Housing and Regeneration Bill

Again, I am astonished by the debate that I set off quite a long time ago now, given our break for a Division. I thank the Minister for her comments about my amendment on poverty and inequality. It is useful to have them on the record. Even if they are not to be written into the Bill, these are some of the things by which the new agency will be judged. When new Members come to this House, everyone looks at them and asks why they have come. Sometimes the answer is, ““Don’t ask””, but in most cases we find out in due course that it is because of the expertise and knowledge that they have to contribute to this House. We have heard this afternoon why the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, came to this House, and he has a great deal more to contribute to debates on how to make things happen at a very local level in communities, or even in the non-communities where it really matters. The noble Lord said that this is all about people and relationships on the ground. That is absolutely right. For some of us who do not hide our scepticism about the value and ability of large national quangos to do what is necessary at a local level, the comments this afternoon of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, are extremely valuable. None of us denies that there has to be national allocation of resources and that there have to be national priorities and strategies. If implementing those priorities and strategies happens through quango-type organisations, that is all right. Some of us are still sceptical, but that is clearly the way it is going to be done, so it has to be done in the best way possible. However, people and relationships on the ground are what really matter. We understand that we are to have a Bill, probably in the next Session, called something like the ““community engagement Bill””. Again, some of us are sceptical about whether national legislation can create community engagement, but those who take part in the debates will no doubt benefit from the expertise and perspectives of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, when he says that you cannot create communities. Perhaps that is true in a superficial way, but there are things that organisations at all levels can do to help communities to create themselves, and there are things that can actually hinder that process. The Minister said that the process of learning what works and what does not is very important. I agree that learning is more important that having a national ideological perspective on these matters. I listened carefully to the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, and I agree with almost everything she said, except when she talked about the agency being engaged in ““master planning””. I hope that the HCA will not do that, but that it will limit itself to providing the resources necessary to allow people on the ground to do the planning. If this is going to succeed, that is where it has to happen. Planning has to involve disparate organisations, agencies and so on, and it has got to be done on the ground. No one can sit in an office in the regional capital or London and lay down the rules. Whether in the county hall or the city hall, master planning has to be done locally among the people who are involved. Some will be professionals, some will be residents and some will be local politicians. If they are all brought together, there is a chance that it will work, although there are by no means any guarantees. That is the way we have to go. Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, referred to rootless estates with no great vision in conception. We know that there are far too many of those, and yet the original big estates on the edge of towns were built with great vision. It was a vision to take people out of the slums, to give them decent homes in a good environment with gardens and local facilities. The best of them have worked well. One of the first examples was Wythenshawe in Manchester. It came about through the huge vision of Lord Simon of Wythenshawe and others who have been involved more recently. By and large, Wythenshawe has been a success. Nobody would claim that there are no problems, of course, but a lot of them are caused by the fact that it was too large to be a single, council-owned estate and community. Part of the problem is the monocultural aspect because it was not properly understood. Wythenshawe would have worked better if it had been broken up into a series of smaller units interspersed with private development. Let us not pretend that all the big projects have been a disaster, because they have not. But the huge vision went wrong somewhere, not just in the suburbs but also in the high-rise inner city estates, and we have to understand why. Was it bad design or monolithic bureaucracies taking over and doing things without thinking? Was it lack of funding for community resources? Unless we understand why things went wrong from the original vision, we will not succeed in future. We will have to keep coming back to this: we must do our very best to create—again, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson—the relationships on the ground. That inevitably means making things as local as possible because it is the immediate locality that people can relate to. No doubt we will discuss all this at great length when we get that Bill, and I hope we will have a great time doing it. It is so important that people in big organisations at national level do not think they can just do things that they cannot do. They can provide resources, ideas, inspiration and professional expertise that allow the people on the ground to do it. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [The Sitting was adjourned from 6.20 to 6.30 pm.]