On the June 8th the MP Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Health, came to the Bromley-by-Bow Centre to announce his ambition to make the NHS a truly patient-centred service.

“Over these years, as Shadow Secretary of State, I have shaped a personal ambition.

An ambition rooted in the commitment to the core values of the NHS – of a comprehensive service, free at the point of use, based on need, not ability to pay.

But an ambition beyond that. Beyond achieving equity and the social solidarity of access to a National Health Service. My ambition is that we can achieve health outcomes – and quality health services – as good as any in the world. That we can achieve a unique combination of equity and excellence, including for the most vulnerable. An ambition for excellence. I’m buoyed by the knowledge that we have medics, nurses and scientists as good as anywhere in the world, I know that we can achieve this.

It is my passion. To back the NHS. To put my heart and soul into achieving success for the NHS, and for, you, the patients.

Over the last six years the key changes that will enable us to realise this ambition, have become increasingly clear.

These now represent our priorities for government:

First, that patients must be at the heart of everything we do, not just as beneficiaries of care, but as participants, in shared decision-making. As patients, there should be no decision about us, without us.

Second, that if we are to seek to achieve continuously improving outcomes, then that is what we must focus on. Not politically-motivated process targets, not simply measuring inputs or constant changes to structures, but a consistent, rigorous focus on outcomes – achieving results for patients.

Third we must empower professionals to deliver. This is the only way we can secure the quality, innovation, productivity and safe care, all of which are essential to achieving those outcomes.

Engaged and empowered professionals will deliver results. Disempowered, demoralised and demotivated staff will not.

Fourth, we must, as a society, do much better on the health and well-being of our families and our communities. Only by prioritising health and well-being and by preventing ill-health more effectively, can we achieve the overall health outcomes we seek, not just good health services but good population-wide health outcomes, and reduce the inequalities in health, which so blight our society.

Fifth, we must see the many links and connections between health and social care, seeing care in its wider aspects. Whether provided by their families, by carers, by support workers or by health professionals, all are part of a spectrum of care for those in need. Health and social care should be integrated more. And so we need to reform social care alongside healthcare, so that we can support and empower people – not least as individuals – to be more safe and secure and, themselves, to be able to exercise greater control over their care.

These will be our priorities. We will act across the breadth of health and social care to deliver these priorities and, in doing so, we will establish and embed the consistent, sustainable strategy for reform, which will give our services the long-term stability they have so desperately needed for so long.”

To read his speech in full, click here

As noble Lords will know, over the past 13 years in an area of great deprivation and health need, where the health authority had left a gaping hole in primary care provision, we, with the local community of Bromley by Bow, have set up a health centre which is integrated with housing, education, businesses and the arts. I declare an interest as the founder and, now, president of the centre, and that, in my professional life, I am increasingly working across the country advising on this area of health development.

The Bromley by Bow Centre is about health, not sickness, which is reflected throughout the building. You enter through a beautiful cloistered garden, recently full of purple wisteria. There are no gruesome pictures of human bodies on the walls greeting our patients, the kind of images that used to haunt me as an imaginative eight year-old at our local doctor’s surgery in Bradford. Instead, you walk into an art gallery and open-plan reception made of natural timbers and bathed in natural light. A high-quality environment, a focus on human relationships, open communication and customer focus are the keys to the Bromley by Bow approach. Doctors come out into the reception to chat and greet their patients in person. In the consulting rooms, patients and doctors sit side by side around curved wooden tables, looking at the computer screen together. At Bromley by Bow, doctors, nurses and patients work in partnership together.

Patients are not merely prescribed pills, referred and sent on their way. The drug we give to a patient with depression is only part of what our GPs prescribe as a fully comprehensive care programme. At the centre, we can offer on-site career advice; support to overcome debt; vocational training qualifications, and even a university degree programme; business support, including the opportunity to set up your own business; and practical housing and legal assistance.

Over the past 13 years the Bromley by Bow Centre has become an exemplar of an integrated approach to health and social care. It inspired the £300-million healthy living centre programme, run by the then New Opportunities Fund, and the £2-billion NHS LIFT initiative, which is of course the public/private partnership programme for building primary health and social care centres in the most disadvantaged areas across the UK.

Others have developed integrated approaches to health in other parts of the country. Dr Angela Lennox built a police station in her health centre in Leicester and reduced crime in the housing estate where it is based. The Westbank Community Care Centre in Exeter promotes healthy living across Devon. The Gracefield Gardens health centre in Streatham works in partnership with Lambeth PCT and Lambeth Council to deliver better healthcare. We ourselves now run three health centres for over 18,000 patients and are the largest primary care provider in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

I apologise for not being able to speak last week in the debate on the big society, but are these not all examples of where, in the micro, a big idea like the big society might take root? If integrated models of health and community care were encouraged in every community up and down the land, and the necessary local relationships and partnerships brought together, this important idea-the big society-might not become subject to yet further cynicism and be seen as more meaningless government spin with little substance underneath. It might actually become the fertile ground within which a wholly new definition of what it means to be a healthy society-a thriving community-took root. Of course, such an approach would need to be given time and consistent leadership.

There is a wealth of untapped social entrepreneurial talent in our country. Many of these entrepreneurs have it in them to generate creative and innovative approaches to primary and community care. There are hundreds of latent and undernourished third-sector organisations in this country with the capability to become like Bromley by Bow and take on the task of transforming how public services are delivered in communities up and down the UK. Our task is to find these people and organisations and put the wind in their sails. Over the past 10 years I have travelled up and down the country and discovered social entrepreneurs who are massively frustrated at how hard it is to be trusted and resourced to take on public contracts, including in the areas of health and social care. Despite the positive rhetoric from successive government Ministers, it has been intensely difficult for dedicated and talented social entrepreneurs to develop creative solutions.

My noble friend Lady Finlay and I offer the Minister a visit to some of these centres and the opportunity for him to see in detail what a successful integrated approach to health and community care actually looks like in practice, and what conditions need to prevail if it is to grow exponentially and to take root. The sad fact remains that these examples of an integrated health model are still few and far between. Despite all the rhetoric and promises, there has been little practical encouragement for these integrated approaches to health. It was ironic that our approach, which everyone now thinks is a great idea, was physically blocked by a boulder across our road to delivery back in the mid-1990s. The boulder was not local people but the local health authority at that time.

I am not convinced that things have moved on much. Yes, money has been spent on building new buildings and, yes, there has been investment in services, but the principle of broadening the base of primary and social care delivery and engaging social enterprises has barely been understood. I am aware that the language of social enterprise is spoken inside Whitehall, but I am profoundly doubtful as to whether it is understood. Indeed, the evidence is that it is not. Our public services need to be known for doing and achieving, not just endless talking, restructuring or writing yet another new stack of policy documents. In a modern enterprise economy, we are nowadays returning to the sensible practice of “learning by doing”. The idea that we learn much through the writing of endless documents that are out of date within weeks can seem rather outdated. There is nothing better than getting your hands dirty in the practicalities to really understand what is going on. When I spoke to the recently departed chair of NHS London, he told me that his mission was to build stand-alone “medical model” health centres without what he called “the distraction of social and community care”. Evidently, the complications inherent in the lives of disadvantaged Londoners were outside the brief of the chair of NHS London.

Similarly, the vision of the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, of a network of polyclinics, announced in your Lordships’ House, was in practice another missed opportunity. When you get into the practical detail with those of us who are practitioners, you see that it was not at all a vision of polyclinics, but of monoclinics-that is, health centres that are almost solely about the clinical model of healthcare. It is a sophisticated clinical model and, invariably, these clinics are full of state-of-the-art equipment and procedures. However, I am vexed to say that they pay scant lip service to the lessons many of us have learnt about integration and the bringing of different disciplines together in the way I have described-that the route into addressing the pressing and underlying health needs in some of our most challenging communities in this country lies in getting GPs to work with their non-health colleagues. It is as simple and as complicated as that.

We need our health service to be open to working in partnership with the third sector and social enterprises in integrated schemes which address the real, practical day-to-day issues that face patients. These include poor social housing, underachievement in education, credit card debt and fear of bailiffs, concern over street violence and anti-social behaviour, and the lack of opportunities to take control of their lives. We are not asking the NHS to solve all these problems. We are simply asking that the health profession be willing to work more collaboratively with others who have the tools to change our communities for the better, including by addressing their physical and mental health needs.

What those of us who have had real experience of running successful integrated health centres found was that the definition of a polyclinic changed on a six-monthly basis, and each new definition was communicated by NHS London with such clarity and certainty that real players and practitioners in the field were left totally paralysed. This meant that important health centres still remain not built, with enormous potential abortive costs. I know of one health centre that has had to go through so many NHS London-inspired redesigns that it has incurred over £1.5 million of design fees and still sits in NHS London’s in-tray. I truly wish I could say that this is the only example I am aware of in London but it is not. I am afraid that the last Government were rather fond of initiatives that never in practice happened, and of trusting the reports of young consultants at McKinsey rather than those who do the job.

I welcome a world envisioned by the coalition Government where resources are put in the hands of practitioners on the ground with a real understanding of their neighbourhoods and local needs. However, this vision is far from straightforward. Not all GPs will deliver the integrated model of healthcare that I described earlier. Many GPs who support an integrated approach tell me that their colleagues who do not support it fear loss of status and title, without realising that real status in communities is based on the strength of their relationships with patients. Often in deprived areas there is a stark lack of GPs with the capacity to rise to the challenges that they now face. This new approach has important implications for the ways in which doctors are now trained.

The Government need to ensure that GPs are encouraged not to resist change, nor protect an expensive biomedical model of health. We need to show our doctors that an integrated approach to healthcare will address the profound problems that people in disadvantaged areas face, with considerable savings to the public purse. At Bromley by Bow, we run our health centre like any successful customer-focused business. For example, 20 per cent of consultations are conducted on the phone, which saves not only the patient’s time but the GP’s as well. What we all have to realise is that the NHS has access to people across the country which any business would die for. Eighty per cent of consultations in the NHS take place in general practice, and 90 per cent of the population is seen in any one year. If we encourage entrepreneurship in the world of health, then the more capable practitioners will step into these gaps in the market and ensure successful delivery of care.

As the new Government begin to formulate their health policy, I have three questions for the coalition and the Minister, who I wish to thank for a very helpful discussion earlier this week on this subject. First, what is the Government’s vision for the future make-up of primary and community care? Will they simply leave it to the marketplace? Will they promote the standard medical model or the integrated approach of the type I have described? A clear approach is essential for the dedicated medical staff, who have had to suffer countless changes in direction over the last decade and now feel disillusioned, confused and frustrated. Secondly, once the Government have clarified what their future model of primary care and community care will be, how will they deliver and develop this approach effectively? This has simply not been happening. Finally, who in the coalition Government will lead with consistency and longevity, and pursue this course? Under the previous Government, we saw a succession of initiatives and restructuring led by “here today, gone tomorrow” Ministers, which has left the health service, frankly, in ill health. Who will be the leader? That is my key question.

The Government are rightly opening up a world of opportunity and I welcome that. However, the devil, as ever, will be in the detail and perhaps most importantly in consistent leadership not from civil servants but from practitioners-GPs and others who have done the job and understand the practical details on the ground. I encourage the Minister and his Government to lessen their reliance on academics and theorists, who have often never built anything, and to embrace the world of the practitioner and the social entrepreneur; to create a culture where we learn by doing, and not by talking and writing endless expensive documents and papers. We cannot afford this expensive, rather old fashioned way of doing things any more. Let us support-and learn from-people who do the job.

The House of Lords is like a living, breathing newspaper – its collective mind is a mine of information. In my experience, though, the calibre of its content is far higher than you will find in any broadsheet. Together, we in the Lords, are an encyclopaedia of detailed and practical knowledge: we Peers tend to know what has worked and, more importantly, what hasn’t. The Commons may have the hand on the wheel but we have a grasp on the tiller: we are here to guide, not to command. If the Lords are weakened, diluted and thinned out through hasty and botched reforms, the Commons will find themselves rudderless and adrift and it will be the people and our democracy that will suffer and be weakened in the process.

As a social reformer, I don’t believe in the adage “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”. Things may not be broken but that doesn’t always mean they work well. But the House of Lords is not broken and it does work well so why throw a spanner in the works of this finely tuned machine? ‘Fairness’, ‘proportional representation’ and ‘equality’ are impressive words but how do they translate into practical, working reality? As a social entrepreneur with over 25 years working in some of the most deprived areas in Britain and having achieved real, positive and lasting results, I know that high and lofty political spin and media speak rarely help Karen and her kids at street level. Recently, in a debate in the Lords, I invited each MP to engage with reality and become involved in one project in their constituency to play their part in building the “big society”. http://amawsonpartnerships.com/lords/?id=1097

For me the most important word in the world of Westminster is “honour”. It is a word that the Commons use frequently: “my honourable friend”; “the Right Honourable gentleman”. But the meaning of the word has been lost in translation. Members of Parliament sorely need to re-earn trust by re-establishing their honour. If the Commons cannot keep its own House in order, and do the maths, its members should not attempt to re-order ‘the Other Place’.

Tradition, pomp and circumstance are all criticised in the Lords at present: are the robes necessary? Isn’t State Opening a waste of money? A few weeks ago, after the election, we had a State Opening. It struck me that the robes and the ceremony I was witnessing are as relevant today as they were when created centuries ago. By putting on the robes, through swearing allegiance, by physically participating in the Parliamentary process, we – Lords and MPs collectively – were literally reminded that honour is central to the longevity of both Houses. I thought Earl Ferrers’s opening speech in response to the Queen’s speech showed great insight in this regard. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/100525-0001.htm#1005255000143

If reform is necessary, then changes need to be carefully measured. Most of the proposals for change come at present from the Commons. Not many people realise that the two Houses operate on two entirely separate systems – until recently, even the computer systems were different! This is for good reason: The House of Lords must be kept as a second chamber if it is to scrutinise and examine legislation effectively. It must not become an identical twin of the Other Place.

What concerns me then is not that calls for change are being made but that those calls come from people that in reality have very little understanding of how the Lords works on a practical day to day basis. They do not understand the detail and if I have learnt anything it is that the devil is in the detail.

As a result of many years of bringing disparate groups of people together to deliver practical results, I know that the key to partnership is to focus on relationships and not just on new structures, processes and strategies. Focus on the relationships and everything will follow. Ignore them and you will face serious difficulties. My colleagues and I have spent more than a quarter of a century bringing together partnerships to modernise public services so that they are more responsive and fit for purpose in our modern enterprise culture.

I thought that it might be helpful if I shared with the new partnership Government a few lessons that my colleagues and I have learnt at the coalface. It might also help them to put some flesh on the bones of what the big society might look like in practice. Many people are wondering what this piece of marketing means. We all know that it is crucial for a new Government to lay solid foundation stones on which real change and development can grow. Real change is elusive and may not come to fruition until a Government have left office. Effective innovation can take a generation and requires committed individuals to champion it. It is rarely captured in a policy document, written by what my colleagues affectionately refer to as “the bright, young things”. Real change has to be grown and deeply rooted in communities, otherwise, as I suspect that new Labour is discovering, it will be blown away like the sand when the first gust of wind comes along.

What are the lessons? How do you create a big society and lift the game in education, health and welfare? First, I would suggest that this Government support organisations that already have a successful record of reforming public services. Do not reinvent the wheel, but build on what works. They should back success and learn from their many years of detailed practical work. Do not, as new Labour so often did, take their best ideas, pass them to the Civil Service machine and exclude these experienced innovators. Let them take the wheel. Support them and enable their efficiency. Do not think that it is now the Government’s job to take control. It is not. They should take the long-term view.

Secondly, we need to question what the overused term “fairness” means. The question to ask is: fairness for whom? If you are seeking to achieve fairness for Karen and her children on housing estates across the country and to improve their educational opportunities or access to health, you must back the best providers with a proven record. It is irrelevant whether they come from public, business, social enterprise or voluntary sectors. However, if you are seeking to be fair in dishing out grants and resources to the voluntary sector, you will do something quite different. Who are you trying to be fair to and why? Life is not fair, and where we began to challenge and question this thinking in east London and embrace not equality but diversity, a thousand flowers began to bloom. “Fair for whom?” is the exam question I leave with the Minister. It is not possible to be fair to everyone.

Thirdly, if fairness is about creating opportunities for employment and improved services, the future must be about enabling environments where business and social entrepreneurs can do business together. These are the new relationships that will reform public services and they are already showing significant success, but this means that some of our cherished ideology will need to be examined and probably dropped. For the last decade, bureaucrats have fed a bureaucracy monster and it is now very large indeed. Often, contracting out has transferred a large government bureaucracy to private sector companies with large contracts-prisons, for example. Then the civil servants have migrated from one large organisation to another. The contracting process seems designed to stifle innovation and risk taking. The role of the new Government needs to be to create a level playing field where new relationships and networks can grow, particularly between business and the social enterprise sector.

Fourthly, I would ask the Minister how he will practically encourage new environments where people “learn by doing”. Will he get his hands dirty by planting the seeds of enterprise in the fertile soil outside the comfortable but dry world of theory? If this new generation of politicians is to gain any understanding of how the real world works in practice, and not hide in the bubble of Westminster, I would humbly suggest that each Member of Parliament should become involved in one project in their constituency to play their part in building the “big society”. Do not pontificate about it: do it. Legislators might then begin to understand the relationship between legislation and practice because attempting to deliver a new school, health centre or service is a practical nightmare nowadays, given the number of contradictory hoops laden with half-baked ideology that practitioners like me have to jump through. The confusion that exists between delivery and democracy is a minefield. The micro is the clue to the macro. Learn from it and gain the public’s respect in the process.

If this Government are serious about empowering communities, Ministers will have to get involved in messy detail. For example, one of the difficulties we face in giving people more professional independence in health is the awkward fact that often doctors do not want to innovate. They have not been trained to think like entrepreneurs and so resist change because they have an entrenched view and an expensive biomedical model of health to protect. This is not just my view, but that of the doctors I have worked with. Can we leave commissioning with doctors? Will they be responsible? It depends on the mindset of the individual doctor.

Finally, the idea that devolving power to local authorities will deliver a plurality of outcomes is not always correct either. Local authorities are not neutral when commissioning services. They often have an aversion to selecting innovative approaches because they do not understand them. Many of their staff have only ever worked in the public sector. They do what they have always done, but change the wording on the forms to please the Government of the day. Look carefully and you will still see the same bodies under new clothes. Local authorities are often the least likely to choose an innovative approach to service delivery, so why are the Government looking to them alone? Could the Minister tell the House what criteria will be used to choose these authorities? How will he select the sheep from the goats? Or, like doctors, are they all as good as each other? Not in my experience.

I wish the Minister well in this time of opportunity. Partnership is a great thing and the present financial crisis is the time to embrace innovation. Never miss the opportunity presented by a good crisis. If you are to deliver, I would humbly suggest that you do not rely on structures or theories, but on people. Back the best people, be they in the business, public or social enterprise sectors, and, funnily enough, you will be fair to everyone.

Last Thursday the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his wife Sarah honoured the Bromley-by-Bow Centre with a visit. It was an unexpected visit that very few staff knew about until the car pulled up outside the health centre gates!

The Prime Minister and his wife were at the Centre for over an hour and met with staff, patients and many of the local people who come to the Centre for classes, advice, and the numerous workshops and activities. There was plenty of time to sit in the café and informally chat to the staff and customers. The Prime Minister was particularly keen to see for himself the progress that the Bromley-by-Bow Centre has made in developing it’s social enterprises and responding to the new opportunities that the 2012 Olympics will bring to the local area, given that the stadium is only a few hundred yards away. He also spoke to our employment advisors about the challenges of tackling long-term unemployment and the barriers to work for local people.

Both the Bromley-by-Bow Centre and the St Paul’s Way Transformational Project have attracted great interest from all the Political Parties. Caroline Spellman, Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, recently visited and stressed the importance of empowering local communities.

Other visitors to the Bromley-by-Bow Centre over the next few weeks will include:

Steve Norris – Former Conservative Minister of Transport and current advisor to Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

Sir Bob Kerslake – Homes and Communities Agency

Ruth Mackenzie – Cultural Olympiad Director

The East London Bond is an innovative campaign to spark renewal in East London.

By investing in the Bond, you can help to transform some of the most deprived communities in England – and receive all your money back in five years’ time.

East London Bond website

Following the success of the second meetingof the All Party Parliamentary Group on urban Regeneration, Sport and Culture on March 10th, the third meeting is being held jointly with the third annual House of Lords Symposium on Olympic Legacy.

This event will include a tour of the Olympic Park and the Lower Lea Valley – the biggest regeneration area in Europe.

Date: 15th June 2010

Venue: London Borough of Newham, Newham Dockside Office

Agenda:

10.45 – Coaches provided from Westminster and Newham Dockside

11.30 – Tour of Lower Lea Valley, ‘view tube’ Olympic Park viewing platform and presentation.

13.00 – Lunch (Newham Dockside Offices)

14.00 – Third Annual House of Lords Symposium “The Reality: An East End View”

15.30 – Reception hosted by Lord Mawson OBE and Sir Robin Wales with a special performance from Michael Bochmann and young musicians from East London, participants in the Water City Festival: “A vision of East London and the emerging Water City Festival”

One Church, 100 Uses’ work in Sunderland makes the national news, and Andrew explains the issues involved with building communities.

To watch click here

“Andrew Mawson is social justice in motion. A hard hitting, tough-talking gentle doer of big business change.”

You don’t get praise like this from John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, without doing something special. During the 1980s, Andrew used his entrepreneurial skills to transform a run-down church in Bromley-by-Bow into a community enterprise centre. This began to give a disparate and deprived area an economic and cultural hub that is now internationally-renowned, and helped kick-start the social enterprise movement in the process: Andrew is a leading social entrepreneur.

In the 1990s, Andrew co-founded the Community Action Network (CAN), which provides support and office space for 110 social enterprises and charities at No.1 London Bridge, Loman Street in Southwark, and Old Street.

Today Andrew is a leading figure in promoting Water City, a physical, cultural and social vision for the future for East London. In Tower Hamlets he leads the St Paul’s Way Transformational Project, which is increasingly seen by business and Government as a pathfinder for urban regeneration and an example of what “going local” means in practice.

Over a decade ago Andrew co-wrote, with architect Richard Rogers, one of the earliest papers proposing that the Olympic Games be brought to East London, and began to develop the idea of the Lower Lea Valley as a Water City. Andrew is now a Director of the Olympic Park Legacy Company. Over the next 25 years this company will plan, develop, and manage the Olympic site, creating a lasting legacy from the 2012 Games.

Andrew is a charismatic and inspiring speaker, who believes passionately in the ability of the individual to affect real change. His speeches are punctuated with the practical stories of his transformational work from across the UK, and offers insights into the future of business and the Public Sector and the new cross sector relationships that are emerging. How do you maximise the business and social opportunities in this changing environment? Andrew will tell you.

Andrew Mawson is an independent Crossbench Peer and is chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Urban Regeneration, Sport, and Culture.

To book Andrew, please contact Andrew’s Executive Assistant, Liz Hodges: elizabeth@mawsonpartnerships.com

‘I met Andrew 13 years ago.I was CEO of British Gas (later BG plc) and wrestling with how to make the company more innovative. I visited Bromley by Bow and met Andrew and was struck by the achievements to date,the dreams for the future, the grit and determination. The BG foundation backed CAN and Andrew, and drew inspiration and encouragement from CAN’s achievements. Andrew experiences are directly relevant to any business leader’s challenge to grow a more innovative and creative entrepreneurial culture within their own organisation.’

Sir David Varney, former chairman of 02, CEO of BG Plc, and Chairman of HMRC

‘Andrew Mawson led a community revolution in Bromley-by-Bow and now inspires many to do the same. He has the credibility of experience and the passion to change forever the lives of those who hear him speak.’
Robert Ashton,
Business author and social entrepreneur

‘The story Andrew told was inspiring and he enabled people to look at their situation with fresh eyes and a renewed enthusiasm for tackling the challenges of their work.’
Allison Trimble
Director of The Leading Room, a cross-sector leadership development organisation

‘As the excellent feedback from our event shows he was both motivating and inspirational. As a result we have employed his speaking services again for our annual conference.’
Natalie Sutherland,
Policy & Practice Officer, Chartered Institute of Housing

‘Lord Mawson was an exceptional, inspirational and thought-provoking speaker, very supportive of the overall aims of the event. He provided a welcome but challenging alternative voice that was well-received by our business-orientated delegates.’
Paul Wheeler
Content Director, Base Communications

‘Lord Mawson’s speech on using your ‘entrepreneurial nose’ struck a real chord with those present.’
Sally Bavage,
Education Leeds

Robert Ashton,

Business author and social entrepreneur

‘The story Andrew told was inspiring and he enabled people to look at their situation with fresh eyes and a renewed enthusiasm for tackling the challenges of their work.’

Allison Trimble

Director of The Leading Room, a cross-sector leadership development organisation

‘As the excellent feedback from our event shows he was both motivating and inspirational. As a result we have employed his speaking services again for our annual conference.’

Natalie Sutherland,

Policy & Practice Officer, Chartered Institute of Housing

‘Lord Mawson was an exceptional, inspirational and thought-provoking speaker, very supportive of the overall aims of the event. He provided a welcome but challenging alternative voice that was well-received by our business-orientated delegates.’

Paul Wheeler

Content Director, Base Communications

‘Lord Mawson’s speech on using your ‘entrepreneurial nose’ struck a real chord with those present.’

Sally Bavage,

Education Leeds

What the audiences had to say

Fascinating talk and inspiring. Great ‘can do’ attitude.

Very inspirational.

Very good topic  and thought-provoking for the sector.

Excellent presentation – enthusiastic and informative.

Stimulating – made me think.

Billy Graham is alive and living in East London!

Excellent – proactive, refreshing, and interesting. Good not to have to think about tick any boxes.

Very interesting to see potential achievements with a refreshing, common sense approach.

Very interesting, good to have a challenge to more established approaches.

Excellent and inspiring presentation – well worth coming just to hear Andrew.

Excellent – he gives the sector the shake it needs!

An outstanding contribution – thought-provoking and inspiring

Wonderful!

Inspirational, real and honest.  Some real food for thought in shaping the way that we work

…the quality of his preparation and talk has challenged us all to think harder and deeper about the next steps and processes

…[Andrew was] the best speaker so far: he talked with deep, real life experience, and used stories and examples.

[He showed us there are] no boundaries for achievement

I could have listened to Lord Mawson for hours!