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.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 18th September 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Mawson]

282A: After Clause 226, insert the following new Clause—
“Departmental implementation review and learning network(1) As soon as reasonably practicable after this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must instruct the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to undertake a review on how best to implement it.(2) The review must include a short exercise to draw together experience from across government departments of what has and has not worked with regard to successful competitive programmes that have specifically promoted joined-up working and innovation.(3) The review must, in particular, consider what mechanisms were and were not in place to take the learning from these programmes to inform future programme design by central and regional government.(4) The review must also evaluate the most straightforward processes to use in implementing this Act, using the methodology that every question to bidders has an opportunity cost. (5) The review must involve input from experienced practitioners from outside government in the design of the programme of implementation, the assessment of applications, including meeting the leaders of shortlisted proposed projects as well as assessing written proposals.(6) Following the review, the Secretary of State must—(a) establish a learning network for those delivering projects and other stakeholders, and(b) take steps to secure that government departments are taking part and learning lessons at all levels,in respect of the implementation of this Act.”

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I put these two amendments, Amendments 282A and 282B, down at Report because we were unable to debate them during Committee because of the timing of the debates. To save time, I have shared with the Minister and my sponsors the detailed speech I had prepared for Committee, with its reference to real projects my colleagues and I are working on and the disconnects we are experiencing in the machinery of the state as we seek to focus on delivering what the Government call levelling up—and I declare my interests. These imperfect amendments were put down simply to encourage a discussion with the Government about implementation and the delivery of their levelling-up agenda; they are not seeking to make a party-political point but to share practical experience on the ground.

My colleagues and I have been working at the front edge inside the machinery of the state for 40 years. Our work began in a failing East End housing estate and is now expanding nationally. We are today operating in some of our most challenging communities across the country. We are sighted in granular detail on what is and is not happening on the ground, below all the processes and paperwork, and on the ability of the public sector to deliver whatever we mean by the levelling-up agenda. The machinery of the state is in considerable difficulty. It is a fact that any Government coming into power will have to grapple with: the inability of this public sector machinery to deliver in detail and in practice the democratic wishes of the people of this country. This is a serious matter.

This is not just true regarding the levelling-up agenda. We have listened in recent debates in your Lordships’ House to speeches about this broken machinery when it comes to defence. I point noble Lords to the excellent speech on the challenges of defence procurement made by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, before the recess. In recent months, we have also listened to debates on the broken machinery in the justice system, the police, the health service, et cetera. There is a serious problem here; we ignore it at our peril.

--- Later in debate ---

Although I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, does not intend to test the opinion of your Lordships’ House, I hope he understands why the Government are unable to support his amendments, but are committed to following through this joined-up approach.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have taken part in this debate and who have engaged with me as I put together these two amendments. I thank in particular the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, who was planning to speak in this debate but the change of date last week of the last day of Report prevented this. We would have benefited a great deal this evening from his vast experience in this area. I also thank the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett, Lord Scriven and Lord Young, who have engaged with me and supported my amendments.

I thank the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and wish her a speedy recovery. I thank her for her responses and her resilience, having watched her over the months, in dealing with so many amendments in a challenging Bill. We are nearly there but I think that, when she is back, some of us should take the Front-Bench team out for a drink and buy them a whisky—they deserve it.

These two amendments are not perfect, but they are an attempt to encourage this House, as part of the levelling-up process, to have a serious cross-party debate about the implementation of the Bill and the fitness for purpose of the machinery of the state. The issues facing this machinery are not new and they are not the fault of this Government. This out-of-date siloed machinery has been evolving and becoming less fit for purpose over several decades, and possibly longer. We have all heard the present state of play in recent debates in this Chamber, as I have said, not just about levelling up and regeneration but about the future of the NHS, the police, the justice system and so on. These systems are increasingly not working and are producing unhealthy cultures which are not fit for purpose. Tinkering with these systems at the edges and doing yet more research is not going to solve the problem.

My two small amendments, Amendments 282A and 282B, will not change the world, but they are an attempt to recognise that, in the modern world, if you are to deliver real change and transformation on the ground in some of England’s most challenging communities, you cannot do that without a strong, healthy partnership on the front line, built on trust between the public, business and social sectors, and of course local communities. The future is all about integration and collaboration, not last-century theoretical debates about public versus private sector. The modern world that our children now live in learns by doing and practice, not through expensive research documents, written at 60,000 feet, that few read.

This is why my colleagues and I, with our national business and public sector partners, and with the NHS and a number of local authorities, are starting to generate a practical response on the ground in challenging circumstances. Together, in some of our most challenged communities, we are starting to create what we call innovation platforms, focused on place, which bring together these partners and are focused on the delivery of practical projects on the ground. We are purposely creating a “learning by doing” environment; a culture focused on high-quality outcomes but which seeks to build trust and understanding across the silos.

If we are going to spend hard-earned taxpayers’ money wisely, it is time as a nation to get more interested in implementation and practice than theory. We need to move beyond too-clever-by-half think tanks and once again get interested in practical people who do things and know how to deliver on the ground. These two amendments, which need more work, are a practical first attempt to find a way to move beyond the impasse at the centre of government systems and encourage this more practical and collaborative culture and approach on the front line. I am happy to meet the Minister and talk with her colleagues in government if there is interest, but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 282A withdrawn.