Housing and Regeneration Bill

I have discovered the problem with the Bill: it is too interesting. Our debates are too interesting. I anxiously watch the time, but I forget that I do not need to watch the time. This debate has been profound. It touches on so much of what we want for our country and our communities and what will be possible under the HCA and the new ways in which it will work. First, I shall deal with the problem of poverty. I do not want to labour this point but, as a Government, we have made a very explicit and ambitious commitment to reduce poverty. We will be judged on what we have achieved, not least in taking 600,000 children out of poverty, and much else besides. There is no doubt that there is a very clear connection between poor quality, overcrowded, unhealthy homes and poverty. Poor people live in the worst accommodation. When you live in awful accommodation, you are likely to be least prepared and supported into work and training. You have less support for your family. There is an awful and toxic mixture of poverty and disadvantage. One ambition of my department is that no one should be disadvantaged by the place in which they live. The two problems go together. Inevitably, we are emphasising this great increase in social housing—£8 billion to go into affordable homes over the next three years—because we want to reduce, and, indeed, wipe out, poverty. Decent homes are the first step to reducing and ending poverty, but within that we have to know what we are doing. I refer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and my noble friend in this regard. The Homes and Communities Agency has a raft of regeneration policies. As he well knows, this is not simply about regarding housing as a social necessity but about providing decent homes, building mixed communities and regenerating areas. That means economic regeneration. On estates where our New Deal for Communities is in operation, one sees refurbished homes—these estates feel like and are better places—new community centres, brand new primary schools, new health centres with a much greater emphasis on outreach, new transport, new opportunities for training and new sports centres. That is all about lifting the spirit, creating opportunities for people to get into training and work and keep and develop their skills. It is about enabling us to bring an end to poverty through regeneration and better housing. We have particular regard for BME communities, which suffer multiple disadvantages and which need particular forms of support, not least to enable them to get out of substandard homes. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, made a very important point about postal workers. We are expanding the eligibility criteria for the new build homebuy and the open market homebuy products, which are a mixture of renting and ownership. Although it is important to continue to give priority to key workers and tenants in the social rented sector, from today new build homebuy and open market homebuy products will be open to all first-time buyers with a household income below £60,000. Therefore, postal workers will be in a strong position to access those new products. I am happy to write to him with more details on that. The noble Lord, Lord Mawson, spoke powerfully about building communities, drawing on his extraordinary and impressive experience. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Ford for talking about the way in which we have traditionally prioritised investment so that it really makes a difference to the places that are most vulnerable and disadvantaged but which also show promise. The tasking framework of the HCA will reflect that, because it will reflect the Government’s priority of putting investment where it can work best. The noble Lord is right, communities are diverse; we do not need to specify this in the Bill. Bow is very different from Braunstone in Leicester, which is very different from Aston in Birmingham. These communities have particular strengths and particular needs. The Bill specifies that the HCA will work to meet the needs of communities, and that is what it must do. The noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, asked how you make communities. You do so by enabling the people who live, or who will live, in those communities to have a prior say about what they want from them. In some of the new greenfield communities that will be built, for example Northstowe, we must start by building the community infrastructure and the social infrastructure, but in a way that responds to and reflects what people say they want. Master planning does not mean anything unless you have the widest possible democratic input. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord said about how you create a new sense of place. It is difficult to do that in a new community. We should not kid ourselves that these places will spring up overnight with a strong sense of community. They will be diverse, mixed and fair. At the very worst, you can design out things; it is not always easy to design them in, but you can if you work with the community. We have a lot to learn from the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, has led the partnership in east London. He is right that we need investment in time, resources and training. The Academy for Sustainable Communities is there to do just that: to build up capacity. He is also right that we should not be hung up on structures. The Bill simplifies structures, brings in funding streams and creates the one-stop shop—the single conversation—of which we have spoken. Regulation must be appropriate, but partnership is key. That is where the relationships that the noble Lord talked about come into play, and the reason why we must hear all the people who speak for the community. Some people at the outer edges are never heard. I am thinking of LINks and the health model, which are designed to bring in people from the margins of the community to voice their anxieties and give them a sense of contribution. This is about people and relationships. I hope that we can learn enormously from the community engagement work that English Partnerships has done in the past, which dealt with some of the pockets of resistance to change in communities. Some communities do not want to change, and why should they in many instances? We must give people credit for being happy, even if we think that their homes are not quite what they might be. We have learnt much from that over the past few years in what we have tried to do and how we have tried to do it. I am entirely sympathetic to that. As the noble Lord said, we must work with the faith communities and get under the radar. The faith communities are better placed than many to reach into communities that are frightened and that do not come forward to make their voices heard. All the faith communities have a big responsibility there. So, no, this does not happen by accident. You can plan it, and we will be intent on planning it. What we can do will be explicit in the tasking framework. We have a lot to learn, and I am absolutely confident, given the things that have been said in Committee this afternoon, that people will watch the HCA as much for its style and the way in which it conducts itself as for its content. The conversations that we have had with Sir Bob Kerslake make me optimistic that we have a leader who knows very well what it is to listen to people and to take hold of sound practice on the ground. I was particularly interested in the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, that we should ask people who have been successful to advise us on what might and might not work. We do not do that often enough, and it is a very interesting suggestion.