Homes: Existing Communities

Lord Godson Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise, for securing this debate, not least in light of the longevity of his interest in this matter, and his role in securing interest in this for the commonweal. I declare an interest in that he endowed the Wolfson Economics Prize with Policy Exchange, the thinktank for which I work. The last one he endowed was on the quality of our hospitals, not least their architectural and urban environment aspects, and I pay tribute to him for that.

I am also grateful for the range of experience of other noble Lords. It is always a concern, when one is further down the batting order in any debate, that people will already have said what one wants to say, so I am relieved to say that there is one dimension which has not been discussed so far and is an underrated aspect in public policy terms. At the forefront of the agenda of this Government, and what they have not done, is the issue of beauty and the shift in the policy on the very word “beauty”. Unless we build homes that create liveable places in rich neighbourhoods, reflect communities and aspire towards beauty, not only will we be making an error of historical proportions but we will be betraying the aspirations and values of future generations by saddling them with the recycled versions of the same housing crisis and the depressing quality of too much of our post-war housing that has afflicted so much of the post-war era.

As I say, I have been involved in this argument for some years. The late Sir Roger Scruton was involved with Policy Exchange as a leading advocate of the pioneering Building Beautiful programme. We played a part in recommending the previous Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which Sir Roger chaired. We have spearheaded moves to reinstate beauty in Britain’s policy lexicon and to ensure that it becomes an intrinsic part of our urban fabric once again. This is not an exercise in aesthetic cultivation or political partisanship. Beauty should not be the preserve of any one side of the political divide; rather, it is an essential element in defusing local opposition to new housing, thereby ensuring that the additional housing supply Britain so desperately needs is finally delivered.

There is, as I say, an idea that beauty is for Conservatives only. Of course, we all know that, for William Morris and Ruskin, the great socialist and progressive thinkers of the past, beauty was absolutely integral to their interest. That is why it is a source of disappointment to me and to others that the new Government have dropped the beauty criteria in their ideas—not because it was the policy of the previous Government but also because, as I say, the present Secretary of State for MHCLG had made clear that it would be part of an incoming Labour Government’s proposals. So my question for the Minister is: why the change? Why has beauty been dropped?

On the wider international front, I was privileged, a few years ago, to be able to welcome Marwa al-Sabouni here to London. She is a noted Syrian architect and the author of a book called The Battle for Home. One of the things in Syria that she most eloquently described was the destruction of the urban space by the now-fallen Baathist regime. It destroyed the urban fabric but also, therefore, destroyed the relationship between communities in Syria with tragic effect; that was not the only reason for it but, as she describes so movingly in her memoir, that was part of it. In a wider sense, the importance of an agreed urban space in forging community cohesion is, of course, another further aspect of the present responsibilities of MHCLG. Why have the Government departed from this, and what will they do to ensure that the spiritual and aesthetic benefits of beauty are once again restored to our national discourse?