My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I reassure the Minister and the House that I am aware of the sub judice rules, both as they affect what the Minister can say and, indeed, what supplementaries may be asked.

The Question was as follows:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to review the law and procedures regarding coroners’ inquests.

My Lords, the Government remain fully committed to coroner reform, and a Bill will be brought before Parliament when parliamentary time allows. Today my honourable friend Bridget Prentice published a briefing note outlining how the provisions in our draft Bill have changed following extensive consultation. Ahead of legislation we will strengthen Rule 43 of the Coroners’ Rules 1984.

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s intention as regards new legislation. In approaching the new Bill, will they ensure that bereaved families are kept fully informed about inquests, that where possible very costly inquests are avoided altogether, that there should not be long delays in holding inquests and that it is not acceptable that inquests should be used to cause distress to the families of the deceased?

My Lords, my noble friend is right to suggest that the needs of families should be fully considered. I very much accept that proposition. We are committed to producing a charter for the bereaved alongside legislation. A draft of that charter will be produced later in the year and noble Lords will be invited to comment on it.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on the Government’s alterations to the draft Bill that were published today. They have significantly improved the Bill and done a lot of things that stakeholders—if I may use that expression—have asked for. But the families are still without a right of representation. They have a right of appeal but there is nothing in the Bill about a right of representation and a right to make submissions to the coroner, or to a coroner’s jury, about the evidence to assist the coroner in coming to his verdict. Will the Government take that on board before the full Bill is published and consider whether something should be done to ensure that families are properly represented and that at the end of the inquest they can make submissions on what the verdict should be?

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his welcome for some of the changes that will be made to the Bill as a result of the consultation. He will know that legal aid for representation—that is one of the issues, as is representation in general—is not considered appropriate in many inquests because an inquest is a fact-finding process; it is not an adversarial conflict between different parties. That is why we are very reluctant to do down the path that he suggests.

My Lords, as verdicts by coroners’ juries are restricted to prevent them reaching verdicts of guilt, will the noble Lord assure the House that those with authority will take steps to ensure that in future coroners’ inquests cannot be exploited by unstable or malicious individuals for personal gain or vengeance?

My Lords, I do not think that I am going to comment on the specifics of what the noble Lord has suggested. Currently, 98 per cent of all coroners’ inquests are held with a coroner sitting without a jury, but I am sure that where juries do sit we can rely on the overall leadership of the coroner. Part of the proposals that will be brought forward in legislation is for there to be a national service, locally run, with a chief coronial officer who can give the professional leadership that is required.

My Lords, will the charter to which the noble Lord referred be a statement of aspirations, or will it have legal force; and if so, what force will it have?

My Lords, it will depend on the Coroners Bill becoming law but, assuming that that goes well, our intention is that the charter for the bereaved would have the status of statutory guidance. It will have considerable strength as a result.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the present arrangements for belated inquests on those killed on operations, with coroners who have little military knowledge speculating on what might have been done in equipment or command terms to avoid the death, are both misleading and very distressing for the families concerned? Why can there not be a roving coroner with some specialist knowledge who goes to the area of operations and, where appropriate, records a verdict of killed on active service?

My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord raises a matter of considerable interest. He will know that there has been concern about the delays in the holding of a number of military inquests. We have taken action. We have provided extra funding to the coroners that are particularly concerned and we have worked very closely with the organisations representing families. There has been a big improvement in the progress of those inquests. I think the noble and gallant Lord is suggesting the creation of specialist military coroners. We are not persuaded that that is a route down which we should go. We believe that all coroners ought to be able to deal with all inquests. Our understanding is that coroners around the country have been handling these inquests effectively and quickly. The development of a national service with a chief coroner will enable there to be much greater consistency and professional leadership in the future.

My Lords, will the Minister take into account the views of the Independent Police Complaints Commission in any reforms, particularly in relation to deaths in police custody?

Yes, my Lords, I am very happy to do that. I am sure that when the Bill comes before your Lordships’ House we will want to debate that.

My Lords, is it true that in inquests into killed in action cases, the Ministry of Defence has so far spent more than £1.5 million on legal representation, whereas relatives are unable to get any legal aid at public expense because a coroner’s court is not a court of law? Is that not grossly unfair and a betrayal of the military covenant? Will the Government cease to hide behind the arrangements for coroners’ courts in the case of those who have been killed in action and allow relatives to have legal aid at public expense when attending an inquest into the death of a loved one?

My Lords, I understand the concerns expressed by the noble and gallant Lord. I have already said that legal aid is generally not available because an inquest should be seen as a fact-finding process. As for MoD representation, that is often because a coroner feels that it can assist the inquest in the finding of facts. There are provisions for allowing legal aid to be provided in exceptional circumstances for inquests in cases such as the noble and gallant Lord described. Legal aid funding has been given to a number of families of soldiers or Armed Forces personnel who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I think that we have a proportionate system.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

Whether the current electoral process in Zimbabwe conforms to the Southern African Development Community standards for the conduct of elections.

My Lords, the conditions for elections in Zimbabwe are poor: the electoral register is not accurate; the electoral commission is not independent; and the opposition parties are not permitted to campaign and hold rallies freely, nor are they being given fair access to media. It is important for the credibility of those that do send observers that they ensure that Zimbabwe’s election meets the SADC principles and guidelines.

My Lords, I am sure the whole House agrees with what the Minister has just said. Are not the elections which will happen in the next few days regarded as particularly important because they are taking place under the auspices of President Mbeki of South Africa and at the instance of SADC? Was not one of the successes of those negotiations an agreement that the police would not be present in the polling stations while voting was taking place? However, is it not also true that President Mugabe has recently revoked that decision without consulting anybody as far as I know, certainly not consulting even his own Government? Does that not mean that the elections will take place without adhering to the SADC rules for elections, which are pretty good? Is the Minister aware of any complaint which has been made by a SADC member country or even by the secretary-general of SADC?

My Lords, the noble Lord’s characterisation of these elections taking place under the auspices of President Mbeki is one that I suspect President Mbeki would quibble with. The changes that he sought to secure in the election processes of Zimbabwe have been honoured more in the breach than the observance. Many of them, while put on to the statute book, have not been fully implemented by the Government and the fact is that the fundamentals of the SADC principles are not met. More than 3 million to 4 million people remain outside the country, which—as there are only 5.9 million registered voters for the election—means that at least one-third of the country is disfranchised. I could continue with the list. It is a very sorry situation.

My Lords, on the assumption that the forthcoming elections in Zimbabwe may well replicate recent events in Kenya, will the Government say what steps are being taken to protect the interests of British nationals who may be living in Zimbabwe?

My Lords, my noble friend is right. We have to look at every possible eventuality. We very much hope that there will not be the violence that followed the elections in Kenya. We very much hope that the Government of Zimbabwe will allow free and fair elections and then accept the result. But if that does not happen and there is indeed violence and displacement, we have plans in place. It will not surprise the noble Lord if I say that it would be imprudent of me to go beyond that at this stage.

My Lords, more important than what we or Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or the International Crisis Group think, has the Minister noted—more importantly, does he think that the observer groups have noted—the comments by Mr Bongani Masuku, international affairs officer of the South African trade union movement, COSATU, that there have been blatant deviations from SADC principles, including, for example, the denial of access to the state-run print and broadcasting media, the printing of 3 million extra ballot papers, denial of access by the opposition candidates to the registers, and so on? How can one have a free and fair election in these circumstances?

My Lords, a wide range of independent observers—the noble Lord mentioned several: the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch and the United States State Department, as well as local observers in the region—have already declared that these elections cannot be free and fair. Given the British position, it behoves us to reserve our own judgment until after the election. I think that the ruling party would like nothing more than for me in this House today to declare the elections as already not free and fair. But the noble Lord is correct: the omens are dreadful.

My Lords, the World Food Programme has brought forward food distributions just in time to boost Mugabe’s campaign. In the light of the WFP’s claim that it has zero tolerance for political interference in its work, does the Minister agree that it should be unacceptable to it that reporters and election monitors from countries that pay for the food are banned from Zimbabwe?

My Lords, the World Food Programme, as the noble Lord knows, is a humanitarian organisation. I have every confidence that it is doing all it can to prevent the politicisation of its mission. While no British election observers, for example, are there, we contribute to the WFP and to its programmes for Zimbabwe. We have always felt that the poor of Zimbabwe should not be the victims of the heinous policies of their Government.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What response they have received to the publication of their strategy for housing in an ageing society, Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbourhoods.

My Lords, the Government published Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbourhoods—A National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society on 25 February. The response from stakeholders has been positive and supportive and the strategy has been welcomed as a major step in raising awareness of the need for better housing and related services for older people and for setting actions to help to achieve this.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply, but I thank her all the more for the hard work and commitment that she has put into creating this excellent national strategy, which has indeed been well received by organisations representing older people. However, does she share with me a profound disappointment that the housebuilders have rejected the proposal in the strategy that by 2013 they should adopt the full lifetime homes standards of accessibility and adaptability for new homes? In view of the obduracy of the housebuilders, would she consider bringing forward changes to the building regulations so that, from now on, all new homes can enjoy the much higher and better standards of accessibility and adaptability that are prescribed within this excellent strategy?

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his kind words. This is the world’s first strategy on housing and ageing and we have had global responses to it. We need such a strategy because one in five children born today is likely to live to 100. Therefore, we have to match our housing policies with our policies on ageing. I was disappointed with the reaction of the Home Builders Federation. I understand that the task is challenging but, on the other hand, there is a huge market for adaptable and flexible homes for older people. We consulted the federation informally and formally. I hear what the noble Lord says, but we think that the best way forward is for us to work with housebuilders by providing advice and support in the next two years to help them to adopt the standards voluntarily, after which we will review the situation, with a view to regulation.

My Lords, the report highlights the fact that the private rented sector is the most poorly performing part of the housing market. Does the noble Baroness feel that the sector is an appropriate place for frail elderly people? If it is, how can we monitor and raise standards in a sector that is dominated by individual private landlords?

My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with what the noble Baroness says. Some of the poorest conditions and poorest people are to be found in the private rented sector. That is why we have commissioned Julie Rugg to have a thorough look at the whole issue of tenure and conditions in the sector. As we said in the report—and this is part of our health and social care strategy—we have put £33 million more into handyperson and handy van services, so that they can visit and repair the stairs, for example. People fall over loose stair carpets and are hospitalised. When one considers that a grab rail costs £50 and a hip operation costs £6,000, one sees why this is a cost-effective policy.

My Lords, while the adoption of the lifetime homes standards for all new buildings will undoubtedly be a welcome step, the reality is that the vast majority of people will inevitably grow old in existing homes, of which there are some 22 million or 23 million. Desirable as the new standards are, the real question that we have to ask is whether we can do enough to adapt existing homes, which have often been built to much lesser standards, to make it possible for the vast majority of the elderly to grow old in them in comfort. Are the Government acting in this field already? I suspect that they are not.

My Lords, the whole strategy is a coherent approach to housing supply. The noble Lord is quite right—one of the problems for older people is that they do not know what the best choices are. Hence, we start with a national advice and information service, which makes it easy for them to make the right choice at the right time and not be forced into making the wrong choice. Housing information, alongside a much expanded service for repair and adaptations, will make the difference, but if older people had better, more adaptable homes to go to, they would be more likely to move out of larger, inappropriate housing. That would free up more housing for younger people as well.

My Lords, what does this strategy do for the severely disabled?

My Lords, lifetime homes standards make it much easier to make further adaptations. We have a whole section in this report on how we have been able to, I am delighted to say, put another £100 million over the next three years into the disabled facilities grant, which is a vital grant to enable big adaptations to be made for severely disabled people. We are also speeding up and streamlining the system so that it does not take so long to get the sort of stairlifts or downstairs adapted bathrooms that make all the difference between people being able to stay in their homes and being institutionalised.

My Lords, talking of the disabled, the Minister will be aware that, in the past three years, the shared-space street concept has led to shared-surface streets, where demarcation between vulnerable pedestrians and vehicles is removed and they have to rely on eye contact to avoid one another. Guide Dogs research has demonstrated that shared surfaces affect the safety, confidence and independence of blind and partially sighted people. In some towns, no-go areas have been created. In promoting lifetime neighbourhoods, will the Government make a clear statement that shared surfaces discriminate against blind and partially sighted and other disabled people, effectively excluding them from the street environment, and that clearly defined pedestrian-only paths—a safe space—must be provided for safer and independent travel?

My Lords, the concept of a lifetime neighbourhood addresses exactly the sort of problems identified by the noble Lord. We should be moving towards age-friendly cities. Part of the challenge that we identify—I would like to take the noble Lord’s advice on this—is how to build in ways that do not trap older people in their homes without the confidence to go out, not just because the spaces or shops are inaccessible and dangerous to get at; the whole environment needs to be welcoming and safe. In the next 10 years, there will be another 2 million over-65s in this country. We need to think much more creatively about the sort of planning and space sharing that we are undertaking.

My Lords, will the Minister give an assurance that her proposals for making these better homes will not be used as another excuse to increase the community charge, such as the valuers are doing to pretty houses with nice views?

My Lords, these 16 elements that make a home more accessible—ranging from wider doors to electric sockets that you do not have to double over to switch on—are simple. The total cost is estimated to be about £550. There is no reason why this should add to the cost of homes or anything else.

My Lords, given what the Minister said about the number of people over the age of 65 increasing by 2 million and the need to be more creative in our thinking about how to adapt, will she say what creative work is being done to use the tax system to enable families to adapt their homes to care for elderly relatives?

My Lords, I cannot answer that question directly. However, because this is in the front line of a range of preventive services in health and care, we are looking at ways in which families can be supported through the community, in their own homes, with their families and in their own neighbourhoods, so that they can support one another. That must be a cost benefit to everybody.

asked Her Majesty’s Government:

What steps they will take to resolve the division of Cyprus, following the recent talks between President Christofias and the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr Talat.

My Lords, we applaud the agreement reached between the leaders of the two communities to resume the search for a comprehensive settlement through negotiations facilitated by the UN and flanked by confidence-building measures such as opening Ledra Street. This agreement is a clear demonstration of their joint desire to reunify Cyprus. The UK’s role in this is not prescriptive but supportive. We will continue to support the UN by encouraging all parties to capitalise on this new opportunity.

My Lords, while recognising the necessity of the two parties themselves resolving the issues between them, will my noble friend nevertheless consult the Greek and Turkish Governments to reinforce any such agreement that occurs? Will he consult our European Union allies to ensure that Northern Cyprus benefits from being in the EU, something of which it has hitherto been deprived?

My Lords, I assure my noble friend that we intend to be actively involved in the diplomacy on this. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have already directly met their Cypriot counterparts. We have intense engagements with the Government of Turkey as well as that of Greece. On the latter point, while it is true that Northern Cyprus has not enjoyed the benefits of EU membership, it enjoys a generous aid programme in per capita terms, intended to raise the living standards of Turkish Cypriots in a way that will reduce the friction on the happy day that the two halves of the island are reunited.

My Lords, while joining wholeheartedly in welcoming the steps that President Christofias, since his election, and his Turkish Cypriot opposite number, Mr Talat, have taken to revive the negotiating process aimed at reunifying the island, will the Minister confirm the importance in any resumed negotiations of the two Cypriot parties taking full ownership of the process from the outset, up to and beyond its conclusion? That way we would not again have any prospect of a party opposing the terms of a deal in the subsequent referendum. Will the Minister confirm that, in the context of an emerging settlement, Her Majesty’s Government will renew the offer made in 2003 to hand over a substantial part of the sovereign base areas to a reunited Cyprus?

My Lords, the noble Lord is of course a well recognised expert on this issue. He knows that the last time there was an agreement, there was coincidentally a change of Government through elections in the Republic of Cyprus, which complicated the issue of support for the agreement. We now have a new President in Cyprus with a new and fresh mandate, who is committed to negotiations. Equally, in the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr Talat, we have someone committed since he came to office to finding an agreement. The omens for both sides taking ownership of this and negotiating in complete seriousness are very high. Of course, we will do everything we can—including on the issue of the sovereign bases—to provide incentives to make such negotiations a success.

My Lords, is it not the case that we have in this country a real responsibility as a long-term guarantor to do something to help Northern Cyprus? Is the Minister aware that real suffering has gone on for years in that little strip of land, not only with the people trying to make a living but in every aspect—property and so on? This is an urgent matter, and we would all welcome action being taken by the Government.

My Lords, the noble Baroness is correct that there have obviously been real economic disadvantages in the north which we have sought to address. With the prospect of two political leaders willing to lead their communities into a final solution to the root cause of this problem, this is not the moment for the UK to introduce new aid or economic incentives to the north alone. We must put all our efforts into finding a lasting solution: a political agreement between the two communities.

My Lords, on occasions over the past six or seven years, it has seemed as if the United Kingdom has been the only EU member apart from Greece that is actively interested in resolving the Cyprus conflict. Given that the Cyprus conflict and its related links with Greece and Turkey are at the heart of the problems of closer links between NATO and the EU, can Her Majesty’s Government make the strongest possible efforts to ensure that other EU Governments also take an active and positive role in assisting both parties in negotiating?

My Lords, the noble Lord makes an important point. We will certainly work to involve individual EU countries in this way. He was not suggesting otherwise, but both parties agree that the right frame for negotiations remains the United Nations. EU member states have a particular role in supporting that.

My Lords, why do the Government appear so dismissive of human rights for Turkish Cypriots, as evidenced in recent Written Answers? Have they forgotten the ruthlessness of EOKA-B against Turkish Cypriots? Why do they still disregard their obligations as a guarantor of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, despite promises renewed in April 2004 after the Annan plan referendum?

My Lords, I certainly hope that the noble Lord is not correct and that we do not overlook either our obligations as a guarantor or concerns for the human rights of those in the north. Rather than direct monitoring by the UK, as occurred in the past, we now rely on the well established UN mechanisms and UN reports on the human rights situations of the different communities as our main basis for action. I reassure him that we have not forgotten about these issues.

My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.

Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 10 March be approved. 14th report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, 15th report from the Merits Committee, considered in Grand Committee on 25 March.—(Baroness Andrews.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

rose to call attention to financial inequality in the United Kingdom; and to move for Papers.

The noble and right reverend Lord said: My Lords, GK Chesterton once remarked that the English working man was less interested in the equality of human beings than he was in the inequality of racehorses. There is still some truth in that. However, what is very deeply rooted in most English people is a strong sense of fairness. The English may not reveal much outward observance of religion, but there is a deeply felt inner conviction that some things are fair and others are grossly unfair. In proposing this debate, I do not primarily have in mind a discussion of equality as such, fascinating though that would be, but the stark inequalities in our society, which the majority of our fellow citizens now regard as unacceptably unfair.

I say “inequalities” but we are all aware that the situation is one of growing inequalities—widening financial and economic inequalities, which are reflected in every area of life. Recently there have been a number of reports which bear on this subject, which have been helpfully summarised in the briefing note provided by the House of Lords Librarians. Although the situation is complex, what emerges from the reports of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in both 2000 and 2008 is that for the poorest 15 per cent of the population, income growth has been very much lower, with real income falls in the very lowest part, while for the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population, there has been rapid economic growth, with what they term a “spike” at the 99th percentile point.

In recent years, as we know, we have become used to stories of vast City bonuses, which have, in my opinion, totally distorted the housing market, and stories of great pay-offs to directors and executives, some of whom, by any ordinary standards, have failed. There is widespread disquiet in our society about this. Three recent polls reveal that 75 or 76 per cent of the population find this totally unacceptable. We are not talking about the politics of envy, with what WB Yeats called,

“a levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind”.

We are talking about a feature of our financial system, which, if it continues unabated, could undermine both the basis of our economic prosperity itself and the fabric of our society.

In the great debates about the market economy in recent years, its most thoughtful defenders have always stressed that the success of the market depends on factors other than the market itself—in short, on certain moral assumptions that go wider than the legal framework on the basis of which the market in fact operates. One of those is the acceptance of what we might term proportionate reward. Appropriate reward for hard work, skill and enterprise is basic to how the market operates, but implicit in that is some kind of judgment about what is appropriate and fair and what is inappropriate and unfair. If people as a whole feel, as they do now, that the gap has become outlandish, that cannot but undermine the kind of social contract on which the whole operation of the market depends.

What does a person on the minimum wage feel when they work long hours just to survive for year after year when groups of people get a regular windfall that is more than they can earn in several lifetimes? I believe that that undermines any sense that what they are doing is worthwhile.

I am sure that your Lordships will fill out the facts and figures of what is happening in various areas of life, but I just mention a few. There are still 3.8 million children living in poverty—one in three—with even higher rates in urban areas such as Manchester and London. More than half of those children have at least one parent working. If both parents are working with at least one of them full-time, families can survive, but with only one working, the situation has not improved. The situation of children with no parents working has improved somewhat in recent years, but there were 1.4 million children of poor parents living in working households in 1997, and that number is the same today. That has not improved. The Zacchaeus 2000 Trust has drawn our attention to the stressful and inevitable rent and council tax arrears, debts, loan sharks and clashes with bailiffs created by poverty for people both in and out of work.

What the Government have done in introducing the minimum wage has been an essential, very welcome first step towards helping with that problem. That wage is now £5.52 an hour, although often paid without holiday or sick pay. A single earner in a couple with two children would now have to work 80 hours a week at the minimum wage to avoid poverty through their wages alone, without any other benefits or tax credits.

Whatever Government we have in power should commit themselves at least to maintaining the value of the minimum wage in line with average earnings growth over the economic cycle and should extend the adult rate to 21 year-olds. But that is not enough, so I very much welcome the Living Wage for London movement. The living wage for London has been set at £7.20 an hour—a big difference from the national minimum wage—and the unions and London citizens have been remarkably successful in persuading a significant number of employers in London to sign up to it. By December 2007, 5,800 were covered, with a total gain of nearly £20 million in wages. I believe that the figure of £7.20 is in fact the minimum that all London employers should be paying.

Cleaners and hotel workers are especially liable at the moment to be treated unfairly. One hotel worker was paid the equivalent of 26p an hour for the first six days’ work, the first three days being regarded as training. That is only one of a number of such stories.

As we know, the Government have committed themselves to halving child poverty by 2010. The recent Budget ensured that another significant step would be taken towards that. We need to ensure that there is no let-up on what will be needed every year until child poverty is eliminated. Again, I believe that whatever Government are in power, they should share that commitment to the total elimination of child poverty.

That is action that needs to be taken at the bottom end of the financial pile: action to raise the poorest people out of poverty and enable them to participate meaningfully in the market economy. What about at the other end? Inequality has two poles to it and is indicated by the distance between them. Some suggest that we can eliminate child poverty while not bothering too much about gross inequality. However, it is no accident that the only countries to abolish child poverty—the Nordic countries—are much more equal than ours. There is a clear link between gross inequalities and the presence of poverty.

The figures on inequality speak for themselves. Some 3 per cent of the country’s income is taken by the poorest 10 per cent of the population; 28 per cent of the country’s income is taken by the richest 10 per cent—and that is only what is declared. According to the recent Budget, the official Revenue and Customs’ estimate is that tax avoidance has now reached £41 billion a year.

As far as wealth is concerned, it is estimated that the share of wealth owned by the top 1 per cent rose from 17 per cent in 1991 to 24 per cent in 2002, while the wealth of the bottom 50 per cent fell from 8 per cent to 6 per cent over the same period. No less startling is the fact that, over two decades, the average earning of the chief executives of the top 100 companies has gone up from 17 times the average employee’s wage to 75.5 times the average employee’s wage. That is an extraordinary jump in just 20 years. Is that jump really deserved? It may be argued that in a market economy—particularly one that is operating internationally—there must be huge salaries and bonuses available to attract the few who allegedly make all the difference in a highly competitive world. However, as Will Hutton put it:

“The practice of giving vast annual bonuses embeds greed and recklessness”.

It is interesting that the Institute of International Finance—the association of global banks—met recently, in Rio de Janeiro, to discuss for the first time a voluntary code of conduct on pay. According to Polly Toynbee, it was,

“revolutionary and penitential, acknowledging that a cause of the credit crunch was wild risk-taking with other people’s money to secure higher bonuses for themselves”.

Suggestions include a deferral of bonuses until the impact of the strategy is clear, or even clawing back bonuses in light of later, worse performances.

The Motion before us is about financial inequality. It is not surprising that this inequality is reflected in every aspect of life—housing, education, health, opportunities for advancement and so on—and I take just a very few examples. One strong theme from the recent reports is how segregated the United Kingdom now is, between rich communities getting richer and pockets of deprivation. This is, of course, because economic inequalities are reflected in what economies call “positional goods”—housing, whose costs have risen so disproportionately, access to good schooling and so on. Then there are the prisons. Martin Nary, who visited one prison a week for years, says quite simply:

“The proportion of prisoners who are not from impoverished backgrounds is incredibly small and investment in poverty eradication would have a direct economic benefit to the UK”.

Less familiar are the figures about low birth weight, a core signal of poverty. From 1953 to 1973 the percentage of babies born in the UK with a low birth weight was in the area of 6.6 per cent. The data for 2007 show that the figure has now risen to 10 per cent. This is compared to 4 per cent for countries as varied as Sweden, South Korea and Samoa, and 9 per cent for countries such as Romania and Namibia. Causes have been identified by experts as being due to poor maternal nutrition owing to poverty and a lack of education about a healthy diet. There is something very shocking about those figures.

Then there are the figures on life expectancy. About two decades ago, there was a difference in life expectancy of about five years for males, depending on whether they lived in Glasgow or the south-east of England. More recently, that difference has widened out to more than nine years. Poverty brings ill health and earlier death; increasing inequality brings about even starker contrasts.

John Rawls, one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century, argued that a degree of financial inequality was acceptable provided that the poor benefited from it. A society is just only if its worst are better off than they would be under any alternative arrangement. He justified this view on the basis that if we all had to choose a society from scratch, with no idea whether we would be badly off or well off in it—in other words, leaving aside our present interests—we would all be bound to choose his idea of a just society, for this would be the only one in which everyone could benefit wherever they were born in it. The acid test, however, is whether the worst off are benefiting or benefiting enough. According to Rawls’ view, which seems to be pretty compelling, our present arrangements, which rightly allow for some inequality, are justified only if they are benefiting.

I come back to my starting point: the widely perceived unfairness of growing inequalities, the results of which can be seen in every aspect of our national life. Above all, this not only undermines the basic moral assumption underpinning the market economy of proportionate rewards but demoralises those at the bottom end of the market by devaluing their contribution. It sets the rich apart and spreads discontent. As Professor Wilkinson has put it, it is likely to mean that the rich have less sense of responsibility to the poor and that the poor may be beset with a sense of fatalism and disengagement. It needs to be tackled on many fronts, both to advance the prospect of the worst off and to create consensus about rewards at the top end of the market that is acceptable to all who participate in it. It needs to be addressed by Governments and employers. Our present financial instability should not distract us from this task. On the contrary; the present shake-up should act as a salutary shock in recommitting us to the creation of a flourishing society, in which all have a proportionate share and in which there is a shared sense of well-being. I beg to move for Papers.

My Lords, I am sure that we are all grateful to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for his brilliant introduction to this important topic. At the outset, let me state my areas of agreement and disagreement with him. I agree very much with him about the problem of poverty and that we must urgently address it, but I part company with him on the question of whether inequality breeds poverty. I shall certainly say something about what the financial markets have done to inequality. Indeed, I shall take it up first because it will be more controversial.

The noble Lord is quite right that the system of bonuses and compensation in financial markets encouraged excessive risk-taking, as did the very cheap liquidity that has been available for the past 15 years. This financial crisis has, however, shown us how fragile some of these numbers are. One gentleman lost $1 billion in the Bear Stearns fiasco—he also has the misfortune of owning Tottenham Hotspur, but we will leave that aside. If the stock market were also to collapse by, say, 40 per cent tomorrow, a lot of those people’s spikes would come down, and it would not benefit a single person in this economy. This is not a zero-sum game. Moreover, some of these numbers are what Karl Marx called fictitious capital. The people who were compensated two years ago by Bear Stearns—some of the brightest people—were paid in shares but with a three-year delay. They have found that what was worth $1 million is now worth $10,000.

I agree that there is a spike at the very top—the top 1 per cent—but the spike exists in the few mainly Anglo-Saxon economies that have very vibrant financial markets. These financial markets have generated fantastic returns not only by recklessness but, mainly, because some highly educated and intelligent research economists have created some very complex financial instruments that have made it possible for people to take risks. These are rewards for risks.

Now, we have to insist that if the risk-takers fail, we will pay no heed to their problems. If they believe in the market, let us enforce the market on them. Let no bank be saved. If banks are saved, let none of their shareholders receive any compensation for their loss. I think that the Northern Rock policy is correct and the Bear Stearns one is somewhat wrong but that is neither here nor there. We have to be completely ruthless. If people say they believe in the free market, let us say: “You play by the free market. There will be no compensation”.

However, as soon as markets begin to collapse, everybody comes on to the scene and all the newspapers tell the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor that something must be done to save the system. Nothing must be done to save it. The system must live or die by itself. We are not interested. The most interesting part of the latest crisis is that the real economy has so far not been affected. We do not know what it has done to the spike, though we will in about three years. I am taking a harder line on this than I necessarily would if I were a Minister, but since there is no prospect of that, thank God, I can do so.

The calculation of income distribution in percentages leads to the idea of a zero-sum game or a fixed pie. We have to part company with this idea. Over the past 20 years, while the financial markets have been perhaps reckless and perhaps quite mad, income growth also has been quite spectacular, and not only in this country. The growth in Asia and the removal of millions from poverty would not have been possible had the financial markets not made it viable to transfer capital to countries such as India, China and lots of others in Asia where it was needed. I am therefore not entirely in agreement with the noble and right reverend Lord about the evils of the financial system. I do not have to declare an interest because I have made no money from the financial markets. I can boldly say that I am not bothered about it.

I would like to say just one more thing, because my time is running out. I think that poverty is the most serious problem in our society. It has happened because changes in the economy have removed the need for manual unskilled and semi-skilled labour. That has been the biggest transformation in our economy. Unless people are highly educated and highly skilled, they will not get a living wage in our economy. As the noble and right reverend Lord said, some of the wages paid for manual and unskilled jobs are absolutely appalling. I agree with him that we ought to do as much as we can to shore up the situation. One thing we must not do, however, is to take seriously the EU’s definition of poverty as such and such a percentage of median income. We must concentrate on poverty as a standard of living measured directly in terms of what people need. We must try to eradicate that poverty and problems of ill health, but we must not be bemused by such statistics.

My Lords, we have had a very stimulating start to the debate with those two terrific speeches. I do not think that I shall be able to compete.

The word “inequality” can have two meanings. One implies an unfair situation; the noble and right reverend Lord has given many examples and this is the aspect that we will primarily be discussing today. The other, as Peter Bauer—later Lord Bauer, one of the most brilliant lecturers when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge—used to say, is that inequality merely means “difference”. I believe that in discussing financial inequality we should keep both meanings in mind.

I would suggest that there are four important principles when considering public policy on financial inequality. The first is the need to stimulate economic growth, which is the only way in which all can be made better off. The second is to recognise the difference between the tax system and the social security system, because they both have quite different purposes. The third, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said, is to focus on absolute poverty rather than relative poverty. The fourth is to avoid giving financial help from state funds to those who do not need it at the expense of those who do. In my book, that is, quite frankly, immoral. I should like to say a brief word on each of these.

A culture of incentives is crucial. The French philosopher Bertrand de Juvenal once said:

“The statesman who believes the world is populated with angels will be sorely disappointed”.

The fact is that man is quite a selfish creature who wants the best for himself and his family. Taxes should be used to raise the revenue needed with the minimum dislocation to the functioning of the economy. The concept of the “social wage”, which will always exist in any society as justifying high taxes, was at one time used to justify virtually unlimited tax take. But a high social wage can rapidly become unsustainable through the limit it imposes on growth. In Europe, it is still a problem in both France and Germany. It is one of the main challenges that President Sarkozy has today. People of course enjoy public benefits, but when it comes down to it most prefer to make their own spending decisions, and the net utility of private spending is usually higher as well as more efficient.

To use high taxes to impoverish the rich does not enrich the poor. We had a long experiment disproving this. When Mrs Thatcher was elected in 1979, the top marginal rate of income tax in Britain was 98 per cent and the threshold at which it came in, in today’s money, was under £100,000 a year. Those were the days of the brain drain when many of the brightest and best people migrated to countries, primarily the United States, where their talents could be rewarded.

Confiscatory taxes really only came to an end some 20 years ago when, in his March 1988 Budget, my noble friend Lord Lawson reduced the top rate of income tax to 40 per cent. Such was the rage from the Labour Benches when he announced it that that was the only occasion ever that the House of Commons has had to be suspended in disorder during a Budget speech. I should take this opportunity to give the present Chancellor, and indeed the whole Government, warm congratulations on keeping to this top rate over the 11 years that they have been in power.

I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Desai, that although the state has a real responsibility at the bottom end, at the top end the market must pay the costs and get the benefits. People should suffer for failing and be rewarded for succeeding. I well remember that the American industrialist, J Peter Grace—who ran W R Grace & Co, a big chemical company—once said to someone who asked for a lot of money: “I shall have absolutely no problem in paying you that. You may just have a problem in earning it”.

The social security system must be used with imagination, flexibility and as far as possible with simplicity. There is no point in having complicated schemes which people do not understand and do not use. We must focus on those who are truly deprived, whether it be because of ill fortune, ill health or simply their own inadequacies. As we all know, there are those who simply cannot cope with life. They will always need the state to give them the decent standard to which, in a civilised society, they are as entitled as the rest of us. Absolute poverty can and must be eliminated in a prosperous society.

By definition, however, relative poverty will always exist. We are back to inequality meaning “difference”. But the state should focus its efforts on what it can achieve. For example, it has a duty to ensure that all families are decently housed. It cannot and should not take responsibility for ensuring home ownership for all; we have seen the disaster that that can lead to, especially in the USA. A real effort should be made to stop giving benefits in kind tax-free to those who do not need them. Two obvious examples are the winter fuel allowance and free bus and tube travel for the over-60s. Both benefits should be taxed. In the former case especially, the tax collected would enable the level of winter fuel payment to be raised, which would really help the poorest.

Many improvements to how we do things can and must be made. But I believe that these four principles can help ensure that Britain remains a compassionate and decent as well as a prosperous society.

My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, who we all know is a very caring and constructive person. I particularly appreciate the moral philosophy that he introduced into this debate when opening it. It is important to take account of, and indeed act on, the principles involved in addressing inequality.

Financial inequality exists widely in the nations and regions of the United Kingdom. The result is, on the one hand, poverty, poor housing—and unaffordable housing at that—social exclusion and unemployment; on the other, relative prosperity, a better quality of life, quality employment and more life opportunities, with better housing and better health. If we have a social conscience, we must address this and try to put it right.

I am grateful that this debate is about the whole of the United Kingdom. In the other place I represented a part of Wales. Because of the devolution settlement, we do not have much chance these days to make comparisons, but in this case we can make some. I will concentrate to some extent on the situation in Wales and say that it is almost identically replicated in the north-east of England and in Cornwall, which have very similar economic indicators, and in some other parts of the EU. I shall then suggest how we might address these matters and improve on them.

The current performance of the Welsh economy is well below expectations, particularly taking into account the application of EU funding in west Wales and the valleys. The evidence is that the gross domestic product per head remains stubbornly fixed at 80 per cent of the UK average. It was that before devolution and it has not moved much. If one applies the gross value added measurement, which takes on board some services as well, it has declined from 84 per cent in 1995 to 78 per cent in 2004. In west Wales and the valleys, it has gone down to 65 per cent. We do not have a very sound economy. Much of the spending has been in the public sector rather than the private sector. If one compares these figures with those for other parts of Britain and Europe, one finds that the gross domestic product of west Wales and the valleys is 79 per cent of the UK average. It is slightly lower in Cornwall. But in Bucharest, Romania—which has not been in the EU for very long—it is 74 per cent. In Warsaw it is 81 per cent. It is even higher in Prague and Bratislava than it is in west Wales and the valleys. In contrast, the figure for Ireland is 143 per cent, as a result of a revolution in the way that it has been managed in recent times. Noble Lords will not be surprised to learn that inner London is on 303 per cent of the EU average, which is an extraordinary situation.

Average disposable income for a family in Wales stands at £21,182, a figure which may reflect two people working. What interests me is that that family spends 13.3 per cent of its income on food. When I was lecturing 25 years ago, it was 27 per cent, which is a percentage that poorer members of our society are probably still on. On a per head basis in Wales, people are on £11,900 compared with £15,000 in London, a difference of £3,100. I do not see that that is fair at all. We know that the cost of living in London is higher, but it is quite hard to make a living in my part of the world. It is clear that where I come from there has not been enough focus on innovative and entrepreneurial economic activity, both private and social, but that is now being addressed.

The success of Ireland over the past 20 years should be an inspiration to many of the regions and nations of Britain which are not so well off. For the first time in the history of Ireland, an indigenous moneyed class has emerged after a long economic boom. The Bank of Ireland estimates that from a few hundred euro millionaires 20 years ago, there are now 300,000, which is hard to believe. Ireland has an educated labour force and a strong demand for labour in well-paid jobs. An in-depth study of the Irish experience and the application of the principles involved is something that many of the poorer nations and regions of Britain could benefit from.

We have a huge mountain to climb. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has laid bare the scale of the challenge. More than a quarter of Welsh children live in poverty, while average family incomes, to which I have already referred, show huge disparities with other parts of the United Kingdom. I believe that the Barnett formula should be revised so that it is based on need. At the moment in Wales, with its GDP running at 80 per cent of the EU average, the question of need is not being met.

In conclusion, Wales, Cornwall and north-east England are way behind other parts of the United Kingdom, and indeed in many sub-regions of those areas, incomes are only two-thirds of the UK average. The result of that is poverty, child poverty and a lack of opportunity in employment. Essentials such as food and housing are rendered unaffordable because they absorb an ever larger proportion of net income. This creates debt. Of the 10 regions with the highest rates of unemployment benefit for longer than five years, five areas are in Wales.

I finish by saying that the Barnett formula needs to be completely updated on the basis of need and government policy needs to concentrate on upgrading investment and entrepreneurship in our poorer regions so that average incomes are brought up to a level where essentials are affordable. In that way, the populations of these areas will not continue to suffer.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries of Pentregarth, first, on securing this debate on such an important topic and, secondly, on providing us with a stimulating introduction that has already provided a lively debate and no doubt will continue to do so. I wish to address my remarks for the most part to a particular group in the population where there is significant inequality and, as a result of that, poverty; that is, the older members of our society. Earlier discussion at Question Time indicated that if this is a serious issue, which I believe it is, it is one that will grow in both complexity and impact on our community. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, gave us a couple of figures: for example, that there will be an additional 2 million people over the age of 65 in our society before long. I can give your Lordships a rather different figure. If I stick to my time in the course of my speech your statistical life expectancy will increase by 1.5 minutes. One cannot claim the deposit individually but that is one of the more interesting statistics of society.

The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, pointed out that the life expectancy of children being born now is such that one in five will live to the age of 100. Those are significant facts, so if there is inequality and poverty in the older community within our society it will have a huge impact. As the noble and right reverend Lord pointed out in his speech, there are two ends to the equality debate. Over the past couple of weeks we have had warnings from the Foreign Office about so-called SAGA louts. There are those who have money and who are misusing it, but that is not the experience of many older people in the community. They are not all out there having SKI holidays; that is, “spending the kids’ inheritance” holidays: many are stuck in their homes as a result of inequality and poverty.

I accept the points made about the definitions of poverty. There is a great danger in simply taking a statistic or a percentage and defining poverty in that way. However, I shall give a version of one of the statistical indicators to which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, pointed. If one takes seven stops on the Central Line in London, one’s life expectancy goes down by about 10 years. This is not individually; it is statistically, but that is the issue of life expectancy in our community. There are poor communities where life expectancy is low. In the same communities—if we look at the available deprivation indices—not only is life expectancy low; earnings are low, employment prospects are bad, housing is bad, health is clearly measured on low scales, and educational success is low. Those indices kick in in the same parts of the major cities and rural communities of our country, so there are issues of poverty and ways of geographically tackling and looking at them.

I want to make a couple of points about pensions in relation to the older section of the community. Separating the measurement of what should be paid by pension from some form of average earnings has been a mistake and will penalise many people. I hope that the Government will look again at how the pensions available through the state system are calculated. They should be linked to the earning power—50 per cent of average earnings or whatever—of our community. That should be possible because the tax system should be able to reflect the income coming from earnings going up and perhaps the benefits available to the poorer members of the community.

I wish to make a further point about pensions. Only 17 per cent of women qualify for the full state pension. That is bound to have an impact on poverty and it is a blatant form of inequality. The women in question have not been able to work permanently throughout what is regarded as normal working life because they have taken time off to have children, to care for them and to bring them up. They may now be taking time off to care for elderly relatives, thereby providing a service to the community. However, that is not recognised in their pension benefits. For various reasons—partly because of the age in which they were reared and learnt their attitudes to life—that same group in the community are bad at claiming benefits. Help the Aged estimates that £4.5 billion in unclaimed benefits lie within the system. That is the reality. Perhaps some of it should be unclaimed, but it is worth asking the Government to examine why those benefits are unclaimed. It could well be that people who formed their attitudes to life 60, 70 or 80 years ago simply have a style of life that is not rights-focused. That may produce a guffaw in certain parts of the City or incredulity among younger members of the population who have been brought up in a rights-focused society, but the danger is that we are not respecting these attitudes as part of the reality of how we treat people. Rather, I fear we might be exploiting them: if they do not claim benefits, fine, the money remains in the public purse.

Those are some of the difficulties that older members of the community face. What can be done about them? I shall stick to the issue of the possibility of employment beyond current employment age. We have the prospect—I think it is inevitable—of the age at which state pensions can be claimed being raised. That is the stick, but there ought to be carrots in place. If older people want to continue working, and 53 per cent of them estimate that they need to because they have inadequate financial resources, what are the incentives for employers to do something about that? Who is looking at the tax threshold that discourages older people from continuing to work and discourages employers from taking them on? Those are areas where not only the comparative wealth of individuals could be helped but no doubt their health as well. Positive social attitudes would come out of all this. I commend to the Government the need to look at the employment of older people as one of the ways in which we might begin to deal with this issue.

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for initiating this debate. It is good to know that although he has left these Benches, he has not left behind the passions and the concerns that distinguished his service.

I shall take the debate in a regional direction. Having lived in and experienced different parts of the United Kingdom over the past 30 years, I am of the view that there is a divide between the north and the south. That is not to say that there is not wealth in the north or poverty in the south—both are definitely there—but the division is one of scale; it is the scale of wealth in the south and of poverty in the north that mark the contrast. Although the gap in growth is narrowing, there has been a consistent gap in the growth rates between the north and the south. The regional development agencies have had a strategic role in narrowing the gap, but there are forces at work that still militate against financial equality across the United Kingdom.

The north has large swathes of population living in deprived areas. Fifty-three per cent of households in the most deprived areas in England are located in the north, with 26 per cent in the north-west alone. Housing waiting lists in the north-west are growing faster than anywhere else in the country, which has had a knock-on effect on homelessness. Despite all of this, the north-west regional funding for housing is falling—indeed, has fallen more than in any other region—while its housing waiting list and homelessness have grown more than in any other region. This is but one example of the persistent inequalities across the United Kingdom.

For a number of years I was chair of the North West Constitutional Convention. Although the debate about regional government has come and gone, what remains is the need to address the strategic development and governance of our regions. That is happening at a regional level, but most of us feel that it lacks coherence, accountability and transparency. As someone involved in the pastoral care of the region, committed to its welfare and aware of the inequalities, I recognise that too many decisions that are made about the region and its economic development are made nationally and centrally, and that the outcomes are sometimes hard to understand at a regional level. I know the Government are committed to making the regional development agencies more coherent, accountable and transparent, and I welcome the sub-national review and the £6.5 billion that the Government are investing in RDAs in the period 2008-11. But in giving more power to the RDAs, the question is begged of how accountable these bodies will be to their own regions.

Financial inequality impacts upon levels of poverty in our regions, especially in the north-west, which is the only region to have borders with both Scotland and Wales. There is a feeling of injustice. Investment per capita in both Scotland and Wales is of a much higher order than it is in the north-west of England. This was one of the factors that drove the debate on regional government. There is a widespread feeling that there is no one to champion the needs of those living in the north-west in the way that the Government and Assembly in Scotland and Wales do for their own people. It is galling for those in the north-west to discover that just a few miles away hospitals and schools are funded on a formula that discriminates against people this side of the borders. This formula for investment has an impact upon the regeneration of the regions.

For four years, I chaired the New Deal for Communities programme in Liverpool. Regeneration requires the creation of real jobs. There is a limit to the benefit that can be gained from the development of social businesses which has been, I am afraid, the weakness of NDC. There has to be real wealth creation, real jobs and real economic activity. But that economic growth can be justified only if it is sustainable. Unfortunately, to date people have looked for a successful economy and then asked to what extent it can accommodate sustainability. This will not do. We have to promote sustainability and show that this is the only economic way forward. In the regions, especially in the north-west, we are already thinking of new ways of developing the regional economy. We need a new approach so that we can turn water, wind and waste into energy, we can develop the rivers and the railways for more efficient and sustainable transport, and we can create cities where, within walking distance, people can live, labour and spend their leisure together.

Forty-five per cent of the diocese of Liverpool has areas of multiple deprivation. One of the greatest aspects of inequality in my diocese is the number of children born into poverty. This was touched on by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. They are born into what I call consolidated poverty. There is much debate about relative poverty but what I am aware of day by day is consolidated poverty. By that I mean where there is generational unemployment, generational deprivation of parenting, vandalised public space, poor health and low educational achievement. It is this accumulated and consolidated poverty which deprives children of equality of opportunity and, ultimately, of financial equality.

The Government have rightly invested in education to break this cycle of deprivation. I pay tribute to the work on academies. I chair two academies and have seen their success. Within 18 months I have seen young people, whose record previously was just 27 per cent, achieve 44 per cent and five GCSE passes at grades A-C, and who are on target this year to achieve more than 50 per cent. I have seen how this can have an impact on our communities. I have also noticed the development of children’s centres and I pay tribute to this initiative, but we have to recognise that some of the neediest people and parents are not being drawn into the sphere of these excellent centres. We need radically new interventions in order to reach those people who are beyond their reach.

For understandable reasons I have spent a great deal of time recently in Croxteth which has many public and voluntary sector projects and where extraordinary work is being done, as I saw yesterday. But time and again I heard the people involved in the projects say how worried they were about the short-term funding. Three-quarters of the time of the person leading the play scheme that I visited yesterday afternoon was spent in finding funds for next year. It seems such a waste that these extraordinary skills in enabling children and empowering parents should be diverted into trying to find more money to support these projects. When all is said and done, we have to find new ways of cutting the cake and making sure that it is shared, and when it is, that it is fed to our children.

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for introducing the debate, which is on an important issue. We live in a worldwide free market economy where the pursuit of wealth is a prime goal. This wealth enables people to live in the way that they choose, pursue their dreams and desires and own the things that they think are important. In our country, that wealth has doubled over the past 25 years and will continue to increase. Politicians, faced with voters’ attachment to wealth and all that flows from it, find it difficult to question the desirability of its continuous growth. Given the scarcity of the world’s resources and the drive for more nations and people to participate in this growth and increase in wealth, the time is surely here for a serious debate about alternatives. It is not my intention to engage in that debate today, but that is the overriding issue in any debate about wealth in the future; the question of the degree to which the world can sustain wealth creation and the extent to which we can look at other alternatives.

I want to speak briefly about something more manageable; about wealth distribution and our attitude to growing disparities of earned wealth. There is a growing body of evidence and opinion in this country claiming unfairness in the distribution of wealth, particularly at the excessive pay of top business leaders. In 1979, the chief executive officers of the top firms were earning about 10 times the wage of the average worker, which for those top people was about £200,000 in today’s money. Today, wages for the average worker have risen slightly ahead of inflation since 1979, but we are told that the leaders of the FTSE top 100 can expect to earn about 75 times the wage of the average worker. Earlier today I read that it was just over 60 times, which is still a huge increase since 1979.

In America, the top business leaders can expect to make about 300 times the wage of an average worker. Is that the direction in which we are heading, and is there an alternative? It is my belief that those huge inequalities of wealth do not necessarily make for good, long-term sustainable companies, nor do they help to create fair and balanced societies. Do the disparities continue? Are we moving closer to the American model? Or is there something else that we can do? I sit on the remuneration committee of a substantial successful business, with 3 million customers and 5,000 employees, so I know something about the need properly and adequately to reward talent and to attract and maintain good business leaders. That does not stop me from feeling uncomfortable about some of the disparities of wealth that I see around me. Remuneration consultants offer continuous comparative data to show where shortfalls occur and, in effect, help to create a spiral of ongoing and increasing reward mechanisms in all the companies that they advise, to ensure that, as they would say, those businesses retain their competitive packages.

Perhaps I am slightly naive, because I think back to the communities in which I grew up, where the chief executive and the workers worked together, lived fairly closely together and shared the same kind of community facilities. They also shared the benefits of the good times and the sacrifices of the bad times. There are many people today in business, some at the highest levels, who share the values of fairness and more equality and who want to live in more balanced communities. They do not subscribe to the pursuit of personal wealth as the main goal in life, and they will say that excessive executive pay is often not justified by business performance. I say to my noble friends the Ministers in my Government and to some of my honourable friends in another place that those people, who have strong and good values that are not just about earning money, need encouragement and support. They need recognition from the Government, because they share what might be called similar values to centre-left, new Labour values.

I hear Ministers say that we should not question the morality of excessive wealth; but I disagree. We should question it, we should talk about it and we should challenge it. We should certainly be in favour of fair rewards. I agree that we should celebrate and encourage success. Millionaires are fine, and 300,000 millionaires in Ireland are even finer. We should promote and argue for balance, and we should say something about other values, not just wealth. There are business leaders who share the wealth of their companies not only with customers and shareholders but with their workforce, and we should talk about them. There are leaders who think that customer satisfaction and employee engagement are just as important as profit levels and personal reward, and we should talk about them, too. There are business schools which develop leaders who appreciate a wider, balanced approach to wealth creation, and we should talk about them, too. There are even pension funds which, while obviously having an obligation to maximise their investment returns, look at many more factors and do not always look kindly on excessive rewards at the top.

I encourage the Government to give more attention to a wider view of wealth, a wider view of how businesses can be led and different kinds of values that can be talked about, supported and championed. That would be good to hear, and it would ensure that the Government were on the side of the people and not of the ever-widening inequality and ever more extremes of wealth.

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for his reflective passion in achieving, introducing and setting the tone of this debate.

My wife and I are about to move from Ripon to Leeds, where the majority of the people of our diocese live, so the Church Commissioners are to sell our nine-bedroom 19th-century house. We thought that it might sell as a guesthouse or maybe as sheltered accommodation, but inquiries of estate agents locally produced quite different advice. We were told, “Sell it as a single home, because there are plenty of people who have £2 million to buy the house and then another £3 million to make it habitable”. I do not know to how many of your Lordships that applies. If it does, there is an attractive house outside Ripon coming on to the market; we will not benefit a penny from its sale.

This welcome debate takes place against that background of growing inequality in this country, which has been well demonstrated by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and others. Our own city of Leeds seeks to rid itself of the tag of a two-speed city with the strapline “narrowing the gap”, but its efforts in that area struggle against the growing inequality in our culture. Some of the narrowing of that gap needs to come from a mixture of tax and tax credit measures. I therefore regret the abolition of the lower rate of income tax. At the same time, I welcome the Government’s continued commitment to dealing with child poverty. There is much to be done fiscally to deal with truths such as that 1.5 million children in poverty belong to households that pay full council tax. Fiscal measures need to be brought together to tackle poverty and so to reduce inequality.

We also need to take account of the evidence that fewer people now believe that redistribution of wealth needs to be a priority. There is criticism of massive wealth, but there is also criticism of those who are in poverty. In this respect, I am grateful for the report When Ends Don’t Meet, which comes from Church Action on Poverty and Oxfam, based on interviews held in Thornaby-on-Tees. The report uses the concept of the sustainable livelihood approach and chimes with my experience in Leeds and elsewhere.

Those oppressed by inequality often have a resilience that puts most of us to shame: there is a determination to bring up children well, to survive in a hostile world and to keep going. Yet they often feel that no one is interested in them and that finance is given to them grudgingly, which means that self-esteem is hard to maintain. In this respect, I salute the social assets provided by the voluntary sector in some areas. I am particularly grateful for the concession on Gift Aid in the Budget, which has done something to allay the worst fears of churches and other community charities that yet again the support that they provide would be reduced. The presence of community groups in areas where inequality bites cannot possibly take the place of fiscal measures, but they are of immense value to those most affected by inequality.

The Thornaby research speaks of two crucial factors in inequality: debt and access to health services. Debt has become a crucial issue for vast numbers of people in our society. The Church of England recently published some helps—mostly very straightforward ones—on household budgeting and avoiding debt. We were astonished at the positive interest—not least from the press—in the assertion that debt was an emotional and, indeed, a spiritual issue, as well as a financial one. This goes for many who see the inequalities in our country, who fall into debt and experience nightmares as they struggle with fear. For those most affected, there needs to be from government a wider restraint on loan sharks—including maximum interest rates—and more positive support for credit unions as one highly effective way of coping with debt.

Access to health services is a further key issue in coping with inequality. The majority of households in the Thornaby study have mental health problems—that is particularly true of women. Yet mental health provision remains too often a Cinderella service that is not available to many, especially to children. I hope that the Care Quality Commission that we were discussing the other day will see this as a continuing priority for its own work. This is a matter not just of poverty but of major health provision for many who cannot afford to buy themselves out of health inequality. Disability and mental health are a crucial and increasing element in inequality in our culture.

This is a crucial debate. Inequality has many causes and elements and we need a coherent, vigorous and imaginative response if there is to be a real narrowing of the gap in our society.

My Lords, the issue of financial inequality is an important challenge confronting the country today and I pay tribute to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for securing today’s debate. Indeed, given the dangers that confront our economy, the focus should be shifted strongly towards those who are the most vulnerable.

One of the biggest concerns in this area should be debt, about which I shall talk initially. The problem of debt divides people into those who have and those who have not. It is another dimension in our discussion today. In response to a recent Parliamentary Question in another place, total personal debt was estimated at £1.4 trillion in January 2008. Further, it was revealed that the average personal debt had increased from £16,000 in 2002 to £23,000 in 2006. That is a large increase and for many it is a serious issue. Total household financial liabilities have increased every year since 1997, rising from approximately £586 billion in 1997 to £1,370 billion in 2006. When one allows for loans secured on dwellings as a percentage of households’ gross disposable income, the figure has increased from 28 per cent in 1997 to 39 per cent in 2006.

Citizens Advice has seen increasing numbers of mortgage and secured loan arrears problems in the past two years. Home owners in arrears receive little help from benefits, insurance or their lenders. Poor lending and arrears collection practices have made problems much worse for many borrowers. In the past year, Citizens Advice reports having to deal with 57,000 problems of mortgage and secured loan arrears—an 11 per cent increase on the previous year.

Safety nets are failing. The take-up of mortgage payment protection insurance has declined and the Government’s own income support for mortgage interest payments scheme is failing to keep people out of serious arrears problems because of the limited help that the scheme provides. Sustainable home ownership is a challenge for many low-income households. Better co-ordination of government policy and proactive regulation of bad businesses are needed to prevent these borrowers from being set up to fail.

Earlier this month, the final report of the Thoresen Review of Generic Financial Advice was published. It sets out a blueprint for a national money guidance service to help people to make better decisions about money issues. The conclusions include the provision of money guidance focused on giving people information on budgeting, saving and borrowing protection, retirement planning, tax and welfare benefits, and jargon busting. The report recommends a United Kingdom-wide approach to money guidance to be delivered using a multichannel approach—telephone, face-to-face and web-based provision. Those improvements would be paid for by splitting the costs equally between the Government and the financial services industry. I am sure that noble Lords would be most grateful if the Minister would provide some indication of the Government’s response to these proposals.

I believe that we need to do more to tackle the problems of financial difficulties and debt issues. There is a role for the Government, civil society, financial institutions and businesses to take responsibility jointly and to work together to find and implement the solutions. I would like the Financial Services Authority to exercise greater scrutiny and control over financial institutions where moral hazard or signs of bad practices are indicated. Financial institutions should follow responsible lending practices.

The Government should take steps to improve the financial education that is delivered in our secondary schools. There should be a clampdown on store cards. Perhaps we should consider a seven-day cooling-off period, so that if a customer signs up for a store card or other revolving credit facilities at the point of sale, this credit cannot be used for seven days. Equally, much clearer information for credit card users should be provided. For example, credit card adverts, application forms and statements should include illustrative scenarios that explain exactly how much credit will cost if only minimum repayments are made every month.

Finally, I should like to add that one of the key causes of financial inequality is that many people are trapped into poverty by the very welfare system that was designed to help them. There is reliance on a welfare culture. It is imperative that we support initiatives and polices that give encouragement and incentives to people to look for work or to go on training schemes. There should be a focused welfare-to-work programme. In addition to earning a wage, people will get satisfaction and self-esteem from working. Unemployment and poverty are contributory factors in the breakdown of families. My party is taking this matter seriously and we have set out our proposals on it. In view of the constraint of time, I am not able to discuss these fully.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on initiating this debate. I am pleased to have struggled out of my sick-bed to take part in it. It has been a fun and instructive debate so far. I am happy to say that I disagree with something in what all noble Lords have said and I disagree with everything in what some noble Lords have said.

If one wants to analyse inequality, one has to take an approach to it over time. You have to look at trends and you have to see how much policies have affected those trends. If one looks back at the period just after the Second World War, from about 1955 to 1975, inequality in all industrial countries was in decline. That was the so-called golden age of the welfare state. All countries followed a roughly similar pattern, and that is also true of the period after 1975 from the late 1970s through to the start of the 2000s. Inequalities started to increase in all industrial countries during that period. Those increases were not uniform. You will find very different levels of increase when you compare some countries with others. If you look at the statistics on the UK, economic inequalities increased more steeply during that period than in any other industrial country, including the US, apart from New Zealand—which also followed a similar kind of economic programme at that time. The polarisation of income here was greater than that in any other industrial country.

By 1997, the UK ranked poorly in terms of child poverty; by most measures it was 14th out of 15 among the EU nations. As Anthony Atkinson from Oxford University has shown, there has been an escape of income at the top. There was a steeply rising accrual of income to the top 1 per cent. For the top 0.5 per cent or 0.1 per cent, the rise was steeper than in most other industrial countries and certainly any other EU country.

Labour came to power in 1997 with the ambition of doing something about that. It was new Labour, which had a different orientation from previous Labour Governments. It placed an emphasis on job creation and work to root out poverty. That was right and proper. It introduced a minimum wage, which was shown not to damage the proportion of people in work. Some 74 per cent to 75 per cent of the UK labour force is in work—a much higher proportion than in most other industrial countries. In France, for example, the figure is about 64 per cent and in Germany it is about 65 per cent. Having a high proportion of people in work is the condition of doing something about the less privileged, because that means that you can spend money on welfare measures that would otherwise be consumed essentially by paying people to stay out of work.

Labour introduced a raft of policies to help people in poorer areas and neighbourhoods. Many policies were targeted to help the poor and, of course, Labour made the radical pledge to reduce child poverty by a half by 2010 and eradicate it—which to me means reducing it to about 5 per cent—by 2020. I completely disagree with what some noble Lords have said about poverty and child poverty. For me, the aim to substantially reduce child poverty is important precisely because it is a means of reducing overall inequality. Child poverty is measured in terms of inequality. If you help children, you help poorer adults and poorer families. The pledge was the single most important statement that the Labour Government made on their commitment to producing a more egalitarian society.

What has been achieved? Well, Labour has been a redistributive Government. According to the studies of David Piachaud at the LSE, about 2.5 million people have been lifted out of relative poverty since 1997. Most people accept that that figure includes some 600,000 children. A much higher proportion of children have been lifted out of poverty if that is measured against an absolute deadline of 1998, as some noble Lords have suggested.

Contrary to what some noble Lords have said, it is not the case that overall economic inequality is on the increase. Most studies show that the Gini coefficient, which is the main measure of overall inequality, has stabilised since 1997 and has not continued to increase. But that is not easy to measure and it is not necessarily the best measure of overall inequality. In terms of child poverty, the country ranks about ninth or 10th among EU countries. At least that is an improvement. Some people say that social mobility has decreased under Labour; that is completely ridiculous because social mobility takes some 20 or so years to unfold. We will not know the effects of Labour’s current policies—for example, the children’s programme—until many more years have unfolded, but there is a decent chance that they will be successful.

What has gone wrong? Why has there not been more change? Since I do not have much more time, I shall briefly mention three things. First, Labour has been too timorous at the top. I do not agree at all with my noble friend Lord Desai. Social exclusion at the top is as serious a problem for society as social exclusion at the bottom. Personally, I am in favour of a wealth tax on the top 0.5 per cent of income earners which would be hypothecated and spent on helping poorer children. I do not think that that will ever be accepted by the Government, but something like that should be done. Secondly, the Government have not managed to reach those at the very bottom. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, mentioned the 10 per cent to 15 per cent who have not profited much from economic growth. I have figures that show that the bottom 4 per cent to 5 per cent has especially lost out. That is because tax credits do not really reach those groups and the problem of the in-work poor is significant.

Finally and thirdly, in contrast to the views of my noble friend Lord Desai, I do not believe that you can conquer poverty by concentrating on the poor alone. The problem is that more affluent people find strategies to outflank what you do. Labour came too late to thinking about policies such as lottery admission and the policies adopted by the Charity Commission and others to ensure that private schools have more social responsibilities. You have to do something about inequalities in the middle, as well as at the top, to help those at the bottom.

In conclusion, I believe that we can have a more equal society. It is completely compatible with economic competitiveness and, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, said, the Scandinavian countries have shown that this is so.

My Lords, I appreciate the opportunity provided by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for me to take part in this debate on inequality. I looked first at the extent of child poverty in various constituencies in the UK. I took as the criterion the percentage of families in receipt of income support, jobseeker’s allowance, incapacity benefit, severe disablement benefit or pension credit. Manchester Central was the constituency with the largest percentage, where 52 per cent of children were in poverty. Buckingham had the smallest percentage of children in poverty— 5 per cent. That is a big division. It indicates that children in that part of Manchester are 10 times more likely to suffer poverty and its effects than those in Buckingham. Other areas I looked at, such as Islington, north-east Glasgow and Tottenham, were all on 47 per cent. I was surprised that Islington, for instance, was there, but it was according to this measurement.

In Wales, as my noble friend Lord Livsey indicated, we also have severe problems. These are not new. I originally come from the quarrying areas of north Wales and we know that in the time of the lockout in Penrhyn quarry, say 100 years ago, poverty was far worse than anything we can imagine today, as it also was in the coalfields of south Wales. However, within Cardiff—not between area and area, but within cities—the Cardiff North constituency registers 13 per cent of children in poverty while Cardiff South and Penarth, just a stone’s throw away, registers 34 per cent. Therefore, we get this difference within cities themselves.

You can compare that with areas outside. The Rhondda has 38 per cent and Merthyr Tydfil has 37 per cent. This contrasts with Brecon and Radnor at 14 per cent, and both Montgomeryshire and Monmouth at 13 per cent. Therefore, parts of Wales have three times greater a number of people in poverty than others. The older industrial areas are faring the worst. Merthyr Tydfil was once the greatest ironworks in the world, but of course declined over the years. The coalfields have gone so the industrial areas have fared very badly.

We can also see rural poverty, but in a different way. I do not know why but there is a different sort of culture. For instance, a year or two ago, the average income in farming communities was about £7,000 per person. It is better now; I am told it is on the level of the national minimum wage. However, there was poverty there. Why? Rural depopulation—we come again to the closure of quarries, mines and steelworks. I come from a tourist area and, even there, we have seen change as people decide they are going to spend their money to get a little sunshine. In Llandudno we offer them a great deal of sunshine, but sometimes they want a bit more than we can offer, so they go overseas and spend their income there. We see a change—where hotels were, flats are being built. Things are different. Some former seaside resorts are now places of real problems, concern and poverty. So many of our young people—the ones who could really take the lead in their local communities—go elsewhere and build careers, often very successful ones, in different areas.

Therefore, regeneration is of course necessary. However, I suggest—and someone has hinted at this today—that even money from Europe is not put to work in the best possible way. It must not be a one-off solution but a rolling programme of solution. One-offs often do not succeed; we need something continuous. People who can look ahead and plan with vision can tackle some of these problems that we are facing. It needs all-round planning.

Not every rural school can be maintained. Not every rural church or chapel can be safeguarded. We may have to take tough decisions about communities on which we can concentrate our efforts, and look at a holistic approach—schools, libraries, post offices, shops, community facilities and churches. Too often, we see these in gradual decline. They disappear one after the other. Jobs go after the quarry closes. Families with children have to go to earn a living elsewhere. With fewer people to buy at shops, they close. With fewer children to make school viable, the school is down and possibly has to be closed. The post office closes. Pubs and churches go. Houses that once housed local families are now on the open market and that is the end of that community.

Communities are vital these days. If you have community, a feeling of a neighbourhood and of people belonging to and helping each other, you can see that this affects not only social things but crime and so on. Recently the lowest crime area was Ceredigion, perhaps the most rural of our communities. If people are neighbours, then changes can happen.

Just looking at the inequalities, we can see not only that there are ways of tackling poverty, but that by tackling it we can improve neighbourhoods, social cohesion and many of the crime scenes that trouble us so much today. Therefore, we can see financial and social but also moral rewards when we try to tackle the inequalities within our communities.

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate, introduced by the distinguished noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. I also welcome the contribution of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool—whenever I hear him speak, I am reminded of the role played by David Sheppard, with the Cardinal, all those years ago in Liverpool—and of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds. They all demonstrate the very valuable and ongoing contribution that those on the Bishops’ Bench make in this House.

One theme that emerged is that there is no equality of respect between people in the top 1 per cent, who now receive, as my noble friend Lord Sawyer pointed out, 100 times more than those in the bottom 1 per cent. There is just no equality of respect. I certainly part company with those who put what I call a panglossian gloss on the current position.

Before turning to the main theme, I note that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury will follow the Bishops in a month’s time, leading a debate on exactly the same subject. I hope that he is not going to have the same problem as I believe he had on the General Synod. It was remarked that he noted a very strong current of disagreement with something that he never said. I hope he will not have that experience here.

The extremity of the ratios we have been hearing about takes us back to pre-war distribution, perhaps not in the general Gini coefficient—I will come back to that—but certainly the top to bottom ratio goes back to before the war. I was on the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in the 1970s, and one could chart the gradual growth of equality. Some industries, including the Post Office, had data going back 150 years. Between the chief executive and the postman, for example, the ratio went from 75:1 before the First World War, to something like 50:1. By the time the Second World War broke out, it rapidly went from 25:1 down to 15:1. By the 1970s, it was down to about 10:1 and now, of course, it is shooting back up. It has leapt back to how it was in the 1930s and, goodness knows, if it goes on like this, it will be back to how it was in Victorian times. I believe that this phenomenon will have consequences, which we are beginning to see with people pulling away from the political process. If they do not think that they are part of society, it is a case of “to hell with them”.

That leads to a political point, with a capital “P”, to some extent. For most of my life, when Labour politicians have been out of kilter with a substantial consensus of public opinion, it has been argued that that has been because they have been in some sense too socialist. You can argue about that, but we now have the extraordinary phenomenon that a majority of people, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation research, consider the income gap to be too large. This perception is specifically based on those on higher incomes being overpaid rather than those on lower incomes being underpaid. We now have a perception—not mine, of course—that the Labour leadership is to the right of the consensus. I do not expect this phenomenon to last.

I strongly agree with some things in new Labour and strongly disagree with others. One thing I disagree with is the green light that people thought that it was giving to the pay explosion in industry. It is not just in financial services. My noble friend Lord Desai, talking about the future of capitalism—he will forgive me if I misrepresent him—implied something along the lines of a spike in financial services; my noble friend Lord Sawyer said that there is not. On the differentials in the remuneration committees, when I was on the royal commission I learnt that, if you raise the top of the pyramid, you will increase its step sizes. That has been the experience of the past 150 years. It is changing now, but somehow equality has not been on the new Labour agenda.

Just look at the argument that this is a question of equality of opportunity, a good thing, next to equality being not such a good thing. I shall call a spade a spade; I come from Lancashire, so I might as well. The parents of children who went to public schools are actually paying for and seeking a rise in inequality. That is what the public schools are there for, to an extent. I cannot forgo the opportunity to mention the old chestnut about the master at Eton who told a boy who was a bit reluctant to write an essay on poverty to write down one sentence to get the essay going. The boy wrote that, in a family, the Daddy was poor, the Mummy was poor and the butler was poor. This is a question of people’s lifetime experiences. I want the Charity Commission to say that public schools must have 50 per cent of pupils on scholarships to change the culture, not 5 per cent. In Parliament—let us cite facts—60 per cent of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons went to public school; for the Liberal Democrats, the figure is 39 per cent and for the Labour Party it is 18 per cent.

We cannot cover everything, and I am up to my seventh minute. I ask the Minister to take on board the fact that more work must be done to look at the relationship between what I call the vertical inequality agenda, which I have been talking about, and all these horizontal inequality agendas. You cannot solve the problems of the horizontal equality agenda—gender, race, region and so on—without bringing them within the totality of the vertical inequality agenda.

My Lords, it is interesting to follow that paean of praise for the 1970s. “Bring back the 1970s” seemed to be what the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, was saying.

Hear, hear!

He agrees, my Lords. It has also been an enjoyable debate for other reasons, not least seeing those two great Labour economists and scholars, the noble Lords, Lord Giddens and Lord Desai, disagreeing so vigorously with each other. We believe in transparency these days; I declare myself as much more a Desai man than a Giddens man. I do not at all seek to harm the noble Lord, Lord Desai, in saying so.

Working as I do now, and declaring my registered interests, both in the City of London and the boardroom, I was particularly interested to hear the references of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, to Chesterton and Yeats in his introduction. It made me pause for thought on the fact that the greatest leveller of inequality is mortality itself, and reminded me of some lines in TS Eliot’s “East Coker” summing it all up. I have for some reason never heard these lines read out at any of the memorial services for the great and the good that I have attended:

“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark …

The captains, merchant bankers …

The generous patrons of art”.

Having reflected on that, I was more than comforted in reading the article of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester in this Easter’s Sunday Times, where he wrote:

“The creation of wealth is certainly part of our stewardship but so is the use of it”.

The right reverend Prelate, who is not in his place today, went on to reflect:

“There were a number of wealthy people around Jesus … What was required of them is also required of us and that is to share our wealth generously”.

Just so. I have caught a hint in one or two of the speeches I have heard so far from the Labour Benches, and perhaps also from the Liberal Democrat Benches, of disapproval of wealth creation. It is all too easy to condemn wealth creators whose activities have genuine benefits when they are spread and multiplied through income groups. I see this in the City of London, where I work with people who give up a lot of their own income and time on charitable and voluntary work. As one example, I have no relationship, and never have had, with HSBC—one of the great British banks, a global superpower. Its chairman, Stephen Green, who was the chief executive, doubles up on Sundays, high days and holidays as an Anglican lay preacher. It is important that these things are recognised. It was because I saw some hint of recognition of this in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, that I lined myself up behind him.

All of that said, I have only two points to make. First, financial inequalities are sometimes relative and a matter of perception. There are lots of people working in the public services, for the public good, who perceive an inequality between what they get and what the private sector gets: the difference between that and their own public-sector wage settlements. Yet these presently rather grumpy public sector workers have great leverage and influence because there are lots of them. They also have excellent conditions, often better than are enjoyed in the private sector, in the matters of holidays, leave, index-linked pensions and all the rest of it. They are in a powerful position, as they were back in the golden age of the 1970s that the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, was lauding so much.

Public sector workers can make a fuss, but lots of people cannot. I think of those who are perhaps elderly and do not have much of an organisation, like the not very well off who have saved a little bit—a few thousand or tens of thousands over the years—as they are always enjoined to do, so that they do not become a burden on the state. Yet when they reach the age of 75, they must have an annuity. That can tip them over, bizarrely enough, into a situation which is much closer to poverty. Particularly in the present state of the markets, it is bad luck to anyone who has had to buy an annuity in the past six months; they may have seen a 20 per cent drop in the income they will get. This seems to be the result of a slightly unholy collaboration between the Treasury, HM Revenue and Customs and, I have to say, some of my friends in the pension fund industry who earn substantial fees from these annuities. People should not be forced to put their hard-earned, often very small, savings at risk through being forced to have annuities in this way.

Secondly, the position of married couples, unmarried couples and those—often women, sometimes men—who live alone with children is a financial inequality that does not get enough attention. When I went into the matter with your Lordships’ ever-helpful Library, I got a letter, expressed with proper restraint, dated 18 March. I had asked what facts there were about income differences between married and unmarried couples and single parents. The kind and excellent Librarian said that Government statistics frequently conflate marriage and cohabitation and, as such, income data, broken down by marital status of couples, appear not to be widely available. I would put it rather more colourfully. I think that there is a conspiracy of statistical silence in government circles to conceal what may exist and what some people assert exist: that some lower-income married couples, who may be in receipt of benefits, are getting less than those who are unmarried. I do not know whether it is true or not. I cannot make a clear judgment because we do not have the facts. We get screaming headlines in the tabloids which say they are the facts. Sometimes those headlines are right; sometimes they are not.

I seek some transparency from the Government on this issue. There seems to be a clear and unusually absolute consensus from scholars of all views—left, right and centre—that family breakdown is bad for children, and is consistently associated with poorer outcomes, increased risk of poverty, crime and health problems, leading to the inequalities raised by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in his introductory speech.

I ask the Minister to give a clear statement today that we are not going to be denied this information in the future. Sometimes the politically correct seek to hide inconvenient truths. The Government should collect and publish the data on the income disequilibria that may exist between married and unmarried couples, and make it publicly known so that there can be a proper debate in your Lordships’ House and elsewhere.

My Lords, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, has been a fighter for equality and fairness for as long as I can remember. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool reminded us that the noble and right reverend Lord debated this issue when he was on the Bishops’ Benches, and he is still fighting on the Cross Benches. As ever, he is right: it is unfair. However you measure it, there has been growing financial inequality. Like the noble and right reverend Lord, I am aware that greater financial inequality leads to more social upheaval. It leads to more crime, embeds greed and, as the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said in his recent book, leads to less happiness.

I say to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, that we have to balance this with other considerations, such as the economy. My noble friend Lord Desai reminded us that globalisation and technology have eliminated unskilled jobs and created the need for greater skills. Innovation has changed the face of industry. Our membership of the single market has created more competition. We deal with this through empowerment. We need to empower people and to give them the tools to improve their skills, to be innovative, to be entrepreneurial, to be more competitive and to grow the economy, as the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, said. Certainly, there have to be safeguards such as a minimum wage and human rights. To a degree, legislation has provided these.

If you are going to empower people, you cannot set limits. As my noble friend Lord Desai said, it is not a zero-sum game. As a result, income differentials arise. This empowerment may have created excessive wealth for the few, which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, described dramatically, but it has also created jobs and opportunities for the many. To give credit where it is due, 29.5 million people are at work in Britain today and unemployment is the lowest since 1975. My noble friend Lord Giddens explained that our 75 per cent employment rate is among the highest in Europe. In general, the policy seems to have worked. It has been successful for the economy as a whole, in spite of the increasing financial differentials.

However, I agree that there is one area of society where rising income differentials are not acceptable and the damage is too great. Many noble Lords have given the answer: children. What convinced me were those wonderful longitudinal surveys, where the same people are interviewed regularly every few years. Some go back to the 1940s. They make it absolutely crystal clear that if you do not reduce financial differentials among children, disadvantage is passed on from generation to generation. This is the consolidated poverty about which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool spoke. Growing financial inequality at work might be tolerated, but financial inequality between children is not. It has to be deliberate government policy to close this gap.

In the 20 years before this Government came to power, the proportion of children in relative poverty more than doubled and something had to be done. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds said, the tax and benefits system had to be reformed. Child tax credits were introduced specifically to increase the income of those households with the poorest children. As a result, the 2008 Budget book tells us that, in real terms, compared with 1997, households with children will this year be on average £1,800 better off. In spite of what my noble friend Lord Giddens said about child tax credits not reaching the lowest levels, the Budget book tells us that households with children in the poorest fifth of the population will be on average £4,000 better off. Tax credits are reducing financial differentiation among children.

Money is not enough. In addition, you have to deal with the consequences of financial inequality on children in order to break the cycle of deprivation. To do this, a whole new sector of public services for the under-fives has been created. Noble Lords who read the House Magazine will have learnt that I took my youngest grandchild to the One O’Clock Club at Brockwell Park, south London, on Friday afternoon. It is one of the 2,460 Sure Start children’s centres established so far. That is where you can see for yourself Sure Start working and financial inequality reducing.

Other things work, too. Every Child Matters was introduced in 2004. We have enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave and the children’s element in the working tax credit. The results have been truly remarkable. The independent evaluation report published on 4 March shows what a positive impact all this has had on the lives of children. This is important, because I hope that by now noble Lords will agree with me that income inequality between children is everybody’s business.

This is why I am concerned when David Cameron says that he would cut government investment in Sure Start in order to employ more health visitors. He said so on 15 March. I say to those on the Front Bench opposite that surely this would have the effect of increasing the income differential between children, not reducing it, and increasing the funding difficulties that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool described. Perhaps they think that, politically, it does not matter. I agree that reducing the differential is a thankless and expensive task, but it is brave and it is right. Right now it is something that may produce very few political dividends and so may be easy to cut, but eliminating financial differentials between children will be one thing for which this Government will be remembered. Irrespective of which Bench we sit on, we should all be prepared to play our part.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for bringing forward this important debate today. My starting point is what is happening to inequality. There has been broad agreement that, generally speaking, the period from the First World War until the end of the 1970s saw a steady fall in the share of income that accrued to the top earners. That trend was then reversed and there has been a big increase in the share taken by top income earners during the past 25 years. UK experience in this respect has been pretty similar to the OECD average, although, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, it is at the top end. At the bottom end, it is not just the Scandinavian countries that have seen a lesser increase; France and Japan are also in that category. Income inequality is now at its highest since the 1940s. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, pointed out, if it is not increasing, it is certainly not reducing. As for wealth, during the lifetime of this Administration, Britain’s richest 10 per cent have increased their share from 47 per cent to 54 per cent of the nation’s wealth.

If that is the situation, why does it matter? Obviously, poverty in absolute terms matters a lot, but inequality matters a lot as well, because it exacerbates a whole range of problems, many of which have been referred to today. For example, several noble Lords talked about how inequality affects health at both ends of one’s life, whether birth weight or life expectancy. Through the reduction in self-esteem that it brings, it helps to fuel crime. It undermines democracy, because, broadly speaking, the poor do not vote. It divides cities; it prices people out of housing; it heightens ethnic tensions; it is a barrier to opportunity; and it stifles social mobility. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, pointed out, it leads to debt.

Most generally, inequality erodes the spirit of community. By contrast, I think that there has been agreement that a society that is seen by its members to be fair is likely to be a more content, happier society—surely the kind of society in which we would all prefer to live.

If inequality is increasing, concern about it, at least until recently, seems to have been falling. Even a generation ago, there was a real resentment among many people about the incomes of the rich and the plight of the poor. That has not gone altogether, but the real anger that drove many, especially those on the left, into politics has in many cases been replaced by a wearied acceptance that hedge fund managers, top lawyers, footballers and film stars will earn increasingly stratospheric amounts.

Perhaps, however—today’s debate may reflect this—there are the beginnings of a sense that that state of affairs is not desirable and should change. If so, what shall we do about it? Traditionally, if you wanted to reduce inequality, the place to start was tax. In particular, income tax was seen as the most powerful redistributive tool, and high rates of tax for high earners were advocated principally on redistributive grounds. Today, a very high level of personal income tax is no longer seen as politically acceptable or, in a footloose age, economically desirable. It was interesting that in the Rowntree poll that has been referred to three-quarters of people said that they thought that the income gap was too great, but only 32 per cent wanted it tackled by redistribution—that is, by higher tax on higher earners.

There are no doubt a number of reasons for that. A major one is clearly that many in the middle classes fear that any further tax hike will somehow hit them. There is also a fear—if I may say so, the affluent are extremely adept at stoking it, as we are currently seeing—that if the affluent were taxed at a high rate, many would leave the UK to work elsewhere and the overall economy would suffer. Partly as a consequence of that line of argument, some believe that higher taxes would reduce overall tax revenues and that, in line with the Laffer curve theory, we should be reducing tax levels to increase tax take. We are also increasingly hearing arguments that direct taxes should be reduced across the board to make room for new taxes to promote more environmentally friendly patterns of behaviour.

Although all those arguments are in my view to a greater or lesser extent intellectually flawed, the fact is that they are advanced with such energy that virtually no politician—perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, is an exception—will now make the argument for higher direct tax rates. There is, however, great scope to rein in inequalities of disposable income of some of the most affluent by taxation measures. Noble Lords will recall that Leona Helmsley, the New York hotel billionaire, famously said:

“Only the little people pay taxes”.

That has too often been the case in the UK. The Government are belatedly proposing measures in respect of capital gains tax and non-doms that begin to tackle the problem, but in both cases their approach is too timid. In the case of capital gains tax, we support the idea that capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as income, which would mean in practice that many paid a rate of 40 per cent rather than the 18 per cent now proposed by the Government. In the case of non-doms, we propose that those wishing to retain non-dom status for more than seven years should pay taxes on all their overseas income, rather than the proposed non-dom poll tax of £30,000. However, at least the Government are making some progress in those directions.

Tax, however, will not greatly affect income inequality if the salaries of those at the top end rise at a much faster rate than those at the bottom. Much as I would like it, I am not a great optimist that voluntary restraint is about to break out. The back-scratching nature of many remuneration committees, for example, has made them an instrument for an upward ratchet in wages rather than a restraining influence. The noble Lord, Lord Sawyer, referred to that; no doubt his remuneration committee is the exception that proves the rule. The bonus culture in the financial services sector, which can see individuals earning bonuses of up to 10 times their salary, is particularly pernicious, for not only does it lead to excessive total income levels but it feeds the kind of reckless decision-making that fed the banking bubble that has now been so dramatically punctured. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, pointed out, the banks are beginning to discuss that. They need to do so for commercial as well as moral reasons.

If reining back the income growth of the rich is necessary to reduce inequality, what about the other end of the spectrum—improving the income levels of those at the bottom end of the income scale? The Government have done a number of things that have undoubtedly made a positive difference. We have heard about those this morning: tax credits, for example, and the minimum wage. However, there is much more that can be done, not least, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, pointed out, in respect of pensions. The level of pension poverty in this country, especially among women, as he pointed out, is a national disgrace and needs to be tackled urgently.

However, just as important as any increase in transfer payments from the state to the poor must be a series of measures that help people to earn their way to a decent standard of living. We have a lamentable track record in providing appropriate education and training opportunities for those who find the traditional academic route unmotivating and which therefore fails them. Here we are talking primarily about the poor and those from poor backgrounds. The report of the noble Lord, Lord Leitch, pointed out that, out of 30 OECD countries, the UK was 17th on low skills and 20th on intermediate skills. Seven million adults lack functional numeracy, 5 million lack functional literacy and tens of thousands of schoolchildren leave school virtually unable to read, write and do arithmetic. Two key initiatives need to be further supported in this area. The first relates to vocational education for those still at school; the second relates to apprenticeships. In both cases, the Government have set high, demanding targets that many of us feel they have not yet willed the means to achieve.

We will have the opportunity to debate some of those issues again in a month’s time, but the message from today is that inequality matters. For too long, it has remained in the shadows of political debate. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, has rightly put it in the spotlight today and we must all hope that it remains there.

My Lords, I, for one, have found this a fascinating and wide-ranging debate, and I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on being successful in the ballot and choosing the subject of income inequality. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Newby, I will not have two goes at the subject because I will not be available when the debate in the name of the most reverend Primate is debated in your Lordships’ House.

I agree with the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and with other noble Lords who said that it is a matter of both economic and social concern when there is massive inequality of wealth. Many of your Lordships have spoken with great feeling—emotion, even—on this. It is often argued that a lack of connection between the rich and the poor is divisive and damaging to society as a whole. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Desai, that this would be true if we were talking about absolute poverty, which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, spoke about and which, thankfully, we have not seen in this country since the Victorian era—a point that was made in relation to south Wales by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno. Absolute poverty is where people lack the necessary food, clothing or shelter to survive. This debate is about relative poverty, which has been defined as the inability of a citizen to participate fully in economic terms in the country in which they live.

The right reverent Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool introduced the subject of the north-south divide, and told us of his belief that relative poverty is greater in the north than in the south. I rather doubt that some who live in Leicester, Birmingham, London or Bristol would agree with him. We do not so much need policies that narrow the gap as to secure a rising income level for those at the bottom of the wealth scale. Too much preoccupation with differentials tends to obscure this more vital objective. I defy anyone successfully to argue that this is not a wholly positive, desirable and noble aspiration.

Neither I nor the Minister can rank ourselves among the professors of economics who grace your Lordships’ House. However, even I, who got as far as A-level in the subject, appreciate that wealth can only be created by providing something for someone at a price that they want to pay. Of course, the rewards that result would be greater than they otherwise would be if the levels of both corporation tax on the company, and income tax on the individual were reduced. This would be all very well for the manufacturer, but I note from National Statistics Online—and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred to this—that lower taxes have increased rather than decreased the income gap between the best and worst off. This is not to argue for an increase in taxes, which would damage the economy as a whole, but it is to suggest that targeting the lower income deciles is the right approach.

It has been argued that hedge fund managers, footballer players and the like, and even venture capitalists, contribute very little to the wealth of the nation and get gross rewards. Good is good, money is bad, in précis. I cannot condone this approach, which is so often based on jealousy, although I noted that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, denied this in his particular case. Those who argue this way are wrong. What these men, particularly the money men, have introduced is a more efficient method of using capital—capital, I might remind you, which can only be effective if it is used to finance goods and services for which there is a demand. If it is not used in this way, it will diminish or even disappear, and then there will be little or no financial rewards for anyone. If, however, it is used effectively, greater wealth will have been created for everyone, both rich and poor.

It should be the duty of government to organise things so that poorer people can afford what they need. That is exactly why we have a social security system in this country. My noble friend Lord Patten is right—the rich should support those at the bottom end of the wealth scale, not only by paying taxes, but through charitable donations. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, parents who send their children to private schools are subsidising the education of the rest of society—to a small extent, I accept. Unfortunately, over the years the social security system has become hugely expensive—the DWP budget is now £120 billion, which is mostly spent on 3.5 million people on inactive out-of-work benefits. It is also out of kilter, by which I mean that people are still getting benefits which are not appropriate to their circumstances.

I have always believed that the basic reason for any Government’s existence is insurance. This has many meanings including, for instance, defence of the realm, or the policing of our towns and cities, which do not concern us in today’s debate. What does concern us is the provision of a basic level of income provided, if necessary, by the State, to those who through no fault of their own fall on hard times. That is the right of all our citizens. However, with rights go responsibilities, and it is the responsibility of those on benefit to do all they can to reduce state support for them.

This Government believe, and I agree with them, that there are those receiving benefit who, even if they cannot cope with full-time work, should do such work as they can part time. The trouble is that the benefit system is now so complicated, and the tapers and withdrawal rates so severe, that for some there is no economic advantage in getting a job. This is the major challenge for the Government. If work does not pay, it will not be achieved—I agree with my noble friend Lord Sheikh on this. The Government have made a bad situation worse here, not merely by removing the 10 per cent tax band—referred to by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds—but by increasing the tax credit withdrawal rate by 2 per cent which, combined with an income tax rate of 20 per cent and a national insurance rate of 11 per cent, brings the marginal rate of people facing tax credits to 70 per cent. Incidentally, this is much higher than the marginal tax rate for very rich people, which is set at 41 per cent.

The Government are target-driven, and the most obvious target, indeed the primary objective of the DWP, is to eliminate child poverty by 2020, and on the way to halve it by April 2011. Child poverty is defined as those children living in households receiving 60 per cent of the median income, which was £14,000 a year in 2007. By definition, this is a moving target. It is hardly surprising then that the Governmnet have given up on the half-way staging post of halving child poverty.

The noble Lords, Lord Giddens and Lord Roberts of Llandudno, spoke about children. I, too, welcome what the Chancellor managed to achieve for families with children, even in these straightened economic times: the increase in child benefit and child tax credit; and the fact that parents’ income from child benefit will be disregarded when calculating housing and council tax benefits. However, even these welcome additions will mean that the target of halving the 3.7 million children currently living in poverty will be missed by between 450,000 and 800,000, depending on whose figures you believe—either the TUC or what I understand came out of the various pieces of paper accompanying the Budget. Even so, the sums found in the Budget will certainly help to reduce the income gap of people with children.

However, what help are the Government planning for single people and childless couples? As far as I can see, they are the people who now need help so as to reduce income inequality. To return from the particular to the general subject of this debate, the reason for the Government’s encouragement to get more people into work is that it stimulates growth by triggering people’s aspirations of gaining wealth so as to climb the social ladder. None the less, a degree of income inequality is not only inevitable, it is essential, to foster those aspirations.

My Lords, I share with all noble Lords who have spoken in the debate gratitude to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for being successful in the ballot and producing one of the more significant debates that we have to address in our society. We may perhaps have a reprieve in a month or so and I am sure that we all look forward to further intensive scrutiny of the issues that have been raised today. We are also particularly grateful to him for the measured way in which he introduced the debate and for the questions that he posed. Underpinning it all, as we would have expected, was a strong moral stance on the concept of a fair society. Indeed, most noble Lords who have participated in this debate have stressed that dimension.

There is no doubt that there are areas in which it is difficult for the Government to act against excess. We all recognise the great difficulties in any international market in this respect. There does need to be a moral force in society and a requirement that wealth faces up to the responsibilities that it enjoys because of the power that it conveys. When that wealth is reckless and heedless of the greater good of society, excess may be to the severe detriment of the economy and the welfare of society. Indeed, aspects of the present financial situation reflect this. It is therefore important that we ensure that people who hold responsible positions in society act responsibly. In the private sector, that goes for the remuneration committees which deal with bonuses that may reflect contributions to society that are not necessarily for the general good. That does not, however, alter the fact that the Government recognise that we operate in a condition-free market in which a great deal of wealth is generated by the private sector but in which there are also responsibilities. One responsibility is the Government’s: their management of resources and the decisions that they take on behalf of society.

I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, who stayed true to the philosophy that has underpinned his contributions in this House and in his previous career with regard to the free market. He will have noticed, however, that he was almost the only noble Lord in this debate who mentioned public services—I shall come in a moment to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who supported his noble friend on this, if I have time. The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, indicated that we need to keep taxation low and that little good may come to the wider society through public resources. How can we talk about equality or inequality in our society without mentioning the National Health Service? One of the great distinguishing features between our society and that of the United States of America is reflected these days not so much in the distribution of income between the top and the bottom but in the distribution of a public good in terms of a free health service, which is of great importance to equal rights, equal opportunities and equality in our society.

I stress that the Government’s public expenditure on health services and education and in other areas has contributed to a fairer society—a concept that has underpinned so many contributions to this debate. In stressing that, I come to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. We have been running an economy that, as he has freely recognised, has been successful for more than a decade in controlling inflation and producing necessary economic growth, which means that real household disposable income has grown substantially in the past decade. There has been a significant reduction in the number of children in poverty. Some 600,000 children have been taken out of poverty.

The concern has also been articulated that the Government are wedded to a target, but the target to reduce child poverty totally by 2020 and to halve it by 2010 is an estimable one. I know that it leaves us vulnerable to the charge that we are having difficulty hitting it. We all know that we need to redouble our efforts in order to tackle child poverty, but we should recognise the success that has been achieved. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Haskel, who did precisely that.

I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, on the pensions position. I recognise that we have to make progress with regard to an increasing number of older people in our society and to pensions, which are a crucial issue for so many of them. In addition, we must consider a flexible working age and the ability of people to sustain themselves when they still have a contribution to make to society. However, the number of pensioners in poverty has reduced by more than a million under this Administration.

The last major point that I want to respond to—I hope I will also have the opportunity to reply to other detailed points that have been made—was the one on which my noble friend Lord Giddens reflected. Employment is crucial to reducing poverty. The opportunity to get and to hold a job is a critical escape route out of the irretrievable poverty that settles on the workless. This Government take pride in the fact that there are record employment rates for lone parents in our society. Indeed, we have the highest number of employed people in any significant economy. These measures help us to respond to a debate which I recognise challenges the Government on issues that are fundamental to a fair society. Nevertheless, it would be remiss of me not to assert with considerable pride from this Dispatch Box the achievements that have been made, or to recognise that the debate has highlighted how much needs to be done.

On the stretching out of differentials in our society, I concede the point made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, that those in the top 1 per cent have seen a significant growth in their resources in the recent decade or more, although that is against a background in which all incomes have risen significantly. There is a slightly wider measure than that. The growth in income of those in the top 10 per cent is not greatly above the median growth of incomes across society. It might be said that that is no answer to extremes of wealth—when has it not been?—but it might also reflect the fact that we can exaggerate the influence of the few when perhaps we should look at the quality of distribution over greater numbers than those in a restricted category, into which we put the hedge fund managers and the few who, with their reckless behaviour, have plunged us into considerable financial difficulties. Their impact on the real economy is quite limited.

In the same way, I am not sure that noble Lords can sustain the argument—the noble Lord, Lord Newby, raised this topic—that the large numbers of working people who go to football matches resent the earnings of footballers, except when they fail. It is all fine and dandy if their side is successful and at the top of the league. We can exaggerate the politics of envy that might sometimes creep into some arguments about income distribution, and I am not at all sure that it stands up to real analysis. I was therefore grateful to both my noble friend Lord Desai for congratulating us—he rightly should do—and to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for sketching out the main issues in the debate so brilliantly in his opening speech. My noble friend Lord Desai also said that the important thing for a Government to do on the question of distribution was to eradicate poverty. That is the moral case, the one that ought to drive government objectives, and is the one that will continue to drive this Administration against a background, as I have said already, where we have made substantial progress.

The noble Lord, Lord Livsey, introduced an extra dimension to the debate and was followed, as far as the Welsh perspective was concerned, very closely by his noble friend Lord Roberts. The right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Liverpool and the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds brought out regional dimensions and the fact that communities in other parts of the country did not enjoy some of the more obvious extremes of wealth that are seen in London. However, I always say to my colleagues in the other place that one of the great distortions that Members of Parliament can have is that, when they think of London, they think of the arrival at a railway station and travel through the West End to the Houses of Parliament. If they went a little closer to Hackney and the East End of London, they would see the same regional deprivation that obtains in other parts of the country. That does not alter the fact that there is an argument about regional distribution and I emphasise that the Government are increasing their support to regional development agencies. They do very good work and I was in conversation only yesterday with someone who marked out the fact that employment in South Wales for one company was directly due to the incentives given and work done by the regional development agency. Good work can be done there, and we intend to increase resources to the agency.

My noble friend Lord Giddens gave us the concept of trends. He is absolutely right: we cannot talk about issues of distributions as a snapshot, we have to look at trends of policies. There are aspects of the Government’s policies that we never conceived could be fulfilled within the narrow framework of the four-year perspective that the parliamentary election cycle tends to determine these days. Nevertheless, he indicated that, while there are trends concerning aspects of the work of the Labour Government since 1997 that he castigated as being too timorous, considerable work had been and is being done to conquer poverty. I agree with him, of course: we cannot concentrate on limited groups of the poor alone, although they are undoubtedly the most important.

I am greatly restricted on time, not least because noble Lords also pushed their time limits to a greater extent and were not entirely in keeping with the clock, but I promised the noble Lord, Lord Patten, a response. We do publish examples of measures and gains from the Budget. There are clear illustrations of the position as regards couples and lone parents. I will be happy to discuss that with him subsequent to the debate. He will recognise the constraint that I am under now and he will forgive me for that.

I can see the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, shaking his head at me because I have not really talked about taxation or responded to the question on benefits posed by his noble friend Lord Skelmersdale. I am all too well aware of the fact that with so many participants in the debate, some noble Lords are disappointed with my response today. I can say only that there is a second round to the debate.

However, I want to emphasise that we have set out some quite critical objectives. We have established increased opportunity for work. We are concerned that work should be the option for people to get off benefits. We have introduced a national minimum wage, mentioned by some in the debate but certainly a critical factor for fairness in society. We have introduced pension credit, which has helped transform the lives of many pensioners. We have been concerned, through child tax credits and working tax credits, to deal with child poverty. These are solid achievements of a Labour Government. It is redistribution in action. There is a great deal to do and we intend to carry on with that work.

My Lords, it remains for me only to thank all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate, and not least the Minister. What has been particularly valuable is that we have had perspectives from so many different areas of life, from Wales and the different regions of the UK, and from the City and industry. We have heard about the impact on older people and the dire consequences of debt. All that has helped us to face the many-faceted aspect of this problem that needs to be treated at both a macro and a micro level. As some noble Lords have brought out, even within the City, we need to pay attention to the very sharp differences within a few miles.

The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, talked about an equality of respect. I think that we would all agree about its importance, but I am left with the question as to how far our present situation favours or undermines such equality.

I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

rose to call attention to the case for encouraging high-quality architecture in the United Kingdom and for ensuring that design quality is taken into account by local planning authorities; and to move for Papers.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, we are projecting a vast amount of building in this country: healthcare facilities and schools on an unprecedented scale, Olympic facilities, regeneration of the Thames Gateway, 10 ecotowns, 2 million homes by 2016, and 3 million homes by 2020. That is a huge opportunity for good or, indeed, for ill. We should be determined to create fine buildings and we should never build less than well.

Great architecture occurs when patrons and architects are inspired to create beautiful buildings, but government can create conditions in which architecture can flourish. By establishing CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the Government have facilitated advice and assistance from some of the best minds in Britain for those who aspire to build well. Tony Blair affirmed his ambition that, in our generation, we should leave,

“a legacy of high quality public buildings that can match the best of what we inherited from the Victorians and other past generations”.

Hazel Blears has said this week that:

“People deserve homes … that are not brutal, but beautiful”.

Rightly, the Government encourage fine architecture, though they cannot command it.

Urban design is much more susceptible to direct influence by public policy. As defined in By Design, urban design,

“concerns the connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric, and the processes for ensuring successful villages, towns and cities”.

Nick Raynsford and Stuart Lipton said in their foreword that:

“Good design always arises from a thorough and caring understanding of place and context”.

Terry Farrell has said that “place is the client”. English Heritage rightly insists that:

“Good design arises from a good understanding of the context of new development and its likely impact on the setting of existing places”.

Better Public Buildings explained that good design adds value and reduces whole-life costs; creates flexible, durable, sustainable development for the community; minimises waste of materials and energy, in construction and in use; provides functional, efficient, adaptable spaces; is attractive and healthy for users and public; contributes to construction which is quick, safe and efficient; and produces buildings which are safer and easier to clean and maintain. Good design enhances people’s lives and transforms how they feel and behave. It can revitalise neighbourhoods; reduce pressure on the countryside; uplift and bring hope to neglected communities; reduce crime, illness and truancy; and help public services—hospitals, schools, housing and transport—to perform better. The Government have now rightly committed us to a zero-carbon standard for new buildings. There are empirically tested ways to achieve good design and there is no excuse for bad design.

The costs of bad design are disastrous. In Utopia on Trial, Alice Coleman examined 15 design variables in 4,000 blocks of flats and correlated these with the behaviour patterns of residents. She found that as the design values worsened, litter, graffiti, vandalism, pollution and the incidence of children in care correspondingly deteriorated. Bad design leads to higher management and maintenance costs, earlier replacement costs, environmental costs and poor quality of life, worse educational attainment, worse stress, worse health, worse crime rates, social exclusion, and all the economic costs associated with these. In Estates: An Intimate History, Lynsey Hanley has written movingly of tower blocks that,

“sap the spirit, suck out hope and ambition, and draw in apathy and nihilism”.

Bad design is utter waste.

In 1918, Lloyd George declared that there must be “homes fit for heroes” and, by 1939, there were more than 1 million council houses. The Tudor Walters standards stipulated generous scales and good materials. Aneurin Bevan insisted that quality should have precedence over quantity in public housing, as well as insisting on what he called,

“the living tapestry of a mixed community”—

the avoidance of physical segregation by class.

But then mistakes were made. In 1951, the new Government gave precedence to quantity over quality in housebuilding. There was also the cult of the tower block. Le Corbusier was a great architect, but a disastrous social theorist, and many of his disciples were disastrous architects. Modernist architects were messianic. As Philip Johnson later said:

“We really believed, in a quasi-religious sense, in the perfectibility of human nature, in the role of architecture as a weapon of social reform ... The coming Utopia when everyone would live in cheap prefabricated flat-roofed multiple dwellings—heaven on earth”.

The prophets and architects of utopia swept aside the survey evidence that people did not want to live in flats. Local authority leaders were enchanted by utopian visions for their cities. Paternalistic chief planners and city engineers saw that they could quickly and cheaply rehouse wholesale. Big builders made a fortune. Central government not only endorsed but intensified the utopian disaster. The Housing Subsidies Act 1956 rewarded local authorities with a bigger subsidy the higher they built.

Other forces also militated against good-quality design and construction. Stop-go economics destabilised architects’ practices and contractors’ workforces. Systems building required little craftsmanship and there were fewer apprentices. The free-market ideology of the 1980s led to the dismantling of local authority architects’ departments, weakened planners and allowed shoddy builders a clear run. Oppressive central control and audit stifled creativity in the public sector. Capital gains tax exemption for owner-occupied homes and inflation led to properties increasingly being regarded as investment units to be traded rather than as homes. The mediocrity and meanness of much housebuilding generated public antipathy to development. Wanton destruction of built heritage produced an aversion to the modern and the different. Subordination of other design considerations to the imperatives of the motorist dehumanised environments.

Much that was good was built in these decades, but we must learn from the bad experience. Since 1997, this Government have made serious attempts to improve the quality of planning and design.

CABE was set up to work for improvement in quality of life through good design. It champions well designed buildings and public space, runs public campaigns and provides expert, practical advice. It works with planners, designers, clients and architects. Although it exercises no statutory powers, CABE has become an influential and creative force within Whitehall and across the country.

The Office of Government Commerce, which is responsible in the Treasury for public procurement policies, no longer insists on the cheapest up-front price, but now propounds the importance of economy in whole-life costs. The National Audit Office also supports far-sighted policies in the procurement of buildings. Although the picture of PFI remains very mixed and the contracting process is often unsatisfactory, there are signs of a better recognition that initial expenditure on design and quality will abundantly pay for itself in lower maintenance costs and better outputs of public goods, such as health and education. The concepts of social inclusion, intergenerational equity and sustainability—language that we have come to use in recent years—are all serving to engage us in better thinking about design.

In 2005, planning policy statement 1, Delivering Sustainable Development, said roundly:

“Design which fails to take the opportunities available for improving the character and quality of an area should not be accepted”.

Paragraphs 33 to 39 say, in brief, everything that one would want in government guidance on the principles of good design. Planning policy statement 3, on housing, issued in 2006, is equally to be welcomed. To help translate the maxims of the planning policy statements into actual good practice the Government and CABE have promoted the appointment of design champions within Whitehall, local government, the health service and the housebuilding industry. Design quality indicators and CABE’s “design for life” standard are helping to establish a common language and reference points for design quality. Pre-application discussion and design review panels are improving the planning process. Changes to the planning rules have given councils more scope to demand higher design standards. The Barker review of land-use planning and the Callcutt review of housebuilding delivery have emphasised the importance of design, as have the housing and planning Green Papers.

All that is no less than is needed. In 2006, Richard Simmons, the chief executive of CABE, reported in The Cost of Bad Design:

“We continue to see badly laid out housing estates, hospitals that aren’t fit for purpose, schools that aren’t inspiring and public spaces that are green deserts”.

CABE’s 2007 housing audit found,

“far too much development that is not up to standard ... and far too little that is exemplary in design terms”.

Only 18 per cent of developments were classed as “good” or “very good”. The quality of 29 per cent was,

“so low that they simply should not have been given planning consent”.

CABE has also found that too many local development frameworks,

“lack a genuine vision for the area ... They are often not realistic or deliverable”.

So, as we head further into this period of intense building activity, what is needed?

We need a drive to improve skills. Among transport planners only about two-thirds have had any formal urban design training. The planning policy statements require high-quality design, but we still will not get it, unless we are lucky, if planning officers and members of planning committees have a poor understanding of design or lack the confidence to reject inadequate design. In 2004, a skills survey by the LGA found that 52 per cent of local planning authorities admitted a lack of design skills. More planning, one might suppose, is being done by consultants working for developers than by local authority planners. Local authorities need more firepower. Just as Sir Terry Farrell is the master planner for Edinburgh and my noble friend Lord Rogers advises the Mayor of London, should not more architects be assisting other local authorities as planning and design gurus? Planning inspectors need the design skills to ensure that poor-quality designs are dismissed at appeal.

We must work to universalise best practice. Design champions should be appointed in all relevant bodies. In January 2007, only 65 per cent of local authorities had a design champion. Many said that they did not know how to use their design champion to best effect. Design champions need to have the standing, the time and the skills to be effective. Design review services should also be available everywhere. Legislation should empower the Secretary of State to make provision for design review panels and for their findings to carry weight at appeal. The new legislation should indeed lay a duty on planning authorities to promote high-quality design. Post-occupation analysis— examination of how developments have actually worked—should become normal practice, enabling us to learn quickly from experience.

Planners and developers need to take to heart paragraph 43 of PPS 1, and ensure that there is genuine involvement of the community in the development of plans and designs. I visited Barcelona with my noble friend Lord Rogers and Sir Stuart Lipton, chair of CABE, to study how the authorities there had made such a success of new development. What was impressed on us was that Mayor Maragall not only had a passion for architecture and for his city, but had spent endless amounts of time meeting citizens in their own neighbourhoods, explaining, listening and responding. He also had power in Barcelona to raise money and take decisions effectively untrammelled by Madrid.

Paragraph 38 of PPS 1 states that,

“planning authorities should not attempt to impose architectural styles or particular tastes”.

If people want traditional architecture—and very many do—they should be allowed to have it, albeit constructed to sustainable standards. The debate about style should be won honestly. There should be no more hubristic imposition of the “innovative”.

We need to think about how to structure rewards and penalties to encourage good design and construction. Long-term costs and benefits for society often are not aligned with costs and benefits for developers. Richard Simmons has noted that accounting and valuation methods often give low weighting to design quality. In the public sector, capital and revenue costs are usually allocated to different budget-holders. Often in the private sector, it will be someone other than the developer who gains from added value arising as the benefits of good design are gradually experienced. Equally, if the development is sold off quickly, the developer does not have to incur the long-term costs of poor design. With land supply limited by planning, the value accruing from scarcity may far surpass the value added by good design. In favourable market conditions, should they come again, almost anything will sell and there is little premium for good design. Planners need to correct this market failure by rejecting bad design. The Government should add what pressures and incentives they can for good design. The Homes and Communities Agency will need capacity and commitment to require high-quality design. The housing and planning delivery grant should reward quality as well as quantity.

We should set space standards that are more, not less generous. It will not do to create 3 million hutches. We must also ensure that enough time is available—you do not get good design in a rush. Encouragement of pre-application discussion will help. In the hurry to get schools and houses built—and I understand the reasons for pressing forward—there is a risk that insufficiently considered and poor-quality design will be churned out.

We need to complete the culture change that has begun. Our civic leaders in the 21st century, like their predecessors in the 19th, must aspire to the best for the people whom they serve. Indeed, they must insist on the best. Leadership at every level and a willingness to learn will be the keys to promoting good architecture and urban design. Nothing will be better for national morale. I beg to move for Papers.

My Lords, I do not seek to damage in any way the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, but I did agree with every word that he said. We are in different political parties, but in the same pro-design party. In his splendid, broad-brush introduction, he set the scene for this debate.

I will address my remarks entirely to that part of the noble Lord’s Motion that raises the importance of design quality being taken into account by local authorities, with which I agree wholeheartedly, and then only in relation to one particular issue, that of good housing design in brownfield and greenfield edge-of-town housing schemes. These may seem a bit prosaic and humdrum compared to shards of glass and signature architects’ vaunting ambitions, skyline-changing statements and so on. However, in the mass, the three million houses that the Government predict will come off the production line will have much larger impacts on the landscape—irreversible impacts on the landscape, changing it for ever. They will also affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I hasten to add that I have no commercial interests to declare and am also out of sight and sound of any proposed developments affecting our homes in Westminster and the West Country.

At the moment, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, new house building is slowing. However, when home construction speeds up again, as it will, the demands of even the most conservative predict-and-provide projections will mean an awful lot of new homes. The Government must realise that, in an age where design, community and landscape appreciation is so high, these will be acceptable only if they are thoughtfully produced. There have been advances in recent years with road schemes. They are never popular, but they have been made a little more acceptable because of the much greater attention that has been belatedly paid, after decades of complaint, to key issues concerning surface noise, landscaping, planting, light reduction and the lessening of pollution of the night sky. There has been something of a revolution by road engineers and designers in order to get the schemes through. We need much more of a revolution in attitude by two of the most important players in the mass home-building area—the design departments of local authorities and the design divisions of our mass new-home builders. First and foremost, a rigorous approach by them should lead to building layout dictating highway design, rather than the other way round. There are still schemes coming forward that are based around highway design, which is generally unfriendly to community, landscape and the night sky. This approach is the first building block in creating an attractive new public landscape—the framework for a well structured layout, making use of, and reflecting, local landscape and diversity.

It cannot be easy—I do not have these skills, I am an amateur—to produce a master plan to build a scheme of 250, 500 or 1,000 homes on the edge of a town, embracing perhaps both brownfield and greenfield sites. The problem is that even if an attractive master plan is produced, it does not ensure necessarily that detailed good design will follow. That is the next frontier. This demands great skills by building companies, but they need to be guided with a firm hand by local authorities’ design departments and planners. Having spoken to and corresponded with designers and planners over the years, I do not think that either group has all the skills. Behind them very often are councillors with the very difficult job of implementing schemes that have been urged on them by central government—build more houses in your region to meet the numbers thought to be needed—often in the face of considerable controversy and concern by local residents.

What happens next is a bit sad and sometimes even—I choose my word carefully—pathetic. In local newspapers up and down the land, you see that councillors about to press the planning button are advised by officers to get that planning gain from developers—as though the planning gain of a new zebra crossing, community centre or school, wrested from a house builder or developer, is in the end what local councils are really all about—and, once that planning gain has come, that is it, their job has been done. While planning gains are significant in themselves, they sink into insignificance compared with how councillors should oversee the way in which schemes are planned and built. The biggest planning gain that any council anywhere in the land can achieve is always found in good and sustainable design, sympathetic to setting and heritage, giving the backdrop for the new community that is going to live in that area. Councillors need to wake up to the fact that this is their main responsibility. Some do, but not all. For such new developments will irreversibly alter the landscape, for better or worse.

Too often, house builders still work from a pattern-book approach—one design fits all. Affordable, two-bed, three-bed and then, right at the top end, a few four-bed and five-bed McMansions added on to give a touch of glamour on the margins. This must be why the chief executive of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, writing in his foreword to its housing audit in 2007—a document referred to by the noble Lord in his excellent speech—wrote that,

“the housing produced in the first years of the new century is simply not up to the standard which customers have the right to expect”.

The chief executive of CABE was absolutely right in what he wrote. The approach that leads to this dire situation is one that I recall with amusement tinged with horror. A few years ago I was talking to the CEO of a major house building company at a private, informal gathering. I pressed him a bit about design. He turned to me and said, “Design, John? Come on”. At this point he lapsed into Anglo Saxon vernacular not so shocking that I cannot risk it in your Lordships’ House. “We basically have the same patterns everywhere in the country and then we use a few gob-ons on the buildings”. It took me a second or so to understand what these gob-ons were. I then realised that he was referring to the fact that in chalk country a flint porch is added, while in the Midlands they gob-on a little brick façade with a bit of what is probably plastic barge boarding. That sort of thing has done the UK house building industry no end of harm. Builders deserve the opportunity to build if the Government want them to, but they must do so in a way that is acceptable and gives customers what they want. We cannot have any more identikit design with a bit of locally derived façade stuck on the front.

In conclusion, there is a huge opportunity for planning authorities, encouraged by the Government, to do what are often marginal things such as checking the designs for estates with huge trees planned for the edges. Those trees are planted as slips and take 20 to 30 years to reach maturity, so that is the ultimate deceit. It is in paying attention to little things such as minimising abrupt and harsh lighting on town edges that pollutes the night sky that in the end will help to deliver the Government’s housing objectives. I look forward very much to hearing what the Minister has to say in response.

My Lords, it is rare to have a debate in the House primarily about architecture, although we have had occasional debates on design. So I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, has sought this opportunity and spoken in the way that he did. My own preference today is to look at a larger canvas because there is every reason to celebrate the profession and current British architecture, although I am anxious about some developments.

For six years I was the director-general of the RIBA and I now enjoy a modest pension. When I arrived at the RIBA in 1987, as a layman in these matters, I called on Richard Rogers to discover my new role and to sit at his feet. He already had a distinguished international reputation, but I did not expect then, as I now do, to receive some of his mail through the House of Lords Post Office, including a letter this week praising the new Heathrow terminal. Equally, some post is forwarded to me from the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside.

It is now a quarter of a century since Foster, Rogers and Stirling broke through to the wider public with a new generation of remarkable architects in the influential Royal Academy exhibition. James Stirling died much too soon, but his name is carried in an international architecture prize, the Stirling Prize. As for Foster and Rogers, they have gone from strength to strength, and their world reputation stands exceedingly high. But there are many other outstanding British architects working at home and abroad, including our own Michael Hopkins—if I may call him that, given Portcullis House. Outside the world celebrities, we have practices such as Edward Cullinan Architects—Edward Cullinan was awarded the 2008 RIBA gold medal—and MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, which has designed many fine buildings in our universities.

It may seem invidious to name names, but architectural practices are usually marked by high quality individuals, dedicated and sometimes idiosyncratic. That is unlike some other professions which often appear to be anonymous. I can think of no structural engineer by name, although the profession plays a crucial role in major architectural projects. However, if the top 10 per cent of the architectural profession is outstanding, some should probably not be practising at all, and even very good architects can make mistakes. But despite architecture being a relatively poorly paid profession, many talented young men and women are seeking places to study architecture in our universities and colleges.

I hope that the profession has overcome the brutal, damaging and unfair speeches made by the Prince of Wales in 1984, when he referred to the “monstrous carbuncle”, and in 1987 when he made comparisons with the London Blitz, along with remarks about the British Library and other buildings he did not like. They were quite inappropriate given his status and disproportionate influence. Those were rather depressing years, including the acceptance of the public finance initiative that diminished the importance of design and put the contractor ahead of the architect in creating major public buildings.

I have to say that the arrival of new Labour in 1997 greatly raised the morale of the profession and, more important, pointed towards even better architecture. In particular, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, already mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and which is now a statutory body, has been a very good thing in advising contractors, architects, planners and clients. That is important, for without a good client, even a good architect cannot create a good building.

One great loss in the 1980s and 1990s was the role of the county architect. Despite some building disasters, the LCC in particular, and then the GLC, had many good architects. The model of an outstanding architect in the public estate is Colin Stansfield Smith of Hampshire. His schools were, and still are, a byword for high quality design supported by a good client; they are pleasing to teachers and pupils alike. There is currently a large school building programme and I hope that these schools will be as good as those of Hampshire, despite what seem to be more complicated contractual arrangements. For example, in the London Borough of Camden there is to be a new academy school sponsored by University College, London, on a key site near Swiss Cottage. I hope that the design will be regarded as a model for other academies. Perhaps the Minister will explain in a letter to me the precise construction procedure—that between the decision to go ahead with the academy and building to begin.

As for my concerns, some arise from success and, hitherto, a confident economy. As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, pointed out, there are massive building developments in east London arising from the forthcoming Olympic Games, but there is inescapable pressure both on time—it is sooner than we think—and the budget. It must be tempting to cut corners in design and the quality of the architecture, but it would be unforgivable. Again, and in due course, I should be grateful if the Minister could explain the procedures and bodies responsible for establishing the permanent buildings and spaces which should last for many years.

Recently I visited Liverpool, where I was born and brought up and which is the European Capital of Culture 2008. I rejoiced in the many exciting changes, but I am reserved about the building site now called Liverpool One because of its bulk. As for the huge conference centre, the Arena, it seems to overshadow the strong and historic Albert Dock area and draws nothing from the river. In turn, in Salford, BBC Manchester has a great opportunity for utilising first-class architecture in the major new developments and to redeem some awful buildings in Wood Lane and White City. I should like to know what is happening and to be reassured on the financing, given that Gordon Brown and the Treasury have cut the BBC’s licence fee income to the bone.

As for housing, there are far too many blocks of flats in the private sector that do not appear to have used an architect at all. I hope that everything will be done to ensure that higher standards in social housing are achieved in the bold programme that Ministers envisage. But there is a degree of scepticism—what an expert recently called “an impossible aspiration”—about new homes becoming zero carbon emitting by 2016 and all new buildings three years later.

Beyond all that, I rejoice in the fact that British architecture is outstanding and competing so successfully in the world.

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, on initiating this debate, and on giving such an interesting and knowledgeable overview of a subject on which we can all make our shorter and possibly more targeted contributions. I enter the debate to encourage the Government to extend the opportunities that outstanding design and architecture create for enhancing the lives of people throughout the country, particularly in the north of England, and to continue making such opportunities a part of their ongoing policies on regional regeneration.

Lay person though I am, I believe that this is a golden age for design, for architects and for architecture. I see before me designers and architects at the peak of their professional potential, and I have observed their work in many locations. They are undoubtedly helping to create some of the most beautiful, sustainable and human-friendly buildings and spaces ever known. We should harness their knowledge, experience and skills at every opportunity. There is absolutely no excuse for some of the dismal failures of the past, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, outlined, or some of the mediocrity referred to both in this debate and in the CABE report. The profession’s skills, abilities and initiative make such failures inexcusable.

In the university town of Middlesbrough—particularly at the University of Teesside, of which I have the honour of being chancellor—we have transformed our town by creating outstanding public buildings and open spaces and using outstanding architecture. The university itself is a tribute to modern architecture. From humble beginnings as a small Gothic college, it is now a beautiful campus in the town centre, with 10 buildings constructed in the past 10 years. Some are iconic, including an institute for digital innovation and a centre for creative technology. We have a new student union building and a new performing arts centre. We have enjoyed 12 major refurbishments over the same period.

Alongside the university, bang in the middle of the town centre and costing £14 million, we have the beautifully designed Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, designed by the leading Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat. The building has won several awards and is absolutely central to our town’s drive for regeneration and renewal. It has opened the town hall area to give light, space and a completely new perspective on the centre of town. It has brought to life, in a way which was never possible before, the original, beautiful Victorian town hall building.

Complementary to the creation of that public space is the Middlehaven project, a riverside development which is bringing the vision of the Tees Valley into being. It is growing where the town was originally founded, on riverside land that was dominated in the previous century and first part of this century by the steel, iron and heavy engineering works of the last Industrial Revolution. It is a place where people will live, learn and work in a new industrial revolution, with apartment blocks, houses, offices, hotels and leisure and entertainment facilities built to the highest sustainable and environmental standards and for people to enjoy.

I cannot begin to tell your Lordships how important this is to a town that was blighted and damaged in the 1970s and 1980s by factory closures and economic decline. Initiatives such as those in Middlesbrough and similar ones in Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and other northern towns and cities are rebuilding our regional economies and the lives of the people in the region.

This is a short speech that applauds the Government for helping to regenerate our university, our town and our region. There is, however, still a north-south divide which was referred to extensively in the earlier debate on equality in your Lordships’ House. Economic and personal problems in the regions still need to be addressed and I do not want to minimise that. Too often, from a regional point of view, the debate on design and architecture is also London-centric. I ask the Government to keep up the important investment in the north. We have to battle every year for our share of investment against a range of other priorities, and we understand that. But my noble friends on the Front Bench should make no mistake: the regeneration of our northern city and region which I have outlined today is making an important difference to people’s lives.

I would also like the Government to value the contribution that architects can make to regeneration. My experience in this is very limited, but it seems to me that the profession has much more to offer than its usual contributions on design and build. It should be involved in regeneration and development work beyond the usual confines and expectations.

To the architects I say: well done—but we want more involvement. Exactly 100 years ago this year, Philip Webb had just retired but Norman Shaw was still working, as was WR Lethaby. CF Voysey and CR Ashbee were at the height of their powers, and Barry Unwin and Raymond Parker were building the garden cities. All of them, as noble Lords will acknowledge, were undoubtedly under the influence of their forebears John Ruskin and William Morris. They laid down the standards of architecture for the people, not just in Britain but in Europe and around the world. Some of them were great influences on giants such as Frank Lloyd Wright. They are the foundations on which today’s best architecture is built. However, they were more than architects, they were also social reformers. That is the bit that we need more of today. Architects are important agents for social reform and they should promote it. They should extend that part of their contribution. It would benefit us all.

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, for initiating this debate. I am familiar with the noble Lord’s interest in design from the time when he was Minister with responsibility for architecture. He kindly opened a beautifully designed block of apartments for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, of which I was then the chief executive. I declare my interests as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association.

In contributing to this important debate, I will confine my remarks, like those of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, to the design of UK housing, and address three questions. First, how do we recognise good design and where can we actually see it? Secondly, how can we secure better design through an inevitably imperfect planning system? Thirdly, how can we pay for better design when housing is already unaffordably expensive for so many?

On the first, it is not impossible to witness imaginative and creative design of new homes that fit harmoniously into their local context. Seeing these is believing that good design matters. Although the bulk of house-building in the UK is the subject of blistering criticism from the Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), a small number of private developers and quite a few housing associations have produced some really fine modern buildings sympathetic to their surroundings. As the housing associations increase their output, it is right to look to these—now highly professional and well-motivated—social businesses to show the way. Presentation Housing Association’s Angel Town estate in Brixton, Wherry Housing Association’s Brooklands development in Cambridge, the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust’s new Art-Eco scheme in York, and so many more, demonstrate ways of integrating environmentally sustainable new homes into their localities.

However, might these social housing providers, with their captive market, repeat the mistakes of the councils of the 1960s and 1970s which resulted in those dreadful concrete estates and ugly tower blocks that we are now demolishing? I think not, for two reasons. First, the mood of the age is to involve and encourage local people—future residents, consumers, neighbours—in decisions about these developments in a way that eludes the private sector house-builder. Secondly, the now universal practice of building mixed-tenure schemes of both tenants and owners—not segregated, separated welfare housing for the poor—means that homes for sale must satisfy the aspirations of purchasers who are making substantial long-term financial commitments and exercising choice in the marketplace next to the tenants in the social housing. Good examples exist of what we mean by better design. Hopefully, as the housing associations expand their work during the credit crunch now inhibiting other development, there will be increasing numbers of inspiring and influential new developments that we can see with our own eyes.

My second question was how we can secure better design through an inevitably imperfect planning system. How can decisions be taken on good design when the staff of the local planning authority cannot be expected to have the expertise required to make difficult design judgments? Many councillors on the planning committee will have had little training in that discipline. After all, an architecture course lasts five years, and even then it may not include much on urban design. The Local Government Association’s Improvement and Development Agency has a good planning advisory service. English Partnerships gives very good guidance on large-scale planning applications through its ATLAS scheme. At a national level, the Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment, as I know from direct experience, comments most helpfully on design aspects of important projects.

How does all that filter through at the local level for the multiplicity of house-building applications? One very sensible answer is through local design review panels of unpaid volunteer experts who meet regularly to offer advice before planning decisions are taken. This commendable arrangement works well in a number of local authorities and could be extended to many more. The use of panels was supported by the thoughtful review of house-building delivery from John Callcutt. Although it brings with it some important governance issues—members must have no vested interest, and a regular turnover of members is needed to renew the panel—it has been shown to make a substantial difference to design quality at the local level.

My third question was: how can we pay for better design when housing is already unaffordably expensive for so many? We have heard of the dismal design record of the UK house-building industry, which produces the smallest homes of any EU country; yet our house prices, relative to incomes, are already extraordinarily high. The house-builders argue that better design would add extra expense. Engaging an architect costs money, and better design may well mean higher space standards for greater accessibility—the full lifetime homes standards, the subject of a Question earlier today—and probably the use of more sympathetic and durable materials. To pay for buildings that are designed specifically to fit different local contexts, rather than using standardised pattern-book designs, would add to the cost and push prices further beyond the reach of many purchasers.

If standards are low yet prices are high, where is all the money going at present? The answer is that the cost of land for each new home in this country has risen so far and so fast that, since there is a finite limit to the amount buyers can afford to pay, something has had to give. That something has often been the standards that go with good design. How can we break out of this negative loop of high land costs leading to poor design and bog-standard housing? The answer is by making planning consent conditional upon design requirements, thereby depressing the value of the land. The landowner always gets a residual sum once planning conditions—including requirements to produce a certain number of affordable homes, to achieve environmental standards and perhaps in future to pay a community infrastructure levy—have all been satisfied. Thus it is that the landowner, not the house-builder, ultimately has to absorb the cost of better design.

It is already possible for local planning authorities to turn down developments where the design is abysmal, and I have addressed the question of improving the skills and confidence of planning authorities in answering my earlier question. It is through this route—insisting on design quality, the cost of which must then be factored into the price paid for the land—that standards can be improved without the purchaser or tenant, or even the house-builder, having to foot the bill.

When the new Planning Bill reaches this House, will the Government be sympathetic to amendments that seek to reinforce the design elements in future planning decisions, perhaps through greater use of design review panels, so that the 3 million new homes that will be built in the UK in the next 12 years or so really will be a national asset for our children and our grandchildren?

My Lords, I refer your Lordships to my various interests, all of which are listed in the Register of Lords’ Interests. It is almost four years since I spoke in your Lordships’ House on architecture and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Howarth on securing this debate. He has excellent timing, as the Planning Bill will be coming before your Lordships in a few weeks. I am impressed, as I often am when I am here, by the way in which quality of design is valued across the parties. I disagree with very little of what I have heard today.

In any civilised society, well designed buildings and glorious public spaces should be a fundamental human right. Better design makes better citizens. Degraded buildings and public spaces degrade society; as Hazel Blears has said, they brutalise us. You need only compare the vitality of Notting Hill with the desolation of many contemporary housing estates to see the truth of that. Beautiful cities, however, do not just happen. From Amsterdam to Barcelona, from Copenhagen to Venice, the cities that we love to visit were created. They are the result of collaboration between clients, architects, builders, government agencies and local authorities.

Ten years after John Prescott asked me to lead the Urban Task Force to assess how we could turn around our failing towns and cities, there is much to celebrate. This is the first Government to have actively encouraged people back into cities, setting clear targets for developing brownfield land and reversing depopulation; it is the first Government to appreciate that the compact, multicentred city is the only socially and environmentally sustainable form of development; and it is the first Government since the early 1940s to have set out a vision for sustainable, long-term change in our cities.

There has been success in creating new agencies and new devolved government, too. In London, we have a mayor who has pledged to accommodate 1 million new residents within the city’s current boundaries. Ken Livingstone has said that all new building should be on previously developed land, has set tough targets for affordable housing and lower CO₂ emissions and has established a dedicated design team under my leadership. Cities around the world now look to London. Nationally, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment has been a major success, creating a focus for expertise, for design review and for helping to make better buildings, towns and cities across England.

However, there is something wrong when, nine years after the Urban Task Force published its report, we still have no examples of regenerated neighbourhoods and cities in the UK that compare with the best in the world. There is something wrong when the Thames Gateway, Europe’s biggest regeneration project, is still peppering the banks of the beautiful River Thames with shoddy, toy-town houses and Dan Dare glass towers. There is something seriously wrong when new houses across the country form rootless estates that could just as well be in Beijing, Buenos Aires or Belfast—developments that have no regard for the community’s sense of place, belonging or identity.

I fear that we are building the slums of tomorrow. Why is this the case? It should not be. Britain has some of the best architects in the world, as we have heard. Indeed, only the USA has more winners of the Pritzker prize, recognised as the key international award for lifetime achievements in architecture. The answer is simple: we are sidelining the talent that we have. In what should be a golden age for British architecture, our output is simply lacklustre.

In November 2005, members of the Urban Task Force produced an update on the original report but, unfortunately, due to numerous ministerial changes over the last two years, no Minister has had time to take it on board or to respond to the recommendations. This exposes a government weakness. It takes at least 15 years and strong leadership for urban visions to become urban realities. In Britain, every policy is watered down through negotiation with countless agencies and every proposal is bogged down in endless process.

As noble Lords may know, the first planes landed and took off from Heathrow’s Terminal 5 today. When my firm started designing this building, I was a much younger man. It was 19 years ago. We have to speed up decision-making. We are entering a new era of devolution. The Government have empowered local authorities to play a stronger role in delivering 3 million new homes by 2020 and to lead the shaping of their towns and cities. This is great news, but to get it right we need to make sure that all agencies have the tools that they need.

What needs to be done? I recommend action as follows. Trained architects should be placed at the heart of decision-making, at ministerial level in government and at cabinet level in local authorities. We must make sure that these design champions have the clout to make a real difference to decision-making. Design quality should be made a central corporate objective for every agency with an impact on the built environment, from the new Homes and Communities Agency to individual housing associations. All planners should have access to advice from skilled architects and vice versa. In my role heading Design for London, I am endlessly impressed by the way in which local authority officers go out of their way to seek advice. We need to make sure that they can get the support that they need. I recommend that we strengthen CABE to provide that support. CABE is one of the great success stories of the urban renaissance, but it needs a stronger regional presence. Why should local planners from Newcastle have to travel to London to get the advice that they need?

I propose that we clarify, simplify and reduce the number of delivery bodies—Thames Gateway, for example, has over 30 authorities and partnerships involved—and move towards establishing single-purpose, area-based delivery bodies. Architectural quality should be central to our public sector procurement. We should make design competitions mandatory where public money is involved, using the guidelines prepared by the Greater London Authority. Every city and district should be required to prepare plans encompassing existing public spaces—the squares, parks and streets where friends and strangers meet—as well as proposals for new space. Why should there not be a right of access to good public space within a few minutes’ walk for every citizen?

In the introduction to the Urban Task Force report, I wrote that local authorities must be empowered to lead the urban renaissance. The Government have gone a long way towards ensuring that that happens. Now they need to give our towns and cities the tools to finish the job. I hope that these recommendations will help to put those tools in place. Unless we empower and enable our civic leaders to create beautiful cities, we will not just repeat our past mistakes but condemn our children to live with them and in them.

My Lords, it is a great honour and privilege to speak immediately after the noble Lord, Lord Rogers, who surely knows as much about this subject as any man alive.

In my maiden speech in this Chamber, I expressed the hope that we might have an opportunity to discuss issues of planning and housing in London before too long, so I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, for giving us this opportunity today. It is gratifying that so many of the themes that I wished to touch on have been anticipated, but I hope that I will illustrate them rather than simply repeat them. I fear that I am not so sanguine as some noble Lords have been about the spirit emanating from new Labour. Only the other day, I was talking with someone who was trying to promote quality in design in school building. “Don’t bother with all that”, was the message that he was getting from the department, “just give us boxes to put children in”. Boxes, hutches, what is the difference?

The debate is certainly badly needed, for what we are talking about goes right to the heart of the lives that people lead and the legacy that we leave to future generations. RIBA has said:

“Design is about much more than aesthetics. It is functional, sustainable and gives pleasure … It attracts people, investment and activity to places, and brings social, environmental and health benefits”.

But of course what is needed is not just a debate. As RIBA goes on to say, design should be one of the most important considerations in new development. The Planning Bill should be used to entrench design into the planning process. There should be a statutory duty to consider the design quality of planning applications and local authorities should be encouraged to establish local design review panels or appoint local design champions. I would support this, so long as local communities, not just “experts”, were represented. Both the Barker and Calcutt reviews endorsed RIBA’s recommendations and it would be good to hear an assurance from the Minister today that the Government will take these forward. But it is not just a matter of institutional reform. There needs to be a sea change in the culture surrounding the planning process, away from one dominated by the values of hard-faced accountants to one concerned more with quality of life and user friendliness.

In my maiden speech, I hinted at the baleful influence of the planning policies of the London Borough of Hackney on the lives of the residents of Dalston, where I live. The protocol surrounding maiden speeches precluded my going into greater detail on that occasion, but today I am under no such constraint. If I may, therefore, I shall describe for your Lordships our experience in Dalston, as I believe that it throws into sharp relief much of what is wrong with development today and what accordingly needs to be put right. Let me straightaway declare an interest as the patron of OPEN, a not-for-profit company of local individuals and businesses committed to promoting excellence in the quality of the built environment.

When we heard that Dalston was to be regenerated, we had high hopes that this derelict, neglected and overcrowded area of east London would rise as a modern phoenix. We anticipated that our few remaining historic buildings would be given a new lease of life and inform the proposed development around them. How naive we were. The proposed development consists of two adjoining sites. The driver of the whole project is a site owned by Transport for London, which is building a new transport hub said to be vital for the Olympics. But there is no direct link to the Olympic site. Had it been 300 yards further on at Dalston Kingsland, it would have linked directly to Stratford as well as being much closer to the commercial heart of Dalston. When we protested about this to the London Development Agency, its reply was simply that this was by no means the only transport hub that was mislocated in this way.

A massively expensive concrete slab over the railway will accommodate an unnecessary and potentially dangerous bus stand, where current routes will be cut short. TfL deployed a kind of circular argument: the bus stand is necessary to enhance the scheme and the scheme is necessary to finance the bus stand. A brutal phalanx of tower blocks of up to 20 storeys will be erected on the slab to help to pay for it. These will blight the environment and bring no benefit to the area. Of their 300-odd dwellings, none is to be affordable. This is in direct contravention of the Government’s policy as affirmed both in this House and in another place. However, when we asked the Secretary of State to use her powers to review the scheme, we were simply told that the transport hub was essential for the Olympics.

The adjoining site is being developed by the London Development Agency. It has similar disadvantages; moreover, it is aesthetically and architecturally unrelated to its neighbour. Together, they represent the worst type of unimaginative and destructive town planning. No more health and other services are to be provided for the total of 550 extra households. Such high density, in an already overcrowded and underresourced area, completely ignores the potential for alienation, anti-social behaviour and vandalism, as we have heard. As a criminologist, I know that this is not the way to build a housing estate.

The two sites are separated by a strip of land overshadowed by the tower blocks, creating a sunless wind tunnel. This is the public space that the inhabitants of Dalston will have to make the best of for their leisure. Both schemes will be divorced from proposed developments on the other side of the road, in a kind of piecemeal development that lacks any coherence. Instead of design-led regeneration, we have the prospect of a sink estate in less than a generation.

How has the travesty that I have described come about? Three reasons immediately come to mind. The first is a poor understanding of what constitutes good architecture and design on the part of town planners and developers. High-quality architecture and good design do not just consist of buildings, as we have heard. Buildings have context. Good design should blend with and seek to preserve the best of what exists already. That is why the residents of Dalston were so concerned to preserve what little was left of their historic heritage.

The irony of a blind man lecturing your Lordships about architecture will not be lost, but I would say that good design appeals to all the senses. As a native of Edinburgh, I know about well planned squares and streets, gardens and open spaces. Other countries manage these things better. For example, some of your Lordships may be familiar with Montpellier in France, which I recently had the opportunity to visit. It has preserved its historic area, yet it has a modern quarter with a unified design, decent public space, trees and water features. You may say that they have more space in France, but even tightly packed New York has small pocket parks for the refreshment and enjoyment of its citizens.

Secondly, consultation with the public was, to say the least, inadequate, even misleading. OPEN’s submissions were even “lost”—forgive my inverted commas. Nevertheless, local residents mounted vigorous opposition to the destruction of their heritage and the imposition of unlovely and unsuitable developments that were wholly out of character with the area. Their case was comprehensively ignored. The historic buildings were demolished, and a modern Gormenghast will rise in their place. This was said to be a once in a lifetime opportunity for Dalston. Instead, we are offered off-the-shelf, unimaginatively designed blocks of varying height, with no relationship either to the Victorian street pattern or to one another and with little aesthetic coherence.

Thirdly, in direct contravention of planning guidance, these schemes have not preserved heritage buildings or enhanced the cityscape that remains. They meet neither of the mayor’s much vaunted criteria that new housing should be built to the highest architectural standards and that it should be 50 per cent affordable. The council has waived social housing requirements and parking and space standards. The windows of inhabited bedrooms in adjoining blocks will be just five metres apart; Hackney’s official standard is 21 metres. To fund TfL’s bus stand, the council has also leased its site to developers on terms so unfavourable that they required the Secretary of State’s consent. The Secretary of State refused to withhold her consent.

Why should all this be? The answer lies partly in the need to meet external and undisclosed financial imperatives out of a misplaced fear that developers would otherwise walk away, partly in developers’ ability to hoodwink poorly qualified planning officers into accepting substandard designs and partly in the ability of multiple authorities in central and local government to evade responsibility with a cynicism bordering on the corrupt. In a country of historically renowned architects and with present-day architects who are changing the face of the world, surely we can do better in our own backyard.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, on seizing the opportunity to bring forward this debate, which he has done in his usual attractive way. I am sure that I am the least expert person speaking in this debate, and I warn your Lordships of the danger of a criminal lawyer speaking about architecture. Nevertheless, even as a mere consumer of our increasingly built environment, I have an acute sense as a lay person that we are so cautious and so set in our ways in this country that we are desperately underusing the opportunities offered by a hugely imaginative architecture profession. Architects have the capacity to create and to enable us to enjoy the world’s finest and most environmentally sustainable buildings at every level and to a far greater extent than now.

My complaint is not about great public buildings and other large-scale structures. Some of those are being built to the highest possible quality. My concern is about the vernacular—about domestic and small business spaces in every population centre, down to villages and the rural countryside. Like the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, in another place I represented a Welsh constituency. His was mainly urban; mine almost entirely rural. Wales provides a useful microcosm of the state and progress of architecture and of many other aspects of life. Wales has seen much new development in the past 25 years. There are some remarkable small contemporary buildings in Wales, but I doubt whether they could be counted on the fingers of more than four hands at the most.

Over the same period, cautious and defensive planning policy has led to an unremitting increase in mock-Victorian cottages, neo-Tudor townhouses and factory units that I would describe as post-nondescript. There has been a disease of bad architecture. The bungaloid growth has been like chicken pox over the countryside, while very good farm buildings that would have lent themselves to modernisation of the most dramatic and interesting kind have been left to go derelict. As a result, there are few housing developments, particularly in the private sector, anywhere in the United Kingdom using the best of modern materials and design.

The dwellings of today should be light, spacious, warm, efficient and sustainable. Too often they are the opposite. However, the housing association movement, in which the noble Lord, Lord Best, played such an important role for many years, has striven at least in some places for the kind of standards he described in this speech, but it is rare to find the same aspirations, and very rare to find the same achievements in the private sector.

Very few planning departments have the will or the funding to judge whether something different is good different or bad different. If it is different, you cannot have it—that seems to be the rule. That makes it all too easy for refuge to be taken in the tried-and-tested shelter, and the results are often disappointing. I reflect that very few of the finer houses, terraces and housing estates of Britain would have had a chance of being built in the current planning attitude.

In areas where land is still relatively cheap some people might well have the will to construct the equivalent of the small Georgian mansion. Yet I feel sure that most local planning officers would have shown Mr Palladio the door rather than even unfold the second copy of his plans. In most areas potential developers know that they would be wasting their money even to go to an architect, let alone to suggest a house or estate be built at the cutting edge of design and materials. Too often design comes from a catalogue rather than an imaginative catalyst. The entrenching of design in the planning system is recognised by Planning Policy Statement 1 of 2005. However, if one goes outside the sort of areas that the noble Lord, Lord Rogers, described, there seems to be little palpable change, resulting in architects, planning advisers and builders tending to play safe. Therefore, I support the conclusions of the Barker review of 2006 and the Callcutt review of 2007 that good design should be raised to a new level of first principle in planning applications.

CABE regional design review panels are beginning to have an impact and should continue to do so. However, it is now imperative that they should be rolled out to become available to every planning authority in the country, wherever it is and where most decisions are taken. The modern should not be messianic, nor should we presume the idealism of the pastiche. There is a real danger that what 70 years ago Osbert Lancaster described as “pelvis bay” is now being replaced by the horrors of “pastiche pastures”.

My other theme is the effort we make to showcase United Kingdom architecture at all levels abroad. There are, of course, some remarkable successes—we have heard of one today. British-designed buildings abound abroad—big, public buildings that will be iconic for centuries. However, in October 2006 I took the opportunity to visit the Architecture Biennale in Venice and the contrast between the British and German pavilions could not have been starker. The British pavilion was quite imaginative and moderately interesting. It made me determined to limit my number of visits to Sheffield during the next 12 months because it presented a depressing view of that city, despite being a pavilion that was community-based in its design.

The German pavilion, on the other hand, contained multiple mini-showcases of projects involving many architects on every scale and throughout Germany, including public buildings, hospitals, houses and a baker’s shop that I remember had been redesigned by an architect trained in the United Kingdom—a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The exhibition revealed what one observes in Germany—an enthusiasm, perhaps built on the enduring legacy of the Bauhaus, to embrace the new within and around the old. The Germans manage to do it at a micro level; why can’t we?

By our reluctance to share that approach we sell ourselves short both at home and in the international arena. I hope that this debate will provide at least some encouragement to those who are prepared to regard vernacular architectural design as dynamic rather than historic. If 3 million homes are to be built, that means 3 million opportunities for good architecture.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on devising this debate, which could not be more timely, for the reasons he gives in the broad sweep of his powerful speech. I, too, want to speak about housing.

The buildings where we live are our first and constant cultural environment. We are all profoundly influenced by the design of our immediate surroundings, probably in ways that we are unconscious of and only realise when we stay in different architectures. There is no non-cultural building, but there are homes whose building style, whose architecture, is a life-enhancing culture and there are those which are not.

In the past we have put up a lot of those that are not life-enhancing. As my noble friend said, Lynsey Hanley delineates acutely the bleakness, corrosive social segregation and the resulting poverty of aspiration and easy move into crime—estate-linked identities which sink with the estate, created by the architecture of successive Governments’ housing policies. We need to remedy those estates and prevent their reappearance in Dalston, as elsewhere. We need to rehabilitate the attractive homes of earlier times, and we need to build new ones in very large numbers which lift the spirits and make wholesome communities easy to grow. And all must be done sustainably without unnecessary stress on the vulnerable atmosphere of our planet. This cannot be achieved without design and high-quality architecture. But it can be done.

Lynsey Hanley describes the rescue of Broadwater Farm. A few weeks ago I saw in Angell Town in Brixton the rehabilitation of exactly one of those estates, accompanied by new building, which created attractive, safe and affordable homes within a strong community, steered by residents’ own wishes. Nearly three-quarters of them said that they now felt safe, that they were satisfied with their new homes and that Angell Town was now a pleasant, friendly and attractive place to live. A few years ago, half of them knew a victim of crime and it was a deeply unpopular place to live.

However, this sort of thing is not yet the norm. For that we need a cultural lead—political leadership—to promote as widely as can be done that it is reasonable, natural and feasible for everyone to have a good built environment. To make this a norm, it must be mainstreamed. But design is invisible in many national policies. Why does the Audit Commission, jointly with the Housing Corporation, in last February’s report, Better Buys, on improving housing association procurement, make so little, in 54 pages, of design or architecture other than a nod to sustainability? The joint consultation by the Audit Commission and the services for social care, health, police, prisons, probation and education on how to assess service provision ignores design. Yet physical design can make all the difference about accessibility and about social integration.

What happens in schools? RIBA and CABE do good work on how to teach design and architecture as living subjects, but how widespread is the teaching that good design matters, that it can be chosen and that it must be available to the ordinary citizen? Where is the cultural champion in Whitehall whose task it is to promote attention to design? In the admirable plans for pensioner-friendly homes set out in Lifetime Homes, Lifetime Neighbourhoods, developed by my noble friend the Minister, good design is implicit; but it could be made much more explicit. If all areas for regeneration have a holistic design focus like Sir Terry Farrell’s magnificent new plans for the Thames Gateway, developers will want to build in previously abandoned areas.

The private-sector review prudently set up by the Government last January does have it in its remit to look at “the quality of homes” converted and maintained by private landlords. Such quality standards would have to be monitored by local authorities. This brings us the role of the planning authorities and their support. One of their best supports is the CABE system of design champions; but fewer than 70 per cent of local authorities have them. As many noble Lords have said, there is an acknowledged lack of design capacity in planning authorities and they do not even have to consider design quality. This is perhaps the biggest area for structural change that the Government could look at.

We have a good national framework with Planning Policy Statement 3, but you normally find people with design skills on the bodies which choose plans for affordable housing in other European countries. This is not a requirement here. There are widely respected regional design review panels under CABE’s auspices, as we have heard, but they are only for major schemes, so it is hardly surprising that one-third of housing applications in the past five years was found to be substandard. The Barker Review of Land Use Planning and the Callcutt Review of Housebuilding Delivery recommended the systematic use of design review within the planning process. A national network of local panels, as described by the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Low, active from the beginning of the process, could make what are now wonderful exceptions, like the developments created by the social entrepreneur Presentation’s design guide, part of the ordinary course of events.

Everyone has a right to the well-being which can be induced by good design and architecture. We could do it once, with our pioneering garden cities and social housing copied all over the world. We have done it here and there since. We can do it again, for the many, not only the few, with our brilliant architects. Derek Walker, the architect of Milton Keynes, said:

“we can only start with a contemporary vision of the immediate future”.

We must own the design of that future now. Our new towns will be the gift of a better future, but first, design must be the Government’s big idea.

My Lords, I was enormously impressed with the comprehensive canter with which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, introduced this very interesting and timely debate. I want to take up one or two points that he made and which have been echoed by all participants, not least by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, just now.

I want to put it in the form of a specific question to the Minister. I am doing it right at the front of my speech, in the hope that she has an opportunity to obtain a specific answer. It is simply this—what proportion of planning officers with responsibility for giving advice on development control issues have experience and expertise in three-dimensional design? In other words, how many planning decisions in the United Kingdom are based on trained and experienced architectural expertise? What is the trend? Is it getting better or worse?

The outcomes to which a number of noble Lords have referred, and which have been well documented by CABE, suggest that an awful lot of decisions have not been based on that sort of advice, so even the best of planning authorities cannot be expected to get the decisions right.

I am not a qualified architect, but worked with and for architects for more than a decade. I have a huge amount of respect for the profession. In the early 1970s, I was responsible for planning policy at the RIBA. I remember during that period sitting in the public seats in the Committee Room at the other end of this building and listening to the then Conservative Minister decide how to compromise on the allocation of planning powers between two levels of authority, as part of the local government reorganisation legislation of the 1970s.

Faced with the competing claims of counties and districts, he ignored the good biblical example of King Solomon and cut the planning baby right down the middle, with plan-making going to the higher authorities and plan implementation, through development control, going to the lower authorities. Through great areas of the country—wherever there was not a unitary authority—that split has had devastating effects, not least, of course, on the planning profession itself. The career prospects in the smaller development control authorities were very limited, while those in the higher plan-making authorities were necessarily conscribed, because they could not see what was going to happen in terms of implementation. Impermeable glass ceilings were appearing everywhere that those two levels of planning authority were installed.

In the three decades since, the situation has deteriorated further. It could be—and the Minister will be well aware of these issues—that the creation of new unitary authorities will give us a new opportunity to put that right. By bringing together planning expertise to fulfil both functions, we have a much better chance of a well-rounded expertise and experience, with all forms of specialist within one department, serving the community at large.

As the noble Baroness knows, I welcome the fact that Cornwall will be one of the authorities able to do precisely that. Bringing together those responsibilities, so that implementation and plan-making are within the same departments—and councillors are well served by people involved with both—will be a great step forward. However, there is a long way to go, hence the importance of my question to the Minister. I hope, in particular, that she will be able to give us some indication of the trend over recent years.

Early in my time at RIBA, I was responsible for a project entitled “Long life/Loose fit/Low energy”. I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside, may even remember that; it was a long time ago—40 years ago. At the time, it needed some explanation. Today, I believe that it has come of age as it is now fairly obvious what it is all about. I believe that the profession has adjusted to those important criteria. I am not sure that the community at large or, in particular, clients have—whether in the house-building industry or anywhere else. We took as examples opposite extremes that clearly met the requirements of LL/LF/LE and those that equally blatantly did not. The Georgian terrace house was clearly a good example. With substantial load-bearing party walls but lightly constructed interiors, it might change its usage and character several times over the centuries, even through several decades: family home; business premises on the ground floor, perhaps with family use above; full use as office; doctor’s surgery; split neatly into flats; and even back to family homes again, as has been the case in more modern times. Indeed, it was fairly economic both to heat and insulate.

However, the contrast with what was being built as hospital or school buildings in the 1960s and 1970s was extraordinary. I remember a very distinguished architect who worked particularly with hospital buildings—Alex Gordon, president of the RIBA— explaining to me that, during the course of the design, planning and construction process for a major hospital building, which would take at least 10 years and sometimes longer, the consultants, each with an individual, not to say idiosyncratic view of medical and clinical necessity, would change the whole thing. There would therefore be major changes in the resulting design in just that period. The design brief and specification would change, each time at considerable cost. In his view, the only sensible way to plan for those sorts of buildings on a long-life, loose-fit, low-energy basis was to build a very basic shell. He thought that aircraft hangars were probably the best way to provide that shell, which the hospital management could fit out temporarily and cheaply and then move on with the next medical fad coming from the consultants.

Energy is obviously topical while the Climate Change Bill is going through your Lordships’ House. There has been great emphasis this afternoon on housebuilding, particularly the domestic residential sector. I shall emphasise the same. Of the UK's carbon emissions, 27 per cent are produced by the electricity, gas and oil used to heat, light and power our homes. This is twice as much carbon dioxide as our cars produce. Cutting greenhouse gases produced by our homes by 60 per cent, the Government’s target for 2050, would cut these emissions more than taking all cars—every single vehicle—off the road. If we had the same home efficiency levels as Sweden, the average householder, every single one of us, would save nearly £400 a year. Three-quarters of the housing stock to be used in 2050 has already been built. Just sorting out new build from now on will only make a fairly modest contribution to that target. These figures do not include other building types which will be just as important, if not more so. Nor do they take into account the energy currently used in traditional forms of material and construction usage. There are major issues to be addressed in that context.

Architects are fully immersed in these environmental issues throughout their training and career development. Energy use in construction materials and usage, quite apart from ecofriendly design for sustainable buildings over ever increasing lifetimes—we must hope—are wired into the architectural mindset from the very beginning. I know that RIBA now spends a great deal of effort ensuring that architects are doing excellent work on the low-carbon agenda throughout their careers. Sad to say, that will not be seen in many new buildings, especially in the speculative residential sector, to which much reference has been made in today’s debate, simply because no architects are involved in that process.

I am back to my original question, and I hope that the noble Baroness will be fully briefed by the time she rises to her feet. How many planners have the necessary expertise and experience to make this vital contribution to the quality of the design of our built environment? That is why this debate is so timely.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, on securing this debate, particularly because I wanted to speak in his earlier debate on design and healthcare but was unable to do so. I declare an interest as a very part-time consultant with HLM Architects. I am a consultant on public policy issues, not architecture, and was going to claim, along with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, the distinction of being the least experienced or knowledgeable person to speak in this debate. I speak, in part, on the basis of some years’ experience as chief executive of the NHS and Permanent Secretary in the Department of Health. I was, in some ways, a proxy client for some very substantial developments.

This may indeed be a golden age of architecture, but my starting point is to question whether architecture and its related professions always do enough to influence their clients and the public about the importance of good architecture and design and, indeed, to explain what it is. As lay people, we all carry around in our heads rather different versions of what high-quality architecture and design quality are. You might have wanted me to say “to educate” the public, rather than “to influence”, but I am not sure that this is education, which seems to me to be very one-way and top-down. Rather, this is to engage, demystify—as all professions need to do in this more democratic and information-rich age—explain, discuss and be more open to challenge. Let us engage with you, and influence.

After all, a lot of the discussion about quality and design can feel highly technical to the lay person. It is sometimes quite theoretical, often very sophisticated and, in appearance at least, pretty elitist. Our understanding, as lay people, is made more difficult by the fact that very few of us are involved in more than one major building project in our lives. We are always, or almost always, beginners. And, of course, what is contained in the terms used in this debate on “high-quality architecture” and “design quality” is very wide-ranging and open to disagreement and interpretation. The task that architects and designers have is not, by any means, easy. How do they reconcile all the different aspects such as the aesthetic, the spatial, the ease of use, the environmental, the social and the economic, to name a few, let alone the vast difference in viewpoints? No doubt it is largely about the balance between all these things, between the aesthetic and the utilitarian, the beautifully functional and the functionally beautiful, things that are fit for purpose, durable and a pleasure to use.

One aspect of high-quality architecture is the functionality of buildings. I know the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and others in his recent debate talked about the importance of creating a healing environment within hospitals and other health facilities. They drew attention to research which shows that there are real, tangible benefits in terms of faster healing, less stress for staff, and patients in mental health establishments having fewer episodes of aggression. This is clearly a vital function of a healthcare building that should be in the design from the outset, but often is not. This point needs much more attention and, in turn, perhaps, more research so that we understand more fully how it works.

I do not want to replay that earlier debate, but rather to pick up on a different aspect of architecture and design that very strongly needs, in the words of this debate, to be encouraged; that is, the social aspect. I am indebted to colleagues at HLM, Chris Liddle and Les Welch, for helping me to understand how big a part social and community function and impact can and should play in high-quality architecture and design quality. This is not only about the social or community role that the building may have as a school or, indeed, a hospital, or about the contribution that the development may make—or, as my noble friend Lord Low has said, may not make—to social and economic regeneration. These are both massive. It is also about breaking down barriers of all sorts, such as the barriers between the community and the development. How integrated, how user-friendly is it?

It is also about breaking down barriers within the community itself. Let me illustrate this last point. We increasingly understand that there are good health and educational reasons for making better links between health and education facilities. Physical activity, diet, surveillance, mental health and health education all have a part to play in both areas. I have seen physiotherapy gyms in schools for children with walking problems; exercise facilities and classes in GPs’ surgeries; and children learning about trauma management in hospitals. Too often, however, we plan facilities within tight constraints, not allowing for overlap and reinforcement and, in doing so, create gaps and dislocations between things that should be linked. Therefore, we create problems.

I hope that your Lordships will not think that I am stretching the notion of high-quality architecture too far by including such social considerations. Buildings shape what happens within them, but they also describe and even shape the way that we see things within the world. After all, we need only look across the river to St Thomas's to see how Florence Nightingale's original hospital not only responded to clinical needs but, as she intended, influenced and helped shape clinical and, subsequently, societal behaviour. It still does. Think, for example, about how we understand infection control or the importance of fresh air flows for health—in our lives, not just in our hospitals. It is worth noting that, like all designers, she did not get everything that she wanted. In particular, she did not want the hospital to be so central to this great city and beside the “great stink” of the river, which was so antipathetic to healing.

Today's great public clients, the Government and the NHS, should of course be able to exemplify high-quality architecture in all its aspects, including the social. They do so very successfully on many occasions; there are many examples of that. I think of the new Birmingham University hospital, currently under construction. It is a huge regeneration project, creating up to 2,000 jobs in the short-term but also building a health hub, a learning and skills centre for long-term unemployed people, thereby enabling 750 previously unemployed people to gain employment. It embodies the other qualities of high-quality architecture: it has high design values, meets its sustainability and environmental requirements and is open and welcoming.

Finally, I turn to the process of planning and approval and to the call of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, for design quality to be taken into account by local authorities. Again, I speak as a layman who does not understand the intricacies of the system, but one who has seen many NHS boards struggle with the planning, design and building of facilities of all kinds.

Why are we not always successful in getting what we want? Part of the answer is financial: the fact that the financial, funding and economic considerations are not only so important but so complex and time-consuming that they can tend to overwhelm other considerations. Another part of the answer is that design considerations often come too late in the process. Another is that the whole process is not simple and that there are tensions and conflicts between different goals. A single example that summarises this for me is that patients may well want a building where the windows can be opened, but the energy consultants will certainly want a sealed unit. How do we reconcile the differences that will come up in the design process?

I know that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, is right to want local authorities to take design quality seriously, and I note that proposals will come forward for the consideration of design quality to be a statutory requirement for local authorities. I have some sympathy with that, but my greater sympathies are with the view that there should be wider use of design review panels and design champions. I am with my noble friend Lord Low in saying that the panels should not consist purely of design experts. It is important that the discussions are not conducted in a private language of reference and concepts that lay people do not share. High-quality architecture and design is too important to leave entirely to the experts.

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, for a very upbeat introduction to the debate. I have to declare interests as a vice-president of the Town and Country Planning Association, as joint president of London Councils and, although I hesitate to do so after the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, as having a connection with the Greater London Authority.

The case for encouraging high quality, the title of this debate, is really a no-brainer, because quality is always to be encouraged. In the case of architecture and design generally, it is so important to one’s well-being, both physically and mentally, as noble Lords have said. My spirits lift when I see both Westminster Abbey and the London Eye. Conversely, poor design, leading to a lack of care and affection, affects the physical environment and, as the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside, put it, degrades society.

We have to define the terms. Quality now clearly encompasses sustainability—in both construction and in operation, indeed, in the life of a building. I am shocked that we are now on the third generation of buildings in London’s Docklands. It may be that the first and second-generation buildings were not that good, but it is awfully wasteful. The initial outlay does pay for itself, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said.

For a time, I chaired the planning committee of the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. I was chair of the committee when the Richmond Riverside Development was constructed. It had consent before the Liberal Democrats took control of the council, so we inherited a scheme. I would have been much more comfortable, and perhaps more enthused, by something that was not traditional, not pastiche—the word that a lot of people applied to the riverside—but something splendid and modern whose form expressed its function. However, I am not sure that I would have been right about that. It was so clear, after the development opened, that people enjoyed it. They took pride in their own place—a point which picks up on what the noble Lord, Lord Sawyer, said—in the buildings and spaces which were liberated by the development. The importance of spaces, and of the public realm, is something that many noble Lords have touched on. I wonder whether we should be attaching status to spaces as much—or even more—as to buildings. Certainly, in London the spirit of the princes of San Gimignano seems to live on.

However, the difficulties are much greater in the smaller, less significant schemes. The big schemes—the big buildings—attract public debate and the resources of organisations and authorities. They allow for pre-application negotiations. There may be a lot of controversy revolving around style and taste, but the basics of how people move around, for instance, are likely to have had proper attention—or they should have had. I share the concerns expressed about the Thames Gateway—so far, at any rate; let us not be too negative about the future. The debate about the gateway too often seems to have taken on an air of desperation about numbers. It must not be a case of the little boxes, made out of ticky-tacky, all looking just the same, which the noble Lord, Lord Low, did not quite say.

The day-to-day—I would not call it humdrum—business is much harder. There is a shortage of planners. There is a shortage of training of planners. I can answer my noble friend Lord Tyler’s question—and he knows the answer—which is, not enough. Nor do I get the impression that there is much training these days for members of planning committees, although I am well aware that many of the professionals would say, “Don’t let the politicians anywhere near the design”.

Design panels have been referred to. I confess to a slight sense of unease about bringing in experts, because what is the implication for those whose job it is to reach decisions and to undertake the work? PPS 1 states:

“Good design is indivisible from good planning”.

That is quite right. However, it does not seem to be easier to refuse an application on design grounds. Is that not the crunch? I thought that PPS 1 was rather a good, short, analysis of both quality and design. However, I found it difficult when reading it—as I did again, yesterday—to see how one could reach a decision using PPS 1 other than on the very functional criteria on what is described as “beyond aesthetic considerations” in the paper.

When I became chair of the planning committee—I am horrified to realise that that was 25 years ago—I was told about the traditional stand-off between planners and architects. I do not know whether it is better now—I hope it is—but I feel some need to defend the planners from criticisms made by, among others, my noble friend Lord Carlile, whose skills as a criminal barrister proved to be very relevant to this debate. Architecture seems to breed a supremely self-confident and assertive group of professionals, and it must be very tough for planners to hold their corner against them. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, put it rather more politely.

Planning tends to be, even though it should not be, in essence reactive and regulatory. I have not heard much this afternoon about that, but it is important to understand how planners and the planning system function. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, referred to local authorities’ design departments. That is not an animal that I know. I do not think that local authorities can afford design departments. Speakers expect a great deal from planners—more, I think, than they have the tools to deliver.

Reference has rightly been made to local community engagement. The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to the mood of the age being to involve. My noble friend Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank talked about the need for a good client. I regret that I cannot remember who said it, but someone said earlier in the debate that the place is the client. It is not, however, the only client. For the past six years, I have worked in the Greater London Authority building, where the client has been the Government Office for London, not the occupants of the building. I give this small example. The building is iconic, admirable and in many ways wonderful to work in, but if it had been possible to ensure that all the political groups working in it shared the same water coolers, the building and the people in it would have functioned differently. That perhaps is the post-occupation analysis to which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, referred.

The everyday presents challenges that are as least as great as the big schemes. If we can achieve something that is better than bad, that is very good, but we should aim for better than the mediocre. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, said, perhaps that is the big idea.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, has done the House a service in bringing this debate here this afternoon. There is no question that this is a significant subject. Debating it in this form enables us to look at it in the round and in a fairly abstract way, but at the same time with a strong sense of agreement—in principle, at any rate—on what we would like to see in the communities that we all serve outside.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, was being very modest when he tried to claim to be the most ignorant person here today. I thought that that claim belonged to me, although I am not going to compete particularly for it. The truth is—this is one of the wonders of this place—that we bring a breadth of experience to a task such as this. The end result is that we usually have, as we have had so far, an extremely good debate and all feel better as a result. If a little collective wisdom rubs off in a small way outside—sometimes I despair that it will—we have a major achievement on our hands.

I declare an interest. I have sold land for building and I still own land which might go for building. It is as well that that should be understood. It gives me very particular experience in relation to the debate. I have also served for five years on a county planning committee, an institution sadly defunct although the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, may be able to revive it in Cornwall. Of course, it will not be called a county planning committee but the Cornwall Planning Committee, and that will perhaps be a good thing.

I was also pleased to hear from the noble Lords, Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Low of Dalston, what I might call a somewhat agnostic approach to the institutional structures that we have to rule, regulate and develop our planning systems and control development. When the job is done well, the result is a town or a village that looks and feels good and then the community feels good about it and, generally speaking, is happy. Not least of the problems that we face, which have not really had a great deal of discussion this afternoon, is how we prevent communities that were formerly good from becoming sink communities. It can happen accidentally over time by a process of drift and I do not know how we stop that. Equally, the opposite process can suddenly take place. Communities can begin to pick themselves up again and there is a very real sense of hope.

Nearly 35 years ago, I was responsible for the whole of the building estate of Essex County Council—not that it was my personal responsibility to look after day-to-day details. I had to control the whole of the maintenance and services budget for those buildings. It was a very interesting experience. Obviously, the buildings had developed over a long period. What I particularly want to talk about in this context is the estate of buildings I inherited, so to speak, that had been built just after the war. In those days, they were built to cost limits set by the Government. That particularly applied to educational buildings. That was the way the system worked. I pay huge tribute to the architects who produced those buildings. They produced volume for very low cost because that was what they were required to do. We needed new schools in the county and it was a very successful programme. We need to remember all the time the context in which people and society are working.

Fifteen years later, of course, we had the most horrendous building maintenance costs and hugely expensive energy costs to keep these buildings warm. They were frame buildings with cladding panels, too much glass, no insulation and so on. One of the results of that was that we put in place a study to see what we should do about building quality. Essentially, the study showed that, if we could reduce the annual running costs of a building by 5 per cent or more per annum, we could afford to double the amount we spent on the building in the first place.

The beginnings of a good architecture preceded 1997 and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment by some considerable amount. Indeed, I have an abiding memory of the improvement in London when we began to clean the city up again.

I am somewhat sceptical about our institutional structure. All the time, we need to remember the great buildings that we long to preserve and the wonderful small communities. We should think of the beautiful architectural arcades in big cities and the wonderful stone in the towns and villages of the Cotswolds. In East Anglia, timber-framed buildings are stuck together cheek-by-jowl and there is an immense difference in character as one goes along the street. Early Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian structures are interspersed with ancient structures. They are higgledy-piggledy buildings in conservation areas, which we fight to preserve, and they were constructed without the benefit of any planning system whatever.

I often wonder what the modern conservation societies might have had to say if they had seen Sir Christopher Wren’s plans for St Paul’s Cathedral before it was built. One can imagine their approach. They may have said, “Not in the British tradition. It is out of scale and out of character”. They may have said that it was Romanesque or even—perish the thought—popish. All those things would have been said of the glorious building that is central to London and an example of what we seek to preserve here. When I am thinking about the London skyline, I think of the Victoria Tower. When it was built, it must have had a dramatic impact on Westminster Abbey, particularly when the rest of this building was added. I am told that when it was built, it was the tallest square tower in the world. We need to remember that progress sometimes is not the way we perceive it to be immediately. In time, our successors may judge things very differently, but that is not to say that we should not make every effort we can to get design improved.

We also need to be sure that there is a clear distinction between design, which has to do with an agglomeration of property, and architecture, which—in deference to the noble Lord, Lord Rogers, if he will forgive me—seems to be about a particular building. Design is particularly important. If I want to see good, domestic architecture, I go abroad, by and large. In this country, planning committees have all too often reduced everything to the lowest common denominator.

There is hope and I look forward to a better quality of design all the time. But, ultimately, it will depend not particularly on planning committees and our institutional structure, but on people who want to have land developed to a high standard; on architects and designers working together to create good design; on financiers accepting that; and, most of all, when the chips are down, it will depend on the client being prepared to buy it and not to buy anything that is not good design.

My Lords, this has been an exceptionally good debate. I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Howarth for creating this opportunity and for, as with every debate in this House, uncovering such a wealth of expertise and experience. For example, I did not realise that so many noble Lords had served on the RIBA, and it is always intimidating to find that out at this stage of a debate.

In the tour de force that my noble friend Lord Howarth introduced, he described the power of good design and the blight of bad design. Much of what noble Lords have said has said has left me reeling at their wonderful examples, as well as being very mindful at their examples of poor and bad design that we all live with still. There has been some wonderful language. I particularly hope that the notion of the post-nondescript passes into the lexicon of what we do not want to see.

There has been an implicit debate about the relationship between good architecture and social reform. Such debate is apposite in this great, iconic building, designed by an architect who placed such emphasis on the moral influence of architecture, and spent so much time thinking about the way in which architecture mediated behaviour. It is an interesting example of that. The debate is timely for many reasons. Design is a big idea and should be a bigger idea—but it is certainly a big idea for this Government. We are on the threshold, as noble Lords have said, of several different things that make this a critical point in our architecture and design history. We are on the threshold of the most ambitious 20-year programme for building new homes and communities. We are in the midst of a renaissance of our city centres, to which some noble Lords have paid tribute. We are in the midst of a programme of social and economic regeneration and housing change in areas of the country that for a long time have been victims of economic catastrophe, as referred to by my noble friend Lord Sawyer. With the Olympic site, we have the opportunity for the first time to demonstrate what we can create as a global showcase.

We are living in a golden age of opportunity and the price of getting things wrong is very high. It was instructive to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, talking about what went wrong with building after the war. Much of the change that we now have to manage, with as much imagination and skill as possible, is being driven by demographic and economic forces that are driving house prices beyond the reach of many people; but is also in the context of an ageing society, which will present the challenge for better inclusive design, to ensure the opportunity to grow old in comfort and in place. All this is taking place in the context of climate change, which has a bearing on where and how we build, and how we manage our land and resources—whether that is energy, water, aggregates or skills. It gives us an opportunity for thinking, planning and building differently, whether we are talking about how we maintain the integrity of our historic villages, how we manage intensified urbanisation, how we reconcile our built heritage so that it drives the future as well as reflects the past, and how we design for identity within density, and for cohesion within spaces that by definition will be very tight. These are big issues and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that we should raise the status of the public realm. People are concerned not only about the type of house they live in, but the place they live in. That is what shapes behaviour.

Sixty years on, we are asking the same questions, and with the same intensity, that characterised the debate on the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. David Kynaston’s book Austerity Britain describes the ferment of activity and ideas in the debate on planning at the end of the war, and what came to fruition and what did not. We have had a catalogue of failures in many respects, judging by what noble Lords have said—not least the noble Lord, Lord Low, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. We know the price of dysfunctional buildings and monolithic estates. I welcome this debate because it gives me a chance to set out why I know that the future can and will be different.

We have to recognise that things have changed. Since 2004, there has been a cultural change in the climate of planning—not least with spatial planning. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that we want to see planning become part of the proactive stage of design and thinking, rather than the reactive stage of mitigation. Planning must go to the heart of policy-making in local government, not stay on the periphery. We can only make friends—and this is crucial—for the sort of housing and community growth that we need if we put such high and irresistible importance on design and quality that people see housing growth as an opportunity for building to the best and most desirable standards. We must create places where people want both to live and to be, so it covers private and public spaces.

Let me take as my text the housing Green Paper published in 2007, which set out key actions that recognise and harness the inspirational power of the very best to make good and very good development the norm, ensure that new homes and places meet everyone’s needs by embedding principles of inclusive design, and work to speed up the system. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, along with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, was absolutely right to put domestic architecture at the centre of the challenge we face. All these principles will be tested on whether they work in relation to our domestic buildings.

It is easy to celebrate the best. The noble Lords, Lord Rogers of Riverside, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank and Lord Carlile, celebrated the work of our most inspirational architects and our best places. My noble friend Lord Sawyer spoke powerfully about the changes in Teesside. Recognising and harnessing the inspirational power of the very best is actually relatively easy to do because, however we describe the value of design and the passage from aesthetics to functionality, there is a simple test. They create places where people want to be, whether it is the forecourt of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Sheffield Peace Gardens or Cardiff Bay. All these are places which people colonise.

However, this is also about shaping less glamorous places. As the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, and my noble friend Lord Sawyer pointed out, there are areas in the north of England and the east Midlands where we need to encourage character and memory as well as providing more choice and quality for a new generation. Achieving that will mean that people will want to live in these places again. This is one of the many ways in which the partnership between English Heritage and CABE can help. Master-planning and advising on procurement and preferred developers are crucial, but the most critical challenge lies in shaping the places where people will live in the future. This was alluded to by many noble Lords, but particularly the noble Lord, Lord Patten. I refer here to urban extensions and settlements in the Thames Gateway, growth areas such as in Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Corby, Portsmouth and Southampton, and developments such as Northstowe. These are brownfield and greenfield sites with settlements to build around, but which allow us to imagine the future. It is in these places that volume builders, local authorities and delivery agents are under the most intense scrutiny because they know that the past will not serve the future. The message is loud and clear: no more monolithic housing estates and no more “character” of the kind described by the noble Lord, Lord Patten. We want well designed, diverse, mixed housing for people who may both live and work at home in the future.

This is not just about architecture. The signals we are sending represent a leap of faith because much of this is in development, but it is clear that people have definitely got the message. I shall return to that when I come to talk about local authorities. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Rogers, that the Thames Gateway is not an empty brownfield site; it is a place with a wonderfully diverse history. By bringing in CABE, developing design pacts with local authorities and setting targets for design, we are in with a chance of creating a very good site.

One of the privileges of my job is to visit the best and the worst in terms of housing development. Recently I have seen three examples where building for the future has come alive for me in extremely powerful ways. The first is the Sherwood Energy Village. It has been built on an old coalfield site by people from the community who have designed the housing and new industrial site in such a way that it is completely eco-efficient. It is a splendid example of what the community itself can achieve when it has a mind to do so. Returning to our debate and the discussion about design review panels, of course there is a case for not leaving all this in the hands of experts; we do not need to do that. Community involvement is a mark of the way we have changed our approach to planning, and it is an extremely powerful and effective development.

Next week I will be visiting a 2,500-acre site near Peterborough originally owned by Hanson plc and now with O&H Hampton. What is important about this site is the extraordinary way in which green space and water resources are at the heart of the whole community. Water will be recycled in many different ways and there is enormous potential for open parkland as well as developing a dense site.

Last week I visited Southampton, a Living Places priority—one of five sites—which is building regeneration through culture. Its arts centres and visual art commitment will be driving much of the connection between its old estates and its new city centre development. These are inspirational, leading-edge sites. We are good at competitions and awards; we can do things to inspire competition. The challenge is making good and very good development the norm. The Government have to shape a vision, articulate an ambition and create a framework, incentives and conditions.

Some noble Lords, not least my noble friend Lord Howarth, invited us to think about more statutory duties to ensure that local authorities consider design quality when assessing planning applications, but other noble Lords, by reference to PPS 1, PPS 3 or statutory guidance, demonstrated the case better than I can that we do not need more statutory powers; that is not what will guarantee that local authorities are encouraged and enabled.

We have to make the best of what we have, particularly following on from the Urban Task Force and the creation of CABE, for which I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Howarth, who was its midwife, using the partnerships and the tools that we have, which are relatively recent but which make some powerful levers. CABE inspires, assists, guides and demonstrates the value of design, not least in some of the public buildings that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, spoke about, particularly in relation to health. There is some extraordinarily good work going on in public health design. We are talking about well-being—better people and better places. We are working closely with CABE. We fund it to the tune of about £11 million to £12 million, which along with the sustainable communities fund has, I think, made the single most important difference.

There is a raft of good advice in relation to housing, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, knows. We have design and access statements and a whole raft of design guidance, which enables people to plan more effectively for better town centres—we can design out crime. We take extremely seriously the status and capacity of training in local authorities. A great deal of research is in place to scope the nature of the problem. A lot of that has come from the Egan review, but I cannot answer the noble Lord’s question despite the fact that he gave me infinitely generous warning; I will have to write. I will say something more about skills in a moment.

This is about dissemination on the ground, whether through the Millennium Communities programme or Design for Manufacture. What excites me is the possibility of demonstrating how best design can work for the future. I am thinking of the opportunities for sustainability in our ecotowns and our need, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, to address the problems of reducing energy consumption, as we have already begun to do through building regulations. Our ageing strategy will give us the enormous opportunity to place both economic and social sustainability together in inclusive design.

As to what we should do, I will start by saying that no one should be in any doubt about what we as a Government want. There is no shortage of leadership or confusion over the statutory framework. There is no excuse for any local authority not to know how and where to obtain help, to plan creatively from the start of development and to get local people involved in planning for community involvement. The challenge is to remove some of the cultural and practical barriers in order to give quality the priority that we have spoken about, to build confidence that people can understand what design is, to address the skills shortage, to put more champions in place and to create advocacy throughout the system. We are on the way.

CABE is critical to all this: Building for Life, the document that it put together with the Home Builders Federation, asks 20 questions to assess design quality in new homes. It helps developers and local authorities to understand what makes a high-quality scheme. We have design reviews, the CABE enabling service and CABE Space. There is no way that a local authority can hide behind an assertion that it does not know where to go for advice. As confidence and discrimination grow, so will the ability to turn down poorly designed proposals.

Design review panels are in seven out of nine regions at the moment. Of course there should be nine—that is what we want—and I will think hard about the arguments that have been made about expanding their scope. We are tackling the lack of design through the use of regional centres of excellence. We are asking regional and local partners—higher education institutes, architecture and design centres, professional bodies—to work with the RDAs to determine the best approach to improving skills and training in each area. That is critical and it is why, following the Egan review, we created the admirable Academy for Sustainable Communities, which promotes not just design and architectural skills in the community but social skills—how to build the sort of communities that we want to see in the future. It is identifying gaps in the provision and how to fill them. CLG itself has grown another 513 high-calibre graduate students across the planning profession. In the future, planning must not be the preserve of planners or geographers; we need the social scientists, the linguists and the critical thinkers to come into planning and be creative. Ultimately, we need more incentives.

With specific regard to the title of the debate, we asked, in a recent consultation on the housing and planning delivery grant, how we might provide incentives to encourage better design through that grant. We are looking now at the responses; I hope that that will be very powerful. The housing Green Paper also set out how we would examine options for a quality assurance scheme. Working on that with CABE will take us forward into a possibility of incentivising local authorities. We have the Bill on the Homes and Communities Agency, which will give us the opportunity to bring all this together.

The Planning Bill gives us another opportunity. I look forward to the debates that I will have with the noble Lord, Lord Best, and with my noble friends Lady Whitaker and Lord Howarth on how we use that Bill to promote design. In that Bill—I say this in response to the noble Lord, Lord Rogers of Riverside—we are streamlining the infrastructure so that, if we have to have an inquiry on another terminal or runway at Heathrow, it will not, we hope, take seven years. That can only be good.

I shall conclude not with a reiteration of the quotation from Bevan because we heard that resonant call earlier—although I am tempted—but with a quotation from Churchill, who said:

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”.

He might have added, “We shape places; thereafter they shape us, too”. I would like to see people from Barcelona coming to visit places such as Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool and saying, “This is the best that can be done. We want something of this”. I am grateful to my noble friend for giving us the opportunity to have this debate.

My Lords, the Minister has outlined the vision and the aspiration quite admirably, but does she agree with me that the trick will be to make the leap from aspiration to implementation and to ensure that there is no disconnect between the two? I agree with her that CABE will be critical to doing that.

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord but this is not quite the procedure that takes place. However, I am sure that my noble friend has taken the noble Lord’s message on board.

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to every noble Lord who spoke for the quality of their speeches. They spoke with knowledge, insight and feeling. It is a vast subject and no doubt we would all like to have been able to talk about aspects of it other than those that we covered. I would have liked to have been able to say something about the architects and the buildings that I personally admire but it is invidious to pick out individual architects, as it is invidious to pick out individual speeches. I will, however, take that risk and just mention that I am a great admirer of the architecture of my noble friend Lord Rogers of Riverside. His participation in this debate as one of the leading architects of our times added yet further distinction to it.

There has been much unanimity. It can be dull if there is excessive agreement in a debate so, prompted by something that the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, said, I will court controversy by suggesting that this is not a debate that could have taken place in an elected House. The depth of expertise in this Chamber is such that that is unimaginable. But let us return to that upon which we more easily agree around the House. Every noble Lord who spoke expressed a deep conviction about the value of good architecture and design. We were all happy to acknowledge the abundance of excellent architecture and design in this country. But at the same time we know that iconic buildings are not enough and every speaker expressed deep frustration and, indeed, anger at the poverty and inadequacy of too much of the design around us.

We will very shortly scrutinise the Housing and Regeneration Bill and the Planning Bill in this House. That will give us an opportunity to return to these issues. In the mean time I particularly thank the Minister. We can all take satisfaction from her personal commitment to the cause of good architecture and good design. I know that she will be ready to engage in debate with those of us who may wish to revert to the issue of whether guidance is sufficient or whether we will need to strengthen legislation to lay statutory duties upon those who have responsibility to ensure that we do better. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 12 March be approved.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I also wish to speak to the Early Removal of Short-Term and Long-Term Prisoners (Amendment of Requisite Period) Order 2008. My purpose today is to discuss amendments to the early removal scheme for determinate sentence prisoners who are liable to deportation or administrative removal from the United Kingdom. These orders set out the Government’s proposals to extend the early removal scheme to enable prisoners to be removed up to a maximum of 270 days early rather than the current 135. This is the first time these specific order-making powers have been used.

The early removal scheme in respect of foreign national prisoners has been successfully in operation since 2004 and more than 3,000 prisoners have been removed to their country of origin under the scheme. The scheme applies only to those foreign national prisoners who are able to be removed to their country of origin. Such prisoners benefit from the scheme only if their removal from the UK can be given immediate effect. We have been working to ensure that arrangements are in place to enable us to remove prisoners to their country of origin.

Prisoners serving a life or indeterminate sentence are not eligible to be considered for removal under the scheme. Determinate sentence prisoners serving a sentence of four years and over under the Criminal Justice Act 1991 for a sexual or violent offence are removed under the scheme only if the Parole Board considers that they would present an acceptable risk to the community. Details of prisoners removed under the scheme are placed on the Home Office’s warnings index. Should they seek to return to the UK during their sentence they can be detected by the border control officer on arrival at the UK border, and returned to prison custody until the point at which they would have been released had they not otherwise been removed.

Based on the successful experience of the last three and a half years, and in particular our increasing experience of and success in securing travel documents from overseas countries and making other arrangements with them that enable us to remove prisoners, we believe the scheme can make an even greater contribution to removing criminals from our shores.

As of December 2007, there were 11,310 foreign national prisoners in the prison system, representing 14 per cent of the total prison population. Foreign national prisoners represent a significant proportion of the prison population, although it is low in comparison to many other European countries. The early removal scheme has a positive impact on the prison population. Moreover, we have made it clear that our objective is that foreign national prisoners should face deportation when they meet the relevant criteria and that deportation should happen as early as possible in their sentence. These proposals are entirely consistent with overall government policy.

The Criminal Justice Act 1991 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 empower the Secretary of State to remove foreign national prisoners from prison early for the purpose of removing them from the United Kingdom. This is formally known as the early removal scheme. To qualify for the scheme, a prisoner must be liable to deportation or administrative removal, in accordance with immigration legislation. The statutory instruments amend the relevant provisions in both Acts to expand the early removal scheme to enable foreign national prisoners liable to deportation or removal from the UK to be removed from prison, and hence from the UK, at an earlier point in their sentence than is currently the case. The instruments double the maximum number of days from which a prisoner may be removed from prison under the scheme from 135 days before the halfway point of the sentence to 270 days before the halfway point of the sentence.

The ERS provisions under the Criminal Justice Act 1991 apply to those prisoners who are liable to removal and are serving a sentence of less than 12 months or a determinate sentence in respect of an offence committed before 4 April 2005. The statutory instrument amends Section 46A of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, which enables the Secretary of State to remove from prison early short-term and long-term foreign national prisoners who are liable to deportation or administrative removal and are subject to the release provisions of the 1991 Act. Section 46A(6) provides the Secretary of State with the power to amend the definition of “requisite period”, being the period prisoners must serve before becoming eligible for removal from prison under the ERS. There is a tapering mechanism, which means that the requisite period that must be served will be dependent on the length of the sentence.

The order provides that a prisoner liable to removal and serving less than three years must serve one-quarter of the term before they can be removed from prison. The effect is that prisoners serving less than three months will now be eligible for the ERS, whereas under the current provisions they are not so eligible. Those prisoners serving more than three months but less than four months will be required to serve a quarter of the term. Currently, they must serve 30 days. This means that they will be eligible for removal earlier then they are currently. Prisoners serving 18 months or more, but less than three years, will be required to serve one-quarter of the term. Currently, they can be removed up to 135 days before the halfway point of their sentence. This means that they will be eligible for removal earlier than they are currently. Prisoners serving three years or more will be able to benefit by up to the maximum period of 270 days. Prisoners serving four months or more, but less than 18 months, will not be affected by this draft order.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 applies to prisoners who are liable to removal and are serving a sentence of 12 months or more in respect of an offence committed after 3 April 2005. Section 260 of that Act contains the relevant early removal scheme provisions. The provisions are very similar to those of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. The draft Early Removal of Fixed-Term Prisoners (Amendment of Eligibility Period) Order amends the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to expand the ERS to enable foreign national prisoners to be removed from prison up to a maximum of 270 days before the end of the custodial period. Again, this is the first time that this order-making power has been used.

The order replaces the current time limit of 135 days with a new time limit of 270 days. That means that the Secretary of State will be empowered to remove from prison a person who is liable to removal up to 270 days before the halfway point of the sentence. Prisoners serving three years or more will be eligible to benefit by the maximum period of 270 days.

I hope that it is clear to the House that the orders build on the success of the original scheme. They are admirable in that effect, and I am sure that they will commend themselves to the House. I beg to move.

Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 12 March be approved. 14th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.—(Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.)

My Lords, first, I should make it clear that we will not oppose the orders. Secondly, I offer my congratulations to the Minister on his gall in coming to the House to say that the Government are making these changes as a result of their successful pilot schemes, and all that stuff. He knows and I know that the Government are trying to make certain adjustments to cope with the fact that the prisons are bursting at the seams. There are far too many people in them and they want to get some out to get the numbers down. I accept, as the Minister put it, that the proposal is entirely consistent with government policy. I accept that no doubt a number of pilot schemes have been looking at this issue, but the Minister knows perfectly well that the reason for this measure is, as I said, to get the figures down. That is a perfectly admirable reason because the prisons are bursting at the seams.

In their Explanatory Memorandums on the orders, the Government give the game away. The two memorandums seem to be identical, but I shall refer to that on the Early Removal of Short-term and Long-term Prisoners (Amendment of Requisite Period) Order 2008. At paragraph 7.9, they explain that there will be amendments to deal with this matter in:

“Clause 33 of the current Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill”.

I forgot to look at my copy of that Bill to see whether it is still Clause 33 because the Government seem to amend it so often. It is probably a different clause now, but let us assume that it is still Clause 33 to which amendments will be made. That Bill will be enacted early in May—in barely five or six weeks. But, so desperate are the Government to move forward—we all know why; the prisons are bursting at the seams—they have to move the orders and bring them into effect now. I seem to remember a call from the Government Whips’ Office asking, “Can you take these orders some time before Easter?”. I gather that this is “before Easter”, although Easter has already happened as far as I am concerned. We are dealing with the orders now, despite the fact that the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill will be enacted in six weeks, and Clause 33 will be Section 33 on the statute book.

Paragraph 7.10 of the Explanatory Memorandum states:

“The Secretary of State is therefore amending primary legislation by an affirmative instrument whilst at the same time taking a Bill through Parliament which amends the same provisions, albeit in different ways. The rationale for using the order-making power to affect the changes to the ERS set out above is because the statutory instruments can be made and come into force well before the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill receives Royal Assent”—

in six weeks from now.

As I said, we do not intend to oppose the orders. It would be comic if it were not so tragic that the Government have to act like this. They are making policy almost on the hoof purely so that they can deal with matters rather more speedily than they could do in the Bill already before them. I feel sorry for the Minister having to come before the House on a day like this to make such a speech.

My Lords, the people for whom I feel sorry are the prison governors who have to read and digest the complicated provisions of this early-release scheme, which are detailed in a 70-page document, Early Removal Scheme for Foreign Nationals, which is now being amended by these two orders. I have no complaint to make about the orders themselves, and I think that my noble kinsman has been a little hard on the Government. We are always complaining that they have done nothing about the bursting prisons, and now they are doing something. But I suppose he is entitled to have a little bit of fun. At the end of the day, it is a good thing that these orders are being made now and that they come along as early as possible.

We are looking at an uncontroversial scheme, which has, so far, allowed fixed-term prisoners to be removed to their countries of origin 135 days before the half-way point of their sentence, with tapering for short-term prisoners at between three and 18 months. As the Minister has explained, under these orders a foreign national can be removed from prison 270 days before the half-way mark, with those sentenced to less than three years having to serve a quarter of their nominal sentence. The lower limit of three months originally applied to the ERS is removed. That is an improvement because those people were not formerly eligible for any release.

Obviously, the scheme applies only to those who are capable of being removed or deported to their country of origin. The Explanatory Memoranda do not say to how many of the 11,310 foreign nationals in our prisons at the time of writing, who the noble Lord mentioned, this scheme will apply. We hope that the noble Lord will tell us what increase there will be in the number of prisoners affected, based on the current number of prisoners, as a result of the extension from 135 to 270 days. The chief executive of the BIA wrote to the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee in another place on 20 November 2007. He said that 1,500 foreign national prisoners whose sentences had expired were awaiting deportation. It would be useful if that figure were updated. In spite of the claim that the experience of the past three and a half years has been successful, the 3,000 removed under the early release scheme since it began in June 2004 is presumably some way short of the number eligible for deportation or removal. It would be useful to have some assessment of what proportion of the total that would represent. What are the obstacles to deportation of the 1,500 who are still detained?

In her evidence to the Select Committee on 15 January, Ms Homer, the chief executive of the BIA, said that it would automatically consider deportation for anyone given a custodial sentence unless there was an appeal. What proportion of foreign national prisoners in custody who would otherwise have been subject to ERS are excluded from the procedure because their appeals have not yet been concluded? Does this account for some of the 1,500 in administrative detention, or are they all from the countries where difficulties arise, such as the four particularly mentioned by Ms Homer: Jamaica, Nigeria, China and Vietnam? Do those difficulties arise mainly from the expiry, loss or destruction of travel or identity documents by the persons concerned? Presumably the prisoners who qualify for ERS are told clearly that if they appeal either against sentence or deportation, it can mean that they will have to remain in custody for part or even the whole of the 270 days’ freedom back home they would otherwise have enjoyed?

If that is the choice facing those prisoners—to accept the ERS or resist it and lose some of the time for which they would otherwise have been freed—can the noble Lord assure me that they will have available to them the best legal advice so that they can make the decision on the best possible grounds?

My Lords, I welcome the general support that both noble Lords have given to the order—

I am grateful, my Lords; I was not certain when I would be allowed to come in.

I am equally surprised at the speed at which this is being done, not least because of the timing of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. Nevertheless it must have some benefits in that at least those who remain in the prisons will have slightly less crowding to cope with. From that viewpoint I suppose that I, too, must welcome what is happening. Apart from endorsing the point about legal aid—it is crucial that they have access to legal aid—I wonder how many of the people we are talking about are women, because a considerable proportion of the prison population are foreigners. I hope that it is not too many, but it would be useful to have those figures.

My Lords, I thank both noble Lords and the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, for their general support for the proposals in the statutory instruments. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, was rather feisty in his remarks. I say at once that the provisions will have a positive impact on prison population. I do not have all the figures that noble Lords have requested today but I will give the ones that I have and see if I can obtain any more. If so, I will write to noble Lords. However, the provisions will have a positive impact on prison population. I do not think that I ought to apologise for that. As for the principle of foreign national prisoners, where it is considered safe and risk assessments take place, it is appropriate to do this. The scheme is worthy in its own right.

We have already made it clear as a general principle that foreign national prisoners should face deportation where they meet the relevant criteria. We therefore believe that the proposals are consistent with government policy. There is no question but that the prison-population situation is serious. As the noble Lord will know, however, we have published the Carter proposals and we have a programme to make an impact on the numbers of prisoners and to increase the provision of places over the next few years. These orders will make a positive impact as well.

The statistics on the number of foreign national prisoners removed early under the scheme are as follows. In calendar year 2007, 1,054 persons were removed. As for the impact on the prison population, we project a saving of approximately 235 places. I should say that this is not an exact science but based on the places that were saved from the original scheme. Nevertheless that is a significant number in terms of our current prison population. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, that according to my information the number of time-served foreign national prisoners in prison stood at 389 as at 25 March. That is pretty up-to-date.

Obviously, one could talk more generally about some of the challenges in documentation where appeals are being heard. One of the questions that has always arisen about the operation of the scheme is how early advance notice from the prison authorities to the BIA is and when documentation can start to be prepared. There has been case law that means that the process cannot be started too early because an actual decision has to be made on the basis of the facts at the time. However, there is no doubt that there is improved collaboration between the Prison Service and the BIA. We are seeing these improvements coming through.

In Committee on the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill we debated the protocol between the Prison Service and the BIA. While there are still major challenges in this area, there are significant signs of improvement. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, that, in terms of the guidance given to governors, they do an extraordinary job under extreme pressure. Anyone who has visited prisons recently and has seen the population pressures they are under can only admire their work. I have no doubt whatever that the quality of the governors and people working in prisons has improved immeasurably over the past few years. We owe them a great debt.

I am afraid that I do not have the gender differential figures—in other words, the number of women—for the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. I will find out, if I can, and let her know. All are entitled to legal representation.

On how many it can apply to, it is difficult to give a fixed figure. That is also why I cannot give an absolute estimate of the reduction in prison population that will take place as a result. The point is that any foreign national prisoner liable for deportation or removal is eligible for the scheme. However, there is of course a great difference between the number eligible and the number it would affect.

My Lords, I do not ask the Minister to give these figures now, because I am sure that he does not have them to hand. Since Ms Homer mentioned before the Select Committee the particular difficulties arising in respect of four countries which apparently do not accept their nationals or the documentation provided, it would be useful to know how many of the prisoners that would otherwise be eligible for the ERS are stopped from taking advantage of it because they belong to one of those countries.

My Lords, I accept that. I have figures for each of the countries represented by the prison population. Rather than read them out, perhaps I may write to the noble Lord. I cannot tell him how many offenders with outstanding appeals are excluded from the scheme. We are not sure whether that information can be obtained, but I will certainly do everything I can to see whether that is possible.

The changes being introduced in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which we are all thoroughly enjoying debating at the moment and look forward to gathering for again next Wednesday, will make the scheme easier to administer and certainly bring more prisoners into scope. Clause 33 amends the position for prisoners entitled to be released under the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, whereas Clause 34 amends the position for the 2003 Act prisoners. Broadly speaking, the changes in the Bill do two things: they remove the current statutory exemptions to the ERS, and extend ERS to those prisoners who are not liable to removal but who demonstrate a settled intention of residing abroad. Clause 33 also corrects a potential anomaly in the operation of the ERS in respect of prisoners sentenced under the different regimes of the Criminal Justice Acts 1991 and 2003. The provisions in the Bill are consistent and in parallel with the provisions that we are bringing forward in the SI today.

I thank noble Lords for the general support that they have given to the orders, if not to some of the other interesting matters around this issue, and commend the orders to the House.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.

On Question, Motion agreed to.

House adjourned at 5.01 pm.