Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Andrews and Lord Jenkin of Roding

Thursday 10th July 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

My Lords, there is a lot to be said for the amendment. Indeed, it follows from what I said earlier this afternoon about the need for more local authority development corporations. I will not repeat that, but it was in the context of local housing estates, which the amendment is not specifically addressing.

My point in a sense supports the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. This country has learnt a great deal about planning of new towns. I lived for some years not far from Harlow and, even 20 or 25 years after it was founded, there was still talk of what had become known as “new town blues”. I am looking at the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, who knows much more about this than I do. However, the new town blues were caused not just by the separation of families, when they went from crowded urban areas to rural areas outside the cities, but because those rural areas were designed with enormous spaces between different little bits of housing. Harlow was a very good example of that. There really could be almost no interaction between little local communities, which felt themselves very much cut off. No one had cars in those days; they relied on foot and bicycle, and whatever public transport might be provided. We have learnt an enormous amount since then. The design of more recent developments is, if I may put it this way, very much more user-friendly. I hope that we shall see that very much at Ebbsfleet. That helps local committees to gel and to develop a local identity. They left that behind when they moved from the cities and, often, city communities were divided as some went to some new towns and some to others.

I saw this a bit in Liverpool, where a lot of the Liverpool council development was in large, out-of-town housing estates that were often quite hideous, with a lot of huge, tall concrete blocks. I hope that I was instrumental in securing something for a group that was eventually called the Eldonians, a tight-knit community of people who were absolutely determined that that was not going to happen to them. Yes, there needed to be redevelopment, but we were able to secure that in a single site, fairly close to where they were already living. I was helped by the fact that the Tate and Lyle sugar factory had closed and that we therefore had a readily available site. To the fury of the Militant Tendency, as it then was, within the leadership of the Liverpool City Council, I was able to insist that that site went to the Eldonians. They have been very kind in their recognition of that ever since, and that community is still going strong.

This is what one has to do: to try to preserve communities, so that they can retain and build their identities to become what one would like to see—a really flourishing social unit. This country has learnt a lot about that. Regarding the development corporations in new towns to which this amendment speaks, I was urging earlier the inclusion of development corporations with the power to initiate substantial housing estates, with the necessary accompanying infrastructure. We are now much better at understanding this, and the planners and other people who have been involved with this deserve great credit. I hope that the Bill will lead to more of the same.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin. He has said much more eloquently than I could what an extraordinarily important new clause this could be, were the Government to accept it. It really does reflect a very different approach to the creating of communities from the ones that inspired the new towns of the past. Those were, essentially, pragmatic attempts to rehouse populations which were in distress or in stress. We have a much more humane and intelligent appreciation of what it is to create communities these days. The noble Lord spoke eloquently about Liverpool but, in the case of new towns, one is of course creating a community. That means creating a sense of identity and belonging from the first steps up. In my opinion, it should begin with the nature of the community and the sort of infrastructure that sustains the community once it is in place.

That is why there is emphasis in this clause on key words such as, for example, “sustainable development”. That is one big change from the world that we were in 30 or 40 years ago when we were talking about growth and new towns. The notion of sustainability should underpin everything that we construct, whether in the demography that needs to be housed, the way in which we build or what sustains the community in terms of its well-being, such as the emphasis here on cultural and artistic provision, which is vital for creating a sense of belonging and opportunities for people to get to know each other and share a culture and indeed many different cultures.