Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the role of books in promoting a civilised society.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, about 450 years ago Michel de Montaigne said:
“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind”.
Montaigne was a great example of a man who tried to live what he believed. He was tolerant, even when sorely provoked. He was hospitable to strangers, even though he lived in a time of feuds and war. He was always a prolific writer and reader, even while councillor and legal adviser to parliaments and kings. His essays are as vivid and relevant today as when he wrote them some 450 years ago. His diaries and essays reach out to me across the centuries.
That is the point of books. They can reach across centuries and national borders and promote comprehension of other cultures and other nationalities. Books are increasingly important, being reflective in our age of instant reactions. Books take us beyond ourselves to a wider humanity. I passionately believe that books promote understanding, tolerance and reflective attitudes in societies. Noble Lords will be able to recall many intolerant regimes which have destroyed tablets or scrolls or books as one of their first acts of aggression before turning against their own people or other people. Noble Lords have only to look at the list by Index on Censorship to see that the world is still not free from that sort of tyranny against the written word.
We in the UK have a terrific tradition of free speech and a free press. That freedom has relied on the book trade to nurture authors, their ideas and the books they write. I am sure that other noble Lords today will speak of how important this is to a number of matters, such as education, the role of libraries and other important issues. I will concentrate on the part that the Government can play in keeping that proud tradition of a vibrant, creative book trade.
It is a time of great change in the book trade. Much of that change comes from the move from print to digital. That move offers opportunities, but it also comes with enormous risks. There is a lot to be positive about. The book trade is worth £3 billion a year to the UK, and the quality and range of British writing is recognised around the world. Forty percent of publishing industry revenues are derived from exports, a bigger proportion than in any other country. The UK is the largest e-book market in Europe.
The past 20 years have seen a huge rise in the number of book clubs, literary festivals and creative writing courses. Book prizes highlighting all the new writing are sponsored by imaginative parts of the corporate world, such as Costa, Baileys and of course Man Booker, so the corporate world is playing its part. The National Literacy Trust’s 2013 study of children’s and young people’s reading was sponsored by the international law firm Slaughter and May. The appetite for reading is very healthy but—and this is a big “but”—the money made by authors has fallen by some 30% in the past decade. As a former bookseller, I am really sad to say that the number of independent bookshops in the UK is now fewer than 1,000. That is down by 500 over the past few years. Publishers face a dramatic challenge in the rise of self-publishing.
The book trade as we have known it is metamorphosing. The Government have a part to play in ensuring that the outcome is a continual flowering of creative talent. There are four practical ways in which they can help.
The first is with copyright. As I have said, it is a time of rapid change from print to digital. There are pressures to relax or ignore laws on copyright, which would be a really bad move. Happily, the Government have already made a move in the right direction. In March 2013, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, announced £150,000 of government money to fund the innovative Copyright Hub, the development and growth of which he said could add £2.2 billion per year to the UK economy by 2020. The hub will support open and competitive markets for copyright licences, present a more efficient online marketplace and cut costs for businesses. Importantly, it will simplify copyright licensing for customers—that includes everyone from the public to schools. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that further disruptive changes to copyright law at both UK and EU levels must be resisted? Can he update us on how the Copyright Hub’s development is progressing?
Secondly, author incomes have fallen in real terms by about 30% in the past 10 years, so fair contracts are incredibly important. Oddly, the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 excluded intellectual property. Given how valuable the creative industries are to the UK, surely this is an urgent issue for UK plc as well as for authors. Will the Minister see whether the Consumer Rights Bill offers an opportunity to remove this anomaly and to provide fair contract protection to authors and other IP creators?
The third issue has been on the table since I was a bookseller in the 1970s and the 1980s. It is the threat of removal of zero-rated VAT on books, which is still a live issue. No Government since the Second World War have elected to tax books, but there is now some pressure—I think coming from the European Commission—to end 0% VAT on printed books. Are the Government committed to maintaining zero-rated VAT on print books? What about e-books? They attract a 20% VAT rate, but a couple of other EU countries which really value their books, France and Luxembourg, have unilaterally reduced the rate of VAT on e-books. Will the Government follow their positive policy and reduce VAT on all books, e-books included?
The fourth issue is the rise of Amazon, which has a big share of print sales but almost a monopoly—around 90%—in the e-book market. As we know, it has a disgraceful attitude towards paying its taxes—that is a slightly different issue. Given that Amazon has a 90% share of the e-book market, will the Minister ask the Competition and Markets Authority whether that constitutes a monopoly and, if so, to act accordingly?
There are therefore several practical things that the Government can do, but they need to be aware that they are one of the main drivers in the attitude and framework surrounding books. They are doing lots of positive things; for example, the involvement of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills with the Creative Industries Strategy, which it has just developed. The Department for Education has certainly created a debate around books, with the slightly negative comments from the Secretary of State about Steinbeck and Harper Lee. He is perhaps a little misguided in thinking that there is not a place for a globalised attitude to literature. Although UK writers should always have a special place in our literature courses, I would hope that our children are studying literature from China to Colombia to Russia.
The Government set an attitude, and perhaps the most negative is that of the right honourable Chris Grayling about books for prisoners. The support for the Howard League for Penal Reform and the English PEN campaign on this issue goes far beyond people who normally worry about prisoners. I very much look forward to hearing the remarks of my noble friend Lord Dholakia with all his experience of rehabilitation, and to what he will say in greater detail about this issue. Indeed, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have chosen to speak today and who will share their perspectives on the critical issue of the role of books in our society.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Miller on raising this important question. I declare an interest as someone who has spent his academic career writing and editing books.
Books are fundamental to a civilised society. They are the means by which knowledge is transmitted in a tangible form. As my noble friend has already indicated, they are at the heart of a free society. As Dame Rebecca West put it:
“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide”.
Good books are a way of nourishing the mind and the human spirit. As Thomas Carlyle said:
“A good book is the purest essence of a human soul”.
The context in which he said it is pertinent: it was in a speech in 1840 in support of the London Library.
Books, then, are crucial to promoting a civilised society. I am not sure that the Government need to devote resources to reach that conclusion. I am much more concerned by what, if anything, flows from that in terms of the actions that the Government should take that they are not already taking. Is not the value of books obvious? Well, I am not sure the value is as obvious as it was. There is a challenge to get people reading books. As my noble friend has already indicated, the internet is both a resource and a threat. It is a resource because of the availability of books through this medium. People can read e-books conveniently when travelling without the need to carry heavy printed books. Sales of e-books are increasing significantly, but the market remains dominated by the printed word.
Although the printed book remains dominant, we are seeing a threat from the internet—or an opportunity. It is a challenge as well because it facilitates the growing demand for instant gratification. It also provides a myriad of distractions. It is a challenge to book reading, which requires the investment of time. The danger is that people will come to rely on digests rather than absorb themselves in the real thing. Given that, what action can Government take? My noble friend has already dealt with copyright, author’s income—I have a particular interest there—and VAT. I shall not repeat her points but merely commend them to the Government. I just want to add a couple of suggestions in the light of our discussion. Book reading should be seen as a necessary component of education policy, but its importance, as my noble friend indicated, should not be seen as confined to the Department for Education. It is as important to BIS and Culture, Media and Sport as it is to education in terms of creating the creative workforce that is essential to our society.
In terms of education policy, there is a notable debate about the content of the national curriculum, but not so much attention is given to the form in which it is delivered. The Government need to be alert that books remain at the heart of any educational establishment. Schools should be encouraged to ring-fence budgets for purchasing books, be that in hard copy or electronically. I am not entering the controversy as to which books should be used. Rather, the emphasis should be on ensuring that students are exposed to a range of texts and encouraged to explore for themselves.
The other suggestion that I have relates to primary education. We know that pupils are disadvantaged by coming from family backgrounds where there is no history of reading and from homes where there are no books. There would be no harm in a campaign to encourage all new parents to expose their children to books, but there should also be leadership by government in encouraging primary schools to place a particular emphasis on book reading and indeed, making books available for young children to explore, if only for the purpose of their seeing them and becoming familiar with them. These suggestions stem from the view that we cannot take the value of books as simply given. We need to ensure that their value is recognised and that we do all we can to encourage young people in particular, of the benefits they will accrue from devoting time to a good book, or better still, a great many good books.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, would like to begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for securing this debate. I wonder whether I should declare an interest here by virtue of the fact that I happen to be the author of at least nine or 10 books and the editor of about a dozen. I do not know whether that disqualifies me from speaking about the subject—but I shall, nevertheless, persist.
Books, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, play an indispensable role in creating and sustaining a civilised society. They are the repositories of thought. I do not think we fully appreciate the fact that, compared to television or radio and many other means of communication, books play a unique role. Books are the systematic statement of an individual’s real thinking, spread out over a large number of pages after careful thought. They also force the reader to engage in a dialogue with the author. Unlike television, where the images come and go and I have no time to pause because its immediacy simply overwhelms me, a book allows me to go back and forth, carry an idea with me, sleep on it and return to it a bit later. A book, in other words, is the repository of the dialogue between the reader and the author and, by implication, within the reader himself. Having read the book, the reader wrestles with the ideas in the new world to which the author has introduced him or her, and feels enriched. That is something that a radio or television programme simply cannot do. A book has a certain solidity. It is outside “me”, and therefore a book can be shared collectively in a way that a radio or television programme cannot. A book creates a world. It creates a public; a world in which we all share in common and which binds us into a community.
I say all that boring philosophical stuff not to make out a good case for books but simply to show that a civilisation from which books disappear and in which thoughts are communicated only through images or sounds is a civilisation that will be deeply impoverished. That may partly explain a paradox. We seem to think that as civilisation marches on with more and more technology, the human mind is becoming more sophisticated. The opposite thesis, I think, is more true. Because we are dependent on technology and because our thought processes are conditioned in a certain way, our brain capacity, our cognitive capacity, declines. That is why, in the past 100 years, we have not produced a Shakespeare, a Beethoven or an Einstein. All the greats who shaped our civilisation, who shaped modernity, are conspicuous by their absence.
It needs to be explained why there is progress in every sphere of life and yet, when we come to the fundamentals, the deepest forms of thought, we do not seem to be able to measure up to our ancestors. Forget Plato, forget Aristotle; even a Kant or a Marx would do, but we do not seem to have any. I think that that may have something to do with the fact that the solidity of the process of thinking that a book generates seems increasingly to be absent.
Having said that, I recognise that historically the book cannot remain what it is. Increasingly, it is difficult to define what is a book. Then I saw the title of the debate, and there are two things to be said about it. The first is about the phrase, “civilised society”. Coming from India and being constantly told by our colonial rulers that we are barbarians and uncivilised, the words “civilised society” rang alarm bells in my mind, just as did the word “book” because I was not quite sure what “book” referred to. Is an e-book a book? Is a blog or a series of blogs a book? Increasingly, publishers predict a future in which “physical” books—that word itself is disturbing—as we know them are likely to disappear. That worries me for all kinds of reasons, but that is not what I want to talk about. As of now, we have e-books, which, happily, sell about 80 million, compared to 393 million physical books; they bring in about £320 million, as opposed to £2.3 billion for physical books.
A physical book has an aesthetic appeal. It has what is beautifully called a jacket. We project anthropomorphic categories onto a book. A book has a jacket, a shape and an appearance which an e-book by definition cannot have. That appearance seduces us into reading it. It draws us into its own world. Therefore a book is not merely a repository of thought, it also has an aesthetic quality and is a cultural artefact. My worry is that if we are not careful—or even if we are very careful—there is a danger that books might disappear. Either they will be replaced by blogs or they might not be written at all.
They might not be written for two reasons. First, increasingly in the academic world a book is equal to three or four articles. Why not write an article instead of writing a book? I am told that there is an increasing tendency not to write big books. Secondly, it becomes very difficult for publishers to pay the author because people can read their books on a Kindle or in many other ways; publishers do not make money and they have nothing to give to the author. Increasingly, the recent phenomenon where an author can earn his or her livelihood simply by writing books may not be the case. In that case, why write books? If it cannot be your source of livelihood, only two things can happen. You will write or you will do other things while writing. That is what has happened throughout history. Shakespeare was doing his own things, Charles Dickens was a journalist. Therefore I suggest that we must find some ways in which the love of owning books can be encouraged in our children.
Lord Dholakia (LD)
My Lords, I add my thanks to those offered to my noble friend Lady Miller for securing this debate. Let me consider one issue and one issue alone: prisons and books.
The process of rehabilitation requires a number of initiatives and fundamental to this principle is ensuring that inmates are better prepared to face the outside world upon their release. The most disturbing aspect of the recent developments is the prison policy which bans friends and relatives sending books into prisons for prisoners to read. This change was made last year as part of the Government’s revision of the incentives and earned privileges scheme in prisons. The change means that friends and relatives in the outside world can no longer send small items to prisons, and this includes books. As a result, prisoners can access books only if they borrow them from prison libraries or if they buy them from their prison earnings. Both these options have serious restrictions and limitations. The Chief Inspector of Prisons drew attention to the restrictions on times at which prisoners can gain access to libraries. In addition, prison libraries are run and financed by local authorities. My noble friend made a substantial point that many of the libraries are now closing down, and there is less and less expenditure on books.
It is very difficult for most prisoners to buy books out of their prison earnings. The earnings amount to about £8 or £10 per week, out of which they have to buy their toiletries, stationery, stamps, phone cards to ring home and other items. Do we genuinely expect the prisoner to spend £8 out of £10 to buy a book to read?
There are a number of powerful reasons for reversing this unfortunate ban. First is the damaging effect on the literacy and education of prisoners. The poor rate of literacy among prisoners is well known, as is the research showing that poor reading ability is strongly correlated with difficulty in obtaining jobs on release, and with reoffending. The experience of literacy tutors shows that prisoners are more likely to be motivated to practise and develop their reading ability if they are able to read material on subjects in which they have particular interests. This is where reading material sent in by relatives can play a very important role.
The facts are just as unfortunate for better educated prisoners who want to pursue vocationally linked courses of study which can provide them with a positive alternative to their continuing life of crime. In a recent survey of the incentives and earned privileges scheme published by the Prison Reform Trust, one prisoner said:
“I am about to start a distance learning course. A friend of mine has done all these courses and is fully qualified and was going to send me all his books but we can’t have books sent in anymore”.
The rationale behind preventing prisoners from receiving books which can help them with educational courses is almost baffling, but the rationale behind preventing prisoners receiving books for leisure reading is also doubtful. I shall explain. In many prisons, inmates can spend around 16 hours a day in their cells, and it can be as much as 20 hours a day. Limiting the opportunity for prisoners to read in these circumstances is unreasonably punitive. Moreover, there is a real risk that it will have an adverse effect on prisoners’ mental health and emotional well-being. At a time when the number of suicides in prison last year reached an all-time high, this is a very disturbing development.
The Government have rightly received strong criticism from many quarters for this policy. In the face of this criticism, the Government have belatedly started to advance an argument which says that parcels containing books could be used as a way of smuggling drugs into prisons. This was not part of the original reasoning which the Government put forward when they established that change. It is true that many prisons have a drug problem and most drugs are brought into prisons—and I speak from experience, having been on a board of visitors in my younger days—by visitors, by prisoners returning from temporary release and by a minority of offending prison staff. It is noteworthy that the Prison Officers’ Association—a tough body which is as concerned as anyone about drugs in prisons—has said that attempts to smuggle drugs in parcels are rare and that the systems for security checks on parcels were working well before the ban was introduced. The Government’s argument therefore does not stand.
I hope that the Government will think again and acknowledge that they have made a mistake in prohibiting prisoners from receiving books from their families and friends. It is not too late to reverse this change, which is likely to worsen behaviour in prisons and increase reoffending rates.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for the opportunity to talk about the importance of books within our culture.
Proper contact with books starts in the home or in schools, and if not in the home then it should certainly begin in schools. My daughter, who is now nine, has been lucky in the two primary schools she has been to—one private, one state—in that they both have decent libraries and librarians, one full time, the other coming in twice a week. But more than this, in both cases the library is located at the geographical centre of each school, not off to one side where it can be lopped off or forgotten about. It is a place through which children have to pass at least twice a day, and for primary school children, in particular, there is then this immediate contact with books. The Libraries All-Party Group chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, in the title of its recent report put together by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, calls the library:
“The Beating Heart of the School”,
which is exactly what the library should be.
I am not someone who believes that it should be a choice between the internet, e-books or hard-copy books. They all do different things and should complement each other. The internet is great for focused research on a specific topic, up to a point, but a school library enables a pupil to expand their horizons in important, less predictable ways. For example, a good teacher or librarian will say to a pupil, “You’ve read this—now try this”. The adventurous and browsing elements which good school libraries enable are greatly underrated in the development of a child’s interests. Books can and should be at the very heart of this process.
My child is lucky at her state school but, unhappily, this is not the case everywhere. I find it extraordinary that school libraries are not compulsory at a time when we as a society are so concerned about literacy; the link between school libraries and literacy is one of the things which the Libraries All-Party Group report recommends that the Department for Education thoroughly examine. It is clear that there is a crisis, with threats to the continuing existence of libraries and librarians. For example, the DfE school workforce data for England show a reduction of 280 librarians within a two-year period. The report also cites the 2010 UK national survey of school libraries, showing a 7% fall over three years in the number of primary school libraries with library space. The same survey showed that while relatively few primary schools had a designated school librarian, 90% of them accessed support via the schools library services. However, because that is often a traded service to schools, some schools are choosing to no longer use those services when money is tight.
A major problem is the lack of comprehensive data about the number of school libraries and librarians. One of the other recommendations that the report makes is that the DfE should ensure that that information becomes part of the annual data submission for schools. Nevertheless, the current evidence, however patchy and anecdotal, suggests that this situation is continuing to worsen.
A good school library should be represented in all areas: fiction, non-fiction, arts and sciences. Art books have traditionally had a special place in school libraries, in part because of their visual immediacy, and art teachers continue to use books as a vital resource in classes. This raises another issue: libraries need to be kept up to date. In the case of art, this means purchasing catalogues of new exhibitions. As the National Society for Education in Art and Design told me this week, “It is almost a given that teachers will supply their own up-to-date art books in schools”. Indeed, one teacher told me that she has spent more than £500 a year on visual resources, such as books, DVDs, posters and art magazines. It is admirable that art teachers are so passionate about their subject and their pupils’ engagement to make these outlays—if, of course, they can afford to do so— but it is a sad reflection on the amount and system of school funding that libraries or departments cannot purchase these books that can then be made available to pupils in the long term.
Every pupil at primary and secondary school level deserves access to a good school library. I hope that the Government will take steps to reverse the current trend and ensure that this becomes a reality.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, when I saw this debate going down, I thought that it would be a good idea to make a speech. Indeed, one of my noble friends said, “Why don’t you speak about books, you can talk about dyslexia again”. Looking at this, I realised that my attitude towards books is not quite the same as other people’s because I am severely dyslexic. I have had access to much of the heavier, deep literature of the 19th century in an audio format. What is a book? I had a think about it. It is not a piece of paper but a pile of knowledge either edited or put together in a whole. That is my attitude towards it.
The audiobook fulfils that function of knowledge. True, having someone who reads it well is a help but it still fulfils that function. It brings things together and allows you access to knowledge. Whether or not we like it, in our society there is a great deal of snobbery about books. Anybody who does not have access to a book or who does not read is regarded as below the salt intellectually. Regardless of whether or not you understand the words that you read, reading them is regarded as a great thing.
The new format, the audio component, has been incredibly popular for a long time. The growth of the audiobook started in the 1970s and many of us have lots of audiobooks that we are now told are fit only for recycling because they are on tape—maybe that is just in my household. But the idea that a book can be accessed in various formats is one that we should take care of.
On the subject of libraries, the huge amount of effort that goes into them to make sure that literature is in audio format—in most libraries—is something, in the accessing of literature, to which I believe that the Government should pay attention. The link between being literate and accessing literature is no longer absolute. You do not need the intermediary of another person to read to you; the capacity to get at it is there. In our society, that is very important. It is an asset to everything else that you do.
On emerging digital technology, the idea that you can access any book via these means is now a reality. It affects many of the ways in which we have been assisting people who have learning difficulties or sensory impairment. I hope that the construction and control of the digital world, and the interrelated way in which we reward people who produce books, are brought into the whole discussion about books. If there is intellectual snobbery around books, it is because this is how we have conveyed ideas, particularly complicated ones, to our society.
I hope that when my noble friend replies he pays some attention to this and shows us how we are going to make progress. We should not ignore that part of it, and my noble friend did not do so when she started this. She said that a book in a digital format is probably easier to access straight away than one in written format—you can still do it but digital is easier. If we make sure that is worked in, we will expand the basis of ideas, discussion and thought. We may even be able to remove the exclusion of those who have bad technical reading skills.
Literacy may be a value to society, but the idea of study, knowledge and the interaction of knowledge is more valuable to society again. Looking at the way new technology works, we can expand the basis of those who can get into a book—that lovely package of ideas and thoughts, good or bad, well done or not. We now have the capacity within society to make sure everyone can access this. I hope that when my noble friend replies he will have given some thought to how audiobooks and e-books can be made more accessible to society as a whole.
Lord Popat (Con)
If you cannot be here at the beginning of the debate, you cannot speak in this gap period. My apologies.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for tabling this debate and for giving us the opportunity for a very thoughtful and passionate discussion about an issue which we all take very much to heart. Unlike some of the debates that I have to speak on, I very much enjoyed doing the preparation for this one. Noble Lords have identified so many ways in which books can be life-changing. They can inspire, educate, amuse, challenge and elevate. For me, reading books is special precisely because it is a one-to-one personal thing and cannot be replicated. What you take out of a book is very different from another person reading the same one. I cannot imagine a world without books.
In the short time available, I will mention three threats which will affect the centrality of books in our lives. First, nothing epitomises better our understanding of the importance of books in society than our fantastic library services, where access to books is free. We should be proud of the fact that our library network has flourished for more than 150 years and remains unrivalled in the world. This free access has been embraced by working class movements from the moment that the printed word became mainstream and I am very pleased that, for example, the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester is still going strong. Books became vehicles for big ideas and social visions as well as new ways of thinking about truth and beauty. I can still remember the thrill of getting my first library card as a child and the excitement of the weekly visits to choose a new book. The thrill of having and holding that book felt like a rite of passage into a secret adult world.
It is, therefore, very frustrating to hear the extent to which the service is under threat at the moment. UNISON has estimated that nearly 500 libraries are being closed, privatised or run by volunteers on a reduced service. The truth is that once that service is closed we will not get it back and another celebrated feature of our cultural heritage will be gone for good. What steps is DCMS taking to ensure that a comprehensive network of libraries is retained so that future generations can benefit from access to the civilising power of books in the way that we have done?
Secondly, the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, talked of all the positive developments in book reading but, sadly, the size of the printed book market slumped in 2013 to an 11-year low in terms of both volume and value. As she pointed out, many much loved independent bookshops are closing around the country, with almost 550 going out of business in the past 10 years. This has to be a concern. We know of at least two main reasons for this: first, as noble Lords have pointed out, the domination of online purchases through Amazon; and, secondly, the growth of the digital e-book market in which Amazon also has a major hand via the Kindle. It already controls 41% of all book sales in the UK.
I do not pretend that there are any easy answers to these trends but there have to be deep concerns about intellectual property and diversity when a single operator can become dominant in the market in this way. Already, there are worrying signals. It is alleged that, in renegotiating its contract with independent UK publishers, Amazon is now insisting on the right to print books itself if publishers fail to provide adequate stock. Can the Minister say whether any discussions are taking place to protect us from exploitation by this market dominance? As I think the noble Baroness said, should not this issue be referred to the competition authorities? Would it benefit from a Europe-wide investigation?
Finally, we face the challenge of the reading habits of the next generation. We know that the incidence of children reading regularly for pleasure is more important than either wealth or social class as an indicator of success at school. However, alarmingly, just over a quarter of children in a National Literacy Trust survey said that they read outside school, and one in five said that they were embarrassed to be caught with a book. I suppose that is the opposite of the snobbery to which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, referred. Even more alarmingly, a survey in 2011 showed that three in 10 children in the UK do not own a single book of their own, with boys being even less likely to own a book than girls. The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, made a passionate case for school libraries. I think that is part of the solution. However, it is clear that, without a better education strategy, we are in danger of losing the civilising impact of books for good. Therefore, I would be grateful to hear from the Minister whether the department has a book strategy. What are its plans for extending the love of reading? How does it plan to protect our future access to the freedom of ideas contained in all the great works of fiction and non-fiction?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate. It has been an exceptional one which has highlighted how books are central to all our lives. Like all speakers in the debate, I come to it as a great supporter of books and, indeed, bookshops. I am afraid that I probably have far too many books cluttering my house but they are much loved and much enjoyed. This came to me very vividly when I saw a photograph in the newspaper only last week of a man in Ukraine rescuing his books from his burning house. I also reflected on how totalitarian regimes have suppressed and destroyed books, fearful of the power that they represent. Dreadful massacres have, alas, often been accompanied by the destruction of books. The dark age and destruction of civilisation that, alas, our continent has seen all too much of, contrasts with the age of the enlightenment that is represented by the book.
Books at their best are a source of information, knowledge, thought and pleasure for all age groups. As my noble friend Lady Miller said, they cross international boundaries and promote understanding and tolerance. My noble friend Lord Norton referred particularly to free speech. The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, referred to the unique role of books in his thought-provoking speech. Unlike him, I do not see this age as marking the beginning of the demise of the book. I think that we will value books increasingly as we go through the technological revolution and that many people will continue to treasure them. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, referred to the challenge and elevation that books bring to us. Indeed, I think that books for children have a special significance. They undoubtedly transform the life of a child and thereby contribute to the shaping of our society in the future. The noble Baroness was right to talk about the excitement and thrill we experience when we first start reading and continue to do so.
My noble friend Lord Norton referred to how essential reading is. Its development should be nurtured from an early age. Parents, family members and the home environment are essential to the early teaching of reading and in fostering a love of books. Clearly, there are parts of the community where that does not happen, and therefore schools are essential in developing the habit of reading books. The Government are committed to encouraging all age groups to read more.
A number of noble Lords referred to the curriculum. The new national curriculum for English aims to make sure that all pupils develop the habit of reading widely and often both for pleasure and for information. Teachers are encouraged to promote a love of reading and to inspire their pupils to choose and read books independently for challenge, interest and enjoyment. The Department for Education has strengthened the English curriculum and the support offered to schools to help children. There is now a phonics screening check for six year-olds and a greater focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation, with a new test for 11 year-olds, along with a strengthened requirement in GCSEs to use accurate spelling and punctuation. There is increased support for pupils in Year 7 who have not achieved level 4 in reading at key stage 2, as well as a greater focus on reading for pleasure, requiring pupils to study a range of books in order to develop a lifelong love of literature. All children deserve to be taught a rich curriculum that encourages extensive reading both in and out of school. The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, referred to school libraries. I agree that the library should be at the heart of the school and well placed to help provide a love of reading. The Government fully support school libraries. It is a matter of choice for the head teacher, but we very much encourage the part that school libraries play in schools.
Adult literacy must also be addressed. BIS supports a wide range of different and flexible types of provision so that adults can learn in the way that suits them. This includes learning in the workplace, in community settings and through traditional college courses and using technology and online learning. BIS is ensuring that good-quality English and maths provision is at the heart of traineeships and apprenticeships to put people in a better position to take up an apprenticeship or other job. It will be piloting a new scheme supporting 18 to 21 year-olds on jobseeker’s allowance to ensure they can improve their English and maths to help them find and stay in a job. In addition, it is offering bursaries of £6 million in 2014-15 for maths, English and special educational needs teachers to attract more graduates. It is terribly important that we ensure that, in looking after children and young people, we also think about provision for adults so that their reading skills, and therefore their opportunities to read books, are much enhanced.
Outside the school curriculum and adult learning, a number of organisations that receive public funding, such as the Reading Agency and Booktrust, also deliver programmes to children and adults. The Reading Agency receives public funding from Arts Council England and runs a number of programmes to support people and develop an interest in literacy. Its programmes are targeted at specific age groups. For children, this includes the summer reading challenge, chatterbox and reading activists programmes. For adults, programmes include the six-book challenge and reading groups for everyone. All these programmes are developed and run in partnership with public libraries.
Booktrust, a UK-wide charity, is receiving £6 million this year from the Department for Education to assist delivery of a number of programmes aimed specifically at getting parents or carers reading to their children and to build children’s own love of reading. Its initiatives include the national flagship programme, Bookstart, which gives free books to all children at two key ages before they start school. This means around 3.8 million books are distributed to children up to the age of four. Booktrust delivers its programmes in partnership with children’s centres, health visitors, schools and local authorities.
Let us not forget the important contribution of the National Literacy Trust. The trust is a national charity dedicated to raising literacy levels in the UK. It works to improve reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in the UK’s most disadvantaged communities with the focus of its work on families, young people and children. Only last week, the trust unveiled new research revealing that children’s enjoyment of reading had increased for the first time in eight years. The latest figures show that 53.3% of children enjoy reading. However, that is not the sort of figure that we should be satisfied with. We obviously all have much more to do in this regard.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, quite rightly referred to the importance of public libraries. The service has a central role to play in spreading the book-reading habit and provides access to a range of free reading material. It is indeed a treasure house of all kinds of books. There remains—I do not deny it, and indeed none of your Lordships will do so—the issue of the gravity of the economic situation in this country, but we still have a strong library service in England, with some 3,181 public libraries. Those libraries remain very popular and a large number of people visit them annually. There were 238.9 million physical library visits and 222.4 million book issues in 2012-13 in England. This is a service that is not just a repository of books in the traditional paper form. The public library service is adapting, as it should, to the changes in digital technology, and we have seen the number of e-books being issued increase by 80% in recent times. My noble friend Lord Addington referred to audiobooks. These are available and can be accessed from public libraries. Moreover, the public lending right was recently extended to the loan of audiobooks as well as e-books.
I was particularly struck by what my noble friend Lady Miller said about the book trade. The statistics for the UK show that book clubs, festivals and so on comprise the firmament of the love of books and of reading. The extraordinary success of book festivals is an indication of the place of the book in our national life. My noble friend also raised a number of points about copyright, and indeed my noble friend Lord Younger would wish me to stress how strongly the Government support the efforts being made by the creative industries to simplify the licensing of copyright material through the Copyright Hub. In terms of progress, phase 1 of the hub was launched in July last year and provided information for those seeking copyright material. Much work needs to continue on that, but because it is a detailed subject, perhaps I may write to my noble friend.
As I have said, the Government fully recognise the importance of authors, and this is why it is so helpful to extend the public lending right to e-books for onsite lending. We have a problem, because of current EU copyright law, about remote lending at this time, but that is also a work in progress. Although I will write more fully, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and my noble friend Lady Miller raised the issue of Amazon. This is of course a matter for the Competition and Markets Authority, but there is more that I would like to say on that.
My noble friends Lady Miller and Lord Dholakia mentioned books in prisons. I will write more fully on this subject, but I will say that the Government have not banned prisoners from having access to books. There is library access for every prison, and indeed prison library budgets have been protected. Moreover, as has been said, prisoners may also use their own funds to buy books. The Government’s policy is about restrictions on sending items into prisons, not specifically books. There have always been restrictions on what can be sent into a prison, and this policy simply seeks to ensure that there is greater consistency across all prisons in terms of their security. However, I will write more fully about this issue.
I was struck by what is involved in the creation of a book: the writing, the production, the author, the publisher, the literary agent, the printer, the illustrator and the photographer. All these are part of what make up books, and I am very conscious of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. I looked at the number of books in his entry, and it is very considerable. It is a great privilege to reply to this debate and I wish that we had longer to discuss these issues. I hope that I have been able to set out what the Government, public bodies and charities—I particularly congratulate the charities on the part that they are seeking to play—are doing. As far as I am concerned, a civilised world without books is unimaginable.