Nye Bevan, Richard Crossman and Harold Wilson inspire leader of Crawley borough council Peter Lamb’s modern-day battles for more and better housing, he tells chair of Progress Alison McGovern as she tours the country meeting the Labour leaders who are governing Britain

Peter:

Here in Crawley we are in overall control [but] we’ve got a majority of one, which is a challenge. There are only two parties: the Tories are on 18 and we’re on 19.

So you’ve got to have a lot more discipline than some other authorities where they’re free to go whichever way they want. Everyone has to turn up to meetings. Everyone has to be able to vote the same way and that means you’ve got to have a lot more, I think, consensus-building in the group in advance to give yourself the opportunity to say everyone’s going to get something out of this.

Alison: What does that mean for you, as a leader? Do you think that means that you are seeking more consensus or do you think that means you just inevitably spend more time here in the town hall rather than out being an ambassador for the council?

Peter:

I think I do both quite a lot, to be honest. It’s less of a struggle in terms of trying to find consensus between people because most of the time you can do it through meetings you already have to go to. But I really do have to go out and spend a lot of time promoting Crawley, particularly with the devolution discussions taking place at the moment. There’s an awful lot at stake potentially.

Alison: Tell me a bit more about how that works in terms of your vision for Crawley, because it’s a place where it’s quite well known in the country, it’s somewhere where the politics has always been marginal. We held the seat until relatively recently, until the last general election but one, and for that reason people who are in politics might know it. But how have you found a vision for Crawley that people have identified with?

Peter:

The reason I decided to run [for leader] was I wanted to make sure we had a clear sense of where we wanted to take the town and I wasn’t convinced that we’d done a lot of that work since we’d lost control in 2006. The party, nationally, with the New Towns in the 40s and 50s had come up with Crawley as a concept. The party locally had then seen that vision through, controlling the council pretty much continuously in the period after.

To us, the council was synonymous with Labour and we hadn’t really taken the time in opposition, I think, to come up with a clear offer about, ‘Well, OK, what do we do next?’ For me, we really had to start looking at a lot of the data. We could see that with the Conservative government there wasn’t going to be as much social support as there had been in the past. To my mind, this meant that we had to try and help people to get on their feet as much as possible. In general, my feeling was: if you can create a situation where someone’s got a decent-paying job, if they’ve got a roof over their head, and if you can provide a sense of community out there, it doesn’t matter quite as much when the state pulls back, because they’re got much of what they need to weather the storm.

We decided, with the resources we had at our disposal, we were going to focus in on that. When it comes to housing, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to make it more affordable and in greater numbers. When the New Towns formed, people were told that there will be a house for you, for your child and for your grandchild. Fundamentally, we failed on that as a country and certainly from the 80s onward, we’ve had a problem with housing because we couldn’t build at a rate that would keep up with the housing sales that were lost.

That has meant that we have very tight restrictions on affordable housing. It’s one of the least affordable places to live in the UK, when you compare average wages to house prices, just because of how much pressure there’s been. Our borders are thoroughly constraining. We’ve built right up against them. Our modelling shows there will be need in the town for about 10,000 extra units over the next 30 years, just for people already living here and their kids. We can provide about half of that by ourselves, but a lot of the planning and cross-authority planning that the Tories brought in fundamentally doesn’t work. We’ve got a lot of our neighbours building on our border and, despite that fact, we don’t get allocation rights and most of the housing won’t meet local needs. A lot of these are larger and more expensive units local people won’t be able to afford.

It’s very hard to argue it’s meeting our need when it won’t match people’s actual income range. So we’ve got a range of problems and we’ve frankly begged, borrowed, and stolen where possible to make up the housing numbers, so with a lot of our neighbours, we’ve played hardball, very hardball, threats of vetoing things developers and authorities want. For instance, we have parcels of land that we inherited from the New Towns Commission that we used as ransom strips.

You’ve got to be willing to go at it hard if you’re going to deliver for people and, in terms of our housing policy, we already took it to the brink in terms of our Local Plan insisting, against some recommendations, we were going to have 40 per cent affordable housing as a minimum requirement for each development with an additional potential 10 per cent low-cost housing, which we felt was worth the risk we took.

Alison: Listening to you speak, it’s like reading the accounts of Nye Bevan, fighting within the Ministry of Health and Housing to get housing for people and it’s really interesting [to see] that kind of Labour mission in terms of New Towns – we are right back there again, desperately trying to build up places for people to live.

Peter:

I think it is something we gave up on or got distracted from. I’ve actually … I’ve got a picture of Harold Wilson on my wall and he was a political hero of mine and I remember reading the Richard Crossman diaries from when he was secretary of state for housing and about that fight – housing was viewed as being as important as health, as important as education. We lost that over time and certainly in areas like Crawley, what we’re doing now is trying to rebuild, or rather make up for an awful lot of lost ground.

It’s difficult because, fundamentally, more than devolution or anything like that, you just want … government to honour commitments that they make and for structures to remain relatively stable so you can form deals with them. We took out, because we were required to by the government, half a billion pounds’ worth of debt to gain local control over our housing revenue account back in 2012. Then there was the decision around reducing rents back in the summer budget that hurt us a lot. We reckon in the next 30 years, when you take into account the compound implications in terms of housing that could have been built, we’re probably going to lose about £160m on that account and that’s £160m that would have gone straight into building new, affordable housing for people in a part of the country where there’s a massive shortage of it.

That was a big deal and you can’t plan for the long term if they’re constantly adjusting these things.

Alison: Do you think the Tories in government understand how the shifting goalposts affects delivery, policy moving quickly and then sometimes there being U-turns? You’re engrossed in the detail of the getting people an affordable place to live. Do you think Tory ministers understand that?

Peter:

I think they haven’t got the foggiest clue quite frankly. I’ve collared Greg Clark at various events … He just simply denies realities when we put them to him. He claims things won’t happen, then you quickly see that they do.

One of the big problems here is all this talk about starter homes. Well, for the average family here, a couple working full-time for the average wage for the town is still going to be £12,000 a year short of being able to afford a starter home. If that’s the average, how are we going to house anyone on a lower income? It’s impossible.

The impact of that is going to be that you’re going to have all these houses built that the local people aren’t going to be able to buy. Instead, you’re going to get migration out of London, which I don’t mind in itself, that was the purpose of the New Towns, but we’ve got to be able to house already people here, otherwise we’re just adding to the pressures. There’s no real long-term strategy with any of this. Everything the Tories do is tactical.

When it comes to councils, I’m always talking to officers about, ‘Well, where are we going to be 20 years from now? Let’s deal with the problems that we’re going to have in 20 years,’ because it’s the only way you’re actually going to solve them.

Alison: Where do you want Crawley to be in 20 years’ time?

Peter:

I think we’re going to need significant development. There are a lot of parcels of land about which are in the government’s ownership and where we could build new eco-neighbourhoods.

Alison: A new New Town?

Peter:

Well, an extension to the New Town. I think certainly the country needs more New Towns but Crawley needs housing now and the government has the to go something about it. I see our town centre being regenerated. There’s been a lot of stopping and starting on that. Fundamentally, I think people are going to give up on the idea that it’s going to be this place filled with brand new shopping malls and a John Lewis and all this or that. Town centres play a fundamental community role. As retail dies away, it’s going to have to take on a new purpose and that’s going to be built around that sense of community, around leisure, around activities in terms of community activities and new housing.

Alison: Yeah, and a bit of positive night-time economy, not in clubs but family restaurants and –

Peter:

There’s that, festivals as well. We have a very healthy local community and it’s about making sure that you base activities in an area where they’re going to have the most impact. The town centre is going to change a lot and I think we’re going to see an awful lot of redevelopment and things have kickstarted. We’ve got £3m going into regenerating our main civic square. We’ve got some big new names coming into empty units around there and that didn’t just happen.

It was because my cabinet member for economic development and planning retired early so that he could take on this role of trying to get the town centre actually sorted out as it had stalled for the last decade, eight years of which was under the previous Conservative administration. He’s gone round and found out everyone who owns all the units … One of the problems we have is we own very little of what’s actually in the town centre, and he’s taken to marrying them up with retailers, trying to where possible have public interventions where the private sector is failing.

We have a big problem with a lot of the units owned as long-term investments by pensions and life insurance companies and that was an example of where national policy could have done something. We’re told, ‘Oh, well, decrease the business rates in these units and you’ll find people go in.’ Well, I don’t actually believe that. I’ve talked to asset managers who deal with an awful lot of these buildings and they’ve said, ‘Well actually, for these people, they’re not trying to generate income from a lot of these units. It’s a long-term asset for them, somewhere to store their money, and at some point they’ll want to sell,’ and we need to realise that.

If they decrease the rent on their property, it reduces the value of their asset on paper, so a lot of times they’re better off leaving it empty rather than accepting a lower rental value. If we reduce the rates they’ll simply make up the difference on rent.

Alison:

Again, do you think that this is where sometimes the debate in politics nationally misses the detail of what’s actually going on? It strikes me that I’ve heard many debates on town centre regeneration on high streets in Westminster. No one’s ever made that quite fundamentally important point.

Peter:

I think a lot does get missed and one of the things that you see on the ground, particularly if you have any connection with the national system, is actually all the different policy interventions which could have made a difference … When you talk to people on the national level a lot of the time they believe that they already have all the answers and it’s very hard to actually put across where they’re missing the point … It’s one of the fundamental things about local government – we’re all about the practicalities of delivery.

We don’t control national policy. I’m not really interested in national strategies, frankly, because it’s too distant. I see that problem that residents are bothering me about today and ask myself ‘What am I going to do about that?’ You think, ‘Well, actually, there are things we could do if the shackles were taken off.’ That’s far more what I would like to see through devolution and all these combined authority areas, because there’s really not much to them at the moment. They’re literally just a way of trying to lever in a bit of infrastructure money for the future while the government is taking all the same money from you in other ways …

Alison: Say more about that. Leaving aside the question of combined authority for a minute, taking the shackles off. What would that look like?

Peter:

There are a range of different ways it could be done … I mean, one of the big problems is whenever any new policy is announced and we look at the details we find that for all the talk of new powers we’re too constrained to actually make any real use of it. There are hundreds of authorities, each with their own set of circumstances, without flexibility any attempt at devolution is doomed to failure. Take the proposals to devolve business rates. I would like the ability, in the case of those units which are empty right now, to have penalty rates for owners who won’t make a reasonable effort to try and get businesses back in their empty units. Those additional rates could then be put aside to subsidise relief for firms which are genuinely struggling.

Alison: Putting local government in the driving seat, basically, with levers as well as –

Peter:

We’ve got the Sustainable Communities Act to try and change some of this policy nationally, but it’s a very slow mechanism and it hasn’t been very successful. Fundamentally, there needs to be better ways of enabling us to just get on with the little things. It’s not going to be the same everywhere. I’m not going to have the same set of problems as people are going to have in Liverpool, as the people are going to have in Newcastle. We all have different sets of problems and a single, one-size-fits-all model is never going to work. There’s got to be a better mechanism than we have right now for devolving the right powers to the right areas. 

Alison: Just coming back to Labour, I think it’s really interesting to hear you speak before of Crawley having been Labour’s idea, having been this New Town and there being a house for people and generations of their families to come. How do you think … Why do you think people have voted for a Labour council in Crawley?

Peter:

Historically, they voted for a Labour council because they saw all the good that it was doing physically around them. It was about delivery fundamentally. The council did some remarkable things. When we had … Well, we Labour didn’t lose the council to the Tories from the moment it was created until 2006, and we lost then on the flip of a coin.

Alison: That must have been bitter.

Peter:

I think it was very, very bitter … We’d just kicked off a project to build an international standard leisure centre, we already had a nationally renowned theatre and that was for a town which at the time had less than 100,000 residents. We handed them a council with over £100m in reserves and no debt whatsoever. The Labour party had done an awful lot of good in the town and they had achieved a lot. There were some problems which have affected us in terms of national policy, but ultimately, swings and roundabouts, people eventually change the way they vote. 

Ultimately, you had decades of people changing their vote nationally while supporting a local council they thought was delivering. They were happy to stick with that.

Alison: Yeah, and also we’ve got it back now. Do you think that your Labour values inform of what you do as a leader? It sounds like an obvious question, but sometimes when we’re knee-deep in policy, we don’t always go back to first principles.

Peter:

I think I’ve gone back to first principles a lot, to be honest. In my undergrad, I did politics at undergraduate level and I took all the theory units because I wanted to be certain that my principles were grounded in something solid and not just second-hand opinions. I’d say I’m a practical socialist at the end of the day. My biggest concern is not about some argument we had and lost in the 1980s. It has got to be about what we are delivering for people now, for the person in front of me. Take the bedroom tax. There are 200-odd families right now we’re preventing from being evicted as a result of the bedroom tax. The moment Labour loses control of the council, those people are out of their house, they’ll be voluntarily homeless. Those are the people who need Labour in office, they’re the ones who pay the price when Labour makes itself unelectable. 

For me, socialism is about what are you actually going to do for the person right here, right now and it’s not about some hypothetical utopia that we’re told to look for. It all comes back down to values and my values are fundamentally about the person who’s actually in front of me and not about some hypothetical ideal.

Alison: I’ve got one last question for you. This is sort of the ‘and finally’ question. Councillor Claire Kober, who is the leader of Haringey, said on things like Question Time or the Andrew Marr programme, or whatever, it’s always a Westminster politician and never a local government leader and that that’s now even more ridiculous when you’ve got nobody in government in Westminster and yet we’ve got Labour governing Britain in whole swaths of the country. She said that her test for whether the Labour party is prepared to change is whether we start to see local government leaders who are becoming more senior, more experienced as you say, more knowledgeable about delivery and what it’s like to be in power, whether we start to see them speaking for the party nationally.

My question is this: It’s Tuesday afternoon, your phone rings, it’s Labour HQ, the press office, and they say, ‘There’s a slot on Question Time on Thursday coming up. We’d like you to be Labour’s representative.’ Yes or no?

Peter:

Yes. I think there’s a lot to what Claire was saying, to be honest. If you look at, for example, the Tories’ honours, I’m not bothered about getting a title myself, but if you look at who they’ve dished them out to you’ve got Lord Porter of Spalding, who as chair of the Local Government Association has been put in the House of Lords and a number of other figures. They recognise that people have information that’s of use. I think the party is fundamentally letting itself down when it fails to realise how much direct knowledge there is of how the system works from those of us having to deliver on the ground and which could be of use.

It’s not really about us and about us getting our chance in the limelight because, frankly, I’d rather be behind my desk. One of the nicest things about being a local authority leader where you’ve got a ceremonial mayor is that everyone thinks the mayor is the person that they’ve got to invite along to events. I get to sit with a spreadsheet late at night looking at the numbers and trying to find a way to make the system better for people.

———————————

Read all of Alison’s interviews with local government leaders and her speech at the launch of the Governing Britain network

Listen again to the launch event here

———————————

Join Alison and Peter at:

Britain and the politics of place: Where next for Labour? 

6-7.30pm, Wednesday 20 April 2016

Westminster Suite, Local Government House, Smith Square, London, SW1 3HZ

Speech:
Alison McGovern MP Chair, Progress

Reply:
Claire Kober Leader, London borough of Haringey
John Denham Director, Centre for English Identity and Politics
Peter Lamb Leader, Crawley borough council

Chair:
Theo Blackwell, London borough of Camden

Labour’s civic leaders, cabinet members and scrutineers recognise that the needs of communities are changing, often in ways which might not be apparent to lawmakers in Westminster. With this in mind, Progress’ chair Alison McGovern MP has been touring the country listening to some of our best Labour administrations to hear how they have transformed public services and pioneered progressive plans. Despite the central government-imposed cuts, they are leading the way on the living wage, on childcare and building infrastructure and new homes.

This event, which is kindly being hosted in conjunction with the LGA Labour group, will promote some of these great achievements and launch Progress’ Governing for Britain network so our national lawmakers and the wider public can continue to learn from our local councillors and AMs.