My Lords, I put these two amendments, Amendments 282A and 282B, down at Report because we were unable to debate them during Committee because of the timing of the debates. To save time, I have shared with the Minister and my sponsors the detailed speech I had prepared for Committee, with its reference to real projects my colleagues and I are working on and the disconnects we are experiencing in the machinery of the state as we seek to focus on delivering what the Government call levelling up—and I declare my interests. These imperfect amendments were put down simply to encourage a discussion with the Government about implementation and the delivery of their levelling-up agenda; they are not seeking to make a party-political point but to share practical experience on the ground.
My colleagues and I have been working at the front edge inside the machinery of the state for 40 years. Our work began in a failing East End housing estate and is now expanding nationally. We are today operating in some of our most challenging communities across the country. We are sighted in granular detail on what is and is not happening on the ground, below all the processes and paperwork, and on the ability of the public sector to deliver whatever we mean by the levelling-up agenda. The machinery of the state is in considerable difficulty. It is a fact that any Government coming into power will have to grapple with: the inability of this public sector machinery to deliver in detail and in practice the democratic wishes of the people of this country. This is a serious matter.
This is not just true regarding the levelling-up agenda. We have listened in recent debates in your Lordships’ House to speeches about this broken machinery when it comes to defence. I point noble Lords to the excellent speech on the challenges of defence procurement made by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, before the recess. In recent months, we have also listened to debates on the broken machinery in the justice system, the police, the health service, et cetera. There is a serious problem here; we ignore it at our peril.
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My two amendments, which were presented in Committee but not debated and which I have now put down at Report, are simply an attempt to encourage a discussion with this Government about the need, as in Amendment 282A, to stimulate innovation and a deeper working relationship between the public, business and social sectors. No sector can deliver levelling up on its own in the modern world. Those of us who are involved in the practice understand this in great detail.
In my second amendment, Amendment 282B, I encourage the development of what my colleagues and I call a “learning by doing culture”. It brings together the public, business and social sectors so that they learn from best practice. It is a culture that encourages the micro and the macro to learn from each other; the micro and the macro need to learn to dance together.
I was rather disappointed, therefore, when I asked the Minister for a response to my speech in Committee, which I shared with her but had no opportunity to give in this Chamber. Her response, if I understood it correctly, was implicitly that local authorities and the public sector have got it all covered. I do not believe that for a minute. I suggest that, if she and her colleagues take a closer look under the carpet in some of our northern communities that are spending levelling-up money, they might find that what is being promised in bids and what is being delivered in practice—if it is delivered at all—are two quite different things. Throwing money at challenging northern communities will not solve the endemic problems that they face or the dependency cultures that have often been created by the state.
I thank the Minister for her reply to my Committee-stage speech, which there is no time now to respond to in detail at this late stage at Report. In her letter dated 27 July, the Minister stated that delivery is about having the right structures and expertise. My colleagues and I often say, “It is actually all about people, not structures”. By relying primarily on the same local public sector leadership, which has not succeeded in transforming their communities in the past, they are not likely to succeed in future without the injection of additional leadership from other sectors. Surely the lessons of previous regeneration initiatives show that this approach has not worked in the past and is therefore likely not to work in future either.
However, if I understand the Minister correctly, her Government are relying primarily on local authorities and other public sector organisations to lead and deliver on the Government’s levelling-up agenda. Our experience over the past 40 years is that, especially in towns across the north of England that are struggling, as well as in seaside towns, a key part of the problem is a lack of skills, capacity and ambition in the relevant local authorities. The Government’s approach seems to suggest that people can simply pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The lessons that we learned in the 19 years that I worked on the Olympic legacy in east London suggest otherwise.
To be precise, I worked on that project from day one in 1999 until 2018. I was a director of both the Olympic Park Legacy Company and its successor body, the London Legacy Development Corporation. I chaired the regeneration and community partnerships committees on both bodies for many years and helped to write the structure for the Olympic legacy company for Hazel Blears, the then Minister in the Blair years with responsibility for the legacy programme. At that time, a Labour Government accepted that the legacy could not be relied on to be delivered by a collection of local authorities; instead, an SPV with a
board with a wealth of world-leading expertise was established, bringing together the public, business and social sectors.
The extraordinary success of that approach is hard to challenge, yet it is not a model that has been adopted more broadly in challenging communities in the north. We wonder why. The success of many London secondary schools has been achieved via the academy approach and then the free school approach. Although not all of these have fully lived up to their promise, they are examples of the need to look beyond local authority control—that is, to look under the carpet and see what is really there, underneath what local authorities think government wants to hear.
Again, this has been a broadly non-party-political approach, which successfully brought in private sector leadership, skills, money and ambition. The previous local authority-led approach severely damaged the prospects for millions of Londoners over previous decades but, based on the Minister’s letter, which I will place it in the Library, I wonder whether, if this approach had not already been introduced, this Government would have done so. I worry that this Government would have stuck with the failing status quo. So I find myself scratching my head and wondering why the current Government are so reliant solely on the public sector to lead, rather than a more mixed economy approach where you celebrate differences, build working relationships across sectors and learn from what emerges and what works. As Einstein famously said, it is a sign of madness to continue repeating the same approach and expecting to see a change in outcome.
I do not intend to push these two amendments to a vote. The purpose of them is simply to encourage a debate with this Government and in this Chamber about implementation and what has been shown to work in practice. I worry that few lessons have been learned. As far as I can see from these successful projects, there is little awareness in any real detail in this Government of what is happening on the ground in some of our most challenged northern communities, which are in practice experiencing little of what the Government call levelling up. My colleagues and I will continue to deliver projects on the ground. We will work with any Government who are serious about levelling up, but business as usual will not get us there. Innovation, a closer working partnership with the business community and social sectors, and the creation of a practical “learning by doing” culture will be essential in the modern world. These two simple amendments seek to find a way to encourage this step change.
My door remains open but, for now, I remain disappointed at the lack of curiosity and interest in the detail that lies under all the paperwork and in proven best practice. I beg to move.