My Lords, I am sympathetic to these amendments, but I am also very sympathetic to what the Government are trying to achieve in getting things built.

My colleagues and I have been at the other end of this telescope in communities trying to build things and get things done. We are now at year 41 and probably nearly a thousand projects in—some have been very small; others, such as the Olympics, became quite big. You get a perspective from practice on all that, which might be helpful to this discussion. Many years ago, we came across the challenge of what we call the two Ds: democracy and delivery. What I discovered many years ago with an East End group of people, on a failing group of housing estates where everything was failing constantly, was that local people were fed up to the back teeth with endless chatter and endless promises by councillors, when nothing seemed to happen. We only really became credible in Bromley-by-Bow, and trust began to emerge, when we delivered our first nursery with local parents and their children, which made a difference to their lives, and began to take over a derelict park where people were injecting every day in a completely dysfunctional situation.

It might be just worth me sharing the reasons why we made certain long-term choices. When I arrived in Tower Hamlets in the early 1980s, it was profoundly dysfunctional. The schools did not succeed, and the roads did not get swept. Some 97% of everything was run by the state, and it was a terrible mess. I was a local clergyman arriving in a rundown church; 12 old people sat where they had always sat in a 200-seater church, and it looked as though the dead had been carried out and no one had noticed. I had £400 in the bank. The little problem for me was to ask myself: what on earth can I do about this? The answer was: I do not have the faintest idea. As a Yorkshireman, my initial instinct was to do a runner; it is all too much for me. Phillip, the Jewish headteacher across the road at the primary school, was retiring early because it had become too much for him, so I thought, “This is me in a few years’ time, falling off my trolley”—I was 29 then.

We were grappling with these problems. Our first engagement in trying to do something about it was with the Liberals—they were not Liberal Democrats then. Someone called Peter Hughes was the leader of the council at that point, who had created nine neighbourhoods. Peter was a very good guy. We spent time working together with his officers on how we might take control of the derelict park behind our church buildings and manage it. We spent six months putting that model together, and we were just about there when there was a local election. The Liberal Democrats lost the election and the Labour Party won the election. Because the neighbourhoods had been a Liberal idea, the Labour Party decided to remove that structure and create seven committees. This was our first experience of trying to get anything done, with all the churn, with the public sector and its processes and the state. No one is to blame.

One of the things that we became involved in trying to build in the early days was a set of nurseries that began in Bromley-by-Bow. We ended up running four, growing a whole range of relationships with families, who then began trust us. They were very vulnerable families involved in welfare issues, health issues and all the rest of it. Yet there came a point, at year 10, when Tower Hamlets Council, then in that form, decided that it was going to pull all the nursery care in-house—I think to protect pensions, local authority officers and a whole range of stuff. All those relationships that we had spent many years building and all the connections made with health and so on began to be destroyed. Even today, that is having implications.

In the 1990s, through the common purpose programme, we started to work with the business community—originally with the manager of the Tesco, across the road. One reason for that is that we found them to be honest, reliable and consistent, and not subject to this kind of churn. We began to develop what has become known as the social enterprise movement and to put a business logic behind this work. When it came to involving residents, we began to realise that it is very easy to sit on a representative committee and say you represent the community and then blame the council, the councillors and everyone else—anyone can do that. We began to ask whether they were going to work with us on building a housing company to take over some of the housing in Poplar and build a proper social business model that would start to connect housing, education, health and place-making. It is through doing stuff that you learn, rather than through complaining and chattering about stuff. We started to build Poplar HARCA.

Some 28 years later, that company today owns 10,000 properties and 34% of the land in Poplar, and has brought in hundreds of millions of pounds in investment. At the moment, it has an investment programme of about £2 billion in play, where local residents have become seriously involved in issues of waste management—how you put it underground and how you remove the dustbins and all the rats—the size of balconies, bankers, money and all the rest of it. There is a great opportunity in the Bill and in what the Government are trying to achieve to start to rethink some of this stuff that is not working.

To be fair, I have a lot of time for the Liberal Democrats, and I have worked with all parties. I notice the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who once very helpfully helped me, is here. When we built the first integrated working health centre of its kind in the country, one of his challenges was to engage with a little local difficulty. As Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, he took hold of the problem and helped us solve it. Not every Minister did that over the years, but he did.

I share the thought that this is a very challenging matter for the Government. The issues are complicated. It is an opportunity for innovation, but I do not see enough talk about innovation in this legislation. I encourage the Government to persist with delivery issues, because they have been democratically elected and have a responsibility to build some of these homes.

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.

I have not had an opportunity to sit down with the Minister. One of the things that worries me at the moment is that I can hear Wes Streeting, quite rightly, wanting to move large parts of the health service out of hospitals and into communities and get upstream in the prevention agenda. We have been leading that agenda for 30-odd years. We have 55,000 patients nowadays and we know quite a bit about it. That is the right direction of travel; they are in the right space. But it is one thing to want it and another thing to do it. That aspiration in the health service is not connected with this conversation we are having. I am trying to have a conversation with the Minister about this—we all need to have this conversation. There is a real opportunity to join the dots here, but can we please have the conversation?