My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 54 and will speak to Amendment 55. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on Amendment 54 and of the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, on Amendment 55. I will focus the bulk of my remarks on Amendment 55 but will first deal briefly with Amendment 54. I thought about degrouping it but, in the interests of speed, the Committee might be able to deal with it as part of this group.
Amendment 54 is about transparency, a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, in her comments on the group beginning with Amendment 4, which the Committee discussed at its first sitting on Monday. Its very simple purpose is to ensure that, if the Secretary of State wishes to introduce restrictions on the way that the dormant assets scheme works, these have to be contained in regulations. This gives a proper degree of transparency to the actions of the Secretary of State. We all have our worries about the efficacy of the scrutiny of regulations, but this does at least bring them before your Lordships’ House. This is primary legislation, so will be in place for some years; it would clearly be inappropriate for a future of Secretary of State to be able privately to influence the operation of the scheme. That is the purpose of Amendment 54; I trust that the Government would have no problem with its objective.
In Amendment 55, I am returning to a point which I made at Second Reading: the very uneven distribution of social capital across the country. I fear that that unevenness may have been increased by the events of the past 15 to 18 months. This unevenness was originally brought home to me sharply during reviews of the charity and voluntary sectors that I carried out for the Government. It was my practice to try and hold meetings in different parts of the country to be able to take on board local concerns and questions. The fluctuating numbers of attendees at these meetings provided an interesting yardstick of the strength and vibrancy of social capital in those areas. When I chaired for your Lordships’ House the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civil Engagement—I was very lucky to have two such experienced committee members as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister—the same situation revealed itself in our trips. Each situation is different, of course, but certain common themes to this problem have emerged. Funding is of course important, often in small, repeated amounts rather than in big dollops, but this is about much more than just money. It is about finding physical structures—buildings in which people can meet, socialise and help create communities. There is a third element: the need for practical experience and paid help to supplement voluntary efforts.
My Lords, I make it clear at the outset that I am very supportive of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson—first, his amendment on transparency, which was usefully preambled in our debate two days ago, and secondly, his amendment relating to a call for the Secretary of State to include the establishment of a so-called community wealth fund in an order under new Section 18A of the 2008 Act.
Labour supports, of course, the principle of putting additional funding into the hands of local communities. Our experience, rather like the noble Lord’s, is that those things are best left local: communities need social capital support to ensure that they work with the charitable interests to achieve the objectives of many of those locally and nationally based charities. The Local Trust and the Community Wealth Fund Alliance have made a strong case in their briefing notes, and we recognise that there is broad-based support for this proposition right across the sector.
The idea of community wealth funds is not new, but the case for long-term and locally focused investment has become even more compelling in the light of the Government’s levelling-up agenda and of events during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our Amendment 56 would make a small but potentially significant tweak to the noble Lord’s proposed text, in that it specifies that new National Lottery community funds should operate independently of National Lottery structures. We appreciate, of course, the good work that the National Lottery Community Fund does across the country, but we saw the arrival of the Bill as an opportunity to debate additional methods of disbursing money to the communities that need it.
The alliance behind the community wealth fund proposal have given it a great deal of thought, and have undertaken research on how best it would work and how a system could be made operational in practice, with neighbourhoods empowered to create a positive community vision, and given time to deliver the change they seek.
2:45 pm
I should also make it clear that we welcome my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s amendment on using money from dormant assets to fund financial education schemes. I hope that the Minister will respond positively to that suggestion. Again, previous Governments—including Labour Governments—thought about rolling that out. While this Government have introduced a breathing-space scheme for personal debt, surely it is better to take action to prevent problem debt occurring in the first instance.
Finally, we questioned whether Clause 29 should stand part of the Bill to reflect concerns that some charitable organisations have around long-term certainty. Despite some help from the Government, many charities have taken a financial battering because of Covid, and although they have received funds from the dormant assets scheme, those can never be taken entirely for granted. The rules and criteria have remained steady since its inception, so this is a viable source of funds. Will the Minister talk in her response about the importance of flexibility? While we agree to a certain extent, we need a clear signal that the fund will be used to further the excellent work done by charities rather than to support short-term political agendas.
In the meeting before Grand Committee, the Minister and her officials offered some assurance about how future changes to distribution rules might take place. I ask her to restate them so that they are on the public record and so that there can be clarity right across the sector about how the funds will operate. I commend our amendment and give notice that we support the others in the group.
My Lords, I am very pleased to have put my name behind Amendment 55, spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. I strongly support the presentation that he made this afternoon. His work on the charities report and in chairing the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement were milestones in understanding the critical importance of civil society and an enabling state. The way in which he presented his case this afternoon reinforced the importance of communitarianism—of building from the bottom, and of engagement with and facilitating the ability of communities to work for themselves and those whom they serve.
In a moment, I will obviously wish to speak to Amendment 56A in my name, but I want to say a word or two first in support of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and my noble friend Lord Bassam in terms of the possibility in future of building from local experiments and local development into a national community wealth fund, and the facilitation of that through the legislation so that it might happen organically. I am proud of the work done over the years by South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, which has been able to distribute grants and support local initiatives. Greater funding and support for that kind of operation is where organic change can take place and where people can see not only the contribution made from the unclaimed assets fund but the contribution that they can make in small ways by adding to that and being part of the process of delivery. They see where the funds have gone, experience the benefit of them and then take forward those learning processes to build that enabling state at local level, reinforcing civil society and enabling people to make decisions for themselves. The case is overwhelming and the question is about how we should go forward. I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to indicate that on Report there will be a welcome for a facilitating clause, which will enable us to move forward on that.
My Lords, I, too, was a member of the Select Committee on citizenship, but clearly I did not make as big an impression as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, or the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I am very glad that I was, however, because it was one of those pieces of work from which one comes away having learned a great deal about a subject that one thought one already knew a lot about but where there was much more to learn.
One of the lessons that came to members of that committee quite forcefully, particularly from people in communities that felt they had been left behind, was the very low level of knowledge of how to participate in local democracy—simple things such as knowing how to be eligible to vote, for example. In part, that fuels what I shall say over the next few minutes. I do not object to community wealth funds; I have considered them over the past few years and they are undoubtedly well intentioned and beneficial. It is also undeniable that they would in some—perhaps most—cases provide assets to go with the aspirations of local people to own and control the assets, which they are already legally able to acquire under the challenge fund and with the assistance of organisations such as Locality and so on. That legal right is already there.
My question about this is: in general, is the addition of another entity that has to be governed, managed, staffed and accountable advisable? Is it an addition or will it be an unnecessary added complication? We have hundreds of local community groups that rely on the knowledge, skills and good will of people in those localities. What they very often lack is technical skills.
Here I will pick up some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, about the National Lottery Community Fund. I go back a very long way. I remember the creation of that fund and the impact it had on the voluntary sector, which I worked in at that point. It is unarguable that the fund brought in resources that could not have been imagined before its creation for capital, sports and social programmes.
3:00 pm
In the best of times, if we had a voluntary community sector that was not under pressure, this might be something into which we could put some investment to see whether the theory behind it is correct: that setting up this kind of stand-alone fund, which would be in addition to what already exists in many places—local community funds into which local philanthropy is encouraged for expenditure in a particular area—really would make a difference to the holding and running of assets, particularly in poorer communities. At the moment, however, I do not think that it is a wise thing to do. All local government departments, but particularly those in poorer areas, are under intense strain. Over the past year, local resilience forums in local authorities have done a tremendous amount of work just in trying to keep people and communities going at a very basic level. They have sometimes had to work very hard to bring in new groups of volunteers, manage them and make sure that the best use is made of their time and talents.
Although I can see the undoubted good intention in all of this, perhaps it is not something that we should pursue in this way. Instead, perhaps we should look at local resilience forums and, in particular, ways in which we could re-establish something that has been hacked back or, as in many places, no longer exists: the CVS network, which supplied skills, training and so on to communities and charitable enterprises. We should look at whether we could get that, alongside local government, back to work in these communities.
My final point is this: when youth services are disappearing around the country, there must be a priority to get them back in some form rather than to pursue this method of stimulating community involvement.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to speak in support of Amendment 55, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts—not least because, as he said, I was a member of the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, which he so ably chaired.
I must admit, it is only recently that I have been made aware of the campaign for a community wealth fund and that I have joined the APPG for “Left Behind” Neighbourhoods. However, I have been persuaded by the evidence from the Local Trust and others that a community wealth fund—or, to take on board what the noble Lord said, perhaps community wealth funds—potentially represents a key building block in the aspiration, shared across the political divide, to build back better or, as Sir Michael Marmot put it, to build back fairer.
In his new report, The Marmot Review 10 Years On, Sir Michael emphasised this:
“Empowering and sustaining communities was central to the 2010 Marmot Review”—
his original review of health inequalities. He also observed:
“Over the last 10 years, these ignored communities and areas have seen vital physical and community assets lost, resources and funding reduced, community and voluntary sector services decimated and public services cut”.
Both in his report and in his Covid update, he called for investment
“in the development of economic, social and cultural resources in the most deprived communities.”
In a similar vein, as I noted at Second Reading, a number of bodies, including the Legatum Institute, have argued the importance of social investment to the levelling-up agenda. According to a recent survey published by NPC, the general public believe that levelling up must address social needs, and just yesterday, the Education Select Committee referenced the idea of a community wealth fund when discussing the implications of the levelling-up agenda for education and children’s outcomes.
20 of 113 shown
One of the most distressing aspects, for me at least, was the loss of self-confidence and self-belief. For too many, aspiration and hope had died, overwhelmed by the scale of the apparent challenge but, when a spark had been lit, often by a small group of people, the results were remarkable. I recall, on our committee visit to Clacton, that the pub which had been bought by the community, an ACV, was now breathing life into the area in a whole host of ways not originally envisaged. Money, physical structures and practical help are important, but there is yet another requirement—staying power and endurance. Rebuilding social capital is a marathon, not a sprint. Volunteers have lives outside the work they do for their communities.
On our committee trip to Sheffield, we met a group helping to keep libraries open and extend their opening hours, better to assist and serve their communities. But as members of the library group pointed out graphically, if Mrs Smith, say, has undertaken to open the library at 9 am on a particular morning and her child falls ill in the night and has to be taken to hospital, the library will not open because, quite understandably, rightly and properly, her responsibility to her child will take priority. That will be a blow to the community, unless there is a structure to ensure that someone steps into Mrs Smith’s place. That is why some limited paid back-up is important. It can be seen that this is a complex, shifting kaleidoscope of requirements that needs to be sustained over time.
Finally, to be really effective, to ensure that actions are done by and not done to, these activities must be and remain really local. That may seem very obvious to the Committee, but I shall quote a couple of sentences from our Select Committee report. We wrote:
“Communication between citizens and government at all levels is often poor, and was a subject frequently raised not just in formal evidence but by those we spoke to on our visits. When seeking people’s views, communication tends to be with the ‘gatekeepers’—those who hold themselves out, not always accurately, as representing their communities. People, especially in deprived areas, must be made to feel that government is speaking directly to them, working with them and for them, and paying attention to their needs and wishes … Communities must also be prepared to open up and bring more voices into the conversation.”
That is the background to the amendment. The concept of community wealth funds could be particularly well placed to meet the complex requirements I have described. They could provide funding, could provide a means to open and maintain buildings, could employ the limited permanent staff needed to provide the necessary structural framework and, finally, could do all these things over the long period needed to provide remedies for the deep-seated, structural challenges that these communities face—hence my interest in the briefing sent to me and many Members of your Lordships’ House by the Community Wealth Fund Alliance. However, I have to admit that I had a concern about the original briefing. The alliance speaks for 400 civil society public and private sector organisations, and the briefing sought the tabling of an amendment establishing a “Community Wealth Fund”—with a capital C, a capital W and a capital F—as a national body.
I told the alliance I believed that the concept and the approach they represented was entirely praiseworthy and worth supporting, but I did not think that as yet there was enough practical experience to justify a “Community Wealth Fund”, with capital letters, appearing in primary legislation as a national body. Could a CWF—with the capital letters—appear as a national body in future? Of course it could, but we are not there yet. We need more practical experience of how this alliance of 400 different organisations will work together, and how methodologies and objectives will change in the light of real-life experience.
Today, I am delighted to urge the Government to support the creation of community wealth funds—individual local efforts, shaped to meet the particular needs of their areas. I think it highly likely that a national body will emerge in due course, and perhaps become a fifth distributor but, as I have said, I do not think we are there yet. We need more experience of building from the ground up. In short, Rome was not built in a day.
There is a range of evidence from Britain and across the world that giving communities a proper stake in local spending decisions produces far better results than imposing schemes from the top down. As with our previous debates on the asset clauses, we should not be confined by how things have been done in the past. Instead, we argue that we should seize opportunities to try new approaches.
I have little doubt that the Minister will say that there is not yet strong enough evidence for the Government to support this approach. If that is the case, would the DCMS be prepared to fund pilot studies in a small number of communities across England, to gain more data? The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in a sense, alluded to that. Perhaps we should consider a pilot approach, before bringing into play the full effect of a community wealth fund clause in, or an amendment to, this legislation.
That would be a practical and pragmatic approach and would garner support, but we obviously want to listen to what the Minister has to say on this. We will be more than happy to discuss with her and colleagues across the House how we can make this work because, like the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, I think that it is a winning idea that would genuinely empower local communities.
On Amendment 56A, I commend the Kickstart money and those who have, over many years, fought for better financial education throughout the education service. Obviously, this applies to young people who reach 16 and are looking to their future. I remember, as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, going around the country on a fact-finding and informing exercise on what needed to be done about the future of pensions and the pension age. We were picking up the report by Adair Turner—the noble Lord, Lord Turner—and looking at the extension of the working age. We looked at auto-enrolment, which took so many years to implement, having been agreed back in 2005, and the way in which young people should think about their future.
This was complemented by the then child trust fund, which we addressed in the House yesterday and is relevant here. It was designed to enable people to have a nest egg—a small amount of capital that they could engage in their own lives. What we are talking about here has a synergy, and it is important for us to understand how the capital asset divide is a major challenge for the future. If you inherit a house from grandparents, parents or an uncle or aunt in London, it is the equivalent of winning the lottery. If you live in rented accommodation in the north of Sheffield, Barnsley or elsewhere and have nothing to pass on to future generations, you will see the reinforcement of intergenerational disadvantage.
I hope that financial education will help in its own right but also with the wider debate on where we are going as a country. It is particularly important that this happens at primary level; at secondary level, there is at least PHSE and the emphasis that can be placed on the economic side of the financial learning exercise. In the citizenship curriculum, the wider issues can be addressed as well. In primary education, those two things, while relevant to the curriculum, are not taught in a specific or identifiable way and it is really important that we get it into primary education at a very early stage so that young people understand the importance of their part in managing their money and how the financial world works around them. The unclaimed assets fund could be of great benefit if we can get this right.
However, it has always been a puzzle to me how we enabled the National Lottery Community Fund to be created and to be the size and extent it is, yet we have never had a requirement that part of its money would go towards sustaining and developing the infrastructure of the charities and community groups that largely deliver its programmes. The National Lottery sits on top of the rest of the voluntary sector and requires it to deliver its agenda. It does not have an obligation to sustain it.
It is worth noting that the financial position of the voluntary sector is vastly different from how it was even 25 years ago. Many noble Lords will know that NCVO, together with Nottingham Trent University, is carrying out a tracking exercise on the impact of Covid on the voluntary sector. It is producing some really interesting results about the way levels of demand for local services are rising and the extent to which, in this last year and in the forthcoming year, the resources of those charities will be under significant strain. At least 30% of them expect that they will have run out of reserves and will go out of business. That is the overall position.
I will tell just one story. Quite a number of years ago, National Lottery funding was used to develop a series of healthy ageing centres. These were flagship programmes set up with five-year funding. The great thing about them was that they had to be innovative and dynamic. Therefore, they have to be free-standing and to bring in new partners. They therefore could not be set up and run by the existing local older people’s organisations. They ran very well and highly successfully. Then the five-year funding ended, at which point the remnants of their good programmes were all absorbed by the then-existing local Age Concerns and so on. I wonder whether, in setting up this kind of mechanism, we might not set people up for a similar kind of scenario.
While dormant assets, as underlined at Second Reading and in line with the additionality principle, must of course not be used as a substitute for government funding, the idea of community wealth funds as proposed in this amendment provides an opportunity for “empowering and sustaining communities”, to quote Marmot. It would be targeted at a very specific group of communities or neighbourhoods: those in which serious deprivation is combined with lack of social infrastructure, or what Community Links calls “civic inequality”. In its recent report Making a Good Place, Community Links concludes:
“The case for investment in social infrastructure is strong, not just because of the long-term benefits that it brings and the need to address civic inequalities, but also because of the pressing situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic, which makes it all the more important to create good places that promote good mental and physical health and well-being and resilience to other attacks.”
According to Local Trust, which spearheaded the campaign for a CWF, in its experience communities lacking in places to meet and social infrastructure, such as youth centres—so it does include support for young people—pubs, cafes, parks and community hubs, can find it difficult to nurture the social interactions and bonds that play an essential part in developing a community’s civic spirit. The trust argues that investment in social infrastructure is foundational in that it helps to build knowledge, skills and confidence in marginalised communities, thereby contributing to a lasting legacy of change. In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, what is important is the knowledge of continuity of funding that one does not necessarily get from local philanthropy.
As a report from the IPPR Environmental Justice Commission shows, this can strengthen environmental as well as social action in deprived communities. The commission argues:
“For communities to thrive in a climate changing world they must be given greater ownership and agency”.
As I said at Second Reading, in a point that has already been made, a particularly attractive aspect of the CWF is the emphasis its advocates place on the control over spending decisions that it would give to local residents. I quoted the Public Services Committee, which has consistently made the case for user involvement in the development of services if those services are to meet local needs and to be resilient.
There is growing recognition that failure to embed genuine community involvement is one reason why past local-area initiatives have not been as successful as they might have been. To quote Community Links again:
“Community participation in decision-making ensures that investment genuinely serves those it aims to support and also helps build capacity within the community”.
The proposals for a CWF contain detailed suggestions for how this could be done and how to build accountability into its structures. That perhaps goes some way to address the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, as to why this kind of structure is necessary: it perhaps adds something to what is there already.
Polling research carried out for Local Trust and its experience of running the Big Local programme suggest there is a real appetite in deprived communities to take on the challenge, provided there is appropriate funding and support to build capacity and confidence. Research in so-called left-behind areas found that three-fifths agreed that local residents have the capacity to make real change in their area, while seven out of 10 said it should be local people and community organisations leading decisions about how any funding should be spent.
The release of new dormant assets under the Bill provides a timely opportunity to invest in such areas through proposed community wealth funds, which, as we have heard, have the support of over 420 organisations, including the NCVO, and 35 local or combined authorities. Again, the fact that it has such strong support from the voluntary sector, the NCVO and others perhaps goes some way to counter the concerns raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker.
While I am not looking to pre-empt the consultation that we will discuss shortly, I hope the Minister will be able to give us some idea of the Government’s views about the proposal for community wealth funds as an appropriate use of a portion of the dormant assets that will be released. At Second Reading, despite it having been raised by a number of noble Lords, I think she carefully avoided commenting on it. I hope she will be able to provide a sympathetic response that will give hope to the 423 organisations in the community wealth fund alliance, and to those living in the deprived communities that stand to benefit from such funds.