Integration and Community Cohesion

Lord Mendelsohn Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for introducing this debate and for her excellent, thoughtful and wonderfully personal speech. I also welcome my noble friend Lord Rook and look forward to his maiden speech.

An extraordinary honour befalls me: to congratulate my noble friend Lord Raval on his outstanding maiden speech, which illustrated the important and powerful way in which he will flourish in the work of this House. I had the privilege to be one of my noble friend’s introducers. He is a remarkable individual. He read law at Cambridge and remains attached to the institution today, serving as a member of the faculty of divinity. He had a very distinguished business career as an organisational consultant and chose to use the skills that he had honed in the private sector to give back to the community. He created Faith in Leadership, a UK-based organisation which now operates internationally, to create an inclusive community of private and public leaders working together for the benefit of the community. The philosophy is, to quote my noble friend:

“Faith leadership is the resource for humanizing and reconciling the world we live in”.


It is a theme which we fully appreciate in his words today and for which he was also recognised with the honour of an OBE in 2018.

My noble friend has worked tirelessly with the emerging and existing leadership of the faith communities in our country and is highly regarded and trusted by all. He is also a very proud member of the British Indian community and is steeped in understanding of the powerful and valuable cultures of the diaspora communities. The late, great Rabbi Hugo Gryn used to say that there were harmonisers and polarisers. We are grateful to have one of our country’s great harmonisers now gracing our Benches, and with clearly a great contribution to make.

This is an important debate and I look forward to all the contributions. I will just raise two areas, and put some questions to the Minister. One of the great challenges we have is how we protect and develop our diverse and cohesive democracy: a challenge that is not unique to our country. It is regrettably clear that open and inclusive approaches to society do not automatically lead to these outcomes. Indeed, we must always work at it to protect our democracy and build in resilience. The challenges we face cover many areas: how we build a society of common values, rights and responsibilities, and how we draw in different communities and underpin their economic and social needs.

Secondly, we must also ensure the integration of communities and how they develop, understand and achieve their place in society. Thirdly, we must bear down on extremism, especially on those whose actions tear the fabric of a cohesive society and whose perceptions of the exercise of their rights not just undermines the well-being of another community but stretches the culture of democracy. Where these issues arise, the number of agencies and parts of the country involved provides illustrates that the key to the success of any of this work will be the capacity of the Government to join it all up. I believe this subject is worthy of being one of the missions of this Government. Of course, I am not asking them to add to the existing five they are already focusing on, but I stress that this does need a whole-of-government approach.

I appreciate that the Minister is from one department, and I am not seeking at this time to sketch out a new job description for him. I know—and many in this Chamber will know, from their experience—of his very active and strong engagement with many Members of this House on these issues. But I would be very grateful if the Minister would outline how the department is working with others on this task across government. In particular, I would be grateful to know how the Home Office and his department are working together—especially as there seems to have been a slight change in those arrangements—and whether we are connecting all the different parts that are required for effective work on community cohesion.

Secondly, last March, Dame Sara Khan produced a report for the Government on social cohesion and resilience which covered many important areas. Its recommendations were very broad and dealt with a number of different agencies and parts of government. I would be grateful if the Minister would give the House an update on whether this Government have reviewed the report, whether they are going to make a substantive comment on it and whether they are going to support its recommendations. In particular, I would be very grateful if the Minister would comment on the recommendation for an office for social cohesion and democratic resilience, on the need for a five-year strategy on this and on the creation of a cross-Whitehall cohesion response unit.

I sense that my noble friend Lord Raval is among a good crowd of harmonisers in the Chamber today, and I hope that the Minister will take on board many of the matters and observations we raise in this debate. I hope the Government will strongly reflect on them and know that within this Chamber there is a strong group of people who are keen to work together in a cohesive way to build resilience and cohesion in our society.

Homes: Existing Communities

Lord Mendelsohn Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am a shareholder in Next plc. I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise, because he has just shown himself, as ever, to be a very big thinker. He is certainly the most gifted and capable business leader of our generation, but his speech also showed that he has big thoughts and a real view about how these things can be delivered as well, which will be one of my themes. I hope the Minister will consider what the noble Lord said very carefully and will invite him in: I would have been more than happy had this turned into an “hour for short lecture” for the noble Lord to outline all his plans, but I am happy to hear the contributions of others as well, as well as to make some very elementary points that I feel are important.

The first is that I think the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise, makes an important point about the impact of housing developments on others. In the communities that we are looking to build, we have to be absolutely clear that the infrastructure is there. It is not just about the economic incentives, which I think are absolutely clear and were outlined very well in the last speech, over the nature of the planning system and the level of costs that it brings, but many of the challenges we face in social cohesion and belief in fairness have all played to the problems caused by development not having the critical infrastructure that is necessary to accompany the extension of wider housing opportunities—GPs, schools and other critical services. Those things have to be planned as well, not just the construction of housing but creating the right incentives for other forms of structure to be there.

Certainly, the Government have done a good job in trying to set the direction on increasing housing supply. They have a significant housing target, a muscular approach to land usage and are putting pressure on local authorities, but it is not enough, because housing targets are huge: 1.5 million over three years is a very significant number, and my concern is that it would be more reasonable to suggest that we could do 3 million over 10 years. It is very hard to deliver 1.5 million over five years for a number of reasons, not least the employment situation in the construction industry and the skills that are necessary to reach that sort of level. Not only that, but we have a huge balance of public sector versus private sector-led development to be able to wash out, and we do not yet have the economics to do that. The private sector is key to this, as is making sure that the private sector has the right incentives to do it.

Here, the planning system is critical. The data says that there were 15,000 planning officers in 2010 and 12,000 in 2020. I, for one, do not feel that this adequately reflects the problems in planning departments. It may well be that there was a drop of only 3,000 but, from my experience of planning issues, it is very significant to see that the length of time in which people are planning officers, where they are brought in and where they are from has changed substantially. I suspect that that involves a huge amount of churn, because the number of full-time planning officers in planning departments that I have dealt with has dropped much more markedly, which makes planning much more complex.

Any plan we have to massively increase housing supply will have to have a real sense about the timings and synchronicity of the plan, the delivery adjacencies, the people challenges and whether we can get the agencies and the role of the state in the right place, and there will be a price to pay, which unfortunately the Government will have to make sure that they can meet. The noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise, extends the point by saying that if we were to have some very strong advanced principles in this, that would certainly also set the right direction for the future.