Housing and Regeneration Bill

Rather pessimistically, I think that the problem we are discussing is almost insoluble. We all know what a community is when we see it, but we are talking about trying to create one. We cannot create an integrated group of people from all walks of life by regulation, direction or even by the best of intentions on the part of an outside institution. A community is something that has to evolve. In Essex, where we had two new towns, trying to persuade those towns to develop into new communities was something else indeed. After a sufficient period, they eventually did develop into communities, but it took a very long time. It took even longer for them to become what I would call part of the county. We moved massive numbers of people into this alien landscape; it was not a Martian landscape, but it was alien to almost all of those who had left London. They were moving into modern housing, whereas they had been living in difficult housing in east London. They had survived the war and they were wonderful people, but trying to turn them into a community and then absorb them into the community was very difficult. Having worked through local government all my life, one of the things that I have become conscious of is that the more you try to force things in a particular direction, the more difficult you make it. People have their own ways and their own motivations. Most people, in my experience, want to get on with their lives in spite of everything that the Government and local government are doing to them and for them, and not because of it. Somehow we have to try to cross that divide, which is extremely difficult. The Homes and Communities Agency will have a strong influence on the social housing sector across the whole country. It will tend to put houses down in considerable blocks here and there. It is extremely difficult to do that in a way that does not involve the rest of community; but once you say that, you are in difficulties, because you cannot force it. The intentions are invariably benign, but sometimes the effects, as the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, showed in his remarks, can be perverse. I know all too well that on the official side it is too easy for people to push their own interests or departmental purpose. They can be jealous of other people working in the same field and will not co-operate with them. It is difficult, if you stand above that, to try to make them do it. The problem is that wretched word ““make””. In a great democracy, you cannot make people do anything. I think even members of the party opposite, like me, at heart are anarchists. We have to accommodate all this, and it is very difficult. The Homes and Communities Agency will have things to do on this, and the noble Baroness will say that they are going to do all this and it will be absolutely perfect. The trouble is that we know that it is not absolutely perfect. If you look at what is happening on the ground, much as we want all those things to happen, they are happening in bits and pieces, and some bits work here and there. We are not going to achieve it. Somehow, we have to have give that ambition to the agencies in the Bill. If we try to prescribe it too tightly, we will get it wrong. I know that the noble Baroness is going to say something like that; I am not exactly arguing her case for her. This is something that we have to find a way of doing. As the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, said, we cannot do it through the regulator; it has to come from within. We can perhaps help it to some degree with design. We had a wonderful debate on architecture a while ago. We can help it by mixing housing, and so on. In the end, it is an impossible task, and I do not see an easy resolution to it.