English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I want to say a word in support of Amendment 133 from the noble Lord, Lord Best, about creating a statutory provision to enable financial assistance to be given to the establishment of a mayoral development corporation—and also, perhaps, just to note that my former constituency lies within the area where the Government have announced today a consultation on the establishment of a centrally led development corporation for the whole area of the city council and South Cambridgeshire.

Noble Lords on all sides might like to stop and examine this substantial issue. All decisions relating to sites of strategic importance in two council areas will, according to the proposal, from 2029 at least be decided by a development corporation and not the councils themselves. That is quite a substantial change. I am not saying that I am for or against it; we were always expecting it and had been expecting it for quite a long time. It is relevant to this debate because the reason why, in greater Cambridge, people not only expected this to happen but, by and large, supported it—I remind noble Lords of my registered interest in the Cambridgeshire development corporation—is that it comes, as announced, with £400 million in investment and infrastructure, and development corporations need to be driven by an infrastructure-first approach.

That is relevant to this debate because, if this were a mayoral development corporation—we have a mayor, so it is not inconsiderable that it could have been—it does not follow that anything like those resources would have been available to a mayoral development corporation in the way that they are for the centrally led development corporation. That is not to say that mayoral development corporations cannot get financial assistance from the Government. For example, in London the Old Oak development corporation has had money from the Government through the Homes England housing investment fund and some capital grants for land acquisition. But I do not think that is quite what the noble Lord, Lord Best, is looking for.

We are looking for two things: first, the ability for the Government to provide resources for the establishment of a mayoral development corporation, rather than for financial support for some of its activities. Secondly, we may be looking at mayoral development corporations, particularly in some of the new towns, where the funding requirement is at scale and is particular to that development corporation and not simply a subset of the grant-making powers that are available to the relevant government department for other purposes.

I remember the days when I was a financial officer for a government department. Having the statutory power is necessary if you are going to have substantial resources devoted to something over a significant period of time. It is not good enough simply to regard it as an extension of other powers that were devised not for that purpose. Giving specific statutory powers to fund the establishment of mayoral development corporations and to enable long-term funding from the Government potentially seems to be an essential part of the new towns programme. I support the noble Lord’s amendment.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 133 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best. I was involved in the London Olympics for 19 years, from day one. Our first meeting was at the Bromley by Bow Centre, with three of us, in 1999. These projects take a long time, and it was only after that first meeting that I dared to go and see the architect Richard Rogers at his house. When he heard our vision and thought about it, he decided to be part of the team as well, and one thing led to another.

It was a very long journey, and it did not begin as a development corporation. The ideas for what eventually became the legacy company grew up among a small group of leaders, including Sir Robin Wales, the Labour leader of Newham at that time, who focused, over many years, on the place, the history of the place and a vision for the future. It was a long journey.

When, eventually, we won the bid, lessons were learned and it did not begin as a development corporation. It became known as the Olympic Park Legacy Company, which was a social business—for those of us who remember it in detail—which wanted to make sure we had the right people around the table who could begin to drive the legacy programme and not do what had happened in so many Olympic projects around the world, many of which I went to see, which had no legacy and ended in wastelands.

As we gained competence, what began to happen is that politicians and the system began to realise that we needed to be given planning powers. It was only after a number of years, as we grew as a company in skills and had a clear vision, that we became the London Legacy Development Corporation. The wise thing at that time was that the directors were not changed and moved on, and we did not have the usual churn that goes on; we were encouraged to stay as a group of people to follow through on this development.

What are the lessons learned over that very long period of time around this development corporation process? Our first lesson was to have a clear vision that is deeply rooted in the history of the place and the people who live in the place. That is absolutely critical.

Secondly, bring together the right people with the right skills and ensure that you have the right business skills on the board. It is not about having boards—if I am honest—that are just council representatives; it is about the right individuals from the public sector, the business sector and the social sector who come together.

Thirdly, good leadership with the right business skills is absolutely essential.

Fourthly, a development corporation has to take the long view. It will pass through different Governments and different local councils. It is really important that continuity is seen as an essential element of any development corporation.

Fifthly, create a learning-by-doing culture focused on quality, not a tick-box culture.

Sixthly, create integrated environments wherever you operate, bring people together and resist silos.

Seventhly, focus on people and relationships, not just process.

Eighthly, government needs to get interested in the detail. This is my thought at the moment. There are real lessons out there, but development corporations across the country are not all good and all the same thing. Get interested in the detail and what works.

Finally, if you look out there at what is going on, you will find that some development corporations are far better than others, some have had some successes and some have failed to learn the lessons.

This amendment is important, and I certainly want to support it, but the detail on this and the practice really matter.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I will be brief. I support all three of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Best. The contributions so far have been very helpful; I hope that the Minister will take due notice of them.

I particularly support the optimal use of land. Amendment 240 talks about placing

“a statutory duty on English local authorities and all forms of development corporation, to secure the optimal uses of their land, including when disposing of it, to achieve public policy objectives and requirements”.

This really matters. It is fundamental to achieving the housing growth objective that the Government have set themselves. I very much hope that the Minister will be very positive when she replies; if not, and if the noble Lord, Lord Best, wants to return to this issue on Report, he will have our support in so doing.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

We also have a terrible risk-averse culture among regulators in this country, which we need to tackle as well—but I really rose to support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I have a later Clause 53 stand part notice, which partly covers the same ground.

Nye Bevan is a great hero of mine. He founded the NHS, but he made one mistake. He beat Morrison in Cabinet in 1947 in terms of the role of local government. Morrison of course had been leader of the London County Council, which, pre-war, had certainly been the largest hospital authority in the world. He argued that local government should be at the centre of the National Health Service. That was rejected, which was a great pity.

I have always believed that local government should play a much larger role, not just in health service provision, but also in health as a whole. My noble friend illustrated why that is important. She mentioned the Health Foundation’s report, which is stark in making clear that health outcomes in the UK are falling far behind those in other countries now. The country that we are most aligned with now is the US, whose health outcomes are pretty disastrous.

We know that we need a co-ordinated, system-wide approach, but what we have is fragmentation. The health service is outwith a lot of the discussions that noble Lords have been having in this Committee. It is very centrally driven. I had some happy years driving it from the centre, but I have concluded that it just does not work like that. We have seriously got to devolve. Local government deals with so many issues that relate to poor health, including transport, low incomes and poor-quality housing—all the things that noble Lords have been discussing. What I am doing, basically, is encouraging my noble friend the Minister to say that her department recognises that it has a bigger role to play in health than it may think.

Clause 44 is welcome. What we are trying to do is urge the Minister’s department to be as ambitious as possible and to do everything that it can to ensure that local government as a whole takes advantage of this. Mr Osborne’s agreement with the leader of Manchester City Council and its chief executive—in 2014 or 2015, I think—led to Devo Manc, which embraced health; it was the responsibility of the combined authorities rather than the mayor. There is enough evidence there to suggest that this is a good thing and that we need to build on it. My disappointment is that nothing has happened since then. The moment Mr Osborne left, no one in government was interested any more. I hope that we can resurrect it and say to local government, “We’re not going to improve our health without you being really important partners in this”.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, as well as what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has just shared with us.

Earlier, I mentioned “learning by doing” cultures. What do they actually look like? We have been engaging in depth in east London for 42 years. We have pioneered a lot of the things that we now take for granted across the country in parts of the health service, including social prescribing. We have the long view. We spent time looking up the telescope, not down the telescope from government. When you engage in a local community in depth, you soon start to discover that health and wealth are absolutely connected—they are fundamental —yet the siloed systems of the state absolutely miss what all of this might mean and the opportunities that are there in practice.

The Bromley by Bow Centre, which I founded and of which I am now president, has pioneered wide-ranging approaches to these precise issues over the years. Today, we are responsible for 55,000 patients and we have built 97 businesses with local people. If they were here, our integrated health team would tell you that, on a vulnerable housing estate in the East End of London, getting a job has more of an impact on your health than anything that doctors can do in our health centre. All of them would tell noble Lords this. Yet, despite hosting 70 Government Ministers from different parties coming to see us over the past 30-odd years, when we share all this, they all say, “Yes, yes”, then go away. Nothing changes. In Bromley-by-Bow, we are still grappling with 62 different funding sources coming from the Treasury, all of which go down into different silos. We then spend a lot of money, with our staff, on putting things together around the same families. It is ludicrous. I share this with noble Lords: lessons are not being learned. In my view, the fundamental question that is being asked in this amendment is absolutely critical.

This Government are starting to talk about prevention and getting upstream. I agree with all of that but, if you talk to our GPs and our team—we have 2,000 visitors a year, from all over the country, looking at our work—they will tell you that the jury is out on whether this Government are serious about joining the dots around these issues. We will go not on what they say but on what they do. As far as we can see, at the moment there is little evidence that these dots are being joined up, but, if the Government get interested in practice, there is a great opportunity for this Administration and future Administrations coming down the line. This is not a party-political matter; it is a matter for us all and for the health of the nation.

In the 1990s, we realised, through practice actually, that the only way to gain scale with these kinds of issues is to start to partner with the private sector. We took these relationships seriously and today, both in east London and in a programme I lead nationally, we work with the private sector around place-making, and I declare my interests. The private sector is also concerned and interested in these questions. People in the private sector have children and families. Get to know them, dig under the carpet and create learning-by-doing cultures with them, and you will find opportunities to take these kinds of questions to scale. I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, but I hope that we will move beyond amendments and yet more talk into practice and detail and get curious about what this actually looks like for local people.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for his salutary warnings. It is very real when you have the experience of somebody in a particular local area who can say that the dots are not joined and that the funding streams are too many and are simply not joined together. There is a huge opportunity here if the Government can take it. This amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, seems to me to be central. I hope that the Minister is going to be helpful in her response. Local growth plans should take account of statutory health duties, and they should be brought together. There is a clear link between economic growth and health improvement. There should be that clear link. Health improvement has to be integral to growth plans. This seems to be unanswerable as a proposal, so I hope the Government will be in full listening mode.

The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, is important. It is helpful that she has proposed a way forward through statutory guidance. I understand the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. There is a serious danger that growth plans will lead to competition between economic growth and environmental growth responsibilities. I think the Government can help here by publishing guidance on this matter. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talked about the nuclear industry. I can think of other examples where there is a conflict between an environmental consideration and a growth consideration. Given the new world that we are about to enter with mayors and strategic authorities, clear guidance would be a big help in this area. I hope the Government will be in a positively responsive mood.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

It is interesting that at the moment the Government are trying to get the NHS to have an additional allocation to community health services in the planning guidelines. But all indications are that it is not happening, because the integrated care boards are saying that they have to protect acute services first. So community health services are not getting real additional funding. Before 1974, community health was of course run by local government and, with the suggestion to take it out again, I am beginning to wonder whether we do not need to be much more imaginative—basically to ring-fence resources.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I absolutely feel the pain of the noble Baroness, because we also feel the pain from the other end of the telescope. It is really difficult, and a lot of these systems are profoundly broken. However, this is an opportunity for this Government. The reason why practitioners like me are suggesting that the Government need to create learning-by-doing innovation platforms at place, in real communities, is because that is where the social sector, GPs, the local authority and the NHS can come together to do this stuff and then really learn the practical lessons. That is the only way; it is not through academic papers at 60,000 feet or policy people who have never built anything. It is about practice. Through practice, you will learn where the real blockages are, and what you then need to do is share the lessons learned. Until we get to that place and learn from the micro, I fear that we will keep talking and very little will change.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank the two noble Lords for their interventions. I will just say that I do not believe it is about anything but power and money coming down—that was my experience. I tried to go to the full endgame; I tried to join the local director of children’s and adult care services with the local director of the NHS. I tried, but it did not work because health would not give up its power and its money.

Amendment 141B would add environmental responsibilities and opportunities to the local growth plan guidance published by the Secretary of State. While this is a well-intentioned amendment to help ensure that local growth plans balance environmental and economic considerations, which all local authorities have to do, we recognise that councils have to take into account a range of factors when drafting their local growth plans.

Indeed, councillors will be aware of their local area’s precious habitats and the places where nature is valued most. In my opinion, local communities are best placed to evaluate trade-offs between those environmental opportunities and economic growth, so we believe that this should be left to local councillors rather than for the Secretary of State to set out a potentially one-size-fits-all approach to this.

I am grateful for the contributions to this thoughtful and interesting debate and I am really looking forward to the response from the Minister.