Housing and Regeneration Bill

My Lords, I, too, welcome what I perceive the Government are attempting to achieve in this Bill. The creation of the Homes and Communities Agency could have enormous potential and be a key delivery partner in building successful communities. The aspiration behind this legislation is laudable and presents enormous possibilities for the investment that will follow, particularly in some of our poorest communities. But, as a practitioner who has spent the past quarter of a century attempting to improve housing conditions and to regenerate local communities in some of the most deprived housing estates in Britain with some success, I know that the devil is always in the practical details. For example, giving tenants a vote laid down in statute about transfer seems very reasonable. But when you have watched the political knockabout in one estate that I know well, which resulted in a nine-year delay in new housing for very vulnerable families, you know that there are unintended consequences. I would encourage the Minister to look very carefully at this clause. I fear that this Bill does not learn from what is working well on the ground and build on it. It seems to fly in the face of the modern enterprise culture that this Government have done so much to encourage. I am confused by much in this Bill and I look for a more balanced approach. I welcome the aspirations, but I am concerned about the practical consequences on the ground. The housing association movement was begun by the social entrepreneurs of their day who used their independence from the state to pioneer new and innovative ways of creating social housing. In a small and specialist housing association where I was secretary 30 years ago, we pioneered high-quality social housing for people with drug-related problems. Alongside the accommodation we also developed a social programme for addicts, which pioneered new ways of working, and gained wide recognition nationally and internationally. Until the late 1980s, the first duty of the housing corporation was to promote housing associations. It is only in recent years that it has moved from promoting a new way of working to regulating and controlling. This Bill takes this direction of travel to its next logical stage and, for me, it is a step too far—not that one is against some regulation. Some regulation has contributed to the success of housing associations. It is important in relation to the first-line service to tenants and to protect public investment. The Government are right to legislate to ensure a high quality of housing service for tenants. These are the core things that this legislation should be about. In the USA, housing has often been the driver behind a great deal of social renewal and innovation. We have learnt from that approach in East London, and over the past nine years have successfully built with partners an award-winning £300 million housing company called Poplar HARCA, in which I must declare an interest as a founding director. The company is predicated on the idea of using the housing capital programme as a tool to stimulate a change in culture among tenants which is moving us all on from a culture of mediocrity and dependence on the state to one driven by enterprise, innovation and personal responsibility. Today, nine years on from a standing start, the housing company has taken over control of nearly 9,000 local authority housing units just a few hundred yards from the Olympic and Paralympic site, and has invested millions of pounds in development and refurbishment. In one tenement block I visited in the early days run by the local authority before handover, I found three dead pigeons floating in the water tank. All of the regulators’ paperwork said that the water supply met health and safety standards, but the pigeons would have disagreed and the tenants had not noticed. Today this company is putting together a £1 billion development programme in the centre of the Lower Lea Valley. When you watch an East End mother chair the board meeting of a £300 million company with development proposals of this scale in front of her, with the full support and respect of all the other company directors and professionals around the table, you know that something very important is going on. My concern is that the Bill is travelling in exactly the opposite direction to those of us who are delivering successful change on the ground in East London, and is in danger of missing an opportunity to see housing as a core enabler of entrepreneurial regeneration. This legislation embodies precisely the wrong approach needed in the modern world. It needs to look up the telescope, not down it. It needs to ask how we are going to replicate and develop the work of the most successful housing and regeneration agencies in the country, not how we are going to make Whitehall civil servants sleep more easily in their beds. The Bill paves the way for the spending of a great deal of public money on housing and regeneration in the coming years, and I welcome that investment. But surely the key question is: will this money bring the added value of greater personal responsibility and a spirit of enterprise, and will it be well spent or another missed opportunity by a Government that sometimes seem unable to break free of the desire for central control and a continuation of the dependency culture? Will it make the job of those of us who are seeking to innovate and enable residents to take more local control of their destinies easier or harder? I fear that it will make it harder for us in East London. This Bill refuses to let go of the view that Government know best. One lawyer with many years of experience in housing and health told me that this Bill looked to him a lot like the National Health Service Act 1948. It did not really encourage innovation, but instead put in place the centralised control of all existing structures. At a time when other government programmes have recognised that we now live in an enterprise culture and are opening the doors and windows to allow in the fresh air of business and enterprise skills into health and education, this Bill seems to be closing some of them. Why is that? It is very confusing. In St Paul’s Way in East London, I am bringing together a multimillion pound development with the local authority, the primary care trust and a local housing company. I declare an interest in this project. Together we will build a new school as part of the Building Schools for the Future initiative, a new integrated primary healthcare centre with a patient list among the largest in the country so far tendered, and 500 homes. The homes will be built by the housing company which will be subject to this legislation. What message am I to give to colleagues who have now committed to working together in partnership to open up new joined-up enterprise opportunities for local people? What is the message of central Government to us as we attempt to build an integrated partnership team and a new joined-up approach, when at any time under this Bill the Secretary of State could intervene to prevent or undermine the social innovation we are making? All this is happening 500 yards from Canary Wharf, a modern bastion of the enterprise culture emerging in East London. I am tempted to give the Bill the title of ““Back to the Future”” because so much of it speaks of another decade and an earlier century. Of course, it does not have to be like this. The commitment of the Government, through the new agency, to spend billions of pounds of public moneys in the coming years is a fantastic opportunity to redefine and rebuild some of the poorest communities in Britain in a way that truly learns from some of the best joined-up ways of working and from some of the best practice that the Government have encouraged many of us to grow and develop. Imagine if the Bill actually put the wind behind the sails of some of the most successful housing and regeneration projects in the country and we really learnt from best practice. What are the possibilities and what would we suggest, from practical experience, that the agency should do? My four specific suggestions would be the following. First, for any new housing or regeneration scheme to work and deliver change you have to identify a long-term leader in that community, perhaps a mayor-like figure, who embodies the change and who builds the team. In contrast, the Bill focuses on changing structures as a way to make a difference. I do not believe that. All my practical experience tells me that you can change structures as many times as you like but it will make little difference on the ground. You must first focus on people before structures and build teams of people that encourage trust, openness and honesty—essential prerequisites if complex partnerships are to work and these housing and regeneration schemes are to navigate the modern world in which we now live and deliver more housing in an increasingly bureaucratic world. The Bill is all about structures. I see little in it about creating environments which support people to develop the relationships that will ensure delivery. Big agencies are not necessarily able to deliver better. The Government seem to want to look seriously at how you actually build new communities, new sustainable places in which people do not only live but also create a new culture in which they can take responsibility for their lives. But to do this, simply creating a new government structure is not enough. We have discovered that building new places is all about building human relationships. It is indeed about people before structures; the world of business knows this. In this regard, I could not find a single reference in the Bill or the Explanatory Notes to ““entrepreneur”” or ““innovation””, yet a key aim is to promote regeneration. What is more, there is only a passing reference to business. If the Government are serious about regeneration, then innovation, entrepreneurs and business are key components, yet they are missing from the Bill. This is the approach that gave us the Dome before business took control, rather than the approach which gave us the London Eye, which was driven by business entrepreneurs from the beginning. I propose that for each new development the Government now request that an entrepreneurial leader with a track record be appointed and that business development, economic growth and supporting local social entrepreneurs are not optional additions but a key requirement. This is how you make places that are worth living in. In my experience, many large housing associations now lack this ability for entrepreneurial innovation. It will not be reintroduced by regulations created by the Bill. My second suggestion is that if the Government are serious about innovation in housing and regeneration, then diversity not uniformity must be the name of the game. It must be about responding to local needs and opportunities. To be genuinely innovative and entrepreneurial and to discover best practice, people need freedom to innovate in both housing development and social and economic projects. The Bill will ask people to walk through treacle, I fear; the regulation of non-housing activities may stifle it. Innovation needs flexibility. Over the years at Poplar HARCA we have often fought against the Housing Corporation in order to create innovation and we were told that some of the services we were creating in the community were not permitted. Now we have innovated and demonstrated success we are told that they are the best thing ever and everyone is being told to do what we have done. There are some housing associations which need to be held to account for their failure to create communities rather than just building large impersonal housing estates. The Bill is danger of stifling the innovation of the willing whilst corralling the unwilling rather than inspiring them. Thirdly, the Bill could present us with an opportunity to move away from the public housing monocultures of the past and to invest in the creation of new places; new towns and areas that have both physical and social identity. The Bill does not recognise that there are different standards relevant to different places, down to a fine level of detail. There is no overarching right or wrong; it all depends on the context. Monocultures created by government just do not work; they create and drive human poverty. My noble friend Lord Best has written an excellent paper on the importance of place-making if we are to deal with the problems of some of our most challenging estates. Place-making is not just about having a leader, bringing people together or having a clear quality design concept. It is also about having a clear and rooted purpose and vision for the place. Finally, I fear that the danger inherent in this legislation is that it attempts to give everyone everything. In the real world you cannot have everything; if you try to make everywhere inexpensive, very green or really accessible, what you achieve on the ground, in my experience, is none of those. Conformity will rule the day. You have to allow for local choice and compromise. I fear that the Bill refuses that logic, which is the logic of life. I welcome the Bill, but there is more to do if the aspirations inherent in it are to be turned into practical realities on the ground.