Communities

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, it is my very pleasant duty to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord True, on his maiden speech. When I looked at his CV I discovered that, in his relationship with the Liberal Democrats in Richmond, he has been someone who—as his colleagues have described best—has exchanged heavy blows with relish, punched his own weight and could take a shot, but who was also a gentleman afterwards. The borough of Richmond, Surrey is well represented among the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, but it was actually a clean fight down there. That relationship is probably something on which the noble Lord will go far in this House and in Parliament, and I congratulate him on that.

It is also very unusual to welcome to this House someone who probably knows more about it than do some who have been here for more than 20 years. That degree of knowledge and grounding in local politics will be extremely useful to this House. It will, I hope, build up the sum of knowledge and the ability to reach out which is so necessary for this House. I again congratulate the noble Lord on his speech. It was good and thoughtful. We hope to hear many more such speeches from him, because we can use them.

The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, introduced a thoughtful and considerate discussion on the backdrop which makes the big society necessary. Over the years, by accident and by design, problems have arisen in society whereby people have allowed society to disintegrate and some unacceptable behaviour to become the norm. It is also true that, when dealing with these problems, the perception can often be far worse than the reality; it depends on who and where you are and what has happened to you personally. The noble Baroness's experiences in life will of course give her deeper insight into what can really go wrong, but how can the rest of us get involved?

The central theme of what the noble Baroness said is the fact that we have to take on much of this responsibility ourselves, and that the Government have to allow that to happen. When I was reading about the report, some of the comments said that however local the activity, volunteer-based groups cannot do all the work themselves. There is a balance here, aimed primarily at ensuring that we allow volunteers to grow. We should provide the fertile soil for these fertile ideas to bloom in.

How is that done? Regulation is a great thing for bashing. We are all against regulation—or, rather, every single one of us is against regulations that inconvenience us but not against regulations that do not inconvenience us and that we think might be a good idea in order to stop someone doing something that we do not like. That is the eternal balance.

We all want to have a drink in a pub now and again. Some of us may think that closing time, to take an extreme example, should be 12 am on a Friday or a Saturday, but if you happen to live on that pub’s main exit route on the way home you will have a different point of view. I have been in both camps. Unless we try to balance that and make that interaction more positive, we are going to get it wrong; we will always lurch from the red-top tabloid description of what is going on—“Society is never going to be the same again”—to the reaction against it from the killjoys, often in the same newspaper on the same day. The two sides are constantly getting at each other. You can imagine the editors of these newspapers or programmes saying, “Now, how much coverage are we going to have about overregulation and how much saying that it’s disgusting and shouldn’t be allowed?”. In the middle there is usually a revelation about the love life of someone whom you have never heard of.

This is something that we have to try to get a hold of in adult ways. It struck me as I was researching this that it is important not to allow areas to be thought of as forgotten, as not counting. Much of the work that has gone on around here has concentrated on little things, like ensuring that rubbish is not allowed to sit on the streets for any length of time. We tackle things like fly-tipping, and involvement from local government, or possibly even other forms of government, allows that to happen. We get involved and that creates a better atmosphere.

If you do not like teenagers sitting on a corner of the street, you make sure that they have somewhere else to go at reasonable times of day. Wearing my other hat, I worry about sport; if you say, “No, we can’t have anyone noisily kicking a ball around. No ball games”, and then wonder why they are kicking a can around and shouting at you, you have created that situation yourself. By denying them a chance for personal responsibility, society has created the problem. If you say that you are going to provide somewhere that a game of football or basketball can take place, if it is well lit and if local law enforcement officers come round, have a chat, have a look and go away again at regular times, you will probably have a safer environment to allow people to interact than you would have otherwise, even if it is slightly noisy and there are a few teenagers outside. If those officers do that job properly, you will probably have an interchange of information that will make it less likely that there will be unreported crime. If, however, you simply turn around and say, “No, someone doesn’t like the noise”, you have enhanced the problem.

We are always going to find this balancing act difficult. It is as important to ensure that community groups have a place to meet and interact as it is for teenagers—they should not have to rely on meeting in someone’s crowded house—but those groups will require support, effort and back-up. Unless the noble Baroness’s ideas are allowed to flourish in a positive environment, unless you allow this space, all the good ideas will come to nothing.

When I started looking at this, I considered talking about the importance of other groups apart from amateur sports clubs. They are my favourite because they embody much of what is good in society. Any amateur association that brings people together, whether that be for train-spotting or for amateur dramatics, and gives them some sense of responsibility for themselves, is something of a model. If you can encourage these groups and allow them to function, and if local government is encouraged to allow them to function, you have taken two steps forward: the first by example, and the second by providing a focus.

I do not have to tell politicians that if you get a bunch of people together who know how to organise, every now and then the problem is to get them to stop organising. We have to try to allow these things to happen. Hopefully, the noble Baroness’s report is the start of an ongoing process that will allow us to get the best out of what naturally happens and to take what can happen everywhere into everywhere.