was raised.

On the point of the noble Lord, Lord Porter, about unitary authorities, the intention is that they should be covered. Indeed, having worked very hard to support the creation of a unitary authority in Cornwall, I would be horrified if I had managed in any way to get the drafting wrong on that point, but I believe it is covered.

I absolutely take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and thank him for his support. In my comments, I talked about the fact that although the mechanism is here for local authorities to take a leadership role, the expectation is absolutely for a partnership approach. I thought quite hard about how one might look at the structures of a corporation. It is very important that this is not a 1950s or 1960s view, whereby a local authority chief executive is appointed and gets on with the job. The world has moved on since then. My view has always been that you need, as we see in Europe and in the States, a master developer and a master planner; you need expertise and business experience.

I chair a joint strategic board for the Carclaze garden village, which has been many years in gestation. The key thing has been to bring together the local authority, the private sector-led development body and the landowner in a partnership. That partnership has been incredibly successful. It took the development through the recession after 2008. The developer is Egyptian-owned, so the partnership took it through the storms of the Arab spring in terms of its financing. It is now in front of planning, and I think will be delivered. That has been possible only because we have built a really strong partnership between all parties, including the private sector, so there is a very deep experience of people creating fantastic places for business reasons, as well as the very important experience of the council representing people and understanding the processes of local government. There has been a great partnership with the HCA as well.

I could not agree more with the noble Lord’s comments. That is why, although this provision uses the powers of the New Towns Act, it is very much in a 21st century setting—and that is not just about localism; it is about partnership between all the stakeholders. I also make the point that it is about holding people to promises, because too often people see wonderful designs at the stage when something is proposed, but the moment when it is allocated or an outline is commissioned, it is traded and traded and, somehow, it gets watered down and not delivered. That experience is important for business, too.

[Lord Mawson]

I welcome that, and I absolutely agree with the noble Lord. The Civil Service finds it very hard to understand—and I think that the noble Lord is saying the same thing—that what really matters is having people around the table from different sectors who care about the place and are going to stay on this journey a very long time. It takes a long time to deliver these things and it is very difficult, but it is all about having the right people—people who care.

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor]

In every case when I have advised on new settlements coming forward, I have advised local authorities, councillors and communities but also those promoting the project to establish the basis of the joint venture and partnership for delivery of the original objectives and to hold people to it. It is only by getting everyone around the table jointly to discuss that—again, that is the case at Carclaze—at every key stage, whether in looking at the master plan and working out how to deliver affordable housing and quality, wherever the ultimate power may lie to take the decision, that we have all been jointly involved in coming to the right conclusion. That is what these bodies achieve; they are, ultimately, about keeping it honest, but they are also about getting it delivered. The noble Lord clearly has that experience in the Olympic context, and we need that experience in each of these initiatives.

The last thing that we want is to create bland housing estates in the countryside, not great communities. If we do the former, the project will die very quickly, and public enthusiasm will disappear; if we get it right, people will clamour for what are actually the intentions of the 1947 planning Act, when people talked about stopping suburban sprawl, rejuvenating cities and towns and building new communities to meet the needs of those who could not be housed. This is about returning to those objectives and putting back under control the suburban sprawl that we see once again too often around our historic towns and cities. It is a new option and a better one.

I thank the Minister very much for his supportive comments. We have worked very closely on getting this right.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Thursday 23rd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak in this debate, but having listened to the noble Baroness, having spent a large part of my working life in housing estates in the East End of London and having been responsible as a clergyman for dealing with the families of people who suffered from the social and economic devastation of a lot of the housebuilding of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been an absolute disaster, I worry a great deal when I hear politicians on all sides talking yet again about building more and more houses without talking about communities and place making. I am speaking to enforce absolutely what the noble Baroness has said. It is really important that we do not yet again allow the machinery of government, which has not changed since those days, to continue to be in real danger of repeating, with the best will the world, all the same mistakes with developers—many of whom I worked with and who are good people, actually. It is really important that we talk about place making and communities, and not just about building houses.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for moving the amendment in the second group, and the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Mawson, for their participation.

I can reassure my noble friend that the Government agree that development is about far more than just building homes—a point that the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, has just made very forcefully. It is about creating communities, and the essence of this piece of legislation, as we all affirmed when it was going through Committee, is not just about building more houses, although clearly as a nation we need to do that, but about ensuring that it is done at an appropriate local level and giving strength to communities. That is the essence of this legislation.

The recent housing White Paper is clear that communities need roads, rail links, schools, shops, GP surgeries, libraries, parks, playgrounds and a sustainable natural environment. Without this infrastructure, no new community will thrive, and no existing community will welcome new housing if it places further strain on already stretched local resources. I agree with that general point. It is very central to the legislation.

A key benefit of neighbourhood planning is that it enables local communities to provide a long-term strategy for housebuilding so that they can manage when and where homes are built in their local area. Depending on the local situation, the process may include consideration of the likely impact of proposed site allocation options or policies on physical infrastructure, such as the local roads network, and on the capacity of existing services, which could help shape decisions on the best site choices. That provision of local infrastructure could well justify phasing the delivery of development. It may also require neighbourhood planning groups to consider phasing the delivery of development to ensure that they have a realistic plan for delivering their housing policy within required timescales with the right facilities available for the community.

At this point, I must thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. We are beginning to know each other so well in these exchanges that he is able to speak not only for the Opposition but for the Government—I know he is after my job, but there are limits. Neighbourhood planning groups are already able to phase development. We would encourage that, although it has to be appropriate to the circumstances of the local community. It must be backed up by clear evidence as to why there should be a restriction on when a specific site or sites should come forward for development. It should be evidence based, and we would all accept that. This is because we want as a nation to ensure the proposals are deliverable.

I agree with all the sentiments expressed in the debate, but I remind noble Lords that this facility is available at the moment. Provided it is evidence backed, it makes sense and is what local neighbourhood groups should be doing. The Government firmly believe that these matters are best dealt with by local communities and their local planning authority working together, as they are best placed to make decisions that affect their local area. With that reassurance, I ask my noble friend respectfully to withdraw her amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mawson]

My Lords, I was not going to intervene but this is a very important conversation in relation to this microexperience and the behaviour of the examiner, who I am sure is a very good and honourable person. However, this is not just about him or her building a relationship with the people on the ground who know the detail of the situation. I suspect that this is a clue to much wider things going on in our society. I have seen this all over the country and am experiencing it in 10 towns and cities in the north of England in which I am actively involved. Lateral conversations are taking place between the Government, civil servants, policymakers, academics and so on. Those conversations are profoundly out of date and do not cut through into real situations with real people, real places and real relationships. The modern world in which we live is all about people and relationships. It is not about systems, process and policy. I suggest that if government could find a way to encourage far more of these kinds of relationships to develop in relation to this microproblem, we might find a way to take the communities of this country into the new more entrepreneurial world we need to build within which they are active partners, not people who simply have something done to them.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, Amendments 3 and 4 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, carry on the same purpose of the amendments we have so far discussed today, which is to protect as far as possible the views and decisions that have been agreed locally. Where they are challenged, reviewed or modified, as far as possible the broad principles of what has been agreed locally should be kept on the table and changes that are deemed necessary should be sought within that framework and everything should not be thrown out and not taken account of. That is the broad thrust of these amendments.

These amendments seek to give local people a voice in a part of the process that can often appear very remote and where they may feel that they are powerless to affect the decisions that are being taken over decisions they have reached over a long period, working with the community, and over which they feel considerable ownership.

We all agree that we need more housing. I think that is something we can all agree on. But surely it must be better if we can agree on getting the homes built where we need them. Therefore, Amendment 3 seeks to include in the Bill a procedure whereby the local neighbourhood forum or parish council has the ability to appraise the examiner of what it is seeking to do and has the right to attend and contribute to any meetings that the examiner calls locally. It goes on further to require the examiner to provide a draft report and to have to consider any representations that are made before issuing the final report. I think that is a very sensible way of doing business which must surely lead to fewer disputes and fewer situations where local communities feel that they have put a lot of work into developing a neighbourhood plan only for it to be torn up, and they have had no ability to influence that process. Therefore, I certainly support these amendments.

As regards the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, I say to him that I grew up on a council estate in Southwark in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, I have some understanding of council housing and of some of the problems that have arisen. I am keen that we should build communities when we build new houses and that we do not make the mistakes that were made in the past. There was a lot of expectation and hype about the White Paper but then it seemed to disappear with a bit of a whimper. We will see what comes back on that but we need to look at building more council housing. I am not sure that we got that in the White Paper. Living in London, I know about the affordable rent model. I have told the House many times that when I walk to the station to come to the House of Lords, I look in my local estate agent’s window and am shocked that people pay considerably more in rent than I pay for my mortgage on my little terraced house—indeed, something like twice as much. I do not understand how people can bring up their families when paying those levels of rent. I think back to the rent that my parents paid. They were still able to afford to send their children on school trips, look after them properly, buy them clothes and pay for the family to go on holiday. It is very difficult for families to do that now, especially in property hotspots, particularly London. I hope that I am wrong about the White Paper and that a lot of social housing will be built. However, that is not evident to me from what I have seen so far.