Lord Mawson (CB)

I know that the Minister cares a lot about these issues around community engagement, which is always encouraging to people such as me. As a social entrepreneur, I have spent my life at the other end of this telescope. I now operate with a team across this country, in some of the poorest communities, grappling with local authorities and the machinery of the state. To be honest, we and some of our business partners find a lot of this state machinery very broken indeed; it is very difficult to make it work in practice. What people such as me are trying to suggest is that there needs to be some humility. It is difficult. I am aware that lots of colleagues in this Room have spent a lot of their lives in the public sector—I get all that; it has been my privilege to work with some rather excellent CEOs of local authorities and in the health service, as well as some who have not been so good, if I can put it like that—but there are real challenges with this machinery, whatever we say. I am experiencing them at the moment in one town in the north, where our Civil Service is not understanding the granular, practical detail of transformation and innovation—or what those things look like—and is in danger of putting old men in new clothes. So, with the opportunity that appears before us in this legislation, let me explain why we need to create, at a granular, local level and at place, learning-by-doing cultures that pay attention to how we work with the public, local authorities, the health service, charities and the social sector—that is, how those interfaces work in practice to deliver. I suggest this because, at the moment, although the words all seem fine and lots of people care about this, when you try to do this stuff—as my colleagues and I do—something quite different starts to appear in practice, I fear that, if we are not careful—and unless we grip some of that difficulty and some of the things that some of us have got a lot of grey hairs from trying to do—there will be lots of meaning well, but very little will change, in some of our poorest communities.