Debate on the Address

My Lords, I should like to bring us back to the subject of today’s debate. I congratulate the Minister on the interesting and constructive way in which she introduced it. I associate myself with the remarks on housing made by the noble Lord, Lord Best, who is not in his place. However, I shall look at things from a grassroots perspective, particularly that of east Lancashire or, as it is now rebranded, Pennine Lancashire; that is, Blackburn, Hyndburn, Burnley, Rossendale and last but far from least Pendle. I remind the House that I am an elected member of Pendle Council. I shall talk about the promised Housing and Regeneration Bill, the Planning Reform Bill and an interesting document published by the DCLG entitled, An Action Plan for Community Empowerment or, as I would prefer to call it, an action plan for involving people. Perhaps I may start a little cynically on community empowerment. For much of the past 40 years I have been a passionate advocate of involving people at a local level in the decisions that affect them, and the future of their communities or, as the Government now call it, place-making. For much of that time, I have fought strongly members of other parties, particularly the Labour Party, who do not agree that this is the way ahead. I am always willing to welcome converts and I notice that the Government are now going about this with the zeal of a convert, which I am not against. However, I warn the Government that those of us who have been doing it for a long time are in a position to understand some of the pitfalls and difficulties. Certain members of the Government, in economic terms, used to be Stalinist in their views—certainly, state socialists—and now are passionate advocates of the free market, but they do not seem to understand that the free market has lots of problems as well as being generally a good thing. The same applies to community involvement. In the debate in the Commons, the Minister, Hazel Blears, said: "““This Government also want to see an unprecedented transfer of power and influence direct to local people; elected representatives who are not afraid of the views of local people but enriched and strengthened by them””.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/11/07; col. 262.]" I look forward to being enriched and strengthened, which, at my age, has to be a good thing. Last night I went to a Colne Neighbourhood Action Group meeting, which is part of the local neighbourhood management system in the ward I try to represent. If I had gone in and said, ““Hello, I have come to be enriched and strengthened. How are you going to go about it?””, the people attending may have thought that I was daft. Nevertheless, I understand the meaning of the words. During the first 20 minutes of the meeting we were shown a video put together by young teenagers on how they see the problems of their fellow young teenagers and older teenagers in the area, and quite a lot of older people were interviewed as well. I think that that is what the Government are talking about. Last Friday, I attended a smaller meeting with community representatives, local organisations, residents and council officers to thrash out the priorities for spending our money on improving facilities and the environment. Together, these illustrate my first major point. Community involvement is a very good thing and all very well, but it needs resources to do it properly. To ask councils to do this at the same time as they have a revenue support settlement which is certainly below the level of real inflation for councils, while at the same time being asked to make 3 per cent cashable ““efficiency”” savings each year, which over three years adds up to more than 10 per cent of the budget, is very difficult. People will not be interested in being involved if discussing where to make cuts is all that happens. They might organise and campaign against those cuts, but I am not sure that that is the kind of community engagement the Government are thinking about. It does not seem very long since we were discussing the 2004 planning Act in this House. The new planning system has led to more top-down decision making and more micromanagement from above, as well as detailed planning and detailed micromanagement. If we and the Government are serious about getting local councils to get far more people involved in serious decision-making, the councils have to be free to make those decisions before they can be devolved. You cannot devolve powers to the community or residents if you no longer have those powers because the system is so top-down and so micromanaged. I would love to talk about lots of things but my six minutes are now up and I am reminded that if we had a chairman in the House of Lords who controlled us, I would be passed a note saying ““Your time is up. Please sit down””. I shall say one more thing on housing, which is a point I shall raise time and again. There will be 3 million new housing units in the next few years, which is great. Some of us would love to contribute to that. I could contribute a few hundred in my ward where we would love to have new housing to regenerate brownfield sites, old mill sites and derelict land, and have some really good community-based housing regeneration. During the next few years we will spend a lot of time struggling to get the Government to agree for us to do that because the top-down planning system in our area is telling us not how many new houses we have to build but that we cannot build any more at all. There is a contradiction at the heart of the system. In many places where new housing will help to regenerate communities we are not being allowed to build them. There will be lots of interesting discussion on these Bills and I look forward to them.