Member

Yes, we need to work together on these issues, but we now live in an entrepreneurial age. We built 97 businesses with local people on East End housing estates, and we found that our children and our residents want to do stuff. They do not just want to become involved in a committee, with a black person and a woman—very condescending stuff—to sit round a table talking about things they have never done. They might want to become involved in the very delivery of the things themselves. There is great opportunity for that through this Bill. It opens a conversation about what community engagement is in the modern world and how local residents can become participants rather than just talkers and spectators, ticking boxes of one representative group or another. That is the space we are in. I certainly am willing to work with this or any Government in that space, because there is a desperate need for innovation in place-making.