Grand Committee
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The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)
My Lords, the hybrid Grand Committee will now begin. Some Members are here in person, others are participating remotely, but all Members will be treated equally. I ask Members in the Room to respect social distancing, which remains in place in Grand Committee. If the capacity of the Committee Room is exceeded or other safety requirements are breached, I will immediately adjourn the Committee. If there is a Division in the House, the Committee will adjourn for five minutes.
Cultural and Education Exchanges
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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The Earl of Clancarty
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the value of cultural and education exchanges for (1) students, and (2) others who may benefit from such exchanges.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, having started my Question by referring to “cultural” exchanges but wishing to focus on educational exchanges, I requested—just to be on the safe side—that the debate be answered by the Department for Education. I am very glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, is here to do so. However, in truth, on reflection, my Question could have been directed in some sense at almost every government department, including, and perhaps especially, the Home Office—I will come back to that.
I first became aware of the term “cultural exchange” in the 1980s, when there was a trend for exchanges of artists between countries. From my time in Sheffield, I remember that there was a huge interest, there and elsewhere, in the culture of countries that are less visited or difficult to visit, including those behind the Iron Curtain or just released from it. Georgia was one such country.
However, one of the things that you quickly observed was how cultural exchange can, at least potentially, get very complicated because the artists concerned have this new, exciting relationship but might also have quite another relationship with their own respective countries—they do not necessarily represent them. One was particularly aware of these undercurrents at the time, even if the wider world then took little notice, at least on our side.
I detect an echo of this today, in a more reverberative way, in the fairly clear unwillingness of our current Government during negotiations to sign up to those aspects of Erasmus+ that they would have been uncomfortable with. Therefore, they could not sign up to Erasmus at all, certain that the schemes would, to the ears of some Brexiteers, have sounded a little too much like an overly cosy relationship at best, and EU propaganda at worst.
My belief is that the reason that the Government dropped Erasmus+ had very little to do with money, as they claim, but everything to do with ideology. Educational exchanges are cultural exchanges and, as with physical borders, this Government are just as keen to control the borders of such exchanges if they feel that their side of the border is in any way threatened. Curiously, they have a very different view of scientific collaboration, with our continuing membership of Horizon Europe, into which we are ploughing large sums of money. This is perhaps ironic, given that science subjects are as much affected by the decision to drop Erasmus+ as any other.
We presently seem to be in a kind of lull between the loss of Erasmus+ and discovering the results of Turing applications. On the plus side, relief has been expressed that something, at least, has been put in place. Also on the plus side is the appointment of the British Council and Ecorys to oversee the scheme, providing both experience and the possibility of a degree of continuity, at least. However, the debit side is long. From what we have heard, Turing woefully lacks the range, depth and ambitions of Erasmus+. The greatest apprehension concerns the potential loss of the links built up over many years by staff and colleges and through associated projects.
One of the major claims for Turing is that it will be global, but figures from 2017-18 show that four out of the five most popular destinations for students are the US—by a wide margin—Australia, Ireland and Canada. Remove the English-speaking countries and France, number 3 on the list and our closest neighbour, becomes the most popular. The language barrier, then, acts to some extent as a disincentive to the majority of UK students. The point here is that emphasising that Turing is to have a global reach only confirms a bias that is already there. Moreover, many universities already have arrangements with other countries, and Erasmus+ itself now reaches beyond Europe. The non-English speaking countries are the ones that really need targeting.
Knowledge of languages, as I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, would point out, is a key factor in deeper cultural exchange, and is, moreover, hugely important for academic and scientific advancement. As someone very interested in the contemporary arts across Europe, I am aware of how much language differences can be a barrier to understanding. Yet, as a number of recent reports point out, language learning in the UK is decreasing. Andreas Schönle, of Bristol University, says:
“A particular concern … is the increasing social divide in foreign language ability. Yet bilingualism opens many doors and fosters social mobility”.
This is an important point to consider, if educational exchanges are also to help the disadvantaged.
In an answer to a Parliamentary Question on 17 June, the Universities Minister wrote:
“The Turing scheme is targeted at all students, particularly the most disadvantaged. While the UK was part of Erasmus, the most privileged were 1.7 times more likely to benefit from studying abroad”.
I ask the Government: what is the evidence base for that statement, and are they referring only to UK students?
A major intention of Erasmus+ is to help the less well-off, and there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence to support its effectiveness in this respect. A 2019 survey of 31 colleges by the Association of Colleges found that three-quarters gave that programme full marks for benefit to their institution. How will the Government monitor their intention to help the disadvantaged through study abroad, particularly in Europe, where post-Brexit logistical difficulties may well deter many, including the disadvantaged? Perhaps a better measure of success would be in absolute numbers, rather than ratios.
An interesting aspect of what has happened since the announcement about Erasmus has been the divergence in terms of opportunities available to students and others within the UK, across England and the devolved nations. The £65 million promised by the Welsh Government in March for the period 2022 to 2026 is not just an influx of money; it is an attempt, alongside Turing, to restructure opportunities according to the Erasmus+ model, and not to lose out on the partnerships that have already been built.
The press release, rather pointedly called “New International Learning Exchange programme to make good the loss of Erasmus+”, has this to say:
“The Programme will provide funding to enable students, staff and learners across universities, Further Education and Vocational Education and Training, Adult Education, youth work settings and schools to undertake a period of structured learning or work experience overseas, as well as enabling strategic partnerships … A fundamental principle of the programme will be reciprocity. Where necessary, the programme will fund costs related to the inward mobility of learners, teachers and young people from partner organisations abroad. This will enable existing partnerships which have been built up under Erasmus+ to continue and help to create new ones”.
Quite simply, Wales is trying to recreate Erasmus+. Scotland has said it wants Erasmus+ back, and Northern Ireland looks as though it will get both Erasmus+, courtesy of Ireland, and Turing. Meanwhile, England, without the direct political representation that could make the case for itself, as is increasingly true on so many matters, is left having to make do with Turing on its own, with no promise of further development of that scheme.
I have some other questions. The applications for Turing have now closed, so when will the Government publish detailed statistics, including the educational establishments participating, the number of participants involved per country, and the numbers per type of exchange? How will they monitor the effectiveness of Turing, and what criteria will they use? Will they commit to a longer cycle of funding? Will they, as Wales has decided to do, expand the scheme to take advantage of the links that already exist, and include other types of exchange, as well as the staff trips that so many colleges, including further education colleges, have, through Erasmus+, found so valuable in developing new ideas?
Will Turing be expanded to include partnerships and collaborative projects, such as the skills sector partnerships, crucial to the identification of emerging skills gaps across Europe, including gaps in digital skills? For so many current projects simply to be dropped through the loss of Erasmus+ would surely be a massive waste and a blow to educational development in this country—not to mention the jobs that would be lost. Will Turing reintroduce reciprocity in funding? That would be a key aspect of any claim for it to be a viable cultural exchange programme. I look forward to the Government’s response.
Finally, with regard to school trips from the EU, it is, again, the obsessive need to control our borders—we come back to the Home Office—that has led to the passport and visa changes on 1 October. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said in the House on 9 June that this would not lead to a fall in trips to the UK, and the Minister here today may back that view up, but the people we should all listen to are surely those who run the relevant businesses. The Guardian reported on 4 June the trip organisers’ view that there might be up to 375,000 fewer trips. The noble Baroness’s response —that the Government were bringing the regulations into line only with those for non-EU countries—was disingenuous, because within Europe the EU identity card is used as a passport, while on both sides the loss of the list of travellers scheme will mean the cancellation of trips, because some students will not be able to participate.
It will be the less well-off students who lose out—the opposite of what the Government claim they intend to achieve on our side with the Turing scheme. Will they monitor what effect these actions have on the number of school trips from Europe? If the numbers do fall, what effect will that have on the economy, including that of cities such as Canterbury, which depend so much on education?
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I just want to thank the noble Earl for introducing this debate. It is not the first time we have talked about this matter. The last time I spoke to it was on 9 June in the Chamber, when the Home Office was dealing with it. I simply want to say that because I was foolish enough to think that the existing arrangements that allow people to come from schools in Europe might be extended to pupils anywhere in the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is a perfectly lovely woman, rapped my fingers and slapped my wrists and made me aware of my own ignorance on such matters—whereupon I undertook to find out whether such school groups on collective passports can continue to enjoy the benefits that the noble Earl so eloquently adumbrated.
Those inquiries yielded this fact: the Council of Europe, through a 1961 treaty, holds a reciprocal arrangement—still valid—whereby countries that ratified it are able to use collective passports. Those countries are Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. The Council of Europe has also confirmed that the United Kingdom has expressed no intention to withdraw from the treaty, in which case the collective passport is still valid, the visits can still take place and the fears the noble Earl expressed for poorer pupils can be met. What is to stop us doing it? I hope that the noble Baroness from the Department for Education will not rap my wrists in the same way the Home Office did, and will give us some assurances on this point and on how well they can take the publicity for this forward at present.
Baroness Featherstone (LD) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on what will be a brief but important debate. The Government must up the offer on the Turing scheme so that it becomes the equal or better of Erasmus+. To take away a successful scheme and replace it with a lesser one is unforgiveable. Yes, on the plus side, the new Turing scheme widens the potential destinations from the EU to worldwide; that is a big plus but the losses are greater.
No longer will the scheme include teaching and college staff and youth workers. UK students will still have to pay tuition fees while they are studying abroad and the scheme is funded for only its first year. I am sure that noble Lords more knowledgeable than I am will talk to the advantages, if any, and disadvantages—many—of the Turing scheme.
What I really want to say to the Government, however, is: invest more in our young people. Make sure that we create restless minds and an understanding of culture and cultures other than our own, promote different experiences, and ensure that all young people have this experience and opportunity.
Erasmus versus Turning is but part of a bigger picture, which paints a reductionist attitude to our future by the Government. It is as though they do not understand that the future well-being of our nation rests on the quality of young people’s thinking, understanding, behaviour and ability. These are terrible times, particularly for our young people, and I really fear for their future. We need to show them that we care and that we want the best for them, setting them an example of leadership, generosity, understanding and empathy. For now, however, and for this debate, I will be happy if the Government make the changes that ensure that Turing is the equal or better of Erasmus+.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Earl on securing this debate. I declare an interest as an academic. I have taught, and do teach, exchange students. I also had the benefit of doing one of my degrees in the United States, at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a Thouron scholar.
As we have heard, existing exchange programmes are wholly beneficial for the student, the sending and receiving institutions, the local community and the sending and receiving nations. As a nation, we benefit enormously from overseas students.
I advocate utilising more of the overseas aid budget to fund exchange scholarships. This could be through using aid to allocate scholarship vouchers to developing nations, enabling them to send bright students to study at UK universities. The vouchers would be wholly redeemable at UK higher education institutions. The developing nations would gain graduates who can contribute to the economic well-being of the nation; aid would thus be an investment for the future. UK universities would benefit from having these students, as would local economies where the universities are based. The United Kingdom would benefit from the expansion of soft power, and utilising aid in this way would avoid problems of tracking where the money is going.
We already have some excellent scholarship programmes for overseas students. Expanding substantially what we already offer is in everyone’s interest. I hope my noble friend the Minister will indicate a willingness, at the very least, to discuss the proposal with colleagues and feed back the result of her deliberations.
Baroness Coussins (CB)
My Lords, this year’s language trends survey, just published by the British Council, shows that the pandemic has exacerbated the decline in international opportunities for primary and secondary schools in England. This includes trips abroad, partnering with a school abroad and involvement in cross-cultural projects.
Some 64% of primaries and 38% of state secondaries reported no international activities at all, compared with only 11% of independent schools. These experiences give pupils an opportunity to use the languages they are learning, which helps motivation and access to a different culture. Nearly two-thirds of language students at university say they were inspired by an exchange trip at school.
In addition, the journal Schools Week has reported that “One little-noticed casualty” of Brexit
“is Britain’s lost access to the EU’s ‘list of travellers’ scheme, which lets non-EU migrant pupils travel on school trips without usual visa rules.”
Some pupils now risk exclusion from school trips, with disadvantaged pupils the most affected. Can the Minister comment and raise this with the Home Office?
Problems at school affect languages at university. UCAS figures show a staggering decline in MFL applicants, and one of the main reasons is the end of UK participation in the Erasmus+ programme, which took students to well over 100 countries—not just Europe. Language skills and cross-cultural experience gained during the year abroad are qualities that employers value. Graduates who have spent a year abroad are 23% less likely to be unemployed than those who have not.
The replacement Turing scheme is full of uncertainty. Echoing some of the questions asked by other noble Lords, I ask the Minister to say whether there are any plans to make Turing reciprocal, as Erasmus+ was, and if not, why not; whether there are any plans to continue its funding for more than just one year; and whether its scope will be as broad and inclusive as Erasmus.
Trips and exchanges enhance language learning and benefit the students themselves and their employability and mobility, but also the UK more widely as we seek to redefine our post-Brexit place and influence on the international stage.
Lord Alderdice (LD) [V]
The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and other colleagues have clearly laid out the risks of our young people, especially artists and students, being disadvantaged by the loss of the Erasmus scheme and the difficulties in accessing work and travel visas. I declare my interests at Oxford University, as noted in the register.
However, it is not the particular needs of students and the issues relating to the replacement Turing scheme to which I wish to refer. Before Brexit and Covid, there was already a widespread move away from international and cross-cultural engagement towards nationalism and what one might call community introversion. Like many other problems, this has been exacerbated and accelerated by the pandemic, not only because of the difficulties of travelling but because, when faced with the anxiety created by the risks of travel and engagement with others we do not know well, turning back towards known people, places and activities is only natural.
We cannot therefore assume that, in the post-pandemic era, people will naturally create, or even take up, opportunities to engage with other communities, countries and cultures, despite it being hugely enriching and maturing. We will need to provide extra encouragement and facilities for young people to engage with those in other countries.
There are already networks that could facilitate this with those young people less likely to go to university. I am referring to international networks associated with faith communities—among Christian communities, the Scouting and Guiding movements, the Boys’ Brigade, the Girls Brigade and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme—and those organisations of other faith communities. My early experience of other cultures came through such networks, and the value and connections were maintained long after the visits. They are inexpensive because accommodation is often provided by families associated with the organisations. Can the Minister advise us whether the Government are prepared to consider including such approaches to enable our young people to expand their cultural awareness and experience?
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab) [V]
My Lords, as the noble Earl confirmed, the issue here goes much further than simply school and college cultural exchange visits, although all the points he and others made about the disaster that will follow the lack of Erasmus+ and all the human, cultural and institutional contact that will be lost rang very true, as did the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, about the need for reciprocity.
Many Members of your Lordships’ House have been appalled by the way the Government sold the cultural sector, one of the most important and vibrant sectors of our economy, down the river when the Home Office refused to allow in the EU-UK trade deal a sensible, pragmatic and mutually beneficial visa and associated permits system for those who wish to perform abroad—something that operated successfully since 1972, as many others said.
The noble Lord, Lord Frost, has repeatedly answered questions on this at the Dispatch Box. He continues to blame the EU for the failure to arrive at a deal on this, although all the evidence seems to say otherwise. He has said at the Dispatch Box that, absent a pan-EU- UK deal, bilateral agreements are the way forward, but details are extremely hard to establish. Which countries are involved? Where are we with each of them? What is the timescale? Has the Home Office agreed with the approach? Is it prepared to offer the reciprocal arrangements and visas necessary for EU citizens to visit this country?
As others have said, the Minister has a reputation for openness and transparency at the Dispatch Box. The issue before us is vital to the creative industries. I hope she can give clear and unequivocal answers to the questions I have asked and the others that have been raised today.
Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl) [V]
My Lords, I remind the Committee of my interest as master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. This is an important if brief debate, founded on a simple and important truth: young people, especially students, have their education and personal development enormously enriched by meeting and sharing experiences with people from other cultures and backgrounds, especially if they themselves experience that culture and background too.
Of course, we had a programme that delivered precisely this: Erasmus+, which many noble Lords referred to. In 2019, 30,000 UK students and trainees travelled to all parts of Europe to take up places on the scheme. No less importantly, 17,000 EU students came here. More than 4,000 university institutions across Europe participate in Erasmus. Yet we have thrown it all away, all in search of some kind of little Englander, pure Brexiter mythology.
The Government claim that their replacement Turing scheme will be better and more global, but here is the rub: it is a pale shadow of Erasmus. The UK Government are putting in less money than the EU put into Erasmus just for the UK. Universities up and down the land are already doing exchanges across the globe. It is not either global or EU; it has been, up to now, both, but no more. This is a tragedy for our young people. We have thrown away access to the largest, most active and best-developed exchange scheme in the world. Our country and our life chances are diminished by this decision.
Baroness Quin (Lab) [V]
My Lords, like the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, who introduced this debate, I urge the Government to have a cross-party, cross-departmental approach to address the issues being raised today, particularly those involving the Home Office. For a number of years now, I have had a link with a school in the suburbs of Paris, in a disadvantaged area, where an inspirational teacher has done so much to open the eyes of her pupils to other countries and cultures. Every year, she has brought a class over to London, sometimes just for a day, to learn about Parliament and our system of government. The Home Office’s recent announcements seem to have cast a pall and caused doubt about whether these visits can continue, particularly when they involve pupils from disadvantaged and least prosperous backgrounds. My noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port put some very interesting points to the Minister, and I hope she can be reassuring about the continuation of such group and class visits in her reply.
The other issue I want to raise is the au pair system. It allowed opportunities for young people to learn our language and become familiar with our culture while being part of a family. However, the system no longer functions as far as our European neighbours are concerned, given that, under the Immigration Rules, au pairs now come under the category of skilled workers who need to show that they will earn £20,000 a year to be admitted. Au pair agencies across the continent have reported drops of up to 90% in applications as a result, with many French newspapers carrying articles deploring the Home Office’s stance, which is seen as yet another way in which the Government seem intent on portraying Britain as an unwelcoming country. Will the Government think again very carefully about these two issues—school visits and the au pair system—and come up with a much more generous and welcoming policy?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, given the time limit, I will focus on the student part of this debate, particularly in higher and further education. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for securing this debate.
I pay tribute to the many contributors to the session of the Westminster Higher Education Forum on the Turing scheme, which I chaired last week. They are too numerous to name individually, but much of what I am about to say draws on their thoughts. There was universal agreement that the Turing scheme is far inferior to the Erasmus+ scheme that it half-heartedly replaces, that we had by international standards, even under Erasmus, a low number of students going to study abroad and that that level is sadly likely to decline. When we are thinking about our productivity, international competitiveness and quality of life, that is a serious disadvantage as the academic and social benefits of studying overseas and having contact with overseas students and academics is well documented.
It is clear that 100% of students would benefit from cultural and educational exchanges. It is obvious that not 100% will be in a position to travel overseas, so we need a far more creative, flexible, effective and better funded scheme than Turing as currently structured, particularly one that brings foreign students and academics here. We need to give home students the opportunity to benefit from classroom and informal exchanges with overseas students and staff as a practical alternative and cheaper method to ensure that crucial contact. We need stable, steady funding, not based on competition. There are all kinds of reasons for that, one being that when students are considering which institution to attend, they need to know what that institution will be able to offer throughout the course in terms of international exchanges. We need to involve students and academics at all levels. This should be part of our efforts to offer reparations to the global south for our previous damage.
We also need to see Turing covering virtual exchanges. An excellent example I came across is called the Australia- Indonesia Co-operation for the Preservation of Underwater Cultural Heritage. It saw students and academics from across the archipelago joining Australian counterparts to explore an area of work which is, as yet, little developed in Indonesia to the benefit of all. We need something much better than what we have now.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for introducing this debate, as we too often take for granted the impact of living in another country or another culture. Perhaps the Covid pandemic has helped to highlight how much we have all missed the value of cultural and educational exchanges, as international travel has been so curtailed.
As my children were growing up, I recall the pen pals they each had: another secondary school pupil abroad, to help improve their French skills. The excitement of the visit when the pen pals would finally meet, and each child would play host in showing off their hometown before a return visit, had a great impact on their lives and their understanding of other cultures.
I have also been lucky enough to see first-hand the benefits of the Rhodes scholarship, which was first awarded in 1902 and is perhaps the most prestigious international scholarship programme, enabling young people from around the world to study at Oxford University. A great-nephew and a great-niece have been awarded this scholarship in recent years—the latest, Freya Willis, arrives this September to take up a place at Oxford to study gender, race and political economy in care work. In each of these cases, we can see how much an individual brings, learns and shares of their culture and ours. We are all the richer for the experience.
I must comment that I had a lot to do with au pairs in the days when my children were young. The points just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, are important. I look to the Minister to assure the Committee that visas, where required, will be easily available so that these exchanges may continue long into the future.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)
My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Earl on securing this debate. I am going to speak about school trips from abroad. My younger daughter is a schoolteacher at a small rural lycée in the Sarthe region. She has lived there nearly 28 years and has a French husband and three children, who have British and French nationality. As a result of Brexit, she has become a French citizen.
Every other year, travelling by Eurostar, my daughter used to lead a party of her 16 to 18 year-old students to visit London. There were never fewer than 21 in the party; the largest group had 43. Typically, they stayed for five nights at a youth hostel in Canada Water. During the week, they visited all the major museums in London, the Cabinet War Rooms, Roman London, the Houses of Parliament, Camden Town, the National Gallery and much more. A lot of what they visited reminded them of the common history and close links of friendship between the people of France and the United Kingdom. I asked my daughter: what was the value of the visits? She said, “It’s hard to put into words how much it gives them. So many have barely left the region. So many have never taken the train before. The majority come from simple backgrounds with few opportunities for travel. Going to London is just such an amazing experience for them”.
The visits have now stopped and French schools are turning to Ireland instead as an English-speaking destination. A major problem is the British refusal to accept the French identity card, as almost none of the students holds a passport. The disappearance of the European health insurance card from the UK is another major obstacle.
Open-mindedness, cultural and linguistic enrichment, the building of character and increased independence and confidence: that is how my daughter describes what the visits give her pupils. The UK is now barely offered as a destination, so future generations of international pupils are being deprived of a wonderful opportunity. This is also the case for European and British students, who of course can no longer participate in the wonderful Erasmus programme.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl) [V]
My Lords, I take this opportunity to congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on securing this important debate about the value and benefit of cultural and educational exchanges. I do not think the comparison can be well made between the Erasmus programme and the forthcoming Turing programme, because it is generally felt that Turing is a substandard replacement for Erasmus and replicates only the university element. This means that, in many instances, it is not available across the board to lots of young people who have been able to avail themselves of the Erasmus programme.
In Northern Ireland, young people will be able to avail themselves of Erasmus with the help of the Irish Government. However, to evaluate fully the benefits and value of such exchanges, I talked to young people, youth workers and teachers. They told me that the importance of the programme is that it develops personal, professional and academic attitudes; broadens horizons to understand and appreciate other cultures; develops cultural awareness and open-mindedness; improves and enables the gaining of new language skills for use in future workplaces; boosts employability opportunities through a broadened CV; and gains and gives new perspectives and understanding, to the benefit of these young people’s degrees. Moreover, youth cultural exchanges provide those who would not normally be able to holiday in continental locations a means of visiting and appreciating other cultures.
I urge the Minister to look at the possibility of regaining and returning to Erasmus+ because of the many benefits gained from it right across the devolved regions and in England itself.
Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]
My Lords, an exchange has benefits of all kinds, both tangible and intangible. Among the tangible benefits, it increases the employability of the individual concerned, makes them familiar with the international markets and tastes of other societies and gives them the capacity to imagine new products and relationships. It also increases their contacts.
However, the intangible benefits are far more important. An individual grows up in a particular culture. We are able to see its strengths and limitations, but they can do so only if they are able to step of their country. However, they cannot step out of their country because there is no cross-cultural Archimedean standpoint from which they can look at their culture and observe its strengths and limitations. The only mini-Archimedean standpoint is another culture. If you look at your culture from the standpoint of another, you get to see its strengths and limitations. In so doing, you acquire a new pair of eyes, a new pair of ears and new sensitivity. This is why I think the word “exchange” is quite appropriate. You exchange—you give up your old self and acquire a new one. For all these reasons, an exchange creates a new individual, a new self. Through him, it has an impact on his family and on the social environment in which he lives and functions. It has a transformative effect on the entire community of which he is a part.
I end by asking two or three simple questions of the Minister. First, exchanges are not limited to university students, although they have tended to be thanks to Erasmus+. Exchange can be a lifelong activity, beginning at the age of 15 or 16 and going on for a long time. Secondly, we could change our visa rules and regulations; we cannot afford to be too stuffy about them. Thirdly, of course, there are the ethnic minorities. There will be a temptation to send them to their own countries of origin, which would be counterproductive. We need to devise more imaginative ways. Fourthly, and more importantly, we will need to think of a variety of countries and cultures to which individuals can be exposed. They cannot simply be sent to countries like their own. A variety of civilisations is just as important as a variety of communities.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab) [V]
My Lords, having spent many years in the higher education sector—at Universities UK, with the British Council, on the Fulbright Commission and as chair of International Students House—I have seen the impact and huge benefits of cultural and educational exchanges. Every speaker today has reinforced that, and I am sure that the Minister will acknowledge it.
I will make two points to the Minister. The first is in relation to home students. In a recent report, Universities UK compared the academic attainment and employment outcomes of students who were mobile during their studies against those who were not. It argued that there was a clear correlation between “outward mobility” and improved academic and employment outcomes. This was particularly true—in terms of both graduate- level jobs and earning more money—in relation to disadvantaged and black and minority ethnic students. Yet, despite that great advantage, those students are unfortunately much less represented in the schemes available. Could the Minister say what the Government are doing to ensure that these opportunities are available to all students who can benefit?
Secondly, for international students coming to this country, there are still negative messages, particularly in relation to the visa programme—several speakers have made this point. Will the Minister reinforce the need to be more open and welcoming in our approach to international students coming here for what should be a life-changing experience? Will she act to integrate messages across government departments?
Finally, we should be enabling these students to get out into their local communities, experiencing local activities—not mentioned at all in the International Education Strategy. I hope that the Minister agrees with this and will encourage greater integration, to the benefit of institutions and localities as well as the students themselves.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, if I were to declare all the interests that would be relevant this afternoon, I would go well beyond my two minutes. Therefore, I am minded to give just one: a school exchange transformed my life and, without it, I would not be sitting here today. On 1 April 1984, I went on an exchange—I remember the date because someone put a fish on my back, which is the French equivalent of an April fool. It changed my life because it gave me the confidence not just to speak French but to understand other cultures. I teach European politics and have worked abroad, and this is all thanks to a school exchange.
How many people are being deprived of that in the 21st century? Things that were second nature when I was at secondary school and when your Lordships were at school are now no longer as possible. Surely, if Brexit and “going global” are to mean anything, we need to find schemes that are not just as good as Erasmus or individual schemes but even better, as my noble friend Lady Featherstone said.
Exchanges are about cultural exchange and understanding. They matter for the individual and society, as my noble friend Lord Alderdice pointed out, but they also matter for the economy. What “assessment” have the Government made, in the words of the Question of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, about the impact of exchanges on the economy, individuals and the ability of the FCDO to recruit? If we want the best diplomats, and to engage internationally, surely we need people to have developed linguistic skills. Finally, if the Welsh Government can replicate Erasmus+, why cannot Her Majesty’s Government?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for his introduction to this debate, in which he made a persuasive case for cultural and educational exchanges, underscored by my noble friend Lord Parekh and backed up by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, speaking so persuasively, as she always does, on foreign language exchange and its effect on us. I am also grateful to my noble friend Lady Warwick, who talked about the power of outward student mobility. I hope that the Minister has listened, can respond thoughtfully to them and can give good answers to the excellent questions from my noble friend Lord Stevenson on the creative industries, my noble friends Lord Griffiths and Lord Faulkner on school trips and my noble friend Lady Quin on au pairs. These questions affect the lives of very many people, and they deserve answers.
Brexit did not mean that the UK had to leave Erasmus+—we could have carried on as a programme country or a partner country—but we chose to throw it away, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, put it. Ministers made great claims for their alternative, but the reality is much more modest, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, highlighted very clearly. Turing is very much Erasmus-minus. Theoretically, it has a global reach, but so much about it constrains our students, such as the failure to provide funding for tuition fees. This was not an issue with Erasmus, which was reciprocal, but Turing is not. If another country wanted to send its students to England in a non-reciprocal deal, would the Minister advise English universities to waive their fees? If not, why should they do it for us?
We have heard wonderful celebrations of the Welsh Government’s decision to invest £65 million in an ambitious and genuinely reciprocal exchange scheme. Are Ministers looking to Wales for inspiration? Might the Government think again about reciprocity or tuition fee support?
Unlike Erasmus, support for travel costs is offered only to those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Can the Minister clarify who this is? The Turing website specifies:
“Learners with low household income or low socio-economic status (including those with an annual household income of £25,000 or less)”.
What are the criteria, other than income?
We have heard lots of criticism of the short notice and the short duration of funding. If we cannot have Erasmus, let us at least make sure that Turing is sustainable. That means longer commitment and plenty of notice. Does the Minister agree?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for bringing to your Lordships’ attention the important matter of cultural and educational exchanges. International exchanges in education open up new and exciting possibilities for participants, broadening their horizons, exposing them to new cultures and languages and, by doing so, developing critical new skills—and perhaps even shaping a career, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, outlined.
I agree with the noble Earl that he could have had a selection of government Ministers sitting in my seat this afternoon. Although I will make the utmost attempt to answer noble Lords’ questions, I am afraid I will have to write to noble Lords or ask my colleagues from the Home Office to write on all the specific questions relating to visas. I will not attempt to answer them in the time available or with the information I have to hand.
We agree that there are life-changing benefits to students from having the opportunity to study abroad. The Turing scheme is backed by £110 million, and we will provide funding for 35,000 UK students in higher education, further education and vocational training. The latter two groups have not had much focus this afternoon, and it is important that we make clear that the proportion of funds that Erasmus+ dedicated to these different groups is remaining the same under the new Turing scheme. The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, mentioned schools. Schools can travel abroad for these life-changing educational exchanges from this September.
This pioneering scheme represents a landmark step in developing our vision of a truly global Britain, enhancing our existing partnerships while forging new relationships to provide exciting opportunities for students, who will benefit well beyond their time in education. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Norton for his comments on the other countries we have relationships with. The FCDO already funds a number of Commonwealth and Chevening scholars to come to the UK.
I turn now to the Turing applications. The application period for the first year has now closed, and we are pleased to say that we have had a good number of applications from across higher education, further education, vocational training and the schools sector, indicating a strong national appetite for placements across the globe. We will announce the details of this in the next few weeks, and I will make sure that noble Lords are further updated. We have not seen the decline in applications from these sectors that noble Lords’ comments and fears might have led us to believe, even bearing in mind that during this time many educational institutions have of course been dealing with the effects of Covid.
In relation to further questions from the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, the evidence base for our saying that the most privileged were 1.7 times more likely to benefit from studying abroad was Universities UK International’s Gone International: Rising Aspirations report from 2016-17. Using data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, it stated that 9.5% of students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds were mobile, compared with 5.6% of students from less advantaged backgrounds—so that is where that statistic come from. We will of course evaluate the first year to see whether it has met the aims and outcomes we wanted.
Many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, mentioned that it is just one year of funding. That is because we were given a one-year spending review. There is nothing more sophisticated than that, and we anticipate having a multiyear spending review later this year.
As many noble Lords have outlined, the Turing scheme is not, though, a like-for-like replacement for Erasmus+. We have focused on and prioritised pupils, students and learners to ensure that as many students as possible can benefit. We have focused on those elements, including on widening access to disadvantaged students, as we recognise that they provide value for money. I know that many noble Lords will not agree, but one of the reasons we did not proceed with Erasmus+ is that over seven years, we would have put £2 billion more of UK taxpayer money into the scheme than we would have received out of it.
There were questions from many noble Lords about the effects on foreign tourism and whether there is a decline in school trips, which are relevant to the economy of many areas of the UK. I will raise these matters again with colleagues from BEIS and the Foreign Office and update noble Lords. But the Committee, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, may be interested to know that one of the initiatives from the Department for Education has now helped 38% of all schools. They are part of the self-insurance scheme that the department set up, I believe, under my predecessor, my noble friend Lord Agnew. That scheme is to make it easier for schools to get insurance and protection when they undertake these activities, such as school trips. Of course, we have been much involved in paying out to schools under that scheme when they had to cancel trips. We are doing structural things to help the sector have the confidence to organise those school trips as well, which are important.
We also want to ensure that students have the kinds of opportunities to go to the countries they want to go to, and not be limited by the EU. As many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, have said, the scheme will enable schools and education settings to be global and students to go to a wider number of countries. I understand that well over 150 countries have been suggested in the bids that we have received. Already, five of the top 10 destinations for UK university students who undertake a mobility are outside the EU. Students who have participated in the Turing scheme will, we hope, return to the UK more motivated and independent, with new skills to add to the global job market.
In relation to the specific points raised about disadvantaged students, the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, mentioned the evidence that students with such experiences then do better academically and in employment. Yet under Erasmus, the most privileged students were 1.7 times more likely to participate in study abroad. No young person should be excluded from that kind of opportunity because of their family’s income.
The Turing scheme is designed for everyone but reaches out especially to the most disadvantaged. It should increase the participation of disadvantaged students by asking providers to demonstrate in their application how their project will support widening access. The scheme additionally provides financial support for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, including increased grants for living costs. We are introducing funding for travel costs for disadvantaged students, as well as for extra related costs, which are often barriers to disadvantaged students, such as visas and passports, regardless of the destination.
Finally, we have reduced the minimum duration of higher education outward mobilities compared to Erasmus+ from one term to four weeks; we identified this as a barrier to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. For instance, they may have caring responsibilities or a part-time job alongside their studies. The Turing scheme also provides funding to help meet additional costs for students with disabilities. This is not only to pay the costs of any adjustments needed when they get their destination; we have added on the costs of a preparatory trip that might be necessary for staff to assure themselves that those adjustments have been made before the young person arrives.
Funding is not ring-fenced, therefore providers across all nations of the UK can competitively bid—with no cap on the amount of funding that institutions in each nation can potentially receive. The UK Government intend to deliver a scheme that will see all parts of the UK flourish, by tailoring it to UK needs and targeting promotion on areas which did not previously have many students benefiting from Erasmus+. If I have left any of the definitions in relation to disadvantage unanswered in replying to the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, I will write to her afterwards.
The scheme is demand-led and education providers have the flexibility to form partnerships that will offer the best benefits to their students. Successful applications will also receive funding towards the cost of administering the scheme on behalf of those students. I add for the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that we are the second-most popular HE destination, after the United States, so we are confident of our attractiveness.
UK education providers may use the Turing scheme funding to support mobilities for any student, regardless of their study subject. This is great news for students, including those studying languages—the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, referred to them; she is known for her interest in modern foreign languages—so that they can do exchanges and visit those countries. Obviously, languages provide an insight into other countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, mentioned, and can open the door to travel and employment opportunities. Exchange can enrich the languages curriculum and provide exciting opportunities for students.
We are grateful for the continued role of the British Council, a provider known to and trusted by many noble Lords. It helps us to administer schemes such as UK-German Connection, Connecting Classrooms and the Singapore head teachers exchange programme, all of which help to develop a generation of globally mobile, culturally agile people and professionals across the systems.
The noble Lords, Lord Alderdice and Lord Griffiths, mentioned the youth side of things. Although it is not part of Turing, DCMS is leading a youth review; it was specifically commissioned by the Treasury to do so in last year’s spending review. Within that will be consideration of the opportunities for youth groups outside educational settings, such as the Scouts, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, outlined.
I thank noble Lords for their contributions on this matter. I am aware that I have left many questions unanswered due to the time allowed, but I will seek to answer them. I look forward to working with noble Lords to help to ensure that all disadvantaged people in the UK have access to life-changing international experiences.
I just want to add that I first got on a plane as a result of a school trip. I had never experienced an aircraft before. I did not know what I was doing; I did not know that I could leave my seat on such a vehicle. That was through a school trip. I think we all have testimonies as to how valuable these can be.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)
The Grand Committee stands adjourned until 3.35 pm. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)
My Lords, the hybrid Grand Committee will now resume. Some Members are here in person, others are participating remotely, but all Members will be treated equally. I ask Members in the Room to respect social distancing, which remains in place in Grand Committee. If the capacity of the Committee Room is exceeded or other safety requirements are breached, I will immediately adjourn the Committee. If there is a Division in the House, the Committee will adjourn for five minutes.
Cadet Forces: Funding
(2 years, 8 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lingfield
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the social impact of their funding of cadet forces.
Lord Lingfield (Con)
My Lords, I am so grateful to noble Lords, who have given up their time on the last day of term to discuss the importance of the cadet services. I remind your Lordships of my registered interest as chairman of CVQO, the Cadet Vocational Qualification Organisation, which I shall address shortly.
It is now two years since I last addressed your Lordships on cadets. There have been several significant developments since then, which are worth discussion. However, first, I will praise the extraordinary way in which the cadet services have risen to the challenges of the pandemic. The Sea Cadet Corps, the RAF cadets, the Army Cadet Force, the Combined Cadet Force and the Volunteer Cadet Corps have all offered contact, support and activity for thousands of young people remotely.
Among the many projects of which I am aware, I was particularly impressed by the bands and corps of drums and bugles of the Army Cadet Force, of which I am honorary colonel. Their officers, under the leadership of Colonel Mike Neville, sent out musical scores to hundreds of cadet players, who performed their parts individually in their bedrooms, gardens and kitchens throughout the country. Via the technological wizardry of their adult leaders, these performances were mixed into a number of concerts, of which that from Scotland, with its screen full of young bagpipers, was particularly inspiring. It was especially good to see so many girls taking part. We tend, too often, to think of cadet activities as boy pastimes, yet 34% of cadets are girls and they form an even greater proportion of our bands.
In March this year, I asked a Question of the Minister concerning when cadets will be able to start face-to-face activities again, given that schools were about to resume. However innovative and useful the virtual training programmes such as those I have mentioned are, I hope she reassures me that we will see cadets able to parade once again soon and to attend some regional camps.
Central to our previous debate on cadets was the cadet expansion programme for schools, to which I turn next. It is a joint departmental programme, run by the DfE and the MoD. When it started, I had doubts that co-operation would be easily achieved. I need not have worried, and I pay sincere tribute to officials from both departments for progressing the programme extremely well. The target was to establish enough new Combined Cadet Force units in schools to create a total of 500, and that has been achieved. Around 300 of these are from state schools. The next aim is to grow the number of participating students from around 45,000 to 60,000, it is hoped by 2024, although the pandemic may set this back.
What would the barriers to such an expansion be and what challenges will have to be overcome? Because the majority of current CCF units have been established lately, their roots are rather shallow and their continued existence is finely balanced. Some could find it difficult to survive now that Libor-funded grants have ceased.
Cadet leaders report that four enabling elements can lead to an individual school’s success in building its cadet corps. The first necessity is to identify and incentivise teaching staff to become adult volunteers. Secondly—this is vital—there is a need for a paid, hopefully full-time school staff instructor, or SSI, to support the teachers and other adults involved. The third element is the availability of dedicated regular training from armed services sources to ensure that programmes for young people are up to date, exciting, varied and, of course, safe. I pay tribute to the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, in this area. However, we need the Minister and her colleagues to consider further interim funding, especially for SSIs, if all the new CCF units are to succeed.
There is a fourth element. It cannot be overstated just how much cadets love sea, air or field training, and how much that is exciting and memorable they gain from it. This is especially important for army cadets, who form the majority of school-based units. It can involve live firing on ranges and the use of training areas and camps. The sad fact, however, is that the condition of some of those training sites is very poor. Indeed, one that I visit regularly has changed very little since I first saw it when I was 15. The MoD has, quite properly, had to reduce its expensive holdings of land and buildings, but I hope that the field training needs of cadets and their officers are taken into full account when decisions have to be made about which parts of the defence estate have to be sold off.
Another significant event since our last debate has been the publication, just two months ago, of the results of a four-year research project on the cadet forces from all services, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence. A reading of this, which considers What is the social impact and return on investment resulting from expenditure on the Cadet Forces in the UK?, spurred me to apply for this debate.
The main conclusions of the excellent Professor Simon Denny and his colleagues at the University of Northampton, who conducted the review, are that participation in the cadet experience has very significant and positive impacts on young people—especially, as we have always suspected, on those who suffer “economic and other disadvantages”—and that expenditure on cadet forces is
“a very good use of taxpayers’ money”,
and supports social mobility and social cohesion.
Among the findings of the report are that the joining of a cadet unit often led to improved school attendance, especially for boys and those for whom English is a second language, better behaviour, with consequential better educational outcomes, and improved career prospects. The research also revealed that participation in cadet forces leads to a better ability to communicate and to lead others, to be resilient when a situation is difficult, to work as a team member, to use social skills to achieve positive outcomes, and to accept diversity freely.
For many cadets from disadvantaged backgrounds, there is a real sense of belonging—of being part of a group that is not a street gang. All this is immensely encouraging, and provides an excellent example of the Ministry of Defence’s corporate social responsibility.
The Cadet Vocational Qualification Organisation—the CVQO—directed by Mr Guy Horridge and funded mostly by the Department for Education, has a very special value for cadet training. It enables young people, via their local units, to take qualifications at levels 1, 2 and 3, which add greatly to their employability. Some 12,000 undertook courses—online, inevitably—during the past year.
Teenagers are not the only people to benefit from CVQO’s work. The five cadet forces together have some 29,000 adult volunteers, to whom we own an enormous debt. Of these, last year some 1,300 took CVQO qualifications, of which 126 were at graduate or master’s level. I hope very much to be able to confer their awards at Sandhurst in the autumn.
The first cadet units were founded in about 1860, and had their roots in the rifle volunteer battalions for defence. Their aim was to grow good soldiers. Today, 160 years later, the aim is to grow good citizens, and they all do it extraordinarily well. I hope your Lordships will agree that public money expended on cadets is extremely well spent.
Lord Jones (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for this debate and I acknowledge his most loyal, persistent and influential work for the cadet movement. I declare an interest as president of our superb local sea cadets and the training ship “Tuscan” in Flintshire and a 40-year close connection with 2247 (Hawarden) Squadron ATC. I was also president of the Army Cadet Force Association in Wales for some five recent years. In these matters, one noted the continuing relevance of the reserve.
Our cadet movement is at the very grass roots of our towns and villages, and this is certainly so in my homeland, the lovely land of Wales. In five years, Lady Jones and I attended 15 cadet camps, three per year, across the length and breadth of England and Wales, covering thousands of miles. One saw hundreds of cadets close up. It was instructive, inspiring and informative. One also saw the annual British national cadet rugby sevens championship at Christ College Brecon. Of course, the Wales seven always won. In a packed theatre, the England and Wales annual cadet band concert celebrated the anniversary of Rorke’s Drift with 90 young women and men displaying superb musicianship. It was an event of powerful emotion with the cadets proud of their achievement. The annual national sports meeting showed the advancing numbers and achievements of the many female cadets.
The noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, emphasised the true worth of cadet life. It is truly worth its weight in gold and just a scintilla of MoD gold can prolong the most useful life. For example, prosperity is unevenly shared across Wales. Some former steel and coal communities are still readjusting to fundamental economic and social change, and some communities are just getting by. Here, cadets and their dedicated professional leaders are making a magnificent contribution through, for example, funds for charities, help for pensioners, linking with the high sheriff for remembrance parades and civic service. It helps, it counts and it is acknowledged locally. Cadet life is gift for British youth. When she or he presents for a job with a cadet record of achievement, that CV will always gain a positive response from the prospective employer. Cadet life encourages fitness, teamwork, co-operation, smartness, discipline and confidence. There are certificates, too, and always humour.
Finally, from our steep-sided Welsh valleys, the open central heartland—cefn gwlad—the slatey slopes of the Snowdonian massif and the urban townships of the eastern border, cadet life does great good. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, I hope very much that we might keep it.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for once again drawing the attention of the House to the cadet forces. He is a great champion of cadets and his enthusiastic support is greatly appreciated. I declare an interest as I chair the cadet health check team and my late husband started his brilliant RAF career with the cadets. He had a gliding licence and a pilot’s licence while still at school and always took a keen interest in the cadet force as he progressed up the ranks.
I followed that interest. For some years I have been a member of the council of the Air League which supports air cadets and other young people fascinated by aviation. The Air League offers scholarships and bursaries for flying, gliding, engineering and drones. It aims to change lives through aviation, particularly for disadvantaged and disabled young people, wounded and injured service men and women and now veteran offenders. The Air League’s recent Soaring to Success initiative, in partnership with Barnsley Council in South Yorkshire, saw a pilot project. Some 600 young students aged 14 to 16 attended an event organised by the Air League and a number of aviation and aerospace companies, including British Airways, DHL Aviation and Rolls-Royce. Some then obtained a fully paid short training bursary to participate in an air experience day at gliding clubs in South Yorkshire and the Peak District, nearly 170 were awarded a flying lesson and the most eligible were selected to fly a powered aircraft.
The purpose was not to train young people to be pilots as such, but to cause students to believe that such an achievement was possible and inspire others to do so too. More than 1,000 young people have been involved in the programme so far and we are aiming towards over 3,000 each year in the future. The video of these youngsters was inspirational: the sense of achievement and palpable pleasure from young people unused to achievement or praise made us realise that the social impact of these activities is immense, especially since the driving force is to encourage aspiration and achievement. Of course, the Royal Navy and the Army have similar exciting programmes too.
Our role on the health check team is normally to visit as many cadet meetings and camps as we can. This year, of course, that has not proved possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, indicated, we have been heartened to be invited to virtual meetings to witness the wonderful enthusiasm and engagement of cadets and the inspiring adults who give so much time and energy to ensuring that young people get cadet opportunities. The ingenuity of the activities was mind-boggling, and the cadets responded by turning up smartly in uniform on Zoom and throwing themselves into whatever exercise or activity was proposed.
Of course, many of the most senior military personnel started their careers with the cadets, both men and women, so we always hope that funding is secure, but perhaps the Minister can say something about cadet accommodation, some of which is very substandard and dilapidated.
Our health check team was very grateful to the University of Northampton, which again the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, mentioned, for the independent report on the social impact of the cadet forces, which concluded that expenditure on the cadet forces was
“a very good use of taxpayers’ money that supports social mobility and community cohesion”,
and that particularly for cadets who suffer economic and other disadvantages
“it is very possible that being a cadet is … a key factor that enables them to achieve positive life outcomes.”
Among the benefits the report named were “reduced vulnerability”, for example to bullying and to criminal or extremist organisations, “increased social mobility” and “enhanced employability”. Surely these are all very good things for our young people. Of course, there are benefits for the hard-working adult volunteers who support the cadets. Adults and cadets can now access qualifications. These, too, can be life changing.
I am proud and delighted to be involved with the cadets. I trust, with the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, that they will increase and flourish along with all the benefits they bring to society.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has withdrawn, so I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Morrow.
Lord Morrow (DUP) [V]
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, on securing this debate, following on from Questions on 1 March. I am very encouraged when I see people of the calibre of the noble Lords, Lord Lingfield and Lord West, and other Peers in your Lordships’ House take such an interest in voluntary youth organisations such as the cadet force, which are based on the fine traditions of the British Armed Forces but, of course, are not part of them.
I pay tribute to all those who give up their talents and time in promoting our cadet force. I do not overstate it when I say that it is a wonderful organisation that the whole of the United Kingdom can be rightly proud of. The Government say that it offers challenging and enjoyable activities. This statement could not be bettered.
My remarks will centre on the Army Cadet Force, or ACF, because as a teenager I was a member of the ACF located in a small rural town in the west of Northern Ireland—a town then, in the 1950s and 1960s, with a population of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. It was there, through the dedication and commitment of volunteers, that I learned many important lessons that would stay with me for the rest of my life. The late Captain McAfee, our dedicated senior officer, instilled in all those under his command the importance of living lives that will enhance the lives of others. He sought to make good citizens of us all and in most cases that is exactly what resulted.
The briefing notes provided by the Library state that an independent analysis suggests that the cadet forces
“provide benefits both for participants and wider society”—
something I know to be undoubtedly accurate. The notes continue:
“An ongoing government scheme aims to increase the number of cadet units in state schools.”
I hope this can be extended beyond our schools and into wider society. The unit I was privileged to belong to was not attached to any school but was part of the whole community of that small rural town in Country Tyrone in Northern Ireland.
I encourage the Government to take a closer look at the funding for our cadet forces with a view to investing in more resources and funding. New incentives should be adopted to encourage more of our youth to join the cadets and ensure the future of our voluntary youth organisations. A study by the University of Northampton, in a report commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, concluded that
“expenditure on the Cadet Forces is a very good use of taxpayers’ money that supports social mobility and community cohesion.”
Others have already quoted this. In addition, cadets are able to access the Cadet Vocational Qualification Organisation—known as the CVQO—which can equate to GCSEs; the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, mentioned this.
I conclude simply by saying that cadets provide an excellent and positive return on the expenditure of taxpayers’ money. The benefits of being a cadet cannot be overstated. I look forward to our cadets being fully operative again, subject to the conditions of the pandemic permitting.
Lord Colgrain (Con)
My Lords, I speak as one who has been a member of a school CCF and a university TA regiment. I also spent a short time as a police special constable, so there are no guesses as to where my loyalties lie in this short debate, so well brought by the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield.
My more recent experience came about through a visit to some sea cadets when I was High Sheriff. I was approached by a man and a woman after a cathedral service, asking if I could inspect their charges on the water in a parade thereafter. On the water, I saw two boats being rowed by the cadets. One was a lightweight fibreglass vessel, the other a heavy, wooden, corked lifeboat. Neither was fit for purpose—both were barely usable—but the commitment given to the rowing effort and the enjoyment derived from it was palpable. There were too many sea cadets for places in the boats.
They were then called off the water. After a short while, they all reappeared in immaculate pressed and clean uniforms, and a well-drilled parade took place. My evening finished with a request for help find £2,000 to buy another boat—the most modest financial request to provide a fantastic opportunity for those cadets, and future ones, to feel like valued members of a team and to enjoy a feeling of self-worth.
I mention this visit to illustrate a wider point. The two adults who originally approached me were volunteers who ran this branch of sea cadets with 70 young people, boys and girls, in their charge. “In loco parentis” is no exaggeration. Nearly all the young people were latchkey kids whose parents—they were lucky if they had two—would be working when they came back from school. Without the camaraderie, sense of belonging and palpable pride in being part of such a disciplined and purposeful organisation, they would have been exposed to all the temptations of the drug and gang culture by which they were surrounded.
The most recent figures from the House of Lords Library show that the direct cost to the MoD of the ACF, the ATC and the CCF is a mere £175 million, with indicative benefit figures to society of £479 million—a return that speaks for itself. Furthermore, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, mentioned, a report from the University of Northampton on the social impact of the cadet forces showed significant educational benefits deriving from the CVQO that were, in many cases, potentially life-changing. Enormous value can thereby accrue to those not necessarily talented in the schoolroom, so it is good to note that more than 500 schools have involvement of some sort with cadet forces.
The sadness is that membership figures have fallen—from 130,000 in April 2020 to 120,000 in April 2021—as has the number of adult volunteers, which has fallen from almost 29,000 to 27,500 in the same period. This cannot be put down to Covid-19, nor to government, since all parties have supported the increase in cadet numbers. Anyone who has been closely involved with cadet forces of whatever association can see for themselves the hugely beneficial social impact that they bring about, as I saw with those sea cadets. We must all do whatever we can to encourage making this opportunity available to everyone, as it was to me.
Lord Boyce (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; I have two cadets annually as my Lord Warden cadets. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for securing and initiating this important debate.
There can be no doubt that the sea, Army and RAF cadets are a force for good for our country. I intend to focus mainly on the sea cadets, but much of what I have to say applies equally to their Army and Air Force counterparts. My general point is that they are all invariably a credit to the uniforms they wear and that, over time, thousands of young people who might otherwise have gone astray or not realised their potential have had productive and fulfilling lives as a result of having been cadets.
When looking at youth interventions, there is a perennial problem of whether the difference made is a sustained change to someone’s life into adulthood, and therefore whether it is good value for money. However, earlier this year we saw the publication of My LegaSea: Launching into Life, a report launched by former Prime Minister Theresa May. It involved independent research with 3,000 20 to 90 year-old former sea cadets and found clear evidence of sustained positive change for former sea cadets, long after they left their cadet forces.
The current reopening of society from Covid is leading to an increase in demand without the resources to respond. Children and young people have spent months locked up, so unsurprisingly there is a massive interest in engaging with youth work. Waiting lists are now growing and overall sea cadet numbers are already up by 3% from 1 April. Maybe it is the same for the Army and Air Force cadets. Right now there are increasing funds to kick-start the economy, but nothing is being applied to help kick-start the cadet youth sector in the same sort of way.
As an independent charity, Sea Cadets has been able to innovate to develop new models to reach out to hard-to-reach groups. For example, its On The Water outreach programme will support 1,200 hard-to-reach young people in Liverpool, Birmingham and London in July and August. The programme is pretty well externally funded by trusts, foundations and corporates, such as the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation, the Gosling Foundation and Capita, but if there were some government funding for these sorts of programmes, they could be scaled up substantially.
Across the cadet forces, a massive amount of value is added through volunteers, but the processes are not in place to unlock more volunteering. They are not what is increasingly becoming the norm in youth work: a brief intervention over a few weeks. Instead, adult volunteers work with young people over years to give them the skills they need to face the world. The biggest barrier to expansion is often insufficient adults coming forward. These volunteers provide a remarkable resource. For sea cadets alone, volunteers contribute the equivalent of over £54 million of work per year. The scale of the work of cadet forces would simply not be possible without them.
When thinking about funding cadet forces, it is vital to think about how we can unlock interest in volunteering. Examples of this could include providing tax incentives to employers to make it easier for their staff to volunteer, providing income tax breaks for the volunteer or introducing volunteering leave as a standard practice. Any discussion about the funding of cadets must take into account supporting the whole cadet ecosystem, not just the bottom line.
Lord Mountevans (CB) [V]
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, on securing this important debate. I declare my interest as president of City of London Sea Cadets and a vice-president of the Marine Society & Sea Cadets, the charity that runs sea cadets in the UK. Sea cadets are the Royal Navy’s main MoD-sponsored cadet force, receiving a grant in aid equivalent to 49p in the pound of the total cost of the delivery of sea cadets, with the balance funded by the charity.
We have heard a cascade—a litany—of tremendous tributes to the value and positive impact of cadets. Following the noble and gallant Lord, my case study is also substantively the sea cadets, but I hope I may add some points to our debate.
Three essential elements make the work of the sea cadets so critically valuable at this time. First, it delivers structured youth activity that lets young people try something challenging, but in small chunks and a supportive environment. Secondly, they become a part of the sea cadets community at unit, regional and national levels, cemented by trusted adults—the volunteers. This is particularly important for some of the hardest-to-reach young people, who often lack strong mentors elsewhere. Thirdly, it is all bound up with the customs and traditions of the Royal Navy, with a rank structure helping to encourage ongoing engagement and development, and with the uniform making everyone feel part of something special.
After the last year and a half, structured, well-supported youth work is really important to all young people. The sea cadets, for example, are seeing a substantial upswing in demand as the nation reopens, as we heard from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce. It would be wonderful if some resources could be made available across the cadet movement to help finances.
I will particularly focus on the work of cadet forces in relation to disadvantaged backgrounds, which I have witnessed at close quarters in my City of London unit. The sea cadets have created a system that is truly open to all, irrespective of background. This has paid off, with really strong representation from young carers, looked-after young people, autistic cadets and white working-class students—all groups that can be incredibly hard for youth workers to reach.
The three core themes I mentioned earlier provide a fantastic equalising factor, helping cadets to mix with people from different backgrounds, creating a real sense of unity among young people and reducing so many of the divisions that can lead to longer-term entrenched inequality elsewhere. This is all delivered alongside effective outreach. Noble Lords heard from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, about the On The Water programme, which will be very valuable and offers potential, if we can encourage others to join such activities.
Most importantly, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, mentioned, we know that membership of cadet organisations has substantial impact. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, explained, the findings of the sea cadets’ recent My LegaSea: Launching into Life research report reveal that this is not just a brief, flash-in-the-pan difference for young people; it gets sustained throughout their life, long after they have left, with some of the most sizeable differences for cadets from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As we have heard from some speakers, cadet forces all over the UK are able to provide this intense, high-quality work at such scale only due to their amazing volunteers, whose commitment and talent is truly impressive. However, the backgrounds that they come from are also important, offering role models from the same communities as the young people. Without these volunteers, it would be impossible to deliver this work at scale, and noble Lords have heard what their contribution in hours monetised represents: £54 million a year. It is just as important to think about how we could encourage more volunteering.
This type of long-term intervention with some of the hardest-to-reach young people is critical to help to build back better and avoid the disproportionate impact of lockdown on our most left-behind young people, creating a chasm of inequality and reducing life chances. Providing support to help to scale up this sort of work should be an essential part of responding to this present need.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, unlike every speaker so far, I have no interests to declare in this debate: I was not a cadet and have not had the opportunity to engage with cadets. I am a member of COMEC, the Council of Military Education Committees, through my role in Cambridge, so I have had the opportunity to discuss, to an extent, the role of cadets and OTCs.
Of course, it is very clear that, despite the fact that the MoD partly funds the cadet forces, it is not intended to be a route to membership of the Armed Forces, although for my late friend and my noble friend Lady Garden’s late husband, Lord Garden, there was an opportunity to learn to fly as a cadet. Then, of course, he became a distinguished air marshal, so occasionally there can be a route from being a cadet to the Armed Forces. However, what we have heard so powerfully is that the cadet movement is hugely important in giving opportunities to young people, particularly those who are perhaps less advantaged, to take on challenges in “small chunks”, as the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, put it. These are opportunities to do activities that they would otherwise perhaps not have—particularly the opportunity to be trained in things that will be exhilarating.
I think the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, mentioned the importance of shooting ranges. As a member of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, I, along with other parliamentarians, have had the opportunity to go out on a shooting range and be taught how to shoot by members of the Army. It is very rewarding when you suddenly realise you have got it and managed to hit a target. If I can feel like that in my 50s, what must a young person feel like when they are able to say, “I’m able to do that. That’s a skill I’ve acquired”? There are huge opportunities.
Several noble Lords have assisted the Minister to look at the financial benefits of the cadet forces, but the question asks what assessment the Government have made of the social impact. Have the Government looked at the social impact and to what extent, particularly in the context of 18 months of Covid? What are the Government thinking about ensuring that cadet forces go back to their normal activity? It is great to hear, as my noble friend Lady Garden said, that air cadets are attending Zoom meetings in their uniform and looking smart, but when will they be able to meet again in person? What are the Government doing to ensure that?
Have the Government given any thought to making sure that the new cadet forces formed in schools in the last decade are consolidated? If I read the briefing correctly, about half of school-based cadet forces are recent and are likely to be the most vulnerable. What support is being given to keep them going and, in particular, to support the adult volunteers who are crucial to ensuring that they are really successful?
I pay all tribute to the cadets and to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for bringing this debate. I look forward to the Minister’s answers.
Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for tabling this debate. I was not privileged to be a member of a cadet force at school, but when I went to university I joined the university air squadron and it shaped my life. The experience, at a young age, of excitement and the military environment shapes one in a special way, and my whole life has related to that.
On the last day before recess, it is a pleasure to take part in a debate on such a positive subject matter. We on the Labour Benches strongly support the opportunities that the cadet force offers our young people to socialise and learn skills, including leadership, resilience and team- work. For reasons that are only too clear, it has been a particularly difficult, disruptive and isolating past 18 months for our young people. Have government departments provided any support to the cadets to ensure that activities can go ahead in a Covid-safe way for the cadets and volunteers involved, and that organisers are supported in responding to changes in guidance and restrictions?
Covid-19 has clearly been difficult for cadets in limiting their access to face-to-face activities. Can the Minister give the Committee an overall assessment of the impact of Covid-19 and what plans the MoD has to ensure a rapid recovery?
I once again put on record our thanks to the volunteers who give up their precious time to make cadets possible. I am sure the Minister agrees that it is rare to read a report that says that government money is being so wisely spent. The report from the University of Northampton on the social impact of investment in cadet forces is extremely welcome. Our key concern should be ensuring that as many young people as possible access these opportunities. As other noble Lords mentioned, the report cites that
“The impact is particularly strong for those cadets that suffer economic and other disadvantages.”
I ask the Minister about the funding announced in April for the expansion of cadet programmes in state schools: what specific strategic planning will go into ensuring new places are made available to children from disadvantaged backgrounds?
The report also focuses on the life-changing potential of the vocational qualifications that can be accessed through the Cadet Vocational Qualification Organisation. The University of Northampton suggests that for the 2018-19 cohort, these qualifications added value in the region of £27 million for girls and £82 million for boys. This is welcome, but one cannot help but notice the discrepancy in impact due to the smaller number of girls who accessed these opportunities. What is being done to increase the participation of girls in the cadets? I look forward to the Minister’s reply on these points and those raised by other noble Lords.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Goldie) (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lingfield for securing this debate and pay tribute to him in his role as chairman of the CVQO—the Cadet Vocational Qualification Organisation. I pay tribute to the fine work that organisation does to ensure that the skills individuals gain through cadet forces are recognised and rewarded. I also thank other noble Lords, not just for their valuable contributions but for the excellent support that many of your Lordships provide to the cadets. I and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, felt humbled listening to this. I am afraid that I too cannot claim a direct involvement—although part of my role as a deputy lieutenant is generic support for the cadet movement.
We all know, instinctively, that being a cadet provides outstanding opportunities and that the cadet forces offer young people the chance to develop key life skills. That is right across the United Kingdom, as the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, so properly and rightly observed. Cadets are not just a fine component but a superb representation of the United Kingdom.
In the MoD and within CVQO, we wanted to go beyond the anecdotal and not only look holistically at the benefits the cadet experience provides for young people but assess the impact that the cadet forces have on society as a whole. So in 2016, the Ministry of Defence and CVQO commissioned the University of Northampton to carry out a four-year longitudinal study, the final report from which has just been published. A number of noble Lords referred to that report.
Thanks to this excellent research—again, I pay tribute to all those who worked on it—we now have clear evidence that being a cadet is not only fun and engaging, as many of your Lordships graphically and interestingly described, but transforms lives by improving social mobility, success in education, well-being and career prospects. The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, gave a marvellous illustration of the varied activity possible. She also asked about cadet accommodation. Having looked through my briefing, I have no specific information but I undertake to investigate and to see what I can find out.
I was delighted to learn of the positive conclusions from this fascinating report. It emphasises the importance of the cadet programme for young people and the adult volunteers, and shows that participation in cadets leads to greatly improved communication and leadership skills, self-discipline, personal resilience and self-confidence. It can be clearly seen that many of the values which we recognise in our Armed Forces can benefit so many of our young people, with skills that they can rely on well into adult life. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, spoke of that. This, for me, is one of the biggest benefits of the cadet movement. It is why we continue to invest in sustaining the cadet forces in the community, while seeking to increase the opportunities available to pupils in schools in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the country.
One of the key findings from the report concerns the concept of self-efficacy—or, as I like to call it, believing in and empowering yourself. That is what it means: it refers to an individual’s confidence, motivation and self-esteem, and their belief in their ability to exert control over their environment. Generally, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds score lower than their peers on measures of self-efficacy, but the research revealed that there is no statistically significant difference in self-efficacy between cadets from disadvantaged backgrounds and more fortunate cadets from more affluent backgrounds. That is significant. It suggests to me that cadets who suffer economic and other disadvantages have improved self-efficacy because of the activities they undertake in the cadet forces and the people they meet as a result of that.
A number of your Lordships rightly identified the specific effects of being a cadet, as noted in the report. The report clearly demonstrates how our cadet forces benefit young people by broadening their horizons and unlocking their potential. As a result of participation in the cadets, young people experience positive outcomes including improved mental and physical well-being. It shows further that participation in the cadet forces develops many important attributes, such as the ability to lead a group of people to achieve an objective—many of us in political parties might envy that attribute—the resilience to keep going when things go wrong and the ability to work as a member of a team, sharing views and helping others. The noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, highlighted these benefits.
An important element of being a member of the cadet forces is an understanding that people are not all the same, and that leads to an acceptance of diversity. The report disclosed that participation in the cadet forces can also reduce a young person’s vulnerability and increase their resilience to bullying and extremism. Cadets form an important part of the communities they represent, with membership helping to forge inclusive community links across ethnic, religious and socio- economic dimensions. The noble Lord, Lord Jones, eloquently exemplified that with the support that he and his wife have been giving to that activity in Wales.
Society as a whole is also a beneficiary of cadet activity. My noble friend Lord Colgrain alluded to this. The research shows that participation in the cadet forces is associated with increases in school attendance and improved behaviour, particularly for those who are economically disadvantaged. It is also linked to a reduction in school exclusions. This can lead to enhanced employability and increased social mobility, promoting levelling up in disadvantaged groups. It is worth noting that school-based cadet units deliver personal development outcomes that are directly relevant to the Ofsted inspection framework.
I have to tell noble Lords that government departments and the private sector can also reap benefits from the MoD’s investment in the cadet forces. For government departments, there may be decreasing reliance on certain of their public service provisions. An important message to get across to employers is that cadets and adult volunteers have skills and behavioural attributes that are very valuable in the workplace. I certainly urge employers to look favourably at young people with cadet experience who are applying for jobs and to appreciate the value of adult volunteers who are either already working in their companies or seeking employment.
The report notes that although the calculation of the value of social impact is not an exact science, it is clear that the return on the Ministry of Defence’s investment in the cadet forces, some £180 million per year, is a very good use of taxpayers’ money. Estimates from the research include, for example, that activities associated with improvements in the health and physical and mental well-being of cadets and adult volunteers produce an indicative annual return on investment of more than £560 million. We also have to note the consequential benefits of cadet vocational qualifications, which deliver an extremely positive return on investment for the lifetime of a cadet.
A number of your Lordships raised the matter of funding. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, asked about that. He is aware of the level of current investment, and the level of funding for the cadet forces has to be seen in the context of competing priorities within the defence budget; I know he is sympathetic to that. We see our continuing strong support for the cadet forces as an excellent demonstration of the MoD’s corporate social responsibility, but as the noble and gallant Lord will be aware, our support is more than just funding. We are there to offer advice, encouragement, support and help—and that is what we have been trying to do during the difficult period of the Covid challenge.
The noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, raised the vital issue of the adult volunteers, and of course, none of the benefits that I have just been describing would be possible were it not for the 27,000-plus adult volunteers who are the lifeblood of the cadets. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to them for their tireless efforts in running the individual cadet units and allowing our cadets to have such wonderful opportunities and experiences.
This is all hugely positive and very encouraging, but most of your Lordships have identified the major challenge of the last year: the Covid pandemic. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, specifically asked about how we have tried to support the cadet movement through that difficult time. We have always been available with advice, and many people, in times of uncertainty, sought that advice.
As for restarting activities, we are beginning to see the relaxation of lockdown restrictions, and we are identifying road maps to return us, albeit cautiously, to a more normal delivery of the cadet experience. We are certainly looking at the opportunities available. Your Lordships will all understand that the responsibility for youth and education is devolved to the various Governments, which have different approaches, whether that is in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Throughout, the cadet forces in the UK have followed the appropriate rules and guidance. They are all doing their best to go forward positively.
The adult volunteers have been vital during this difficult time in maintaining activity and keeping morale going. They have been innovative and imaginative in finding ways to continue activity when physical social proximity was denied to us.
There is good news: a small pilot scheme run by the army cadets in Surrey resulted in 58 volunteer and 186 cadet applications, from over 600 expressions of interest recorded in one month. There are good things happening.
In conclusion, the cadet forces are indeed the embodiment of resilience. The effort now under way to recover the ground lost over the past year means that it is particularly important that we capitalise on the University of Northampton’s report, and exploit this good news story. I thank my noble friend Lord Lingfield for tabling the debate, and enabling your Lordships to do just that, and to conclude our debates on defence matters on, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, observed, a positive, upbeat and optimistic note.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)
The Grand Committee stands adjourned until 4.40 pm. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)
My Lords, the hybrid Grand Committee will now resume. Some Members are here in person, others are participating remotely, but all Members will be treated equally. I ask Members in the Room to respect social distancing while remaining in place in Grand Committee. If the capacity of the Committee Room is exceeded or other safety requirements are breached, I will immediately adjourn the Committee. If there is a Division in the House, the Committee will adjourn for five minutes. The time limit for the following debate is one hour.
Human Rights Situation in India
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Harries of Pentregarth
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the human rights situation in India; and in particular, of the impact it is having on (1) academics, (2) non-governmental organisations, (3) Muslims, (4) Christians, and (5) marginalised groups, such as the Dalits.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB) [V]
My Lords, I have enormous admiration for the people of India, especially for the resilience and sheer joy shown by so many of them even when living in dire poverty. I recognise the early birth of its culture 4,500 years ago in the Indus valley, and note the brilliant contribution of Indians in the fields of mathematics and astronomy over many centuries. I appreciate the long tradition of public debate and intellectual pluralism in India, as illustrated by Amartya Sen in his wonderful book, The Argumentative Indian. I marvel at the way in which a country of 1.4 billion people can hold democratic elections in which nearly 70% of the people vote. I also believe that many aspects of British policy and behaviour during the imperial period are deeply shaming. As Gandhi responded when asked what he thought of western civilisation, “It would be nice”.
So it is with real sadness that I have to bring this Question before the Committee this afternoon, sadness that, over the past few years, India has joined the growing list of countries that have combined an increasingly autocratic rule, an appeal to a narrow nationalism and a denial of fundamental human rights.
Fundamental to human rights and the long tradition of Indian public debate and intellectual pluralism is academic freedom. There are now numerous reports showing how this in increasingly under threat, with academics who hold views that the Indian Government do not like being put under pressure to resign, and with permission from the Government now being required to hold an international webinar if it relates to certain sensitive subjects. A recent headline in an Indian newspaper asked, “Is academic freedom any longer viable?” Another cited what can happen even in a privately funded Ivy League-equivalent university such as Ashoka. When Pratap Bhanu Mehta was pressured to resign, he said:
“After a meeting with founders it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the University may be considered a political liability. My public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived to carry risks for the university.”
I should also mention journalists. Between 2010 and 2020, 150 were arrested, detained and interrogated, 67 in 2020 alone.
NGOs—in India, they are called civil society organisations—are another group being put under great pressure. Even before Covid, they were finding it difficult to obtain visas. Since Covid, they have been harassed by new laws against protesters, and some have had their bank accounts frozen. So serious is this that Amnesty International, for example, has had to stop its work in India.
A no less serious cause for concern is the position of Muslims. There are some 200 million Muslims in India—about 14% of the population. One recent survey revealed that 35% of Muslims in north-east India said that they had experienced discrimination over the past year and were now adopting a survival strategy in the realisation that an anti-Muslim Hindutva policy was now the dominant narrative.
Christianity in India is not a western import. Christians have been there for 2,000 years, and were certainly well established in Kerala by the sixth century. There are 28 million Christians in India—about 2.3% of the population. They, too, are suffering from the present Hindutva policies. Their stigma is increased not only by the fact that they are not Hindu but because they are sometimes regarded—quite wrongly—as a legacy of western imperialism and because many of them are Dalits who converted to Christianity, as others converted to Buddhism, partly to escape the stigma of being treated as untouchable.
So I come to the Dalits and other marginalised groups, such as the tribal peoples. It must be emphasised that the Indian constitution is in many ways admirable, in particular its emphasis on equality for all India’s diverse peoples. Its architect was the polymath, scholar and jurist Dr Ambedkar, who was recently honoured by having a new portrait unveiled at Gray’s Inn, where he studied. He was born into a family of what were then referred to as untouchables in 1891, and wrote:
“Untouchability is far worse than slavery, for the latter may be abolished by statute. It will take more than a law to remove the stigma from the people of India. Nothing less than the aroused opinion of the world can do it.”
His constitution was a step towards achieving that but, despite that constitution, Dalits continue to suffer disproportionately by every indicator. The policies and practices of the present reveal that the stigma is still there and being reinforced.
When it comes to access to clean water and sanitation, Dalits lag far behind; when it comes to access to education and health, again they are disproportionately failed. The conscience of India can rightly be aroused when a student on a bus in Delhi is abducted, raped and murdered—as happened not long ago—but rapes of young Dalit girls in isolated villages happen frequently and get very little publicity. A high proportion of Dalits are bonded or day labourers—groups who are particularly vulnerable to violence. It is particularly distressing when Dalits try to get justice for some outrage and, again and again, fail to achieve it. A Dalit Christian village might be burned, as has happened, and the perpetrators known, but justice is delayed and delayed.
At the moment, more than 24 Dalit rights activists are in jail on unproven charges, including 80 year-old poet Varavara Rao and, until he died on 5 July, 83 year- old Jesuit priest Father Stan Swamy. Father Swamy spent nine months in jail under the anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, was denied bail and medical care and was transferred to a hospital only when his condition became critical. At the time of his arrest, Stan Swamy was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, significant loss of hearing in both ears and other serious underlying health issues. His death in custody and the continued incarceration of other defenders is a tragic indictment of India’s human rights record and the global community’s human rights commitments. India sits on the United Nations Human Rights Council and the United Nations Security Council, which carry specific human rights commitments.
As I said at the beginning, it is a real sadness to note what is happening in India today. I believe that all true friends of India should protest about this and make it clear to the Mr Modi that this is a denial of what is best in Indian culture and is totally unacceptable. I know the Minister very much shares this concern about human rights, and I look forward to hearing from him about the action that Her Majesty’s Government are taking. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)
I call the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. I regret we cannot hear you, Lord Parekh. If you are on mute, could you unmute yourself? I call the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, again. We can hear you now.
Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]
I am happy to participate in the debate initiated by my good friend, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, on the human rights situation in India, especially as it relates to academics, Muslims, Christians and Dalits. I will take these four groups in the order in which I mentioned them.
I need hardly remind the Committee that human rights have long been an integral part of the Indian constitution and inform every Indian citizen’s political inheritance. The Supreme Court of India has acted as the custodian of those rights and been vigorous in enforcing them. Religious minorities enjoy far better rights in India than elsewhere. They enjoy religious freedom and the right to set up educational and constitutional institutions, and are governed by their own personal laws.
However, this is the formal side of it only; at a more substantive level, Hinduism, Islam and other religions have interacted and created a composite culture, to which they all have contributed and in which they all participate. For example, the law of karma, which is supposed to be a Hindu doctrine, is shared by 77% of Muslims. As a result, it has become ridiculous to talk about Muslims or Christians “in India”; they are Muslims or Christians of India because India has shaped them.
Obviously, in a country with a population of 1.3 billion, incidents are bound to occur when minorities—and even majorities—feel oppressed or treated unjustly. The task is not to exaggerate those incidents but to ask whether the system has the robustness to deal with such situations. The Indian institutions—the Supreme Court and others—have robust capacity to deal with these situations.
I come to Dalits, who for centuries have been subjected to high caste oppression. Independent India devised a host of policies for their uplift, including positive discrimination in government jobs and university admissions. Dalits have occupied positions of power and influence, and have fought for their rights with determination. Obviously, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, pointed out, India still has a long way to go in this direction and could do with a greater sense of urgency, but public opinion will not be silenced. It is beginning to mount and put pressure on the Government. It is also worth bearing in mind that even after 200 years the Americans are still struggling with the legacy of racism, as witnessed by the Black Lives Matter movement.
I turn to academics. There have been cases of government agencies leaning on university authorities to harass or get rid of inconvenient academics. My good friend Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who had to step down as vice-chancellor of Ashoka University, is a good example of this. Some professors have suffered in this way. But although I regret all this, it is worth bearing in mind that these cases have been very few in number. Many academics have freely criticised the Administration of Mr Modi, but none has come to grief. My own family foundation has given 3 million rupees to Jawaharlal Nehru University and we have not come to any grief, nor have we done so for giving 1 crore rupees to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. We must also remember how much Edward Said had to suffer—or how much my good friend Henry Louis Gates has to suffer now—at the hands of Harvard University for supporting the Palestinian cause.
All I say to my good friend, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, by way of ending is that we are not on opposite wavelengths. How can we be? We are on the same wavelength. We all feel grieved and pained when things happen in India that should not happen, but it is a society with a great civilisational depth, a great heritage in the shape of Gandhi, Nehru and others, and shaped by certain values. That kind of society cannot be swept off its feet so easily or be dominated by a single, simplistic ideology. That kind of situation was shown recently when the Prime Minister, who is immensely popular, could not carry the state of West Bengal in the recent elections. He was defeated by Mamata Banerjee.
India welcomes critical advice—if not, it should welcome critical advice—provided that advice is accompanied by humility, is not condescending or patronising, and is based on a sympathetic understanding of India’s problems and predicament. It is very important that India should remain true to its democratic and pluralistic legacy, which can happen only if the watchful eye of Indians abroad and their good friends remains critically focused.
Lord Hussain (LD)
I too thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for introducing the debate. India’s current human rights record paints a very dark picture in many areas. According to a June 2021 report by a Christian advocacy group called Open Doors, daily life for many Christian and Muslim communities in India has become an unbearable struggle to earn a living and practise their faith while remaining alive and under the radar of the far-right Hindutva organisations that now dominate the Indian public and political sphere.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which provides citizenship to religious minorities, excludes Muslims, the largest religious minority in India. Furthermore, millions of people, most of them Muslims, are being put at risk of becoming stateless by the enforcement of the most controversial National Register of Citizens. This could potentially create another Rohingya-like situation.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights described the CAA as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature”. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom said that it was “deeply troubled” by the Act. Violence against the Dalit community never ends. An Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights report of April 2021 said that the Dalits are
“born into a life of discrimination and stigma”,
highlighting the plight of the Dalit community in India.
Kashmir continues to remain an open prison, under the siege of an army with extraordinary powers granted to it by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Regular cordon and search operations of the Indian army, detaining and torturing young people, blowing up residential properties, injuring and killing civilians and assaulting men, women and children, have become the norm in Kashmir. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have reported extensively on the human rights abuses in Kashmir.
On 5 August 2019, the BJP Government unilaterally revoked Articles 370 and 35A, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir within the Indian constitution. This was done by totally locking down the state, cutting off all external communication systems—including telephones and the internet—and imposing a curfew. During the course of this, thousands of political workers and leaders, including Shabir Shah, Yasin Malik, Asiya Andrabi and others, have been detained on trumped-up charges.
Shabir Shah has spent most of the last 33 years in detention. In 1992, he was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Mr Yasin Malik, who visited the UK, the United States and many other countries after his release in 2006, after many years of detention, has been arrested again since 2019 and is kept in the high-security Tihar Jail in New Delhi. Both leaders have millions of followers at home and abroad, and they believe in the democratic right of their people to decide about the future of their state, according to UN resolutions. Both suffer from serious health conditions and have cardiac issues, which make them more vulnerable to Covid-19.
Asiya Andrabi is a middle-aged lady suffering from hypertension and asthma. She has been held in Tihar Jail in New Delhi since 2018, charged under various sections of the Indian penal code. Evidently, the Indian Government are violating the UN charter, the Geneva convention and the values and principles of the Commonwealth.
I ask the Minister why, despite all that, India is not even mentioned in the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s latest annual report on human rights. Will he ask the Indian Government to, first, withdraw the most controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens to prevent another human catastrophe? Secondly, will he ask them to release all Kashmiri political prisoners, including the popular leaders I mentioned? Thirdly, will he ask them to demilitarise Kashmiri cities, towns and villages? Finally, will he kindly share the response of the Indian Government with the Members of this House by putting a copy in the Library?
Baroness Verma (Con) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for this debate. It is always a great pleasure to listen to my dear friend the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and the wise way that he lays out India and its citizens.
Over the last seven or eight years, the current Indian Government have visibly gone to great lengths to remove deep-bedded cultural beliefs and traditions that prevent all people from progressing. Ensuring access to education, particularly for girls, has been at the centre of this Government’s mission through their first and second terms. The fact that they have pushed hard to enable women from the Muslim faith to get protections in the triple talaq legislation is a testament to ensuring that, regardless of their faith, women have access to their rights. This is a Government who, in the past eight years, have pushed hard for pensions and for the poorest in India’s communities to have access to bank accounts so that they can have pensions directly put into their accounts.
Of course, India is a huge country of 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion people. The birth rate is at a pace that is not keeping up with the needs of the people of India and it is right and proper that while we question the injustices and discrimination that people face, we need to do it in the context of the economy, social progress and economic progress, and of making sure that the barriers that prevent people being able to access and fulfil their potential are removed. We sit on the outside lobbing charges into India without contextualising all the progress that has taken place over the past eight or nine years.
I am one of those people who are incredibly critical of discriminatory policies of any kind, whether in India or here. I am a proud person who was born in India but has spent her whole life in the UK fighting discriminatory policies and barriers. We need to be incredibly mindful that, when we start pointing fingers, we first and foremost look at our own institutional discriminatory barriers.
When the Minister responds, will he remind us all that we have long-embedded relationships with India and other countries in the region and that all countries in the region are facing challenges? I am not going to start another debate today, but I ask the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, to look at minority communities in other countries in the region and see how they are faring and what is happening to them, so that we can have a wider debate on barriers to all communities and see how we as British parliamentarians and good friends of all those in the region can help cement cohesive internal growth.
I have often listened to some of the commentary that comes from your Lordships’ House and I ask one thing—that when comments are made, they are made on the basis of proper evidenced reporting because we do not want to add to the inflammatory discussions that take place across the waters where we have no say.
Citizenship legislation has been alluded to. If a country is to know the needs of its citizens, it needs to know who they are, where they are and what the population looks like to be able to service them properly. I have run out of time. This is a much bigger debate. I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for raising it.
The Earl of Sandwich (CB) [V]
My Lords, any friend of India must be sad about the direction of the BJP Government in the past few years. There is plenty to be sad about, as my noble and right reverend friend said, especially the continuing discrimination against so many minorities, including the Dalits, and the attacks on the media. Journalists covering protests now get arrested alongside the protestors, just as if they were in Belarus, even during the pandemic. I am sorry about the feebleness of the opposition—Congress and the smaller parties—which ought to be able to stand up to the Prime Minister, but I am sad above all about the treatment of Muslims.
During the year my wife and I lived in India, mainly in Mumbai and Delhi, we made many Muslim friends. I regret having to state the obvious—that they are people of great honesty and integrity. I have to say it because there is an almost universal, mainly unspoken, prejudice against Muslims among many Hindus in India and here in the UK, and in France, hidden under the thin veil of anti-terrorism. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 led to violent communal riots in Delhi, costing many lives. It specifically excluded Muslim refugees from Indian citizenship and was condemned by the UN and human rights groups, as well as Indian Muslim leaders, as discriminatory.
In such a climate of fear, it should be up to that Government to face up to their own constitution, reassure Muslims and counter prejudice. But that would not fit in with the history of Prime Minister Modi, a member of the RSS who left a trail of persecution when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat back in 2002. He was widely accused of condoning the violence in Ahmedabad which left over 1,000 dead, on a conservative estimate, although he was personally acquitted by India’s Supreme Court.
We know that the Minister has dropped polite hints to South Block—Whitehall’s opposite number in New Delhi—about the virtues of human rights and democracy, and rightly so. We have a long, shared history, and we should be able to speak out much more bravely and frequently than we do. The high commission has done well in putting on programmes such as the interfaith leadership programme and cultural events promoting minority rights, and that is absolutely right.
A free trade agreement is in the offing and our expensive visa regime still presents Indian students and businessmen with an enormous obstacle. But we need more action, specifically to condemn the injustice and discrimination against Muslims, now being encouraged at a very high level.
The Indian Government should also amend their invidious Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, the FCRA, which regulates foreign donations in India. As my noble friend said, it restricts all international NGOs and has a damaging effect on local civil society. Amnesty has had to suspend its operations; even the Commonwealth human rights initiative, based in Delhi, had its FCRA certificate suspended and its bank account frozen. The Minister will be well aware of this; I expect he has mentioned it during his human rights dialogue. I would be grateful to hear whether that still continues.
Finally, I expect that the Minister has already perused the study by the Ethical Trading Initiative of India’s business and human rights framework. It is just the kind of quality academic work which can bring together all stakeholders, UK and Indian, including those benefiting from the new FTA. With that, I wish the Minister a restful summer holiday.
Lord Cashman (Non-Afl) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for securing this timely debate. I share his admiration for India but also his sadness. The criticisms that I offer in this short contribution, I offer as a friend of India. But it is true to say that in India civil society organisations, international institutions, multilateral organisations, human rights groups and others have publicly voiced their concerns that the situation has not improved on human rights. The Indian Government have ignored calls from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for states to release persons detained without sufficient legal basis, including political prisoners and those detained for critical, dissenting views, to prevent the growing rates of infection everywhere, especially in closed facilities such as prisons and detention centres.
The BJP-led Government have increasingly harassed, intimidated and arrested human rights defenders—as has already been outlined—journalists, peaceful protesters and other critics, including under draconian sedition and counterterrorism laws. Civil society organisations that have questioned or criticised the Government’s policies have faced similar challenges under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich. This Act was envisaged in 2010 as a means to regulate foreign donations in India, but has now become an effective tool to silence Indian civil society.
As has been mentioned, in September 2020 Amnesty International India was also forced to halt its work in the country. Last week, it was announced that the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, based in Delhi, had its FCRA certificate suspended and its bank account frozen, effectively suspending the payment of all staff salaries and thereby the organisation’s ability to carry out its important work. The Indian authorities have also, sadly, enacted discriminatory laws and policies, referred to earlier, against Muslims, Dalits and other minorities. The appalling treatment of the Dalits has already been documented by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries.
Yet despite the deterioration of the country’s human rights record under Prime Minister Modi, the Indian Government have so far shielded themselves from international criticism. It has been able to shield itself from widespread international condemnation is because some countries are desperate to strengthen trade and economic ties with India. Therefore, I seek the Minister’s specific reassurance that the United Kingdom Government, when negotiating a free trade agreement or strengthening economic ties with India, will ensure that there is a specific human rights clause within any such agreement, as is the case in EU free trade agreements. Such human rights clauses enable the parties to effectively raise human rights concerns and respect the international standards on human rights, and ensure that we never negotiate away the rights of those most in need and most at risk. Human rights clauses in any of our trade agreements say as much about our own country as they do those we partner with.
I remain deeply concerned about deteriorating human rights not only in India but around the world, and the accompanying demonisation and misrepresentation of minorities. As the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said, we are witnessing such misrepresentations here in the United Kingdom where, sadly, some government Ministers and elements in our media pit one minority against another, misrepresent NGOs and deride those who take a stand against discrimination. This stoking of cultural wars must end. It harms individuals, puts lives at risk, diminishes all concerned and lays us open to charges of double standards when we raise human rights abuses in other parts of the world. There must be no double standards on human rights, in particular the rights of all minorities, wherever they may be.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for securing this important debate. Partition of the subcontinent on the fallacy of irreconcilable religious difference gave a green light to religious bigots in India and Pakistan. In 1984, Indira Gandhi’s mass appeal to bigotry led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Sikhs, in what former PM David Cameron described as the greatest blot on post-partition history.
In 2001, Narendra Modi, a member of the RSS, a paramilitary Hindu fascist group, was elected Chief Minister of Gujarat. He was considered to be implicated in the killing of thousands of Muslims throughout the state and for some years barred from entry to the UK and the USA. Years earlier, the paramilitary RSS, modelled on the Hitler Youth, had demolished the centuries-old Muslim Babri Masjid. A compliant Supreme Court has now given permission for a Hindu temple to be built on the site.
Narendra Modi went on to become Prime Minister in 2014 and was re-elected in 2019. Backed by the growing power of the paramilitary RSS, he has never made any secret of his desire to turn India into a Hindu state—a view echoed by other Hindu leaders. The Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, openly refers to Muslims as “termites”. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 denies citizenship to thousands of Muslims. Christian worship is under constant threat in a supposedly secular state. Dalits, the lowest of the low in the Hindu caste system, are treated with brutality and contempt, and their women frequently raped.
Attempts are made by threat and flattery to absorb Sikhs into the Hindu fold, despite clear Sikh teachings repudiating the caste system, idol worship and discrimination against women. Some years back, I wrote to the Foreign Office about a young Sikh from Glasgow who was arrested and tortured by the Indian police for supposedly questioning the government line. He is still incarcerated.
Religious minorities are not the only targets of India’s arrogant new rulers. For more than a year, farmers from across India have been camped on the outskirts of New Delhi in the largest and longest mass demonstration ever seen, to protest against the Government’s unconstitutional rigging of the market to enrich their supporters. Water and power are routinely cut off, and demonstrating farmers savagely beaten by the RSS, under the watchful eyes of the police. Effigies of human rights activists, such as singer Rihanna, have been burnt by mobs for interfering. Amnesty International has been barred from India.
Judges who dare to call out this criminal behaviour are routinely moved. University lecturers and students who protest against India’s growing intolerance are subjected to police brutality. Such brave people are India’s best hope for the future. They deserve our support. They deserve more than the usual Foreign Office response—either “India is the world’s largest democracy”, or “We take these matters extremely seriously, and are in touch with our counterparts in India”.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I thank my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries of Pentregarth for initiating this important debate. As he said, India is a truly great country; it is one for which I too have great affection and admiration.
One of the greatest Indians was Dr BR Ambedkar, the Dalit who became a lawyer—an alumnus of Gray’s Inn—a parliamentarian and a social reformer, and who crafted India’s constitution. Last month I was honoured to take part in the unveiling of a new portrait and the opening of a room at Gray’s Inn, dedicated to the only Indian ever to be awarded such an honour. Dr Ambedkar’s great-grandson, Sujat Ambedkar, was present. Santosh Dass, Ali Malek QC, the Master Treasurer of Gray’s Inn, and the Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organisations UK, all deserve our congratulations for bringing this project to fruition.
For all Indian citizens, the story of Dr Ambedkar and his constitution is an inspiring route out of enforced misery, a pathway out of servitude, and a road map to emancipation, justice and equality. It signposts the way to social, economic and political justice, to liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship, to equality of status and of opportunity, and above all, to the fraternity and dignity of India’s citizens.
However, as Dr Ambedkar once said,
“If I find the constitution being misused, I shall be the first to burn it”.
He would surely be greatly disturbed that millions of Dalit and tribal people still remain excluded from their rights, as guaranteed in that constitution, and that the BJP Government have presided over the steady erosion of those hard-won gains. Take the incarceration of human rights defenders, academics and lawyers, referred to earlier, who are in jail, without bail or prospect of an early trial. Dr Anand Teltumbde, Dr Ambedkar’s grandson-in-law, is one of those incarcerated without bail. He is 71.
Those jailed in the Bhima Koregaon case have consistently and robustly denied the charges against them. Yet some have been in jail for years, without bail, under dubious sedition laws—bequeathed, regrettably, by the British—on trumped-up charges and flawed evidence. Many are elderly and have medical health conditions. Along with Dr Teltumbde, there are the 80 year-old human rights activist and poet Varavara Rao and the 60 year-old trade unionist, activist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj. All of them are languishing in jail; all are in extreme danger of catching the Covid virus there, and all have been denied bail.
Think of Father Stan Swamy, who has been referred to before, and about whom I was in regular touch, and correspondence, with the Minister, who tried incredibly hard to be helpful in this case. Father Swamy spent his life defending the rights of tribal people in India. He was a frail 84 year-old man with Parkinson’s yet despite applications on health grounds, the authorities denied him bail. His death was unjust and it needs to be investigated impartially.
Following Father Swamy’s death in custody, Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, said:
“There is no excuse, ever, for a human rights defender to be smeared as a terrorist, and no reason they should ever die the way Father Swamy died, accused and detained, and denied his rights.”
I echo those remarks.
The rape and punishment of Dalit and tribal women and girls also must be of the gravest concern to us. I welcome the reply that the Minister gave me on 19 July about the British high commission’s project to provide legal training for Dalit women to combat violence against them. I really hope that this will make a tangible difference that can be measured in due course.
Finally, like other countries, India has suffered grievously under Covid. We have all seen the heartbreaking reports. The long-term health and economic effects on Dalits and tribal peoples, who would frequently be the daily labourers or bonded labourers, should surely be examined and researched. The human rights that Dr Ambedkar championed all his life must be protected.
I will end with this. In his book, Annihilation of Caste, Dr Ambedkar said:
“A just society is that society in which ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt is dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society.”
Baroness Northover (LD) [V]
My Lords, I too thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, for securing this debate and for his sensitive though probing introduction.
India is a close ally, an important member of the Commonwealth and a rising economic and political power. Its path to development and prosperity, as cited by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, is indeed remarkable. Nevertheless, there are concerns about actions that the current Government have taken. Just as human rights are judged to be universal and the UN adopts the responsibility to protect, we cannot close our eyes—wherever in the world human rights are under threat.
The amendment to the Citizenship Act in India provides fast-track citizenship for certain religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan yet, as others have noted, the change does not extend to Muslims. The Minister, whom I believe is now listening and will respond at the end of the debate, said in February 2020 that he had raised this with the Indian high commission and that the Government would continue to monitor the situation. Can he update us on that? Can he also update us on the situation for Amnesty International, which, as others have mentioned, had its funds frozen, severely impacting its ability to work in India?
In August 2019, the Indian Government revoked Article 370 of the Indian constitution, removing constitutional autonomy from Jammu and Kashmir. This was followed by considerable unrest, as my noble friend Lord Hussain mentioned. Indian troops were deployed and there were worrying reports of human rights abuses. Transparency was hampered because phone and internet services were shut down. Politicians and others were arrested.
This followed the 2018 reports from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which were updated in 2019. They recommended that human rights abuses should be investigated. What action are the Government urging? Can the Minister assure us that seeking a potential trade deal with India now that we have left the EU is not standing in the way of our flagging potential human rights abuses? Surely the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, is right to insist that we must have human rights clauses in any trade deals.
I commend the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, on his long commitment to the Dalits. It is partly what led to the International Development (Gender Equality) Act. India has passed legislation to improve Dalit status, but I certainly saw that there was a very long way to go when I visited DfID projects supporting Dalits, particularly women. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, that Dr Ambedkar was remarkable in achieving what he did, given all that was against him. That is surely right. We now hear that Dalits have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. Is the FCDO adhering to the gender equality Act I just referred to in its ODA funding?
We hear, too, of an increase in hate crimes against Christians as far-right Hindu groups persecute them. I too was very sorry to hear of the death in custody of 83 year-old Jesuit priest Father Stan Swamy. Indeed, his death should be investigated. As we hear, the pressure on academics, NGOs and others is clear.
We know, too, of huge concern when agricultural laws were passed. Some 400 protestors were reported to have died and a number of journalists were arrested, as the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, noted. Those laws were subsequently suspended following a ruling by the Indian Supreme Court. As the noble Lord, Lord Singh, said, discontent must not be stoked against the judiciary, as has happened in the UK. I can assure the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, that I agree that we need to hold the UK Government to account as well.
Freedom House has this year downgraded India’s status as a democracy and free society to “partly free”, noting that the Indian Government
“appears to have abandoned its potential to serve as a global democratic leader”.
Given the importance of India globally, that must give us all cause for concern. We need India’s leaders to be playing a full part globally in pursuit of human rights, countering climate change and supporting the rules-based international order. I hope that the United Kingdom is assisting in that aim, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I too thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for initiating this debate and for his welcome opening remarks. He is right to point out the rich and varied traditions of India. As noble Lords have pointed out, India is the world’s largest democracy and will soon become the world’s third-largest economy. I am sure the whole Committee recognises the value of the long-standing relationship we have with it, but our relationship must be deeper and reflect our values of democracy, human rights and the primacy of international law. We need to work with India on issues such as security and climate change but also to recognise that, as part of any trusting and respectful relationship, we have the confidence to raise issues around human rights and religious freedoms.
Any functioning democracy must include a free civil society, and that is why India’s recent clampdown on NGOs is so concerning. When Governments fail in their most important task of providing safety, security and freedom for their people, it is always civil society which leaps first to their defence. Last year, Amnesty International ended its operations due to reprisals following the freezing of its bank accounts. Amnesty had previously warned that other human rights advocates in India had been subjected to counterterror raids. My noble friend Lord Cashman was absolutely right to raise this and its context. I hope the Minister will tell us exactly what steps the Government are taking to protect civic space in India.
It is equally important that the UK uses our relationship with India to support the principle of free religion. Free religion is not about just the right to practise a religion; it is also about the right not to practise a religion. Human Rights Watch has presented repeated evidence of mob attacks on religious minority groups, and police in Delhi have been accused of ignoring attacks on Muslim neighbourhoods. The noble Baronesses, Lady Northover and Lady Verma, mentioned the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us what assessment the Government have made of the application of the Act, given that it has now been in place for 18 months.
It is also right that we should call on the Indian Government to stamp out caste discrimination, to which noble Lords throughout the debate have referred. It includes violent attacks against the Dalit population and, in particular, Dalit women. The UK has a very strong priority policy on violence against women, and I hope the Minister will particularly address this issue. According to the BBC, 54% of Dalit women have been physically assaulted, 46% have been sexually harassed and 43% have faced domestic violence. In the light of the Government’s strategy, I hope the Minister can give us some more detail about what we are doing to ensure that violence against Dalit women, in particular, ends.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con) [V]
My Lords, I begin my apologising to your Lordships for my delays and technical faults. The joys of virtual participation meant that, for some reason, I had been linked into a rather interesting debate in the Chamber, as opposed to the Committee. Nevertheless, I am delighted to join noble Lords and I heard a major part of the debate. I start, as have others, by acknowledging and recognising the role of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for his long-standing commitment to freedom of religion and belief, inter-faith relations and human rights. In his opening remarks, he again reflected on the importance of these principles in the wider context of human rights.
I also welcome, as ever, a robust, open and challenging debate, which I am accustomed to on the broader issue of human rights. Today, we have heard various insights presented and questions rightly asked about our relationship with a standing partner and friend, the Republic of India. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and my noble friend Lady Verma, among others, on the importance of our strong relationship with India—bilaterally, as a Commonwealth partner and in the multilateral sphere. As the Minister responsible for our relations with India, as well as human rights, I assure noble Lords that our relationship is strong, which allows for a candid and measured exchange on important issues. That relationship with India goes both ways: for India in asking the United Kingdom, which my noble friend Lady Verma alluded to, and equally for us to raise important issues of human rights, as we continue to do.
As was pointed out by a number of noble Lords, Indian citizens are rightly proud of their history of inclusive government. The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins, talked about the history of inclusive government. Let us not forget the secular constitution, which protects the rights of all communities, including minority communities, within India. It guarantees equality before the law, which we are proud of in our own democracy in the UK.
Our shared values and vibrant democracy sit at the heart of the transformational relationship between the United Kingdom and India and the comprehensive strategic partnership we work towards, launched at the virtual summit between Prime Minister Johnson and Prime Minister Modi in May. In June, at the G7 summit and in the 2021 Open Societies Statement, both Prime Ministers again highlighted our countries’ shared belief in the importance of human rights, freedom of expression and the rule of law. They recognised the role of human rights defenders in promoting fundamental freedoms and our rejection of discrimination. We all recognise—and, again, my noble friend Lady Verma alluded to this—that human rights is never a job done. We have to be constantly vigilant, both at home and abroad, about this important agenda. I assure noble Lords that this remains a central priority of my work within the FCDO.
Along with G7 partners, we committed to co-operation to strengthen open societies globally, including by tackling all forms of discrimination. Media freedom was a key component of the statement and communiqué issued by the G7. As the integrated review made clear, open societies and human rights remain a priority for the UK. This month, as was acknowledged by the noble Lord, Lord Hussain, among others, we published the Human Rights & Democracy report.
It has been a challenging year. As several noble Lords mentioned, Covid-19 remains a challenge in its erosion of human rights and democracy and has amplified existing hardships and inequalities. In response, I assure noble Lords that the UK stepped up its efforts as a force for good in the world, championing those core values we hold so dear. We very much stepped up in our close collaboration with India, when it came to Covid-19, in supporting the supply of oxygen mini-factories to places such as those in Rajasthan to ensure that, in its time of need, we stood with India, as India stood with us during the early Covid-19 challenges.
The noble Lord, Lord Hussain, specifically asked about the human rights report. Just because a country is not mentioned within that report—and specific criteria go behind the inclusion of a particular country—it does not mean that we do not raise human rights issues with countries across the world.
I turn to human rights in India specifically. The UK Government engage on a range of human rights matters. The noble Lord, Lord Hussain, mentioned Kashmir; I assure him that we continue to raise issues, including the detention of leaders in Kashmir. We were heartened by the fact that Prime Minister Modi invited some leaders from the state to join him in Delhi. We believe it is very much a first step towards progress in Kashmir. Whether it was the internet being suspended or the release of those held in political detention, we continue to monitor and work with the Government of India in ensuring early resolutions. Through our high commission and network of deputy high commissions, we work with the union Government and, importantly, state Governments and NGOs to build capacity and share expertise.
I have visited India twice since my appointment as the Minister for India, and I assure noble Lords that human rights have formed a regular part of my direct engagement with Indian counterparts in Delhi. We look towards the Indian Government to continue to uphold the freedoms and rights guaranteed by India’s constitution and the international instruments to which it is a signatory.
The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned human rights defenders and Father Swamy. I assure noble Lords that his passing is a point of deep regret for us all; I mentioned it in a statement I put out at that time. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that we raised this matter directly with the Indian authorities.
It is thanks to our deepening relationship that we have been able to engage on such sensitive matters with Indian counterparts on a regular basis and as sovereign equals. The Government of India also raise direct concerns with us. To give noble Lords some insight, in December the Foreign Secretary discussed a number of human rights issues, including those relating to Kashmir, with Indian Minister of External Affairs Dr Jaishankar, on 5 January our acting high commissioner in New Delhi spoke with officials from India’s Ministry of External Affairs about minority communities in India and on 15 March, while I was visiting India, I discussed the situation for different religious communities, including Christians and Muslims, as well as the situation in Kashmir, with India’s Minister of State for Home Affairs, Kishan Reddy. These were both productive and constructive engagements.
In October and December last year I raised concerns with the high commission about NGOs. The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, rightly raised Amnesty International and the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act. I have requested that all Amnesty International accounts be unfrozen while the investigation is ongoing and have stressed the important role that organisations such as Amnesty International play in any democracy. I meet quite regularly with representatives of Amnesty International here at the FCDO.
In my capacity as Minister for South Asia and Minister for Human Rights, I regularly have frank discussions on the topic with the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi and the Indian high commission in London. Most recently, this month we also had discussions about this during my visit to New York with the Indian Permanent Representative to the UN in New York.
As noble Lords will be aware, in our human rights work key priorities for the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and me are freedom of religion or belief and promoting respect between different religious communities. The British high commission regularly meets representatives of all faiths to understand their perspectives. The excellent team on the ground undertakes a variety of projects to promote interfaith dialogue. For example, in 2020 we hosted a virtual round table with leaders from faith communities.
This year, the British high commission hosted a multifaith virtual iftar during Ramadan. I was very pleased to speak at that event, which included leaders from across India’s Muslim community and the wider religious tapestry that makes up modern India today. We continue to support interfaith leadership programmes for a cohort of emerging Indian faith leaders, creating a dialogue—I know the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, will appreciate this—to tackle shared challenges and promote not just tolerance but respect.
The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, and the noble Lords, Lord Singh and Lord Alton, raised the situation with the Dalit community. Our recent project work with the Dalits has included the provision of legal training for over 2,000 Dalit women to combat domestic violence and the creation of the first ever network of Dalit women human rights defenders trained as paralegals. We will continue our support in this respect. The British high commission also held an event on empowering Muslim youth, which saw over 100 educational institutions participating in six three-day workshops.
I turn to academic and journalists’ freedom, raised by my noble friend Lady Verma, the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins. I am sure that noble Lords will agree that academia and a free media are two further elements of a successful democratic society. Here again, India and the United Kingdom share fundamental values. We regularly engage with the Indian media, which promotes lively debate—[Inaudible]—directly during my visit by members of the Indian media fraternity.
The annual South Asia Journalism Fellowship programme, under our flagship Chevening brand, is central to our activity in this regard and has been since 2012. We also engage with India’s academic community, as expanding academic co-operation is among the principal aims of the 2030 road map, which was agreed between the two Prime Ministers. I regularly speak at universities; indeed, on one of my earlier visits to India, I spoke at a Muslim university.
To conclude this debate, I assure noble Lords that we will continue to engage with India across a series of areas, including on issues of trade. I note what the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and others have said about the issue of human rights within the context of our future trade agreements. I assure them that human rights remain central to our thinking, as we negotiate trade agreements around the world.
We will also continue to work with the Government of India to ensure that the rights of all minorities, as according to their constitution, continue to be upheld in the rich tradition of religious inclusivity, which I know full well from my family’s experiences remains alive and well. Indeed, during my last visit to India, I convened a round table of religious leaders in Punjab.
I give noble Lords the further assurance that was sought: we will continue to monitor human rights directly though our high commission in New Delhi. We have a strong relationship with India and a relationship of being partners and friends with it. When we have concerns, I assure noble Lords that we will continue to raise them. On occasion, as I have said before, we do so privately because we believe that that is the right thing to do. Where there are more general issues of concern we will continue to raise them, not just in the context of our relationship with India but further afield.
When it comes to human rights, our principle is clear. It is central to our thinking and we remain steadfast in our opposition to any form of discrimination, for it is our common values, shared by India, and our common belief in international rules and norms that will continue to govern our growing and strengthening partnership with India.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, the Grand Committee stands adjourned to enable the technicians to make arrangements for the next debate. I remind Members to wipe their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, the hybrid Grand Committee will now resume. Some Members are here in person, others are participating remotely, but all Members will be treated equally. I ask Members in the Room to respect social distancing, which remains in place in Grand Committee. If the capacity of the Committee Room is exceeded or other safety requirements are breached, I will immediately adjourn the Committee. The time limit for the following debate is one hour.
Belarus: Elections
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Balfe
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the possibility of joining forces with the governments of (1) France, (2) Germany, and (3) the United States of America to persuade the government of Russia that it is in its interest to push for new elections in Belarus.
Lord Balfe (Con)
It is a great pleasure to introduce this debate, which is overdue. By way of background, all my political life—in fact, all my life—I have been involved in some aspect or other of foreign affairs. I include in that a short time in a very junior position in the Foreign Office, 25 years in the European Parliament and, since I came into this House, my time as a member of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, so I have a reasonable amount of experience. During that time, I have visited Belarus on a couple of occasions and Moscow on more than a couple, most recently in December 2019 using the facilities made available by this House to pay for visits to members of the Council of Europe. There, I met a number of members of the Duma and the upper house.
Belarus is, of course, the only country that is not a member of the Council of Europe. This is largely because of its refusal to suspend the death penalty but that also seems to have become rather convenient, because it has placed Belarus in a position where few queries are ever raised as to its policies et cetera. The election that took place some time ago, however, gave rise to a lot of controversy.
Let me say at the beginning that I am indebted to the Chatham House unit, which has supplied me with opinion polls and other data, as well as to Dr Mikalaj Packajeu and Dr Alan Flowers, who provided me with a briefing around the subject of this debate. I am sure everyone will notice that is not condemnatory; I am looking for a way through the woods here.
The first question is: why should we listen to Russia? I like to think I am a pragmatic person, and one good reason to listen to Russia is that it is the next-door power and it, frankly, has its own version of the Monroe doctrine. In the last few days, the United States has been gleefully celebrating its misplaced policy of 60 years in Cuba. It could have achieved what it has now much more quickly, had it been more flexible. Russia similarly regards the countries on its border as those in which they want, at least, to keep powers not hostile to them. That is one of the difficulties with Belarus.
Another factor about Belarus that we must face up to is that no fewer than 79% of the population has either a positive or a very positive attitude towards Russia. Some 58% think that Russia should stay neutral in the present dispute but—according to a poll provided by Chatham House, not an internal poll of Belarus’s people—32% of the population of Belarus support a union with Russia. Some 46% would like to be united to both the EU and Russia. But one sees from this no outright rejection of the big neighbour next door, and we need to bear that in mind when tackling this problem.
The Lukashenko regime is undoubtedly unpopular, and on a very wide basis. One of the results of this will certainly be what has happened in other former Soviet countries—an increasing brain drain. Repressive countries lose the best of their middle class, and this has been demonstrated time and again. I live in Cambridge and it is full of people from other parts of Europe who are the cream of their societies and have chosen to leave to live in what they rightly see is a free society. The first danger for Belarus is that it will lose its population by people just leaving the country.
The election in Belarus was not wholly supported in Russia. The day after, 9 August 2020, Foreign Minister Lavrov said that the election circumstances “were not ideal”. For a Russian, that is a strong statement. When the main leader of the opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, met Macron, she called on Vladimir Putin
“to play a constructive role in the crisis resolution.”
This is the key: if there is to be a resolution there, we need Russia on board. At the moment, for Russia, Belarus is dependable, even if not particularly savoury. It is rather like the old American phrase, “He may be a something, but he’s our something”. We have to make it possible for the people of Belarus to change their Government. Crucial to this is whether the Russians can be persuaded to treat Lukashenko in the same way they treated Yanukovych—in other words, to give him a way out of Belarus, because he is not going to leave voluntarily.
The next thing that I think is important is that if he is replaced at the helm, it has to be with a Government who will be pragmatic in their approach to Russia. This is where the gist of my resolution comes in because the big powers, so to speak, of Europe, which are France and Germany, I hope with the assistance of Britain and the United States, must put their work behind an optimal solution. This must be accompanied by a strong message to go to the Belarusians.
I know that in June the IMF board discussed a proposal for a historic $650 billion general allocation of special drawing rights. Some of that, roughly $1 billion, is due to go to Belarus, and this will be voted on early in August. I think, following a precedent in 2019 when the IMF denied Nicolás Maduro access to $400 million of special drawing rights on the grounds that the international community did not recognise him as the legitimate leader of Venezuela, the IMF should not decline, but should freeze for the time being that allocation of special drawing rights. I have signed, together with a number of other Members, a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer asking him to look at Britain taking that position within the IMF. In other words, in looking to change the regime in Belarus, we have to be firm as well as fair. We cannot be soft, but at the same time we must not indulge ourselves in some sort of hate fest, and we certainly have to realise that, unless we can bring Russia on board, we are very unlikely to succeed.
Lukashenko has become a very toxic ally for Moscow. He is not popular there, and I was told when I was in Moscow that the chemistry between him and Putin is absolutely awful, but at the same time, he is the only leader the Russians have—he is their only dog in this fight—so we, as responsible western nations, have to make it possible to construct a solution where we can get a regime change in Belarus that is acceptable to the Russians. I suggest we ask the Russians to help with an exit strategy for Lukashenko, and I hope the Foreign Office will work with its colleagues in Europe and Washington to form a common position which can lead us to a desired result.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, first, I warmly thank the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who, as he said, is a UK delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, as, indeed, I am. I thank him for tabling this important subject for debate today. As he said, in PACE we have debated the situation in Belarus on a number of occasions and we have received strong support for the kind of action he is calling for today and, indeed, for going further.
The presidential election held in Belarus on 9 August last year, which saw Lukashenko returned based on the so-called official result was described by independent observers, and indeed by our Foreign Secretary, as neither free nor fair. I particularly commend the United Kingdom Government for rightly describing Lukashenko’s subsequent inauguration as fraudulent. However, the protests against the regime in Belarus have resulted in an unprecedented series of arrests of innocent political prisoners and a vicious crackdown on journalists—and, in particular, against civil society activists and opposition politicians.
Indeed, the lengths to which the dictator will go to clamp down on opposition activities reached a new height on 23 May with the hijacking by the regime of Ryanair flight FR4978 to detain an opposition activist, Roman Protasevič, and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega. It was an unprecedented, astonishing state hijack, widely condemned by the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and almost everyone—with the notable exception of Russia, which considered it an “internal matter” for Belarus.
What can we do, here and now, to respond to these acts of repression and barbarism? First, as individuals we can protest. But even more usefully, as parliamentarians we can give some hope to individual prisoners—as I am doing, along with others here in Westminster and around Europe, by adopting one of them.
Ten months ago, the prisoner I adopted, an arborist called Stepan Latypov, was arrested on a trumped-up charge because one of the chemicals that he uses for his work as an arborist can be combined with others to make explosives. He was brought to court limping, with bruises and a bandaged hand resulting from the way he had been treated. He was threatened that if he did not admit his guilt, his relatives would be persecuted. He then attempted suicide. Meanwhile, pressure is exerted on him by refusing visitors, controlling correspondence, round-the-clock surveillance and limiting access to showers and other facilities.
The delay in bringing Stepan to trial puts more pressure on him; however, it also looks as if they are playing for time. The fact that he and other prisoners know that we are monitoring their situation gives them some hope and, I hope, lets the regime know that we are watching. Specifically, will the Minister arrange for our ambassador in Minsk to request a visit by an official from the embassy to Stepan in prison, to report back on his condition and whether and when he is to be charged? I hope he will deal with that in his reply.
As the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said, we need to go further collectively to help all the prisoners, journalists and opposition activists. We also need to get new, fully democratic elections in Belarus, as was in fact demanded by another of our colleagues, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his report to the parliamentary assembly.
Along with other Peers, including the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and Members of Parliament I have written to the Chancellor, urging stronger financial sanctions on the Lukashenko regime. We should be using our position on the IMF board to veto the billion dollars due to be allocated to Belarus. As the noble Lord, Lord Balfe said, the IMF previously denied funds to the Maduro regime in Venezuela, so there is clear precedent for taking such action.
In spite of Brexit, London remains one of the key financial centres, so our Government should look at further ways that we can bring pressure on Lukashenko to move quickly to accept the inevitable, because it is inevitable that he will have to go. I support the proposal in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that we should join with the French, the Germans and the United States to pressure Russia to accept that there must be new elections in Belarus. But we also need to take our own action, individually and collectively here in the United Kingdom, to put pressure on the Lukashenko regime. I hope that we will get a positive response from the Minister on that action too.
Viscount Waverley (CB)
My Lords, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. We have just been debating in Grand Committee matters relating to the democratic state of India—a country of 1.4 billion people and a far cry from what brings us together now.
I intend to broaden the debate. I fear that President Putin will not be persuaded by the question before us. Free and fair elections in Belarus would be followed by an increasing call for free and fair elections in Russia, presenting existential threats to the personal survival of both leaders. While it is to be applauded, therefore, I fear that the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, is mission impossible in the short-term. However, he has presented us with a helpful opportunity for a road map in the longer term. The challenge was articulated in an interesting recent piece in the Financial Times, which said:
“Nationalist autocrats need enemies abroad to justify political repression at home, and the Russian president has long found his in the west.”
If perceived wisdom is correct, Moscow is targeting de facto absorption of Belarus into Russia. The situation in Belarus has now become, therefore, a test of autocracy over democracy, tyranny over decency, and self-preservation. The Kremlin’s gameplay of taking control of Belarusian security institutions—the KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the armed forces—is, in addition to the aim of ensuring that Lukashenko retains power, demobilising the protest movement through mass repression.
Messaging from Minsk or Moscow about constitutional changes and new elections will only ever be on Moscow’s terms. Any proposed constitutional changes will only ever be paving the way for greater economic integration with Russia, with the omnipresent risk of invasion—either under cover of darkness, or, more radically, in order to discourage all such countries from moving geopolitically westward.
How, therefore, can we support the people of Belarus while managing the relationship with President Putin’s Russia—recognising that the ploy of disruption is Kremlin gameplay, but still responding to it with a tough approach on ground and sea, not just with words? The recent Black Sea right of passage exercise is clearly a starter for things to come, as part of a grand strategy. We must be prepared to stand up for what we believe in, beating the drum with parallel savvy engineering and diplomacy. The principle of critical dialogue must on all accounts be maintained. We must be consistent, and address the fundamental lack of trust on both sides.
President Macron and Chancellor Merkel—with her somewhat conflicting messaging—suggest that a culture of automatically blaming Russia for everything is wide of the mark, and a consequence of the current relationship. They are making heavy weather of it. News today that the United States and Germany have reached a truce over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has sent shock waves through energy security concerns. This could conceivably put Ukraine back on a journey into the Russian fold, notwithstanding a surety from Berlin to impose sanctions on Russia if Moscow threatens Ukraine on energy security. If I were President Putin, I would see this as a potential chink in the armour, with the West undermining its position.
I do not profess an immediate solution to the desperate Belarusian issue, other than to publicly urge President Putin to support ideals built on decency and accountability, which could be turned into a quick win for Russia and lead to a more constructive relationship throughout.
Global leaders must learn from history. The time has come to understand what has happened to put us in the situation in which we now find ourselves, based on the many examples that exist—Myanmar being just one current example—and to devise whatever channels that, with strict conditionality, could be best made to work, including, if necessary, a surety of freedom from prosecution in return for free elections.
The international community should then enact a “citizens first” global charter with a courts-based system to adjudicate when leaders clearly demonstrate failure to uphold their responsibilities to their people. We must not give up on this, but the time has come for like-minded actors to up their game and to be more smart—but not Machiavellian—about it. A fundamental reset is required. Now is the time for a new world order, supported by actions, not words. Let Belarus be the test. Failure will spell trouble.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, whose name is next on the list, has withdrawn from the debate, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Northover.
Baroness Northover (LD) [V]
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, for securing this debate. He made an extremely interesting contribution, based on long experience. But here we are, out of the EU, trying to engage over a problem in our neighbourhood. So I first ask the Minister: are there any plans yet for a formalised structure so that we can co-operate and gain support from the whole of the EU on foreign affairs, or are we doomed to have to make individual approaches to one country after another, in the middle of the many other issues that we have to deal with? We know that the EU would have been happy to have such an arrangement. I am glad that we now recognise the EU ambassador as such; I commend the Minister for any efforts he made in that regard.
We have the challenge of the elections in Belarus. Such outcomes are not unknown, of course, but then we have the absolutely extraordinary situation of, in effect, the state-sponsored hijacking of a European commercial airliner. On its way from Athens to Vilnius, it was diverted by military planes and forced to land and hand over two of its passengers, who were then taken into detention and later showed signs of abuse. This was in our neighbourhood. Dealing with this is indeed immensely challenging. I note what the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said about engaging with Russia, but I also note what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said about individually supporting prisoners of conscience in Belarus so that they feel less alone.
On the election, in September 2020, 17 countries—including the UK, the US and France, as members of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe—invoked the “Moscow mechanism” to investigate possible human rights abuses in Belarus at the time of the election. The Moscow mechanism rapporteur presented his report in November 2020, concluding that
“allegations that the presidential elections were not transparent, free or fair were found confirmed.”
He stated that new elections should be organised according to international standards. We know that this has not happened and that the President makes no moves to do so, despite widespread protest in his country. Opposition leaders have been arrested or have fled.
In May 2021, this was followed by the hijacking of the Ryanair plane and the arrest of Roman Protasevich, along with his girlfriend. Mr Protasevich is a former editor of Nexta, which sought to promulgate news even when the Government were imposing blackouts. Sanctions have been imposed by both the EU and the UK. Can the Minister tell us what effect these may be having and whether the Government are considering further action? In response to the arrest, a spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs described it as a “domestic affair of Belarus”. I note the polling evidence from Belarus, cited by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, on what relationship people wish to see with both the EU and Russia.
On 8 June 2021, the EU delegation to Belarus, together with the embassies of the UK, the US, Switzerland and Japan, issued a joint statement after meeting the Belarusian Foreign Minister. They called on Belarus to halt the persecution of all those engaged in pro-democracy movements, independent media and civil society, and to start a credible and inclusive political process resulting in free and fair elections. Can the Minister tell us what the response was, if any?
The Foreign Secretary has expressed concerns about Belarus becoming even more of a client state of Russia. Can the Minister comment on the implications of those concerns? Do the Government see merit in what the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said? What further action does the Minister feel can be taken? This is an unstable and concerning situation right on EU borders. It certainly needs European countries to co-operate and strategically work out how best to put pressure on the current leadership in Belarus.
It is difficult not to see Putin’s leadership in Russia as a major block even if he is seeking to defend himself against the West, as the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, and the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, said. Putin’s interests in destabilising the West and the pumping out of disinformation and dissent, whether about vaccines or other matters—they can so easily be spread through social media—serve as a warning, as the integrated review emphasised. The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, made the point well: autocrats traditionally find enemies without in order to shore themselves up at home.
Clearly, we need to work closely with our EU partners, as well as the USA, on this matter. This crisis, like others around the world, is unresolved when we have so many issues on which we need to work together, not least in tackling climate change.
I am sure that the Minister is looking forward to his summer holiday. Who knows what foreign affairs crises may emerge during that time? That said, I wish him a peaceful and hopefully enjoyable summer. I thank him and his team for their engagement. I also wish the same to the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the other noble Lords here, as we conclude the last debate in Grand Committee before the Summer Recess.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, picking up on that last point, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, in wishing everyone a happy, peaceful and restful Summer Recess.
In the past year, since the fraudulent presidential elections in Belarus, we have seen the incredible defiance shown by activists and opposition leaders. Here I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Foulkes, who has been consistent in raising the cases of individual opposition leaders and activists. As he said, we need to ensure that they know that they are not alone and that their voices are heard. The mass protests have been met with violent repression and attacks against the Belarusian opposition. Noble Lords have referred to the absolutely outrageous forced landing of a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius basically to kidnap two passengers. The UK Government have been right to impose sanctions along with our allies, but much more needs to be done to support the people of Belarus.
Of course, in February and May this year, we had short debates on this question. The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, raised the OECD report, the Moscow mechanisms and the actions. In both February and May, the Minister responded to those Questions; I hope that he can give us a more detailed update on exactly where we are with the full implementation.
Of course, one of the other things that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and my noble friend referred to was the Council of Europe. Belarus is the only European country to be excluded from it—because of its appalling human rights record—yet, unlike Russia, it has not invaded two neighbouring countries or poisoned people on British soil. I hope that, in responding, the Minister can also tell us what has happened to the implementation of the Russia report; we have yet to see that happen. Of course, while we need to co-operate with countries on important issues, we also need to ensure that they understand our determination to stand up for international law and agreements.
I know what the Minister will say if I mention sanctions and the fact that London is still the home for a lot of corrupt moneys. I know that the mantra that is normally repeated is, “We do not talk about prospective sanctions”, but I hope that he can tell us a bit more about our discussions with allies about how we can co-operate, including on the initiatives raised by the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, in terms of debt relief and IMF policies. They are really important.
However, we need to stand up for the rights of the Belarusians better. The UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur has warned of
“a full-scale assault against civil society, curtailing a broad spectrum of rights and freedoms”.
We hope that we will absolutely focus on the conditions that Roman Protasevič has been subjected to; I hope that we will ensure that our diplomatic staff monitor that situation as effectively as possible. I also hope that the Minister will be able to report on recent steps at the UN for this particular action. Also, what assessment have the Government made of the recent attacks on civil society, including on trade union organisations?
Finally, I repeat the call from all noble Lords to use all available means to ensure and push for new democratic elections. Earlier this week, Belarus’s main opposition leader met the US Secretary of State. The US Government are encouraging support for a democratic resolution. Could the Minister tell us what recent discussions the Government have had with our allies on collective steps to support fresh elections in Belarus? Finally, I once again join the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, in wishing everyone a good, long and peaceful Summer Recess.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con) [V]
My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Balfe for tabling this debate and all noble Lords for their valuable contributions. The Government share the many concerns that have been raised in today’s debate about the situation in Belarus. I hope that my comments and responses to the questions asked provide further clarity on many of the salient points that were made.
As noble Lords acknowledged, it has been almost 12 months since the presidential election in Belarus. The Belarusian authorities manipulated that process for the sole purpose of ensuring that Alexander Lukashenko retained his grip on the structures of power he has held since 1994. To be frank, there was nothing democratic, free or fair about those elections. Such was Lukashenko’s fear of a genuine, open, contested popular presidential election that other candidates and their supporters were jailed during the campaign. Others were prevented even from registering as potential candidates. As a consequence, I join the noble Lord, Lord Collins, in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and his consistent raising of such issues. I will come on to political prisoners, in a moment.
We saw tens of thousands courageous Belarusians take to the streets in peaceful protest, whose voices were suppressed simply because they called out their right to determine how they are governed. Lukashenko’s regime has flatly refused to listen to them. Instead, it launched a brutal and sustained crackdown against peaceful protesters, democratic opposition leaders and supporters, as well as independent media, journalists and civil society. It has been a devastating assault on democratic principles and the rule of law, and it continues to this day.
The consequences for the Belarusian people have been extraordinary and the scale of the brutality is truly shocking. Just reflect on what has happened since: more than 35,000 people arbitrarily detained, more than 550 people imprisoned on politically motivated charges, the forced expulsion of opposition leaders and countless credible reports of physical mistreatment and torture by security forces, which the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted in her report to the Human Rights Council in February 2021.
As noted by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, this shameful charge sheet existed before we even consider the forced landing of Ryanair flight FR4978 on 23 May and the subsequent arrest of journalist Roman Protasevič and his partner or the raids on human rights organisations. I know the noble Lord, Lord Collins, feels passionately about the role of civil society organisations, and rightly so. Sadly and tragically, those raids included the detention of members of the internationally respected NGO Viasna.
Noble Lords are aware of the role of Russia, which was alluded to by my noble friend Lord Balfe in his opening remarks. Russia and Belarus have close historical, cultural and economic ties, and Russia has been one of the few countries to continue to back Lukashenko. Putin was one of the first leaders to congratulate him on his alleged electoral victory. He also continues to host visits from Lukashenko and has provided more than $1.5 billion of loans, amid talk of closer economic integration. Clearly, Russia has influence on Lukashenko, but we do not foresee Putin using his influence constructively—as alluded to by the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley—to resolve any human rights issues in Belarus peacefully or to address the injustices around last year’s flawed election.
The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, raised the specific issue of those who are prisoners and have been imprisoned in Belarus simply for exercising their right to peaceful expression. He mentioned the case of Stepan Latypov and the recent charges and sentences imposed against political prisoners. They are indeed tragic examples of the repressive actions of the Belarusian authorities, which are criminalising opposition voices for the sole purpose of protecting Lukashenko’s regime. I assure all noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that the Government continue to call on the authorities to release all those wrongfully imprisoned and bring an end to the crisis through peaceful and inclusive dialogue.
The UK equally supports new elections that are free and fair. We welcome the important work of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, who has undertaken it as the rapporteur for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; we appreciate its work on the need for widespread and achievable electoral reform in Belarus. To support this objective, we are implementing sanctions, which I will come on to in a moment. However, on the specific question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, on Mr Latypov and others, I assure the noble Lord that, through our embassy, we have made repeated requests for access to him and the other prisoners being held. I will ensure that I keep the noble Lord updated on any progress in this regard.
My noble friend Lord Balfe and the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, raised the issue of Russia. Notwithstanding our differences, it is important that we continue to engage in dialogue. We do so: we have raised the situation in Belarus in our discussions with Russia. Indeed, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary did so with Foreign Minister Lavrov on 17 June. The Minister for European Neighbourhood and the Americas also discussed Belarus during her visit to Moscow last November and in her recent discussions with the Russian ambassador on 5 July.
The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, also talked about partnership and joint working, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Northover. The UK has responded to events in Belarus swiftly, robustly and in lockstep with our international allies and partners, particularly France, Germany and the United States. It was the UK, on behalf of 17 participating states, that invoked the independent investigation under the OSCE Moscow mechanism.
It was no surprise that the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, spoke of the need for international collaboration, not least with our closest neighbours in the European Union; she has been a long-term advocate, and I pay tribute to her in this respect. We continue to work in a co-ordinated fashion with our colleagues and friends in the EU. Indeed, earlier today, we saw how concerted action has also taken place in response to the other challenges we face. On the broad issue of human rights, we have acted in concert with both NATO and EU colleagues, as well as the United States and other like-minded partners.
The independent report produced by the OSCE Moscow mechanism has also shown and produced a series of recommendations, which provide a pathway to peaceful resolution and free and fair elections. To deliver on the report’s recommendation of a mechanism for a long-term investigation into the human rights violations, we are also working closely with Denmark and Germany to bring together a consortium of international NGOs to form the International Accountability Platform for Belarus. I can share with noble Lords that this platform now has the support of more than 20 states.
We have also worked very closely with the wider international community, co-sponsoring a new mandate to investigate human rights violations and acts of torture at the UN Human Rights Council in March, with a view to assisting accountability. That area was raised specifically by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, in terms of continued multilateral action.
The Belarusian authorities believe they can operate in an environment of impunity, but accountability is clear: perpetrators of violations will be held responsible. As the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and others have noted, we have already implemented sanctions—indeed, over 100 sanction designations in response to human rights violations and the suppression of democracy in Belarus. We have done so hand in glove with our closest international partners.
The UK, in co-ordination with Canada, was the first country to implement sanctions against the leadership in Belarus, including Lukashenko himself, during the immediate fallout from the election. Most recently, we implemented further sanctions on 21 June in co-ordination with Canada, the European Union and the US, following the diversion of flight FR4978 and the arrest of Roman Protasevich and his partner.
It is important that we continue to speak out on the international stage and shine a spotlight on what is happening in Belarus. That is why, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Collins, has noted, we initiated a G7 statement on Belarus, and, as co-chair of the Media Freedom Coalition, led 47 nations in the condemnation of attacks against journalists and the independent media in Belarus, as well as rightly honouring the Belarusian Association of Journalists for its continued courage, advocacy and work. The democratic opposition have also been courageous, fearlessly continuing their peaceful struggle for a democratic future.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, raised the issue of civil society. We have increased our financial support for civil society and independent media organisations to help develop and protect specific democratic ideals. We are very much looking forward to the forthcoming visit to the UK of prominent opposition activist, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. The UK supports all those in Belarus who seek democratic change.
We call on the Belarusian authorities to cease their repressive campaign and enter into negotiations that can pave the way to electoral change. We want to see a reformed Belarus that has a good relationship with Russia and other European partners. We will continue to work with our partners to further urge Russia to impress on the Belarusian authorities the need to create space for political dialogue, including mediation by the OSCE. However, I fear there is unlikely to be a change in Russia’s stance towards Belarus any time soon, but our efforts and co-ordinated actions on this will remain.
I finally acknowledge and thank all noble Lords for their continued engagement and participation on this important issue. In responding to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins, I thank them for their continued support and direct engagement, as key voices for their respective parties in your Lordships’ House. I also thank all colleagues, across all Benches of your Lordships’ House, for engaging on the important and broader agenda of the policies, programmes and initiatives within my work, as the Minister of State for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
I reciprocate the best wishes for a restful, peaceful summer. We have all become used to being stars of the House of Lords on screens big and small, but I am sure we all very much look forward to some degree of resuming business as usual. I look forward to seeing colleagues—may I say friends?—in your Lordships’ House, once the Summer Recess has ended. Until that time, you have my best wishes for the summer.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)
My Lords, that completes the business before the Grand Committee. I remind Members to wipe their desks and chairs before leaving the Room. The Committee is adjourned until September. Good wishes have been extended by Members for the holidays that lie ahead. I endorse them as regards all contributors to this debate and the Grand Committee’s excellent officials, who serve it so well.
House of Lords
Oaths and Affirmations
Arrangement of Business
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, the Hybrid Sitting of the House will now begin. Some Members are here in the Chamber, while others are participating remotely, but all Members will be treated equally. The social distancing requirements in the Chamber have been removed, but I strongly encourage Members to continue to wear face coverings while in the Chamber, except when speaking, and to respect social distancing in relation to staff in the Chamber.
Oral Questions will now commence. I ask those asking supplementary questions to keep them no longer than 30 seconds and confined to two points. I ask that Ministers’ answers are also brief.
National Insurance Numbers: Electoral Register
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Rennard
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress they have made in ensuring that details on how to join the electoral register are included with the notices informing young people of their National Insurance numbers.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con) [V]
My Lords, Cabinet Office officials have continued to work with colleagues in HMRC on the inclusion of additional information on registering to vote in letters issuing national insurance numbers. I am assured that this change will be implemented by HMRC shortly—at the very latest, in October.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted if progress is being made, but I remind the Minister that, on 8 October last year, the House voted overwhelmingly for the Government to consider further action to get more young people registered to vote. On 26 November last year, he said that this was happening, but it has taken eight months since then. Why has it taken so long for the Government to consider adding perhaps a dozen words to a form in order to encourage more young people to register to vote?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Government are committed to making registration as easy as possible, and we encourage everyone eligible to register to do so. I stand by those earlier statements. Due to internal processes, there have been delays in implementing the changes to the letter. There are HMRC processes in place to implement change that involve HMRC’s IT partners, but I repeat that HMRC has assured us that this matter will be implemented by October.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]
We read that the Government are so keen to encourage young adults to vaccinate that we are all to be threatened with domestic Covid ID. Can the Minister confirm that they are just as keen to encourage young people to vote? If that is the case, will the Government explore automatically registering them for the electoral register at the moment when an NI number is issued?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Government do not support automatic registration, but we certainly wish to see everyone register and exercise the right to vote, for which so many people have made sacrifices for so long. Our Register to Vote website is used by many young people, with almost 10.8 million online applications having been submitted by 16 to 24 year-olds since the service was introduced. I remind noble Lords that the number of people who have voted in recent elections has continued to grow, and that is hugely welcome.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, the Select Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, which was excellently chaired by my noble friend and much missed colleague, the late Lord Shutt of Greetland, called for the piloting of automatic registration for attainers. Further to his previous answer, would the Minister consider having such a pilot? Does he further acknowledge that removing barriers to registration would be a positive step forward in encouraging more young people to vote?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, we have spoken often about the great service of the late Lord Shutt. We are determined to see people exercise their right to vote, but there are numerous important practical reasons to oppose automatic registration, and that is the position of the Government. Automatic registration would likely require a single national electoral register and/or a centralised database, and the Government have no plans to move in that direction.
Lord Hayward (Con) [V]
My Lords, I welcome the comments made by the Minister a few moments ago. I regard this as a substantial step forward in encouraging participation by attainers in elections, and it should be greeted as such. Progress can be made in encouraging people to vote and to register, and, like him, I do not believe in forced registration.
Lord True (Con) [V]
I thank my noble friend for his remarks. Each step is important. I acknowledge that this has taken time; HMRC has competing priorities—noble Lords will understand the situation that we have been living through—but we have been assured that this will happen by October. As my noble friend says, this is one small step, but we should all engage in the battle to get more and more people exercising the right to vote.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, can I pick up the noble Lord on the last point he made? It has long been conventional wisdom among politicians that we want to see an increase in those registering and, indeed, an increase in those participating in elections. Yet the Minister has set his face against automatic registration, when we also have coming before us at some point, when we return from the recess, the election integrity Bill, which some of us think of as the voter suppression Bill. Will the noble Lord rethink on both these issues—on that Bill, which will make it harder for people to vote, and on this issue of automatic registration?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, we will have many hours to discuss these matters on the Elections Bill. Time is short now, but I reject the view that that Bill is anything to do with voter suppression. I think the Labour Party has adopted a position on that which is contrary to the overwhelming view of the public that voter ID is sensible. So far as automatic registration is concerned, I can only repeat that the Government have no plans to introduce it.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, one person’s forced registration may be another person’s citizens’ rights. When I was the Lords’ Minister in the Cabinet Office, some years ago now, government digital experts were discussing the greater integration of local and central public data and the idea that digitisation might well extend to the electoral register. Is that still on the cards? Is this something that we may expect to be covered, either positively or negatively, in the Government’s digital strategy paper, when next it appears?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, I have indicated that the Government do not see attractions in producing a single national electoral register or centralised database. It is one of the aspects of our position that we should not move forward to automatic registration, and there are others. I have to disappoint the noble Lord on that score.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, I too welcome the news that my noble friend has given us. Would it not help to reverse the rather worrying trend in recent years that has seen the number of 16 and 17 year-olds on the registers, in readiness to vote at 18, fall by some 20%? Has any recent assessment been made of the effectiveness of the work done by electoral registration officers in schools, where Northern Ireland has had particularly marked success?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, my noble friend raises an important point and we will certainly look at the Northern Ireland example. As he and the House may know, we have been working to try to encourage enrolment through the universities, and an evaluation will be published today of Cabinet Office work looking at the effectiveness of the student electoral registration condition. These are all important areas where we need to continue to work.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that there is a fundamental difference between forced registration and increasing participation by young people in the democratic process? In the light of the comments from my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, does he accept that increasing young people’s involvement with citizens’ rights and democratic processes is as good as mandating the vaccine for all care staff? I think that mandating young people to vote in the democratic process would be a really good thing.
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Government do not support compulsory voting, and, in fact, it has very limited public support, but I agree with the need to encourage participation. We have the parliamentarian youth engagement toolkit, as well as the secondary schools’ resource, introduced in 2018. I hope that, following remarks from my noble friend Lord Lexden, these will be increasingly used.
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the proposal to remind young people to vote, but for those who somehow do not get an automatic national insurance number, Covid-19 restrictions have made it almost impossible to get one. Those waiting in the growing backlog, through no fault of their own, should not be further disadvantaged from registering to vote. I know that, at the moment, you cannot register online without a national insurance number. Has the Minister made an assessment of how many people have been affected in this way? What steps does he have to address this?
Lord True (Con) [V]
My Lords, I do not have an assessment to hand, but my noble friend raises an important point. I will pursue that matter and report back to her.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed. We now come to the second Oral Question.
Net Zero Test
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Hayman
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the recommendation of the Climate Change Committee that all government policies should be subject to a ‘Net Zero Test’; and what steps they intend to take in response.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)
My Lords, over the last three decades the UK has achieved record clean growth. Between 1990 and 2019, our economy has grown by 78%, while our emissions have reduced by 44%—the fastest reduction in the G7. The Government recently set out the UK’s sixth carbon budget, which would reduce 2035 emissions by 78% compared to 1990. We have strong governance around net zero; this includes two Cabinet Committees, one of which, the Climate Action Strategy Committee, is chaired by the Prime Minister. We will respond officially to the CCC report in due course.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that response and I declare my interests as set out in the register. I was privileged to be present to hear the speech of Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry, in London this week. He spoke passionately of the scale of the challenges the world faces and the urgency and breadth of the action needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Do the Government accept the need highlighted in the recent report of the Climate Change Committee to put a climate lens on all government legislation and all policy choices? Will they show global leadership on this issue, in the run-up to COP 26 in Glasgow, by committing to a net zero test in their imminent, I hope, net zero strategy?
Lord Callanan (Con)
Well, as I told the noble Baroness in my Answer, we have really strong governance around climate change. There are two Cabinet committees, one established and chaired by the Prime Minister and the second chaired by the COP 26 president designate. Of course, we look at all policies and their impact on climate change.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
I call the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich. No? I think we will go on to the next supplementary question. I call the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB) [V]
Can the Minister confirm that, as stated in their response to the Climate Change Committee recommendations, government policy that flows from the Agriculture Act and the Environment Bill that impacts on agriculture will take a holistic approach and take into account the significant benefits that agriculture does and will deliver, such as carbon sequestration in soils, crops and plants?
Lord Callanan (Con)
I agree with the noble Lord on the important contribution that agriculture makes and will need to make in the fight against climate change. Defra is looking at ways to reduce agricultural emissions and is progressing its environmental and land management schemes. It is also looking at other options to reduce agricultural emissions, including some very innovative solutions on the use of, for instance, methane-inhibiting food additives.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
In Monday’s debate on transport decarbonisation the Minister said:
“The more we can set out … what our expectations are, the more we expect that development to increase.”—[Official Report, 19/7/21; col. 26.]
The Government’s wish list is unsupported by effective plans for action. A yet to be published report of the Science and Technology Committee that deals with the means of transport decarbonisation has stated that the Government’s actions do not align with their ambitions to achieve net-zero emissions. What is required is an independent office for climate responsibility, which can assess the extent to which the Government’s actions correspond with their stated objectives. Do the Government recognise this need?
Lord Callanan (Con)
I understand the point the noble Lord is making, but I would refer him to the independent Committee on Climate Change, which does many of the things he is suggesting. It was established by the Climate Change Act 2008 and provides expert advice to the Government on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As he will have seen in its written reports, it is not afraid to point out what it sees as any deficiencies.
Lord Teverson (LD) [V]
My Lords, could the Minister explain how the Government’s proposed planning Bill will help lead towards his department’s goal of net zero?
Lord Callanan (Con)
Planning of course is extremely important, particularly in terms of delivering net-zero buildings. The noble Lord will be aware of the proposals we have to modify building regulations to reduce the impact of new buildings.
Lord Grantchester (Lab) [V]
This is the decisive decade for action and achievements, yet behind the Government’s scatter-gun rhetoric there is only dither and delay to key strategic coherency: the net-zero strategy, the hydrogen strategy, the Treasury’s finance road map, and others. Can the Minister confirm reports that another key strategy document, the heat and buildings strategy, is further delayed? According to Sky,
“Whitehall negotiations are stuck over how best to incentivise the public to change to low-carbon alternatives”.
How will the different strategies combine to support the UK’s climate change goals on both net zero and adaptation, along with wider environment-related goals?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The heat and buildings strategy will be published in due course. I do not agree with the noble Lord that we are not doing anything. I refer him to action we have taken recently: the energy White Paper, the revised emissions trading system, all of the announcements and investment to do with offshore wind, the pledge to phase out new petrol and diesel vehicles, the transport decarbonisation plan, and so on. Of course, there is always more to do, but I do not accept the noble Lord’s premise.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
My Lords, I would like to congratulate the Government on their achievements so far, with the fastest reduction in the G7. We have two Ministers—one in the Lords and one in the Commons, my noble and honourable friends—who are determined to help reduce our emissions and achieve success for the environment. I agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, that an independent assessment of the net-zero impact of policy is important and I commend the work of the Climate Change Committee. However, I hope the Government will continue to focus, for example, on direct action, by encouraging institutional and pension fund investors to invest in climate change mitigation, and promoting a net-zero approach to investment portfolios rather than asking officials to continue with a net-zero test in a way that the family test has been more of a tick-box exercise.
Lord Callanan (Con)
I thank my noble friend for her comments and certainly agree with her. As she is well aware, the trustees of occupational pension schemes are independent of government; they are not bound by the commitments we have signed up to. However, given the significance of the financial risks posed by climate change, we expect all investment decisions made by pension scheme trustees to take climate change into account. As of 2019, trustees of pension schemes with 100 or more members have been required to set out in their statement of investment principles policies on stewardship on an ESG, including climate change.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lords, if this test was brought in, would it not help government departments by giving them a very clear direction of travel? It would cover the sorts of decisions we are still wrestling with—Cambo in the North Sea and the Cumbrian mine—which have somehow slipped through despite government ambitions to reach carbon neutrality. This test could save future Ministers’ blushes. Can the Minister say what discussions have been had about this proposal and whether he will advocate it to his ministerial colleagues?
Lord Callanan (Con)
We have not had any discussions about implementing this proposal yet. We will respond to the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations in due course. But we are looking at the impact of climate change across all our policies. As I said, we have a couple of senior Cabinet-level committees, one chaired by the Prime Minister, which take all of these things into account.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the Climate Change Committee sees local authorities as having a critical part to play in achieving net zero. On 16 July, the NAO revealed
“serious weaknesses in central government’s approach to working with local authorities on decarbonisation, stemming from a lack of clarity over local authorities’ overall roles, piecemeal funding, and diffuse accountabilities”.
Does the Minister agree with its assessment that there is
“great urgency to the development of a more coherent approach”
and can he explain how the MHCLG, BEIS and other departments are responding to this challenge?
Lord Callanan (Con)
I do not agree with the noble Lord. Of course, local authorities are critical in terms of delivering this agenda and I have many meetings with them to discuss a number of the grand schemes for which I am responsible. We have spent something like £1.2 billion in dedicated funds given to local authorities through the local authority delivery scheme and the public sector decarbonisation scheme to help them in this job.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, the Government’s remit to the Oil and Gas Authority is MER, maximising economic recovery—also known as “drill every last drop”. The Government’s continued support for this policy leaves them open to applications such as the Cambo oilfield, which one trusts they will turn down. May I ask the Minister how the MER policy is compatible with our net-zero targets, given that existing oilfields already in production will take us over our agreed NDC?
Lord Callanan (Con)
The independent Committee on Climate Change recognises that there is an ongoing role for oil and gas, and we are working hard to drive down demand and emissions. The updated Oil and Gas Authority strategy includes a requirement for industry to “take appropriate steps” to support the delivery of the net-zero target—and, of course, we have put forward the ambitious decarbonisation plan for the North Sea. With regard to the Cambo field, Shell and Siccar Point have put forward a development proposal seeking consent, with an intention to commence production in 2025. This is not a new project; it was licensed in 2001 and 2004 and is going through the normal regulatory approval process.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed.
Council Tax
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have, if any, to introduce higher rate bands for Council Tax.
The Minister of State, Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)
I recognise my noble friend’s interest in this issue, but the Government do not have any plans to introduce higher bands for council tax. Many people living in high-value properties are on low incomes and may have lived in their homes for a long time. Higher bands risk penalising such people, including pensioners, who have seen their homes increase in value. They could face a substantial tax rise without having the income to pay the higher bill.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
Does my noble friend agree that it would be odd to calculate today’s income tax on what people earned 30 years ago, but this is the basis on which we fund local government? The council tax is out of date, arbitrary and regressive. While the right policy would be revaluation, ducked for too long by successive Governments, would it not be right in the meantime to take the higher band and, without breaking any manifesto commitments, introduce two extra bands to bring in extra revenue from those with more valuable assets?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My noble friend’s suggestion has some merit. Even a limited revaluation would be costly and would yield significant extra revenue only in those parts of the country where house prices are the highest, given that council tax income is not redistributed. It would also leave council tax payers in a rather odd, and arguably less fair, situation where some were paying their tax based on 1991 values while others were doing so based on prices in the present day.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans [V]
According to the citizens advice bureau, council tax is the most common debt problem faced by families in Britain, with 86,000 people in England struggling to keep up with payments. The current system heavily favours the south-east and disproportionately disadvantages the poor. As part of the levelling up agenda, what consideration have Her Majesty’s Government given to a land value tax to address these inequalities?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, the Government do not have any plans to introduce such a land value tax, but they are committed to supporting those on low incomes, including by increasing the living wage and by spending £111 billion on welfare support for people of working age in 2020-21.
Lord McLoughlin (Con)
My Lords, the council tax was introduced as a result of the abolition of the community charge, which was introduced as a result of the discredited rates system. One reason why the rates system became so discredited was that there was no revaluation. There has been no revaluation of council tax for 30 years. Are we going to find ourselves in the same position in another five years if we do not act soon?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
I note my noble friend’s call for a council tax revaluation. As I said in my previous answer, a full revaluation would be costly. The council tax bands are well understood by residents and provide a stable income for councils, so at this stage we have no plans for a full revaluation.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, how is it possible for a £54 million luxury house in London’s Mayfair to have a lower council tax than a former council house on Windebrowe Avenue in Keswick in Cumbria and almost the same council tax as an £80,000 house on Moorclose Road in Workington, both in my former constituency? Is it not the simple truth that the whole council tax system is now discredited? It is unfair, it penalises much of the north, it favours London and much of the south, and it is now in urgent need of reform.
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I am interested to hear the specific examples given, but we must recognise that, for local authority funding, council tax represents only a proportion of the income received. That is why we try to equalise through measures such as the grant system, which recognises the index of multiple deprivation as one of the reasons in how you provide grant—
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
Yes, it does. On that basis, grant enables areas with lower council tax bases to receive 16% more in core spending power.
I recognise the point made by the noble Lord about the disparity in valuations between the north and the south, but it is a system that works well to develop the funding that councils need at the moment.
Lord Shipley (LD) [V]
My Lords, I refer the House to my registered interests. What consideration will the Government give to the potential benefit of a proportional property tax, as recommended by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee to replace council tax and business rates in its report published earlier this week?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, we have looked at putting on hold the reform of the local government finance system because of the pandemic, and further reforms will be potentially be brought forward as a result of the spending review. I note the idea that the noble Lord raises.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, I yield to no one in my passionate belief that the state should tax the citizens less, but domestic real estate is by international standards undertaxed. It would not be that expensive to restrict a revaluation to council tax band H properties —perhaps those over a certain current market value. We should then look at empty properties. There are currently 30,000 empty properties in London alone, with a value of £15 billion. They should attract a surtax, along with overseas-owned properties.
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I note that my noble friend again calls for a new, higher band of property. If that higher band were based on 1991 values, the Valuation Office Agency would need to revalue all properties in the current top band. That would certainly be cheaper than a full revaluation.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I refer noble Lords to my registered interests. The impact of the pandemic has led to the worst recession of any major economy. With the virus still not under control, local councillors will again be forced to raise council tax this year to protect vital local services, just when many families are struggling to make ends meet. Will the Government remove the necessity for planned council tax rises by giving councils the resources they need and stand by their pledge, so far not honoured, to do whatever is necessary to support councils?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I do not recognise the picture that the noble Baroness paints. Throughout the pandemic, we have provided considerable additional funding for local authorities. Local authorities received £3.8 billion in social care grant funding through the social care grant and the improved better care fund. We continue to support councils throughout this very difficult period.
Lord Jones of Cheltenham (LD) [V]
Hardly a week goes by without a news story about someone’s new basement causing problems to their neighbours. Should there not be an automatic revaluation when such improvements are carried out and higher bands introduced to cope with massively inflated property values, or do we need a new system altogether, related to the ability to pay?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted that all these ideas are being floated on how we should support and organise the funding of local government. As I said, the Government have put that on hold, and we are looking at bringing forward measures as part of the spending review.
Lord Flight (Con)
My Lords, there is a clear rationale for introducing higher-rate council tax bands. The gap between the top and bottom bands is ludicrously small compared with the value of the premises. I ask the Government to consider reviewing the whole territory of property taxation and introducing a new, fairer tax covering property—commercial and residential.
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
I thank my noble friend. He joins the chorus of people calling for new bands and a reform of the council tax system, but, as I have said, we do not intend to bring in new bands. Plans around local government finance reform have been put on hold and will be carried forward as part of the spending review.
Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister not realise that the disparities in council tax create a lot of the poverty that he referred to in his earlier statement? Is he aware that the maximum level in Westminster is £1,655? In every district in Cumbria, the average is in excess of £4,000. How can that be fair?
Lord Greenhalgh (Con)
My Lords, I point out that Westminster has a low-tax policy and sets probably the lowest council tax in the country, and it should be commended for being a low-tax authority. Certain authorities know how to squeeze every penny in every pound, and I commend Westminster on being able to do that.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed. We now come to the fourth Oral Question.
Zimbabwe: Human Rights
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Oates
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they conducted an assessment of the political and human rights situation in Zimbabwe prior to the decision to deport Zimbabwean nationals to that country on 21 July; and if so, from whom they sought evidence when making that assessment.
Lord Oates (LD) [V]
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and, in doing so, declare my interest as the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Zimbabwe.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, assessment is made against the latest country of origin information and relevant case law. This is based on evidence from reliable sources; reputable media outlets; local, national and international organisations; human rights organisations; and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office information. Sources are included in the footnotes of the country policy and information notes published on GOV.UK.
Lord Oates (LD) [V]
My Lords, in a response from the Minister for Immigration Compliance to a letter from over 75 Peers and MPs, the Government sought to distract attention from the human rights situation in Zimbabwe by focusing on foreign national offenders. However, as the minutes of the meeting between the British Embassy in Harare and the Zimbabwean Government dated 30 June make clear, this is a PR tactic, and it was agreed at that meeting that Zimbabwean nationals who were not foreign national offenders could also be included on the 21 July flight.
Can the Minister clarify to the House whether it is the Home Office’s policy to deport only foreign national offenders to Zimbabwe, or does it intend that future flights will include those who are not FNOs? Can the Minister also tell the House how many deportation orders were originally issued for the removal of Zimbabwean nationals on 21 July and how many were subsequently found to be unlawful or were otherwise stayed by the courts?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I can confirm to the noble Lord that it is government policy to deport foreign national offenders who have received a custodial sentence of 12 months or more. We are not trying to distract from human rights issues. Regarding the flight that departed last night, 50 were due to be on it; 14 were returned and 44 submitted last-minute claims.
Lord Rosser (Lab) [V]
The Home Office has a poor record in relation to Covid-19 safety, having already been warned by the High Court about its approach to the asylum system in this regard. Following what happened at Napier barracks, what is the position at the Brook House immigration removal centre? Is it that there has been at least one confirmed positive Covid-19 case? Were any of those on the scheduled deportation flight to Zimbabwe, whom the Government said were all foreign national offenders, people who were awaiting a Covid-19 test result; had tested positive themselves; or should have been, or were, self-isolating for 10 days because they had come into contact with somebody with Covid-19?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, I can confirm to the noble Lord that public health guidance is adhered to on all removal flights. I will have to get further information on how many were from Brook House. The welfare of those detained in our care is of the utmost importance. We are working closely with our providers and PHE to stop the spread of the virus. That absolutely includes immigration removal centres.
Lord Chidgey (LD)
My Lords, to come back to the assessment of the situation and consultation before decision to deport, in April, the US State Secretary, Antony J Blinken, assessed Zimbabwe as one of the worst countries abusing citizens’ rights, with state-sanctioned violence continuing a culture of impunity. Zimbabwe’s security forces acted with tacit support for President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Government, torturing human rights groups by brutal sexual assault and beating with clubs, cables, gun butts and heavy whips. Victims were forced to eat human excrement and drink poisonous chemicals, among other tortures. Victims included MDC Alliance members, Joana Mamombe, Netsai Marova and Cecilia Chimbiri, who suffered 36 hours of sexual abuse and physical torture. Can the Minister confirm whether the US report was included in the Government’s human rights assessment? If not, why not? And what were the conclusions of the assessment?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
What I can say to the noble Lord is that, back in 2018, the Government, with officials from the embassy in Zimbabwe, agreed to redocument Zimbabwean nationals without a right to remain in the UK, including foreign national offenders. Since we commenced that redocumentation in 2018, we have returned 50 people to Zimbabwe. While it is an FCDO priority country for human rights—the noble Lord is right—we have received no reports of human rights violations against those returned since the 2018 agreement.
Lord St John of Bletso (CB)
My Lords, while I fully understand the rationale behind deporting serious foreign national offenders, what is the level of the seriousness of the crime? At a time when Zimbabwe is in the grips of a major Covid outbreak with very little spare capacity, what assessment was made of the timing of this deportation, and what assessment has been made of the planned patriot Bill, which will make it illegal for members of the Opposition to criticise the Government?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
Well, the types of FNOs are those who received a custodial sentence of 12 months or more, subject to limited exceptions. The types of criminals on the flight yesterday included murderers, rapists, sexual offenders against children and drug suppliers. In terms of Covid, they receive PPE and other support when they return. I cannot remember the last point the noble Lord raised, but that is two of the three questions answered.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, last night, a High Court judge accepted that anyone on the deportation flight given face-to-face interviews with Zimbabwean officials before being granted an emergency travel document required to enter Zimbabwe could be at risk on return. The judge directed that the individual who brought the case be saved from boarding the flight, but by the time the news of that order was made public, others who may have been able to benefit from it had had their phones confiscated. Should the Government have put anyone on the flight who had been in such an interview, given the judge’s ruling? Does this not defy the international principle that non-refoulement? Can the Minister tell me, now or by letter, how many of the 14 individuals on the flight this applied to?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
As the noble Baroness will not be surprised to know, I will not discuss individual cases. What I will say is that on that flight were murderers, rapists, people who had sexually offended against children and suppliers of drugs. To go back to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, in terms of the frequency of reviewing concerns about human rights: FCDO regularly and consistently raises any concerns and would do so if there was any evidence of violations against those returned.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, the note of 30 June that my noble friend Lord Oates referred to is the framework agreement with the Government regarding these flights, which the British Embassy indicated
“would start with around 100 possible persons … We agreed the flight would focus on Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) and (if capacity allowed) some immigration offenders.”
On the media points, it stated that in proactive and reactive communications that the returnees on the flight would have criminal records and, therefore, had to return to their country of origin. But that will not necessarily be the case in future if it includes those who have administrative removal for immigration purposes. Will the Minister please investigate this and reassure the House that, if this is a framework for flights going forward, all those on return flights who do not necessarily have criminal records will not all be badged as FNOs and therefore be highly vulnerable to abuse in the country of return?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I will certainly check that out for the noble Lord. We are committed to removing from this country any FNOs or anyone else for immigration purposes.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, can the Minister tell us how often Home Office officials meet the Zimbabwean diaspora here, in London in particular, who are well aware of the difference between a genuine asylum seeker and someone who has been deported for very heinous crimes? How many times have Zimbabwean officials from this embassy been involved in meetings with Home Office officials and the person who is about to be deported? Very often, that brings back to them what will happen to them when they go back to Zimbabwe, and the Home Office should not be doing this without a Home Office official there, taking notes.
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I shall say to the noble Baroness what I said to the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey: the FCDO regularly and consistently raises any human rights concerns with the Government of Zimbabwe, and we would do if we had any evidence of violations against those returns.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, all supplementary questions have been asked.
Arrangement of Business
Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)
My Lords, before we start the main business of the day, I rise to say a few words with the agreement of my noble friend the Leader of the House, the usual channels and the Convenor of the Cross-Bench Peers. Since 21 April 2020, the House has sat virtually or in hybrid fashion. Following the decisions taken by the House last week, from September we will to all intents and purposes return to our normal physical ways of working. This means that today is likely to be the last day of hybrid proceedings.
As noble Lords acknowledged in our debate in May, creating and maintaining the hybrid House was the work of many. While the hybrid House has had its frustrations and flaws for all of us, it is right to pay tribute to the staff of the House who have worked, seen and unseen, to ensure that the House continued to function for so many months. Today, at the end of the hybrid House, I thank some of the staff who have worked to maintain the hybrid proceedings. This includes those who managed the daily invitations to Members to participate; those who assisted Members with technical difficulties; and those who worked in the hub, to link the broadcasters to the Chamber. They include Eleanor Clements, who ably led the behind-the-scenes co-ordination and administration of the virtual proceedings, as well as her colleagues Maggie Barnes, Alex Brocklehurst, Simon Nicholls and Seonaid Still. I also thank Sally Freestone, David Loader and their colleagues in the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit, and our contractors, NEP Bow Tie. I also thank all those in the Virtual Participation Administration Team and the Hub Clerk Team, which were created at the start of the pandemic to enable Members to participate virtually in the Chamber and Grand Committee. The staff on these teams volunteered to take on this work in addition to busy day jobs to keep the House running.
I am sure I speak for the whole House when I pay tribute to their unstinting professionalism, hard work and dedication—and, not least, their patience. We are very grateful, and we thank them all.
The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)
My Lords, I thank the Chief Whip for those remarks and echo his thanks to the staff of the House, the Digital Service, the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit, the Virtual Participation Administration Team and the Hub Clerk Team. I also thank the Members of the House. This has not been an easy 18 months but technologically we have achieved much more than we ever thought possible. Our virtual and hybrid House arrangements were world leading and, importantly, we have continued to carry out our constitutional duty.
Chief Whips are not accustomed to being thanked in the Chamber, but today I do just that. The Chief Whip, together with the Leader of the House and all members of the usual channels and the Convenor, deserve our thanks. The work they do to build consensus, often in very difficult circumstances, is a great service to the House. During this period, they have worked tirelessly. Ahead of the rise of the House today, I wish all noble Lords and staff a very restful and enjoyable Summer Recess. It has never been more well deserved.
Special Public Bill Committee (Charities Bill)
The Senior Deputy Speaker
That, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following Lords be appointed to the Special Public Bill Committee on the Charities Bill [HL]:
Etherton, L (Chair), Barker, B, Barran, B, Bellingham, L, Cruddas, L, Fullbrook, B, Goudie, B, Parkinson of Whitley Bay, L, Ponsonby of Shulbrede, L.
That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records;
That the evidence taken by the Committee be published, if the Committee so wishes.
Draft Online Safety Bill Committee
The Senior Deputy Speaker
That the Commons message of 21 July be considered and that a Committee of six Lords be appointed to join with the Committee appointed by the Commons to consider and report on the draft Online Safety Bill presented to both Houses on 12 May (CP405) and that the Committee should report on the draft Bill by 10 December;
That, as proposed by the Committee of Selection, the following members be appointed to the Committee:
Black of Brentwood, L, Clement-Jones, L, Gilbert of Panteg, L, Kidron, B, Knight of Weymouth, L, Stevenson of Balmacara, L.
That the Committee have power to agree with the Committee appointed by the Commons in the appointment of a Chairman;
That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records;
That the Committee have power to appoint specialist advisers;
That the Committee have leave to report from time to time;
That the Committee have power to adjourn from place to place within the United Kingdom;
That the reports of the Committee from time to time shall be printed, regardless of any adjournment of the House;
That the evidence taken by the Committee shall, if the Committee so wishes, be published.
Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee
The Senior Deputy Speaker
European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 (References to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) Regulations 2021
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord True [V]
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 16 June be approved.
Relevant document: 7th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Considered in Grand Committee on 21 July.
Electricity Capacity (Amendment) Regulations 2021
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Callanan
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 21 June be approved.
Considered in Grand Committee on 21 July.
Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations 2018 (Consequential Modifications) Order 2021
Viscount Younger of Leckie
That the draft Order laid before the House on 8 June be approved.
Considered in Grand Committee on 21 July.
Fisheries Act 2020 (Scheme for Financial Assistance) (England) Regulations 2021
Viscount Younger of Leckie
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 15 June be approved.
Relevant document: 7th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Considered in Grand Committee on 21 July.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Benyon, I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper.
International Travel Rules
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Rosser (Lab) [V]
My Lords, it is not possible to travel to France without the need for quarantine and all the costs and upheaval that involves, as France, following a sudden decision, is now in a separate subcategory of amber-list countries. As one Conservative MP put it when this UQ was discussed in the Commons,
“public confidence in going abroad is now in a ditch”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/7/21; col. 679.]
Another Conservative MP said,
“the further restrictions for France stretch both the credibility of the system and the patience of the travel industry. The whole industry … continues to watch as its reserves are dried up”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/7/21; col. 685.]
The travel industry was promised a rescue deal, which has never materialised. When do the Government intend to give this important industry the support that it needs, as we have called for, and as the shadow Secretary of State demanded again in the Commons on Monday, to which there was no response from the Minister?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, talks about the decision that we had to make on France, which of course was not made lightly. We have in place a good traffic-light system which enables us to categorise countries according to risk and, therefore, travel can happen accordingly. However, we have also reduced requirements for people who have had double vaccinations in order to travel to amber countries. That is of great benefit to the travel companies and I am sure that they will take advantage of that opportunity.
Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]
Can the Minister explain why the Government, with a fanfare of publicity, moved France on to the amber list while at the same time issuing instructions that from Monday, Border Force officers no longer have to verify that new arrivals from green-list and amber-list countries have negative Covid tests or other legally required paperwork? Can the Minister explain why the decision to remove these checks was made? Was it due to a lack of staff and, if so, why have the Government not provided enough Border Force staff to perform checks at a predictably busy time of year?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, all the decisions that this Government make are on the basis of risk—risk to the country as a whole from a public health perspective and risks to travellers who choose to go abroad where they are able to. It is not the case that checks were dropped because of reduction in demand. However, we need to keep the travelling public as risk-free as possible. That is a great benefit to citizens, but also to the travel industry.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, what are the prospects and timing of agreeing a deal with the United States that would allow quarantine to cease for vaccinated individuals from both countries? This is our largest market, with a high rate of vaccination, so “risk”, in the words of my noble friend, is low. And what is the answer for Japan? I should declare an interest, as I need to travel there as chair of Crown Agents.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
Japan will be taken under consideration as we review the traffic lights system going forward. Transatlantic travel is hugely important for both the US and the UK, and as announced by the Secretary of State for Transport on 8 July, we are confident that vaccines will play an important role in normalising travel, when it is appropriate. There is a UK-US expert working group specifically driving this work forward.
Lord Bilimoria (CB) [V]
My Lords, the queues at arrivals at our airports are now completely unacceptable. They are two hours or more, as I have experienced recently. Why do the Government not do two things? First, they could get airlines to check documentation before passengers board planes to the UK. Secondly, with universities having closed, they could employ university students, or recent graduates, train them up in a day or two and get them to check Covid documents at arrivals at the airports, with one or two Border Force agents supporting and supervising them, and then let the passengers through to the e-gates and to the immigration officers to do the passport checks. These two moves would remove the congestion and queues in one swoop.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for his suggestions, and I will ensure that my colleagues at the Home Office listen to them as well. We have always been very clear that wait times at the border may be extended due to biosecurity checks being carried out. These are essential to protect the public and the success of our vaccination programme. Passengers have a key role to play in this, as to a certain extent do airlines, because they do some checking before passengers board aircraft. The noble Lord mentioned e-gates. Automation is also really important. We have been able to upgrade the e-gates to speed passengers through the airport.
Lord Snape (Lab)
I draw your Lordships’ attention to my entry in the register of interests. The travel industry is at present on its knees. Regular changes in government policy, as well as changes in the government policy on the admittance of British businesspeople and holidaymakers from other countries, are making the situation considerably worse. Could the Minister tell us what consultations, if any, have been held with the Treasury about some sector-specific assistance to this vital industry?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
My Lords, we believe that by the end of September 2021 the air transport sector, for example, will have benefited from around £7 billion worth of government support since the start of the pandemic. Decisions around the sector support will of course ultimately be a matter for the Chancellor based on the evidence that we have been able to provide. Of course, we have regular conversations with our colleagues at the Treasury, but also with industry. We are listening very carefully to the sector.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con) [V]
My Lords, perhaps one of the more confusing issues surrounding the traffic lights system is not knowing on what basis the grading is made. Chile, for example, has falling infection rates and is at least on a par with our high vaccination rates here, yet it remains red. Could my noble friend give us some idea as to how exactly these grades are calculated and whether she is aware of any red countries likely to move to amber in the foreseeable future?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am unable to provide any insight to my noble friend as to what might happen in the future in terms of countries moving from one group to the next, but we look at a range of factors when making these decisions. Of course, we are reliant on the joint biosecurity centre for producing a risk assessment of the countries and territories. The factors that the JBC risk assessment considers are very varied. They include the genomic surveillance capability within the nation, the Covid-19 transmission risk and the transmission risk of variants of concern. A range of measures is incorporated into reaching these decisions.
Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)
My Lords, I would like to pick up on the point on France raised by my noble friend Lord Rosser. The Government’s decision on Friday to change quarantine rules on return from France has bewildered and angered not just the travel industry but the hundreds of thousands of UK citizens gong to France on holiday or for work. Can the Minister tell the House when this decision will be reviewed—and hopefully reversed—given the small number of beta variant cases in mainland France, as opposed to La Réunion, so that people can get on with their jobs when they return without self-isolating first.
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
I am happy to provide some more information to the noble Baroness. GISAID data suggests that the beta variant accounts for around 5% of cases in France, with data earlier in the month suggesting it could be as high as 9%. This data does not include La Réunion. It includes Corsica, which is included in the quarantine policy, and Monaco. This data for the beta variant compares to similar data from Spain and Greece of less than 1%, so that it why we are concerned about France. It has nothing to do with La Réunion. That is why we took that decision. I cannot say at this time when that process will come under review. Of course, we would love to have people travelling to France again, but it was the right decision taken on the information available.
Lord Rogan (UUP) [V]
My Lords, many people travelling from Belfast to international destinations will initially fly to London or Manchester before continuing their journey on to their final destination. Given that the decisions made by the United Kingdom Government for travellers in England will therefore also apply to large numbers of travellers from Northern Ireland, what discussions is the Minister, or her officials, having with her counterparts in Belfast to ensure that changes to international travel rules agreed in London are properly conveyed to holidaymakers departing from Northern Ireland?
Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)
We have ongoing conversations with all the devolved Administrations, because this is so important. I recognise the noble Lord’s point: if you are travelling to Northern Ireland, chances are you may be coming through one of the large airports in England. It is very important, but we must recognise that health policy is devolved. However, we have every intention of working as closely as possible with the devolved nations and ensuring that our interventions are as aligned as possible.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
The time allowed for this Question has now elapsed. I apologise to the noble Baronesses who could not be called.
Cyberattack: Microsoft
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, I must admit that I share the view of Iain Duncan Smith about the seriousness of this matter and why there was not a Statement from the Government at the time. In the Commons, the Minister estimated that approximately 3,000 UK-based organisations may have been vulnerable to this attack, but there was no confirmation on whether any public bodies are included in this figure. Can the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, state whether any public bodies were compromised and what urgent steps are being taken to secure public bodies from future attacks? Also, when the Government acted with targeted sanctions against individuals involved in the Russian state-backed cyberattack on the German Parliament, why were there no sanctions in response to Chinese state-backed cyberattacks, on—among others—the Finnish Parliament?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con) [V]
My Lords, I agree that we need to ensure protection for all organisations. The noble Lord is correct in saying that 3,000 organisations were impacted. Obviously, we made a full evaluation when we were informed of these attacks to ensure that all the information was readily available. He asked specifically about government organisations. We do not believe that government organisations were victims. Because this was an untargeted action, it is not possible to give a credible assessment of the overall economic damage. He asked about further mitigation. As he knows, the National Cyber Security Centre is very much world beating and, together with Microsoft, we have worked to give specific and timely advice. By the end of March, 92% of all those organisations impacted had taken appropriate mitigations.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, the Answer in the House of Commons suggested that there had been a response in the form of a statement by 39 countries. That is welcome, but what action are the Government taking, beyond making statements, to ensure that the United Kingdom and her allies are no longer vulnerable to China? Statements are one thing; sanctions or other actions would surely be far more effective.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am sure that the noble Baroness will acknowledge that when we call out such action, as we have on this occasion, that is done in co-ordination with our key partners. The fact that 39 countries, including those of the European Union and NATO, including Norway, as well as Japan, are among those demonstrates the strong condemnation of these actions. Alongside international partners, we continue not just to call this out but to ensure that we are vigilant to these threats, wherever they come from, and ready to defend against them. As for specific sanctions, the noble Lord, Lord Collins, pointed to Russia, and the noble Baroness will be aware that we have an autonomous sanctions regime and, where necessary, we have acted in the past, although I cannot speculate on any future action that we may take in this respect.
Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]
My Lords, last year Twitter suspended more than 32,000 accounts linked to Chinese, Russian and Turkish propaganda operations and more than 170,000 state-linked bot accounts tied to China. Analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that China’s influence operation targeted users outside the mainland, where Twitter and Facebook are blocked, aiming to manipulate opinion on issues including the Hong Kong protests, coronavirus and Taiwan. What assessment has the Government made of such state-linked propaganda campaigns targeting UK citizens and the attempts to destabilise British society?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]
My Lords, my noble friend makes an important point and I assure her and your Lordships’ House that we work in co-ordination with international partners, as well as through the National Cyber Security Centre, to ensure that those who may be targeted and, indeed, those who have been targeted are properly supported. Equally, we share information which allows further mitigation of risk. We must close down this space. Cyberspace is a force for good for many, in the opportunities that it offers, but any use of cyber must be legal, responsible and proportionate. The actions taken on this occasion, supported by the Chinese state, fall foul of that. It is right that we work with international partners in condemning such action.
Lord Wigley (PC) [V]
My Lords, do the Government systematically seek to identify all businesses and individuals who may have been targets for cyberattacks, whether from China or elsewhere? If so, do the Government, as a matter of policy, advise all such businesses and individuals of their potential vulnerability? Do they offer help in how to avoid or minimise the deleterious consequences of such exposure?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]
My Lords, the noble Lord makes an important point and I shall answer it on two bases. We have worked consistently with other countries, particularly those that do not have the technical capacity to take appropriate mitigation against cyberattacks. We have invested a great deal, including through the Commonwealth, on issues of cybersecurity. Working through the NCSC, we also recommend that, where possible, organisations update to the latest version of software and patch frequently to protect against cyberthreats. On this occasion, both the NCSC and Microsoft have published actionable advice for network defenders. As we improve our capacity to defend, we continue to work with key partners to further mitigate risks to any individual or organisation within the UK.
Baroness Goudie (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the widespread nature of this attack shows that cybersecurity is a global issue which needs global co-operation. What steps are the Government taking to play a greater role in the United Nations innovation agencies to help to make future technologies more cyberspace-secure?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]
My Lords, the noble Baroness points to multilateral action. Cybersecurity and cyber more generally remain a point of discussion within the context of the United Nations, as well as other multilateral organisations. It is worth reflecting that, when I mentioned 39 countries earlier, that demonstrates that this is an international challenge that, as the noble Baroness rightly recognises, requires international action, as on this occasion. Working with international partners and organisations, we have illustrated the need for uniform action and calling out those who seek to use cyberspace to attack other countries, organisations or individuals.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, cyberattacks are part of the low-intensity warfare being waged by President Xi with the aim of securing global domination. Other weapons are terror in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong and the illegal occupation of neighbouring countries’ territories. Is it not now the time for the Government to impose trade sanctions and a ban on Chinese products and investment?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]
My Lords, the Government have been at the forefront in the broader challenges. Indeed, as the UK Human Rights Minister, I am at the forefront of the work that we have done at the Human Rights Council, for example, in calling out the systematic detention and abuse of the Uighur community in particular. Most recently, we backed the Canadian statement and worked with our Canadian partners to ensure that more than 40 members at the Human Rights Council called out the situation of the Uighurs and to ensure the access of the human rights commissioner to Xinjiang. We have taken action. The noble Lord talks about sanctions, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins, mentioned them too. Back in 2018, the UK, along with 14 partners, called out, on the basis of APT 10, the action that China had taken. We work systematically and will continue to focus our activities on calling out human rights abuses wherever they occur.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, notwithstanding the focus on any Chinese or Russian interference in our security and civil liberties, in light of the Guardian investigation and reports, and given the Statement made to this House by the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord True, that our Government are fully aware and made representations about potentially illegal surveillance of British citizens and institutions, will the noble Lord say if he is aware to whom representations have been made? What assurance can he provide that such security breaches have been stopped as a result of our Government’s work and that the Government are not failing to protect our citizens and institutions against any further attacks from seemingly friendly countries and partners?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con) [V]
My Lords, I assure the noble Baroness, that it is essential—I say this very clearly—that all cyber actors use their capabilities, as I said earlier, in a legal, proportionate and responsible way. On the issue that she highlighted, which has been the cause of media reporting, I assure her that we make representations to all appropriate Governments. We work closely with our allies on this important issue and, ultimately, to tackle cyberthreats and improve resilience. That is what we have done in the case of China. We will continue to act responsibly to ensure that citizens and organisations in the UK and, indeed, across the world are protected in the best way possible. We will continue to work to mitigate such actions.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has elapsed and I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, who was not able to ask his question.
NHS Update
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, I first record from these Benches our thanks for the hard work of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, who has gone on maternity leave. We wish her and her baby all the very best for the future. Also, adding to the words of the Government Chief Whip, I thank the clerks, the virtual technicians, the managers and all our staff, for keeping the show on the road and for keeping us safe throughout this year. I particularly echo his words about their patience with us. We have continued to do our job and could only have done so with the support of these dedicated teams. I also thank the Lord Speaker, his predecessor, and Members of all those Committees that have been in almost permanent session this year, for guiding us through.
This is the last repeat Statement before the summer—I think this may be number 50; the Minister will know. We have three matters to deal with today: the somewhat puzzling Statement made in the Commons yesterday afternoon, the Written Statement from the Secretary of State which announced the results of the NHS pay review and—I have given the Minister notice—I will also address some of the issues raised in the Covid update given in the Commons this morning.
The Statement made by Helen Whately yesterday was an odd moment. We of course join her and the Minister in thanking Sir Simon Stevens for all his work in the NHS—he has also taken up his place in your Lordships’ House. We also join others in welcoming progress on the autism strategy, which the honourable lady talked about in her speech; although, in due course I will seek the views of the organisations who are experts in this area. However, the honourable lady gave what can only be described as a parliamentary doorstep clap for the NHS and its staff. Welcome though that might be, it does not pay the bills or provide the respect that this Government owe to our NHS staff.
The Statement was followed within hours by a Written Ministerial Statement outlining the NHS pay award. This is not a respectful way to treat Parliament or our NHS staff. As my honourable friend Dr Rosena Allin-Khan said yesterday, once again the Government have had to roll back on a shoddy, ill-thought-through position, with their 1% pay rise—a real-terms pay cut —rejected by the independent pay body. Less than an hour before, there were competing briefings on what the deal was to be and, at that moment, it turned out to be nothing. Our NHS staff deserve better than this. My honourable friend invited the Minister in the other place to shadow her in the A&E department where she has worked shifts throughout the pandemic. I suggest that she takes her up on that offer, and that the Minister here might do the same.
My right honourable friend John Ashworth has said:
“Ministers were dragged kicking & screaming to 3% for NHS staff. But after years of cuts & rising pressures, NHS staff will feel let down & disappointed especially after today’s chaos. And where is the pay rise for junior docs? Where is a fair pay rise for care workers?”
It really was not worthy of a Government. We had chaos and confusion, with the Government once again rowing back on their position. Does the Minister agree that the pay review body has done what Ministers could not and would not do in recognising that our NHS staff absolutely could not be given a pay cut? Does he accept that, after last year, this is not enough?
Does he accept that this is not an NHS-wide pay settlement? It does not cover all the health and care workforce, who do not fall under this pay review body, and it does not cover junior doctors—I declare an interest, as two are nephews of mine, both of whom were redeployed during the pandemic. We know that our junior doctors have been put on the front line, caring for sick patients, and redeployed across an understaffed, pressured NHS, and that their training has been disrupted. Will the junior doctors get a pay rise? Will all health staff employed in public health receive the settlement? Again, when we know absolutely the value of care workers, why do the Government not guarantee a real living wage for those working in social care?
How will this pay settlement be funded? NHS trusts do not even know what their budget is beyond September, and NHS employers pointed out that this settlement will cost the best part of £2 billion, so where is that coming from? Is the Minister expecting trusts to find it from their existing budgets? These Benches keep repeating this question: the Government seem not to appreciate how central this is to stopping the spread of the virus, so when will they address support for low-paid workers who have to self-isolate?
I posed many of the immediate questions yesterday to the Minister. Sometimes I felt enlightened by his answers and sometimes I did not, but the one I wish to go back to concerns the Government’s plans for September. Are they ready to reimpose safeguards? Will our schools get filtration units over the summer so that we can feel that our children will be safer? Will our teenagers be vaccinated so that, next year, this cohort can do a full year of learning without being sent home in their millions?
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, I echo the thanks to all the staff who have made a hybrid Parliament work over the last year especially, from these Benches, to the health team, because of the high workload of health and Covid business. I also repeat the good wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, as she starts her maternity leave.
Along with colleagues in the Commons, I am unconvinced that the first half of this Statement was planned to be delivered by the Minister yesterday. In the bizarre events of this week, of Covid restrictions being lifted, a rush of announcements—Monday’s, and today’s on vaccine passports—U-turns, and No. 10 contradicting Ministers, this Statement is definitely filed under “Y” for “You couldn’t make it up”.
Yesterday morning, the press were briefed and opposition politicians heard on the parliamentary grapevine that the NHS staff pay rise would be announced in the Statement. Even Sky News and the BBC news channel were saying that there would be an announcement on NHS pay in the Commons yesterday afternoon. Yet, when the Minister stood up, there was not one word about the pay award, just an end-of-term report and a much-deserved paeon of praise about how wonderful our NHS staff are—they are, and they deserve that praise. However, an extraordinary line in the Statement says:
“But I can assure those hardworking nurses: you should feel it soon”.
Well, they did. Four hours after that Statement, a Written Ministerial Statement and a press release were slipped out, bypassing parliamentary scrutiny, presumably in the hope that it would not be spotted. NHS staff, especially junior doctors and nurses, are appalled. I am not sure this is what the Minister meant by
“you should feel it soon”.
However, it gets worse. This morning’s Times says that the 3% NHS staff pay rise will be funded by robbing the expected increase in national insurance contributions reserved for the social care proposals leaked earlier this week by the Government. That is an absolute disgrace, especially given the appalling way that No. 10 has handled the social care reform proposals. After the Queen’s Speech, Ministers told us that it would be this autumn. Last week, they suddenly said that there would be an announcement this week but, this week, they have thrown the proposals back into the long grass, with a promise—again—of later this autumn, two years after the PM promised us, on the steps on No. 10, that this was his absolute priority. His actions are showing otherwise.
I know that the Minister understands that social care needs urgent reform and that it has borne the brunt of the first year of the pandemic. Can he confirm the Times story about the funding of the NHS pay rise and whether this decision was made by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care or by the Chancellor of the Exchequer? Can he also say when the full proposals for social care will now be published, including the funding arrangements?
Moving to the only substance of this Statement, the autism strategy, we on these Benches also pay our respects to the late Dame Cheryl Gillan MP, who was such an advocate for those with autism. Peter Wharmby, the autistic writer, speaker and tutor, says that the autism strategy sets its targets very low in saying:
“Moreover, we have been able to transform society’s awareness of autism, as … 99.5% of the public have heard of autism … which is so important in autistic people being able to feel included as part of their community.”
Peter Wharmby is right. Much of the strategy talks about continuing as usual, but if you talk to autistic people or parents of autistic children, they all say that much needs to be done in supporting those with autism, especially in education and at work. Knowing that autism exists is not the same as providing the best environment for those with autism to overcome the barriers they face in society and giving them the support that they need to succeed. The Disabled Children’s Partnership points out that the pandemic has exacerbated existing problems around support for those with autism, creating further social isolation and poor health outcomes. It is depressing that the autism strategy is so unambitious.
One particular problem that parents face when trying to get support for their autistic children is an automatic assumption that parent carers are treated as a resource—worse, their parenting capacity is often questioned. There is no mention here of support for their needs. As John Bangs, a special needs expert, points out, this deliberately ignores carers’ legal rights. It is noticeable that this autism strategy makes no real reference to ensuring that parental and familial carers are supported. When will these wider issues relating to positive support for those with autism and their familial carers be addressed?
Finally, briefly on the Covid Statement in the Commons today, page 4 says that
“two doses of a covid vaccine offers protection of around 96% against hospitalisation.”
But the key bit of information we need in the “pingdemic” at the moment is the rate of double-jabbers getting Covid. I understand that it is part of the same study that is quoted, but what is the answer and where can we find it? If the pingdemic is due to the virus spreading —we hear of police and control rooms unable to operate and empty shelves at supermarkets—perhaps it is time we actually understood how many double-jabbers are getting Covid and having to go into self-isolation, and thereby creating a problem. The Minister needs to consider whether lifting all restrictions on Monday was the right thing to do.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con) [V]
My Lords, I join the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Brinton, in thanking my noble friend Lady Penn for her hard work over the last 18 months and wishing her well in her pregnancy. She looked absolutely fantastic as she left, and our hopes and good wishes are with her.
I also thank the usual channels, the House of Lords staff and the Speaker’s office for all their contributions to the virtual House and for keeping the business of the House going during this awful pandemic. There has been an enormous amount of traffic from the Department of Health—more than 50 Statements, 2 Acts and hundreds of regulations. I thank all noble Lords for their challenge, their scrutiny and their patience during this difficult time.
The pay review body has given us its recommendations, and we have accepted them. I thank it for its work and insight. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that the Office of Manpower Economics will publish its analysis online shortly. We are extremely pleased that we can follow the guidance of the pay review body. Junior doctors have their own separate framework, worth 8.2% over four years. They are working from that framework today.
On the funding of the pay review, as noble Lords know, we gave the NHS a historic £33.9 billion settlement in 2018 and have provided £92 billion to support front-line health services throughout the pandemic. The pay uplift will be funded from within that budget, but we are very clear that this will not impact funding already earmarked for the NHS front line. We will continue to make sure that the NHS has everything it needs to continue to support its staff and provide excellent care, throughout the pandemic and beyond. That is why we accepted the PRB’s recommendations in full and provided NHS workers in scope with the pay rise.
On the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on safeguards in September, I cannot make any guarantees but I definitely hope not. We very much hope that we are in the final stages of this pandemic, as the impact of the vaccine is being felt, bringing down the R number and saving those who are infected from hospitalisation, severe disease and worse.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, talked about filtration for schools, and I noted her question on this yesterday. I said that we had been looking at it. I am not aware that the results of that analysis have come through yet. To be honest, I am wary of investing too much in unproven technologies. The two things that have been proven to work are isolation and vaccination; we are backing those two measures most of all. However, I accept her point about the importance of ventilation and will continue to look at it.
Likewise, the JCVI is looking very carefully at vaccination for children. We are working with international partners to get to the bottom of it. At the moment, we have a clear read-out—we will move—but our priority is providing either third shots or variant booster shots in the autumn to the most vulnerable. That is where our priorities are at the moment.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked about social care. I note the Government’s statement on that; we will bring reform recommendations in the autumn. On her point about the autism strategy, I also pay tribute to the contribution of Cheryl Gillan, who worked so hard in this area and whose impact is still being felt.
I think the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, overlooks some of the really good work in this strategy. There is £74 million of funding for a number of high-priority projects, which have been designed in collaboration with stakeholders from the community. I guide her to the implementation plan that accompanies the strategy, which has detailed recommendations on a six-point implementation matrix that has grit and traction. I would be very grateful for her feedback on that.
I pay tribute to parent supporters; the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is entirely right that they often bear the brunt of care and are often best placed to care for and support those with autism. I remind her that we have provided £31 million through the mental health and well-being recovery action plan specifically for the parents of those with autism, recognising how the pandemic was hitting that group in particular.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
My Lords, we now come to the 20 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief so that I can call the maximum number of speakers.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, following our debates on the Medicines and Medical Devices Act earlier this year on an innovative medicines fund, the announcement in this Statement of a ring-fenced £340 million budget for innovative medicines is very welcome. When will those become available, so that clinicians and patients can access this funding? Given that it now takes us beyond cancer drugs and innovations, will there be a focus on those diseases for which there has been no effective treatment?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for highlighting this important development. The cancer drugs fund was a great success, and we are building on it with a substantial investment. The new fund will support patients with any conditions, including those with rare and genetic diseases. Dementia is one area where we are extremely interested in looking at investing further, and I hope that this would be captured, but we are waiting for recommendations from NICE and the data that it will provide before we set the right prioritisations. In terms of the date, I do not have that at my fingertips, but I would be glad to write to my noble friend with the details.
Baroness Hollins (CB)
My Lords, the strategy promises millions to prevent mental health crises for autistic people and to help people detained in hospital back into the community. The Written Ministerial Statement responding to my 2020 independent report about people with learning disabilities and autistic people detained in long-term segregation was laid in the other place after the Minister’s Statement had finished. My report emphasised the urgency of these strategy promises. Will the noble Lord commit to meeting me, with the Secretary of State, to discuss the full implementation of my recommendations?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am enormously grateful to the noble Baroness for her hard work in this area. We are taking a range of actions to drive further, faster progress on reducing the number of autistic people and those with learning disabilities in in-patient mental health settings, including robust action by the CQC, work on our new cross-government “building the right support” delivery board, and reform of the Mental Health Act. I would be very glad to meet the noble Baroness and her colleagues to discuss these and other measures in more detail.
Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Lab)
I declare my interests as set out in the register. My Lords, Ministers rightly come to these Chambers and praise NHS staff for all they have done throughout the pandemic, yet a third of NHS staff are considering leaving their job. Vacancies are endemic and, to top that, we have a looming summer crisis. For an average nurse, 3% is equivalent to £15.40 a week. Inflation removes £11.58 of that; so, for all the Minister’s kind words, in real terms that is a pay rise of £3.82 a week, or 55p a day, and less than half of that for a newly qualified nurse. Does the Minister think this is fair, and what does he think the nurses should do with their 55p a day?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am also enormously grateful for the contribution of NHS staff at all levels and from all parts of the United Kingdom. This pay settlement is based on the recommendations of the pay review body. We said that that was the mechanism we would follow, and we are following it; in that respect, we are doing what we said we would. I reassure the House that recruitment to the NHS is extremely strong. We are hitting our targets on the recruitment of 50,000 nurses and our targets for GP trainees and in other parts of the NHS.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s offer to meet the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, to discuss her devastating report. We should be ashamed to see the way some of our people with learning disabilities and our autistic young people have been treated. I would like to know whether the Government’s action plan can give some realistic dates on when there is likely to be proper service and support given within local communities and within homes that should be created for them.
Secondly, on Covid generally, I have been double-jabbed with Pfizer, so it is unlikely that I will go into hospital, but I have Covid. I would like to pick up on the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton—what are the figures for the number of people who have had their vaccinations but are now starting to suffer from Covid? This is not flu; it is quite different from flu. You get the jab for the flu and you stay clear of it. With this, you get the jabs but you can get it just the same—and I have been suffering. Why are the Government giving mixed messages that people are now going back to normal? This is just not the case. We are sending out mixed messages and giving the impression that we have this “freedom day”. Yes, there will be freedom, but there will be freedom to spread on a scale that we have not experienced latterly. So I hope the Government will be cautious with the mixed messages they have been issuing and they will underline that having the double jab does not necessarily mean that people are clear of catching the disease.
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
The noble Lord has my profound commiserations. It is an extremely tough and nasty disease, as he rightly points out. Even for those who have had two jabs, if they get the disease it can still be a really horrible experience, which he has at this moment.
He is not quite right, though, on the mixed messages. We have been crystal clear from the very beginning, even before the first vaccine arrived, that the vaccination was not going to be a panacea in itself. It will not prevent all people from getting all Covid diseases for all time, immediately. These things are incremental. The societal impact of the vaccine is to drive down the infection rate to the point that R is below one; that is the objective. But, in the meantime, those who have had the vaccine not only remain infectious but can be heavily symptomatic, and I am very sorry for the position he is in. Incidentally, that is also true of the flu vaccine; it is not a 100% vaccine, but it does an enormous amount to break the chain of transmission and to reduce the spread of flu on exactly the same basis.
Lord Haselhurst (Con) [V]
My Lords, if more people anxious to show their support for our magnificent NHS staff would see being vaccinated and wearing masks in crowded places as a smart move on their own part, would they not also see it, crucially, as sending a signal of support to all those in the NHS?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, my noble friend hits the nail on the head. Not only is getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in the right settings a sign of support for NHS staff, it is a sign of support for the whole of society. We depend on each other during this pandemic. When someone catches the disease asymptomatically and spreads it to someone else, they hurt all of us. We all have to be careful to take our tests when we are going into a position of risk, to wear our masks when we are close together and, of course, now that the vaccine is available to all over 18 year-olds, to ensure that all the people we can persuade have taken two jabs.
Lord Dubs (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the Minister has on more than one occasion in the last few minutes been asked about the position of care workers. They have been totally left out of the pay settlement. They are working on extremely low wages. Does the Minister not agree that something must be done to help care workers, whether in domiciliary care or in care homes, to have a decent wage and not be treated as the country cousins in this whole thing?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
The noble Lord is right: we are concerned about the pay, conditions, career prospects and retention of care workers. I have spoken about this in detail in debates on social care, and I share the sentiments of the noble Lord. When we come to social care reform, the correct provisions for social care workers will form an intrinsic part of those reforms. I do not wish to be obtuse, but this is about the NHS. The NHS is a direct employment body, whereas social care has a different employment system and is therefore not covered by this particular settlement.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, while I am sure that we appreciate the work done by NHS staff, I remind noble Lords that it was NHS staff in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford who put a “Do not resuscitate” notice on my good friend Caroline Jackson’s bed without her knowledge—she found out about it only much later. I have asked the Minister about this. The last Written Answer I got said that a report would be produced “in due course”. Can the Minister ensure that these notices are rigorously reviewed before they are put on people’s beds and certainly not, as in the case of Mrs Jackson, put on the bed without her or her husband or anyone close to her knowing that it had been put there? Not all NHS staff are perfect.
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
As my noble friend will know, I know Dr Jackson extremely well from the old days and heard her story with great regret. I took the story back to the department and played it into the system, as I told him I would do. A report is being drafted and I can reassure my noble friend that it is being taken seriously. The clarification of guidelines has been sent to all wards and there has been additional training for staff put in the position of needing to consider and engage with loved ones on this issue. However, may I push back against my noble friend? It is not right to try to generalise about staff on this point. I have the highest regard for NHS staff. In the very large majority of cases, they have worked extremely well in difficult circumstances in these situations and they are owed our respect for that.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the Minister made that point very well. I declare an interest as a member of the board of the GMC because I want to ask him about workforce strategy. Clause 33 of the Health and Care Bill sets out a duty on the Secretary of State to publish
“at least once every five years … a report describing the system in place for assessing and meeting the workforce needs of the health service”.
The Minister will be aware that a number of NHS organisations say that this is not going far enough and that what is needed is the development of regular, public, annually updated long-term workforce projections so that the health service can meet the undoubted challenges that lie ahead. Is the Minister prepared to consider this?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, I have heard the noble Lord on this point two or three times and he makes the argument extremely well and persuasively. As he knows, a huge budget of the NHS goes on the workforce; essentially, the NHS is a mobilised healthcare workforce. It is intrinsic to the success of the NHS that we manage our workforce correctly. There are substantial workforce transformation programmes in place at the moment, including the People Plan, and a huge recruitment drive is going on, including the creation of a much clearer employer brand, which has landed very well among the workforce generally. However, I take the noble Lord’s point. I am not the workforce Minister but I will take it back to my colleague Helen Whateley in the department and ask her for her consideration.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I hope that my noble friend, who deserves a real holiday, will accept that it would have been far better and more honest had the pay award been made in an Oral rather than a Written Statement. We all send our warm wishes to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, for a speedy recovery. However, does not his story underline the need for clarity in Oral Statements? I put to my noble friend last week the idea of statements in all the newspapers which would be clear, cohesive and coherent. Is that idea still being followed up, as he promised it would be?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, I have followed it up. We have invested a huge amount in our statements. This takes up a large bandwidth for our broadcasters and of the advertising budget of the Cabinet Office and the department—we could not have spent any more money on advertising than we have done to try to get our messages across. However, some of these messages are difficult to understand and sometimes difficult to accept. We all wish that the vaccine was as clear-cut and emphatic as are the vaccines for polio or the other blockbuster vaccines. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, just described, and as poor old Sajid Javid is currently feeling, two jabs do not guarantee that you will not be infected and infectious. However, neither of them is in hospital and neither of them is suffering from severe disease. The message is nuanced: the vaccines work, will reduce transmission and will help us to get this country out of the disease, but people will still have to proceed with caution, isolate when they are in contact with those with the disease and protect themselves from transmission with masks and social distancing.
Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I express my gratitude to each and every one in the House for their care and attention these past difficult months. To echo the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, I, too, have been messaged on hundreds of occasions over the last few months on the issue of DNR, on which I will ask a question. In the light of the reports of 39,000 deaths in care homes and the fact that 59% of all those who perished had a disability or autism, when will the Government commence the national inquiry so that those who lost their loved ones can be reassured that no deaths occurred unnecessarily due to government policy decisions and lack of proper and adequate safeguards for all residents in care homes and their well-being and that DNR was not applied disproportionately to people with disability and autism without sufficient oversight, given the incredible pressures on the NHS during these months?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My Lords, we will be accountable for the use of DNR and it is right that the noble Baroness’s specific question should be asked: were any groups disproportionately at the wrong end of this? She is right to ask the question. I cannot give her a precise date for the inquiry, but I have given absolutely cast-iron reassurances that it will happen. I am very tired, as is everyone else, and the thought of starting an inquiry today while preparing for the winter is not one that will help our productivity or help to save lives in the difficult time that we have ahead. The right time for the inquiry is probably when the pandemic is truly behind us.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, the NHS is highly regarded by most people because it is available to all for free. But, as the Statement rightly recognises, despite record investment, it faces major challenges. In particular, survival rates for many cancers trail those in comparable countries. How do we secure the necessary improvements in the NHS, especially at a time when it faces record waiting times?
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
My noble friend gives me an opportunity to raise one of my main ambitions for the health service, which is clearly outlined in the life sciences vision. She is right: we catch too much cancer at stage 3 or 4, when there is sometimes not much that we can do, and anything that we do will be very expensive and make only marginal differences. That is not the same in all countries and it is not good enough in this country. That is why we need to invest in diagnostics and preventive medicine. We need to reweight our health system away from clinical interventions on lumps and bumps at a very late stage. We need to interact with patients at a much earlier stage of their disease. Only in that way will we be able to afford the healthcare system that this country deserves and to give people longer, better lives.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)
My Lords, as we have reached 2 pm there is no need to adjourn the House, but I will arrange a short pause to allow the relevant people to be in their places for the next item.
Arrangement of Business
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
My Lords, the Hybrid Sitting of the House will now resume. The time limit for the next debate is three hours. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top.
Covid-19 (Public Services Committee Report)
(2 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top
That this House takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee A critical juncture for public services: lessons from COVID-19 (1st Report, Session 2019–21, HL Paper 167).
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, the report is the Public Services Committee’s first. The committee was established in February 2020 and is the first in this House to hold the Government to account on a range of issues that cut across public services and on policy areas that are the responsibility of multiple departments and so, too often, are the priority of none. It is a Standing Committee, so will continue to work for many years, I hope. I have the enormous privilege of being the first chair and am working with an outstanding group of Members from across the House, who have all worked with energy, commitment and challenge throughout. We have also been served by similarly outstanding officials, and I want to say thank you to all involved.
The establishment of the committee coincided with Covid-19 and it soon became clear that the pandemic was the most testing experience that our public service model had faced for several generations. It would reveal its strengths and weaknesses, and would be an opportunity, some might say a critical juncture, for reform. This became the focus of our first report.
We heard from 165 organisations and individuals, and I am enormously grateful to them. Unfortunately, no government Minister found it appropriate to come and talk to the committee. However, much of what we heard has informed our follow-up work on commissioning and data sharing, as well as our current inquiry on child vulnerability. How public services are organised, how they are funded and how effectively that funding is spent, how different services work together and, most importantly, how services are experienced by the people and communities that use and need them are the priorities for the committee.
Covid-19 has been a national tragedy for the United Kingdom. We have lost more than 130,000 people to the virus and Covid-related pressures have pushed many families to crisis point. After 18 months of tireless service, our front-line workers are exhausted and their well-being is at an all-time low.
However, the inquiry also gave us cause for hope. Amid all this despair were incredible innovation and civic action, often at local level, to support communities to stay resilient under unprecedented pressure. Decisions that before the pandemic took months or even years were made in minutes. National government worked with councils to accommodate 15,000 rough sleepers. Many of those had access to addiction and mental health services for the first time.
We were inspired by the surge in voluntary action: there are now more than 4,000 mutual aid groups across the UK. Innovative local authorities played a key role in co-ordinating volunteers to support hard-to-reach groups. For example, Agatha Anywio, 76 years old from London, relied on her local Age UK group to support her during the first lockdown. A few weeks ago the committee heard from her again. She told us that she was still getting support from the local voluntary sector to connect her to her local community. Age UK even organises two virtual exercise classes a week, which she participates in and loves.
We also saw how digital technology was used more widely and more successfully than ever before. Changing Lives, a charity working with vulnerable adults, moved many of its addiction recovery services online during the pandemic. This gave service users greater flexibility and responsibility. They were not given daily scripts by the NHS, but weekly ones instead. This meant that they were more empowered. It was risky, but, actually, it resulted in increased engagement with services, a reduction in the relapse rate and, ultimately, fewer drug- related deaths.
However, while these innovations are impressive, unless government acts urgently to lock in such changes, this good work will be lost, and we heard evidence that this is already happening. Shay Flaherty is recovering from addiction and now volunteers in Birmingham with the charity Revolving Doors. At a follow-up evidence session last month, he warned us that much of the good work with rough sleepers during the early stages of the pandemic had already been undermined. He said that, once people had been moved out of temporary accommodation, their point of contact with mental health and addiction workers was often lost. Many have relapsed and returned to the streets.
Moreover, Covid-19 revealed how innovation and community resilience are too often undermined by fundamental weaknesses in the way we deliver public services in this country. Going into the crisis, the national Government too often did not take local expertise seriously. This played out with disastrous consequences. Jessica Studdert, who is the deputy chief executive of the New Local Government Network, told us that, during Covid’s early stages, too many local authorities did not get the information that they needed from the NHS about shielded groups, even though it was the local authorities’ responsibility to deliver food and essential supplies.
We found that our poorest communities went into the pandemic with incredibly low levels of resilience. Witnesses told us that the funding of preventive and early intervention services had not been a priority in the years preceding Covid-19. This had placed greater pressures on the NHS and increased costs to the state through poorer education, employment and justice outcomes for the most vulnerable.
Sir Michael Marmot reported to the committee that cuts to local authorities’ public health grants had fallen disproportionately on the most deprived areas. Since 2014, England as a whole has seen a cut in public health budgets of £13.20 per person: in the Midlands, it was £16.70 per person; in the north, it was £15.20; and the north-east has been worst affected, with cuts of £23.24 per person in the public health budget. Witnesses told us that the upshot of those cuts was that obesity and associated diseases such as diabetes were concentrated in our very poorest communities and among our most marginalised groups. That made them extra vulnerable.
Covid-19 mortality rates in the most deprived areas were almost twice as high as those in the least deprived. Diabetes was mentioned on 21% of death certificates where Covid was also mentioned. The proportion was 43% among Asian people and 45% among black people. It was higher in all BAME groups than in the white British population.
Pre-existing inequalities have only deepened during the last 18 months. Sir Kevan Collins, who resigned as a government adviser over school catch-up funding, recently told the committee that disadvantaged children had fallen even further behind their better-off peers as a result of lost school time. His resignation should be a wake-up call to the Government that such disparities cannot be left unaddressed.
The pandemic influenced innovative local areas to break down long-standing barriers between the NHS, local authorities and other services, but in much of the country we found that collaboration between agencies was wanting. Many did not share crucial data on people’s needs. During the crisis, the lack of integration and parity of esteem between health and care saw patients discharged from hospitals into care settings without testing, resulting—we believe—in thousands of unnecessary deaths. The proposals in the Future of Health and Care White Paper and the subsequent legislation to strengthen co-ordination between the two services are welcome and necessary. True integration will depend on delivering real parity of esteem between the NHS and social care. It is deeply disappointing that the legislation to put adult social care on a secure financial footing has been delayed yet again—until, we are now told, later this year. Can the Government confirm whether the forthcoming legislation will include proposals for the reform and integration of social care, alongside any new funding settlement, to increase the resilience of the sector?
To address fundamental weaknesses in public services, strengthen the resilience of our communities to future crises and ensure that the innovations from the pandemic are not lost, the committee called for a national programme of reform. In carrying out this essential task, we asked that the Government should be guided by eight key principles. These included the Government and public service providers recognising the vital role of preventive services and early intervention.
In its response to the report, the Government said that they were committed to levelling up life expectancy. They have not yet set out how they will invest in preventive services in order to meet their 2019 general election manifesto commitment to extend healthy life expectancy by 2035, and to narrow the gap between the richest and the poorest. Health prevention and early intervention in education were not a focus of the March 2021 Budget. To date, levelling-up announcements have largely focused on physical infrastructure and skills. How will the Government address this in the forthcoming spending review? The role of charities, community groups, volunteers and the private sector as key public service providers must also be recognised. They must be given appropriate support and encouragement.
Witnesses told us that the procurement guidance, introduced by the Cabinet Office in response to the pandemic, granted local public service commissioners greater flexibility to award long-term funding and contracts based on social value, rather than just the lowest cost. We were disappointed that the Transforming Public Procurement Green Paper failed to embed those flexibilities. It did not differentiate between the commercial purchasing of goods from the private sector and the commissioning of services for people, whether delivered by the voluntary sector or by other organisations to meet the needs of the local community. In recent letters to the Government, we have urged them to work with the voluntary sector and with commissioning experts to ensure that the procurement Bill promotes social value and delivers long-term funding agreements for charities delivering services. Can the Minister update us on progress in engaging the voluntary sector on this issue?
Another principle is that public services require a fundamentally different, vastly more flexible approach to data sharing. The Information Commissioner wrote to us as part of our current inquiry on children’s vulnerability. In her letter, she acknowledged that the current threshold for sharing data on children was too high and that her office would be working with the Department for Education to update its data-sharing guidance. Can the Minister tell us how this important work is progressing?
We argue that integrating services to meet the diverse needs of individuals and communities is best achieved by public service providers working together at local level. This should be supported by joined-up working across government departments at national level. I welcome the establishment of a Cabinet committee. Will the Minister set out how this committee will co-ordinate government activity to improve data sharing and integration? Local services and front-line workers must be given the resources and autonomy to improve, and innovate in, the delivery of services. How will the Government use the forthcoming levelling-up and devolution White Papers to achieve this?
People themselves are best placed to understand how services should meet their needs, strengthen their resilience and support them to thrive. I am running out of time, so I cannot go into this in detail. It is critical that the government strategy for public service reform takes this as its core in the months and years ahead. If people and places are to be resilient in the face of future crises, services must have political and financial support, as well as autonomy, to be truly preventive and integrated around the needs of their local area and people. They must have the places and the people they serve at their heart. I beg to move.
Lord Shipley (LD) [V]
My Lords, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. First, I congratulate the committee on its report and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for her introduction. She is absolutely right in calling for us to learn the lessons of how public services have been delivered—or, indeed, not delivered—during the pandemic. She also talked about the importance of resilience and of engagement with people and communities. I subscribe to everything that she said.
As the title of the report says, this is a critical juncture for public services. The committee was right to use those words. It is urgent that we learn the lessons of the Covid pandemic. It brings into stark relief the delay in this report reaching the Floor of the House for debate. It was published in November 2020. The Government replied three months later, but it has taken a further five months for this House to hold a debate. Can the Minister explain why there has been such a delay?
I want to make one crucial point this afternoon, and it is this: you cannot run England out of London. The Government’s replies to paragraphs 117, 139, 140 and 141 of the report, on the need for decentralisation and local integration of services, are, frankly, inadequate. I submit that it is not enough to promise a White Paper “in due course” based on directly elected combined authority mayors and regional partnerships such as the Midlands Engine and the Northern Powerhouse. This leaves out counties, public health structures and local government generally. It does not address the need for a single, unified health and social care service and for greater investment in prevention, which could in turn save public money, as the report makes clear.
Crucially, and as the report also makes clear, we cannot continue with a system of overcentralised delivery of public services, poor communication from the centre and a tendency for service providers to work in silos. This, my Lords, is a hub and spoke model, so beloved of bureaucracies, which promotes silo working rather than service integration. As the committee has pointed out, local authorities often receive divergent messages from different government departments. As worrying was the need for local areas to interpret public announcements by the Government without prior consultation.
I said earlier that you cannot run England out of London. We do not try to run Scotland like that, nor Wales, nor Northern Ireland, so why, for example, do we run Yorkshire like that? The argument the Government have used has been that decisions have had to be made quickly. Of course they have, but that is no excuse for national attempts at recruiting volunteers not being aligned with locally co-ordinated responses, nor for national public health executive agencies not using local public health resources effectively, nor for the expertise of local authority contact-tracing teams being unused in the design of test and trace. These are fundamental matters. It is vital that local areas are seen as partners with far greater decision-making powers.
Very wisely, the committee, on page 14, described the German public health system, which has local and regional governance structures with 375 local health offices empowered to make decisions. We could learn much from them, and I hope we will.
I want to raise a final issue, which relates to schools and which the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, mentioned. The Prime Minister appointed an adviser, Sir Kevan Collins, as education recovery commissioner. He produced a report, supported, it seems, by the Prime Minister, calling for substantial funding over three years to assist pupils who had lost school time, but the Treasury refused to fund it. Just £1.4 billion was allocated for one year—about a 10th of the money asked for, albeit over three years. The commissioner resigned. This is not joined-up government.
Covid has exposed serious flaws in our systems of government. I hope this is understood by the Minister and his colleagues, because they have the power to drive the change we need.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I begin with a tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, who chaired our committee with tact and skill. Her professional background in social work has been a real advantage, not just in putting witnesses at ease but in managing any neuroses from committee members. We were well-served by our clerk, Tristan Stubbs, our policy analyst, Mark Hudson, and our operations officer, Claire Coast-Smith, who navigated the virtual network between us and our witnesses.
We are a collegiate committee with a broad range of relevant expertise, and our discussions have been non-partisan and good humoured. Thanks to Zoom, I am now familiar with my colleagues’ tastes in literature, paintings, casual dress and light refreshment. In our report, we mentioned what went well during the pandemic—often overlooked by the commentariat: the success of DWP in coping with a huge number of claimants for universal credit, and introducing the £20 supplement; the Treasury’s furlough scheme and wider support for business; and, of course, the stunning success of vaccine procurement and distribution. But we also identified a number of structural problems, some touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley: over-centralisation, departmental silos, underinvestment in preventive measures and ill-preparedness for emergencies, themes that are recurring in our current inquiries.
I want to focus on the lessons to be learned from the three countries from which we took evidence: New Zealand, Taiwan and Germany. They are all different, but they are grappling with identical viruses with the same range of policy options and the same information about the disease.
I have three points to make about New Zealand. First, like Great Britain, it is an island—or, rather, two islands—but unlike us it challenged the early WHO advice that border restrictions were unnecessary, and in retrospect it was absolutely right.
Secondly, to deal with departmental silos, it has just set up interdepartmental boards, which they call joint ventures. We were told that
“all the interesting and difficult public policy issues are on the interface”,
by which was meant that they cross departmental boundaries. Here, NHS Health and local authority social care spring to mind. The joint ventures bid direct to the treasury for funds and a cabinet Minister is in charge, but instead of a permanent secretary, a board of the relevant permanent secretaries delivers the policy. My noble friend might like to ask the Cabinet Office to keep in touch with New Zealand on this, as it is often ahead of the game in the development of public policy
Thirdly, public confidence in the Government rose as the pandemic progressed, whereas the opposite has happened here. We did not press too hard for the reasons—again, the Government might want to pursue that further—but it was ascribed to firm leadership, a strong culture of co-operation and robust dealing with fake news.
Taiwan’s approach avoided lockdown entirely and last year it recorded record GDP growth, but its experience may not be entirely representative as it had the background of coping with SARS and a tradition of wearing masks, which was described to us as the equivalent of a vaccine.
Its equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out was more broadly based, focused on retail spending rather than just spending in restaurants, and those on low incomes were included, receiving vouchers worth about £80, whereas our scheme was much narrower and arguably regressive. Ninety-eight per cent of the population in Taiwan participated, and you got a bonus if the money was spent out of doors.
I turn finally to Germany, with its federal structure, where health and education is devolved to the Länder, which managed most of the Covid response. Perhaps the most remarkable contrast was on health spending, where there are no government-imposed cash limits, as insurance picks up the tab. I quote verbatim what we were told:
“There is no room for refusing somebody an operation that he needs or a pharmaceutical drug that she needs for financial reasons … There is no place in the German health system for refusing money because somebody is 90 years old and has a life expectancy of only seven more years. In that case … if it does not medically kill them and they can stand the operation—then go for it and the finance system has to follow that.”
That, of course, has wide ramifications for how we fund the NHS, but against the current background, I thought it worth mentioning.
I make one final point on Germany. The local authorities there all have equal powers. Our witness, John Kampfner, told us:
“It is one thing to advocate the devolution of powers within England to local authorities; it is quite another to be able to deliver that within the patchwork quilt of local government that we have at the moment, which in my view is really not fit for purpose to deal with a crisis like this, as distinct from what exists in Germany.”
Clearly, it is easier to manage devolution if the bodies you are devolving to have equal powers. At the end of the session on Germany, we asked for a key message. “Plan for the future and build in some slack”, was the reply.
I hope the Minister in response to our debate will recognise that the present system of running the country is capable of improvement—without wholly adopting the Cummings agenda of hard rain—and can tell us that the Government have an open mind on some of the radical implications of our report.
Lord Bichard (CB) [V]
My Lords, as a member of the committee I welcome this debate, partly because it gives me an opportunity to warmly thank both the noble Baroness for the way in which she has chaired the committee and the staff for the quite exceptional way in which they have supported us.
Some of us have spent many happy hours down the years talking to empty rooms about the need to reform government, not because we long for some bureaucratic nirvana but because we were convinced that without reform some of the most disadvantaged people in our society would continue to experience poor, difficult-to-access services, and we as a nation would continue to waste scarce public money. So I was pleased that for its first report the committee chose to look at what the pandemic could teach us about our public services, and I was not surprised that it concluded that there was now an overwhelming case for reform, notwithstanding the outstanding commitment of so many of our public servants. That view seems now to be shared by the Government themselves because in their own Declaration on Government Reform, published just a few weeks ago, they accepted that the pandemic
“has … exposed shortcomings in how government works.”
I hope the Government will now revisit the committee’s recommendations, particularly the eight principles of reform that the chair referred to earlier.
For today, I shall focus on four of those principles which, surprisingly, the declaration of reform barely mentions. The first, as has been said, is the need to prioritise prevention and early intervention. Our system of government is designed to respond to problems rather than prevent them, and the pandemic has demonstrated how short-sighted that can be. Covid hit hardest those with preventable disease, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, living in poorer communities. It is not just in the field of health that we need to prioritise prevention. Our prisons are full of people who have been failed by the education system, whose mental health problems have never been addressed and whose addictions have been left untreated. We are now seeing the cost of responding too slowly to the impact of climate change, measured in terms of the human misery caused by flooding and pollution. Any credible vision for the future and the reform of government has to prioritise a shift from response to prevention.
It also needs to tackle the issue of sharing data. The declaration of reform mentions data only as a way of enhancing the accountability of services. While that is important, the committee found countless—and I mean countless—examples of how the failure to share data between services has stood in the way of improving those services and providing essential services. We were told that schools are often not aware that a pupil is receiving support from social services, GPs are not told that a family is involved in a child protection process and criminal gangs are able to exploit teenagers in county lines because of the failure to share information between the police, children’s social care and health. We found some excellent examples of how, during the pandemic, services had found new ways of sharing data—usually at the local level—to benefit clients, but in a governance system that is now so fragmented we have to find better permanent ways to share information across bureaucratic boundaries if we are ever to reform government.
As the chair has said, the committee also saw many great examples of how charities, community groups, volunteers and the private sector had delivered essential services, often supported by their local councils. These non-statutory services, not for the first time, showed how they could respond quickly, how they could innovate and make services more accessible and how they were more trusted than traditional providers. To be fair, we saw many examples of how statutory services had helped them by introducing new flexibilities, not least in the way in which services were commissioned. Again, though, our concern was that these changes would not survive the return to normality. We felt strongly that the new normal should be about services for public good being provided by a coalition of providers, some statutory, some voluntary, with those in the voluntary sector being given real parity of esteem as professionals in their own right.
Lastly, the committee became persuaded that, in future, public services should be designed and delivered with a great deal more user involvement. We heard how the failure to do that in the past had resulted in services being provided in the wrong place, at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Civil servants and local officials need to find new ways to involve citizens and users, children included, not via ever more sophisticated consultations but by way of genuine co-design and co-production. That is especially important if the inequality of access experienced by minority groups is to be tackled.
The pandemic exposed serious flaws—we need to be honest about that—but the innovative response from so many points us to how we should change by creating a system where public services are more devolved, co-designed with users, focused on prevention, delivered through diverse providers and better at working in partnership and sharing data. That should be our future.
Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]
I declare my interest as a Cumbria county councillor.
This report from our Public Services Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lady Armstrong, is one of the best things that I have ever read on the reform of public services. It sets out an ambitious agenda, drawing on the lessons of the Covid crisis and international experience. It shows what a cross-party consideration of these issues can achieve and how a remarkable degree of consensus on principles for reform can be established.
However, I am afraid my question is whether our politics is up to the challenge. We saw a very weak response from the Government to this report, both in their refusal to engage in the work of the committee and in their very weak response. The response popularised by the Government is the so-called levelling-up agenda, but we saw in the recent Prime Minister’s speech how empty that is. When you come out with a proposal for a £10 million plan for dealing with chewing gum on the streets, that shows that you do not really have sensible principles for reform in your head. It seems to be a splash of central government paint to cover up fundamental cracks in our society.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, in his condemnation of overcentralisation. Not only is that a very inefficient way of trying to tackle deprivation and complex problems of poverty at local level but it is, frankly, quasi-corrupt; it is getting near to pork-barrel politics, and that is not where we should be going.
We need fundamental reform in governance and funding. At present, the Government are levelling down, not levelling up: the proposal to withdraw the universal credit supplement will plunge many poor families further into poverty; the rejection of Sir Kevan Collins’s plan for educational catch-up was a very bad sign; and, despite all the talk, there is still no long-term funding solution for the NHS and social care.
Yet the present moment is an ideal time for a Government to make difficult tax and spending choices. Everyone is aware of the cracks exposed in public services, but at the moment we are seeing the Government allowing a manifesto commitment that they made on taxes to trump the lessons of Covid—and of course that commitment came well before the Covid crisis. The point about manifesto commitments applies equally to my own party: some in my party want to elevate the 2019 manifesto to semi-sacred status, but really we should be looking at the lessons of the Covid crisis and developing policies for public services along the lines of the committee’s report.
It is not enough to simply say, “Let’s spend more money”; we also have to have a credible agenda for reform. On reform of the NHS, we have to recognise that, despite its achievements, the NHS has failed so far to provide an equal opportunity for people to live a healthy and full life, and the emphasis has got to shift to prevention. In education, we have got to recognise that there are many problems of deprivation leading to poor educational opportunities and schools where standards need to be raised.
We know that people in public services work very hard, but they often work in silos. We have to be prepared to use the charity and the voluntary sectors and even, at times, the private sector, which we must see not as an enemy but as a potential partner. We have got to avoid hidebound, bureaucratic approaches that lead to inadequate data sharing, as we have heard.
We need an ambitious agenda of public service reform. I hope that a Labour Government would be prepared to follow the principles of this committee report, which are so sensible and so wise. I thoroughly commend the committee on its work.
Baroness Pinnock (LD) [V]
My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my relevant interests recorded in the register as a member of Kirklees council and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. As a member of the Select Committee, I too wish to praise the leadership of the committee by the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong.
My abiding memory from the witnesses who gave oral evidence to the committee was of the dedication of all those involved in providing public services. Service providers rose to the multiple challenges posed by the pandemic and overwhelmingly put first the needs of the people they served. As we know, some of them literally gave their all. I pay tribute to all those in public service for their heroic actions during this continuing pandemic.
As we have already heard, this is a wide-ranging report and I wish to focus my comments on the response of services provided by local government. What struck me most in listening to the witnesses was that staff were energised by the challenge of continuing to provide services in a different way. They were almost always motivated to continue providing the best services they could and determined to find ways round the barriers rather than be intimidated by them. The result, we heard, was that innovative practices were introduced. Some were the result of government initiatives and funding. As we have already heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, 15,000 rough sleepers were rehoused in hotel accommodation very quickly thanks to a government grant and local government action. This was a significant success and one that had other benefits for homeless people.
Innovations were also sparked by practitioners from different services and organisations, such as NHS community services and local government social care working more closely together and with local and national charities and voluntary groups. They described how they felt empowered by the challenges of the pandemic to pay less heed to existing service guidance and just find a better way of doing their job.
One of the examples in the report is of social care and the NHS in the Leicestershire area establishing what they call their “care home cell” to ensure co-ordination. That is an example of dependence on already very good working relationships across the organisations. The importance of effective personal relationships was repeated by other witnesses.
It was also vital in another strong theme that emerged: the importance of local, place-based services. Time and again we heard evidence about topdown control being less effective than local solutions. For instance, as someone in the Local Government Association described it:
“Guidance came out in dribs and drabs. One of my [local authority] colleagues said it was like trying to construct a piece of Ikea furniture with a piece missing and the instructions being posted daily in bits and pieces.”
Another example of topdown instruction not being as effective came from my own local authority. Early in the pandemic there was a significant outbreak in a meat processing factory in Kirklees. The central data provided was so poor that the council’s public health director asked the council’s digital service to provide the data in a more meaningful and accurate way. This was successfully achieved.
However, it was clear from the witnesses that local services of all kinds were in a fragile state following years of austerity. Age UK wrote that the pandemic had revealed the
“true extent of the impact that underfunding, structural issues and market instability have had on the system’s ability to respond”.
Local government was described as much less resilient as a result of very significant funding cuts.
One of the lessons was best described by users. They said that where providers have listened to them and then changed their practice as result, their needs were much more effectively met and there was a reduction in duplication. This co-production—codesign— was much the best way forward for users who gave evidence.
This is a valuable report; I have touched on just a small part of its deliberations and conclusions but to me the lessons are clear. First, we should reduce central control and have much more local, place-based definition of service provision. Secondly, we should enable coproductions to flourish. Thirdly, we should recognise the enormous contribution of people and personal relationships in innovating and overcoming adversity, and value those people. Finally, underfunding services on which our society relies cannot continue if care for the more vulnerable among us is important to society as a whole. The challenge for the Government is how these vital lessons are to be at the forefront of their thinking and funding decisions. I hope the Minister will explain how the Government intend to respond to these very significant challenges.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, and remind noble Lords that the time limit for speeches is six minutes.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
It is a real pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock and to speak this afternoon as a member of the Public Services Committee on the first report of the committee. This was a very revealing inquiry prompted by the unfortunate and unexpected arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic.
I pay tribute to the chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and the committee staff who worked under extreme pressure, frequently producing documents and suchlike at very short notice. I also pay tribute to my fellow committee members whose depth of knowledge and diversity of life experience made this inquiry so interesting and worth while. This was the first inquiry that I had been party to since joining your Lordships’ House, and I found it quite thought-provoking.
I say that it was a revealing inquiry because it highlighted areas of government that hitherto had been accepted as perhaps good working practice or, at the very least, accepted as the norm, with no real incentive for change. The Covid pandemic certainly put many of these previously accepted practices to the test, and they were found wanting when the chips were down. The report identifies many of these, a recurring theme being that of data sharing and, as it says clearly and is very well evidenced, Covid-19 has highlighted the inadequate data sharing between national agencies and local services.
As can be seen, we identified a number of conclusions and recommendations. If I were to choose an area from the inquiry that really caught my attention, it would undoubtedly be the overcentralised delivery of public services. We heard compelling evidence from a large number of witnesses identifying a clear lack of involvement at local level. In many cases they had been left in the dark as to the support that they were entitled to but denied due to confusion and a deficiency of clarity caused by a very centralised approach.
This was made abundantly clear by a number of witnesses. I too want to mention Agatha Anywio from Wandsworth, who told us of her experience in the early days of lockdown. She said that
“I had a letter from the Government telling me that I should officially shield, but nothing happened … It was about four weeks into lockdown before I was actually recognised, only because I persisted … If I had kept quiet and done nothing about it, I have a feeling that I might have been completely forgotten.”
Debra Baxter from Wigan, who is 55 years old and has cerebral palsy, told the committee that she was now a full-time wheelchair user. She said:
“My personal experience was that if it was not for the support of my daughter, who is here beside me, during lockdown I would not have been able to cope … I also felt that this pandemic, shall we say, took us all by surprise, and there were no actual structures with the social care setting to deal with emergencies like this. If it were not for my daughter and the friendly neighbours who live around me, I would struggle a great deal during lockdown.”
The impression left by front-line public service providers who gave evidence was that there was no co-ordinated communication strategy across government departments. Dr Jeanelle de Gruchy, president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, told us that her colleagues from central government
“often failed to draw on local resources because they were unaware of the role played by local authority public health teams”.
She said:
“There was a really poor understanding and recognition of the role of the director of public health, the local public health system and indeed local government as a key partner in managing this pandemic”.
The Government’s response has been to recognise the importance of public services working together, saying:
“We are evaluating how Government can be more joined up for local government. The recent Spending Review outlines Government’s ‘Focus on Outcomes’ … and as part of this HM Treasury has been driving a X-Whitehall approach on outcomes, and evidencing impact and public value.”
It cannot come soon enough.
In contrast, there was a very constructive aspect of the response of government to the pandemic. I refer to the way in which the homeless were taken off the streets and found accommodation.
“The Government’s March 2020 ‘Everyone in’ initiative requested that all local authorities provide accommodation for rough sleepers in their area, often in hotels or hostels … by May 2020 a total of 14,610 people in England who were sleeping rough, or who were at risk of sleeping rough, had found emergency accommodation.”
I am bound to say that that was quite some achievement.
We heard from Revolving Doors, a truly remarkable organisation which aims to help people with substance misuse, mental health problems, domestic or sexual violence, homelessness or who have had frequent contact with police and the criminal justice system. Shay Flaherty, who I have already mentioned, a volunteer with Revolving Doors who gave evidence to the committee, is nine years into recovery from alcohol addiction and helps support homeless people in Birmingham. He was keen to tell the committee that the help the homeless were getting
“in the premises they happen to be in, whether hotels or hostels, has given them a start in life and a chance to get access to addiction services and support workers.”
He said:
“I have been amazed at how the Government and councils have managed to get the entrenched homeless off the streets … This might be the first step to getting a roof over their heads permanently.”
The important point here is that, when push comes to shove, government can be innovative. As we point out in the report,
“the Government and public services must now act to ensure that the progress made is not lost.”
Shay Flaherty told us that some innovations were being abandoned:
“Slowly but surely, the guys are coming back out on to the streets … because the accommodation is being withdrawn.”
That is disappointing, to say the least. There is no doubt that the Government’s approach to rough sleeping during the pandemic has proved what can be done by working with local authorities.
I ask—I hope—that this report will galvanise the efforts of government departments to learn from the experience of Covid-19 and acknowledge the deficiencies of a centralised government approach, in order that those less fortunate members of society may benefit. This report is worthy of recognition and of being acted upon at all levels of government. I am delighted to have been involved in the inquiry.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB) [V]
My Lords, I declare my non-executive membership of the Cabinet Office. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, a colleague in the police service, the House of Lords and this Select Committee.
I add my own thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for this debate and her determined and human leadership throughout the Select Committee—no easy task, given that the committee was new, the membership had not worked together and it had to be arranged virtually. I would also like to thank the clerks of the committee, who were flexible and very hard-working, for keeping the committee and the witnesses well briefed and cared for: a great achievement.
I fully endorse this report and our recommendations but wish to talk about only two issues, which were themes running through the evidence. The first is whether prevention is truly prioritised by the Government. The second is the ability of our public services to share data for the benefit of our citizens. Covid and the consequent lockdowns have brought both into sharp relief.
Nearly every public service claims that prevention of harm is its principal objective. This must be true logically; it is better that someone does not contract a disease or become a victim of crime if it can possibly be avoided. They will not suffer harm and the public service can either be allocated fewer resources in the future or—more likely—use the resources for other priorities. However, Covid showed that we did not prevent the spread of the disease and that we did not have a clear plan for how to prevent the spread of the disease.
It is also true that each public service struggles to articulate a detailed plan for how they will implement a preventive strategy. To take policing, all chief constables say they have a clear preventive strategy, but, when you ask for details of how they will do it, there is no detail. They cannot clearly indicate in their budget the resources allocated for this purpose. Yet we know that the design of products, for example cars, and places really helps reduce crime. People could not steal cars until recently because they were designed not to be stolen. Reasonable alcohol-control strategies, not allowing drug markets to get out of control, special measures to help and protect young people, and giving information to potential victims about how to avoid becoming a victim, will all have an impact. Health has a similar list.
The pandemic showed that we do not have clear and measurable preventive strategies and 10 to 20-year plans for either of these particular challenges. The UK was particularly affected by this pandemic because of obesity and diabetes making people more vulnerable to serious and sometimes fatal side-effects; both obesity and diabetes being preventable problems to some extent. So I urge the Government to take prevention seriously. It is not, as it is often portrayed, a soft, woolly subject; it is as hard-nosed a discipline as engineering, and susceptible to hard-nosed, effective measurement.
In terms of data sharing, we heard some excellent examples during the pandemic that local public service partners had found imaginative, effective and radical ways to overcome hurdles to sharing data. This was excellent news, but the question must be asked: why did they need to be so creative? Why did it take a world- wide pandemic to create the perfect circumstances for such a leap forward? The various regulators cannot understand why the public services say they cannot share data. Well, I am afraid, “They would, wouldn’t they?”
The reality is that legislation is designed generally to prevent the sharing of data: we have privacy legislation to protect our confidentiality and data protection legislation to stop the inappropriate sharing of private data held digitally. This is, of course, commendable. However, I do not think Parliament, when seeking to prevent the inappropriate sharing of private data, also intended to inhibit public services from sharing personal and mass data for the purpose of giving benefits to citizens in terms of health and security—as just two example. But this seems to have been the outcome.
At the very least, public service practitioners and leaders believe there is a problem, and there is clear evidence that poor data sharing is leading to poorer outcomes. The regulators say they will produce yet more guidance to reassure the practitioner. I believe that it is time consider legislative change to change the landscape. I propose that a statutory defence should be created for public services that share data. It is a simple “reasonableness” defence. If they share data believing it is to carry out their duties and help a citizen, they should have a full defence in law to any breach of privacy or data sharing breaches.
The pandemic has allowed public servants to take risks on our behalf in the sharing of data. However, they should not have to take those risks and, by providing a clear defence in law, the Government will reassure our public services and improve their efficiency for the collective good.
Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, I was delighted to be appointed to the new Committee on Public Services. I knew that under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Armstrong it would be a lively experience, and I join others in paying tribute to her and the clerks who supported us so well.
Of course, when we began, we had no idea that we should be producing our first report during a pandemic, nor that that report would focus on how those public services we were investigating would react to that pandemic. I must record what a privilege it was to work with a group of such experienced, wise and committed Members, and to reach a degree of consensus which was, and is, part of the pleasure of our work together.
A Critical Juncture is the title we chose for our report, which we are debating today, recognising that Covid represented an unprecedented challenge to our public services to which they responded with innovation and commitment. The outcomes are critical in terms of lessons learned, what can be retained from such excellent outcomes, and how resilience against any further challenges can be built up.
We have had some wonderful and heart-warming examples of how services responded to the pandemic: huge upscaling of provision, rapid decision-making and the breaking down of long-standing barriers by the urgent needs of the moment, but of course the virus further disadvantaged those already left behind. Black and minority-ethnic groups and those on the margins suffered disproportionately, and the years of underfunding of preventative and early intervention services came home to roost. Poor children’s education attainment got worse and the ability of local services to understand the needs of their communities was sometimes ignored in favour of some overcentralised and needlessly bureaucratic national service provision.
Lessons must be learned if we are to reap the benefits we have gained and not slip back to old ways as soon as the pandemic is over. Nowhere is this more important than in the issue of co-production, already mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, where the users of services are involved in their design and planning and treated as equal partners. Our witnesses emphasised that this approach could have helped to predict and short-circuit some of the problems that came up. On the rough sleepers initiative, already mentioned by some of my colleagues, that separate sleeping accommodation was required by male and female rough sleepers would not have been a sudden surprise to providers if they had talked to rough sleepers before they set up a service which did not provide it, wasting time, money and good will. We must remember that most users when consulted—and I mean really consulted, not presented with a plan once it has been agreed—do not ask for the moon, as many providers think they do; on the contrary, their asks will usually be modest and far less than expected. If more services adopted this approach, it would be possible to maintain some if not all the innovation we saw over Covid. We must never undervalue the lived experience of users and customers—that is a very important lesson.
This lesson must be learned by public services, and they must similarly hear that the way really to engage with their consumers is most likely to be not through statutory service providers but through the voluntary and community sector. If you are single mother with addiction problems, you do not want to talk to your social worker for fear that you will lose your children, but through a local support group where you meet other mums in the same situation, share your fears and get advice and, above all, support; you will learn to deal with your difficulties, gain in confidence and become a reliable mother to your children. Time and again, we had examples of these experiences, but time and again too, we heard charities and community groups say that were treated like poor relations, did not have a seat at the table and were patronised and talked down to. Many of those barriers were broken down due to the simple urgency of the situation. The speed of acting may be much easier for a charity or community group, and many were able to mobilise services quickly without going through the various procedures and permissions which are inevitable in the statutory sector. We must commend the courage and willingness to take risks which was shown not only by staff and volunteers in charities but by their trustee boards. Often thought to be resistant to risk taking, they stepped up magnificently to support innovation and speed of delivery. The better relationships and increased respect which were gained in the pandemic must not be allowed to slip away. Not only will it provide more satisfactory services, meeting the needs of users rather than the notions of providers, but it will often save money too.
I hope the Minister will be able to confirm the value the Government place on the voluntary sector and their willingness to support it, not only in terms of funding but in ensuring that both the sector and the users on whose behalf it advocates are treated as equal partners in the provision of services, and in ensuring that the voice of users is strong and influential whenever public services are planned.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD) [V]
My Lords, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to serve on the Public Services Committee under the exemplary leadership of the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. I too thank our excellent committee staff.
Our first inquiry offered a unique opportunity to examine the state of public services in response to the pandemic, to acknowledge the positives, the amazing innovations to meet the Covid challenges and the incredible dedication of front-line workers, and to identify what needs to change as part of a major programme of public service transformation.
As we have already heard, the committee identified a number of fundamental weaknesses which must be addressed to make services resilient enough to withstand future crises. These included insufficient support for prevention and early intervention, overcentralised delivery of public services, poor communication from the centre, a tendency for service providers to work in silos and a lack of integration, especially in services working with vulnerable children and between health and social care. None of this is new—indeed, it will be depressingly familiar to many in your Lordships’ House—so why has it proved so difficult to move the dial: inertia, lack of political will or not?
As we have heard, the committee identified a number of key principles for public service reform which will require a fundamentally different mindset. I highlight just three: first, the vital role of preventive services in reducing the deep inequalities that have been exacerbated by Covid; secondly, central government and national service providers radically improving how they communicate and co-operate with local-level service providers; and, thirdly, the much-needed integration of services—the joining up of the silos—which is best achieved by public service providers working together, certainly at the local level but, critically, supported by joined-up working across government departments at the national level.
Other noble Lords have already highlighted the importance of preventive action. One of the report’s key recommendations was that an approach to public health that focused on preventing health inequalities would pay real dividends by increasing the resilience of communities and reducing the pressure on the NHS when a crisis occurred. The committee heard that many deaths from Covid could have been avoided if preventive public health services had been better funded. Therefore, I am disappointed that the Government have not committed to publishing a public health strategy to reduce health inequalities to fulfil their 2019 general election manifesto commitment to
“extend healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035”.
I join other noble Lords in asking the Minister when the Government intend to set out their plans for doing this. What assurances can he give that the Health and Care Bill will place clear duties on integrated care boards to reduce health inequalities, with sharp lines of accountability?
On the lack of integration between health and social care, our conclusions were stark. They were that
“the Government’s own pandemic planning … identified that social care would need significant support during the outbreak of a disease like COVID-19, yet social care was the poor relation to the NHS when it came to funding”
and allocation of PPE during the first lockdown. Discharging people from hospitals into care settings without testing and with inadequate PPE led to the tragic loss of the lives of thousands of older and disabled people. Our evidence suggested that the failures in adult care resulted from insufficient planning coupled with years of underfunding. The Nuffield Trust told us that although the Government’s 2016 pandemic planning exercise, Exercise Cygnus, had shown that care homes and domiciliary care
“would be in need of significant support in a pandemic”,
no advance arrangements were put in place to meet those needs. It concluded that integration between health and social care hinged on reform in three key areas: first, parity of resources; secondly, equal visibility and priority in policy-making, and, thirdly, commitment to better data collection and sharing. These things lie at the very heart of the report’s findings.
A further key issue revealed in our excellent international evidence, already referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Young, was on health system resilience—specifically, the need to build in spare capacity rather than have the NHS run continually at red-hot levels of bed occupancy. It was salutary to learn that the UK has 2.7 hospital beds per 1,000 of the population, compared to an EU average of 5.2—far lower than Germany with 8.2 and France with 6.2.
The committee produced 41 recommendations for government, including recognising the vital role of preventative services and early intervention and committing to interim funding to ensure that adult social care gets sufficient support to protect older and disabled people in any further waves of coronavirus and future pandemics. In short, it came up with a comprehensive agenda for change to address the systematic weaknesses revealed by the pandemic to deliver lasting and transformative reform.
Being charitable, as I like to be, I can only describe the Government’s response as lacklustre. While they largely agree with the committee’s main conclusions—it would be hard not to—their response contains very little detail on how or whether they plan to address its recommendations. It is, to say the least, disappointing that after tantalising rumours in the press that the PM is finally going to bring forward his proposals to reform adult social care before the Summer Recess, they appear to have been relegated to the long grass again.
Covid has been a serious wake-up call for this country and particularly for the way we plan and fund our public services. There really is a chance to build back better if the Government are prepared to do things differently and invest in the areas highlighted in this report.
Lord Bilimoria (CB) [V]
My Lords, the House of Lords Public Services Committee was established to consider the operation and future of public services, including health and education. It started work in February 2020, and the committee recognised very quickly, following the outbreak of Covid-19, that
“the pandemic would have an enormous impact on the delivery of public services in the years to come.”
Therefore, it set up an inquiry to examine what the experience of the coronavirus outbreak can tell us about the future role, priorities and shape of public services. The committee found five key weaknesses in public service provision, which it argued made the response to the pandemic more challenging. One of them was
“insufficient support for prevention and early intervention services,”
which I will come to.
The committee made various recommendations, and one of those that I want to focus on was:
“Recognising and supporting charities, community groups, volunteers, and the private sector as key public service providers.”
If one word stands out throughout the pandemic, it is “collaboration.” Last year, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was privileged to be appointed a trustee of the National Bereavement Partnership right from its outset. It has carried out inspirational work throughout the pandemic under the leadership of our inspirational CEO Michaela Willis. The National Bereavement Partnership has made a difference to the emotional well-being of callers. These are people who call in with very sad and tragic situations. The National Bereavement Partnership provides emotional support and therapeutic intervention and is a conduit between other services, enabling long-term well-being. It adds value to NHS services; it saves the Government money; and it keeps people out of the mental health system. So here we are where the public sector and charities work hand in hand to the benefit of each other.
When it comes to prevention and early intervention, the committee cited evidence highlighting the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on BAME communities, including:
“almost a third of all patients critically ill with COVID-19 in hospitals were from BAME backgrounds—despite making up just 13 per cent of the UK population—
that is, almost double the proportion of the population being critically ill—
“and … people of Bangladeshi background in England were twice as likely as white British people to die if they contracted COVID-19.”
The committee recommended that the Government take an approach to public health that focused on preventing health inequalities over the longer term.
The pandemic has highlighted the potential of the NHS to drive forward large-scale change and new approaches in a short period of time. There are so many examples of this. The vaccines are a great example; we have a world-leading vaccine programme with Kate Bingham, a private sector individual, appointed by the Government in May last year. On 8 December, we had the first vaccination. We had six vaccines on order and 400 million doses for a population of 67 million. Today, almost 90% of the adult population have had their first dose and almost 70% have been double-jabbed.
Again, this could not have happened with the public sector on its own; it is due to the public sector working with the private sector, with Oxford University, with the university sector, and with the Serum Institute of India in Pune, the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world, which now has a 1 billion-dose contract with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Of course, it is international collaboration: AstraZeneca is a Swedish-British company headquartered in Cambridge.
The way we worked with the ventilator challenge was amazing. We got 20 years’ worth of essential ventilators in 12 weeks. So was the way we created the Nightingale hospitals, such as the 4,000-bed centre at the ExCeL centre—the first where you had the private sector, the Armed Forces, universities and the NHS all working together.
All this underlines the importance of the health and life sciences sector. As president of the CBI, we have launched our economic strategy for the next decade, called Seize the Moment. Within that, one of the pillars is:
“A healthier nation, with health the foundation of wellbeing and economic growth”,
which is absolutely crucial.
“COVID-19 has put the health of the nation under the spotlight. Firms have stepped up, with a significantly increased emphasis on the health and wellbeing of their employees. And, for us as a country, the crisis has been a wake-up call, bringing the pervasive impacts of health inequalities into stark focus, underlining the importance of health to people’s personal and professional success, and reinforcing just how vital our life sciences capability is to the UK’s progress now and in the future.”
Poor health is expensive: 63% of years lost to poor health are in the working-age population. This costs the UK £300 billion in lost economic output annually, excluding health costs. So, life sciences and health can be a major driver of economic success for the UK, with the global market in pharmaceuticals and medtech worth £1.2 trillion in 2020; and it is expected to see a strong growth of around 5% a year through to 2030. The secret, again, is collaboration between the public sector, charities and the private sector.
People talk about building back better. Well, I chaired a CBI event with the mayor of Athens, and he said, “We do not talk about building back better; we talk about building forward better.” So, let us build forward better.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con) [V]
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, who spoke compellingly about collaboration. It has been a pleasure and an honour to be a member of the Public Services Committee, which has behaved throughout in a collegiate and constructive way, and I thank my committee colleagues. Like others, I would like to thank our excellent chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hilltop, who has demonstrated throughout hard work, dedication and great good humour. Thanks also go to our secretariat—the team of Tristan Stubbs, Claire Coast-Smith and Mark Hudson —for their utter professionalism.
Our first report, as has been stated, commenced physically in February last year, before the first lockdown, but we quickly moved to working virtually. Work was carried out remarkably smoothly on our report A Critical Juncture for Public Services: Lessons from COVID-19, which was published in November last year. I thank officials, broadcasters and all who made this possible. I will focus on three areas in particular, although, as has been demonstrated by those serving on the committee, our report was wide-ranging. I would like to look at prevention and early intervention, then at local delivery, and then at the importance of voluntary organisations.
On prevention and early intervention, a key area, the evidence that we saw was clear. People who are obese, who smoke, who are diabetic and who live in unhealthy social, economic and physical environments are at a far higher risk of dying from Covid-19. That seems now almost beyond challenge. The Prime Minister himself nailed the danger of obesity when he spoke of Covid-19. Yet the Government in their response to the report did not recognise these factors explicitly, rather surprisingly, saying that further analysis of the evidence will inform our learning. I hope that the Government accept the very clear evidence, and it will be good to hear from the Minister on this.
Our inquiry heard from Sir Michael Marmot about the underfunding of prevention services, and we heard that obesity rates were highest in deprived areas. It is laudable that the Conservative manifesto of 2019 commits to extension of healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035. A litmus test of the Government’s approach will be the attitude to the recently published national food strategy, the Dimbleby report, the last part of which was published last week. That report is clear on action at producer level to reduce salt and sugar in foods, just as we have done successfully under a Conservative Government for soft drinks. That action would produce results. I hope that the murmurings of some on the libertarian extremes, who suggest that exhortation is sufficient, are ignored, given that they are the voices of a few people who have not been following the evidence of the pandemic, and who are committed to an imagined libertarian Valhalla. Not only will positive action help hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our fellow country men and women, it will also of course ease pressures on the NHS and, indeed, on the economy from the impact of ill health. The details of how the Government are to carry out future arrangements are awaited with interest.
The importance of preventive services in the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office is also highlighted in our report. The Government’s response does not pick up on how there will be investment here in preventive services for those who have been impacted by addiction, homelessness and poor mental health—evidence that we received on this from Revolving Doors. By the same token, early intervention on education, particularly as disadvantaged children have fallen further behind, is crucial. Beyond the existing pupil premium, we need to pick up the proposals on catch-up that Sir Kevan Collins put forward.
On localisation, in the memorable phrase spoken earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, running England out of London is not on. I agree with that, as does the report. Local provision, whether through the public sector or voluntary organisations, is vital; it is familial, trusted, responsive and fleet-footed, and it is more likely to be flexible. We need to recognise that through public health teams and more local funding, not just because of a democratic deficit but because of lack of local provision, certainly contributing to the disease and to death. I welcome the progress that has been made on metro mayors, and I anticipate more—but much more than that is needed for the localisation that is necessary.
The third area of our report that I wanted to cover related to the importance of voluntary organisations. As I have indicated, they are trusted and familial. Their reach is extraordinary, as I found during our inquiry. For example, Ian Jones, the chief executive of Volunteer Cornwall, told us of 4,500 Cornish charities. Many local councils pick up and work with the voluntary sector. Camden Council, for example, relies on Hampstead Volunteer Corps to help with food distribution, and we welcome the development of the new outsourcing playbook by the Cabinet Office. It is welcome, but we need to see it being followed by ensuring that public service commissioners prioritise social value when contracting services. We look forward to that.
In short, there is a lot to do, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister on taking things forward—in all our interests, but particularly in the interests of those most disadvantaged, which, as we have heard, includes the BAME community, as well as the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. Generally, those at the bottom of the pile have been hardest hit, and the Government must do more to help them.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Pitkeathley) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Desai, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Sikka.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, for this debate and the Public Services Committee for its immensely insightful report. Future generations will wonder how their Government permitted nearly twice the number of their citizens to die during the Covid pandemic than all the civilians who died during the Second World War. Yes, we need to transform public services, but that cannot be done without transforming politics, and economic and social policies. We need a visible politics of care and compassion. The fact that the Prime Minister was comfortable with 83,000 Covid fatalities in the age group 18 or over is really a sad low point in British values. Front-line workers, including hospital staff, care home workers, transport staff and retirees feature disproportionately on the Covid death list.
As Sir Michael Marmot’s recent report demonstrates, the main reason is that, due to low incomes, people have poor access to good food, housing, healthcare and personal space. The pandemic has shown us that poverty and inequalities cause death, but the Government have done little to check that; indeed, they continue with their wage freezes, without any impact assessment on the lives of people or the capacity of the country to manage pandemics. In 1976, the workers’ share of the gross domestic product was 65.1%, and just before the pandemic it dropped to 49.4%—a decline unmatched in any other industrialised country. The average wage was stagnant in the decade preceding the pandemic. This economic legacy has weakened the people’s resilience to pandemics. Many people tested positive for Covid but could not find a safe place to isolate, as they lived in cramped accommodation, all because they are poor.
To manage pandemics, countries need institutional memories and capacities; we lack both. The NHS lacked investment before the pandemic. To manage the crisis, the Government hired expensive and often ineffective private sector consultants for their test and trace programme, which has not augmented the long-term capacity of the NHS. Consultants quickly enter and exit an organisation and leave little trace of their activities. This makes it harder to build a pool of experience and draw lessons.
The Government need to look at their own obsession with privatisation, a key factor in the deaths in care homes. Since 2010, central government grants to local authorities have been cut by 38% in real terms; this accelerated the privatisation of social care. In care homes owned by private equity, nearly 11% of revenues vanish in servicing contrived debt. Private equity also expects a return of 12% to 14% on its investment, which meant that 20% to 25% of the revenues of private equity disappeared in returns, leaving very little for care home residents. Care home workers and residents suffered. Of the 1.49 million workers in care homes, only 50% are full time—nearly 24% are on zero-hour contracts. Almost 42% of the domiciliary care workforce is on zero-hour contracts, and staff turnover is nearly 30%.
In March 2020, the real-term median hourly pay of staff was just £8.50 an hour. In these circumstances, it is difficult, if not impossible, for carers to get to know patients and provide personalised care. Low-paid staff cannot afford to isolate or take time off to recover. It is hard to recall any government concerns about the negative outcomes from privatisation of social care. We cannot build capacity to tackle future pandemics by just creating poverty.
The Government’s economic policies are also creating new dangers and diseases—just look at the water industry, where almost every water company has been fined for anti-social practices. Southern Water is the latest example. The company illegally dumped tonnes of raw sewage into rivers and seas, increasing the likelihood of diseases. Its directors calculated that it was better to pay fines than to treat the sewage, so they dumped it. The puny £90 million fine is no deterrent: Southern’s chief executive has just received a bonus of £551,000 for boosting profits. I cannot recall seeing any health impact that accompanied the Government’s two-thirds cut in the Environment Agency’s budget or deregulation, which expects water companies to self-report their illegal practices.
I hope the Government will reflect on how their political, economic and social policies have inflicted death on thousands and sadness upon millions of innocent people, but I am not too optimistic.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and all the members of the Select Committee. Although I put my name down for this debate, I seem to be one of the few people speaking today who did not sit on that committee. When I put my name down, I did not think the report would be this good—I had not read it—so I would like to say that it is an absolutely amazing report and I thank the committee for achieving it. It is wonderful to see such excellent cross-party working, which is often true of Select Committees.
It is good that the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Davies of Gower, mentioned the positives about the Government because, quite honestly, looking through this it is hard to pick out the positives. The way that homelessness was dealt with was one of them, but unfortunately homeless people are now being thrown out and are back living on the streets—I see evidence of that every day. I hesitate, being one of the few speakers today who was not on the Select Committee, to comment on every issue, but there are three areas I want to speak to, because they seem so important.
The deep, ongoing inequalities in our society are well documented and clearly had an impact on our ability to deal with the disease, for individuals and for organisations. From a green point of view, we always argue for less inequality, because if people cannot feed their children, clothe themselves, pay their bills and their rent, it is very hard for them to care about other issues, such as the climate emergency. We are better as a nation if we are more equal. That has always been true, and it is something the Government have not grasped and acted upon. The report says:
“People … who live in unhealthy social, economic and physical environments are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19.”
The greater the inequality, the more people will die from a disease such as Covid-19. The Government have to be aware of that and change their actions on this issue. Their job, as a Government, is to care for us all, to reduce inequality, to lift people out of poverty and to prevent worse poverty in the future. What part of government is actually working on a plan to reduce inequality, now and for the future? Of course, many children are likely to be disadvantaged in the long-term by the first lockdown, possibly—probably—leading to much worse life outcomes for them. As a nation, we lose their potential, their skills. So, what do the Government plan to do to make sure that those children catch up as quickly as possible?
I do not get the feeling that the Government understand just how important the National Health Service is and how they need to resource it better. Better resourcing does not mean selling bits of it off. I do not know whether this is still true, but earlier I read that there was going to be a 3% pay rise for NHS staff, and it was going to come out of national insurance. Obviously, that was a few hours ago and the government policy could have changed in that short time, as it sometimes does; however, I want to know why that 3% rise might come out of national insurance when it should come out of tax, so that everybody who is on a higher income would pay more and people on a lower income would pay less. That seems much fairer to me than what the Government are planning to do.
It is a common view that the Government completely messed up on the pandemic. We have heard about a few areas where they did not, but they were incredibly lucky that the NHS did the heavy lifting, made them look better and saved many lives. Of course, the NHS is still saving lives. There are still people with Covid-19, the numbers are rising once again, and the Government have instituted a “Freedom Day”, which is essentially the freedom to get a nasty disease and possibly die.
The third area is why the Government did not send anybody to the Select Committee to give oral evidence. That seems to me to be a derogation of duty and it shows a lack of respect for the House of Lords, which clearly does immensely good work, time and again. It also fits with the Government’s refusal to launch an inquiry. They keep saying, “Now is not the time, because it would distract people”, but of course it will not be the same people dealing with the pandemic at the moment who would be looking into what actually happened. The committee has said that it is not trying to look at all the failings but to set out a road map for the future, which is fair enough. As people dealing with the inquiry would be different from those coping with the pandemic, why are the Government still resisting? Are they hoping people’s memories will have faded? Why cannot an inquiry start immediately? Why not tomorrow?
We cannot afford to deny that this has been a disaster. This report is an excellent way forward. I think the Government should learn from it and accept that the road map being offered is an excellent one. I urge the Government to follow it.
Lord Haskel (Lab) [V]
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out, your Lordships’ committee wrote this paper some nine months ago—sufficient time for events to prove the committee right or wrong. Events have proved it overwhelmingly right and the Government’s response totally inadequate.
For example, the paper speaks of overcentralised delivery of public services. Thanks to a report earlier this week by the National Audit Office, we are able to compare the centralised procurement in England, using companies without experience of PPE—but, incidentally, with connections to the Conservative Party—and companies new to test and trace, with the Welsh procurement, where local authorities carrying out this work used trusted and experienced suppliers. Not surprisingly, the result was that the cost per head of the test and trace and PPE in Wales was half the cost in England, with no decline in quality and service. As a result, Welsh businesses were supported more generously. In Wales there were winners all round. Surely one of the first lessons learned must be the need for careful analysis of whether services are best delivered from the centre or locally.
The committee calls for a more flexible approach to sharing data. Surely, there is no better example of this than the speed at which an effective vaccine was produced and distributed. Years of research, financed and carried out in the public sector, produced the revolutionary RNA system of vaccines, which enabled the private sector to produce and distribute a Covid vaccine within months, instead of the years previously needed. It was this that enabled the Government quickly to vaccinate a large part of the population. Surely, the lesson learned here is to encourage this co-operation as a matter of course, not as an exception when there is a crisis.
The report also calls for radical improvement in the way government communicates and co-operates with local service providers. This means that the Government must provide clarity to local authorities and businesses. We are currently suffering exactly from this, because the 10-day stay-at-home alerts are advisory rather than legal obligations. Also, there is now inconsistency over wearing masks and social distancing, caused by abrogating responsibility to local authorities, businesses and each one of us individually. Only yesterday, the British Chambers of Commerce said that companies were struggling to make sense of which staff were defined as critical workers and so were eligible to continue working when pinged by the NHS app or by test and trace.
By asking us to make sensible decisions without clear guidance and without providing the tools to make these decisions, the Government are guilty not only of creating uncertainty by mixed messaging but of further endangering public health. Indeed, this lack of clarity has become a defining feature of this Government. The Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, of which I am a member, almost weekly takes the Government to task over lack of clarity in one or more of their instruments. These examples show that the committee is absolutely right to call on the Government to make public services more resilient and more able to withstand any future crises. As my noble friend Baroness Armstrong explained in her excellent opening speech, this lack of resilience has taken a huge toll on human life and caused enormous physical and psychological damage—as well as damage to the economy. The committee is right: we must learn the lessons, so that we are better prepared if it happens again.
Baroness Goudie (Lab) [V]
I thank my noble friend Baroness Armstrong and her colleagues for this excellent report. It is a true road map for the Government to follow, coming out of Covid and taking us forward—not building back but building forward. We must look forward and ensure that we go forward and put the correct finance behind this.
I was very disturbed on reading the two pieces in the report about education and inequality. We know that for a child, from the time it is born, equality, food and care are important, as is education. We have seen throughout this pandemic that money for young children and mothers has been cut. There have been no Sure Start start-ups, and no real efforts to provide free nursery education. There is the whole question of food banks and benefits for food. We know that children cannot concentrate without food, and their lungs and the rest of their body are affected too. We are talking about the future generations of this country. Promises have been made but not kept by the Education Minister, and it is a disgrace. We were so lucky that teachers stayed and continued to try to work.
I must ask this Government to think seriously about education. It is not an issue I am known to speak about often, but I find it impossible not to address the way the Government have dealt with it. This report really makes the case, and the road map is here. We must look not only at education from the point at which a child is born, but at the way mothers are treated in hospital and the care they need. We have seen, through this report, how vulnerable mothers from certain sectors are. They need more care, and their babies need care. We also know that a child’s brain, if it is not helped, is not going to grow well; and again, I mention the lungs.
I ask the Minister to undertake that she will ask the Government and the Department for Education to look yet again at children’s education from the very start. We need to have Sure Starts. We cannot rely, as we do, on the voluntary organisations and others that help to make this happen. Sure Starts in all primary schools also have to be brought back. They help not only the children but mothers who are working from home; they need this social contact with each other. Further, we have to give a better undertaking in respect of food banks and how the associated cards operate—when you pay for food, the money is not on them. Why are we using agencies and consultants that cannot deliver? As many noble Lords have said, we pay lots of money to consultants, but nothing is given back. Also, we must look again at the benefits system as we come through Covid. If people cannot look for work, they need benefits to keep themselves and their families going. That is absolutely vital; otherwise, this is going to cost the health service much more, as the report says.
I support all my colleagues in what they have said today. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, since coming here 10 months ago, I have read a lot of legislation and reports and to be honest, it has all been a bit of a chore. However, this report sparkled. I know it has had lots of plaudits, but I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and all the members of the Public Services Committee for an accessible, informative and thought-provoking document. There is lots in it I disagree with, but it was just so useful—and unusual for these toxic times, in that it was free from rancour and “gotchas”. As it says itself, it is not about apportioning blame for past failures, but making constructive suggestions for future reforms—a great relief.
One caveat: in general, I am wary of any sphere allowing the normal of the pandemic to automatically become a new normal by default. The call in the report is to lock in innovations, but that makes me nervous. Yes, it is very useful to kickstart debate, but not to institutionalise as a rigid fait accompli. For example, we all know that digital technology may have facilitated everything from working from home to digital health consultations. But as the report itself points out, Zoom teams and the like could never, and should never, replace face-to-face services. I note with concern that too many GPs and, for example, university lecturers and senior managers, seem reluctant to resume real-life interaction, at the expense of service users.
One striking feature of the report that I would like to make explicit is the cost of treating the NHS as almost a sacred cow public service. It is understandable to celebrate and almost sacralise the health service in a health pandemic, but this can be at the expense of other services. Testimony in the report noted that support for the NHS, especially during the initial part of the pandemic, might have been necessary but should not have come at the expense of preventive and public health services. I agree.
The Nuffield Trust is quoted as noting how the Covid crisis highlights the startling inequality between health and social care services. Many of us felt uncomfortable that that initial “clap for the NHS” neglected care workers. Even today, all the focus is on the pay rise for the heroic NHS staff, whereas social care is plagued with poor wages and awful employment conditions; and now we have even singled out social care workers as the only workforce facing mandated vaccines or the sack.
So, it is important that the report highlights that, long before Covid, successive Governments prioritised funding the NHS—especially acute services—and neglected funding social care. The Nuffield Trust notes that the NHS received generous emergency funding from the Treasury in the early stages of the pandemic, which then enabled a dramatic expansion of capacity. Care providers, in contrast, said that extra funding did not reach them. Also, and related, the deputy director of the New Local Government Network contrasted the experience of local government with the NHS. The NHS had its costs met in full and deficits written off unquestioningly, but that was a privilege not afforded to councils or other public services. I do wonder about this hierarchy of priorities.
The consequences go beyond material funding. As ADASS points out, the historical tendency to prioritise the NHS has influenced policy decisions, sometimes with tragic consequences. In the name of saving the NHS, rather than the NHS saving lives or the public, we now face the collateral damage of non-Covid deaths from cancer and heart disease and huge waiting lists for many in dire need of medical interventions, with the terrible news of an increase of 50% of under-20s hospitalised with eating disorders. In a different debate earlier today, we also heard about the use of “do not resuscitate” in hospitals. We cannot ignore these things.
But perhaps the greatest horror associated with the focus on the mantra of protecting the NHS was the scandal of patients being discharged from hospital into care homes without testing—what the Nuffield Trust called, as quoted in the report, a
“rapid clearing of hospital beds in the early stages”,
regardless of the
“lack of preparedness of the care settings”.
The most vulnerable died as a consequence and, at the very least, it is important that we be able to query NHS policies without being shut down as somehow disloyal to NHS staff who, I agree, have been and are heroic and hard workers—but so are other workers. I do not think that you should be called a traitor to the institution if you query it.
Another striking aspect I read from the report is the wasted potential of civil society in helping deal with the pandemic. On a positive note, of course, the report gives lots of examples of innovation happening because bureaucracy was swept away. In fact, sometimes to tear up the red tape is caricatured as a laissez-faire, careless approach, but the removal of overly bureaucratic hurdles allowed public services to work alongside charities and community groups and volunteers, and the private sector stepped up. Altogether, this played a huge role in delivering services.
The surge of civic action, such as the 4,000 Covid-19 mutual aid groups and the local WhatsApp and Facebook groups I am sure we were all in as volunteers, showed a real appetite for providing practical solidarity in the emergency from so many people. We saw the generosity of 750,000 people signing up in four days when NHS England’s Royal Voluntary Service was launched in April 2020, but sadly that was wasted. The Institute for Volunteering’s research rightly notes in the report that overcentralised co-ordination was not aligned to locally organised activities, significant time was taken to respond, enthusiasm dwindled and people became demoralised. I think it was just so sad when volunteers could have helped, for example, relieve the pressure on social care workers, or indeed NHS workers.
In general, the official approach to Covid was to demobilise the public—to squash initiative and volunteerism. The report notes how the German public health service, in contrast, mobilised and seconded public servants from across departments: forestry, museums—
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness—
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
I am sorry. I hope that we can mobilise the public in the future. I thank the committee for the report, and I apologise to the House.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am delighted to take part in this debate. I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Armstrong on her skilled chairing of the Select Committee and the clerk and his staff for their excellent work.
As the report says, the pandemic represented an unprecedented challenge to the United Kingdom’s public services. I take the positives from it: many of them rose to that challenge. Many public service providers developed remarkable innovations, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, just referred to. Decisions which before the pandemic took months were made in minutes. Good personal and organisational relationships broke down long-standing barriers between the statutory and voluntary sectors. New ways to deliver services flourished. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that we do not want to lock in certain behaviours, and we need to tackle the issue of the difficulty of face-to-face interventions. Yes, the NHS does have its challenges. I agree about the issues around “do not resuscitate” and the transfer of patients with Covid into care homes. But I would say to the noble Baroness that, when you look at the comparative statistics, the NHS has fewer beds, doctors and nurses than any comparable healthcare system, and we have to consider that in terms of funding decisions for the future.
Of course, it is not all good. We heard as a committee that the overall public health response was at times hampered by overcentralised, poorly co-ordinated and poorly communicated policies that were designed and delivered by central government, even though local-level providers were often better equipped. One of the key questions the committee poses is: how do we hold on to the positive behaviours we saw during the pandemic? I want to concentrate on just one issue: the over- centralisation of public services.
My noble friend Lord Liddle asked if our politics is up to the challenge of tackling this centralisation. The Government’s response was pretty wet, although the Prime Minister’s recent speech on levelling up did at least cover some of the ground. He spoke about the country being the most centralised of all the developed countries. He acknowledged that the big metro mayors were championing their hometowns, and that in the rest of the country, including the counties, local leaders needed to be given the tools to make things happen. Does this suggest a possible big move to decentralisation or even devolution? Well, up to a point, because I wonder whether the Government have themselves taken note. Last week in the Commons, the Health and Care Bill had its Second Reading. It did not show much commitment to devolving or decentralising power. Indeed, it faces the other way, with a power grab by Ministers and an imposition of powers of direction for the Secretary of State on the NHS. This suggests that there is a little way to go before government and Whitehall understand that devolution requires a huge shift in thinking.
In a really interesting paper about this, the Institute for Government has pointed out that, in recent decades, UK parties of all political persuasions have made commitments to decentralise power but in reality, coming into government, have found it very hard to do so. The institute’s analysis suggests that decentralisation requires at least three main groups to either support or acquiesce to reforms: national politicians, local politicians and, of course, the public. These groups often have different interests, are not internally cohesive and have different priorities and values—all factors which make securing sufficient support difficult. As important, all these groups have considerable, and not to be underestimated, power to block or undermine reforms they dislike.
Each of the obstacles the institute identifies is linked to one of these groups: national government lacks trust in regional or local government competence; those leading decentralising reforms are often unsuccessful at persuading other departments or Ministers to give away powers; taking powers from existing local politicians to give to a new sub-national government layer creates opposition; and the public generally lack interest in regional and local government reform and are sceptical of the value of more politicians. This goes perhaps some way to explaining why the bold talk of decentralisation is not always matched by deeds—and yet you come back to the conclusions of our report and to the argument that decentralisation could boost economic growth, better reflect differences in local identities and preferences and allow more variation and innovation in public services.
This, in the end, is the challenge for the noble Lord, Lord True, and the Government. Are they really serious about levelling up? If they believe that decentralisation and devolvement of powers is the way forward, if they want to build on the fantastic local innovation in evidence over the last 16 months, their forthcoming White Paper must be ambitious. I hope it will be.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a vice-chair of the All-Party Group on Coronavirus and the All-Party Group on Adult Social Care. I start by thanking on behalf of these Benches the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, and her committee, as well as those who gave evidence, for their time and for this excellent report. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, that it is outstanding and should act as a blueprint for any future Government to use for public service reform—which, frankly, should happen straightaway, but, having read the Government’s response, I am not convinced it will happen soon.
Like many others, I find it quite extraordinary that no Minister found it appropriate to give evidence. Even today, in an earlier Statement, the Health Minister said that the best time for reflecting was after the pandemic. We have learned since the publication of this report last November that lessons could have been learned; mistakes were repeated because they were not.
My noble friend Lady Tyler talked of the dedication of all public sector workers. These Benches agree. There is often high performance and a strong sense of duty and they go beyond what is called for. Most of the problems outlined here are cultural and structural, and no reflection on the individuals who work in beleaguered public services, often trying to cope with cuts with no reduction in their responsibilities.
The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, rightly said that action is needed urgently and that the Government should not delay. The noble Lord, Lord Haskel, made the vital point that, since the report’s publication, lessons should have been learned and that the Government were therefore doomed to repeat mistakes.
The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, rightly focused on the need for substantial reform, setting out eight areas. His noted expertise in local government means that, along with other members of the committee, he understands the real practical stumbling blocks of public services in our society and the ways of managing them.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, is right that challenge is vital in every single way we do things. From my experience of local government over the years, giving professionals and the people they are working for the chance to find value-for-money solutions can frequently result in better public services in their area.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, helped us with lessons from other countries. I will briefly mention Taiwan, which, in addition to the points the noble Lord raised, from day one, early in January, closed its borders to make sure that the virus was not brought in. It was also completely frank with the public, explained why it was doing things and put in place strong support for those who had to self-isolate, bringing them food and helplines. That, plus daily television programmes on which scientists were quizzed about what was happening, remains one of the absolute strengths in its community.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, also made the point about local authorities in Germany having equal powers, which is very helpful. Our mixed democratic structures and different local authority economies are just not fit for purpose in the 21st century. However, the answer is not more metro mayors. Things need to be clear, simplified and accountable to the people in ways they can understand.
As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, our public emphasis must move to prevention, but it must be funded. It has not been over the last few years. Levelling up was not evident in March’s Budget, but it is critical in dealing with early intervention and prevention, as other noble Lords have said. I echo the request of my noble friend Lady Tyler and others that Ministers say clearly when their public health strategy—and the funding for it—will be published. Public health cuts over the years are one of the reasons why levelling up will not happen any time soon under this Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, spoke of the importance of the need for positive action on food reform; the Dimbleby review, key parts of which were immediately dismissed by the Prime Minister on its publication, has many lessons for us. Yet the sugar tax on soft drinks, and other pressures, mean that our large supermarkets have started to move to reformulate. While the results are encouraging, the 2024 target must be met and pressure must be maintained. Educating children and their parents about good food choices is vital, too, but the cost of healthy food, especially fruit and vegetables, often means that the most nutritious foods are out of reach for the poorest families, thus building in poor health and other problems in yet another generation.
Sir Michael Marmot’s evidence, as well as an enormous amount of data, has shown that inequality and disadvantage put people not just at much higher risk but, in the pandemic, at risk of death. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, reminded us of the high percentage of severe death and disease in our ethnic-minority communities. Frankly, as a country, we should hang our heads in shame. Where health inequalities are baked into our public services, it is too easy to turn a blind eye, but this appalling death rate is a wake-up call to us all. He is also right to say that poor health costs the economy. That is why we need the innovative thinking about how investment in public health and education will act as a driver for the economy and for productivity.
The noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, rightly reminded us that early years support, through schemes such as Sure Start, are vital in deprived communities. America learned this through the Tennessee STAR project over three decades ago. We have still not learned that lesson fully.
The example given by the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, of the user voice and coproduction in pandemic provision for the homeless was important, breaking down barriers with those people who are hardest to reach and getting to the root of the problem and solving it. We must not lose that experience.
One problem very evident in the pandemic was the way that officials—whether health, education or local authorities—failed to listen to parents of disabled children when they explained that they were struggling without their essential regular respite care. The result was that they were often criticised by social services; some were even threatened with having their children taken away from them. That must not happen again. Contrast that with my noble friend Lady Pinnock’s example of the Leicestershire cell for social care. It is vital that we mark and learn where things have worked and find mechanisms to make sure that this good practice is not just debated in your Lordships’ House but is in every community in our country.
The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, outlined one of the key crises in our adult social care sector over the last 30 years, which is increasingly moving from public sector provision to commercial companies. That is not bad in itself, but it now includes hedge funds and others who should not be in the business of care and certainly not using a business model that exploits the cheapest labour and expects low retention of staff when caring for other human beings. Now a combination of Brexit and the pandemic has shown that the social care workforce deserves to have a proper plan, to be paid in parity with their health opposite numbers and to have proper career pathways like those in the NHS. There are currently over 120,000 vacancies in social care. Government proposals must tackle the root and branch, not just the funding of beds, and ensure that we have a reliable and functioning social care sector as the baby boomers move into their old age.
The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, is right that the Government have focused in their procurement White Paper on commercial contracts, when this report demonstrates that, by empowering local services and communities and using the voluntary sector, many key services can be joined up.
My noble friend Lord Shipley’s point that you cannot run England from Westminster is vital, too. I hope that the Minister and the Government really understand that. The hub and spoke models of central bureaucracy never trust local areas. Often in the pandemic, that is where things went wrong. There were national attempts at recruiting volunteers when local councils had already done so; local councils got people to help people who had been asked to shield and then suddenly an NHS scheme was announced and nobody knew who was running the volunteer scheme. That is so easily avoidable, but the NHS, in its towers, just felt that it would start a new scheme at short notice without referring back to local government.
My noble friend Lady Pinnock commented that local staff, whether in local authorities or working in the community, wanted to rise to the challenging circumstances and to work differently, embracing innovation and feeling empowered. Again, we must capture that for the future. It is not just a pandemic issue but about our life in our communities. She also referred to codesign and coproduction as a powerful way of real innovation, value for money and value to individuals involved in receiving this public service.
The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said that the committee found countless ways in which data sharing worsened the lives of people. Those points were extraordinarily well made and we must resolve that. However, this is not just about giving everyone the data. It must be safe and secure, and for public service.
Finally, it is vital that fundamental reform comes soon. It means, as with social care 10 years ago, cross-party working and the Government working with other parties to make it happen. I hope that the one message that the Minister will take away from this debate is that they need to be spurred into action now to deliver the recommendations in the report and take our communities and the agencies that work with them into a 21st century that will be safe and secure for them.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I begin by echoing the thanks that she gave to my noble friend Lady Armstrong of Hill Top for her introduction to this debate and the work she did in leading the committee. Her commitment to improving public services is second to none and, speaking personally, I have long been inspired by the tenacity that she has shown in that endeavour over many years. The work that she and her fellow committee members undertook in the preparation of the report is admirable and I get the impression, having listened to the debate, that all Members thought it to be a thought-provoking and paradigm-challenging experience—as well as, if I am reading between the lines correctly, about as much fun as is allowed in the course of parliamentary duties on Zoom.
It is regrettable, though, that the Government chose not to give evidence and, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, observed, to delay this debate for as long as it has been delayed. I hope that that does not reveal a wider reluctance to engage in scrutiny of the delivery of services during the pandemic. Perhaps the Minister can reassure us on that in his response. Ministers must guard against giving the impression that they are either insufficiently curious to learn lessons or perhaps fearful of what will be revealed. It is essential that any such misgivings are not allowed to interfere with learning from what has happened. I am sure that the Government will want to make sure that they can learn from this compelling report when finally they begin their own investigation.
I hope that my noble friend Lady Armstrong does not mind me saying this, and does not take it the wrong way, but, when I saw that she was leading this debate, I kind of knew what she was going to say, because she is such a respected voice on these issues. I have heard her talk passionately many times about the need for early intervention and the urgency of addressing the lack of co-ordination between health and social care in particular—but she has never been more right to say these things than she is now.
The report identifies fundamental weaknesses, insufficient prevention and early intervention, overcentralised delivery and silo working, lack of integration, problems with data sharing, and lack of user voice. As others have said, none of those observations is especially new, but Covid has exposed them starkly and that is why I encourage the Government to build on this report and proceed quickly with their own inquiry. For grieving families, the sense of loss never fades, even though the anger, shock and pain can ease with time. However, the ease with which precious lessons can be learned will fade with time. That is why this report at this time is so valuable.
There is clearly much to be proud of in the way in which our public services responded. The resilience shown, especially in the early months, was awe-inspiring. The way in which the public, private and voluntary sectors joined forces has been hugely beneficial to us all. The deployment of new technology has been rapid and impressive. Although the app is driving people mad at the moment, the ability to access health information and share it securely with providers could be game-changing. Remote consultations, used appropriately, could make accessing services permanently easier for patients. We should ask ourselves how we take this innovation, as my noble friend Lady Armstrong said, where it is good and lock it in. My noble friend Lord Haskel highlighted the success of the Welsh Government in sourcing PPE, which seems a good example of a lesson that could be learned and shared, to the benefit of all, as a consequence of a future government inquiry.
If the global financial crisis in 2008 did not persuade small-government advocates of the need for an active, flexible and engaged state at a national and local level, coronavirus surely must.
The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, provided a detailed and revealing description of how other countries have coped. We need to contrast the outcomes of countries where political leaders stepped up and took decisive action, such as New Zealand, with those who wilfully neglected their citizens’ well-being, such as Brazil.
My noble friend Lord Hunt explained how comparatively poorly resourced our health services are. The UK’s death toll stands at almost 130,000. I do not want to stand here and point the finger at the Government—that is not what today has been about—but it is undeniable that weaknesses identified in the report should have been tackled sooner. Health inequalities are well known and we are going backwards. This must change. The committee points out that, while it is important to learn lessons from the data and the workforce, it is equally important to hear the voices of service users. Co-production is recommended and I look forward to learning more about that process.
Inevitably, our debate focused on health services and it has been good to hear noble Lords attending to the impact that the pandemic has had on the justice system, rough sleepers and our youngest citizens. The scarring on the education and mental health of all children, especially the disadvantaged and those who have lost as much as six months of education, will shame us forever unless we take urgent steps to correct it. The potential harm to them as individuals is not yet known, but neither is the harm to our society and future prosperity. The message to the Government could not be clearer: “Fix this. Fix it quickly, before it’s too late and the scarring is too deep to heal”.
The catch-up tsar may have resigned in despair, as many noble Lords have pointed out. That is always embarrassing, but this is not just about tsars and special projects. As my noble friend Lady Goudie said so compellingly, we need to see every lever pulled in every school, family and community for years to come to make sure that no child’s life chances are permanently damaged.
My noble friend Lady Armstrong hammered home the need to invest in thinking further ahead, intervening and preventing problems. So perhaps the most important lesson of all from this pandemic will be that short-term, reactive, politically driven decision-making costs lives. This report shows us that there is another, better way.
The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con) [V]
My Lords, this has been an outstanding debate on, frankly, what I thought was a really outstanding report. I thank those who worked on it and all those who have spoken to it, and I commend the spirit in which most have spoken. It has been a wide-ranging debate on a wide-ranging subject and I will respond as much as I can and as best I can in the time available.
However, I should stress, as all noble Lords have, the importance of awareness of cross-cutting services, and the interrelation and collaboration between services at all levels and across all sectors. These matters are vital and I had the privilege of chairing a committee of your Lordships’ House looking at intergenerational matters. I know that many will feel that those kinds of issues run across services and are not always adequately considered inside Parliament—or, indeed, outside it. This report makes a great contribution and I hope that it will not sail off into the mists.
I think we are all agreed that the past year has been unlike anything in living memory, and we have had to come together in an extraordinary national effort to overcome a virus which has threatened our very way of life. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed areas in our economy and, yes, inequalities in our society that mean the most vulnerable people have been hit the hardest. As we recover, we have an opportunity, as my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said, and as the report of your Lordships’ committee asserts, to build back and build forward better and stronger than before.
I apologise that we were not able to engage with the committee sooner. The Government take their duties to Parliament seriously and thank the committee for its work. I offered to speak to the committee in March, not on this report but on ongoing work, but that was declined. It does not serve much to throw stones at each other. We should all seek to do better in engaging in the ongoing dialogue between Parliament and government, and I shall always seek to do that.
At the forefront of all our efforts are our public services. I have spent a lifetime in public services, and from hospitals to classrooms, and job centres to courtrooms, the work of the United Kingdom’s public servants has been nothing short of heroic, as so many of your Lordships have said today. I would certainly like to add my thanks to all those, from every walk of life, who have been involved in responding to the pandemic and keeping our country going. I appreciate what the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong—who clearly did a magnificent piece of work in bringing this committee report together—said about the swift adaptations made by so many in public service. It is important that this is acknowledged.
The United Kingdom Government have worked strategically and at scale to save jobs and support communities throughout the United Kingdom, working alongside the devolved Administrations to keep every citizen safe and supported, no matter where they live. As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said so eloquently, collaboration between charities, the third sector, the private sector and all levels of the public sector is vital.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, asked whether the Government simply had the desire to get involved in public service reform. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster chairs the National Economy and Recovery Taskforce (Public Services) Committee precisely in order to drive public sector recovery and reform. Key cross-cutting government priorities are also overseen by Cabinet sub-committees: for example, the Crime and Justice Taskforce. In addition, the Government have strengthened cross-government accountability through appointing Ministers whose portfolios sit across at least two departments. For example, my noble friend Lord Agnew sits across the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. At the Civil Service level, we have put in place multi-departmental boards. Efforts are certainly being made to improve cross-departmental working and avoid the kind of silos to which some noble Lords referred.
The Government have an ambitious policy agenda; government needs to operate as effectively as possible to deliver the recovery we need. In June, the first joint Cabinet meeting of Ministers and Permanent Secretaries agreed the Declaration on Government Reform, committing to immediate action on three fronts: people, performance and partnership. The declaration set out 30 actions that will be taken in the first year to begin the process of modernisation and reform. I am pleased to say that the response to the declaration was positive overall. The Institute for Government called it
“a statement very much to be welcomed”,
Prospect said it was a “welcome first step”, and the FDA union was pleased with the “tone of collaboration”. We are already making progress. We have already committed to early funding on a variety of projects, including over £600 million to fix legacy IT. These changes are also about increasing the skills and capability we have in government. We will do this through developing the skills and experience of existing civil servants as well as bringing in skills from outside.
We welcome the Commission for Smart Government’s contribution to the intellectual effort—the debate about government reform. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was present at the launch of the report and made it clear that the case the commission made overall is powerful. The report aligns with the Declaration on Government Reform in its focus on digital and data transformation—something which your Lordships have underlined today—and capability and accountability as priority areas for reform, and progress will be made here. I undertake that the Government will of course continue to look closely at the commission’s recommendations but also at those of other contributors to the debate on government reform, including the distinguished report of your Lordships’ committee, and we will report back on progress with reform. Yes, we should be collaborative, and government reform should not be seen a zero-sum game.
Many noble Lords spoke in the debate about the challenges we face and the task of rebuilding. In particular, we know—as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and a succession of other noble Lords pointed out—that the impact of the pandemic has been felt most heavily by disadvantaged children and young people, so it is vital that we target support towards those children. In June we announced an additional £1.4 billion to support high-quality tutoring and great teaching. This package was the next step towards recovering from the impacts of Covid. It built on the £1.7 billion already announced, providing more than £3 billion in all to support education recovery in schools, 16-to-19 providers and early years settings, whose importance was rightly stressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie. This will have a material impact in closing gaps that have emerged.
The Government are committed to an ambitious, long-term education recovery plan. The next stage will include a review of time spent in school and 16-to-19 education and the impact that that could have in helping children and young people catch up. The findings of the review will be set out later in the year to inform the spending review. We will also continue to monitor how effectively pupils are catching up. For most pupils, being back in the classroom itself will have a positive impact on learning, and evidence published in June suggests that primary pupils recovered some of the learning they lost once in-person teaching for all resumed.
Ensuring that vulnerable children remain supported and visible during the outbreak has been a critical focus of the Government’s work. That is why, from the outset of the pandemic, including the period of national lockdown announced on 4 January, the Government kept primary and secondary schools, alternative provision, special schools and further education open to vulnerable children and young people. Where vulnerable children and young people cannot attend, we have asked local authorities, children’s social care and educational settings to ensure that they have systems in place to continue support and keep in touch with them and their families.
Throughout all restrictions to date, children’s social care services and early help services have continued to support vulnerable children and young people and their families. We established a vulnerable children and young people survey for local authorities to make sure that we had an accurate picture of contact between children and their social workers, and we will continue to monitor this.
We have invested millions of pounds in charities and other services which work with vulnerable children and their families to support them and spot the signs of abuse and neglect more quickly. Doing that more quickly was underlined by so many of your Lordships who spoke; prevention is vital. This includes the See, Hear, Respond programme, backed by £11 million of government funding, which reached more than 100,000 children and their families.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, asked who is in charge of cross-party activity. My honourable friend the Minister for Rough Sleeping and Housing leads in this area, and the Changing Futures programme is a £64-million, three-year-long, joint-funded initiative between the Government and the lottery fund, funding local organisations and working in partnership to better support those with multiple disadvantages.
Many noble Lords referred to adult social care, which of course has never been under as much pressure as in the last year; the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, spoke eloquently about that issue. Throughout the pandemic we have been working with the social care sector to ensure that all recipients of care receive the support they need. There are lessons to be learned from that experience and we are aware of the long-term challenges facing the social care system. Our objective remains to join up health and care around people and meet the needs of individuals, giving them personalised care to help them to live life to the full. We are working closely with local and national partners to ensure that our approach to reform is informed by diverse perspectives, including those with lived experience of the care sector. I agree with all those who made the point that user knowledge and experience are vital. We are providing councils with access to an additional £1 billion and more to fund social care in 2021-22. The Government are committed to reforming the adult social care system and will bring forward proposals in 2021.
Many, such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Pitkeathley, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, spoke of health inequalities. This issue is at the heart of the NHS plan. All major national programmes in every local area across England are required to set out measurable goals and mechanisms by which they will contribute to narrowing health inequalities. NHS England has committed to inclusive recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The NHS has set eight actions to reduce inequalities in its restoration of services, including reporting on providing services to the 20% of poorest neighbourhoods and black and Asian parents. We will improve joined-up local working on population health and reducing health inequalities through integrated care systems. We will reinforce the role of local authorities as champions of health in local communities and enhance the NHS’s public health responsibilities to act on prevention. Reducing health inequalities will be a core aim of the new office for health promotion. Under the professional leadership of the Chief Medical Officer, the OHP will systematically tackle the top preventable risk factors, improving the public’s health and narrowing health inequalities.
A question was asked about life expectancy. We are determined to level up health and life expectancy across our country. We are committed to ensuring that people can enjoy at least five extra years of healthy independent life by 2035 and to reducing the gaps between rich and poor.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and others asked about timing. The prevention Green Paper, Advancing Our Health: Prevention in the 2020s, outlined commitments with varying timelines regarding the services that we received, the choices that we make and the conditions in which we live. I acknowledge that the Government’s response to the consultation has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but we will update on the response to the prevention Green Paper in due course.
To respond to my noble friend Lord Bourne, the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, and others on prevention, I assure the House that as we begin the recovery from Covid, now is the time to redouble our efforts to transform the nation’s health. That is why in March the Government published their policy paper about transforming and reforming the public health system, setting out our plans for a refreshed public health system. These reforms will embed a stronger focus on prevention right across the system and ensure that we have the structures and capabilities in place to level up health. Our response to the consultation on advancing our health has again been delayed by the need to focus on the pandemic response. Again, I assure noble Lords that we will bring forward a response to the consultation in due course.
However, we have not waited for the response to take action; we are already taking action on the main drivers of ill health—for example, obesity, which has been referred to, including £100 million in extra funding for healthy weight programmes, and bringing forward legislation to restrict advertising of junk food and on labelling requirements for food. In January we published our mental health White Paper, which aims to reduce mental health inequalities, a subject of profound importance and concern.
Having spent all my life in local government, I agree with all that was said about the importance of public services working together to provide an integrated approach. That informs our programmes overall, including in relation to helping vulnerable families. Supporting Families was launched for this financial year in March and is backed by £165 million of new money. The next phase of the programme will include a focus on building the resilience of vulnerable families.
In March the Government launched a new £8 million local data accelerator fund and invited local areas and their partners to bid for funding to support data projects and improve services for children and families. I agree that ideas must flow up and across, not just from the top down. We hope to announce successful applicants shortly.
Later this year we will publish the levelling-up White Paper, setting out new interventions to improve livelihoods across the country. We remain committed to devolving power to people and places across the UK. That must be genuine devolution. Our plans for strengthening local accountable leadership will be included in the levelling-up White Paper, which will include county deals. The White Paper will be led by the Prime Minister personally. A new No. 10/ Cabinet Office unit will be set up to drive through work on the White Paper, and the Prime Minister has appointed Mr Neil O’Brien, MP for Harborough, as his levelling-up adviser. The White Paper will replace the English devolution White Paper. Full details on county deals will be included in the White Paper. These again will be bottom- up, enabling local partners to come together with powers exercised at the right level to make a difference for local communities.
Central government cannot do it all on its own. Our towns, cities and regions have a greater chance of levelling up when local people have more of a say over their own destinies, and that is our objective. Devolution must go with the grain of local identity and we want to give places the tools that will bring economic, social and environmental benefits alongside improving local services. We know that a mayoral combined authority will not work everywhere, which is why we are keen to work with areas on developing other options. I am sure, from reading the report and hearing what many noble Lords have said, that that will be welcome.
Data sharing has been emphasised as vital by many, including the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Brinton. The data-sharing playbook was established as part of an objective to support a step change in the way that the Government use and share data. It works as a cross-government virtual team. The Data Standards Authority was established in April as a multidisciplinary team, working with experts across the wider public sector and helping to improve services in this area.
We are working with government departments to build services that reflect the lives that citizens live rather than the silos of government departments. For example, to start a business in the UK, a citizen now has to interact with 10 departments. That must end.
I agree with the points about social value. We are committed to that. I will write to noble Lords specifically on these issues since my time is running out, but we intend to extend the use of the Social Value Act, and that will inform ongoing work on public procurement.
I am sorry that I have not been able to cover every aspect that has been brought forward in this fascinating and, I think, hugely important debate, but I profoundly appreciate the work done by the committee and the opportunity to listen to your Lordships’ House today.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I thank everyone for their contribution to today’s debate. I said at the beginning how privileged I was to chair this committee, and I know that the speeches that its members have made will have reinforced for noble Lords their quality, expertise and enthusiasm. I thank them again for the contribution that they have made in the past and today. I thank everyone else who contributed too; everyone brought something specific to the debate that meant it reflected the work of the committee and the work that went into its first report.
Running through the speeches today, I was very pleased to hear, was a thread that reinforced that the report offers practical ways forward—through decentralisation of power, longer-term investment in early intervention and preventive work, more effective activity across services; and by the involvement of the voluntary sector, the community sector, civil society and the private sector in helping to make places work for people, wherever they live.
Of course, we also heard from lots of Members today about the importance of hearing the voices of people with lived experience. This is a really important issue for the House, as well as the Government. We had enormous support from the teams in the House to engage people with lived experience and the organisations that they often work with to bring them to the committee to give evidence. My colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, mentioned Debra from Wigan, who has cerebral palsy and is very much a community activist in Wigan but has really struggled. Her words give us a real call to action. She said that, from her experience of the NHS and social services in the past 16 months, services were delivered at her rather than with her, and, when she attempted to discuss her needs, she felt belittled, patronised and ignored. That should be a wake-up call to all of us.
I thank the Minister for his response. I think he knows that the committee worked in a very cross-party way, and we look forward to engaging with him and other Ministers on how we can properly prioritise what is needed in public services so that they work for Debra and others. I look forward to making sure that we establish good relationships with him and his colleagues so that we can all take this work forward. There is a lot to do, and we all have a responsibility to play our part in making sure it happens. I commend the report to the House.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
My Lords, the time limit for the following Motion to Take Note debate is one and a half hours.
Future UK-EU Relationship on Professional and Business Services (EU Committee Report)
(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Donaghy
That this House takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee The future UK–EU relationship on professional and business services (13th Report, Session 2019-21, HL Paper 143).
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, our report was published in October last year and I thank the House authorities for timetabling this debate nine months later—I am aware that some reports have not been so fortunate. In that nine-month period, we have had the trade and co-operation agreement and nearly seven months’ experience of it, together with the Covid pandemic, which has affected all aspects of trade and mobility.
Since the publication of the report, the sub-committee covered in more detail the impact on financial services, the creative industries and research and development. This work was published in March this year as Beyond Brexit: Trade in Services. I thank the members of the sub-committee and its staff, particularly Dee Goddard, for all their hard work producing the report. We did not share the same views about Brexit, but the views expressed in the report are unanimous. I am also grateful to all the witnesses who contributed to our inquiry, and to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone of Boscobel, for his frankness about possible outcomes—it was much appreciated by the committee.
We had no expectation that professional and business services would form a major part of any agreement between the EU and the UK, and the trade and co-operation agreement of 24 December last year confirmed that expectation, covering mainly goods and a promise of future co-operation—but we nevertheless welcomed the TCA, because the consequences of no deal would have been serious for professional and business services. It is a broad sector and includes legal services, market research, accountancy, audit, architecture, engineering, public relations and management consulting.
I emphasise the interconnectedness of those industries with each other and with the creative industries and financial services. It is also important to remember that they are mainly medium and small enterprises, spread throughout the UK. It is not just a London issue—although it is a London issue. The sub-committee was concerned to ensure that London remained a world centre of excellence in those industries.
One witness said about financial services: “The ecosystem for financial services is not just banks and investment houses. It’s also lawyers, accountants and related professionals.” Another said: “We are soft power exporters as well as actual exporters, but primarily we are a sector made up of very small businesses—more than 600,000 in the UK—and the average number of employees is fewer than four.”
They are vital to the UK economy, and the BEIS figures for 2019 indicate that the sector was worth an estimated £224.8 billion to the UK economy in terms of gross value added. They also provide 4.6 million jobs. This is a UK success story, and all those industries contribute to the wealth and richness of experience that we enjoy, whether it is in creative industries, a legal system that is respected throughout the world or recruitment and management consultancy.
The sub-committee was concerned that any deal needed to prevent the creation of barriers to trade that would have a detrimental effect, specifically on the issues of national reservations, mutual recognition of professional qualifications, business mobility, including comprehensive protection for travel, intellectual property rights and data adequacy. On national reservations, companies face a patchwork of complicated rules that vary by sector and member state. The committee subsequently called for guidance for business on navigating those reservations, but, as of today, this guidance has not been published. On business mobility, this will be a major change for service providers. Although the impact of the Covid pandemic has delayed the outcome, I think it will be felt once international business resumes. As of this month, the Government have published country- specific guidance on business mobility for 21 of the 26 member states.
On mutual recognition of qualifications, all our witnesses gave high priority to its importance once we had left the EU. The UK Government had an ambitious proposal, which the sub-committee welcomed, but we ended up with something much less. The TCA leaves open the possibility of a new agreement on mutual recognition of professional qualifications in future. My guess is that we will probably never know what happened in the negotiations on mutual recognition or on mobility of labour, but, post the TCA, the sub-committee urged the Government to seek such an agreement in the medium term. This is a personal view, but the professional qualifications legislation currently going through Parliament is a long way short of any medium-term deal.
On intellectual property, subsequent to this report the TCA embedded a mutual commitment to high standards of intellectual property protection, which is welcome. The sub-committee expressed the hope of regulatory dialogue with the EU to manage divergence. On data adequacy, the good news is that the EU confirmed its data adequacy decision on 28 June. One hopes that this will stick if the UK decides to make substantial changes to the GDPR.
As I said in a subsequent report, the service sector is at the heart of the UK economy, so it is essential that the Government and the EU make improvements to smooth UK-EU services trade. The sub-committee accepted that there might be divergence but urged the Government to be constructive and to set up joint consultative arrangements to maximise co-operation and avoid misunderstandings. I have to say that there is little evidence of this happening. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, said only yesterday that he regretted that the relationship was punctuated with challenges characterised by disagreement and mistrust. Passporting arrangements in financial services have stalled and there is little evidence of help for the creative industries in temporary movement of goods and people.
Parliamentary scrutiny is more important than ever on the impact of the TCA and the regulatory changes taking place, particularly in the financial sector, where financial regulations will be given the role that primary legislation has performed in the past. So it is with great relief that we finally have the European Affairs Committee to keep these issues under review and hold the Government to account. I wish the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and his committee all the best in this endeavour.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)
My Lords, four speakers have withdrawn from this debate: the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Altmann and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. I call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB) [V]
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and to congratulate her on securing this debate at last. I also pay tribute to her and her sub-committee for the work they did putting together such an excellent report on this crucial issue. The debate has been much delayed, but that delay has not taken anything away from its importance. The message that the report was designed to convey about the contribution that the professional and business sectors make to our economy, and the importance of unimpeded access to the EU, has lost none of its force. It is just as relevant today, and so is the importance for the Government to understand the needs of these sectors and to do what they can to support them. It was already clear when the report was published in October 2020 that there were fundamental differences between the UK and the EU on the issue of mutual recognition. Apparently, negotiations were still continuing when the Government published their response on 7 December, but their failure to reach agreement was plain for all to see when the TCA was published on 24 December.
The noble Lord, Lord Grimstone of Boscobel, explained where we are now when he was winding up for the Government at Second Reading of the Professional Qualifications Bill on 25 May. He said that the UK had proposed ambitious arrangements on professional qualifications recognition, but that the EU did not choose to engage with them. He said:
“We took the horse to water but it refused to drink”.—[Official Report, 25/5/21; col. 975.]
He recognised that UK regulators will now have to form their own professional specific agreements, which will take time and effort, and that this why the Government stand ready to help. I hope that this is still the case.
Regrettable though the situation is, we must move on. We cannot turn the clock back. At least we have the TCA and the possibility of some form of agreement in the future. The Professional Qualifications Bill is another step forward. It will create the framework that is needed on our side for mutual recognition. The question for the Minister is: what more can the Government do now, both here and in the member states, to provide advice and help to the regulators as they seek to pursue and develop recognition agreements with their European counterparts? The situation we are in was their creation. Those who work in these sectors, many of them small businesses, as the noble Baroness pointed out, are entitled to look to the Government for that support.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, I refer to my interests listed in the report and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, for the fine job that she did chairing our committee. I also thank the staff—clerk Dee Goddard and Hadia Garwell—for their excellent work. Overall, I support the Government on Brexit, but with only three minutes, I must concentrate on areas of difficulty.
This is a big sector, with professional and business services providing £225 billion gross value added in 2019 and employing 13% of the workforce, yet in the negotiations it was more or less ignored. However, all is not gloom. Our legal and accountancy firms have been ahead of the game, setting up complex arrangements where necessary, to keep serving customers in the EU. Extra qualifications have been secured by talented individuals, young and old, with the Republic of Ireland being a major beneficiary. The very process may have generated innovation, fired up by the need to move online with Covid.
I have two areas of questioning. The first relates to small and medium-sized businesses, which are less able to jump through expensive hoops, such as smaller legal firms, architects, and engineers. Does my noble friend have any data on how they are faring? Are they offering services in the EU? Are they diversifying into markets elsewhere?
My second area of questioning is a matter that we found most unsatisfactory. It is the Government’s handling of the future relationship with the creative industries—a sector facing the challenge of both Covid-19 and arrangements in the agreement, which make touring very difficult. In response, the Government said that they
“could not expect to end free movement into the UK while at the same time expecting that nothing would change with respect to movement into the EU … It was inevitable therefore that there would be significant changes in the arrangement under which creative workers operate in the EU, all the more so because many of the relevant rules are set at Member State level.”
To put it mildly, the sector feels let down and that better arrangements could have been won.
We suggested that the Government should pursue negotiations to address these issues, with both the EU and member states. Sadly, the Government do not seem to be in negotiation with the EU, and instead say:
“Through our engagements, we have established that some touring activities are possible without visas or work permits in at least 17 out of 27 member states.”
This is progress, but it is not sufficient. Can my noble friend update us and offer any hope?
The Government’s response to two related issues was disappointing. The first was the extra costs of creative professionals moving their equipment across borders and the need for costly ATA carnets. The second was the impact on the specialist touring haulier industry of cabotage restrictions. The creative sector, especially musicians of the classical and pop variety, and the tours they make, are hugely important to the UK. We need a better response. I hope that my noble friend the Minister can update us or write, and that the European Affairs Committee, with its new energy, will be interested in taking this issue forward.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I should declare an interest as a practising member of a profession. I thank the committee for its excellent report. I suppose you could say that today’s debate is better late than never, even if that effectively lets the Government off the hook. I want to use my three minutes to urge the Government to expedite the process, laid out in the trade and co-operation agreement, of facilitating the mutual recognition of professional qualifications.
The provision of professional services to Europe is one of our most important exports. Solicitors, accountants, architects, engineers, and even actuaries, bring us significant sums. All the treaty does is provide a mechanism on which regulators can work together to establish mutual recognition of professional qualifications to enable professional services to be sold in Europe. I do not believe for one moment that this is a simple process. In its guidance note, issue in May, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy admits:
“Negotiations for establishing recognition arrangements may be a lengthy and resource-intensive process.”
That is even more reason for the Government to play their part in getting the process underway.
We all understand that what we have at present, under the treaty, is simply a framework, with the practice to be agreed through the joint Partnership Council. But the widest possible mutual recognition was a key negotiating demand in the original UK mandate. It had its own chapter—chapter 12—in the document. Given its importance to the UK’s professional and business services sector, it might be expected to be a priority area for the Government in seeking to enhance the agreement. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the council did not mention this issue in its initial work—no reference was made to it in the statements made following the council’s first meeting. This is not good enough, because it means years of uncertainty, leaving UK professionals at a competitive disadvantage.
Can the Minister and his colleagues offer any concrete hope of expediting action in this area? Is the Minister satisfied that mutual recognition is being given the priority it demands?
Viscount Trenchard (Con) [V]
My Lords, I declare my financial services interests as stated in the register. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, on securing this debate. I am glad that we just squeezed it in before the Summer Recess.
It was a great pleasure to serve on the EU Services Sub-Committee, under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Baroness. She skilfully led the committee—whose members represent different strands of opinion on Brexit and its effect on our services industry—to agree this report, and indeed our subsequent short report, without dissent.
Three minutes is not enough time to begin to comment on the myriad important issues identified in the reports, so I shall mention just three. First, we thought that the Financial Services Act was a missed opportunity to make major changes to our financial regulations. Since the return of powers to our regulators allows for a more flexible and innovative regime, it is still unclear precisely how Parliament will scrutinise regulations and hold the regulators to account. The report of the Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform, led by my right honourable friend Iain Duncan Smith, shows how the UK can seize the opportunities available from Brexit by reshaping its regulatory approach. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that we need to be swifter and bolder in reforming our cumbersome rulebook?
Secondly, a combination of Covid and new rules restricting travel to the UK for artists and creative support teams from the EU has increased costs and reduced opportunities for many festivals and events organisers. Can my noble friend confirm that the Government will continue to work with the EU and with member states to make it easier and cheaper for touring performers and crews to travel both to and from the UK?
Thirdly, our report called for a mutual commitment to high standards of intellectual property protection. The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys argues that divergence from EPO standards, such as the introduction of the grace period or the need for the ability to extend patent terms, should be resisted unless agreed as global standards in multilateral fora such as WIPO and Group B+. Does my noble friend the Minister think that this will present a problem in negotiating accession to the CPTPP, or does he think that our acceptance of CPTPP rules on patents would encourage the EPO to be more flexible in working towards international harmonisation of patent rules and a common rulebook for itself, the Japan Patent Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office?
Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (CB) [V]
It is a pleasure and privilege to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and to agree with the praise with which he and other speakers have referred to the very able and skilful chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, in the report that we are now debating and in all the work that the committee did. I also add my tribute to the work of the staff and particularly to Dee Goddard.
Others have spoken at length about the importance of services to the UK, particularly financial services, accountancy, law, and the creative industries. It is now important to look forward. It is perhaps disappointing that the EU has so far refused to go much along the lines of what was hoped for, but I do not find that unsurprising, given that some see this as a competitive advantage to be snatched from the departure of the UK. However, we must look to the future, and it is the future on which we must concentrate.
First, it is vital that we get certainty on mutual recognition of professional qualifications and that the Bill is brought forward in a proper form in due course. Secondly, we must continue dialogue. My own experience—outlined in the declaration of interests in the register and in this report—shows that there is a great deal that we can do. Our accountancy profession, our legal profession and our financial regulators are highly respected across Europe, and I very much hope that we continue to push forward our dialogue. I have no doubt that that will be well received. Thirdly, it is important that we use that dialogue as part of what we must show for the future, which is leadership. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, showed wonderful leadership on this committee, and the Government need to show leadership in showing what we can do to bolster our service industries by dialogue with Europe but also leadership across the world.
The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, spoke eloquently about the need for proper regulation, and it is important to stress that we have huge advantages here. We have an innovative spirit with which to approach regulation. We know how to avoid the kind of mistakes that led to Enron, and we have, above all, the advantage of a flexible legal system, particularly the common law, which is able to develop and buttress regulatory systems that operate to support innovation, to support the new economy that is emerging from the digital revolution and to take us forward. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to be encouraging about how he sees regulation and the service industries associated with it moving forward.
Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and her committee on the quality of this report. It is about a crucial sector of the British economy that has been sorely neglected in the EU negotiations. I find it extraordinary, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, will try to explain why it is so, that so much attention was paid to the British fishing industry, where the gain in catch as a result of Brexit is something like £25 million a year, when the needs of the business services sector, worth £224 billion to our economy, were so neglected in negotiations. Did the Government simply get their priorities wrong?
When we are looking to the future, as I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, is right to suggest we have to, on some issues we may be able to make progress. We might be able to make progress on short-term mobility, which is particularly important for the creative sector, our musicians and all the rest; but we will have to recognise that such progress will require reciprocal action on our part. If we take an ideological approach, as I believe the Government do, to ending freedom of movement, they will find an agreement on this difficult to negotiate. If we set aside the ideology, we might get somewhere on mobility.
On mutual recognition of qualifications, it is going to be a very hard grind. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, says, we have to demonstrate that we have something to offer. We have a trade surplus with the EU on services. It has always been difficult within the EU to get progress on services liberalisation and, to the extent that there has been progress, it is because we were in a single market where the Commission drove member states to open up with the backing of the ECJ. We have lost that by not being in the single market, and it is a very big loss for us indeed. In future years, if the gains of Brexit are as minimal as they appear at the moment, we will have to reconsider this question of single-market membership.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
We seem not to be getting the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, so perhaps we should move on and come back if we can.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, I add my admiration for the noble Baroness and her excellent report. I am beginning to feel left out, having not been a member of the committee, since it is evident that it was an excellent process with some really important results. I am delighted that there has been such a tremendous rush to join this debate, even if not all noble Lords have shown up, because it is a demonstration of the really important part that businesses and professional services play in the United Kingdom.
When I was young, many years ago, I was told—the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will know more about it than me—that the trade unions for miners and steelworkers would go into No. 10 for beer and sandwiches. My aim and aspiration, when I was responsible for leisure and hospitality, was that there should be a CBI debate on leisure and hospitality—the industry and jobs of the future. But it is business and professional services that are now involved in so many jobs and businesses, and so many small businesses; two-thirds are not in London and the south-east but really across the economy.
I pay tribute to the many trade bodies that have worked so hard for business and professional services, but particularly to the Business Services Association and Mark Fox, who for 13 years has worked so hard with his small team to ensure that these aspects are fully considered. In business services, they include ICT, business process outsourcing, facilities management, construction and infrastructure services and managed public services. They point out that in today’s economy, many contracts span more than one category; they are together in the real economy, even if they are not always linked by statisticians. Of the services and projects provided by businesses large and small, 70% is business to business, with the remainder being provided in the public sector—that is before we get to the professional services that support them, which are equally vital to our economy and often dominate the debate.
The UK business services industry is globally acknowledged as being at the cutting edge of service transformation and technological creativity. For some parts of business services, such as business process outsourcing, exports are integral. To quote the committee’s report:
“The EU is the UK’s largest market for exports in professional and business services, accounting for 37% of professional and business services exports.”
The UK
“ran a trade surplus of £12.4 billion with the”
EU’s professional business services. It is a highly lucrative and important market, and one we have, rightly, to nurture.
I pay tribute to the Ministers, my noble friends Lord Grimstone and Lord Callanan, and the many officials in the Department for International Trade and BEIS who have worked so hard to work with industry and acted as a go-between. Although much progress has taken place, we appreciate that there are still some outstanding and tricky issues. We have talked about the creative industries and the recognition of qualifications.
What does the Minister see as the critical and exciting role of business and professional services in the green economy as we move towards COP 26? I believe that this will provide further jobs, opportunities and wealth creation.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, has withdrawn from this debate, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Bhatia.
Lord Bhatia (Non-Afl) [V]
My Lords, I fully agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, said in her speech. She has laid out all the parts of the committee’s report, which was unanimous. We must acknowledge that this sector is vital to the UK economy, contributing £224 billion and employing some 4.6 million people. The Government are yet to give their final response to the committee’s report. Can the Minister inform the House when they will do so?
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the committee on this very full, comprehensive and welcome report. I recognise the contribution that all professional services and businesses make to the UK. As a doctor’s daughter, sister and niece, I would like to place on record my view that professionals in this country are the jewel in the crown of the United Kingdom. I will make particular reference in my remarks to the legal profession in both England and Scotland, particularly the contribution made by the Law Society of Scotland and its members, and the Faculty of Advocates and its members—of which I am a non-practising one.
I refer to the references to the Internal Market Act 2020 and all the work the Government did there, and the recognition that the legal profession is different, which was acknowledged in the Professional Qualifications Bill. There are some 160 professions regulated by the legislation in the UK and worldwide, and numerous others with voluntary regulatory arrangements. Many of these professions, such as nursing and teaching, provide a wide range of employment opportunities. Much of the policy around this legislation centres on maintaining an adequate supply of professionals in areas where a potential shortage is a concern. As such, the Government’s focus was to facilitate cross-border recognition and regulation to ensure as integrated a system of transfer of professionals as the Immigration Rules would permit. That is something I support.
As was acknowledged in the Internal Market Act 2020, the legal profession is somewhat different. We have different legal systems and separate jurisdictions. That is something we have to be cognisant of as we monitor and support the Professional Qualifications Bill’s passage through this House.
On my noble friend’s work in this regard, particularly in his role in the Department for Exiting the European Union, I was grateful for a reply that I received from him on 16 March to a Question that I asked about non-reciprocal rights being offered to those from the EEA countries and Switzerland coming to this country. He said:
“The Government is firmly committed to the agreement in December and we are working with the Commission to agree how they should be translated into legal form in the Withdrawal Agreement. We are committed to turning the Joint Report into legal text as soon as possible and it remains our shared aim to reach agreement on the entire Withdrawal Agreement by October.”
I hope that my noble friend shares my disappointment that we were not able to reach agreement by that deadline.
It is important that we establish such an agreement in the context of the trade and co-operation agreement. I hope that my noble friend will take this opportunity to say how important that is. I share my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s concern about how badly affected businesses have been, as set out in the report, particularly small and medium-sized companies. Having suffered the loss of EU drivers, we now face a severe shortage of lorry drivers. As honorary president of the UK Warehousing Association, I know that there is an equally severe shortage of space in warehousing, which could become acute in the run-up to Christmas. I am sure that my noble friend is aware of that, so I hope that he will put my mind at rest in that regard.
I welcome this opportunity to discuss the recommendations and conclusions of the report before us today.
Lord McNally (LD)
My Lords, like all the members of our committee, I was in awe of the ability of the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, to keep our unruly group in order and enable us to deliver a unanimous report. The way she conciliated and arbitrated between us you would almost believe she had spent a lifetime doing that kind of thing. As has been said, we were most ably aided by Dee Goddard and the staff.
I disagree with what the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said about us letting the Government off the hook. The hard truth that runs through the report, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, indicated, is that professional and business services were the forgotten army of the Brexit negotiations. Time and again, on topics ranging from intellectual property to data adequacy, from recognition of professional qualifications to business mobility, and the business and professional services mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, we were met with responses to our concerns from Ministers that could roughly be described as “It’ll be all right on the night”.
As yesterday’s Statement on the Northern Ireland protocol clearly demonstrated, Boris Johnson’s much-vaunted “oven-ready” deal was in reality half-baked. We are now going to learn the hard way the consequences of signing in haste and regretting at leisure. I hope that Parliament will learn the lessons of this debacle. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and his Committee on International Agreements will need to be particularly robust in examining the details and consequences of some of the trade deals that the International Trade Secretary, Liz Truss, is rushing to complete. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership is already being hawked round by the Brexiteers as the alternative safe harbour to the EU, yet concerns are already being expressed about the safety of patents and intellectual property under any CPTPP agreement. Of course, we have the promises of a US-UK trade agreement. We all know how we can rely on the special relationship with our American cousins when they come to talking about trade. The Northern Ireland experience shows that negotiating under political pressure to demonstrate that Brexit is done can lead to catastrophic mistakes. “Caveat emptor” should be the watchword for the committee of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith.
In recent weeks, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has made increasingly clear that the harsh new Brexit world in which whole sectors of the British economy will have to compete is the one that the Brexiteers intended. There will be no soft Brexit. For example, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, pointed out, a settlement that would have allowed the important music and concert touring industry to have easy access to the EU markets could not be countenanced because it involved diluting the purity of quitting the single market in labour mobility. This is not an immigration or free movement issue. What is needed is to have negotiated simple, frictionless, cost-free arrangements for temporary paid workers in EU countries so that this important creative sector can continue to flourish. I pay tribute to the efforts of Sir Elton John to make the Government see sense—I did not think that I would ever say that in the House of Lords.
We also put on record our concerns about data adequacy. The recent announcement of a data adequacy decision by the EU Commission is, of course, welcome, as the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, said. But, to quote the Commission’s own press release, the decision included
“strong safeguards in case of future divergence such as a ‘sunset clause’, which limits the duration of adequacy to four years”.
This short rein imposed by the EU is in sharp contrast to the sense of urgency in bringing our domestic legislation into line with the GDPR in 2019. Is it because the Government are already planning to bring us into conflict with EU data adequacy? Do Ministers anticipate any conflict between remaining true to our EU data adequacy commitments and our ambitions to join the CPTPP?
What about our ambitions for a free trade agreement with the USA? I ask because in the last couple of days I have received two invitations to round tables looking at greater co-operation between the USA and the UK on data transfer. It would be helpful if the Minister was to give us some idea from the Dispatch Box of how the Government intend to use the four years of data adequacy now granted. Will they be working with the EU, as it refines its own data framework, and have influence in shaping the outcomes, as we did with the GDPR? Or will we be like the Bisto kids, sniffing the gravy but on the outside looking in? The report’s declaration that the
“free flow of data between the UK and EU is vital to professional and business service providers”
remains valid today. The Government owe it to the sector to spell out their intentions in this area and their priorities during the four years that we have been granted.
In the pages of this report are unanswered questions after unanswered questions about the prospects for financial services, the problems facing lawyers, the uncertainties about patents and intellectual property, the fate of our creative industries and other things that have been raised by noble Lords during this debate. The report shows that the Prime Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Frost, have delivered a Brexit with much unfinished business and with a mindset ill-suited to resolving the many problems that they themselves have created by their tunnel vision and ideological inflexibility.
The noble and learned Lords, Lord Hope and Lord Thomas, both wisely advised us not to try to turn back the clock but to look to the future. I realise that there is no chance of our returning to the EU in the near future or on the favourable terms negotiated by successive British Governments in our 40 years of membership. But there is an alternative to consistently seeing Europe as the enemy. At some time, there will come a British Government willing and able to work constructively with our nearest neighbours and most important trading partners. This report provides a useful checklist for how the most successful sector in our economy can have its interests protected and enhanced in that process.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, the sad story of this excellent report, so ably introduced by my noble friend Lady Donaghy, is that the Government failed to heed the clarion call to place our professional and business services centre stage in negotiations with the EU. That is hard to explain, given what a great foreign earner those services represent, the sheer numbers employed and the role that they play in servicing other business so that they too can trade and prosper. All those were mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, my noble friends Lord Davies of Brixton and Lord Liddle and others.
The TCA focused on fishing and goods and, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, rather ignored services, leaving them facing barriers to their continuation and growth. In particular, while the TCA provides a framework, as my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton said, for mutual recognition of professional qualifications, this new system will, in the judgment of TheCityUK, take a long time to yield any meaningful results. I hope that the Government will hear the need for urgency in making progress on that vital aspect, as mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd.
While there are undoubtedly some positives in regard to legal services—a sector mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and others—particularly on where UK lawyers can practise UK and international law under home title anywhere in the EU without requalification, such access is subject to national restrictions. Importantly, along with all professional and business services, including cultural services, the trade agreement provides little on the movement of people. That is one of the biggest losses for UK professional service providers in doing business in the EU.
Perhaps most worrying since the conclusion of the TCA is the absence of agreement on Lugano, about which I have tabled Written Questions, though I await responses from the Government. Perhaps the Minister can update the House as to why he thinks that the European Commission has concluded that it is
“not in a position to give its consent to invite the United Kingdom to accede to the Lugano Convention”
and tell us what steps the Government are taking to rectify that and mitigate the resulting difficulties.
There remains work to be done to improve our trading relationship with the EU over the ongoing provision of the UK’s professional and business services. TheCityUK has outlined its priorities, some covering financial services, which are beyond the scope of this report, but a number are germane to our debate, particularly over data adequacy—as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McNally—Lugano and the movement of people. However, TheCityUK’s major message to us is the most important: outstanding practical and implementation issues are unlikely to be solved
“until the political situation between the parties is heavily de-escalated”.
That is our plea to the Government. Can we tone down the language? Can we stop the playground name-calling and accusations of bad faith? Please can we not even think of triggering dispute mechanisms or other such macho devices? How can we possibly at this moment be setting ourselves on a collision course with the EU by threatening to suspend parts of the Brexit deal, which the Government have only just negotiated and signed, if the EU does not accede to our demands?
As the FT says today, the Command Paper
“represents a root-and-branch rewriting of the Brexit deal UK prime minister Boris Johnson agreed with the EU in October 2019”,
amounting to an attempt to tear up an international treaty—an attempt, in the view of the FT, that the EU was bound refuse. Indeed, I understand from the BBC website that Mrs von der Leyen has already this afternoon rejected the Prime Minister’s bid to renegotiate the protocol. That is not just important for the protocol, but how does it help our wider relationship with our vital partner, particularly the continuation of the business and professional services on which, as we have heard from all speakers, we are so dependent? Can we please heed the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, and look to the future and so keep our eye on the major prize? That is increased and growing trade in professional and business services with our nearest neighbour and our biggest single market—an objective that does not have to be at the expense of trade further afield.
We need better atmospherics to achieve the improvement in our relationships with the EU on the services that we are discussing today. They are vital for our economy, both in the direct benefit of these services and for all the other businesses that they support—goods, fishing, agriculture, academia. Everything that we do with the EU tends to depend on advice, legal advice, professional services and recruitment—all the ones that we are covering today, including, of course, accountancy. I hope that the noble Lord will offer some real assurances that the Government share our ambition in this regard to ensure that this sector of our economy continues to thrive, grow with the EU and help all the other bits of our economy and, similarly, trade with this biggest and nearest partner.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)
My Lords, I express my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, for securing this important debate, which I thought was characterised by some excellent contributions, from her and many other Members. I am also grateful to my ministerial colleague and noble friend Lord Grimstone, who has offered evidence to the EU Services Sub-Committee on several occasions over this past year, including on this report, and who continues to engage with the sector’s leaders as co-chair of the PBS and investment councils.
As a number of noble Lords have pointed out, professional business services are one of our largest and most successful sectors. My noble friend Lord Grimstone’s open letter to the sector in May this year highlighted that, from 2000 to 2019, growth in PBS outperformed that of the UK economy as a whole. The sector generated 12% of the UK’s total gross value added in 2020 and represents one in seven jobs across the country, with two-thirds of those jobs outside London and the south-east. Internationally, the sector has also excelled. Since 2000, exports of PBS have grown from £28 billion to roughly £111 billion in 2019. The UK is now second only to the US as the greatest exporter of professional business services in the world. This is something that the UK excels at and that we should be proud of. Our task now, of course, is not only to maintain but to develop the sector’s reputation for excellence.
The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, pointed out, and the Government recognise, the challenges that the UK’s new relationship with the EU and the Covid-19 pandemic present for the sector. Naturally, many noble Lords focused their contributions today on these challenges. I will address many of those comments and questions later, but I think that it is also worth reminding ourselves briefly of what the UK-EU free trade agreement and the Covid relief programme offer our businesses.
The agreement grants UK firms access to EU markets in a way that matches, and in some areas improves on, the EU’s best agreements to date with countries such as Japan and Canada. In practice, this means that most PBS businesses can continue to access EU markets and that they will not be subject to discriminatory barriers to trade while doing so, except where either side has expressly reserved the right to do so. The agreement means that business travellers can move easily between the EU and the UK for short-term visits —for example, by eliminating nationality requirements for some roles and guaranteeing how long temporary business visitors from the UK can stay in the EU. It is also future proof, which means that our businesses get the most liberal market access that either party grants to any future trading partner as well.
Notably, the agreement includes a number of important wins for the UK and PBS businesses. On legal services, we negotiated unprecedented provisions that will help ensure that UK law remains popular and competitive as the governing law of choice for commercial contracts worldwide. We also secured one of the most liberalising and modern digital trade chapters anywhere in the world. Among other things, it makes the cross-border flow of data easier by prohibiting requirements to store or process data in a specific location and thereby avoids costly requirements for British businesses.
Our exit from the EU represents an unparalleled opportunity for the UK to do things differently and better. Our priority is to help the sector adapt to these changes. To that end, we have been operating export helplines, running webinars with experts and offering businesses support via our network of 300 international trade advisers. We have also published extensive guidance on GOV.UK, including sector-specific landing pages to help individual sectors navigate the guidance available online, enhanced guidance on visa and work permit routes in EU member states and an interactive tool that can be used to find which reservations are most relevant to UK businesses selling services to customers in the EU. These are bespoke resources whose detailed guidance is unmatched by other trading partners worldwide.
The sector has overcome adversity in the past, but none has proved as great as the Covid-19 pandemic. At its worst point, economic activity in the sector as a whole fell by 20% in 2020. While the sector has suffered, 2021 has so far proven a positive year for PBS. As of May 2021, PBS output was just 3% below what it was pre Covid, in January 2020, tracking the strong recovery of the UK economy overall. With the help of the Government’s furlough scheme and plan for jobs, many businesses have adapted to new and innovative ways of delivering their services to support their clients through this adversity.
One of the ways we are ensuring the continued recovery and growth of the sector is through the PBS council and its working groups. The council has already made great progress this year by jointly publishing the Skills for Future Success report with the Financial Services Skills Commission. This report explores how to deliver recovery and growth right across the UK and complements the work of the socioeconomic diversity task force, which will provide much-needed evidence on what we can do to progress and retain talent across all backgrounds.
The council’s trade working group is exploring the possibilities that lie further afield—feeding the sector’s views into new potential FTAs as well as the global opportunities through COP 26 and an increased focus on environmental services. I completely agreed with my noble friend Lady Bottomley, as I so often do, that the PBS sector will be key to supporting a sustainable economic recovery and making the UK a world leader for green technology and finance, including in areas such as reporting of climate-related financial information and facilitating the use of the Government’s sovereign green gilt and green savings bonds. My department is working with DIT’s trade promotion unit and the four major new trade hubs across the UK to showcase the international expertise and excellence of our PBS sector, helping make businesses more sustainable and achieving our net-zero objectives in the process.
I will now turn to some of the specific points raised by noble Lords in the debate. My noble friends Lord Trenchard and Lady Neville-Rolfe raised the knotty issue of touring musicians, which I know has exercised a number of others in this House. Officials have now spoken to every member state about the importance of touring. DCMS Ministers have also raised touring with their counterparts in a number of member states, including Portugal and Austria. Through this engagement, we have established that the picture is better than previously thought, and that some touring activities may be possible in at least 18 member states without visas or work permits. This includes many of the most economically important countries, such as France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. DCMS, via our embassies, is engaging with those member states that do not have any visa or permit-free touring, such as Spain, calling on them to more closely align their arrangements with the UK’s generous domestic regime. DCMS Ministers are personally involved in the engagement with these priority countries. I hope that reassures my noble friends.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, raised a number of points, including the important subject of financial services. Our new chapter for financial services is already under way. Building on his Statement to the House of Commons in November 2020, at the Mansion House in July the Chancellor introduced four key themes of the Government’s vision for financial services. These are to be: an open and global financial hub; the sector at the forefront of technology and innovation; a world leader in green finance; and a competitive marketplace promoting effective use of capital. The Chancellor was clear that the UK had an abiding interest in a prosperous and productive Europe. Leaving the EU means that we have a unique opportunity to take an approach that better suits our markets while maintaining our high regulatory standards. We are using our new freedoms to build on our historic strength as a global financial centre and to develop our relationships with jurisdictions all around the world, attracting investment and increased opportunities for cross-border trade.
A number of noble Lords raised the recognition of professional qualifications on which the PBS sector often relies to practise overseas. Mutual recognition agreements generally smooth this process. In the TCA negotiations, the Government worked hard to agree a framework for MRAs across all EU member states. This framework improves on the one which Canada negotiated with the EU by streamlining certain aspects of the application process. I hope that I can reassure the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, that we have been working hard to provide a suite of support for regulators and for professional bodies wanting to agree these arrangements. We have established a new recognition arrangements team, published technical guidance and launched a pilot grant funding programme for the PBS sector, specifically to help regulators navigate this important area.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, raised the important issue of mobility. As a result of the TCA, business travellers do not require a work permit to carry out certain short-term business travel activities, such as attending meetings and conferences or providing after-sales services or translation and market research services. Some EU member states allow additional activities without the need for a visa or work permit. For those undertaking longer-term stays or stays involving work, or providing a service under contract, a visa and/or work permit may be required. I can tell the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy and my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe that we have published guidance on visa and work permit routes in 27 out of 30 EU member states. We continue to engage regularly with our embassies in order to better understand the requirements in each country and to support UK nationals when they travel abroad. We have also secured a review clause on the list of permitted activities for short-term business visitors which will allow both parties to update their commitments further down the line.
At the moment, it is too early to say to what extent reservations will affect UK firms’ decisions on whether to operate from a particular place or how to structure their businesses. Reservations that apply to niche sectors are likely to have less of an impact—in particular, I was struck by the one on reindeer herdsmen in Lapland, should the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, wish an alternative career. Those which apply across the EU as a whole or which cover highly regulated professions, for example, lawyers, accountants and architects—which may be of a little more interest to the noble Baroness—are likely to mean that businesses must adapt. Many businesses which use the reservations tool that I mentioned earlier will likely only need to engage with a handful of member states—for example, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Spain. These made up approximately 62% of our services trade with the EU in 2019.
I am pleased to reassure the noble Baroness that investment into the UK remains robust. Figures from the Department for International Trade show that during the 2020-21 financial year, new inward investment from the EU created over 21,000 new jobs in the UK.
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, rightly observed—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter—data flows and the digital economy are crucial to supporting cross-border trade in services, not only with the EU but with all our trading partners. We have welcomed the EU’s recent adoption of adequacy decisions for the UK. Some estimates suggest that this has saved UK businesses as much as £1.6 billion on data transfer compliance costs—such as setting up standard contractual clauses—and it allows for the ongoing free flow of personal data from the EEA to the UK in the safe and secure way it has always been in the past.
Our most recent deals with Japan, Australia, the EEA/EFTA countries and the EU contain some of the most advanced digital trade provisions seen in any modern trade agreement and we are now looking to strike additional arrangements—both for data and digital —with other like-minded partners.
My noble friend Lord Trenchard raised the issue of the IPO. The UK’s IP regime achieves an effective balance between rewarding creators and innovation and reflecting wider public interests, such as ensuring access to and use of IP on reasonable terms. We will ensure that the terms of our accession to the CPTPP are consistent with the UK’s IP interests, including not doing anything that increases reactive costs for our IP service providers.
My noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering asked for information about support to small businesses. Innovate UK, the United Kingdom’s innovation agency, offers several support mechanisms that are available to SMEs and other businesses, such as: the innovation loans pilot programme; smart grants; the Small Business Research Initiative; and catapults, which are all there to provide support to small businesses in navigating this important area.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and other noble Lords, talked about the Professional Qualifications Bill, which we will seek to progress as much as possible. It revokes the UK’s interim system for the recognition of professional qualifications which currently often gives preferential treatment to holders of EEA and Swiss qualifications, and it will help aspiring professionals to understand how to access the UK’s professions. The Government have reflected carefully on the points that were made during the Bill’s passage to date and will be continuing conversations and engagement with noble Lords and stakeholders over the summer to try to address their key concerns.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, asked about the Lugano Convention. We continue to maintain that we meet the criteria for accession to the Lugano Convention, both because it is open to countries outside the EU and because all non-EU members already support the UK’s membership. Supporting UK accession is the sensible and pragmatic solution for all citizens. The Government are aware of the European Commission’s notification that it is not in a position to give its consent to UK accession to the Lugano Convention. However, we understand that member states have not yet been given an opportunity to vote formally on that position.
I am running out of time so I will move my remarks to closure. I assure noble Lords that helping PBS businesses both to adjust to our new relationship with the EU and to recover from the pandemic remain some of the Government’s highest priorities. We will continue to feed the sector’s views into future trade negotiations with other countries and develop the sector’s reputation for excellence both at home and abroad. Through trade promotion, we will support the sector to take advantage of opportunities in existing and emerging markets, maintaining and growing its global competitiveness.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I think all Members who have contributed, particularly the four members of the committee. I was not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, was trying to act as a recruitment officer for reindeer herders; the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, had better watch out—he is moving into the headhunter profession. However, I will politely decline. I do not think I would be very good at it, although, watching the numbers of speakers dropping like flies this afternoon, I am not sure whether a 30% attrition rate would be acceptable in that new career.
We have to look to the future. We are not looking just for mitigation, which the Minister spent some time doing. I know the Government are working hard on these issues but it is mainly to mitigate; it is not about improving people’s positions but about trying to make sure that they keep as good as they had.
We have such a lot of talent in the UK and such a lot to offer, and these businesses deserve constructive dialogue and renewed efforts by the Government to enable a thriving future. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, summed it up in saying that we need better atmospherics; that is what the professional and business services are looking for.
I shall not go on any longer, but I thank everyone for their contribution. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, talked about the innovative spirit that the UK has in regulation and our flexible legal system. It is not that I lack confidence in what we have to offer; I just lack a bit of confidence in the ability of the Government to overcome the barriers that to some extent they themselves have created.
Calorie Labelling (Out of Home Sector) (England) Regulations 2021
(2 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Bethell
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 13 May be approved.
Relevant document: 4th Report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (special attention drawn to the instrument)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con) [V]
My Lords, I beg to move that the draft regulations be approved.
Two thirds of adults in England are overweight or living with obesity, and one in three children leave primary school overweight or obese. Obesity has huge costs to individuals, families and the economy and is one of the few modifiable risk factors for severe Covid-related illness and death. This measure is a vital part of the Government’s healthy weight strategy and will contribute meaningfully towards achieving our ambition of halving childhood obesity by 2030. The instrument that we are discussing today concerns the introduction of mandatory calorie labelling in the out-of-home sector, such as restaurants, cafés and takeaways.
Before I outline what the instrument does, I encourage noble Lords to read the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s fourth report, which draws these regulations to the attention of the House. I extend my thanks to the committee for its scrutiny and work.
The instrument requires businesses in England with 250 or more employees to display the calorie content of non-prepacked food and drink items, except alcohol, that are sold ready for immediate consumption. Calorie information must be displayed at the customer’s point of choice, such as on menus, menu boards, online menus, and display labels. To better help customers to understand and use calorie information, businesses are also required to display a short statement referencing recommended daily calorie intake. The wording of this statement is specified in the regulations and must be displayed where it can be seen by customers when making their food choices. As well as helping people make more informed choices, transparency about the calorie content of meals will also support efforts to encourage businesses to reformulate products and reduce portion sizes.
The requirement applies to food sold in England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been engaged throughout the consultation process, and the Scottish and Welsh Governments are considering whether to introduce similar requirements in their nations. Subject to Parliament’s approval, the regulations will come into force from 6 April 2022.
We know that people are eating out or ordering takeaways more frequently and that when people eat out, the meals they consume are less healthy. Research suggests that eating out accounts for around one-quarter of adult energy intake and that when someone dines out or eats a takeaway meal, they consume on average 200 more calories per day than if they eat food prepared at home. I know that this is the case in my life.
Research shows that portions of food or drink that people eat out or order in as takeaway meals contain on average twice as many calories as equivalent retailer or manufacturer-branded products. In a supermarket, an average pepperoni pizza is 704 calories compared to 978 calories in the out-of-home sector. I would guess that homemade pizza is less than both.
People’s access to food served in the out-of-home sector is increasing through the accelerated growth of online aggregators such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Kantar Worldpanel data suggests that in 2020 these types of businesses grew in value by 172% and serviced 14.5 million shoppers.
Out-of-home calorie labelling supports people to make more informed choices when eating out and encourages businesses to reformulate their food to provide lower calorie options. Research shows that popular UK chain restaurants with calorie labelling serve items with less fat and less salt than those that do not display calorie information. Calorie labelling may therefore encourage businesses to offer healthier products altogether.
Evidence from the US, where calorie labelling in out-of-home settings already has come into effect, reinforces that calorie labelling delivers a small but significant reduction in calories purchased by consumers, who noticed and used the information. Increasingly, consumers want to know how many calories are in the food and drink they buy when eating out or ordering a takeaway. Surveys indicate that nearly 80% of people think that menus should include calories for food and drink items and that 60% of people would be more likely to eat at an establishment that offers calorie labelling on its menus.
Some businesses understand this and are taking the lead by voluntarily displaying calorie information. However, we can do more to ensure that this practice becomes more widespread and consistent across the sector. Previous attempts to encourage businesses to voluntarily display calorie information through the Department of Health and Social Care’s responsibility deal have proved insufficient at driving action on the scale required to make a substantive change to our food environment. That is why we are introducing a mandatory requirement for large out-of-home food businesses.
The importance of the out-of-home food sector to local communities and to the economy is something we are acutely aware of, as is how hard our hospitality sector has been impacted by Covid-19. By requiring only large businesses to calorie label, we are ensuring that smaller businesses which will likely find the requirement more challenging to implement are not impacted. Large businesses account for 49% of all turnover in the out-of-home sector and potentially there are more significant benefits. Our impact assessment estimates that the policy will have a net benefit to the economy of £5.6 billion over the next 25 years.
In conclusion, given the scale of the obesity challenge, we must take action to make the food environment healthier and promote transparency between businesses and consumers. I encourage noble Lords to review the helpful and informative briefing provided by Diabetes UK, which I would be happy to share. Its briefing highlights the importance of this legislation to help people with, and at risk of, diabetes. By taking action to improve our nation’s health, we will be happier, fitter and more resistant to diseases such as diabetes, cancer and Covid-19. I beg to move.
Baroness Bull
At end insert “but that this House regrets that they may not have their intended effect of addressing concerning levels of obesity in the United Kingdom; further regrets that their introduction will have negative and damaging consequences to those living with, or at risk of developing, eating disorders; further regrets that they do not reflect the views of experts and those with lived experience of eating disorders and do not take an integrated public health approach to obesity and eating disorders; and calls on Her Majesty’s Government to commit to timely reviews of the impact of these regulations not only on obesity, but on eating disorders, as such disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental health illnesses in the United Kingdom.”
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, I share government’s commitment to addressing obesity. My concern with these regulations is not their underlying intent; it is that they will have limited impact on reducing obesity while causing real harm to people with eating disorders.
If body weight was entirely under volitional control, this measure might be the answer to the obesity challenge, but obesity is more complex than that. Metabolism, poverty, environment and psychology all play a part, while hundreds of different genes influence our propensity to gain weight. The assumption that voluntarily eating less and/or exercising more can entirely prevent or reverse obesity is at odds with a definitive body of evidence developed over decades. They are not my words, but those of 100 obesity experts in a statement co-ordinated by the World Obesity Federation. Yet government’s obesity strategy turns a blind eye to this evidence and to the complex interface between obesity and mental health. I am astonished that the Minister did not mention this.
Eating disorders affect 1.25 million UK citizens and have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. While some manifest in low body weight, others, such as binge-eating, lead to obesity. Obesity is not a mental illness, but the two often co-exist, with 30% of the extremely obese having a diagnosable eating disorder. Obesity measures will work only if they take these interactions into account. These regulations do not. While the impact assessment admits the poor quality of the studies supporting calorie labelling, the evidence for harm is strong. It drives people with anorexia or bulimia to eat less and those with binge-eating disorders to eat more. It leads to unhealthy weight control behaviours such as laxative use or vomiting, and it increases disorders in the wider population.
Calorie counting is an all-consuming obsession and a common trait in eating disorders. One person described her disorder as thriving off counting calories, while another said it ruined their life. Recovery is possible but fragile, with learning to eat in public a key part of the pathway. The affordable chains that these regulations affect are exactly the places where this happens. One sufferer described overcoming a terror of restaurants but said, “With calorie counts on the menu, I don’t think I’d have coped”. Given the complex and secretive nature of eating disorders, it is unduly cruel to insist that restaurants provide label-free menus only on request. Will the Government reconsider this, and can the Minister confirm that daily calorie requirements in the guidance now match what the NHS recommends?
Public health always involves trade-offs, with small harms to a few the price of gains for the many. The risk of my mammogram is worth it because I am screened for a disease to which I am vulnerable, but can it be justified for a public health measure to hurt people with no risk of the disease? If labelling was really going significantly to impact obesity, this prioritisation of physical over mental health might be justified, but evidence suggests it will not. We need instead an integrated approach to weight-related issues across the spectrum, recognising the co-occurrence and shared risk factors for obesity and eating disorders, and involving both fields from the outset. These regulations are not that. Given the high levels of concern, I ask government to commit to reviewing their impact not just on obesity but on any rise in the rate of eating disorders.
My regret today is genuine. I regret the limited effect that the regulations will have on obesity and the distress they will cause to those with eating disorders, and I deeply regret that we have failed in our efforts to protect them. I regret that, despite so many people bravely speaking out and despite the efforts of charities and clinicians, it has not been possible to work together on a public health approach to obesity, an approach that would more effectively support one part of the community without causing lasting collateral damage to another.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
I remind noble Lords that the time limit for speeches is four minutes. I call the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for in effect taking up much of my speech, so I will not repeat it, because I would be speaking broadly in favour of what the Government are endeavouring to do, but arguing, as I have done in my amendment, that they have not gone far enough. The Government’s Achilles heel is that they do not yet move on labelling on calories in sugar and in alcohol, and the Minister quickly skirted around that topic.
Before coming to my arguments, I want to express that I greatly sympathise with many of the arguments that the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, has advanced. I have a lot of experience in this field; I have a friend whose daughter recently committed suicide and I have another friend who presently has a granddaughter seriously ill in hospital. It is a growing problem and is not easily resolved.
On the other hand, we have this massive problem with obesity, and we cannot deny it. Covid has driven it home more forcefully than ever before. Close to 130,000 people have died from Covid, many of them with underlying conditions linked directly to obesity and, in particular, to type 2 diabetes. NHS data indicates that 26% of those who have died had type 2 diabetes.
I speak as someone with a little experience; I am on the cusp of type 2 diabetes. The NHS has put me on a nine-month course to try and get me to change my eating habits, particularly in relation to the amount of sugar I consume. Part of that has been about me checking what I am eating and drinking, what its calorific content is, and what the sugar element is. So I welcome a step that moves towards greater openness and gives me the information I need to try to avoid becoming a type 2 diabetes patient. That is possibly on the cards if I do not take the appropriate steps.
There is no simple solution to obesity; I freely concede that. A whole range of measures have to be addressed in different ways. Small steps will make up a big leap forward. Regrettably, sometimes when we are trying to find solutions and we are all working with similar problems, we end up with contradictions and conflicts. Today we have a degree of conflict arising. It is not easy to find harmony and the only way we will do it is by continuing to talk to each other and trying to move forward in a friendly and comradely way.
I believe the Minister has fallen short with the regulations that he has produced. They do not go far enough. The Government know perfectly well that, of the calories obese people consume, 10% come from alcohol, yet they consistently resist displaying sugar and calorific content on labels for drinks. When this comes into play in February next year, you will be able to go into a restaurant and see what the calorific effect will be. You will be able to see what the calories are in food and in any non-alcoholic drink you may have—a fizzy or non-fizzy drink—and how much sugar is in it, but, if you pick up a pint of lager, you will have no idea what effect it will have on your health and well-being, or whether it is contributing to obesity. That must change. The Government must break their link with the powerful drinks industry—and before long they will have to. They know in their heart that they must do it, and the sooner they address the issue, the better for the country as a whole.
Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, who has done so much in his own way to bring together those of us who speak with the eating disorder community and those who represent those with obesity. I wish the Government would take on his approach of encouraging yet more joint dialogue.
I support the Government’s ambition to make the nation healthier, but these regulations are to be regretted and I therefore wholeheartedly support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. At best, there is weak evidence for their efficacy and there is insufficient attention paid to the impacts on extremely vulnerable people, and the growing number of people suffering from eating disorders.
First, the weak evidence. The Explanatory Memorandum makes it clear that the approach is based on the 2018 Cochrane review, which concluded:
“Findings from a small body of low-quality evidence suggest that … energy information on menus may reduce energy purchased in restaurants.”
It went on to recommend the need for:
“Additional high-quality research in real-world settings”.
So I ask the Minister: did the Government consider trialling this approach first?
Secondly, these regulations will create another place of fear for a vulnerable community of eating disorder sufferers, having the potential to impact on their often-fragile recoveries and shattering the chance of moments of connection with families and friends.
I want to explain what I mean by a “place of fear”. When our daughter, Rose, was in the depths of her eating disorder and was hospitalised, part of her specialist treatment over many months involved taking the eating-disorder patients into cafés and other eating venues to learn how to manage these frightening situations. For those suffering from an eating disorder, the stress of a restaurant is huge: fear of other people watching you eat, fear of people eating less than you and fear of not having safe foods on the menu. It means obsessing about it the day before and restricting food intake beforehand. Going is a known risk, but one that is taken to try to have a moment of joy and celebration, given that food is a way to strengthen all those positive social bonds of connection with family and friends.
Those in recovery—and to be clear, recovery is not a linear process for sufferers; many get dragged back down time and again—will be at greater risk once this measure is introduced. Seeing calories on a menu will be one more way, once they are seated at the table, of stacking the cards against them as they battle the demons in their head telling them exactly what they are allowed to eat. In short, it turns what might have been a manageable situation—a moment of all too brief happiness for a family eating out—into one that descends into a paralysing stand-off.
There is no logic in eating disorders, only triggers to letting the illness claim control of your loved one. Victoria, another eating disorder sufferer, described it to me like this:
“During my recovery, I found calorie labelling highly triggering as it held me back from rebuilding my relationship with food and my understanding of how to feed myself in a healthy way without being controlled by numbers ... Eating disorder recovery is very fragile and I am daunted by the prospect that calorie counts will be harder now to avoid”.
This is the reality of these regulations for eating disorder sufferers.
The Explanatory Memorandum refers to the concession that menus without calories will be permitted—but, when I asked about the guidance that businesses were being offered, the department confirmed that there will be no obligation to produce such menus. So there is no guarantee of one being available and no sanction if the restaurant just turns around and says no. Why does the guidance for businesses not at least strongly recommend that such menus are available on request?
So the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, is right. We must review the impacts of this legislation within 12 months of its introduction, including assessing fully the impacts on eating disorder sufferers. We all want to encourage more healthy eating, but interventions should be evidenced-based and consider the implications for other vulnerable communities.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, I speak today in support of the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and, while I have the utmost sympathy for those with eating disorders, to oppose that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull.
When I came to this House over 10 years ago, my office-mate, my noble friend Lord McColl, was a lone voice asking questions about obesity and its consequences. We talked about it endlessly at our desks. In my case I was motivated as, after 55 years of being overweight, I had finally lost 28 pounds—and I have more or less kept it off. For years I struggled with my weight, so I know how hard it is, but I also know how important it is not only for my own long-term health but for the future—indeed, potentially the survival—of the NHS. Anything that we and the Government can do to help and support others in a similar position, with information that makes it easier to make informed choices, must be tried.
The rise in obesity and its related problems, including diabetes, heart disease and cancers, is a growing problem internationally as well as in this country. The relationship between our environment and health is becoming increasingly clear, and I very much welcome the part 2 of the national food strategy, which joins up the dots so clearly.
In 2017 I chaired a report on childhood obesity for the Centre for Social Justice. If previously I had not been aware of the severity of the crisis, I certainly was by the time that we had done the work and launched the report. Dr Chris van Tulleken’s current work on ultraprocessed foods—seemingly more chemicals than food—which now make up over 60% of the average Briton’s diet, is particularly alarming. He experimented on himself by eating a diet of 80% of these highly addictive foods for a month. What it did to his body was shocking: not only did he put on more than 14 pounds in weight, he suffered many other side-effects such as heartburn, sleep problems, loss of libido and piles. The food even altered his brain. The effect on our children’s health and their growing brains is horrible.
As the Minister said, nearly one-quarter of children in England are overweight or obese when they start primary school aged five, and this rises to one-third by the time they leave aged 11. Childhood obesity rates in the UK are among the highest in western Europe. Obese children are more likely to become obese adults; currently, around two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, with one in four living with obesity. We know that regular overconsumption of a relatively small number of calories leads to individuals becoming overweight or obese.
The problem is clear: it is likely that eating out frequently, including eating takeaway meals, contributes to this gradual overconsumption of calories. Research suggests that eating out accounts for 20% to 25% of adult energy, and that when someone eats out or eats a takeaway meal they consume, on average, 200 more calories per day than if they eat food prepared at home. This all adds up. Data also tells us that portions of food or drink that people eat out or eat as takeaway meals contain, on average, twice as many calories as equivalent retailer own-brand or manufacturer-branded products. Some 96% of people eat out, and 43% do so at least once or twice a week—a huge increase on even a decade or so ago.
There is strong public demand for calorie labelling in the out-of-home sector. People want information so as to make better choices. Nearly 80% of respondents to a survey by Public Health England said they think that menus should include the number of calories in food and drinks. This thirst for information also applies to alcohol. An experiment conducted by the RSPH in 2017 showed that, on an evening out in the pub, those drinking with calorie labelling on the menu drank 400 calories fewer than those who were not aware of what they were drinking. The problem is huge, and every tool in the toolkit has to be used to tackle it. There is no time to waste.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB) [V]
My Lords, I declare that I chair the Commission on Alcohol Harm. We cannot ignore the obesity epidemic, and we must grasp the nettle of the crisis of eating disorders of all types. However, alcoholic drinks are a major contributor to national ill health and obesity.
In 2020, our commission took evidence on alcohol harms, and I want to focus on the evidence we heard about the obesogenic effect of alcoholic drinks. As the Institute of Public Health in Ireland told us, alcohol
“can make a significant contribution to levels of overweight and obesity in the adult population”.
Adults who drink get nearly 10% of their daily calorie intake on average from alcohol, but people are ignorant of the calories. Over 80% of people do not know, or underestimate, the number of calories in a glass of wine and, similarly, over 80% of people do not know, or underestimate, the calorific content of a pint of lager.
A 175ml glass of 12% alcohol-by-volume wine has about 158 calories. That is equivalent to more than three Jaffa cakes, and it is more than a 330ml can of Coca-Cola, which contains 139 calories. This means that, per ml, wine contains more than double the calories of Coca-Cola. The Government have recognised the obesogenic effect of fizzy drinks through their high calorie content but turned a blind eye to one of the most damaging substances to our economy. Yet 308,000 children currently live with at least one adult who drinks at a high-risk level in England. We worry about obesity and do nothing about the most harmful of obesogenic substances.
Alcohol is exempt from the labelling requirements for food and non-alcoholic drinks. Alcoholic drinks are only required to display the volume and strength, and some wines are required to include allergens. I suggest that the alcohol industry is happy to describe alcohol by volume content, because it knows perfectly well that the public do not understand what this means, either in daily consumption terms or in calories. Information on nutritional values, including calories, ingredients, health warnings and so on are largely absent from labels. In commenting on this, the professor of public health nutrition Annie Anderson, told us she is
“shocked how far alcohol is always kept out of nutrition policy”.
Today’s debate is an example of that.
I would like to quote Adrian Chiles, who explored labelling for “Panorama”. He said:
“It is absurd in a pub that you buy a pint, it doesn’t have to tell you how many calories are in it, but you buy a bag of crisps to go with the pint, by law, it has to give you the number of calories … on an alcoholic product you don’t have to provide nutritional information including calories … if you’ve got a Becks blue, which is the alcohol free one, it’s got all the nutritional information and how many calories on it, ordinary Becks, they don’t have to put it on there”.
If we are labelling food with calories, it is blatantly absurd and deeply irresponsible to ignore alcoholic drinks, both in the bottle and when served by the glass in all out-of-home venues. There is evidence, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, that when calories are displayed on drinks, people drink less, thereby also decreasing their liver damage, their risk of injury, of a road accident or of fuelling their addiction, quite apart from reducing their calorie intake and the obesogenic effect. I could go on. I strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to take part in this debate, and I certainly support my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe’s amendment. Going back to the Question we had on Tuesday about the possible addition of salt and sugar tax, I thought that was a rather good idea, because there have to be as many different solutions to the obesity problem as possible. As many noble Lords have said, this is extremely serious, and I suspect the Government should be looking at a wide range of different solutions, which might include a salt and sugar tax—it is not much different to adding fluoride to water, I should say—but should also go ahead with this regulation.
It is a pity, as many noble Lords have said, that most alcohol seems to have been omitted from it. Looking at the Explanatory Memorandum and the comments about the government consultation, it is obvious that not everybody in the food and drink industry thinks this is a good idea. I think they have been fighting it hard, and we shall probably continue to have to fight if we are to get anywhere.
I have a few questions for the Minister on the document. The first relates to something that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, I think, mentioned: going to the pub and having a pint. I may go to the pub tomorrow night and have a pint and a fish and chips. As we know, beer is excluded. How do you put a label with the number of calories on it on a plate of fish and chips? You can put it on the menu, but the calories depend on the size of the fish, let alone how many chips they give you. The complexity of this regulation demonstrates just how difficult the Government have found it to put together.
I worry about the institutions that are included and excluded and what the limit of 250 employees means, because people have tried to work out franchises, where something such as McDonald’s adds up to well over 250 employees. I see plenty of arguments coming there. I wonder what the cost to each food authority will be to maintain the necessary register and monitor it, because we have heard so much about the Government not giving local authorities enough money to do that and whether they will actually do it when they get it.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, mentioned, there are some serious issues with the regulation, but on the other hand, as I said on Tuesday, this country of ours is the second most obese in the world after the US. If this calorie-count idea and these regulations follow the US, it is probably because so many of our food producers are owned by US companies. It is a start, but I do not think it is sufficient. We can see from the Explanatory Memorandum that there was no support for an independent voluntary arrangement. That says a lot about where the food industry—and the brewing industry—is coming from. I hope that the Government will come back with something a bit stronger in future.
My final question may seem a bit silly but paragraph 7.17 of the Explanatory Memorandum states that international aircraft, trains and ferries are excluded but presumably, if one wants to buy a sandwich on a train, all the relevant documentation will be needed. I am sure that the Government will come up with some more ideas—
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but his time is up.
Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, we are living in an unhealthy food environment in which an obesity epidemic sits alongside eating disorders, hunger and malnutrition, and consumption of damaging amounts of ultra-processed foods. We need an integrated public health approach to food. My attitude to these regulations is cautious but optimistic that they might do some good if implemented as part of a wider strategy, and with compassion for those who are concerned about their effects. I share the Minister’s hope that they may result in reformulation by restaurants and takeaways, as the sugar tax has done already. We all know why action is needed.
We heard the figures on childhood obesity from the noble Lord, Lord Bethell. UK childhood obesity is almost the worst in Europe. He also reminded us that two-thirds of adults are overweight and 28% are obese. That matters because obesity ruins and shortens lives. It leads to type-2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, liver disease and skeletal problems. We have also seen to our horror how obesity affects a person’s probability of dying from Covid-19. The issue is complex, the numbers are enormous and the cost is eye-watering.
On the other hand, we hear that 1.25 million people suffer from eating disorders. Those are acknowledged to be mental health issues requiring expert therapies that are not sufficiently widely available. I hope that all noble Lords will acknowledge that mental health is also an issue for people living with obesity. It can be either a cause or an effect, and similarly require emotional support. It is no use just giving an obese person a diet sheet and telling them to get on with it.
Therefore, both problems endanger life and we must find a balance. In what way could these regulations help or hinder? I should emphasise that they must be only a tiny piece of the jigsaw. Let us look at the facts. We know that 96% of people eat out regularly, many of them families, and that number is rising. We know that the calorie content of restaurant and takeaway meals can be twice that of the same meal bought from a shop or home-cooked. How could knowing the number of calories help an obese person? It fills a gap in their knowledge. Most overweight people have no idea how many calories are in meals from a takeaway or restaurant. Knowing can help them to choose something lighter if they are trying to reduce their weight. Information is power.
On the other hand, people with eating disorders usually already know exactly how many calories are in every food because they have been limiting them for years. Therefore, putting figures on a menu tells those people nothing that they do not already know. But it is a difficult situation for them. I understand the concern that just seeing the amount of those calories might trigger a relapse for those who are valiantly fighting an eating disorder. I therefore hope that all restaurants will make a non-calorie-labelled menu available. However, the primary need for such people is expert support in order for them to make those difficult food choices. That is the crux of the matter—the need for expert therapies for eating disorders, and information and support for obesity.
I realise that, unfortunately, it is impossible to have a pilot for this measure. However, the three years quoted in the regulations is too long before reviewing them to see whether they meet their objectives or, conversely, do harm. I therefore share the concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. The regulations must be reviewed after a year and the concerns of those with eating disorders taken seriously. I also share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and sincerely hope that the Government will add alcohol calorie labelling when carrying out an early review of this measure.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, this September sees the launch of the Government’s new office for health promotion to drive the improvement of the health of the nation. Its function is to lead national efforts to level up the health of the nation by tackling obesity, improving mental health and promoting physical activity. It will be an important part of the consideration given to the forthcoming health and care legislation and should be key to co-ordinating policy across Whitehall, working, inter alia, with local authorities, which will play a key role in monitoring these regulations. Should the regulations pass into law, they will require very close co-ordination between government and local authorities, and I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed that the office for health promotion will be fully engaged in delivering this policy change.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, about the labelling of alcohol.
I now move to the critical issues affecting these regulations. I fully appreciate that there are many important, nuanced and competing arguments to consider, including those so clearly and persuasively made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, regarding eating disorders, which I have consistently argued deserve a far higher priority in the NHS. However, the number of people with eating disorders who would be directly and negatively affected by the requirement for restaurants, takeaways and cafes with 250 or more employees may be considerably fewer than the number who are obese—people whom I believe, on balance, would benefit from this information.
The NHS Health Survey for England 2019 found that 16% of adults screened positive for a possible eating disorder. It is reasonable to deduce from that statistic that many in that category would not be negatively impacted. Even if all were so impacted, the same survey found that 64% of adults in England were overweight and/or obese, with conditions associated with an increased risk of a number of common causes of disease and death, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. What is more worrying is that in recent years there has been a marked increase in the proportion of adults who are overweight or obese.
That contrast is a powerful factor in weighing up the pros and cons of these regulations. The consultation exercise demonstrated the demand for the provision of information on calorie content, and that information should not rest exclusively on calorie counts, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, is by no means a perfect standalone guide to a healthy diet. Take Itsu: one reason I regularly buy lunch there and take it back to my office is that it takes a holistic approach to the quality of the food it serves. It is high in protein and low in fat. It indicates the percentage of daily vegetable allowance providing potassium, iron and fibre to maintain healthy immune and digestive systems. It lists omega-3 content and products which contain zinc, iodine, potassium and vitamins, as well as the calorific value.
The labelling of nutrition will never be perfectly accurate. There will be complexities in implementing these regulations, including the resources required for local authorities. The Minister drew our attention to the report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and its conclusion is persuasive:
“It appears that this is a situation where there is no ideal solution, but DHSC’s policy is one it believes will benefit most people. Although the evidence of success is equivocal (for example, Beat cites evidence that some of the dietary changes made by individuals in America in response to a similar campaign were small and short-lived), the obesity problem is so widespread that DHSC sees these Regulations as part of a campaign to raise awareness of calorie intake not only for individuals but also the hospitality industry.”
I believe that, on balance, these regulations will be for the greater good of the population and should be approved by the House today.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]
My Lords, I am in favour of both regret amendments and commend the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, for tabling them. I recognise that at first glance, backing both these amendments might appear contradictory. One regrets the regulations while the other seeks to expand them, but what we are talking about here are two different sets of products. Eating is something we all have to do and need to do collectively in a far healthier manner than we do now. I hardly need to rehearse our place as world-leading in obesity and subsequent morbidities and mortality. It is one league table we certainly do not want to be high-ranking in.
Eating out, eating in the community with friends and family, can and should be healthy, happy occasions but we know, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, has powerfully outlined, that for those with eating disorders—between 1.25 million and 3.4 million people in the UK—they can easily be fraught, difficult and immensely stressful. There is strong evidence that calorie labelling will only add to that. There is little evidence of the effectiveness of calorie labelling in tackling our obesity crisis, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, outlined.
The science tells us that counting calories in food consumption is a far from exact or useful approach. We need a nutrient-rich, calorie-appropriate national diet based on vegetables, fruit, and wholegrains, giving us a range of important nutrients, as the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, just outlined. A calorie label tells us nothing about that. All calories are not equal and the values of two servings of food with identical calorie counts could be at opposite ends of the health scale. An artificially sweetened, flavoured and coloured dessert may be very low calorie but it also has virtually no nutritional value, and increasingly we understand that artificial sweeteners, as well as raising serious questions about their safety, contribute to increased risk of metabolic conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, even if the mechanism for that is as yet poorly understood.
We also increasingly understand that the thermic effect of food depends on a whole range of consumption factors, such as the size of the meal, the pace of eating and the time of day. Relying on counting calories is a simplistic—potentially dangerously simplistic— approach to achieving a healthy diet. There is also the issue of our microbiome—damaged and reduced by our national diet of ultra-processed pap that is 68% of the calories that we consume—that we are increasingly understanding has a significant impact on appetite and consumption. We need a joined-up public health approach to tackling our obesity issue, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said.
I was very tempted to use this debate to deplore the Government’s immediate, negative, knee-jerk, populist reaction to Henry Dimbleby’s excellent and important proposed national food strategy which proposes such an approach while also taking account of the disastrous environmental impacts of our broken food system. However, I decided that there was not really the proper space to do that, but I must note a question that I asked during the passage of the Agriculture Bill debates: what constitutional place does Mr Dimbleby occupy? We kept being told throughout that debate when issues of food and public health came up to “wait for Dimbleby”. How can Ministers say that about something they are signalling that they plan to ignore, essentially?
On the simple proposition that if we have calorie labels on food, they should also be on alcohol, even if we did not, alcohol is of limited nutritional value; however, most drinkers do not understand how it might contribute to obesity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, outlined. I declare an interest, as I do drink alcohol. I try to drink in moderation and take account of the energy intake from it. What the Government are regulating here is inconsistent between alcohol and food. We know that the alcohol sector has a large amount of lobbying muscle, as seen in its resistance to advertising restrictions. Unfortunately, we are seeing this effect further here.
Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and her sensible comments on nutrition.
I support the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lady Bull. She is absolutely right: these regulations are misguided and will be counterproductive. If calorie labelling were an effective way of curbing obesity, sales of crisps would not have grown by 4.6% in volume last year. Neither would biscuit manufacturers have been able to enjoy a bumper year, with sales up 7.2% to almost £3 billion. Among the top 10 biscuit brands, only two failed to register growth—they were the ones in the healthier category. The best seller, McVitie’s chocolate digestive, has 86 calories. That may not sound a lot, but those prone to obesity find it hard to stop at a single biscuit.
These regulations are intended to hit in particular those who frequent fast-food outlets, but no one in Britain can be unaware that a Big Mac and fries will not win favour at Weight Watchers. In fact, together they add up to 845 calories. Throw in a caramelised frappe and you have 1,164 calories. Spelling it out on the menu will not reshape the eating habits of those intent on a quick and relatively cheap hunger fix, and it is the cheapness that is important. Obesity is strongly linked to poverty. A study of children in 2018-19 found that the incidence of childhood obesity was more than twice as high in the most deprived areas of the country as in the least.
Insisting that calorie numbers are on the menu will not deal with the obesity problem, but it will feed the problems of those suffering from eating disorders, the numbers of which are rapidly increasing. Only today it has been reported that hospitalisations of young people with eating disorders rose by 50% last year, and many more are queueing up to try to access treatment. Someone with anorexia nervosa will be as fixated on these calorie lists as a heroin addict on getting the next fix.
The regulations will make the struggle of trying to persuade an anorexic to eat something—anything—even harder than it is now. I know this because I spent many hours trying to persuade my desperately sick daughter to eat. It was sometimes easier to try to do this in a restaurant rather than at home, where she could take flight to her bedroom. As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, these trips were often very stressful for the anorexic and for all concerned.
My daughter nearly died. Had it not been for the brilliant Professor Janet Treasure and a year in hospital, she almost certainly would have done. Instead, she is a happy mother who has just produced her second child. Before making this speech, I asked if she would mind me talking about her, and she was keen that I should, because she wants to add her voice to those who counsel against insisting on this calorie labelling measure. She agrees that it would have added to the agonies of those sessions when she tried to find the least worst, in her demented view, item on the menu. Anorexics see calories as the enemy. I have been so fortunate that my daughter managed to overcome this pernicious illness, but these regulations will make it harder for others to do so while achieving very little positive.
While I realise that the Minister will not be swayed from his decision to go ahead with these regulations, may I add Lucy’s plea to that of my noble friend Lady Bull that he agrees to a timely review of their effects on everybody?
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Fall. This debate is running out of time—four minutes, please.
Baroness Fall (Con) [V]
My Lords, all crises give way to opportunity, the chance to reassess and adapt, and Covid is no different. Eighteen months on, we are confronted with some really difficult issues. Among these are the growing reality that some have fared better than others in terms of their health, livelihood, prospects and mental health. It is right that the Government should focus on the reasons for these disparities and seek to find some answers.
One such issue is obesity. We have been shocked to see the growing evidence of how Covid has adversely affected those deemed overweight or obese, and Covid is not the only vulnerability for this group. They are susceptible to type 2 diabetes, heart disease and many types of cancer. Recent surveys have talked about 64% of our population being overweight or obese, and childhood obesity is among the highest in western Europe. This is a substantial group, and alarm bells should be ringing. It is certainly the time for a national conversation about how we address this problem. We have heard much in recent days about initiatives to improve the nation’s diet, a sugar and salt tax, or getting the nation to eat more fruit and veg. While Ministers consider whether any of these proposals should make it to the statute book, we have an immediate task of assessing this one, the calorie labelling legislation, today.
I am very sympathetic to the intent here. I see the urgent need to raise awareness of the effect that obesity has on health, but we need to do this in a way that takes account of some of the complexities of the issue and does not miss the mark. With this in mind, I draw attention to three concerns. First, I fully support the objective of increasing transparency around what we eat, especially aimed at larger establishments and chains, which greatly impact the eating habits of our nation. People will not choose healthy unless they know what they are eating, and in many cases they simply do not know. But calorie counting is a blunt instrument to crack a complex issue. Calories also impact different people in different ways and take no account of the energy they use. So why not flag a healthy or unhealthy option or operate a traffic light system instead?
My second concern is that we need to deliver a strategy that does not look like an attack on those with limited budgets. Tone is important here, and a real understanding of choice and the financial reality of stretched household budgets. Real choice means that affordable healthy options are available. We should be putting pressure on companies to lower sugar and salt content in their products rather than taxing consumers, which hits low-income families.
My third concern is the focus of this short debate; that is, the effect of this initiative on eating disorders, which are sky high, especially among the young, and which destroy lives and blight many others, as many have said, especially the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft. I therefore have sympathy with some of the reservations raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, today. Young people have been shut up at home, missed exams, missed each other and have had their prospects blighted, so it is no wonder that eating disorders have rocketed, and we already had a grave problem before. We have no evidence or data to suggest what impact calorie labelling will have on eating disorders but it does not take a huge jump of imagination to work it out. We should not have a tin ear to these concerns. Good policy should be creative and targeted and should not disregard the plight of a minority who are adversely affected just because a greater number are set to gain.
I support the Government in their endeavour to tackle the difficult but important issue of obesity. I do not speak in regret, but I ask the Minister to take note of some of the concerns raised today.
Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]
My Lords, I speak in favour of the calorie labelling regulations being set by the Government and, with some difficulty, against the amendments to the Motion tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke. I do so as someone who had severe anorexia as a teenager, before it was even fully recognised; later, one of my teenage daughters had a similar disorder. These two episodes profoundly affected the whole of my life, and certainly represent the most difficult time of my life, as they do for my daughter. The noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Walmsley, described very movingly the sort of effect this kind of illness can have on the whole family and on many others.
It is important that we as a society talk about these issues openly and honestly, as they do in many schools now. For people with eating disorders, it is important that they have access to full information, especially if they can see that the calories for healthy food are in fact quite low. If young people are fully informed, they will eventually know the difference between a healthy, balanced diet and one that puts you on track to make you abnormally thin. Its only through providing all the information in a balanced way that people of all ages can eventually make rational and healthy choices. We should not be withholding information or creating a situation where people are not given all the facts. Much of the information we receive about food products at present is in fact advertising or marketing, so what is needed for everyone, of all ages, is full and accurate information at all times.
Although I do not support the amendment to the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, I agree with the second part of it, which calls for timely reviews of the impact of these regulations for both obesity and eating disorders, as both have such serious consequences. A significant proportion of the adult population is living with obesity or is overweight, according to research from Public Health England in 2019. By the age of 55, 70% of adults in the UK have at least one obesity-related health issue, as the All-Party Group for Longevity recorded in 2020. In the UK, obesity-related conditions currently cost the NHS £6.1 billion a year, as Public Health England recorded a few years ago. We desperately need a strategy to tackle eating disorders and obesity.
I conclude by asking the Minister for an update on the Government’s strategy of supporting people to live five extra healthy years by 2035. Are these regulations part of this strategy, and what other actions will the Government be taking in terms of food labelling to support it? These experiences profoundly changed my life, and I want other people’s lives to be profoundly changed too, by knowledge, understanding and full information at all times.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con) [V]
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Jenkin has already mentioned that for many years in this House we have been calling for action to deal with the obesity epidemic, mainly with the slogan, “The obesity epidemic is killing millions, costing billions and the cure is to put fewer calories into their mouths”. This will save a great deal of money and reduce the strain on the NHS, as has already been mentioned.
It will probably come as no surprise to noble Lords that I support these draft calorie labelling regulations. There are a few problems, which I think can be ironed out quite easily. First, fat, preferably unsaturated fat, acts as an important brake on how much we eat, as does whole milk. This was demonstrated by scientists in Canada and, recently, Danish scientists showed that whole milk actually reduced the level of cholesterol in the blood. We need to remind ourselves that fat produces twice as many calories as protein and carbohydrate, so this needs to be taken into account in calorie labelling and working out what to buy and eat.
These regulations, as has been mentioned, can present problems for those with eating disorders. I hope that it will help them to have menus available that have no mention of calories at all, and I hope that it will be essential for restaurants to have those menus available.
On average, 2,000 calories per day is mentioned, but of course the total number of calories one should eat will vary substantially from person to person, according to occupation, age and weight. It is worth reminding ourselves that the all-powerful food lobby was the culprit in causing this obesity epidemic in the first place. It wanted to get people to eat more food but realised that it was the fat they were eating that slowed the stomach emptying and made them feel full and satisfied early on in the meal. So the lobby demonised fat and insisted on a low-fat diet, which is so tasteless that it then had to add a great deal of sugar to make its manipulated food palatable. It pilloried those who opposed it, including Professor John Yudkin, who was sacked from his university chair of nutrition in London for warning against the high-sugar, low-fat diet. So much for the so-called independence of universities. We need to counter the anti-people’s lobby, which wants to stop people from having whole milk and healthy fat because these villains know that fat reduces appetite and reduces their ill-gotten gains.
It was gratifying to see reference at the end of the document warning against the potentially fatal combination of Covid and obesity. People should take note of that, especially in both Houses of Parliament—that obesity is one of the problems causing high mortality from Covid. I wish more people would join the Prime Minister’s campaign to tackle the obesity epidemic with his slogan, “Don’t be a fatty in your fifties”.
Baroness Redfern (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak in support of the draft Calorie Labelling (Out of Home Sector) (England) Regulations 2021, noting the requirement for labels to be displayed by April 2022. This is another step forward in addressing obesity, which, as we know, is one of our biggest public health challenges, as our food environment continues ever to change. It is targeted not only at the eating-out sector, but also at the consumption of on-the-go snacks. More than a quarter of adults and one-fifth of children eat food from out-of-home outlets at least once a week. The regulations include bakeries, caterers, supermarkets and entertainment venues, so this is an important tool in guiding customers and making informed choices much easier for everyone.
I welcome the response to the consultation about concerns expressed by individuals living with eating disorders. It is important to note that appropriate provision is being made in the regulations to allow businesses to provide an alternative menu without calorie information, if the customer so wishes. That also endorses the Government’s commitment to playing their part in engaging with eating disorder charities in offering continued support and guidance, with a commitment to timely reviews of the impact of these regulations, not only on obesity but also on eating disorders.
Calorie labelling in the out-of-home sector applies to English businesses with more than 250 employees operating outlet foods that are prepared for immediate consumption. Smaller businesses are exempt, but I hope that many more outlets will come forward to offer their support and contribute meaningfully in the coming months so that they, too, can inform their customers and show that they want to be part of this drive to encourage even more people to make healthier food choices.
Feedback has shown overwhelming public support for calorie labelling on menus. Unfortunately, childhood obesity continues to be one of the major health problems faced by this country. Nearly one-quarter of children in England are overweight or obese when they commence primary school. Statistics also show that three out of five children are overweight when they leave primary school. Obese children are more likely to become obese adults, adding to their vulnerability. This further impacts on their life outcomes, in developing the increased likelihood of heart disease and cancer. Significantly, we are seeing more people at the relatively young age of 40 suffering from type 2 diabetes, with numbers almost reaching a staggering 5 million. All this can have a negative impact on mental health as well.
In conclusion, putting calorie labelling on menus and offering information for families will assist them in making better-informed, healthier choices when eating out. It will be another step towards complementing the Government’s healthy weight strategy, which was published last year. I support these draft regulations.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, today’s debate on calorie labelling regulations has demonstrated how complex and sensitive this subject is. At face value, the idea of labelling calories on the menus of large chains of food outlets may appear sensible and easy. On behalf of these Benches, I thank all those organisations that have sent us briefings, including Diabetes UK and Beat Diabetes, which have helped our thinking on what is not at all an easy subject. This is a complex issue with competing demands from vulnerable people on both sides who need help and support. Helping one group may cause serious problems for another.
We know that there are many people who have or who are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and obesity. As a number of noble Lords have mentioned, more than a quarter of adults are obese and 66% are overweight. These two conditions provide the basis for a high risk of developing other serious disease, requiring much treatment and possibly leading to early death. This is a serious crisis for our country. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, set that out well in their contributions.
Obese people need support and information to change their lives. Calorie labelling could be a tool in that. Can the Minister answer the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, as to why the Government have decided not to put calorie labelling on alcohol? These are rightly described as empty, hidden calories. Is the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, correct that this is because of the alcohol lobby? Doing this would seem more obvious than putting calories on menus.
The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, sets out the equally serious problems that well over 1 million, mainly young, patients with eating disorders face and how calorie labelling could exacerbate their illness, whether in withholding food or binge-eating. Even though eating disorders are primarily classified as a mental illness, the reality is that a patient’s reaction to controlling their food intake is at the heart of it. Some will always choose the least calorific option; for others, it is the opposite. Labelling for this group acts as a signpost, supporting their control of their intake. As my noble friend Lady Parminter said, calories on menus could bring young people with eating disorders to a “place of fear”. She spoke movingly and eloquently from family experience, a reality that most of us just cannot understand. But we need to listen, as we also need to hear the testimony from the daughter of the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft.
My noble friend Lady Walmsley made a thoughtful contribution highlighting the need for an integrated public health approach to food that takes account of these wider issues relating to diet and well-being, rather than just focusing on calorie labelling. We believe that public policy should always be evidence-based and we are struggling with the Government’s lack of any compelling evidence on or an impact assessment of mandatory calorie labelling on menus at some restaurants and take-aways. As worryingly, there is little evidence of serious effort to consult experts and stakeholders on all sides of this debate. There has been no formal review of similar initiatives and no attempt by Ministers to trial a pilot scheme or to draw from the evidence from those restaurants that choose already to list calories on their menus, which would have been a useful resource.
As outlined by others, there is limited evidence to suggest that this legislation would even have its intended outcome. A Cochrane review found that there is only a small body of low-quality evidence supporting the idea that calorie counts on menus lead to a reduction in calories purchased. A more recent study found that calorie labelling in American fast-food restaurants was associated with a 4% reduction in calories per order but that this reduction diminished after a year, suggesting that any small differences that may occur are not maintained.
The Minister mentioned reformulation of supermarket products. The 2020 sugar reduction report said that supermarkets had indeed started reformulation and that there were some reductions but that there was still a long way to go before the food industry meets the targets in 2024. That means that evidence is being assembled, but it is not there yet.
Both eating disorders and obesity are extremely important illnesses, which are severely damaging the health and well-being of millions in the UK. On these Benches, we remain committed to tackling both issues. We have long argued, also, that mental health should be considered in every government policy and that it should be treated with the same urgency as physical health.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Parminter: given the concerns expressed from a large number of speakers during the debate, please will the Government commit to reviewing the regulations’ impact, both beneficial and adverse in 12 months’ time to ensure that they are fit for purpose and not wait the proposed three years?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My Lords, the need to tackle obesity and to support people in so doing is crucial to the health and well-being of individuals as well as the health and well-being of the nation. Excess weight directly impacts how well—and how long a life—we live, carrying a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. It places limits on us at work, at home and in our social lives. It is a growing challenge that exacerbates inequalities. There are nearly three times as many hospital admissions due to obesity in the poorest communities as in the better-off.
It is demonstrably not the case that everyone knows how to manage their weight or that it is simply a matter of exercising a choice as to whether we do so or not. The challenge of maintaining a healthy weight and lifestyle requires information, knowledge and support, as well as personal effort, as was illustrated by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington.
The Department of Health and Social Care cites evidence that one in four children and adults is now obese and that restaurant or takeaway meals contribute to the overconsumption of calories because they contain, on average, twice as many calories as the equivalent retailer own-brand or manufacturer-branded products. We know that voluntary compliance on labelling has not worked, and the pandemic has certainly been no friend to healthy weight levels, making this an ever more pressing situation to address.
This statutory instrument offers one step along the way, with many more steps needed, matched by proper investment and a strategic approach. As the display of calorie information and the recommended daily calorie intake is required only of larger businesses—those with 250 or more employees—does the Minister agree that there is greater value to be gained from this measure through the reformulation of products and portion sizes? The sight of a 2,000-calorie meal on a menu may well drive a provider to address that. Can the Minister explain what plan is in place to lever this opportunity for a bigger prize of change?
As we heard, the Government’s impact assessment gives a best estimate of net benefits amounting to over £5.5 billion over the next 25 years. The impact assessment makes it clear that most of the benefits come from a change in personal decision-making, but it seems that the evidence base on reformulation is stronger. It is particularly important that an evidence base around personal choices is acquired, so that we can have full, informed conversations as we look forwards. I hope the Minister will take note of this.
As we have heard in this debate, calories are a very crude measure of what we put into our bodies. It is crucial that we understand the nutritional content of what we consume. Will the Minister explain what consideration was given to a model much closer to what we see on packets in supermarkets? That does not seem to have been considered in the options appraised in the impact assessment. Is extending the scope of these measures being considered and, if so, on what sort of timeline? Will the research base be grown before action is taken?
The amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe rightly highlights that obesity is also impacted by alcohol consumption. It is right that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley laid down a challenge to the food and drink industry to step up to the mark. We on these Benches will return to this during consideration of the Health and Care Bill.
I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, for bringing real insight to this debate and to the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter, Lady Wheatcroft and Lady Greengross, who all spoke movingly and personally about the reality for those living with eating disorders. To follow this through, before implementation, will the Minister continue to engage with those who have legitimate, very real concerns about the draft regulations and seek to address them?
We know that eating disorders in the UK have increased during the pandemic, while services are simply not good enough, particularly failing children and adolescents. Will the Minister commit to a national strategy, matched by proper investment? Improving access to treatment and support is crucial. We will further press this home through amendments to the Health and Care Bill.
Will the Minister also commit, as a starting point for local authorities, to reinstate the resources already lost to the improvement of public health? The evidence favours interventions that promote a life of healthy choices, while cuts to public health over the past decade have put pressure on local authorities and worked in the opposite direction. I hope these regulations can offer a step forward.
Lord Bethell (Con) [V]
I thank noble Lords for their participation and thoughtful and moving contributions to today’s debate. As I have said, helping more people to achieve a healthy weight is one of the greatest public health challenges that we face as a nation.
My noble friend Lady Jenkin spoke movingly about her own battles with her weight. I completely identify with this personal struggle. I have a constant struggle to keep my own BMI in the green zone, which is about the best thing that I can personally do to live long enough to see my children grow into adults. There must be many who feel the same way.
The out-of-home food environment has an important role to play as an increasingly growing contributor to the food that we consume. People are already accustomed to seeing nutritional information on prepacked food that is typically sold in supermarkets. We want to see clear calorie information when we are eating out or getting a takeaway. This instrument plays an important role in helping to make our food environment healthier and to make healthier choices easier.
On the amendment regarding alcohol, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, is right that excessive alcohol consumption is by far the biggest risk factor attributable to early mortality, ill health and disability among 15 to 49 year-olds in the UK. It is estimated that each week 3.4 million adults consume an additional day’s worth of calories just from alcohol. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is entirely right that the public are utterly unaware of the calorie content of alcohol. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I like the occasional drink, but surveys show that up to 80% of adults have a hazy understanding of the calorie content of common drinks, and I confess that I am probably one of them.
Transparency is key to support consumers to make better choices. However, nutrition labelling requirements are currently voluntary for alcoholic drinks; the example of a bottle of alcohol-free Becks makes that point pretty well. I accept that this makes it more challenging for businesses to list calorie information for alcoholic drinks on their menus. I give the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and all those who have expressed concern about the issue this commitment: the Government will be consulting shortly on whether calorie information should be mandated on prepacked alcohol and alcohol served in pubs and restaurants. Covid-19 makes it more important than ever to support the nation to achieve a healthier weight, and the Government are taking action to help people to lead healthier lives.
On the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, I completely understand the concerns about the impact of these regulations on those living with eating disorders. In particular, the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Greengross, and my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft spoke movingly, with highly relevant personal testimony. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, that these experiences and evidence-based reservations make Ministers stop and think very carefully about the regulations. They reminded me of the experiences of my loved ones who have struggled with eating disorders, and of my friends whose parents have struggled with the heart-breaking battle of loving children who are dogged by these torments. That is why we want to ensure that people have access to the right mental health support in the right place and at the right time.
To the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Greengross, and my noble friend Lord Moynihan, I make it clear that improving eating disorder services is a key priority for the Government and a vital part of our work to improve mental health services. We recognise that eating disorders are a serious, life- threatening condition. With that in mind, we have to be careful to consider the views of mental health charities and experts, and we did so as we developed our regulations.
We have consulted widely throughout the development of the policy. We heard from key medical groups, including the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which highlighted the importance of tackling obesity and support for the introduction of mandatory calorie labelling in the out-of-home sector. We also studied carefully research in the UK that found that menu labelling is associated with serving items with less fat and less salt in popular UK chain restaurants compared with those that do not display calorie information.
I say in response to my noble friend Lady Fall that research suggests that mandatory enforcement of calorie labelling will encourage reformulation.
We have also engaged with and listened to feedback from those representing the views of people living with eating disorders, including the eating disorder charity, Beat. In response, we have put in reasonable adjustments to help mitigate any unintended consequences.
I therefore reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, with the following commitments. First, following feedback on our consultation, we have decided to exempt food that is provided in schools and other educational establishments due to some concerns about displaying calorie information in school settings. Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has noted, we have also included a provision in the regulations which permits businesses to provide a menu without calorie labelling at the request of the consumer. I would welcome any suggestions from the noble Baroness or any other noble Lords on how this can be done in the most sensitive and effective way possible as we draft the detailed guidelines.
Regarding those guidelines and regulations, I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, that we are working closely with business and local authorities on guidance to support implementation of the policy to ensure that it can be implemented smoothly, including in relation to the practical dilemmas he rightly highlighted such as the labelling of irregularly shaped fish and chips.
My third reassurance to the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, is that we will continue to evaluate the impact of calorie labelling across the population, including on people with disorders. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that, as required under the regulations, the Secretary of State will review the regulations at between three and five years. I make the commitment now that this will be done with the full engagement of all those concerned about this important but delicate regulation.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, is right: every public health measure is a trade-off. Obesity is a massive challenge we face as a nation. We cannot duck it, but this does not diminish the Government’s determination to ensure that people living with eating disorders have access to the support they need.
In response to the question about the evidence available to support this policy, I highlight that the Government’s impact assessment estimates that 174 billion fewer calories will be consumed in England per year as a result of this policy.
Consumption of fast food and takeaways is particularly prevalent among families. Evidence from 2016 showed that 68% of households with children under 16 had eaten takeaways in the previous month, compared with only 49% of adult-only households. We have a role and a responsibility to support parents, particularly in the most deprived families and areas, to help their children have the best start in life.
The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, is right to emphasise that transparency in our food environment and giving people information they need about their food and drink purchases is important in delivering our ambition to halve childhood obesity by 2030. There is a lot to gain by helping more people to be the right weight, and it is vital for us to work together to achieve this. I commend the regulations to the House.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, time is very tight, but I want to express my gratitude to everyone who supported my amendment, especially those who shared such moving and personal stories. I am grateful to the Minister for his invitation to engage with further suggestions and for his words on impact reviews—there is no time to explore them today, but I shall read them in Hansard and he can be sure that I will follow them up when the Recess is over.
I have no illusions about my ability to prevent the regulations passing. My intention today was to ensure that the unheard voices of those with lived experiences were on the record, and that we have achieved. I have learned the lesson of King Canute and I shall not divide the House. With regret, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment in my name.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
At end insert “but that this House regrets that the Regulations do not extend to alcohol, even though mounting evidence shows that it is a significant contributor of co-morbidity and obesity, one of the major underlying causes of the nation’s 128,481 COVID-19 deaths, the highest number in Europe; and calls on Her Majesty’s Government to require the publication of the calorie content of alcohol by the end of 2021 in order to improve the people’s well-being and good health.”
Strategy for Tackling Violence against Women and Girls
(2 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Rosser (Lab) [V]
[Inaudible]—are at a record low and domestic abuse in this country continues to increase, but charging continues to fall. According to Ofsted, sexual abuse in schools is becoming the norm. Ending abuse against women and girls is a cross-party issue on which all sides of this House wish to see progress. Unfortunately, the strategy the Government have outlined in their Statement falls short. We need ambition that matches the scale of the problem.
I again raise the concern that many have raised before: that the Government have regarded the violence against women and girls strategy as being separate from domestic abuse when, in reality, they are unavoidably interconnected. A policing lead on violence against women and girls is certainly welcome, but we already have one for domestic abuse, one for rape and sex offences, another for historical sexual abuse and one for child sex abuse. This policing lead, we are told, will be full time, unlike the others, and is in line with the recommendation last week from the inspectorate.
The Minister in the Commons yesterday seemed unable to answer questions about how the policing lead would work, including what the relationship would be with the inspectorate in respect of their investigations. What resources and powers will this new full-time policing lead have? Will the individual have the same resources and powers as the other policing leads, or will they have more extensive resources and powers? If so, what will they be?
On plans for the rape helpline, how prompt will the response be via the helpline in linking a victim to specialist support? How long a wait time will we consider acceptable? In the Commons yesterday, the Minister said in the Statement:
“we will be launching a multi-million-pound national communications campaign with a focus on targeting perpetrators and harmful misogynistic attitudes, educating young people about healthy relationships, and ensuring that victims can access support.”
How many millions of pounds will be allocated to the campaign? When will it start and how long will it last? By what criteria will the success or otherwise of the campaign be judged? Crucially, who will the department engage with and consult on the content and design of the campaign? The Minister in the Commons also said the Government had
“launched a specific safety of women at night fund worth £5 million to ensure that women do not face violence in public spaces at night.”—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col; 1084.]
What exactly will that £5 million deliver? Over what period of time will it be spent and how will its impact be judged?
The Statement says that the Government will
“review options to limit use of non-disclosure agreements in cases of sexual harassment in higher education”,
which is welcome. Why, then, is there nothing about non-disclosure agreements in workplaces, where women are still being abused and silenced—completely legally—in our country?
The Minister asserted in the Commons that
“there are legitimate reasons for non-disclosure agreements in workplaces.”—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col; 1087.]
That may be, but there are also non-legitimate reasons for non-disclosure agreements in the workplace, including in relation to the sexual harassment of women. What action do the Government intend to take over these agreements? Should the Government not think about taking the side of women who have been subject to sexual harassment in the workplace?
Why is there no national strategy for, or inclusion in this strategy of, adult victims of sexual exploitation? Where do these women find their experiences in this strategy? There is nothing but a gap. The only passing reference comes where the Government say they are going to ask porn sites to voluntarily do better on exploitation—do not hold your breath on that one if it involves a potential loss of money.
Where is the much-needed public sexual harassment law? The Government have said they think offences exist already. That will certainly be of real comfort to the two-thirds of young women who tell us they are suffering abuse every day. Home Office statistics show that 83% of sexual assaults go unreported. What is going to be done to address this alarming situation and the apparent lack of trust between victims and the policing system?
We need to make sure that women and girls, wherever they are and whatever they are doing, are safe and able to feel safe. The violence against women and girls strategy expects services to be able to deliver without any serious funding to deliver it. If that is wrong and there is such additional long-term funding to deliver this strategy, could the Government say how much it will be, and over what period of time?
What is clear is that, on every single step of their journey, women and girls are being failed—and, today, it feels as if the Government do not have enough of a plan to manage that. The Labour Party has worked up a green paper for ending violence against women and girls. We have set out, among many other things, toughening sentences for rape, stalking and domestic murder, and reviewing sentences for all domestic abuse. We have set about introducing a survivor’s support package to improve victims’ experiences in the courts, including fast-tracking rape and sexual violence cases, end-to-end legal help for victims and better training for professionals to give people the help they need. We also suggest the creation, as quickly as possible, of new offences for street harassment.
Clearly, the Government do not expect any early results from their strategy, since the Minister in the Commons said that she was prepared to wait until the end of this decade to see
“changes in the attitudes, misogynistic and otherwise, that underpin so much of this offending behaviour”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col. 1087.]
The chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee summed it up very well in the Commons yesterday when she said:
“Much of this feels very incremental—just limited pilots and evidence gathering”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col. 1090.]
Lord Paddick (LD) [V]
My Lords, before I start, I wish all noble Lords, and especially the Minister, a well-deserved, restful and restorative Recess. However, before we get there, such is the importance that this Government place on violence against women and girls that this strategy was announced in the other place at 7 pm yesterday—or, as the Minister in the other place put it,
“at an unusual hour, I think it is fair to say, of the parliamentary day”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col. 1083.]
And here we are—last business before the Summer Recess.
A strategy should include a coherent set of specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely objectives, rather than what appears to be the result of a “board blast”, where every possible option is thrown in the paper. The Minister in the other place said that the strategy would build on the
“progress we have made in recent years”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col. 1083.]
She cited London as being the first major capital city in the world to publish a comprehensive strategy to combat violence against women and girls, when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London.
The current Mayor of London said this year that the capital’s streets were not safe for women and girls, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, in response to his comments, said that the streets of London were
“not safe for everyone all of the time”.
Is that the sort of progress that the Statement referred to?
We have seen an incoherent collection of random ideas before, with the serious violence strategy published by the Government in April 2018. The difficulty is that success should be measured in terms of outcomes, not outputs. Can the Minister tell the House what impact in terms of outcomes that strategy has had on levels of violent crime in the past three years?
As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has just said, the Statement says that the strategy includes a
“multi-million-pound … communications campaign”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/7/21; col. 1084.]
It also talks about a £5 million safety of women at night fund, and talks about the broader, £25 million safer streets fund. Exactly what does “multi-million-pound” amount to? How many millions? The Statement is quite specific on the other initiatives, so why not on this one?
The Statement says that the Government will continue to back the police to catch perpetrators of violence against women and girls and bring them to justice, and that they have given the police more powers, more resources and more officers. How much more are this Government currently giving the police in real terms compared with 2010? What is the current establishment of police officers and community support officers in England and Wales—who are the visible policing presence on the street—compared with 2010? Although it is not just how much money is being spent but how it is spent that it is important, can the Minister tell the House exactly how much new money is specifically being targeted on reducing violence against women and girls, in support of this strategy?
It is abundantly clear what the problem is with violence against women and girls: it is the attitude of men, the culture in our society, and the belief among many men that they can do whatever they like to women because they can. They can because they are, on average, physically stronger, and they do not fear the consequences, whether disapproval from their peers or wider society, or effective sanction—whether by the criminal justice system, employers or institutions, including schools, political parties or religious organisations.
Too many men are likely to be given an encouraging slap on the back by other men for abusing women and girls, rather than condemnation. Every single person and every single organisation needs to say clearly and unambiguously that any abuse of women and girls, particularly male violence against them, is totally unacceptable. In particular, male leaders, especially political leaders, must set an example—not by being one of the lads, but by treating women and girls with dignity and respect. Noble Lords will not have to think very hard or for very long to think of an example.
We made drinking and driving socially unacceptable, and we need to make even verbal abuse of women and girls equally unacceptable, including making street harassment a specific criminal offence. We need every man to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
I join both noble Lords in commending the VAWG strategy. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for wishing us happy holidays—I am definitely looking forward to mine. I often do last business before Recess, so the noble Lord is not wrong in his observation. None the less, this is an incredibly important Statement. My honourable friend Vicky Atkins did not say that it would take a decade, but rather that it is the start of a decade of change. It is the beginning of the journey; it is a statement of intent. I am very glad that she laid her Statement to the House of Commons last night.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, talked about prosecutions being down and what we are going to do about it. We have absolutely acknowledged that prosecutions are down, particularly for rape. My honourable friend Kit Malthouse in another place led the rape review together with the MoJ; it concluded in May. The whole point of the rape review was to make the victim’s horrendous journey a much easier one from start to finish and to ensure that convictions, now so low, matched the number of victims coming forward in terms of proportion.
The noble Lord asked about the police lead on VAWG, as did the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. It is not just another police lead on something; we intend to make this a specific role. This will be a full-time job, and it is absolutely the right thing to do, particularly in terms of good practice, training, et cetera. The noble Lord asked about the wait time for the helpline. I am afraid I do not know the answer, and I will have to let him know, but we will be spending £1.14 million on it.
The noble Lord also asked about NDAs in universities but not in workplaces. Of course, we are all familiar with NDAs in the workplace and there is no doubt that, if someone is made to sign an NDA and it conceals the fact that they might be sexually harassed, the NDA is null and void. On universities, we want to send a clear message to students that sexual harassment is in no way tolerable on our campuses and online environments and to take the necessary steps to ensure that it is stamped out of our world-leading higher education sector.
Both the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Paddick, talked about street harassment. Although it is true that there are existing offences that can address sexual harassment, we are looking carefully at where there might be gaps in existing law and how a specific offence for public sexual harassment could address these. This is complex and it is important that we take the time to ensure that any potential legislation is both proportionate and reasonably defined.
We are committed to ensuring that not only are the right laws in place but that they work in practice. First, £3 million will go into the national communications campaign, which noble Lords asked about. It will challenge this kind of behaviour and ensure that victims know how and where to report it. Secondly, we will ensure that police and prosecutors are confident about how to respond to public sexual harassment—for example, through new police guidance. Thirdly, to prevent it from happening in the first place, we need to deepen our understanding of who commits these crimes, why they do so and how it may escalate—for example, through our new funding for what works to tackle violence against women and girls.
Both noble Lords asked about additional money. The total funding for 2021-22 is £300 million. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked about additional money. That will be £43 million in addition. On funding for the police, in terms of numbers we have committed to the 20,000 and in terms of future commitment clearly a spending review precludes me from committing to anything further than that.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Barker) (LD)
We now come to the 20 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief so that we can call the maximum number of speakers.
Lord Hayward (Con) [V]
My Lords, I am very much aware of the need to respond to the genuine and substantial concerns of women and girls in our society, but could I just take one moment to remind the powers that be that many gay men are sexually abused or raped and that, as Chris Wild has so vividly described in his books, many boys as well as girls have suffered in residential homes or abusive families and flee them to seek what they believe is greater safety, often on the streets?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My noble friend raises an important point and IICSA is currently looking into some of the institutional abuses that took place in the past. We absolutely recognise that men and boys experience these crimes. That is why the Home Office is funding the men’s advice line run by Respect, which advises male victims of domestic abuse, and the Galop helpline, which provides support to LGBT victims. In addition, as part of the VAWG strategy, the Home Office has committed this year to increasing funding by £1.5 million for by-and-for service provision for victims of violence against women and girls, including by increasing the £2 million specialist fund recently launched by the MoJ with Comic Relief. This will build the capacity of smaller, specialist by-and-for organisations, supporting survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence who are also from ethnic minorities, are disabled or, indeed, are LGBT.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB) [V]
My Lords, while not disagreeing at all with the concerns expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Rosser, Lord Paddick and Lord Hayward, especially where rape is concerned, may I sound a more positive note just for a moment? I am sure the Minister would agree that there are beacons of hope to light the way forward on which we should build. The Home Office-sponsored Barnardo’s Cymru domestic abuse scheme is a whole-family approach that allows both parents and child victims to receive support while the perpetrators of abuse take part in rigorous programmes designed to change behaviour, rebuild relationships and keep families safe. Moving statements on BBC Wales yesterday from all the parties involved attested to the success of this approach. Is this not the way forward where domestic abuse is concerned?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I must whole- heartedly agree with the noble Lord. Clearly, a whole-family approach, where the perpetrator acknowledges what they have done and wants to change their behaviour, is absolutely the right way to go. Often, a multiagency approach will work, but I want to join him in commending Barnardo’s for the tremendous work it does in this area.
Baroness Gale (Lab) [V]
Can the Minister say how the strategy will work on the big problem of sexual harassment on the streets, where girls and women have to put up with sexual remarks and other incidents as they walk along, often in the daytime? My second point is that the Minister has told me on numerous occasions that, once a domestic abuse Act becomes law, the Government will ratify the Istanbul convention. This has yet to happen. So, can the Minister say why there has been a delay and when the convention will be ratified?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
Well, I think the noble Baroness will have heard me addressing the issue of public sexual harassment to the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Paddick—which is to say that not only is it completely unacceptable but we are looking at where there might be gaps in the law to address it. We are compliant with the Istanbul convention in all but three areas, and I can assure the noble Baroness that we are committed to ratifying and will do so as soon as we are fully compliant. We will then inform Parliament of the date. We will be compliant once Northern Ireland has introduced its new domestic abuse offence in the autumn and we have determined our compliance position on migrant victims. She will know about the pilot scheme. The House must acknowledge that, in some cases, we do more than we need to do to be compliant—for example, with forced marriage protection orders—but we are not complacent.
Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, nowhere in the Statement is there any mention of online pornography. Yet the Times and the Telegraph both reported that Wayne Couzens, who pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, was obsessed with violent, extreme pornographic websites. So what assessment have the Government made of the effect of their decision in 2019 not to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, as planned, on the safety of women and girls? It would have meant that, since the beginning of 2020, we would have had a regulator with powers to take robust action against any pornographic website showing extreme, violent pornography in the UK.
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for raising this, and she is absolutely right in what she said. I know this will not be to her full satisfaction, but we are, through the Online Harms Bill, going to be addressing some of the issues that cause concern, such as user-generated pornography. I know that is not what she is referring to, but we are going some way towards addressing it.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, clearly we are all united in our condemnation of violence and aggression against women and girls, and we are also united in our view that perpetrators be pursued and prosecuted with vigour and the full force of the law. I share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, that in the context of online pornography I hope to see more moves addressing the availability and access to that among children, which is incredibly concerning to all of us in the way in which it might influence the attitudes of young men and boys to women. In the context of such an important strategy, I want to raise very carefully a concern that is worth us being mindful of, and that is how we can avoid a mindset developing where all women are victims and all men are villains. Are the Government conscious of this, and if so, how are they reflecting that in this strategy and in the way that they intend to roll it out?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
I thank my noble friend for that. We are not just conscious of it; there have been many debates in this House about anonymity. It is a difficult issue. We have to balance the lack of cases that come to court and conviction with the devastating effects that they can have on someone who is accused. We are committed, first and foremost, to arresting the steep decline in prosecutions for this offence and to improving the victims’ experience of the criminal justice system and access to justice. Any changes in this regard will, of course, uphold the principle of procedural fairness that is due to defendants in all criminal cases. There are existing offences designed to protect the administration of justice from false allegations, including the offence of perverting the course of justice, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for the most serious offences. But that does not undermine what the noble Baroness is saying, because for someone who is accused wrongly it can devastate their lives.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, following up on a point raised by my noble friend Lady Gale, what should women and girls who are harassed in broad daylight do in the absence of a specific sexual harassment law?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
As the noble Lord will know, we are introducing the online pilot, which will be a repository for people to come forward if they are concerned about any element of violence against women and girls. The noble Lord is absolutely right that people can be harassed in broad daylight. Harassers are completely blatant in what they do, and there are existing offences which can include and address sexual harassment. However, as I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, we will be looking at where there might be gaps in the law and how a specific offence for public sexual harassment could address them.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl) [V]
My Lords, can the Minister outline what preparatory work will take place to ensure that specialist work takes place in schools, workplaces, media and communities, on the harmful gender norms and stereotypes which underpin this violence against women and girls?
Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)
One of the things that is quite well established is the procedure for reporting sexual harassment in the workplace, notwithstanding what we were talking about earlier in terms of non-disclosure agreements, which can be used wrongly to suppress sexual harassment.
I think education has to be where it starts, because as a child you develop the values, social norms and morals that you keep for life. The DfE has updated its statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, for this September, which ensures that schools and colleges have even clearer guidance on how to deal with reports of sexual violence and sexual harassment, whether they occur inside or outside the school or college gates—or, indeed, online—and how to identify and take action to make sure that support is provided.