Communities

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this has been a very valuable and constructive debate. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, immensely for giving us all the incentive to read her report carefully: part of what debates are for is to give wider responses to useful reports. This report deserves to gain a wider reading and a much wider debate. As we talk to others, I hope that all of us will help to contribute to that. I should also like to thank both maiden speakers. I thank the noble Lord, Lord True, in particular, for his emphasis on the role of local government in rebuilding stronger local communities, which was one of the things I felt was not touched on as much in the report of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, as might have been the case and why I particularly welcome that she is now moving to the Department for Communities and Local Government to take on this work. The DCLG, with its responsibility for the Localism Bill, to which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred, and for grabbing hold of the issue of how we effectively decentralise power, is very much the right place for her to continue. I should also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Noon, particularly for stressing the importance of faith communities in helping to build and maintain a sense of community solidarity and in bringing and holding people together.

The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has been tireless in her efforts as a community campaigner and it is not just her report but also her example of which we should be conscious. That things get done only when people get off their backsides to do them is one of strongest messages of this report. We all face this problem that Britain has become a more passive society. The report several times refers to the need for more active citizens, which is a problem. Again, all of us recognise—this is not in any sense a partisan point—that we need a more active society and more active citizens. We have got to turn around some of the long-term trends which have led to that. The noble Baroness has conducted an intensive and thorough review of the ways in which local people can get involved in having a say on how they are policed and on making communities safer. She also looked at how a number of areas had overcome the barriers in the way and she highlighted the successes they had achieved.

The noble Baroness noted, and I strongly agree with this, that communities have become overly dependent on professional agencies, expecting them to sort things out on their behalf. As we all know, that is one of the problems we face. I have to say that it is there far too much in the younger generation. I recall my wife and I talking to a young acquaintance of ours last winter who was complaining that the path to the station had not been cleared of snow. “Why have they not done something about it?”, he wanted to know. We chorused, “Who do you think ‘they’ are?”. That is an attitude from which we have to pull back, saying that we have to do something about a lot of things, not simply depend on the state or the professionals. Everything in the report suggests that in our local communities we expect everything from clearing the snow to keeping an eye on our neighbours, to joining neighbourhood watch schemes or whatever it may be, to be done for us. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that one piece of quite substantial evidence that the Government have collected is that communities with neighbourhood watch schemes have lower levels of crime, even when adjusting for other things. There is evidence that this sort of approach is extremely valuable.

The noble Baroness says in her report that people do not see the safety of their community as something they have any influence on or control over. Those of us who have been in politics, particularly in the inner cities, know of the sense of powerlessness that many people feel, particularly in the big inner city estates. You do not know who to go to, you do not know how to do anything, and you are often told by council officials that such and such cannot be done. The winter before last, I recall an agonised and irritable debate we had with a local official who assured us that it was almost impossible to have a 20 mile an hour speed limit in Saltaire. We happen to be a world heritage centre and we think we are entitled to a speed limit. However, all sorts of bureaucratic obstacles were being put in our way. We are a fairly articulate, middle-class collection of people, and we did not see why they should.

That, of course, is partly the difference in our communities. We also have to recognise that one of the long-term trends we have suffered from is the extent to which we have separated out different classes of people into different communities. As the right reverend Prelate remarked, the professionals often live somewhere else. Single class estates do not help to build integrated communities. So I very much welcome everything that is said in the report about the culture needing to change. We need a radical culture change in which neighbourhoods no longer see crime, anti-social behaviour and disorder as somebody else’s responsibility.

What are the long-term trends and changes we need to reverse in order to build a society in which citizens recognise that rights have to be balanced by personal responsibility? We have seen social change, such as in the revolution of the position of women. So often they were the people who actively held communities together. I am sure that many of us remember our mothers taking part in informal and formal voluntary activities because, when they married, they were not supposed to go on working. Their energies were poured, first, into their children, secondly, into their extended families, and, thirdly, into their wider communities. We now have a world of two-career and two-job families, so we have to look elsewhere to find active volunteers, asking people to take a day off a week, a day at the weekend or an evening, or to use the fit retired, that large new element in our society who are now beginning to take over that role.

The disappearance of local shops, pubs and schools and thus the loss of points of easy contact and informal information exchange has also weakened local communities. There is also the extent to which we have become a car-borne society, so that you do not mix easily with your neighbours because you can go somewhere else for your social activities. It is a real problem increased by the extent to which we have been building new estates where each house has two car parking spaces. You go five miles in one direction to the supermarket and 15 miles in a different direction to work, so you do not interact with your neighbours. I have some sympathy in this respect with what the Prince of Wales has for some time argued: we build our communities and we have, to some extent, been building poor communities through the way in which new housing has developed. I declare a very strong interest. I live in the village of Saltaire, where most of the houses are terraced. The community is very concentrated and it is impossible not to know your neighbours. That is one of the reasons why we have built a very strong community.

Secularisation has weakened communities, as the right reverend Prelate remarked. There has been a weakening of the social glue that churches and faith communities provide. The right reverend Prelate talked about rural crime, but I recall the Church of England’s excellent work on Faith in the City and how difficult it was in one or two Yorkshire dioceses to persuade rural congregations that the city and its problems counted and were high priorities.

The long-term trend of weakening local government over the past 40 years, through successive Governments, has also weakened local communities. That is why the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, to the Department for Communities and Local Government will be so valuable. There have been some very useful experiments, under the control of different parties in different cities, in decentralising responsibility below the level of now very large councils to local communities. There have been experiments with urban parish councils and community councils, as well as with other community groups. That is clearly something that we need to take much further. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said, we have a long way to go in finding consensus on what we all mean by localism.

Then there is the long-term trend of declining trust in the state and in state agencies as a whole. When yesterday I was looking at a report by Policy Network—a European organisation in which the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Mandelson, are very active—I was rather shaken to find that in Britain 29 per cent of those asked said that they saw no advantages in the state intervening to improve matters. How many people have now given up on trust in state action is a real shocker.

We have a culture in which too many people believe that only professionals can act. We have the health and safety culture, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, also referred. The idea that all responsibility for tackling social problems lies with “them” is another of the things that we need to reverse. The report of the noble Baroness is extremely welcome in encouraging communities to be more self-reliant, giving them real influence and ensuring that agencies are ready, willing and able to back them up when needed, working in genuine partnership. Her report touches on the most difficult issue, which is finance.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I intervene with hesitation but I will be brief. There seems to be a certain amount of time. My noble friend has listed many of the down-side factors, which are difficult in comparison with when we—probably I rather more than he—were young. There have been a lot of changes. My mum had to give up work when she married in 1936. She put a lot of energy into being a pillar of the local Red Cross, which would not now happen. However, there is one factor on the plus side: a gathering army of people who are older than what used to be regarded as retirement age, and who are fit, active and want to put something back into the community. They are not all in here, although there are quite a lot of us. There is a new resource to be tapped, which is a positive factor in looking to the sort of objectives that my noble friend Lady Newlove is looking for. I hope the Minister will acknowledge that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention. I had indeed referred to the fit retired as a new resource. I would like to have been among them but my wife complains that I am at present working much harder than I have ever worked before. It is clearly a resource; we see it in local communities; and I hope that we will benefit more from it as more of us go on living longer and being fit.

I was just about to touch on finance and the problem of transparency and accountability. It is a real problem; we all know when the sources of finance are public. There is much more to be considered in the noble Baroness’s report on how substantial public finance can be transferred to autonomous community groups. That raises all sorts of questions about the relationship with local authorities, but, as she rightly pointed out, there are also local charities and contributions from private business to consider. I am afraid that I cannot answer the question on the exact guidelines for the Big Lottery Fund, but I shall write to those who spoke about it in the debate.

The right reverend Prelate referred to restorative justice, which is also recommended in the report. I have followed a number of the experiments in this area, particularly the very successful experiments in south Somerset. The Government’s intention—the previous Government followed all this with interest, too—is to take restorative justice further and as far as we can in helping to resolve local conflicts and tensions. We should recognise that we have lost a certain amount of ground by building fewer magistrates’ courts. In a health and safety culture which has demanded decent steps up into buildings and all sorts of other things, we have taken justice further away from localities. As the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, suggests, we have to find ways of bringing justice closer again to local communities.

There are a whole host of other things that we can do to reduce crime. My wife and I visited some weeks ago an excellent voluntary group in Bradford, Together Women, which focuses particularly on young women who have been caught up in first offences and tries to help them to put their lives back together so that they do not get caught up in repeat offences. I am sure that all noble Lords here who are familiar with life in the cities know that there are some young women of all ethnic groups who fall out of the community. The work which Together Women and others have done has reduced reoffending by between 50 per cent and 80 per cent over the previous five years in different parts of Yorkshire. That is the sort of thing which we have to do. It can be done only at the local level because one is often working with different ethnic groups and different local circumstances.

I am very pleased that the noble Baroness will continue the work begun in the Home Office in her new role at the Department for Communities and Local Government. She will cross over from the Home Office, where neighbourhood policing and other issues are considered an important part of this. She will not entirely forget that. I should reassure the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that neighbourhood policing is regarded as the front of front line. I should apologise on behalf of the Home Office for the extreme delay in answering his Written Question.

The Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government will work closely together and with other departments to formulate the cross-government response to the report, which we hope to produce this summer. I hope that noble Lords here will all agree that this work needs to be done to build stronger, safer and more active communities. As the noble Baroness’s report has shown, there is enormous commitment and passion in communities on which we can build. There is a real appetite among individuals to get involved and make a difference, often accompanied by their not quite knowing how to do so. It is very much one of the values of the report that it reminds us that we have to connect people to mechanisms and groups which can tell them how to use their energies in a constructive community fashion. In responding to the noble Baroness’s report, we will do all that we can to create the right environment for this to happen.

Again, I thank everyone who has contributed to this excellent debate.