§ 1.55 a.m.
§ Mr. David Lane (Cambridge)After dealing with the countryside we must now turn our attention to a crisis in the cities which needs urgent action. The conditions in some of the worst of our urban areas should not be tolerated in a civilised society, certainly not by one as wealthy as our own. The contrast between these areas and the rest of the country is wholly unacceptable. There has been plenty of evidence over the last few years, plenty of studies and, most recently, an appeal by the Community Relations Commission in its annual report that action should be taken.
I doubt whether there is any need for a new agency of government to do the job, but I am certain that we need a new national effort. I want to urge on the Government that we should build on the experience obtained in other directions and develop a programme which will involve positive discrimination on a scale larger than ever before. If the Minister cannot reply to all my points tonight, I shall be happy to hear from him by letter.
The House is familiar with the general background. For a number of years a number of programmes have been operated by different Government Departments. The last Government increased, in particular, the resources devoted to the urban programme, but problems of co-ordination and scale have cropped up.
On co-ordination I fear that Whitehall has been tending to lag behind the developing techniques of the best local authorities, where departments have been brought together to work as one on what is really a single problem. On scale, we 238 are not as a nation devoting enough to tackling the problem. There was an important milestone under the last Government when the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton (Mr. Carr), was given a co-ordinating job in dealing with urban problems. There was also the increase that the Government put into effect in the total scale of support for the work being done in the cities. As a result of my right hon. Friend's appointment the urban deprivation unit was established in the Home Office and before we left office promising ideas were already emerging from it.
I am glad that the Government have continued this co-ordinating role for the Home Office, and I disagree with the view implied in the current issue of the Economist that the Home Office is the wrong place for this role to be carried out. I believe that it is the right place and I am glad that it is continuing. I welcome the Home Secretary's statement on 18th July about his general strategy. What he called the reordering of priorities in favour of people living in the most acutely deprived areas continues the higher priority to which the previous Government were pledged.
I wish to make my remarks under five headings. The first is the general arrangements for helping these areas. The second is housing and the environment. The third is education. The fourth is health and social services, and the fifth is community involvement. If any hon. Members are alarmed that that might indicate a lengthy speech, let me reassure them and say that I can only skim over the surface.
First I deal with the general arrangements. This must be a partnership between central and local government and others concerned, not least the voluntary bodies. The main responsibility must be placed on the local authorities, with support and stimulus from the central Government.
Some people might prefer to set up a special agency, perhaps parallel to development corporations, which do particular jobs in particular parts of the country. I doubt the wisdom of that. I think that it is better to trust the local authorities to get on with the job, but we need to be certain that they will tackle it with vigour.
239 There is a phrase in the statement issued by the Home Office on 18th July about selected local authority areas being invited to put forward programmes. How do the Government envisage this working precisely? I am not thinking of the trial runs in five or six areas also mentioned in that statement. I am thinking of the main programme that the Government have now unveiled. The suggestion of selected local authority areas rather implies that the initiative will start from the central Government in inviting certain local authorities to make proposals. I should have thought it better to invite any local authorities which believe that they have a problem requiring the Government's new style of help to put forward their proposals, rather than to seem to make even an initial selection in Whitehall.
I believe that a three-stage procedure would be better. First, the Government should issue a general invitation to local authorities to make their bids. Secondly, the interested local authorities would do so. Thirdly, the Government would decide which to back, and in what order.
My second question is, how do the Government visualise satisfying themselves that the local authorities most concerned will tackle the matter as vigorously as we want? We must consider a number of possibilities. For example, should we require every local authority which is getting this new support from the Government to set up a special committee concerned only with the community programme in its area? Should we require some liaison role involving the regional offices of the Government Departments concerned, which would work closely with the local authority? Should there be an augmented team in the Home Office whose job it would be to keep in touch with what was happening, monitor progress and see that the knowledge of the best practice was passed all round the authorities concerned?
I turn to the areas themselves. The Home Office scheme refers to "comprehensive community programmes". I have no quarrel with that phrase. An alternative would be to devise a label for the areas. I cannot think of a better one than "social priority areas".
That is a matter of detail, but I have one or two questions about the areas 240 which go to the heart of the problem. First, can the Minister confirm that the figure of 10,000 inhabitants mentioned in the Home Office announcement will perhaps be the norm but that he will not exclude giving help to smaller areas in suitable cases? I think that that would be necessary. We should not be tied to a particular figure.
Will the Minister also confirm that he has in mind not only the inner-city and inner-ring areas of the big conurbations but certain areas which may equally need help in some of the older but small industrial towns and, as a third category, some of the modern estates on the fringe of big cities, where a number of families with social problems may happen to be congregated?
I mentioned the trial runs that are envisaged. I am very much in favour of them. I welcome them particularly because I believe that it is necessary to see what can be done by this new, very-strong-support technique in a small number of areas. The Home Office mentioned four or five in England and Wales and two in Scotland. Will the Minister say something more about the areas that the Government have in mind? From my experience in England and Wales, I think we should include one and may be two areas in London, certainly one in Birmingham and one in Liverpool. In Scotland there should obviously be one in the Glasgow area.
My next question concerns the time scale. How do the Government relate in a time sense the trial runs for this handful of areas and the main programme which will then develop? Over how many years do the Government see this extending? I hope that they will be able to announce the trial run areas well before the end of the year, if not this evening. I am sure they are right in envisaging five-year programmes for whichever areas are selected. I hope they will add to that that the five-year programmes should contain definite targets—for example, school buildings or the pupil-teacher ratio.
My last question at this stage is about the total cost. The House will probably feel that we shall need to spend over the years ahead a good many more millions—I would not put it more precisely than that—than we have spent in the past few 241 years. Will the Minister give any indication of the scale on which the Government are thinking or the terms of the financing? Will the terms be like the financial arrangements for the urban programme, or something different?
I have been speaking about the general arrangements between Government and local government and the areas concerned. The programmes must clearly be tailor-made for each area. Subject to that, I have one or two brief suggestions for what might be the ingredients of the programmes under the headings I have mentioned. The fist concerns housing and the environment. I assume that these areas will have in most cases the housing action area treatment, using the powers that are given to local authorities by housing legislation. We must aim at achieving a socially-balanced community in such areas—for example, by encouraging the voluntary housing movement and the extension of home ownership. We must give still more attention to improving and making the best use of existing housing stock—in other words, renewal rather than comprehensive redevelopment.
For the environment we need still more low-cost projects for brightening up the surroundings in the various ways that experience has already shown are most successful.
For education the sort of thing I have in mind would be giving as much priority as possible to the areas of special need when extending pre-school provision, giving more attention at the same time to the outdated secondary schools and stimulating children's interest in their last year at those schools. I am sure we shall have to consider further special allowances for the teachers in these areas. We shall have to put more effort into English language teaching for children and adults in immigrant families and into developing closer links between the schools and the immigrant parents.
Last year, in September, the Select Committee on Race Relations and immigration reported on the education of immigrant children. That was a document of major importance for education and for the future of race relations in this country. I hope that there will be a positive response from the Department of Education and Science. Has the Minister any idea when we will get any 242 response from the Department? It was promised before the Summer Recess.
Under the heading of health and social services, the sad fact is that so far the areas of urban stress, despite their greater needs, have had available relatively fewer resources in terms of manpower and money than have been available to the more prosperous areas. The first essential is that total resources at the disposal of society should be distributed proportionately to social needs. In the health services it will mean more doctors and more health workers and more health centres over the next few years in these areas. In the social services, it will he necessary to seek out positively, and to find new ways of doing so, the families which need help and to encourage them to use that help.
My last heading is "community involvement", which is last but not least in importance. It is vital that the community should be involved actively in the efforts to improve the conditions of living in such areas. The pressure in recent years for more community involvement in decision-making has been growing. I welcome this trend. I am sure that we can turn it to constructive advantage, although we are all aware of the problems it sometimes creates.
It would be useful to have in most if not all of these areas some kind of a neighbourhood council, if it does not exist already. We should leave it to the local authorities to devise suitable methods of public consultation and participation according to the character of the area concerned. But I would expect to be created in each area at a very early stage some kind of community advice centre. Also in every area the voluntary workers should be given a vital rôle to play. They and their organisations have already shown in existing urban programmes what valuable suggestions they can contribute. The programmes of the local authorities must encourage them and get their co-operation, because there is a great, untapped reserve of good will and energy there, particularly among young people.
I have skimmed over a wide area. As a nation, it is time that we gave new hope and more help to families trapped in urban deprivation, whatever their race and colour. I urge the Government to 243 move forward boldly as far and as fast as national resources will allow.
§ 2.13 a.m.
§ Mrs. Lynda Chalker (Wallasey)My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Mr. Lane) has highlighted the essential problem of the whole urban aid programme, that of co-ordination. Many worthy people seek to assist the community in one way or another but their efforts are often, not necessarily misplaced, but not used to the best advantage because they are not co-ordinated with the local authority's ideas and the efforts of other voluntary bodies.
The Home Office really finishes up with literally the end product; the people who do not get through the rigours of modern life. They include, unfortunately, many young people who now benefit from community service orders and who formerly went into remand homes and other places into which they need not have gone if a little more community care of them had been exercised. Sadly, others go to prison for longer periods.
The nation has awakened too late to the problems of the inner cities. Whoever has been responsible for the past—both Conservative and Labour Governments are to blame—we are now in a position to ensure that we remedy the situation, which we see very clearly in every major city.
If the Home Office has to deal with the end product, let us work our way backwards through the other Departments to see what can be done to stop the problem at source. I have always believed in prevention rather than cure, and our money is well invested when it is put into a commodity which can help to protect existing advantages and develop others in years to come.
The Department of Education and Science is largely divorced, particularly at local authority level, from the conversion process which can go on with young people and older people in overcrowded city centres in helping them to cope more gradually and more beneficially with the rigours of life.
Thirdly, we have the next aspect of the conversion process, the Department of the Environment. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge has already spoken of housing renewal, but it is with 244 some sadness that I say that I am told that at present there are people who, through no fault of their own, qualified for improvement grants under the previous Government's Act but did not receive them and who, because of the wording of the new Housing Bill, will not be able to get a grant with which they can afford to make up together with their own money to improve their homes. These are the very people in the middle of cities that we need to help. Therefore, if the Minister of State has any influence over his colleagues in the Department of the Environment, I hope he will use it to back the request that I made to the Secretary of State way back in May that he should look at some of these problems with a more sympathetic nature.
Then there is the other aspect of housing with which we have tinkered for a long while—the homeless families. They, very often through no fault of their own, are evicted from old and crumbling properties only to be put into so-called hostels which, while I would not plead for them to be comfortable hotels, are really the worst restart we could give to help split-up families in any city centre. It revolts me to see droppings of animals in the cellars of such places, and to see holes in walls between bathrooms and lavatories and many of the other injustices which these people have to face, on top of having their family split up with the husband in one place and probably the wife and some of the children in one of these so-called hostels for homeless families.
It is in those places that many wardens are trying to give people a sense of responsibility to restart. These are the very people whom we are not serving through our urban renewal programme. In recreational and holiday centres we make many attempts, one of which I shall come to shortly. At the beginning of this cycle, however, we now have what I term the voluntary push, a positive push for action. It started under the previous Government. It is obviously continuing. There is an in-depth study going on in Liverpool at present. While I hold no responsibility for what goes on across the Mersey I, naturally, in the sense that my local authority is rehousing people from that conurbation, have an interest in seeing that city centre helped by urban aid in its own renewal. With 245 the movement across the river and, indeed, in our own roots in Wallasey we have a problem of urban renewal where new communities have grown up as simply concrete slabs and nothing more.
It seems that the crisis of today is psychological as much as a crisis of cement and lack of care. In terms of homes, that is a local authority responsibility and one with which local authorities are seeking to cope under enormous pressures. But it seems also that problems are being put in the way by unnecessary restrictions, by discouraging many people who would be willing to let part of their home to other people, homes in which to be rehoused to restart life in urban centres, the freedom to do so. People are frightened to provide new homes in that situation.
Among these things we have next the problem of education. This education of young people who at present are likely to stray can be helped through the urban aid programme. One of the things I find most depressing among youngsters all over the country is the low level of ambition to which they strive. This is because their sights are simply not set any higher than getting through the remainder of the years in school and then earning money, with no real sense or urgency or interest in the type of job they may take up in the future. If through special projects in holiday times we can overcome some of this low level of ambition among schoolchildren, we shall be saving Government money in the long term because they will be more able to cope for themselves in their later years.
A great deal of encouragement should come from the Department of Education and Science and from the pressure of Home Office Ministers to the local authorities. Schools should be encouraged to offer their facilities after hours to a far greater extent than currently happens. In my constituency we are fortunate in that we have some forwardlooking staff who do their best to make schools available after hours. There are very many people needing further recreational opportunities. Young volunteers do their best to provide the facilities but many schools lie idle for much of the time when they could be used.
I come now to the recreation facilities provided by the community. There is no point in the Government providing 246 urban aid without the co-ordination of other Departments. There is no point in communities trying to help one another, in all—age groups and all types of people, unless we can iron out some of the incredible red tape with which we tie ourselves in modern government. We have one instance in my constituency. We are seeking to arrange that a sports club may offer facilities to children who would otherwise have no proper football club and no training facilities.
At the moment we are seeking to persuade one of our nationalised industries to sell the sports club, the Poulton Victoria Sports and Social Club, to the community because it is in an area which has no other land that can be used for this purpose. It is in a high-density area where there is nothing for the kids who want to use their leisure hours usefully. Yet we are tied up in red tape and trouble from beginning to end. But the battle is on.
We need in the urban aid programme to give a sense of purpose and of belonging to youngsters from school age to adulthood. If we can do this, the need for urban aid will decline over the next 50 years. Unless we put the money in now and obtain co-ordination at a local level as a result of pressure from Ministries, I do not see that we shall be able to cease urban aid in 50 years' time. It will have to be extended over a much longer period.
If we are to preserve the health of future generations there must be co-ordination in all aspects of urban aid. This probably means freeing the hands of the Home Office and allowing it to intervene in the work of other Departments to make sure that people in need get the service which Urban Aid is seeking to provide.
§ 2.34 p.m.
§ Mr. Bruce George (Walsall, South)I am delighted to have caught your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker—far more successfully than my attempts two hours earlier to catch Mr. Speaker's eye. Having remained in the Chamber until 2.30 a.m. I should like to express a few points on the subject raised by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Mr. Lane).
If any Minister wants advice on how to dispose of vast resources I shall be only too pleased to assist. I represent an area which has enough problems to warrant an 247 entire Cabinet to look after it alone. It is in parts a declining urban area which young people are leaving for other places. It is an elderly population. The fabric of much of the town is declining because of neglect. The terrifying thing is the realisation, when listening to debates such as this, that there are so many similar areas desperately in need of enormous injections of capital. It will require hundreds of millions of pounds to rectify the neglect of centuries. I cannot see an end to the problems unless we as a country are able to create the wealth so that resources can be diverted into these areas of need.
Certain areas in the structure plan of my county borough are classed, in fine language, as areas of multiple deprivation. Problems go hand in hand in these areas. We do not simply have problems of bad schools built in the nineteenth century. Alongside aged schools there are enormous environmental problems of pollution, of poor social services and of poor public transport. There is a deficiency of recreational facilities and there are bad shopping facilities. All these problems are bound together and produce a dour setting in which thousands of people work in stark contrast to other areas, even in my constituency, which enjoy much better facilities.
I refer to an area known as Darlaston which at one time was in the county of Stafford but which is now in the Walsall metropolitan district. People in this area tolerate conditions which would be regarded as intolerable in many other areas. Yet in other areas in my constituency, as money is put into them, there has been a regeneration. Such areas could have gone into total decline, particularly as a result of housing neglect, but there is now an element of hope because of the creation of a general improvement area, for instance in Caldmore, and because its problems are being dealt with as an integrated whole. People are beginning to feel a sense of pride and of belonging. There is now a community spirit in an area which otherwise would have died in five or 10 years.
Therefore, I look upon this area of Caldmore, which has received much central Government and local government aid, as a sign of hope for the future. We may talk about the problems of urban 248 aid and of the integration of central Government and local government programmes, but it is daunting when one considers so many like areas which are in urgent need of financial aid. We have money available for a limited number of areas, but what about areas which are not in any Ministry list?
I hope that there will be a much greater element of co-ordination between the various services of central Government and local government, focussing on specific areas. Only if we break the concept of departmentalism in local government and central Government are we likely to achieve the level of provision of services which most people would regard as adequate.
§ 2.28 a.m.
§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Alexander W. Lyon)It is a tragedy that we should be discussing the question of urban deprivation at two o'clock in the morning in an almost empty House vibrating with all the usual signs of the end of term. In this debate we are to discuss a multitude of subjects, all of which are espoused with deep fervour by the hon. Members who wish to raise them, but not one of them is as important as the subject raised by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Mr. Lane).
The reason why there are no people in the Press Gallery to witness these proceedings and why no word of this debate will be reported in the national newspapers is that this subject has such a low priority in our thinking and spending programmes that it arouses virtually no interest. Yet if there were to be in one of our big cities a situation such as that which obtained in Watts, in Los Angeles, at one time in recent American history, and if a similar pattern were to spread throughout our major cities, we would not have a President's commission to consider it; we would have Select Committees and Questions in the House, and we would probably debate the subject ad nauseam. The tragedy is that probably in the 1990s the Select Committees would present their portentous reports and would say "If only we had considered this matter in greater detail in the 1970s". We did not and we have not done so, either as a Labour Government or a Conservative Government.
The order of priority for urban deprivation is too low and it should be raised. 249 The hon. Member for Cambridge does us a service by raising it tonight. I only hope that he will go on raising it at more appropriate times, if only for the sake of my constitution, and I hope that other hon. Members will go on raising it in Questions and in speeches, because the priority must be raised.
We even talk in a language which is incomprehensible to the average newspaper reporter and, therefore, to the average reader of the Press. What is one to make of a statement contained in a wonderful speech that has been prepared for me by my Department on this subject? It reads:
The House will be aware of the other initiatives in this field, including 12 community development projects, the arrangements for making special grants available to areas of high immigration population, the three inner area studies and the studies concerned with the 'cycle of deprivation'.That sentence bespeaks the reason for the lack of interest. We do not talk in real language about what the problems are. The hon. Member for Wallasey (Mrs. Chalker) has done us a courtesy tonight.We are talking about poor people in areas which have become depressed by years of neglect so that they live in inadequate housing and go to bad schools serviced by an inadequate number of teachers, without all the facilities which are required to bring up the balance of the education they get. They go from school to homes which are deprived of many of the things that are regarded as the normal standard of life of middle-class families, and they therefore continue an unending cycle of deprivation because they carry it on into the next generation.
The problem is complicated by the fact that a great many of those who suffer in these areas of deprivation are black and immigrant and therefore add to the deprivation felt by the indigenous population of those areas. They add newness, inadequacy of language and the cultural differences which go to make up racial discrimination within our inner cities.
It was at this point that the Labour Government in 1968 began the first tentative approach to doing something about the problem of the inner city. In 1969 my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced a programme of urban aid with the object of trying to assist immi- 250 grant communities in areas of deprivation in the inner cities. That programme was passed into legislation in the Local Government Grants (Social Need) Act in 1969, and so far about £30 million has been expended in a series of programmes. The programmes vary from help with nursery education to helping gipsy children to go on holiday, programmes for hostels for West Indians and a vast range of experimental programmes, all of which are peanuts against the problems we face but none the less of immense value in getting experimental programmes on their feet.
In addition we have the 12 community development projects. Those projects are not a means for channelling money into areas of need. They were designed to put teams of articulate, young people into areas where the population, though deprived, was inarticulate, to help those people to express their own sense of grievance and to put pressure on the authority to do something about the situation. The teams have been successful in carrying out that task to the extent that many local councillors wish they did not exist, but the pressure has been productive of change in a number of areas and has brought to light the kind of deprivation we want to tackle. But simply because it was never intended that those programmes should themselves provide the money or resources to end those instances of deprivation, that has not been the way to continue. It has been a way of educating, of enlightening those who live in the areas about services available, but is not the way to put an end to deprivation.
The Conservative Government instituted the three inner area studies which had the objective of putting a consultant in charge of a programme in three cities to look at the total area and produce a report about what was required. We have not got much further with those. The special grants available to areas of high immigrant population included the urban programme, but they also included Section 11 grants to allow local authorities to obtain staff to cope with extra needs caused by immigrant populations. As, however, will be seen, in trying to unwind the Americanisms that beset the titles we have adopted for our various programmes, the fact is that we have not got very far and we have not done very 251 much. The Urban Deprivation Unit is an attempt to see whether we can begin a comprehensive programme that will get rid of urban poverty.
Let me outline the way in which we have approached the matter in building on the foundation left to us by the Conservative Government. We reckon that over England and Wales as a whole there are probably about 50 areas that qualify as areas of intense urban deprivation and about 40 areas in Scotland. To make those areas suitable places to live in, one has to channel into them huge resources. It is not the object of the Home Office, which has been given the task of overseeing the urban deprivation programme, to provide those resources, nor need it do so. It is not a question of providing the extra money on top of the existing programmes. The real question is to find within existing programmes the right order of priority so that money is spent in urban areas of acute need rather han in other areas.
To give a contemporary but somewhat controversial example, one reason why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment recently decided to change the way in which the Government assisted local authorities with rates was precisely that the allocation left to us by the Conservatives was unfair to those areas of highest need—namely the inner cities.
The object of the exercise in part was to try to channel more of the available resources towards those areas of most acute need. We know what happened. There was an immediate outcry from those who had to pay more as a result. But that is at the very heart of the problem. We shall never have enough resources to make this a land of plenty for everyone in every area. We have to decide whether there are areas which relatively have more and therefore ought to be denied further access to Government resources, and whether there are areas which have less and therefore ought to have more channelled into them.
The object of the studies which are the first trial runs of this new programme is to select a number of those 90 areas—initially four or five in England and Wales and a couple in Scotland—to put in 252 people who will work with the local authorities and the local voluntary agencies, to try to determine how they can best use available resources to meet the needs of their areas and to throw up through this process the way in which existing programmes are inadequate to meet those needs. Housing action areas, improvement grants and Section 4 grants for immigrant teachers will all be utilised in channelling the money where it is most needed.
The object of the exercise is ultimately to produce reports on these areas which will indicate what has been done as a result of close co-operation between Government, local authority and voluntary agencies and to indicate also what needs to be done and where are the gaps in the existing programmes.
In those general terms the approach seems nebulous, but in Leeds, for instance, when the Department of the Environment recently got together with the local authority to produce a transport study for the inner city and to look also at what could be done about pedestrian precincts, although no greater resources were channelled into Leeds than would have been available from the existing programme, the speed in meeting the problems of the motor car was enormous. Coming from York, where we have talked about pedestrian precincts for the past 10 years and we have one street laid down, I look with envy at Leeds. That was merely because the local authority was backed by strong central Government initiative to use the available resources wisely, coherently and with the greatest impact to solve the problem.
That example is not inapposite, because transportation is one problem of deprivation. The provision of public tranport is crucial to solving problems of how to move poor people about in areas of deprivation. That too, therefore, would be part of any trial run.
We hope to get these trial runs going in these seven areas as quickly as possible, to have them report within about nine months on what they think the programme ought to include for each area, and to work that programme out in a period of about five years. We reckon that the cost might be about £1 million in each case. Relatively, however, the cost is not the most important factor. What is important is how we use the 253 existing resources much more effectively in those areas to get a better result than we have managed so far.
We hope that this venture will grow. It is not intended that we should sit and wait for the seven studies to come out before we take any further initiative. It is hoped that this whole programme will be an increasing part of public expenditure over the years. If it is to be an increasingly important part of public expenditure, it can only be so if hon. Members keep pressing to find out what is happening and to give it greater aura of priority.
The hon. Member for Cambridge asked me a number of specific questions. I think that I have answered most of them. He asked particularly about the Select Committee's report on education. I doubt whether we shall get the reply out before the end of the Session, but it is at a very advanced stage and we hope shortly to publish a White Paper which will set out that reply.
Although the response to the Select Committee's report on Housing is not so advanced, we hope to deal with that at a fairly advanced stage. I hope that the hon. Gentleman was not making any party point about delay. No report except one from the Select Committee Race Relations and Immigration has yet received a Government reponse. We have made it a matter of the utmost priority that all such reports should receive a Government reply within the near future. Education will certainly be the first.
I do not think I need deal with any of the other matters referred to by the hon. Gentleman. If I have left any out, I undertake to write to him and to deal with them later.