Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 185, tabled by my noble friend Lady Coffey.

Only about half a dozen noble Lords in the Committee at the moment have previously served as Members of Parliament. From my own experience, there is nothing more annoying as an MP than to find constituents writing to you about some planning development that you know nothing about when other stakeholders have been notified. The Member of Parliament must then ask the council, the Government or the agency what the issues are about before forming a view on it and either supporting the constituents’ concerns or not. Constituents simply do not understand why MPs are not already in the loop. That diminishes their status when it seems that every other Tom, Dick and Harry has been on the stakeholder consultation list.

I appreciate that this amendment is narrowly focused, with a much smaller range of stakeholders. However, the issue here, as my noble friend has said, concerns nationally significant infrastructure projects, where the Secretary of State is the decider. Therefore, while MPs might not be on the general planning consultation list, it would be reasonable for them to be on the list for these nationally significant infrastructure projects. The principle is the same. That is why I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Coffey.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, before I speak to my Amendment 185SG, can I thank colleagues from all parties across the Committee who have supported me, including the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, who is in Birmingham today?

I declare my interests relating to this amendment. I am the chairman of the 360 Degree Society. This is a national social business that is applying the lessons learned from over 40 years of practical work in east London to community developments across the UK. Today, my colleagues and I are focusing on integrated development and placemaking, with business, public and social sector partners. The relevant business partners for this amendment include Barratt Redrow, Kier Group, Morgan Sindall Group, HLM Architects, the NHS and various local authorities.

This amendment is aimed at preparing the ground for and supporting the Secretary State for Health Wes Streeting’s 10-year plan for the future of the health service as he seeks to move services out of hospitals and into the community. It is my view, and that of my colleagues with many years of experience, that the health service needs to get upstream into the prevention agenda and move services out of expensive hospitals and into the community. This Planning and Infrastructure Bill is about not just housing but building truly joined-up places and cultures, where families want to live and where communities can thrive. It is my experience that the built environment and culture are profoundly connected. We really are the places that we live, work and play within.

Many of our inner cities and their fractured communities show the social costs of getting this wrong. This Bill and this amendment provide us with an opportunity to nudge the right direction of travel in a practical way, and it comes at a crucial time. So many previous attempts by government departments to encourage a more joined-up approach to development at a macro level have failed. I suggest that the opportunities to join the dots that make a real-world difference are in the micro, at place.

This amendment seeks both to support the Government’s desire to build 1.5 million homes and to ensure that we learn from the mistakes of the past. We need to create more joined-up services and communities and move beyond rhetoric into practice.

I could take noble Lords to so many places across the country where services are literally hiding behind their own fences and are not joined up, either physically at place or structurally in a co-ordinated operating culture. The main players barely know each other on the same street, yet they all work with the same families. This is an expensive disaster that continues to replicate. It needs to stop.

In new developments, we are still witnessing on the ground a fragmented health and community infrastructure. Not only are they not creating a sense of place but they are in danger of unintentionally repeating many of the same mistakes of large-scale housing developments of the past. We could be in the 1960s or 1970s: soulless housing estates, created by both the private and public sectors, that generate well-documented social and economic problems over time. Local communities need a soul and beating heart at their centre.

In the modern world, health is everybody’s business. It is no longer a matter for just the medical profession. The focus now rightly needs to be on the social determinants of health. We urgently need to build more joined-up social and health developments in local communities and neighbourhoods. In front of us is a real opportunity, as this Government commit themselves to building 1.5 million homes, to rethink the social, health and welfare infrastructure in these communities, and to bring together housing, health, education, welfare, and jobs and skills, truly encouraging innovation and more joined-up approaches.

Lots of research out there gives endless data on why all this makes sense; we just need to start doing it. One housing association’s social prescribing programme supported 277 people and reported a 90.8% change in their well-being. Mixed-use developments that blend residential, commercial, health and recreational spaces stimulate local economies by attracting businesses, creating jobs and prosperity. This research shows that the proximity of services encourages residents to shop and dine locally, creating a self-sustaining economic ecosystem. Siloed housing schemes are not only less effective but more expensive in the long run.

This amendment seeks to encourage closer working relationships between the public, private and social sectors so that, in this next major building phase, we actively encourage innovations, best practice and greater co-operation between these sectors. We cannot force people to work together, but we can actively encourage them to do so. We need to create learning-by-doing cultures across the country, which share best practice, as we set out on this new, exciting journey of housebuilding and infrastructure.

This amendment is a first attempt to find a form of words that encourages greater co-operation at place between the place-makers. The wording is not perfect and I am sure we can improve it, but it allows us to have a cross-party debate about the siloed machinery of the state that is not delivering the change that people want to see and experience. Very good people from different political parties have attempted, over the years, to mend these disconnects at departmental level. I have worked with many of them and this has proved really difficult to do. This amendment offers a simple, practical solution that encourages a direction of travel and a clear steer to practitioners and people of good will on the ground.

In my experience, what really counts when it comes to innovation and change is not diktats from government or more process and strategy, but transparent, joined-up, working relationships between partners involved on the ground. The siloed world of government is increasingly not fit for purpose and is daily hindering the very relationships we now need to bring together and help flourish.

The 360 Degree Society, which I help run, has a proven methodology that is enabling co-operation between major parties involved in place-making from the public, business and social sectors, and residents. There seems to be a consensus around what Wes Streeting is proposing for the future of the health service. We are at a moment where the players in local authorities, the NHS, the social and private sectors and housebuilders want to build a more joined-up world. We have all talked about joining up services and cultures; this amendment provides a practical next step on this journey.

Some of this is about ensuring that community infrastructure is an integrated part of large-scale developments and is created early on, rather than the last element to be built, but also that a much wider range of partners are involved in creating high-quality new places where people are healthy and can thrive and prosper. The 360 Degree Society, which I lead, has created a social value toolkit to explore the practicalities of how to do this. To take just one example, we suggest getting beyond the often confrontational, usually purely transactional approach between developers and local authorities and special interest groups to get to a place where there is a genuine commitment and endeavour to agree a shared vision for the place.

Our experience suggests that this is partly achieved by surprisingly straightforward changes, such as developing human relationships between key players and focusing on them. When we get to know someone, rather than just reading their papers and emails, it is surprising how often a way forward can be found. Relationships with the key players, rather than consulting and engaging absolutely everyone, are part of a way forward we suggest. The purpose of this amendment is to help create the appetite and desire to encourage colleagues to take this approach and encourage innovation in this space.

I was in east London recently, in a multi-million pound development. I was met by an African mother with two rather beautiful children. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent; the health centre is at one end of the estate, the community building at another, the nursery somewhere else and the school somewhere else. She described how her child was already picking up needles in the play area and she showed me a small video of two youths outside the housing association office jumping into a van and stealing the contents. The culture was already starting and I can imagine this mother already wondering—these estates need strong families —whether she was going to stay.

Let me briefly share with you a practical example of what success looks like in practice. My colleagues and I do not like papers; we tend to build practical examples with partners. In 2007, I was asked by Christine Gilbert, then CEO of Tower Hamlets Council, who went on to run Ofsted, to lead what became a multi-million pound development in Tower Hamlets, following a murder and considerable violence between two warring white and Bengali housing estates. The details of this development are in Hansard, because we debated it in the levelling-up Bill, but the basic points are: you had a failing school with a fence; next door, a failing health centre with a fence; attempts to build 600 homes that had spent £3 million on schemes, with not a flat built; and two warring communities, one Bengali and one white.

My colleagues and I spent time building relationships with local residents and with the local authority, the NHS and the housing association—top, middle and front line. We started with no investment and we have rebuilt a £40 million school; a £16 million health centre; 600 homes, with 200 for sale; and now a new primary school. In June, Professor Brian Cox and I did our 13th science summer school, and he led a masterclass at the end of the day; this school had involved 695 children and, at the end of the day, a group of them in a masterclass debated quantum physics—an extraordinary experience.

What were the lessons learned? First, it was not about structure but about people and relationships—

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

Order!

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

I am just about to finish. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, told us on Tuesday that there is a rising tide in this space. My suggestion is that we all need to grasp the moment or we will lose it yet again. The foundation stones need to be laid now. Let us take the first step together. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and the Committee for jumping ahead of him in speaking to my noble friend’s amendment. I had not clocked that he was due to speak and that it was his amendment. I apologise for my discourtesy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for his comprehensive reply.

The common theme between the amendments is empowering officials to do their job well. I will pick up an example from the noble Lord, Lord Mawson. If an official in the local hospital is only looking up the line to someone in the health department, it is very hard for them to take into account the needs of other aspects of the community.

If there is something in law or secondary legislation—whatever it is, I look forward to seeing it—that the Government produce that says, “You must consult, you must talk to these people and you must take them into account”, that empowers the official to do so. It does not make it happen, but it sets out a structure where we can communicate properly between silos. We can get things done as a community and not in little bits.

I am sure that we can all think of examples of where things would have been done much better if the community had been involved. In fact, we do not need to look much further than our own front door. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, has a lot of experience with construction, but when I took one of my friends who is in the industry through the front door and asked him how much he thought it cost, he was at about a 50th of what it was. We were not involved; the community was not consulted. This has been done to us; we were not part of that decision. The same applies to our “HMP Westminster”-style enclosure. I therefore really encourage the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, to work with my noble friends Lord Hayward and Lord Forsyth to see whether we can get our own mechanisms to be rather better than they are.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I have commented on the door and had conversations with various people around the House, which was very fascinating as a parable of this problem.

Christine Gilbert was a very good local authority leader who understood the limitations of the state and understood that just the processes and systems alone would not get us there. Something else needed to happen in which the local authority, the NHS and the normal players were obviously key partners. It was about the people and relationships; the machinery was not going to get us there, and she understood that as a very capable leader.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I also felt that the Minister’s reply to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was good, but I would be grateful if he could send him and us a link to the guidance that he referred to so that we can check through it and understand how it works before Report. In the case of my amendment, I await the Hillsborough law. If it can do what Amendment 158 is setting out to do and a lot more across government, it will make a huge contribution. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.