Neighbourhood Services: Government Support — House of Lords, 2019-10-24
Topic: Mixed Topics
Andrew Adonis (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. Her remarks about community bus services, having new request bus services and refashioning libraries as community hubs, and co-locating other community services, were extremely well made. It is vital that we deal with underfunding, but it is also important that we get the best value from the resources, the infrastructure and the funding that is currently available, and redesigning services along the lines that she was discussing in relation to Lincolnshire, which she knows well, is a point well made I have a gentle criticism of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. He said that there were problems, "even in the south-east". Can I inform my noble friend that there are many problems in the south-east, and most of the issues that he talked about apply equally to London and the south-east as other parts of the country? It is a very bad idea for us to be setting the north against the south, as if somehow the south is a land of milk and honey and the north is all starved. These problems are fairly common across the north and the south, and many of the issues which the noble Baroness referred to about redesigning services are equally important in the south-east Recently I visited the wonderful new library and community centre run by Oasis, a brilliant charity run by the outstanding community leader the Reverend Steve Chalke in Waterloo, in the London Borough of Lambeth. He has turned a library that was threatened with closure into a community centre. It also has a school and a debt advice service. The police station next door, sadly, is being closed, and Oasis is hoping to bring that into the community hub, too. There is a community centre and a café there. It is a vibrant community service that has enabled the local authority, working in partnership, to keep open a service that would have been closed even without the cuts which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred to. What we need to do—this is part of the role that noble Lords in this House can play—is showcase successful models of delivery, even though politically some of us would like to see fundamental changes in national policy, so that we can make the best of what we have got and utilise our still-rich panoply of local community institutions and infrastructure to provide still-better services I of course agree with the substance of what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, says. We need to join up the big picture here. Part of the reason why we are going through this Brexit crisis, and a massive crisis of confidence in our political institutions and our Government, is because the services on which people depend, all of those neighbourhood services, street collections, libraries, schools, housing—which I will have more to say on—have been seriously cut back in recent years, and people make a connection between the two. They think that the fact that they are getting such a raw deal in terms of their local services is part of the reason why they should lack confidence in their national Government. Alas, three and a half years ago the only question they were asked in a referendum was: "Do you want to leave the European Union?" They are now taking it out on politicians, particularly in communities more distant from London, such as Lincolnshire and parts of the north, that voted to leave It is very clear to me that, if we are going to deal with the massive crisis that we face as a country, we have to end austerity and fundamentally invest in our local communities—particularly poorer communities—and stop Brexit. We need to do the two together. It is a somewhat sad commentary on our failure in Parliament to put these together that this debate is so poorly attended, with so few of your Lordships taking part—because we must crack this issue of investment in local services. I am delighted to see that my noble friend Lord Kennedy is replying to the debate. He is a distinguished local councillor. Of the few of us who are here today, many are distinguished leaders of or have played parts in local authorities. Unless we can get this right, we are not going to crack the bigger problem of our whole relationship with Europe and our membership of the European Union I want to address the issue of housing. The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, was interesting and revealing. He talked about improving housing administration and the quality of local authority housing stock, but I suggest that that prospectus is not bold enough for the future.