House of Lords
Special Educational Needs
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Addington
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review the effectiveness of the ‘education and healthcare plans’ process for identifying and delivering support to those with special educational needs.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, in begging leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, I remind the House of my declared interests.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, this Government acknowledge the struggles faced by children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and their families when trying to access the right support, particularly through a long and difficult EHCP process. We are currently working on plans to deliver our manifesto commitments to take a community-wide approach to special educational needs and disability. This work will improve inclusivity in mainstream schools and ensure that special schools cater to those with the most complex needs.
Lord Addington (LD)
I thank the Minister for that reply. Does she agree that the current system has, basically, failed completely? When can we get an assurance from the Government that they will manage to get to a situation where schools are identifying special educational needs, rather than concerned parents going to the school and asking them what the problem is? This is the situation at the moment, which favours the wealthy and informed parent throughout the system, right up to the plans.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I agree with the noble Lord. In fact, so does the National Audit Office, which published a report this morning, and so do members of the former Government, who have described it as a lose-lose system. That is exactly why we need to ensure that within our mainstream schools, and in our early years provision, where most children’s special educational needs can and should be identified, we have better support and training for the staff and more support for those children when their needs have been identified, short of having to go through the very arduous process of getting an education health and care plan, on which the noble Lord is absolutely right.
Lord Touhig (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the National Autistic Society. Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, has recently produced a report on waiting times to get a diagnosis for autism. She says:
“We have created a system … working against itself”.
Children need the diagnosis before they can get SEND provision and they have to wait up to five years, sometimes, for a diagnosis. Will my noble friend look at this and the report? In the meantime, children are getting no help and support at all. We have to change this.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend is absolutely right. That is why, as part of the 10-year plan for change and modernisation in the NHS, I am assured that there will be a focus on reducing the length of waiting times and improving the provision of autism services. The SEND Code of Practice is also clear that meeting the needs of a child with special educational needs and autism does not require a diagnostic label or a test. We expect schools and colleges to monitor the progress of all pupils and put support in place where needed. There has been some good work—for example, by the Autism Education Trust—to provide a range of training and support for staff on autism. However, it is clear that there is more we need to do, both to identify and then to support children and young people in this situation.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, what is the Government’s plan to have the right level of SENCO support throughout our education system? Similarly, what are the Government going to do in terms of access to clinicians and experts for the preparation of reports? It cannot continue to be a matter of those who can pay, paying, and those who cannot, sadly, having to wait and often ending up in an endless loop, never ending up getting the diagnosis and help they require.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Lord is right that in an education, health and care plan, the health element is also very important. As my noble friend identified, where there are delays in getting a diagnosis, that can also mean that children and young people are not getting the support that they need in schools or being identified for additional support within those schools, which is wrong. That is precisely why the Government are determined to make the long-term fundamental reform that will support inclusive mainstream schools for the early identification and support of children, and also ensure that where special schools are needed, there is a place in them for the most complex needs.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
At the end of their time at school, many of these people—who are now young adults—have ongoing educational needs to be addressed to allow them to integrate into society and find places of work. Are the Government planning to make sure that they look at continuity, so it does not just end at the age of 18—or whenever they leave—but that educational provision is included right up into their early 20s, to make sure that these children can eventually become well integrated into society and have a prosperous and fulfilling adult life?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right that as good practice for children and young people with special educational needs and disability, we need to prepare them for a healthy and productive adulthood. That is already clear in the SEND Code of Practice. For those with an education, health and care plan, there must be a focus from year 9 onwards on preparing the young person for adulthood, as part of their annual review. That also means that we need the expertise within our further education colleges and higher education as well, where students can receive specific support. This will make sure that the support is there available for them through the education system and onward into fruitful and satisfying employment.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, as I understand it, the situation for looked-after children—who, as we know, have a much higher proportion of EHCPs and SEND—is that, when they move from one area to another, the new local authority has to conduct a review of the EHCP. This causes further unnecessary delays. Can the Minister confirm that, as part of the review of current provision, this unnecessary duplication will be addressed?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate makes an important point about the experience of looked-after children, which I also discussed in an Oral Question earlier this week in response to the noble Lord, Lord Laming. We have to get to a system where there are fewer bureaucratic processes to enable children and young people to get the support that they need. The point about moving from authority to authority is very important, and I will certainly take it back to my colleagues in the department. This strikes me as an additional piece of bureaucracy. While it is obviously important that, in every context, children’s needs are properly understood—and that provision through an EHCP, for example, is properly put in place—that should not be a bureaucratic process that prevents children getting the support they need when they need it.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, can the Minister confirm whether the Government are committed to continuing the reforms that the previous Government set out in the SEND and AP plan to set national standards and to digitise the process, so that EHCPs are much clearer and speedier, removing a lot of stress for parents and their children?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The Government are committed to doing everything we can to ensure that the process of going through an education, health and care plan—even now, only 50% of parents get them within 20 weeks of applying for them—is made much easier. I am sure that there are ways that we can build on work from the previous Government to ensure that that happens. Fundamentally, the problem with the system, which we also inherited from the previous Government, is that too many parents feel the need to go through this arduous process alone, because they do not have the support in the rest of the school system and do not get identification early enough. That is what, more fundamentally, we need to put right, and that is what the Government are committed to doing.
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
In Wales, the additional learning needs framework was introduced in September 2021 to provide children with an independent development plan in place of the SEN statement. There is also a right to advocacy for children—an active offer of advocacy—provided by the National Youth Advocacy Service Cymru. Have the Government evaluated these initiatives, and would they help to alleviate the pressure in England? My grandson is being helped with special schooling and travel under just such a plan. Cardiff is truly an exemplar that all local authorities should follow.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am very pleased to hear that Labour-led Wales is providing a good service for the noble Lord’s grandchild. In the fundamental reform that we need to undertake, we will be very keen to learn from good experience, wherever it comes from. I will certainly ask officials in the department to look into the examples that the noble Lord highlighted.
EU Settlement Scheme
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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The Earl of Clancarty
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to further protect the rights of EU citizens living in the UK; and what improvements they intend to make to the EU Settlement Scheme.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
The Government take citizens’ rights very seriously. The EU settlement scheme has provided 5.7 million people with the immigration status they need to continue to live in the United Kingdom. Pre-settled status is extended automatically to ensure that people do not lose rights because of a failure to make a second application to the scheme. In future, we plan to start granting settled status automatically where we hold the data to do so.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, of a number of concerns that EU citizens living in the UK have, one that stands out is the lack of a physical back-up for immigration status. That is important not only for the vulnerable and digitally excluded. First, will the Government improve the implementation of the digital status so that it can sit with the status holder even when there is no internet connection, providing the physical back-up that the previous Government denied? This remains a concern, particularly with the move to e-visas. Secondly, will the Minister meet with parliamentarians and others, including the3million, to discuss ways forward for this and other concerns?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hope that I can assure the noble Earl that, if a request comes in, I will always meet with any parliamentarian to discuss issues in my area of responsibility. It may take time to sort, but I undertake that commitment. The simple answer to his first question is: yes, work is ongoing.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)
My Lords, on the settled status voting rights, will my noble friend the Minister look at how advice on voting rights on the Government’s website can be made much clearer? Will he also consider further steps, such as providing guidance to local authorities on the ways in which EU citizens with settled status can be better advised on their voting rights, so that we can increase voter participation and registration?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Elections Act 2022 preserved voting rights for individuals from the European Union who had settled status in the United Kingdom. They can vote and stand in elections in every way, with the exception of general elections, where they cannot vote or stand. This is a Cabinet Office responsibility, but I will ensure that the points made by my noble friend are brought to the attention of the Cabinet Office Minister. There is clarity on the Electoral Commission website to that effect, which gives the information that is required.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, the EU settlement scheme has generally been a success, but there are some problems with it, including those attracting legal action by the European Commission that raise the prospect of another Windrush. Will the new Government undertake an overall review of the scheme, including the impact assessment that has never been done of the denial of physical proof of residence rights and the imposition of digital-only status? That is to be extended throughout the visa system, but we have never had an impact assessment.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Government have been aware of both the court cases and the challenges that have taken place—that happened under the previous Government. We believe that we are now legally meeting the obligations of High Court judgments and of the status scheme that was implemented following the withdrawal agreement. However, obviously we keep that under review. We are also aware of the challenges mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on digitisation and we are working through to, I hope, meet our obligations to those citizens who have a right now to live, work and indeed in some cases vote in this United Kingdom.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
My Lords, the Minister will have discovered that, among his officials, one of the most efficient teams is that which deals with the EU settlement scheme. To what extent are the Government committed to retaining the status review unit, which we set up under the last Government to ensure that those who had obtained EU settled status by deception or had not otherwise met the requirements were dealt with in the appropriate way?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I hear what the noble Lord has said, and although that is not directly my responsibility within the Home Office, I will refer that to my colleague who works in the House of Commons and who has direct responsibility for this area. However, I hope I can reassure the noble Lord by saying that there have been 8.1 million applications to June of this year, 7.9 million applications have been concluded, and the overall refusal rate is only around 9%. Very often, those are for reasons which this House will accept: due to criminal records or criminal behaviour. So, I hope the scheme is working well. We need to monitor it, it will be ever-changing, and I will certainly take back the points that the noble Lord made.
Baroness Bull (CB)
My Lords, following on from the original Question, many people encounter problems with their digital status when trying to travel home to the UK in different time zones. There is a staffed helpline, but it operates only during working hours, so people are likely to get an AI-generated webchat response, which is not always helpful. Will the Government commit to providing a people-staffed helpline 24/7 to help people who are trying to return from different time zones?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes an important point. I cannot commit to that today, but it will form part of a review as to how we look at digitisation and ensure that the people who have the right to have settled status can exercise that right and understand it, have the appropriate paperwork and meet their obligations as well as ours. I fully sympathise with the noble Baroness on chatbots, which I find quite annoying.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, is my noble friend the Minister aware that a large number of Roma people came over here when we were in the European Union to escape a really inhospitable environment, who, largely through digital exclusion, have not been able to apply properly for settled status? In addition, there was some ambiguity about the need for the children of those Roma people to apply separately. Will he look into these problems and see whether they can be remedied?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Government take citizens’ rights extremely seriously, and we will continue to work constructively with both the EU and internally with those who represent those who wish to have citizens’ rights, to ensure that we meet the provisions of the withdrawal agreement and that they are properly implemented within the United Kingdom. I heard what my noble friend has said and I will take that back and reflect upon it.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, following on from the question from my noble friend Lord Murray, in some areas concerns have been raised about potential abuses within the EU settlement scheme, including the ability of those with criminal records to apply. What steps will the Government take to ensure that these loopholes will be closed and that we are able to keep our streets safe from foreign criminals with no right to be in the UK?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Earl for bringing that question forward. The first duty of the Home Office is to keep our citizens safe and to make sure that those who have criminal activity are punished by being sent to prison or, in this case, potentially by deportation. It is very important that we reflect on that. A large portion of the 9% of refusals are individuals who have a record of criminal behaviour and therefore have been refused under the settled status scheme. We will monitor that ongoing situation, and I assure the noble Earl that criminality has no place within the EU settled status scheme.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
We have plenty of time. We will have the noble Baroness first and then the noble Lord.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, the previous Government issued EU settlement scheme status to people yet later denied that they had any rights under the withdrawal agreement. Will my noble friend the Minister provide an assurance today that the Government will ensure that everyone with status under the EU settlement scheme is a beneficiary of the withdrawal agreement?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I can give my noble friend that assurance with a firm yes.
Lord Deben (Con)
Does the Minister accept that most of these people are not criminals, that they are welcome in this country and that the way we deal with them should show that people with whom we share culture, history and a great deal of common interest are welcomed, instead of sounding as if they are being pushed back?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I do not believe I have given the noble Lord, Lord Deben, that impression—I certainly hope not. Some 5.7 million people have been accepted under the scheme, and they are very welcome. They work among us in this city and in my area where I live, they live among us and their contribution is welcome. But we have to monitor the scheme to ensure its integrity, for the reasons that the noble Lord’s Opposition Front Bench indicated.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, when the Minister conducts the inquiry into the digital aspects of settled status and the aspects of possibly having either a plastic or hard copy, will he take account of the large amount of work done by your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee, which three times recommended that it should be possible for a plastic or hard copy to be made available, particularly given the problems of very elderly and infirm people?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for that contribution. I hope I have indicated that we are examining those issues, and he has certainly given me some weekend reading for the future.
UK-Scottish Government Relations
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
To ask His Majesty’s Government what meetings have taken place between UK Government Ministers and Scottish Government Ministers in the past month and what matters were discussed.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name, and in doing so I welcome my noble friend, who was born in Edinburgh and who is answering for the first time on behalf of the Government a Question on Scotland.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for his generous comments—let us hope I live up to them. The Government are committed to resetting relationships with the Scottish Government. Ministers across departments have been meeting to discuss a broad range of issues with their counterparts from the Scottish Government, and ministerial engagement is underpinned by regular engagement at official level. Intergovernmental relations are led from the top by the Prime Minister, who chaired the inaugural Council of the Nations and Regions on 11 October. The council will reconvene in the spring.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, that is a helpful Answer. However, the Minister knows that while justice is devolved, there is great concern here in the rest of the United Kingdom about the fact that Operation Branchform, which is dealing with serious matters of fraud, embezzlement and signature-copying, has now taken over three years. It is in no one’s interest that it should drag on and on. So, if Police Scotland asks us to provide specialist help from the National Crime Agency and the Serious Fraud Office, can we give it that help?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for his question. I am of course aware of the Police Scotland investigation into the Scottish National Party. However, it would not be appropriate for me to comment on an investigation that is ongoing, and operational decisions are a matter for Police Scotland. Of course, if it was to make such requests, I am sure that every agency would wish to assist.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
I welcome the noble Baroness to Questions. Can she please tell the House when Sue Gray will start work in her new role as envoy to the regions and nations?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
We are delighted that the Council of the Nations and Regions is now up and running and will be meeting again in the spring. Sue Gray has been appointed as the envoy but obviously, she had a busy two years while getting ready for ensuring that the Labour Party won the general election, so she is taking a holiday. She will be appointed in due course, and I will report to the House.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that the Scottish Government set up a review by the former chief executive of the Scottish Law Commission to look into the dual role of the Lord Advocate, first, as the head of the prosecution service in Scotland, and, secondly, as an adviser to the Scottish Government? If the review suggests that there should be a division of these responsibilities, which would require legislation in this Parliament, would His Majesty’s Government be willing to facilitate that, should the Scottish Parliament ask?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
We look forward to the outcome of the review and will respond in due course, in the usual manner.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
Was my noble friend the Minister excited and interested to learn that the SNP Scottish Government have, after considerable effort and research, managed to identify and officially classify 24 different genders? Do His Majesty’s Government have any intention of replicating that research?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I am always interested in what the SNP is doing in Scotland. At this point, I am not aware of any efforts by the UK Government to repeat that research.
Lord McInnes of Kilwinning (Con)
My Lords, in the debate on the humble Address, I asked the Minister about the future of the Prime Minister/First Ministers council in relation to the setting up of the new Council of the Nations and Regions. I did not receive a satisfactory answer. In opposition, the now Government’s position was that both councils would continue to exist. Is that still their position? When will the next meeting of the Prime Minister/First Ministers council take place?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The new Prime Minister met with the Scottish First Minister the first weekend after the general election. It was the Prime Minister’s first official meeting. We also have the Council of the Nations and Regions, which met only this month; it is an extraordinary thing and demonstrates devolution in action.
On future engagement, with the greatest of respect, I find it extraordinary that, although those meetings were agreed to in 2022, they did not happen under the previous Government in 2023, nor in the first six months of 2024. We are reviewing when that meeting will happen next but, for the moment, the Council of the Nations and Regions and the intergovernmental relations body will continue in parallel.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, the previous Government set up the system of quarterly reports on intergovernmental relations. The last of those reports was delivered in December last year, which is quite a lot more than a quarter ago. Is this system still in operation and if so, has it reverted to the Cabinet Office? It had moved from the Cabinet Office to what was then the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
We are re-establishing the scheme, and data is currently being compiled. I will have to get back to the noble Earl on whether it has reverted to the Cabinet Office.
Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)
My Lords, quite a few intergovernmental units have been set up recently. The Minister will of course be aware of the east-west council, which was set up under the Safeguarding the Union Command Paper earlier this year. One of those meetings has taken place. Do the Government value the east-west council and the bringing together of the devolved Administrations with Westminster? If so, how frequently will the east-west council meet?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for her question. She will be aware that we have a future Question on Safeguarding the Union, and that is when we will give a formal update. Of course we celebrate bringing together all the people who run the nations and regions of the United Kingdom—that is why the Council of the Nations and Regions was convened. It held its first meeting in Scotland, and the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland were present, as were the mayors and those who lead combined authorities. It is devolution in action, with everyone responsible for delivering for the people of the United Kingdom coming together to make sure that it works. I will get back to the noble Baroness about when the next meeting of the east-west council will follow.
Baroness Quin (Lab)
My Lords, a number of detailed government Bills with implications for people and citizens across the UK are being considered by both Houses at present. I am thinking of measures such as the water Bill, bearing in mind that waterways adjoin the different nations of the UK, such as the River Tweed, which adjoins Northumberland and Scotland. Can the Minister assure me that detailed measures concerning the practical decisions we need to take, in conjunction with the devolved authorities, are being considered in an orderly and detailed way?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for her question. Ensuring that consideration is given to the wider impact of legislation in this House and in the other place is fundamental. That is why Ministers have met their Scottish counterparts more than 20 times in the past month to discuss each part of our legislative agenda.
Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)
My Lords, one of the many successes of the Scotland Office under the previous Government was building deep relationships with the 32 local authorities in Scotland. Of course, that was greatly assisted by £3 billion of Treasury funding, whether it was the community ownership fund, the levelling up fund, the city deals or the towns fund. We know that it was successful because the 32 local authorities told me personally that they were having better interactions with the UK Government than they did with the Scottish Government, and that includes SNP-led councils. My friends in Argyll and Bute tell me they are concerned that the £70 million rural growth fund, which is a commitment, is on hold pending the upcoming Budget. Can the Minister confirm that this Government are committed to strengthening the union and to continuing funding, direct from the UK Treasury, the 32 local authorities in Scotland?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
This Government are of course committed to doing everything we can to secure the union. The Budget is only six days away, so the noble Lord will have to wait for an update on expenditure from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)
My Lords, the position of the Secretary of State for Scotland was introduced more than 100 years before the Scottish Parliament was established, and it has not been sufficiently considered since then. Are there any plans to review the role?
Lord Brownlow of Shurlock Row (Con)
My Lords, earlier on, the Minister may have misspoken in her answer to my noble friend Lord Sandhurst’s question. She said that Sue Gray had been appointed as an envoy and would be appointed as an envoy. Can the Minister confirm which is the case, and whether Sue Gray will be at the next meeting of the Council of the Nations and Regions?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I am sorry if I misled the House; that was not my intention. Sue Gray has been appointed. I am not sure of her start date—I am not in charge of HR for the Government.
Lord Dobbs (Con)
My Lords, is this a good moment to offer our thanks to and support for Sir Chris Hoy, a great Scotsman who has worn the union jack around his shoulders in so many places around the world for so many years? He has inspired an entire generation of young people, and he has brought joy to elderly people in their chairs—even on these red Benches. He now faces a new challenge, which he is doing with extraordinary courage. May we express our thanks for his inspiration, and hope that the inspiration and joy he has brought us will be returned to him in his way ahead?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My father has recently completed cancer treatment, and I am in awe of those who are experiencing exactly what Chris Hoy is experiencing. He is an inspiration, as members of the Royal Family have been in recent days, for everybody who faces an incredible uphill battle. I send my thoughts and prayers to him and his family at this very difficult time.
Red Sea: Houthi Attacks
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord West of Spithead
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to respond to Houthi attacks on global shipping passing through the Bab el-Mandeb straits and Southern Red Sea; and what recent advice has been given to UK flagged merchant ships travelling through that area.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, given that my noble friend is in uniform, I feel underdressed on this occasion.
My noble friend asks a serious Question. UK forces have participated in five joint operations with US forces against Houthi military facilities to degrade their ability to persist with their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. We continue to defend the freedom of navigation, safe passage and British lives at sea. We share with British shipping regular updates containing relevant security information, which support commercial decision-making.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
I thank my noble friend the Minister for her Answer. I am sure she shares my admiration for our ships that have been involved there in very difficult circumstances and the aircraft that have carried out the attacks.
Having one ship there means that we need three ships. If we put two ships there, we need six ships. This being Trafalgar week, I think of Nelson, who said he would die with “lack of frigates” engraved on his heart. He had 210 frigates in his Navy. Today we have six operational frigates in our Navy. For many years we have been warning that this is the state we would get to. Looking to the future, ships are being built but very slowly. Can the Government speed up the rate? For example, the Japanese build a large destroyer in three years. We take eight years to build a small frigate. Can the Government pursue this, to speed up the building rate and get a quicker drum beat?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, as my noble friend would expect, we are committed to making sure that our military, be that on air, land or sea, is adequately equipped and has everything it needs to do its important job. We currently spend around £54 billion on defence and are working hard to get to a point where we can meet our commitment to spending 2.5% on defence.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that it is beyond urgent to put global pressure on the parties in the Middle East to bring the conflict to an end, given the devastation, loss of life and instability, as in this case, that it has produced? What action are the Government taking?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The implication of that question is that somehow the behaviour of the Houthis regarding shipping is related to the instability and the war in Israel and Gaza. We do not accept that. The behaviour of the Houthis needs to stop. It is a threat to security and stability more widely in the Middle East. We do not accept the Houthis’ contention that their behaviour is in any way related to the situation in Israel, Lebanon or Gaza.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, just to add to that question, will the Minister look at the wider situation regarding the peace agreement in Yemen? Until there is more momentum behind the peace talks in Yemen, this problem in the Red Sea is not going to be solved.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Until the horrendous attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October, the peace process was progressing. An envoy was engaged, and it looked as if there may well be some progress. Sadly, that is not the situation that we are in at the moment. We will use every diplomatic lever that we can, in addition to the measures we are taking to defend shipping and prevent further attacks, to bring about stability and de-escalation.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
My Lords, one effect of the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea is the increase in maritime insurance premiums. London is a world leader in maritime insurance. What discussions are taking place with the maritime insurance industry to ensure that shipping is insurable?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Clearly, the cost of insurance has been impacted by the activities of the Houthis. We have seen much shipping diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, which takes much longer and is more expensive. We are concerned about this. London is host to the International Maritime Organization, so we play a leading role in international maritime security. We continue to monitor closely the implications of this activity on the cost to shipping, which is one of the reasons why the action we have taken has been so decisive. We will continue to work as hard as we possibly can, using whatever levers are available, to prevent this danger to life and to stability in the region.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, one of the things that affect the security of the Red Sea routes, as we have discussed before, is security in the Horn of Africa. With the current inability of Ukraine to export its grain to that region—it is now almost exclusively going to western Europe—Russia has seized the opportunity to back-fill the provision of that grain to the region and to use food as a political tool to spread its malign influence. What are the UK Government doing to counter Russia’s activities in this regard?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The behaviour of Russia in this instance, as in many others, is deplorable. This shows how interconnected many of these conflicts are, meaning that our response to these issues and the posture that we adopt need to be carefully calibrated so that we work very carefully, consistently and with some effect—although we want to achieve far more to make sure that aid can get into Yemen and that the people of Somalia and Ethiopia get the support they need. The activities of Iran and Russia have been devastating to the lives of many people living in those countries.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, I think we all wish to commend the professionalism of our Royal Navy personnel, so evident in this part of the world. In particular, HMS “Diamond” has been protecting shipping in the Red Sea. She called in a couple of weeks ago to refuel at Diego Garcia. Can the Minister confirm that the recent transfer of sovereignty of BIOT to Mauritius will not in any way obstruct the ability of the United Kingdom to protect UK-flagged merchant shipping in the region?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Absolutely. I am happy to provide that assurance, particularly since, as I am sure the noble Baroness is aware, the Houthis have made statements on wishing to extend their activities into the Indian Ocean. She is completely right to raise that, and I can provide the assurance she seeks.
Lord Turnberg (Lab)
My Lords, the Houthis have cast the United Kingdom as one of their enemies. People have been marching on the streets of Britain disgracefully supporting that. Will the UK Government proscribe the Houthis now?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We are doing everything we can to de-escalate the situation. We do not seek a conflict with the Houthis. We have had to take military action to respond to the threats to shipping, including to British vessels, and we will continue to do that as we need to. Everything we do is with the aim of de-escalation, not least because that is what the people of Yemen need. They are experiencing extreme hunger. We need to be able to keep getting the aid into the north of Yemen for the sake of those people.
Lord Geddes (Con)
My Lords, can UK-flagged merchant ships be armed if the owners, captain and crew agree?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Regarding decisions on maritime security, we have constant conversations with those responsible for shipping and give advice on security. We have not advised shipping to divert away from this route, but clearly those responsible are making decisions for themselves. We have seen a large number of vessels divert around the Cape of Good Hope, for obvious reasons.
Lord Sandhurst (Con)
I thought the question was about arming vessels, not the route they took. Can the Minister answer that, please?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The answer I provided may not be the one that noble Lords opposite wanted to hear but, none the less, it is my answer. We work closely with those who are responsible for maritime security and for shipping. I think that is what a responsible Government would do. That is as far as I will go today.
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Thursday 24th October 2024
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Climate Agenda
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Lilley
That this House takes note of the impact of His Majesty’s Government’s climate agenda on jobs, growth and prosperity.
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, it is a great and somewhat unexpected privilege to open this debate. I particularly look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead. It is fitting that her first contribution should be to this debate, since the net-zero commitment is very much her personal legacy. It also gives me a chance to thank her for what she and your Lordships may feel was a less wise part of her legacy, which was nominating me to this House.
It is hard to overstate how crucial cheap energy is for economic growth and prosperity. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1974 ended three decades of rapid growth in western economies. Energy price rises have invariably been followed by a slowdown in growth. On the other hand, thanks to shale oil and gas in America, that country has had cheaper energy and grown faster than other western economies, and China’s extraordinary growth has been fuelled by cheap coal.
Let me start with a few facts about climate change and the climate agenda impacts. First, Britain has reduced its territorial emissions of CO2 more than any other major economy and they are now back to the level they were in 1879. Secondly, Britain has more offshore wind power than any other country bar China, not to mention its onshore wind, solar and bio energy.
Thirdly, despite or because of this, British industry pays the highest electricity prices in Europe. They doubled in real terms over the two decades up to the start of the Ukraine war, even though real gas prices remained largely unchanged over that period.
Fourthly, we have already lost most of our aluminium industry and are losing our primary steel-making capacity and, with it, thousands of jobs. We are seeing the Grangemouth refinery turning into an import terminal and other British refineries under threat. We import an increasing proportion of energy-intensive goods, such as cement and bricks.
Fifthly, when our manufacturing industry moves abroad, it does not reduce global emissions at all—far from it. We now import many carbon-intensive products, so the reduction in Britain’s carbon footprint is only 36%, much less than the near halving of our reported territorial emissions.
Finally, the Government propose to accelerate the move to net zero regardless of cost, to prevent new North Sea exploration and instead import oil and gas, and to ignore or deny the impact this will have on our energy costs, growth and jobs.
This is an unusually significant debate because, as far as I can tell, it is the first time that Parliament has formally debated the impact on jobs, growth and prosperity of our decision to decarbonise our economy. Our failure to do so has been part of a collective institutional failure by Governments of all parties, both Houses of Parliament, the BBC, the Climate Change Committee and other public bodies to permit or promote an informed debate on the economic costs and benefits of net zero.
Costs were never discussed during the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, nor during the 90-minute debate committing us to net zero in 2019. It is extraordinary that we still have no official cost-benefit analysis of net zero, five years after embarking on the project.
Long ago, our national broadcaster formally decided not to give airtime to any views that might undermine public support for net zero. I discovered this when expressing doubts not about the science of global warming, which is rock solid, but about its scale and impact. The BBC published an apology “for giving voice to Peter Lilley”, removed the offending programme from the BBC iPlayer lest other people hear my voice, sent the producers on a re-education course and banished me from their studios on this issue ever since. Now my absence is no great loss to me or the nation, but our national broadcaster’s refusal to allow serious debate on the costs of the most expensive commitment since the welfare state is a travesty.
The most egregious failure has been that of the Climate Change Committee, which should have provided unbiased estimates of costs for public debate. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Deben will be able to explain why it has refused to do so. It even spent large sums of taxpayers’ money resisting a freedom of information request for details of its forecast that net zero would cost the nation 1% to 2% of GDP by 2050. Many assumed that this was the cost of getting to net zero but, actually, this is the cost we will face after 2050 once we have eliminated our emissions. The CCC has not calculated the cost of getting there; maybe its forecasting instrument is like one of those telescopes that can focus with great clarity on distant objects but renders anything near at hand a blurred and fuzzy image. There seems to be no other reason for not giving us the costs of getting to 2050.
The CCC’s reluctance to publish its workings was perhaps understandable given that it was so optimistic but, as it turns out, that is true of estimates produced by most public bodies. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith—the lead author of the Royal Society’s report on the cost of large-scale electricity storage—recently pointed out that all official estimates were grossly optimistic, and he was honest enough to include his own, by the Royal Society. It is sad that we do not have the information on which we can have an honest and informed debate.
True believers in net zero are reluctant to discuss its costs because they have convinced themselves that there are none. It will give us cheap energy and boost growth by creating new jobs in new industries, exporting clean technologies worldwide, making the world greener and ourselves richer. How wonderful if that were true. There is an old saying that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is not true. I hope that wind power, in particular, because we have lots of it, will one day be cheaper than fossil fuels, but it patently is not yet. If wind and solar are cheaper, why have our electricity prices doubled as they have replaced fossil fuels? If renewables are cheaper, why is our electricity more expensive than in other European countries, which have less than us? If renewables are cheaper, why do they need subsidy?
Apologists say that those are the costs of old technologies and that the costs are coming down. The first part is true, although it is a shame they did not tell us at the time. Dieter Helm has calculated that Britain wasted up to £100 billion by investing prematurely in immature technology, rather than waiting until it was cost effective.
The Secretary of State assured us last month that, on the basis of recent auctions, renewables are the cheapest form of power to build and operate. Unfortunately, that is simply not true. The latest auction price for offshore wind was £82 per megawatt hour in today’s money, whereas his own department’s figures—for reference, on page 24 of the Electricity Generation Costs 2023 document—put the cost to build and operate a new gas plant at less than £60 per megawatt hour. Does the Secretary of State repudiate his own departmental figures?
Moreover, this is only half the story, because the comparison is not like for like. Wind is intermittent, and Dieter Helm advised the Government that, to make a true comparison, the costs of wind should include the cost of back-up generators or storage. Electricity that is not there when you want it is less valuable than electricity that is.
My economics lecturer taught us this by the old fable of the two New York bakers. One advertised bagels at 50 cents each, the other opposite at a dollar. A customer went to the cheaper baker and asked for a bagel. “Sorry, we’re out of bagels”, he was told. So he went to the other store and asked if they had any bagels. When the shopkeeper gave him one and charged him a dollar, he protested, “But the shop opposite only charges 50 cents a bagel”. “Well, why didn’t you go there?” “I did, but he’s out of bagels just now”. To which the other shopkeeper replied, “When I’m out of bagels, I only charge 50 cents”. Wind may be as cheap as other things when it is available, but it is a lot more expensive when it is not.
Electricity when it is not there when you want it is less valuable electricity, so you need back-up gas plants or storage. Back-up gas plants are doubly expensive because they can operate only when the wind is not blowing and they in turn need carbon capture and storage, which, even if it can be made to work with gas-fired stations, which it has not yet, will add further costs—again doubly so, because it will operate only part-time.
The second leg of the too good to be true story is that if we plough ahead with decarbonising our economy supply, we will enrich ourselves by generating new export industries. The Industry Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, who pursued the Sue Gray route to the upper echelons of the Labour Party, was given a little section of his own in the Labour manifesto, in which he said that
“by accelerating the transition to clean, homegrown energy”
we will not only
“end the era of high energy bills”
but be
“helping ourselves and exporting our solutions worldwide. But if we choose to go slowly, others will provide the answers, and ultimately we’ll end up buying these solutions rather than selling them”.
Where has he been for the past 20 years? Far from choosing to go slowly, we have outpaced other countries, but we have had to buy the solutions from abroad. Imports of renewable technologies vastly exceed our exports. Foreign suppliers have finally begun to make wind vanes in this country and assemble generators here, which is welcome, but they are largely for our fields, and those companies are not going to make us an exporter. The only turbines we export are gas turbines, which we are phasing out and urging others to do likewise. The only area where we might take the lead in developing a new industry is small nuclear, which I persuaded the Energy and Climate Change Committee to back a decade ago. I hope this Government will give that project more welly than my Government did.
An honest appraisal of the cost of net zero will conclude that it is bound to be costly. That does not necessarily mean that we should abandon it. If the costs are less than the likely benefits to the world in reducing the impact of global warming, it is worth the world bearing those costs. Of course, Britain’s contribution to global emissions is very small—less than 1%—so our impact alone is negligible. I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution to that collective effort.
I know that many noble Lords believe that we should lead the world by going further and faster in that direction. I confess that I have always found the idea that we can lead the world somewhat hubristic—a hangover from our imperial past. So far, the big emitters —China, India and, in future, Africa and Latin America —have made it clear that they do not give a damn what we do. The one thing that we can be sure of is that if we impose such costs on our economy that we self-harm and reduce our emissions by exporting our industry abroad, other countries will take note, learn the lessons from our folly and make sure that they do not follow our lead.
I hope that we can now have an honest, frank, well-informed debate comparing the costs of action with the benefits of action. I am sure that will be a point that my bishop, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, will make in due course since, although we may not agree on this issue, we agree on the importance of honesty. We can have an honest debate only if it is well informed and if we stop trying to convince ourselves that fairy tales are true. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
I welcome this debate and look forward to the other speakers and the debate that will take place between them. In particular, I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead.
I will not pursue the specific points that were made in the introductory speech. I will use the limited time available to me to highlight some excellent and important work that has been undertaken on climate change by the actuarial profession. I declare my interest as a member of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries as entered in the register. Climate change is an issue to which actuaries are devoting increasing attention. What happens in the future is intrinsic to the work of actuaries, hence the risks inherent in climate change are an essential element in the work that we do. It is already built into our professional standards. We are, in an important sense, risk scientists, able to uncover uncomfortable possibilities involving the risks we face, to which mainstream debates struggle to give sufficient weight.
I do not have enough time to go through all the arguments, but I trust my noble friend the Minister will follow up the information and perhaps even organise a meeting at which they can be explored at greater length. In summary, work undertaken by the profession in the report it produced last year, The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios, identified that many of the models used to predict economic damage from the hothouse world we face have been too optimistic. Actuaries are saying that the models are not sufficiently accurate for us to place sufficient weight on them. They underestimate the rate at which the Earth is warming, hence carbon budgets based on those estimates are no longer applicable.
More recent work by the profession has identified how close we are to the risk of real problems and how they should be taken into account when making our decisions on policy. The key document here is the institute’s report from March this year, written in conjunction with Exeter University, Climate Scorpion—The Sting is in the Tail. The point made in the title is that the models currently used fail adequately to take into account what are called “tail risks”: the problems that appear towards the end of the period that is being assessed. The risky outcomes of climate change are those in the tail end of the models that are being used.
In short, the message is that we need to give greater weight in our assessment to worst-case scenarios. They need to be taken into account when making policy on climate change. This is essential, given our growing yet precarious lack of knowledge about extreme climate risk and, crucially, the range of tipping points that we face. For example, we have to treat the 1.5 degrees centigrade limit as a physical limit, not a political target. Too often the long-term impacts of climate change are described in terms of central estimates, when rule number one of risk assessment is to focus on the worst case. This subsequent note by actuaries makes it clear, first, that current energy policies are not sufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goals, that an overshoot of the 1.5 degrees centigrade threshold is now more likely than in the past, and that the rate of global warming was accelerating in 2023. In fact, the rate of acceleration was accelerating. We are going faster towards these tipping point risks.
Secondly, there are material risks associated with a failure to meet those goals, with the risk of triggering multiple climate tipping points and a potential tipping cascade. We must understand that a failure to meet the target does not mean that things will be a bit worse; we must take more seriously the fact that passing one of the tipping points will result in catastrophe.
I am therefore concerned about the Answer that my noble friend the Minister gave yesterday to the Written Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, referring to AMOC, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation; at school we may have referred to it as the Gulf Stream drift, but it is now AMOC. The collapse of AMOC undoubtedly presents existential—an overused word, but in this case it is meaningful—risks to food production and water availability. Saying “It’s okay so far, and there are a range of views” is not an adequate response to the risks that we face.
The actuarial profession is taking these risks seriously. There are reports by practitioners who understand the nature of risks and how to adapt policy to those risks. I hope the Government will accept the information they are being provided with and adapt their policies to reflect these new dangers.
Lord Browne of Madingley (CB)
My Lords, I refer the House to my interests as set out in the register, specifically my chairmanship of BeyondNetZero, of Carbonplace and of the board of Equatic, and my membership of the board of the Institute for Carbon Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. I also refer noble Lords to my co-chairmanship of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. I very much look forward to hearing the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, in this debate. Meanwhile, I will make four short points.
First, targeted investment in net zero will encourage rather than hinder economic growth, and for that reason it is worth pursuing. The market opportunities are sizeable and, importantly, the UK labour market possesses the relevant skills to grow climate-related activity at scale. We are fortunate to have world-class research scientists and academics at the cutting edge of climate and energy technologies. Structures such as the Faraday Institution, the UK’s flagship institute for electrochemical energy research and development, show what is possible when industry partners are involved, working together with the innovators on projects with real commercial potential. We probably have 50% of the technologies that we need to get to net zero, but we also have universities such as Cambridge that are awash with groups that have the potential to take discovery science, incubate it and prepare it for the commercial markets at the scale that we need not just in the UK but also in the world. There is a wealth of engineering and technical expertise among those who have spent decades working in my old industry, oil and gas, that can now be deployed in the wind, solar, nuclear and other energy sectors.
Secondly, the Government’s commitment to net zero must be reflected in consistent policy approaches. Whatever the rationale at the time, the previous Government’s announcement that they would delay banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by five years to 2035 was counterproductive. It sent mixed messages to investors, and electric vehicle supply chains were heavily damaged. Supply was disrupted and consumer confidence suffered. The new Government’s green energy mission, the establishment of Great British Energy and the convening of solar and wind task forces are all encouraging but they cannot simply be strong statements of intent; they must be accompanied by vehicles for focused delivery. For that, the private sector must be invited to the table and provided with incentives to invest and scale its operations even further.
This brings me to my third point: incentives and private sector investment. Incentives are the result of pricing externalities, something that we must tackle head on if we are to achieve the necessary climate correction. For example, the carbon released by one actor but affecting another must be priced and paid for. Incentives to release less carbon or to avoid emissions altogether then follow. Governments are well placed to introduce incentives of this kind or preferential tax regimes, but they must be accompanied by substantial levels of private investment if the national energy transition is to be delivered and the necessary climate technologies commercialised and, importantly, scaled. Governments can set the regulatory environment to encourage investment and in some cases they can lean in, providing incentives or concessionary finance, but they cannot be expected to deliver. The UK continues to lead the world as a wellspring of sustainable finance in the form of venture capital, private equity and large-scale institutional investors. The success of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States is a case in point.
Fourthly, we must now pick up the pace. The direction and quality of investment flow are eminently predictable if the surrounding conditions are known and controlled. This is the story of economic growth in all sectors, perhaps most notably in the extraction and burning of hydrocarbons over centuries past in this country. There is no reason to believe that it will not continue to be true in the story of our new energy and climate revolution. I am very optimistic, and progress is picking up, but the missing element is time. In my opinion we are approximately 25 years behind, so we must accelerate the rollout of incentives, financing and R&D breakthroughs. This country is well placed to do just that.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this important debate. I am looking forward very much to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady May, who I know will bring great insight and experience to your Lordships’ House. I declare my interest as president of the Rural Coalition.
We need to take climate change extremely seriously. I commend the previous Government, and indeed some of the plans of the present Administration, for the steps they have taken and are taking. I support the plea by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for open and transparent costs of net zero so that we can make informed choices; that seems fundamental to all that we do in every part of our work. Other noble Lords will be able to speak in a more informed way than I can about the positive impact that net zero can have on the economy, not least in terms of jobs in new and emerging sectors such as renewable energy. It will also offset the negative economic impacts that climate change brings with it, such as droughts, pollution and ill health.
I shall limit my comments to quite a focused area: the use of land and, in particular, working with our farmers. Farmers are acutely attuned to changes in weather and therefore to the impact of climate change. They do not have a choice; their whole livelihood depends on it. Some of the increasingly extreme weather that we have seen over recent years, with record windfall and subsequent flooding alongside periods of extreme heat, has hit farmers very hard. I outlined to your Lordships’ House a few weeks ago the devastation and economic costs dealt to farmers recently in the wake of extreme flooding. I remind the House that, last winter, parts of the UK experienced double the level of the monthly rainfall totals of the period that were experienced between 1991 and 2020.
Farmers, as stewards of so much of our land, are uniquely placed to play an important role in helping to achieve His Majesty’s Government’s climate change agenda through nature recovery, sustainable food production and clean energy supply. There is a real opportunity here to have our agricultural industry set a leading example of how economic growth, food security and new energy technologies can work together as a force for good in responding to the environmental challenges we face. I urge the Minister to ensure that farmers are treated as crucial partners in pursuing the climate change agenda; that they are listened to and supported as the burden of demands made on them continues to increase.
In one of the counties in which I am privileged to serve, Hertfordshire, we have some of the most innovative and forward-looking farmers in the whole world. They are right at the cutting edge of how we are going to face the challenges of food production, food security and net zero. What they are asking for, of course, is a level playing field in the international markets and, as any future trade agreements are brokered, their concern is that they should not be disadvantaged in any way. In light of the urgent need to safeguard our environment and to make the Government’s aims for food security, energy security and net zero a reality, the Government must provide a renewed and improved agricultural budget of at least £4 billion a year, which is what the NFU has been calling for, so that farmers can play their part in what is required.
British farmers already own or host about 70% of the UK’s total solar generation capacity, whether on the rooftops of farm buildings or in solar farms. Many food producers also host on-farm wind power. They have a clear role to play in the Government’s commitment to making the UK a clean energy superpower, but it is important that this is balanced with protecting the best agricultural land for food production. It was only a couple of years ago that we saw the invasion of Ukraine having an immediate impact on the cost of food and fertilisers. It was really impacting upon us, so food security is not some optional thing; it is absolutely fundamental to us as a nation.
While rooftop installations offer an ideal platform for renewables, I urge the Government to ensure that those, along with brownfield sites, are prioritised for mounting solar farms, rather than using the most productive agricultural land, which we must protect for our food production. I seek assurances from the Minister that he will do all he can on this front to ensure that these principles are enshrined in the forthcoming land use framework.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, I very much welcome my noble friend Lord Lilley’s speech and congratulate him on calling this debate, because climate change is a challenge that we need to face, especially those of us who believe in an open, free-market economy. We have to accept that, historically, our free and open economies have operated without properly acknowledging the external costs created by the energy that we were using, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said. We need to move to honest prices that fully reflect the costs of carbon emissions as part of a belief in a functioning market economy.
If we go through this process, we will end up with a system with enormous benefits: with greater security of supply, with much less exposure to the risks of volatile gas prices and indeed, in many cases, with lower operational costs, particularly for people driving motor vehicles. The costs of adjustment are indeed high. We absolutely need rigorous economic analysis of what those costs are and who bears them. At the Resolution Foundation—I declare an interest as president —we absolutely try to apply economic analysis to those costs.
I am delighted that this is a debate where we will be hearing the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead. One reason, of course, is that she took a lead in committing Britain to a net-zero target. But, if I may say so, there is a second reason as well: she also took a lead in focusing on the living standards of people who were just about managing—people who were struggling to make ends meet. She reminded us that concern about those living standards should be a cross-party issue and not the prerogative of any one party. This debate is an opportunity to combine our concern about the challenge of climate change with a recognition that the costs of adjustment must be borne fairly.
Some of these issues are most acute in the transport sector, which I would like to touch on in particular. This is not an area where we have made massive progress. Transport emissions of carbon dioxide are now greater than they were in 1990. The problem is getting worse, not better. In large part these emissions are associated with car use—over 80% of journeys are still taken by motor car—but it is also where the gains from successful adjustment are massive, with hundreds of billions of pounds of savings when we move to fundamentally lower-cost electric vehicles, powered by clean energy. At the moment, the cost of buying these vehicles is still too high while the benefits, once you have one, can be very low. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s plans are to improve the regime for electric vehicles.
For a start, if you are able to charge your electric vehicle at home—in a private driveway or whatever—the costs of charging are only half those faced by less affluent people who are having to charge their cars on the street. This gap in pricing is a major problem. We need to improve the planning regime, so that on-street charging becomes cheaper and quicker, and we need greater competition. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us what plans the Government have to narrow the gap between the costs of on-street and off-street charging, which is now very substantial.
We have historically been rewarding the purchase of electric cars with a very favourable tax regime. These benefits have largely gone to affluent people buying them. That is where innovation starts; they were initially very high cost and it was understandable that the driver of the change would come from the people who could afford expensive electric vehicles. But as the costs fall, will the Government accept that it is no longer necessary to have such expensive subsidies and rewards for the costs of buying an electric vehicle, and instead put more support into holding down the costs for people charging them?
Briefly, another area of transport where we face serious challenges is flying. The growth of emissions from jet flights means that we will soon be seeing them as the biggest single contributor to carbon emissions in the transport sector. There is another uncomfortable fact about the distribution of the costs of adjusting to climate change and the inability, at the moment, fully to cover those costs. It is very likely that the emissions simply from the jet travel of the most affluent 20% of people in this country will be greater than the total emissions incurred by the least affluent 20% from heating their houses, using transport and any other costs. Yet jet travel is an area where we are still not properly covering the costs of the carbon that we emit. Is that not an area for radical progress?
At the end of the day, I think we will end up with fantastic opportunities for Britain; the economic analysis is pretty compelling on this. This will be not because of fantasies about being world-leading, and certainly not by ignoring the economic costs, but by investing in technologies and our natural advantages, with wind and offshore power, tidal power and small modular reactors. We can then have a more efficient economy and a more equitable one as well.
Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, it is a huge privilege to be standing here in this place to make my maiden speech. In doing so, I refer your Lordships to my entry in the register of interests, in particular my chairmanship of the Aldersgate Group, a not-for-profit which deals with climate change and environment matters, and of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.
I stand here feeling the privilege of being in this place, but also with a sense of trepidation. People outside this House have said to me, “Don’t worry—you were a Member of Parliament for Maidenhead for 27 years. It’ll be all right. You’ll know what the ropes are—you’ll know the rules”, and I say, “No, this is a very different place”. When they ask how, I say, “Well, for a start, their Lordships normally speak only when they know what they’re talking about”. I will endeavour to follow that rule in my contributions in this place.
I thank all those who have welcomed me and eased my transition: the staff of the House, Black Rod and her staff, the doorkeepers, the clerks, the Lord Speaker’s office and the catering department, which provided a wonderful lunch after my introduction. I thank the security staff and others who have helped and guided me when they have found me wandering aimlessly along a corridor. I thank my two supporters on my introduction, my noble friends Lord True and Lady Evans of Bowes Park.
I also thank my mentor, my noble friend Lady Goldie. I hope she will not mind if I tell the story of the day of my introduction. I was standing in the Moses Room with my supporters, waiting to process into the Chamber, and my noble friend turned up with a very large envelope for me. My supporters indicated how generous it was of her to give me a gift. She said, “It’s the Companion to the Standing Orders to read during recess”. I have not yet been tested on it, but I thank my noble friend for the help and support she has given me, not just recently but over many years.
It is a great pleasure to be speaking in a debate on climate change. I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for initiating this debate but recognise that there may be some differences of opinion across the House on this issue. I view with deep concern the changes in our climate recently; 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Without action, we will see the frequency and severity of extreme weather events accelerating. The Amazon rainforest will become a carbon source, not a carbon sink. Some of those countries currently sitting around the Commonwealth Heads of Government table will simply cease to exist.
But I believe that there is good news and that we can reap economic benefit from dealing with climate change. The net zero review of 2023 indicated that dealing with the transition from fossil fuels to sustainability was the growth opportunity of the 21st century, estimating that we could see nearly half a million new green jobs here in the UK by 2030. McKinsey has estimated that dealing with providing goods and services for the global net-zero transition could bring £1 trillion to the UK economy by 2030.
I also believe there is a cost of inaction. As just one example, the Green Finance Institute has estimated that the degradation of our environment linked to climate could lead to a loss of 12% of our GDP. I also think that, if we look at this debate just as a matter of who has the biggest sterling figure on their side of the argument, we are missing something. There is a real human cost to climate change.
When extreme weather destroys homes and livelihoods, harvests fail and water supplies dry up, people are driven to destitution and desperation. In that destitution and desperation lies vulnerability, and particularly vulnerability to modern slavery and human trafficking. If the agriculture in a community fails year on year, parents are more likely to take the difficult, heartbreaking decision to let their sons and daughters move or be taken away to the promise of a better life—but in fact taken into slavery, forced into work from which they cannot escape, their freedom and human dignity cruelly taken from them. I believe that is an issue we simply cannot and must not ignore.
In looking at and dealing with climate change, I believe there is an economic benefit. It can bring jobs and prosperity, but it can also help us reduce vulnerability to modern slavery and human trafficking. I urge the Government and all across this House to recognise the need to deal with climate change to save our planet and to save our humanity.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to be the first to commend the moving and compelling speech of my noble friend, and my former Member of Parliament. How appropriate that it should be made on the subject of climate change where, as we have heard, my noble friend ensured her legacy by making the UK the first major economy to enshrine in law a net-zero carbon target. She also accelerated progress internationally, cementing our credentials as an ambitious and reliable climate change partner. My noble friend is particularly welcome in your Lordships’ House because, as Prime Minister, she responded to the Burns committee report by exercising restraint in new appointments, unlike the generosity of her immediate successor.
Our paths first crossed nearly 30 years ago when Maidenhead Conservatives were choosing a new candidate. My seat in London had been abolished, and I fancied my prospects in this newly created constituency. My family had lived in it for more than 200 years, my wife had been on the local council, my children had been to the local comprehensive and I was in the Cabinet. The selection committee threw me out in the first round and chose instead an unknown councillor from Merton.
My noble friend became a great local MP, dominating the pages of the Maidenhead Advertiser every Friday and surprising constituents between elections by knocking on their doors on a Saturday morning to ask what they thought of the train service to Paddington. She did that even when she was Prime Minister. No cause was too small to generate her support—literally, as she came to Cookham last year to celebrate the return of the water vole to the banks of the River Thames.
My noble friend was on the Front Bench from 2001, becoming the longest-serving Home Secretary for 60 years and then becoming leader and Prime Minister in 2016, without the necessity of asking party members—not the most reliable of electorates. She generously invited me to join her Administration and retained my services throughout, unlike her predecessor who sacked me not once but twice.
My noble friend led the country with patience at a time of maximum turbulence in her party at the other end, which treated her badly. In retrospect, Parliament should have backed her proposals on Brexit, as the country would have had a better deal than the one we ended up with.
Along with the net-zero commitments, my noble friend will be remembered for the Modern Slavery Act. She is pursuing that cause by leading the Global Commission on Modern Slavery & Human Trafficking, focusing on the impact of climate change on population movement.
Throughout her public life, my noble friend has demonstrated decency, integrity, courage and selflessness. Before we heard of the Nolan principles, she embodied them. In her book The Abuse of Power, she poses this question: “Does politics attract people who yearn for power, rather than for the opportunity to serve?”. For my noble friend, there is no shadow of doubt about the answer. We warmly welcome her to the House and look forward to her future contributions.
Turning to my noble friend Lord Lilley’s Motion, I will make just one point as I have used most of my available time. My noble friend invites us to take note of
“the impact of His Majesty’s Government’s climate agenda on jobs, growth and prosperity”,
but he is choosing his own criteria. Without pressing the analogy too closely, but just to make a point, what would have been the reaction of your Lordships if, 80 years ago in 1944, my noble friend had asked what was the impact on jobs, growth and prosperity of World War II? The answer then would have been that, while those issues were important, there was an overriding priority.
Of course, climate change is not about saving freedom and democracy, but the Prime Minister and others, including in this debate, have described it as an existential threat. It follows that taking steps to avoid that threat would push the criteria my noble friend has chosen down the agenda. To that extent, they are of course important but secondary. The primary question should be: how effective is the Government’s agenda in averting climate change?
My noble friend may not accept that there is an existential threat, and others will argue this case better than I can, but my view is that we are approaching a number of tipping points that would adversely affect the world in which we live, with consequences for the air we breathe, global warming, rising sea levels, droughts, mass migration and the rest. So, forced to choose between my noble friends Lord Lilley and Lady May, my noble friend Lady May once again has my vote.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing this important debate and for his insightful introduction. Climate change is real and a living reality for many across the globe. Indeed, for some small island nations, it remains an existential threat and it impacts growth and prosperity. In welcoming my noble friend Lady May to her place, I note that she brings incredible insights and a deep sense of devotion to public service, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Young. During her tenure as Prime Minister, she championed tackling climate change and was a powerful advocate of collective action on the world stage. To coin a phrase, we are all in it together.
My noble friend Lord Lilley talked of my noble friend’s decision to appoint him to this House. I assure my noble friend that, perhaps like others, we love hearing his voice. I agree with his call for transparency of costs for enabling those long-term decisions, both at home and internationally.
As far as appointments are concerned, I will take a moment to give my personal reflections in relation to my noble friend Lady May. The noble Lord, Lord Young, talked of her selection for Maidenhead. She left a vacancy in Merton and I followed in her shoes, minus the heels of course—although perhaps, standing at five feet six, I would have benefited greatly from them. Nevertheless, she was an advocate for localism, and it was an honour to follow her. Indeed, she introduced me to the Conservative Party and appointed me as Minister of State at the Foreign Office. That turned out to be a long-term decision.
When I was appointed to the Foreign Office, one of my early visits was to the Caribbean. I was at the Pacific Islands Forum in Australasia, in Fiji. Hurricanes hit the Caribbean, and there was a moment of trepidation. Very early on in my career at the Foreign Office, I needed to invoke that call to the boss, to alert the Prime Minister to what had happened in the Caribbean. My noble friend acted promptly and convened a COBRA meeting, and with others I was dispatched to the region. What I saw was nothing short of devastation—it was like a war scene. It instilled in me the need to tackle climate change collectively and the need for international action.
What I saw first hand was physical devastation and the economic impact on both independent nations as well as our overseas territories. In Antigua and Barbuda, the country’s entire GDP was wiped out by Mother Nature and the ravages of the hurricanes. It brought into focus the importance of climate finance, which I will focus on, and the need to update processes and dated bureaucratic procedures that hindered countries’ abilities, particularly those that had graduated to middle-income status. Through a single event, through no fault of their own, they saw their economic infrastructure wiped out. As I look towards the Minister, I hope the Government continue to advocate for reforms in these international structures. They need reform urgently. I hope the Government will champion the importance of small island developing states accessing funds. More pointedly, the issue of access must be addressed. Much work needs to be done on technical support for these countries.
As a country, we have already signed up to internationally agreed targets limiting our emissions, and we have delivered on these. But the UK has also stood up and committed to providing financial support to developing countries, in the form of international climate finance. In 2009, the UK, together with other developed countries, committed to providing $100 billion in climate finance annually by 2020, provided by both the public and private sectors. During the UN high-level week in 2019, I announced a commitment of £11.6 billion for the years 2021 to 2026 on behalf of the United Kingdom, in support of this international target. Yes, the UK was rightly recognised as an international leader on this important priority. Can the Minister please confirm that the Labour Government will continue to uphold our international commitments?
The previous Government committed to investing directly in both adaptation and mitigation. They committed to spend $3 billion on nature, which was a priority of the COP we hosted in Glasgow. The direct benefits are clear: when you travel around the globe, you see how climate change impacts and you see the results of taking action. When I visited Bangladesh, I saw that nature-based solutions, through the replanting of mangroves, have a major and powerful result, not just mitigating typhoons but saving lives. As my noble friend highlighted, such action saves livelihoods.
At COP 26, we introduced the Global Forest Finance Pledge, and I hope the Government will continue to champion this, particularly as CHOGM is convened this week with our Commonwealth family of nations. Therefore, I ask the Minister again: can he confirm that the Government remain committed to upholding existing commitments? I was somewhat puzzled—perhaps the Minister can clarify—by how the commitment that the previous Government made on climate finance can be squared with the Foreign Secretary’s recent statement that the ICF would be subject to a planned spending review.
The issue of the UK’s green finance strategy, where the private sector is being mobilised, is also an important priority. I hope the Government will continue to focus on the strong relationship and co-operation between Governments and the private sector, which we heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Browne. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, I remind the House of my declared interests, particularly as the former chairman of the Climate Change Committee. I particularly welcome the maiden speech of my noble friend. By talking about one nation and handing on to the next generation something better than we have ourselves received, she sums up why I am a conservative. Only when the Conservative Party follows those views are we actually conservative.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for producing this debate. He is a very old friend, so he will not mind me reminding him a bit about his past. When Margaret Thatcher was off in the United Nations pleading for international action against climate change, he was telling his colleagues in the Cabinet that he did not really accept the arguments about climate change or global warming—
Lord Lilley (Con)
That is completely untrue. The noble Lord is making it up.
Lord Deben (Con)
I remember the conversation. The noble Lord said, “I’m a statistician, and the statistics don’t prove this”. But it is perfectly true that he now believes it is rock solid, although he does not accept that, if it is, we have to do everything about it because it threatens us all. His speech could be made in any parliament in the whole world, saying, “Climate change is very serious, but not for us, because we’ve got to do this, that and the other. It’s rather bad for our economy, so we won’t do it”. Every country could say that. His is the “After you, Claude” policy: when other people do it, then we do it. That seems to me to be dishonourable—you cannot put that forward. If you believe in climate change and see it as an existential threat, you have to act.
I am proud of a cross-party attitude; all parties have supported this, although my noble friend Lord Lilley did not support the Climate Change Act. We have to realise that there is a difference between accepting the facts and being prepared to act on them. Action means that we do it ourselves first because, if we do not, as the Bishops’ Benches would accept, there is no point in asking people to do as you say.
And the effect of Britain doing it has been remarkable. If I look back to my first days as chairman of the Climate Change Committee, I have to say that I did not expect that we would ever get to the decision in Paris. Nor would I have expected from Boris Johnson, whose leadership was not my favoured one, the remarkable steps forward which we had at Glasgow. The result was that nations throughout the world have signed up to net zero and have begun to ratchet up what they are doing. That is why we have to get back the leadership we lost by doing entirely unacceptable things such as putting off the date by which we were going to have compulsory electric or equivalent cars. That meant that business, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, pointed out, did not in any way feel the conviction and the certainty that it needs.
Apart from being a Minister for 16 years, I have been a businessman all my life and I know perfectly well that the most important thing in business is to find out the certainties, and the certainties are clear: that climate change will get worse every year and the cost of not doing something about it gets worse every year. The Climate Change Committee has produced a detailed statement about how much it will cost: it will be something around 1% of our gross national product every year. But that is only if we do it—of course, it builds up. If you do not do it, it costs you more and more. The cost of inaction is huge and it is already true.
Because people—who shall be nameless—pressed Mr Cameron, now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, as Prime Minister, he rowed back on what was called the “green rubbish”. What did he do? It meant that every family in Britain has had to spend at least £1,000 more because we have not moved fast enough into renewable energy. I do get fed up with people who cherry-pick the facts; the facts are quite simple. The basic cost of gas today is £83 per megawatt hour; onshore and solar have just been agreed at £68 per megawatt hour and offshore at £80 per megawatt hour, so already it is clearly lower, and that is with gas not at its highest price. Do we really want to be in the hands of the volatility of the gas price? Do we want to be in the hands of some of the nastiest regimes in the world, or do we want to have our own energy source at a lower price and at a cost we can afford? The figures are all there. The Climate Change Committee has done it year after year, but I have not noticed my noble friend Lord Lilley present at any of the presentations or discussions. So I merely say to him that he should read the documents again and accept that he is on one side and that science, the Church and the Climate Change Committee are on the other.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing today’s debate and for his strong support for economic rationality in this area over the years since he voted against the Climate Change Act in 2008.
I draw noble Lords’ attention to my statement of interests in the register: I am a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It is one of the few organisations that tries to keep the debate alive on this issue, so it is very good that we have today’s debate.
Today’s debate is a very good sign; I think the net zero consensus is beginning to crumble. In my view, we are not in a climate emergency. Climate change is a challenge we can meet; it is not one that requires us to upend our entire economy and way of life.
This debate is supposed to be about the economy and I want to focus on that. For too long, many people have claimed that net zero is good for growth and prosperity, and we have heard that today. I am sorry, but I believe this is nonsense and I am going to show why.
One reason why I am confident that our current approach is harmful is that it requires many normally sensible people, and perhaps some who are not quite so sensible, to believe in a whole series of economic fallacies for the policy to work. I shall briefly set out some of them. The first is the broken window fallacy. We are supposed to believe the Skidmore report that net zero will make us richer. Of course, spending trillions of pounds on a new energy system has some economic spin-offs and it does get you an asset, just like repairing a broken window funds the glazier and gets you a window back—but your wealth is just the same. In fact, what we are doing today is creating a reduction in wealth: the new asset is worse than the old one. The replacement of the current grid with rickety and expensive renewables is not an improvement; it is a massive reduction in productive capacity—malinvestment of the worst kind. Just think of all the genuinely productive projects that could be funded with the trillions that we are going to spend over the years and how much real wealth could have been created.
The second fallacy is that it is all going to be all right on the night. This is a belief that one day we will just solve the problems—that we will solve the storage problem with hydrogen, hydro, batteries or whatever. It is the view that interconnectors will always work well, that they will never export when they are supposed to import, and that those to whom we are connected will never think their interests come first. I learned from the vaccines saga and France’s threats to Jersey in 2021 that we cannot rely even on our closest friends when the chips are down. This policy is making us deeply insecure.
The third fallacy is that of self-deception, most obviously on prices and costs. In the real world, renewables are simply not getting cheaper and some are eye-wateringly expensive. The existing CfD-funded offshore wind farms have cost over £150 per megawatt hour in current prices this financial year so far. The new projects awarded in AR6 will cost more than £80 per megawatt hour, when, as my noble friend Lord Lilley pointed out, the market price is around £60. And those figures for renewables ignore the subsidy; they ignore the need for back-up and storage. A child can see, surely, that it is not cheaper to build a renewables grid, plus all the back-up, than just to build effective back-up and forget about the renewables.
The fourth fallacy is that jobs are a benefit, not a cost. Net zero proponents paint this glowing picture of hundreds of thousands of new, green jobs. But, if the energy system requires many more people than now, how is that making the country more productive? If you believe that, you must think that we could make ourselves wealthier by sending everyone back into the fields to work the land. We want the fewest and most highly productive jobs possible, like those we already have in the oil and gas industry—jobs which this Government are gradually extinguishing.
The fifth fallacy is that of the infinite availability of resources. In this world, in the net zero world, there is always lots of capital waiting to be used; we always have enough workers; there are no linkages or timing problems for proper sequencing; foreigners are always willing to lend to the UK; and UK consumers are always happy to save instead of consuming. Massive projects, such as insulating every home in the UK or doubling the capacity of the energy grid, can be undertaken apparently without any resource constraints or knock-on effects in the wider economy. To put it charitably, that is not a realistic depiction of the world in which we live.
Finally, there is the industrial policy fallacy. It is the view that the Government know best and that they can pick the technologies, the subsidies and the targets to get us to net zero: the ineffective boilers and heat pumps, the expensive EVs, the windmills—the technology that was last cutting edge in this country under Henry II. I think we can be confident that any project pursued in this way is going to be a drag on the economy; all economic theory tells us so.
I believe in the long-standing Conservative principles—seemingly so uncertainly held in much of my party nowadays—of economic freedom, decentralised decision-taking, incentives for entrepreneurs, and economic experimentation. Yet the net-zero approach that we have chosen is requiring us to junk all that in favour of greater control and restrictions, with Soviet-style production targets—policies that we believe are wrong in any area, except when it comes to net zero. I urge my colleagues on these Benches who support net zero to reflect that, if you are a Conservative and your policy forces you to implement socialism, just maybe it is a bad policy.
The truth is that all this can have only one consequence for the economy, which is to make it less productive and slower growing, as it increasingly is. The only way out is to unwind, invest in productive energy—gas and nuclear, and lots of it—stop picking winners and roll back the subsidies, letting the market decide. I would have more sympathy with net-zero proponents if, as some have been today, they were honest about this. If they said, “This is going to cost you, but we have to do it anyway”, at least it would focus minds and we could have a real debate about whether the ends justify the means and not the fantasy debate that we are currently in, where everything is for the best and everything will turn out right. On net zero, we need a bit more Hayek and a bit less Candide.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this debate, even if perhaps it has turned out somewhat differently from what he expected. It has been a rich and encouraging debate, but I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has been watching the same debate as the rest of us. We have seen not a crumbling but rather a strengthening of the wall of understanding and common sense, particularly among the majority opposition party on this side of the House.
I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, to your Lordships’ House, and to publicly offer thanks for her notably restrained resignation list, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, noted, offering the Green Party the seat that came to bring me into your Lordships’ House. I hope that she might encourage further moves in that direction from her new position in your Lordships’ House.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in introducing this, said that he wanted an honest and informed debate. I start by picking up a couple of the terms that he used, including “cheap energy”. Fossil fuel energy, as a number of noble Lords have outlined and as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, identified, has very considerable externalised costs. In fact, burning fossil fuels is costing us the earth. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, highlighted, looking at the risk of the ending of AMOC—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, often referred to as part of the Gulf Stream—giving Britain the climate of Scandinavia would be a considerable cost and could not be called a result of cheap energy.
I pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on the drop in territorial emissions in the UK. As the Climate Change Committee has highlighted, we should be counting our consumption emissions. When we look at those figures, those emissions are only 19% lower in 2021 than in 2001. They are the goods and services that we are using, and we are responsible for the emissions associated with them.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, I think that the criteria that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has used to judge climate change action are interesting: jobs, growth and prosperity. I shall focus briefly on each of those. On growth, I am going to differ from most of the speakers thus far. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We are, whether we like it or not, in a post-growth world, and it is not just me saying that—I point to the fact that the IMF has just been saying in the past week that we cannot have expectations of growth in future like the ones that we have had in the past. The pie of our economy cannot get bigger. What we have to do is to stop forcing some people to rely on crumbs and slice that pie up fairly. Who is benefiting from growth in an economy where, in the UK now, we have 4.3 million children growing up in poverty?
The second point is jobs. Everyone is saying that we need to create jobs. I remind the House that in one debate this week we were looking at the new funded childcare places. We need 36,000 more workers to provide those childcare places. We are short of 50,000 nurses and 100,000 care workers—and look at the immigration shortage list, which has chemical and biological scientists, bricklayers, stonemasons, tilers and retrofitters. These are the activities of the economy that we desperately need. What we need to do is to stop having jobs that trash our climate and environment and ensure that, in a just transition, those skills, and the energy, time and talents of those workers, go towards doing what we actually need to be done. That is a just transition.
Finally, I focus on prosperity. One dictionary definition gives it as
“the condition of being successful or thriving”.
We are a society in poor and declining health, and what the noble Lord identified as “cheap energy” is a significant contributor to that ill health. There is air pollution, for example. We can look at recent mapping from the EXPANSE project at the University of Utrecht. There are only a few areas in the north of Scotland that have pollution levels at or below World Health Organization-recommended levels. Those levels of air pollution are contributing to heart and lung disease, COPD, lung cancer, dementia, lower birthrate babies and asthma. We are not a prosperous society, we are an ill society, and the burning of fossil fuels is a significant contributor to that. Climate action is also action to improve health in our society.
The noble Lord, Lord Frost, questioned the insulating of homes. Having a warm, comfortable and affordable-to-heat home—a healthy home—is surely a foundation of life that our economy should provide to every single person. Let us not forget that the cleanest, greenest and cheapest energy that you can possibly have is the energy that you do not need to use.
I briefly mention childhood obesity, poor diet and our broken food system, based on fossil fuels. Our five year-olds now are shorter than they were a few years ago. The economy is not working for our people and it is not working in its own terms, so we cannot afford not to have a climate agenda—one that needs to be far bolder and more effective than what we have now. We should be looking for zero carbon by the early 2030s, because of the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the planetary boundaries that we are exceeding—but also for health and well-being and the prosperity of our nation. We need to ensure that we have well-paid and secure jobs in every role that actually needs doing. We need a climate agenda and a just transition for a society living within the physical limits of this planet.
There has been, and will be, a lot of talk about technological innovation. Of course we need that, but we also need social innovation—such as a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay; universal basic income; and free education. These are the social innovations that we need for climate action and for a prosperous society.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I welcome this debate, and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lilley on initiating it. I too welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead to these Benches and warmly congratulate her on her formidable maiden speech. We entered Parliament together in the other place in 1997, and I served under her leadership in the shadow team for environment, food and rural affairs, so I can vouch that she is well versed in the issues before us today.
Personally, I accept that climate change is real and that we are subject to increasing extreme weather events. I would argue, as my noble friend Lord Ahmad did, that we need a global approach to tackling it, and we need to find international solutions of not just one country acting on its own but to act together with the EU, the US and the BRICS countries, which we saw meeting this week—otherwise, progress will be slow, and it could serve potentially only to penalise our own industry and households. I welcome the reality check by the then Prime Minister, my right honourable friend Rishi Sunak, who in September 2023 undertook a more pragmatic approach.
I would like to speak in particular to the impact of the climate agenda on rural affairs, and I have to say that it is not altogether a positive one. Let me take some examples from the recent Climate Change Committee progress report to Parliament. First, the ending of production of any cars other than electric vehicles by 2030 will be extremely challenging for rural areas. There is a lack of charging points in rural areas, and there is also a lack of range. Apparently, we have gone from charge anxiety to range anxiety. If a car can go only 200 miles maximum, without any heating, radio, windscreen wipers or air conditioning in the summer, we rural dwellers—in either summer or winter—will be lucky if we can go 100 or 150 miles without having to charge again.
Secondly, on the commitment to renewable energy, such energy is often generated on land in the north of England or Scotland, or offshore and brought in to coastal areas. Yet the energy created is transported across rural and coastal areas—away from the very communities that could do with that electricity more than some others—through ugly, intrusive pylons and fed into the national grid. There is a very strong argument for ensuring that, whether it is offshore or onshore wind, the energy generated serves communities close to where it is generated, which is what generally happens in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries. As a result, those rural communities would be more inclined to support this type of rural energy going forward. I fear that if the Government persist with plans to criss-cross the country with even more overhead line transmission pylons, there will be a revolt. The earlier REVOLT—Rural England Versus Overhead Line Transmission—campaign, started by Professor O’Carroll in North Yorkshire, may be dormant but it will be revived if this persists.
Thirdly, the recommendations to ramp up tree planting and peatland restoration both sound like good ideas, but we should be aware that it takes 200 years to create a peat bog. Realistically, while we can bring about modest achievements such as the peat dams we created through the Slow the Flow project to prevent flooding in Pickering and North Yorkshire, it takes 200 years to create a peat bog from scratch. Tree planting in inappropriate areas can in fact be extremely damaging: it can create more floods, rather than prevent them. Also, I firmly believe that trees should not be planted on most fertile, productive farmland.
As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans set out, farmers have a key role to play in tackling climate change and achieving net zero. They have been the victims, particularly over the past 18 months, of the record rainfall taking large rafts of land out of production. My noble friend Lady May referred to 2023 being the hottest year on record; the last 18 months is the wettest period on record, particularly in England. Farmers would like to become more self-sufficient in energy production but, as I understand it, they are currently prevented from doing so by existing planning rules. The rules should be revisited to ensure that farmers can generate more of the energy they need, as other businesses are doing.
The rural economy provides the food we eat, and farmers are the powerhouse of rural communities. If we have learned anything from the current invasion and hostilities in Ukraine, it is that we need to boost our self-sufficiency in food, not least in fruit and vegetables, which is woeful: we are only 16% self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables. We also need to boost our food security. Food security and energy security are complementary and should go hand in hand.
The climate agenda should work just as well for rural areas as for urban ones. It should not undermine food production, jobs, growth and prosperity in rural communities, as it currently appears to do.
Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)
My Lords, I refer to my interests as listed in the register. My remarks today will not be about the expected extent of climate change; however fervently some may wish to introduce that, it is not the topic of this debate.
Let me quickly address the claims made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. I read the Climate Scorpion report that he based his remarks on. He may wish to read it more carefully. The “tail” that the report refers to is not, as I took him to say, what is expected to happen in the end; rather, it is the highly unlikely worst case. It is our old friend the precautionary principle rearing its ugly head again; it is time we stopped basing policy on the precautionary principle.
I welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead and congratulate her on making her maiden speech in this debate. Net zero was introduced in the waning days of her premiership, and since that Bill was passed—four years and four more Prime Ministers later—there has been no impact assessment of it. How can that be? One might wonder to what degree the impact is seen as unimportant, because net zero is a religion rather than a logical decision. Let us hope that that is not it. Microsoft and Amazon, of course, did their impact assessments, decided that renewables were for the birds and are purchasing nuclear power stations instead. We need a critically evaluated choice in which net zero’s impacts, particularly its cost, receive far closer consideration.
As my noble friend Lord Mackinlay, who is not in his place, has pointed out, in 2019 the Climate Change Committee estimated net zero’s cost at £50 billion a year—more than was claimed earlier in this debate—and quickly raised it to £70 billion. The OBR opined that the overall cost would be £1.4 trillion, which is £56 billion a year from now until 2050. That was five years ago, and we know how under-costed government projects always are. Depending upon your assumptions, different estimates increase from that £1.4 trillion up to £8 trillion or £9 trillion. At those sorts of sums, exactitude is by the by: such amounts will beggar the country regardless.
The Chancellor recently expressed alarm over a £20 billion pound black hole, but here we are talking of speculative expenditure going into the thousands of billions of pounds. You would expect us to have a pretty high level of certainty, therefore, that net zero was going to work. Do we? Not so much. Let us consider just a few of the many different ways in which our net-zero plan could fail. If the speculative net-zero carbon models prove overly pessimistic, the entire cost will have been wasted. If the rest of the world fails to follow us—that, let us face it, is pretty much what is happening—we will beggar ourselves while making the merest pinprick in atmospheric carbon levels. If we overload our grid because we do not overcome the formidable technical challenges of bringing solar and wind power from source to point of need, we will have brownouts, blackouts and a dangerously shrinking economy. If the controversially optimistic forecasts of the decline in the cost of mandated green products and wind power, and even in the number of windless days by 2050, fail to eventuate, the cost of net zero will dramatically and unaffordably escalate.
If, God forbid, we end up in, or near to, a war, and belatedly realise that our lack of heavy industry, of steel, of hydrocarbon feedstocks, imperils this nation, then net zero will be abandoned—although most likely too late for us to win that war. If there is a Europe-wide energy crisis, it will uncover our folly in relying on the trio of, first, renewables, secondly, one large, not-yet-working nuclear station and, thirdly, imported energy that, due to the crisis, suddenly becomes unavailable. Then, calls for a proper energy security policy will quickly lead to us dumping net zero. Any one of these could be enough to do for net zero, yet several are already what the situation is, with others lurking in the background. Probability theory tells us, therefore, that 2050 net zero will, in the end, never come to pass. Like some religiously motivated children’s crusade, it will never arrive at its intended destination, but there will be plenty of misery along the road.
Until such time as it is actually abandoned, net zero’s exorbitant cost and its overweening regulation will frustrate much human happiness, crowd out many useful innovations and, whatever ridiculous claims are made, lead to lower economic growth. Economic growth in our country is entirely possible, whatever is said. It comes from three things: leaner government, lower taxes and less regulation. Net zero is the opposite of each of those three. From the Financial Times to academia, the view is the same about green jobs, but talk of green jobs is nonsense. With net zero, the economy will grow more slowly, jobs will be fewer, innovation will be in so many ways frustrated and our nation will become less wealthy.
To conclude, sooner or later the net-zero programme will come to be seen as having been a tragic cul-de-sac. The longer we take to conclude that, the worse it will be for our economy. We owe it to our country to end this misguided, ultimately catastrophic programme as soon as possible.
Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)
My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Lilley on securing this debate. As he said, it is very useful and important that we have the debate and, because I do not want to be confrontational, I can tell him that the other day I actually agreed with him about Drax power station. We should work together to make sure that that “sustainable renewable” is exposed properly. I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet and, tendentiously in this debate, as the chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation, as my noble friend Lady May indicated.
I congratulate my noble friend Lady May on an excellent and inspirational speech. I have to warn her: she says she was told that this Chamber is different because people here speak only when they know what they are talking about. I am normally the exception to that rule, I have to say. I also have to say that this debate, in its good-natured Chamber way—as we do here, as opposed to at the other end—has been more confrontational than I have come across, I think, since I have been here. However, my noble friend was an excellent colleague. I came to the House of Commons a few months after her and left a few years before she did, but she was also my boss at No. 10 when I was the environment special adviser. As a couple of my noble friends here will not be pleased to hear, I helped to get the net-zero Act through. There were various other things that I think were a great success, including the Environment Act and what we did on plastic reduction. One of the reasons I mention waste plastic is that the important thing was to take the public with us and, by and large, we did, although Covid interrupted that a bit, with masks being thrown down and everything else.
The important thing about this debate is that I do not think I have heard anybody actually deny that there is a problem with the climate changing and the impact that that is having on the world and all the different aspects we have heard about. I think the problem is actually down to how much we want to contribute, or what not taking action will do for ourselves. A lot of these things are actually inconvenient for us, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said. Yes, it is inconvenient. I feel a little ashamed when my noble friend Lord Willetts mentions air travel, because I enjoy travelling around and I feel a bit of guilt about it.
I have seen some things happen as I have been around the world. As many noble Lords will know, I have a great interest in conservation and biodiversity around the world and I have seen the impact of climate change on biodiversity and on our natural world in stark relief. A few years ago, I was in Senegal. Our birds who come here to summer winter and feed in Senegal and the Sahel, and it is almost a desert now, so it is no wonder that they are disappearing and their numbers are going down. These are all things we have to consider.
I am talking about the impact around the world. My noble friend Lord Ahmad made reference to the small islands that are going to disappear and the things that can be done. Do we sit back in this country and say, “It is not going to affect us that much”? It is affecting us—we have seen that in the weather, the rainfall and what it is doing for farmers and everything else—but do we sit back and say, “Well, it is a bit inconvenient, but is it going to make a difference if we do something in this country?” It might not make a huge difference, except, as has been said, in giving an example to others. As we want to be good neighbours in our own homes and set a good example to others, whether it is just down our road, in our town or whatever, I think that is what we have to be doing in the world. We have to show that we can back up what we believe in.
I think we have to go out, and I encourage my noble friends who do not see eye to eye on this to have the debate, because we want to get people to understand what they are letting themselves in for. I can tell my noble friends that my children are intensely worried about what is happening, and I am worried about what world I am leaving my children. As my noble friend Lord Deben said, that is what I think. If I am going to stay on these Benches, which I aim to, it is that sort of Conservatism that I want to be part of.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall, and to echo what he said. I think it is the first time that young people have been mentioned in the Chamber. We all need to recognise where the public are on these issues, particularly people younger than ourselves—where not my children but my grandchildren are about their future—because much of what we are debating today involves the potential damage and potential prosperity not of our generation but of generations to come. I declare my interest as chair of Peers for the Planet.
I am going to be disciplined and not follow many of the assertions that have been made in this debate with which I disagree; I will try to argue my own case, but I think it is a bit rich to be told that we, who are on the side of the argument that recognises the existential challenge of climate change, as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said, and the category in which that danger and threat exist, are the ones who are subject to the fallacy that it will be all right on the night. We are the ones who actually recognise that something has to be done.
If you accept the facts of the severity of climate change, they logically take you on to look at what needs to be done and, of course, what it costs. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is absolutely right—we are talking about big numbers. But the numbers are not nearly as big as they would be if we did not do anything. That point was made 15 years ago by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, in his review, it was endorsed by the OBR and there is a publication today from the University of Cambridge talking about exactly those issues. There is a cost to inaction exactly as there is a cost to action.
Much of the debate has focused, from those on the other side—we are a divided House, in some ways, on this—on the idea that those of us who argue for action overestimate issues; we overestimate the dangers of climate change. If you overestimate the dangers of climate change, you do not have to do so much. I would simply refer them to every single scientific climate academy and meteorological organisation in the world to see the seriousness of what we face. I refer in particular to the proximity outlined recently by Professor Tim Lenton of the earth systems tipping points, such as the melting of the west Antarctic ice sheet or the melting of the carbon-rich permafrost. These could cause irreversible change and accelerate some of the most damaging impacts far beyond those we have already seen.
We should recognise that, alongside those apocalyptic tipping points, there are also positive social and economic ones, and we should not underestimate them. To quote Professor Lenton again,
“tipping points in favour of renewable energy and EVs”—
in some countries but not here, because we have not done it properly—
“are already underway that can help eliminate 37% of global emissions”.
His wider work on tipping points suggest that the global economy could move rapidly towards zero emissions by triggering a cascade of tipping points for zero-carbon solutions in sectors covering 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The cost of delay is serious. It is a cost because, rightly, we have to look at this country’s economic interests. It also means the cost of falling behind our rivals and those countries that have recognised what the future is: the States and those countries that have set strategic industrial targets and are seeing the benefits of that investment. For example, last year, clean energy represented 40% of China’s growth. We talk about China as the bad guy on emissions, but it is at the forefront of clean production and we should not go behind that.
The last thing we should not underestimate is the power of Government to unleash new economic opportunities by providing incentives and consistent policy frameworks that allow businesses to innovate and succeed, as my noble friend Lord Browne of Madingley said.
Nor should we underestimate how globally influential we can be in this area. As has been pointed out, we may only contribute to 1% of annual global emissions, but a third of global emissions worldwide come from countries with less than 1% of the total. Half of global emissions come from countries with less than 3% of the total. So our contribution does matter numerically, as does our leadership—our hard-won global standing—across business, science and technology.
I conclude by saying that I have always believed that this country’s contribution to fighting climate change will be measured not only in the quantity of the emissions we reduce but mainly in the quality of the leadership that we provide. I hope this Government will continue that leadership.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for giving us the opportunity of this debate and it was a great privilege to listen to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead. I note that she had the prescience, having started her life at sea level in Eastbourne, where I live, to move up to the hills of Maidenhead, thereby ensuring that, whatever happens with global warming, she will be okay.
One advantage of this place is that we listen to people we disagree with and very often we learn from them. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, and I disagreed with much of what he said, although I did agree with him on the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle and, indeed, actuaries have made a huge mess of our pensions system, resulting in a stock market with annual outflows rather than inflows, greatly weakening our economy. I very much hope this Government will do something about that. When I was the Lords spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture and BSE hit, the first reaction of the precautionary principle people was, “We must kill every cow in the country”. Fortunately, we took wider considerations into account—so one does learn from people one finds oneself in opposition to.
We are dealing with a science-based question. Science at its best is a retailer of truthful, beautiful, digestible stories, based on clear metrics, evidence for what works, a real interest in getting at the gaps in the evidence and constant evaluation. I think we are in much that position when it comes to climate change. There is a huge amount of work going in to trying to understand how our climate works. It is a very public body of work. I personally would like to see more red-teaming. I bristle when I hear about scientific consensus. Science is not about consensus; it is about disagreement and challenge. By and large, we have done a pretty good job on that. Where I think we have failed is on net zero. We have not produced the stories, the understanding—what my noble friend Lord Randall called “taking the public with us”. When even the national grid does not know what is expected of it in five years’ time, we are not being open about what lies in front of us—we are not taking people with us.
If we are going to make the best possible and best co-ordinated decisions, we need to really understand where we think we are going to get our power from and what its characteristics, price and availability will be. We are not dealing with little bits here; we are dealing with a whole system and economy and we need to understand how all the bits will work together. And this is not a story which will remain static. We are a long way away from 2050. How we think we are going to get there will change every year, but we need to be telling that story openly and I really hope that that is something the Government will set their mind to.
To pick on three smaller, more particular issues, one of the characteristics of net zero is that carbon will become really valuable. We will not have access to the fossil sources that we have relied on. If we are to run a chemical industry, produce jet fuel, or whatever it is we do, we need to find carbon where it is concentrated. We really ought to make an audit of where those carbon sources are, because a lot of what we now regard as waste will actually be a really valuable resource in 25 years’ time. We ought to build the systems to make access to that resource possible.
Secondly, nuclear clearly has some very good characteristics when it comes to powering those parts of the economy that need guaranteed, continuous power—a data centre is the obvious example, which is why Google has gone in that direction. I really hope that the Government, as they are with housing, will take a pair of shears to the regulations, which grew up over decades of excessive anxiety about the safety of nuclear, and look at giving us sites, chasing multiple technologies for modular nuclear reactors, and dealing with idiocies such as the prohibition on burning the nuclear waste at Sellafield. Why do we have to keep it when some varieties of modern nuclear reactor will use it as fuel?
Thirdly, let us look generally at where the technological pinch points are. What are we finding difficult that ought to be possible because it is allowed by the basic laws of science, but we cannot quite get there? Battery technology is an obvious example, but there are many others. We should make sure we put money into research, because if we can get an early lead there, it will turn into big industries.
The Earl of Leicester (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lilley for bringing forward this debate. It is astounding that it has never been had in Parliament until now. I refer the House to my interests in land in Norfolk as set out in the register—land upon which nearly every form of renewable energy other than wind has been developed.
I started installing all these green forms of energy in the late 20th century, nearly three decades ago. I have loved the journey and as a result have a reasonable idea, from a practitioner’s point of view, of what works. The first source of renewable energy we took was evacuated solar tubes for pre-warming water in shower blocks on our holiday park. Interestingly, it was the only one that was not subsidised. We decided to install them on economic grounds. On the Holkham estate, we are on target—at least aiming for, but pretty confident—to be net zero by 2035 and carbon negative by 2040, thanks in large part to a large number of trees, hedgerows, regen ag, and all the things we are trying to do for the right reasons to achieve that.
I remember when the coalition Government came in after the last Labour Government had apologised that they had spent all the money. David Cameron’s coalition demanded every department look for savings. One such thing that happened was that the feed-in tariff for solar power halved. The next day, somewhat miraculously, the cost of solar panels halved too. While I agree that it is necessary to kick-start all novel green energies, my example demonstrates that government is not necessarily the nimblest of bodies to administrate them.
Our new Labour Government have made clear to us their commitment to make the United Kingdom’s electricity supply carbon free by 2030. Despite my overall support for the transition towards a decarbonised future, I am becoming increasingly concerned about the speed of implementation of these policies. To put it bluntly, in less than three months it will be 2025. From that point onwards, the Government will have five years to radically transform the entire energy supply sector of our economy to be completely carbon free by 2030. Once again, I reiterate that I am a supporter of the transition to a greener future. However, I am also a realist. To believe that this transformation can occur in a mere five years, without having a crippling impact on various facets of our economy, is bordering on delusion.
It is a fact that when renewables are used to replace fossil fuels, the price of electricity goes up. Examples of this can be seen across other developed economies. For instance, the German Energiewende policy, designed to phase out fossil fuels and nuclear energy supplies, drove up electricity prices in Germany by 50% between 2006 and 2017. However, Germany’s phenomenal economic revival following the Second World War was based, in the main, on an unlimited supply of cheap energy, particularly on cheap gas from Russia. Recently, Germany has invested more than any other country in wind and solar power, but the current UK Government are convinced that we can do the same in a mere five years without similar kinds of economic effects.
In California, the home of US renewable power supplies, progressive policies such as these have increased prices at a rate which is five times faster than the rest of the United States. I wonder whether the Government have considered such case studies when formulating their decarbonisation targets. Can our economy, which is already under significant strain, afford for such additional pressures within the next five years?
I welcome the Government’s plan to increase wind and solar energy across the UK, but I am very wary of the threats an overreliance on these renewable energies could pose. As many Members of this House understand, wind and solar power are intermittent. This means that the energy they can harness is dependent on the strength of the wind or the level of sunlight on any given day. For now, this is not an issue, as the United Kingdom, along with many other nations, rests on the safety of a baseload of fossil fuel-powered electricity and nuclear. If the Government implement their decarbonisation targets, this baseload of gas energy may cease to exist.
One could rebuff my concerns around wind and solar power’s intermittent nature by claiming that there are ways to store excess electricity created when demand is less on very sunny or windy days. One of these methods is through pumped-storage hydroelectricity, a mechanism that is already in use across four sites in the UK. Despite the efficiency of this energy storage system, it can be installed only in mountainous areas with reservoirs high up them. Thus, it cannot serve as a grand-scale solution to this issue.
Another potential solution is of course batteries. In theory, this would provide a low-carbon solution to fill in for the intermittency issues of those renewable energy sources. However, once again, we have bad news. Researchers from MIT have shown that, for batteries to replace fossil fuels as baseload energy, battery storage costs would need to fall by 90%. I do not see how these changes can be feasible in such a short space of time.
Perhaps the lack of alternatives to fossil fuels as a baseload is why National Grid executives have been warning of potential blackouts in the south-east of England by 2028. Shifting away from this baseload of fossil fuels and gas, while ensuring that there is enough energy to keep the country running, will certainly require massive spending. If the Government’s decarbonisation targets are met by 2030, I am sure that it will come at an unbelievable financial cost. Does our economy have the capacity for such spending? I am no economist, but I do not think it does—at least not without pushing members of the public into deeper economic plight.
Finally, the Government’s policy of decarbonisation through deindustrialisation will have a direct, detrimental impact on our economy. The closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar just a month ago represented the closure of Britain’s final coal-fired power station. Similarly, plans were announced to shut down the Port Talbot coke-fuelled furnace, making 2,500 out of 4,000 workers unemployed at that steel-making plant. Actions such as these will no doubt be commonplace in the coming years if the Government continue to impose their policy to achieve net zero by 2030. Let us be clear: these actions will not move the dial on global carbon reduction.
Lord Strathcarron (Con)
My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing this debate. The main impact of the Government’s climate agenda is to import pollution and to export jobs, growth and prosperity, and the two are directly linked.
Turning first to importing pollution, since 1990 our share of CO2 emissions embedded in imports has risen from just over 10% to nearly 50%. The very fact that we import half our emissions should give us pause for thought, but, unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction. The decision to cease all new oil and gas licences can only mean that, in future, we will need to import even more oil and gas to make up for our own self-induced shortfalls.
Whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Even the Government’s own assessment suggests that, by 2040, the demand for natural gas will decrease by only 4%. This simply means that any domestic reduction in emissions will be made possible only by offshoring the production, and of course the jobs, to other countries. Furthermore, the imported fuels will need to be liquefied—itself a polluting process, alongside the emissions caused by shipping them here—and then there is further pollution from processing them after they have landed here.
While Ministers may be able to stand up at international conferences and proudly proclaim that our domestic emissions have reduced, these same policies have in fact only contributed to increasing global emissions. One might say that, as we produce only 1% of the world’s emissions, it does not really matter and that the gesture is more important than the reality. However, it is a mighty counterproductive gesture with a direct, negative impact on our standard of living and quality of life.
Turning to jobs, growth and prosperity, as has been well publicised, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, which is directly caused by artificially penalising industrial and domestic consumers with subsidies for renewable energy, carbon pricing and the extra infrastructure costs as a direct result of the policy. The OBR suggests that subsidies for renewables will add £12 billion to our bills for this year alone—and it will only get worse as we factor in future renewable subsidies and the £100 billion grid upgrade needed for decarbonisation.
To give an indication of the wishful thinking by net-zero advocates, in 2014 the current Secretary of State for Energy promised 1 million new green jobs. The outcome is somewhat less impressive. Since then, official government data shows an increase in employment in the low-carbon sector of just 40,000. Against this must be offset the manufacturing jobs we have already lost in other sectors. Moreover, there will surely be many more to come, not least in the steel and oil and gas sectors. We now have the worst of all worlds: high taxes to pay for job losses.
The other great beneficiary of all this wishful thinking is China. It is now the world leader in two seemingly contradictory energy policies: green energy, by securing the global supply and demand lines for lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind farm components; and brown energy, by building the equivalent of two coal-powered power stations a week. However, the Chinese famously take much a longer-term view of events than we do. They would agree that, due to recent advances in paleoclimate science, we know that over the last 400 million years the earth’s climate has been changing constantly and often dramatically. Relatively speaking, we are now in one of its cooler periods—the late Cenozoic ice age—meaning that we are at the tail-end of a 50-million-year cooling period.
On our own continent, even very recently we can see climate change in action. In Roman times, it was far warmer than it is now, followed by a brutal cold period in the Dark Ages. Then came the medieval warm period, when vines were growing even in Scotland. That was followed most recently by an especially cold period called the “little ice age”, the coldest period in the last 10,000 years. The statement we heard today that 2023 was the hottest year on record is quite simply not true—far from it.
This long-term view of the earth’s climate changes puts the whole net-zero delusion into a much greater perspective. It suggests that we are taxing and bankrupting ourselves domestically for absolutely minimal global benefit, if any. This whole worldview of climate change should be the subject of another debate, and a very fruitful one it would be too.
Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I rise to speak in the gap and apologise to your Lordships for having failed to get my name down in time. I start by declaring my interests and say that I shall endeavour to be crisp.
I believe that there is a real challenge from climate change and that, where one is facing a challenge, you have to do something about it. For the last six years or so I chaired a local enterprise partnership at the other end of England, which was established to address problems, to do and to catalyse things being done. We were a small organisation; we had a small budget and pretty small capacity. At about the time I took over as chair, there was a resurgence in general political awareness and interest in all the issues related to climate change. Needless to say, I and the rest of my board were bombarded by advice, ranging from eminent scientists through to cranks, mountebanks and chancers—sometimes it was not clear which was which.
What should we do? We were an organisation to do things, not to talk about things: the opposite of your Lordships’ Chamber today, where we have had a lot of talk—not that that is a bad thing, because you have to think before you act. But what should we do? I advised the board and it agreed that, within the general parameters of the relevant regulations, we should focus on what we thought would be most effective and bring the biggest bang for the buck we could. We focused on business decarbonisation and clean energy generation. I said, “Don’t worry too much about what they think in Whitehall; we’ll just get on and do it”. I believe that was the right approach, because you have to have policies that work and are sensible not merely in theory but in practice. Just as an aside, I suggest that another look at the EPC regulations against such a background would be a good plan.
It is important that we all recognise that action is necessary, and it must be considered action. As I thought about it, it struck me that perhaps the most effective response of all to climate change was one of the earliest ones. When Noah was told that the world was going to be flooded, he did not sit and wait; he cut down gopher trees and built an ark, and thereby saved the world.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger.
I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, on her excellent and moving maiden speech. I was chief of staff to the Deputy Prime Minister when the noble Baroness was the Home Secretary. It is fair to say that the DPM office and the Home Office did not always agree on things, and in fact the noble Baroness was a cause of some suspicion of me among my fellow advisers. One time we were all having a drink when somebody posed the question, “Who’s your favourite Conservative Cabinet Minister?”, and to the consternation of many I said it was the noble Baroness. This was quite shocking to them; I think the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, was generally the more favoured Conservative Cabinet Minister. I said it because, despite the policy differences we often had with the Home Office, I was always a great admirer. It was not just because, like the noble Baroness, I am a child of a vicarage but because politics never appeared to her to be a game, as it did to some people. It always seemed that she was serious about government and its role in serving the public; she never shied away from difficult problems and was always willing to confront and adapt to inconvenient truths. I know I was not alone; my noble friend Lady Featherstone, who was a junior Minister in the Home Office, was also a huge admirer. It is great to have the noble Baroness in this House. On this occasion we will agree; we may disagree in future.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, whom I congratulate on getting this debate, opened by saying how important it was to have an open and honest debate around the figures, and I entirely agree. One needs to be honest about the costs of net zero. But as the noble Baronesses, Lady May and Lady Hayman, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and many other noble Lords said, we have to be honest about the costs of inaction as well. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, spoke about cheap energy, but he did not say anything about the actual costs of that carbon energy—the external costs, which the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Madingley and Lord Willetts, referred to. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, talked, from his actuarial background, about the scale of risk and how we are probably underestimating, rather than overestimating, it.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, complained recently about carbon pricing as if carbon emissions do not have a cost. They have a severe cost. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, and the noble Baroness, Lady May, referred to small island states. The cost to them is utterly existential.
The noble Baroness, Lady May, also talked about what happens when agriculture fails as a result of climate change. She spoke movingly about how wide ranging the impacts can be, including on modern slavery. In my work around malnutrition and hunger, we see how climate is driving hunger, malnutrition and conflict. The costs are huge, not only to the people who are directly impacted; the costs will also come home to us in terms of migration, et cetera.
Earlier this week, or perhaps at the end of last week, Concern Worldwide (UK) published a report on the climate impacts on nutrition. It is not just that crops are failing; climate heating is having an impact on their nutritional value as well.
The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, spoke about the series of misery that we were going to impose by acting on net zero. Let me tell him this. Some 38 years ago I worked in a rural school in Zimbabwe. I am still in touch with many of the pupils I taught then, who are now somewhat older. They report the impacts of climate change as increased extreme weather events and drying rivers; they are unable to fill their fish ponds anymore. This is causing misery for people now—misery that is replicated all across the world.
It is coming home to roost here as well, because rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns are altering vector breeding habits and pathogen development. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases recently organised a visit to Ethiopia, which I was lucky to attend. We visited the Gelan health centre on the outskirts of Addis Ababa with the Global Fund. As many noble Lords will know, Addis Ababa is high up and is traditionally a non-malarial area. Well, at that health clinic on the outskirts of Addis, they were seeing the first evidence of transmission of malaria in that area as warming happens.
These mosquito-borne diseases are spreading with climate. Dengue has seen a thirtyfold increase in the past 50 years. There are more than 5 million cases globally and transmission has started across Europe, with local transmission now in Spain, France and Italy. I recently visited south-west France. When I returned, I went to give blood. They asked me, “Have you been abroad?”, and I said, “Only to France”. They asked where. I told them, “Somewhere near Cognac”, and they got out their maps. They said, “I’m sorry, you can’t give blood until after the quarantine period. That is now a tropical virus area”. It is expected that dengue will be transmitted locally in London by 2060. Think about the costs of those sorts of things to our economy.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said that India, China and Africa do not give a damn what we do regarding climate. That is absolutely untrue. I was recently in South Africa, talking to the Portfolio Committee on Electricity and Energy. We had been saying that we were going to issue licences for more oil and gas and then announced that we were opening another coal mine. The committee said, “Why on earth should we do any of the things that you say we should on net zero when you’re doing this?” Example is contagious—nothing is more contagious. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said in her excellent speech, the quality of the leadership we show is critical as well.
There are also huge economic opportunities from leadership. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, spoke about our sustainable green finance capability in the UK. We have a real opportunity to develop that. There are opportunities with energy efficiency in our homes—the savings that we could make for people on their household bills and the jobs that could be created. Look at what happened to household energy between 2010 and 2020. Household energy costs fell. Why? Because consumption fell. Why? Because the green levies were funding insulation and reductions in consumption. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, if we had continued with that, we would have made massive savings.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said that it was quite rich for those on this side of the argument to be accused of saying that it will be all right on the night. I fully agree with her. The noble Lords, Lord Lilley, Lord Frost and Lord Moynihan, and others, like to pose as the hard-headed realists in the face of starry-eyed idealists like me and others, I suppose. However, they are the fantasists. Because they do not like some of the things that we will need to do, some of which will be difficult, they pretend that this does not exist. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, says that he does not believe in the climate emergency. Well, I am afraid science does. We need to act—and act now—because, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, the longer we wait, the more it will cost.
Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for tabling this debate. I also welcome my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead to her place in this House and congratulate her on a first-class and compelling maiden speech.
Speaking on behalf of the Front Bench of His Majesty’s Opposition and having read the document, I begin by applauding the Government on their ambition in this area—the ambition to
“make Britain a clean energy superpower”.
This is something I think all sides of the House can agree on. I note that the energy mission is very specific and stated as being to cut bills, create jobs and deliver security with cheaper zero-carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero. This has been highlighted by my noble friend Lord Leicester. The practicality of this is an area that I should like to explore this afternoon.
To remind ourselves what we mean by net zero at 2050, we can say that today we power our economy by roughly 75% hydrocarbon and 25% renewable, and that our target by 2050 is to spin that on its head and make it 75% renewable and 25% hydrocarbon. We can all agree that it is a good target. What we are talking about today is how we get there and at what cost.
The first thing to say about net zero is that it does not mean zero hydrocarbon. Hydrocarbon is a very important part of our energy supply. We still have high-intensity industries in this country that we need to power. We have days when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. We have a baseload that we need to take care of. However, we have an opportunity to make our hydrocarbon the greenest in the world. The science and technology being deployed in the North Sea is extraordinary. There will be no flaring, there will be carbon capture and there will be the use of green hydrogen. The technology will allow us to have the greenest hydrocarbon fuels in the world, thereby not relying on bringing in dirty fuel from elsewhere.
We will surely end up with a balanced scorecard. Is that not the point of this? We will have 75% non-hydrocarbon, whether—pick a number—50% or 60% renewable and 15% or 25% nuclear. If we do this correctly, we will have a balanced scorecard, which will be to everybody’s benefit.
The philosophical question is: who are we to determine the mix? Should it be left to bottom-up forces to determine where the best solutions lie, as technologies emerge, or should it instead be imposed by top-down ideologies? My worry about the Government’s 2030 target is that it is artificially unrealistic and driven by ideology and politics rather than practical. If that is the case, what are the costs? Will this cost the British consumer on the journey that we feel sure we will achieve by 2050?
Why do I say that the Government’s ambitions are perhaps unrealistic? To take the calculation of leading analyst Cornwall Insight, if the renewables are principally solar, onshore and offshore wind, they will provide 44% of UK electricity by 2030. That is the date that the Government have in mind, but 67% is required to fully decarbonise the electricity system. These are two quite different numbers, and Cornwall Insight calculates that it would cost a whopping extra £48 billion, on top of the £18 billion already committed, to achieve that target by 2030. The British taxpayers will ultimately bear that cost, through a combination of higher consumer bills and higher taxes.
The first question I pose to the Minister is whether the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Treasury completed an impact assessment of this timetable and the 2030 target, including a sensitivity analysis that clearly takes account of energy pricing and capital cost volatility.
On energy transition, there was consensus in the House that we will go from 75% to 25% or the other way round. The worry is that we do not want to do this at the point of endangering jobs and prosperity. Take, for example, the impact on the North Sea oil and gas sector. This sector employs 220,000 people in the UK. These are highly technical and well-paid jobs, 93,000 of which are in Scotland. The windfall tax imposed by the previous Government, however reluctantly, at least had the merit of being temporary until 2025. It could be justified as preventing short-term profiteering after the Ukraine war. The current Government’s plan to increase that to 78% and extend it to 2029 will create a massive disincentive to investors in this sector, which remains important to our economy. This will be a barrier to growth. As one American investor said to me recently, “We now consider west Africa a more stable and appealing investment environment than the UK”.
Labour’s proposed ban on awarding any new North Sea oil and gas licences has already spooked producers. For example, the three owners of the Buchan field, 120 miles off the shore of Aberdeen, have already delayed by a year their planned start to oil production, until they have clarity on the Government’s intentions. Be aware that these gas licences are already in the pipeline. Approval was given many years ago and they are already baked into our net-zero plan for 2050. They are already baked into the green hydrocarbon fields, which will still allow us to have a quarter of our energy from that important source. Delays in this regard are not to the benefit of anyone, consumers or otherwise.
Just look at how the North Sea transition should work practically, rather than ideologically. The fact is that the biggest investors in renewables in the North Sea are the hydrocarbon companies, as they are reinvesting their profits in renewables. They hold the two key components for an orderly transition to net zero from oil, gas and renewables—capital and people.
I will give the House an example on capital. I had the privilege of sitting on the North Sea Transition Forum while I was a Scotland Office Minister. One of the investors in the North Sea said their target for capex in 2025 was going to be 50% in hydrocarbon, 50% in renewables to get a blended return on capital of 12.5%. Being a private equity guy, I asked, “What is your return on capital on renewables?”. After a short silence and a slight look at the floor, it emerged that return on capital is quite low, about 5%. If you do the maths at 50:50, you work out that the return on capital on hydrocarbon is 20% to get your blended 12.5%. That is market economics because wind and water are, on the face of it, relatively cheap to capture, and therefore they are not expensive things to generate and one has a lower return on capital, whereas hydrocarbon is more difficult, especially in the deeper fields in the North Sea, requires a lot more expense and therefore has a higher cost of capital. The point is that one is funding the other, and you cannot disconnect the two.
On the second thing around people, I had the privilege in that period of going to the offshore wind farm at Kincardine, off Aberdeenshire, which is the biggest in the UK. Fun fact: if you are doing media, take them on the boat to Kincardine wind farm. The journalist was so ill on the journey that he could not ask me any questions. What is notable about the sheer scale and size of these floating turbines is the technology and engineering required to power and maintain them. The skills that have been developed in the deep sea offshore oil industry are now being deployed to create our offshore wind farms overseas. That expertise is sought around the world. I did a couple of trade missions to Chile and Mozambique, two countries with large coastlines. UK expertise is required to help the world understand how to do offshore wind farms.
Hydrocarbon companies have the key components of capital and people. If we accelerate the transition just for ideological purposes—just to say at conferences that we have brought our target forward by five years—and along the way we reduce capital in the system and make skilled people redundant, I am afraid we will not get the transition we all want. There will be no transition at all; it certainly will not be a just transition. It will result in needless job losses and project cost inflation to the great detriment of British consumers and taxpayers. Offshore Energies UK thinks that trajectory of shutting down the North Sea too early will result in 42,000 job losses, 25% of this critical and well-paid sector. So my second question for the Minister is: have DESNZ and the Treasury done any impact assessment on the jobs and prosperity to come from this ideological early acceleration of the North Sea transition?
The issue—ideology versus being practical—is also driven by top-down targets imposed by Governments. Is that the right thing that we should be doing? If we look at a couple of examples, such as what is happening with electric vehicles at the moment, we have actually managed to reduce—oh, I am way over my time. I will leave that there.
In conclusion, my worry is that we need to be more practical in how we deliver the transition, and we also need to allow technologies to emerge. They will provide the answer to the question we are facing. We do not wish to become like a telecoms company in the 1990s installing infrastructure for phone boxes, landlines and fax machines. We need to be savvy and technologically aware.
The Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath) (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for instituting a very interesting debate and to all noble Lords who have spoken in it. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Offord, to what I think is his first speaking outing in his new position. I thank him for his service as a Minister and readily acknowledge that on the Horizon sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses issue he was very fair in the information and responses he gave to the House.
I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady May, on what I can describe only as a truly excellent maiden speech, which included her insights into the threats that climate change can bring and the risk to vulnerable people. I commend her record in relation to modern slavery, which has been very much recognised in our debates on these issues over the last few years. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Young, in saying that her sensitivity to the House of Lords when it came to the question of the balance of membership and appointments was highly regarded around the House.
We have had a really interesting debate. We have heard again from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who extended the argument that he started in our King’s Speech debate. Essentially, as he said then, he accepts that the science of global warming is rock solid but he is sceptical that tackling climate change and accelerating the move to net zero will lower energy bills and generate economic growth. I get his argument, but I think he would recognise that he had a mixed response even from his own Benches. I certainly warmed to the noble Lords, Lord Randall, Lord Willetts and Lord Ahmad. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, a former chair of the Climate Change Committee, put the case for urgent action.
It is noticeable that the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan, Lord Frost and Lord Strathcarron, and to a certain extent the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, came in firmly behind the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. The noble Lord, Lord Offord, while praising our ambitions, posed challenges over the 2030 target. I sense, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, suggested, that some of the political consensus on net zero may be breaking down. That would be a great pity. It would be a pity if the Conservative Party under its new leadership retreated on net zero. To pick up the point about the need to take the public with us and to paint them a picture of where we are trying to get to on net zero, a lack of political consensus would make it much harder to get that over to the public, whose support we need for what are often going to be very challenging policies. There is no point running away from that. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, is right: the last Prime Minister relaxing the electric vehicles target had a really damaging impact on the sector and public confidence. My worry is that the Conservative Party as a whole seems to be retreating from its ambitions. With due acknowledgement to St Augustine, the Conservatives seem to be saying, “Oh Lord, deliver us from climate change, but not just yet”.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman—whose leadership of Peers for the Planet I readily acknowledge and applaud—put it, the 2030 target is not a notional political game. The fact is that we cannot afford to slow down; we have to speed up. Despite the comments by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, on climate change we know that human activity has already resulted in warming of around 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We are seeing the impact already. This is no longer a theoretical construct for the future; it is happening now, here and globally. As the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, in some developing countries the impact is having a huge consequence on individual vulnerable people already.
The paper circulated before this debate by Peers for the Planet and Exeter University quotes a number of people including Professor Penny Endersby, chief exec of the Met Office, who should know a thing or two about this. She says that if we do not limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we will see
“many more weather and climate extremes”,
resulting in
“loss of food, water and energy security, leading to increased global conflict”.
The other point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, is that the spread of disease cannot be confined to those vulnerable developing countries. In the end, we will suffer the impact as well.
The comment by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, about the threat to small islands was very well taken. I also noted his comment about climate finance and the need to support developing countries. I can confirm to him that we are resolutely committed to upholding previously agreed international commitments, such as the global forest finance pledge. He will of course understand that we are approaching crucial discussions at Baku in the next COP meeting.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, was a mite critical of the Committee on Climate Change. I thought that his noble friend answered that pretty robustly as well, but the Government respect the work of the committee. We rely on its independence to provide us with robust advice, which I believe it has done. The robustness of its research and evidence has been first rate. The committee was critical of the previous Government because of the inconsistent messages they gave on net zero, with the cancellations, delays and exemptions to certain practices undermining confidence. The committee has said to us that we are currently off track to hit the 2030 target of a 68% reduction in emissions compared with 1990 levels and that we have to move “fast”. It said:
“Action is needed across all sectors of the economy, with low-carbon technologies … the norm”.
I suppose that is one of my responses to the noble Lord, Lord Offord. That is why we have to move so quickly.
So what we have done? The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked how effective the Government’s approach is and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, discussed the power of government. In a sense, the philosophical question that the noble Lord posed was about whether this should be bottom up or led by the Government. I think that, on climate change, the challenge is so tough that government really have to take a lead.
This is what we have done in the last few weeks. We have got rid of the ban on onshore wind; consented a number of large solar farms; launched GB Energy to leverage in private sector investment; and reached a partnership deal between GB Energy and the Crown Estate to encourage yet more offshore wind development. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that we have also signalled our support for nuclear power as the essential baseload of our electricity generation. We had a very successful auction round, which delivered a record number of new clean energy projects. We have announced funding for carbon capture utilisation and storage projects, which are very important for the industrial processes of the future. We have set up an office for clean energy jobs, because of the whole discussion about the skills agenda, and published an industrial strategy to support key growth-driven sectors, including clean energy.
Unlike some members of the party opposite, we actually believe in an industrial strategy. It is not a question so much of government picking winners as of trying to support, as much as we can, from the centre, those sectors that clearly have great potential to grow and to export. The central argument is that investing in clean energy at speed and scale can help tackle the climate crisis. We can create good-quality jobs, drive investment, protect bill payers in the long term and, crucially, ensure energy security.
On the question of why the UK should be taking the lead, my answer is: why on earth not? The noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, were so right. We have a strong vested interest in the world achieving net zero as soon as possible and we can have a pivotal role in persuading other countries to follow our example.
The question of costs and economic growth was focused on by the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan, Lord Lilley, and the noble Earl, Lord Leicester. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, referred to Dieter Helm’s review for the previous Government. I have now had a look at least at the summary of the report, in light of his King’s Speech remarks. What is noticeable is that the previous Government ducked it when they had the results of the review. They then conducted what they called a “listening exercise”, and we all know why Governments do listening exercises—because they have received a report they did not like. As far as I know, the previous Government are still listening, because it was never brought to a conclusion. I suspect that means that this is not a simple area of cost comparisons.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is critical of the use of levelised costs to get a fair comparison—he said that, too, in the King’s Speech debate—but it does attempt to compare the costs of different generating technologies over different timescales: essentially, over the lifetime of the generator.
The noble Earl, Lord Leicester, asked: can we afford the transition to net zero? An assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2021 concluded, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, surmised, that the
“costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
My noble friend Lord Davies was critical of an Answer I gave to a Written Question yesterday on AMOC. He is concerned that the risk assessment of the actuarial profession is not fully recognised. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, also referred to this. I say to him that that Answer came after very considered advice, but of course I will take away his comments. I take his point about actuaries: who could doubt the importance of actuaries in forecasting the future? But even they do not always get it right.
There is the question of course of whether in our drive to net zero we are impacting our own industries and importing more from abroad. Of course, I do take that and I accept that we will never be a leading manufacturer in all renewable technologies. However, we can assemble, and we are now assembling, many of those imports, so a lot of the value comes to British companies and workers. We also have many opportunities to export our skills as well. For instance, the noble Lord, Lord Browne, referred to our world-leading R&D capability, which is capable of export in many ways too.
There are areas of technology where we have a great opportunity to export. I cannot go into the details of, for instance, the assessment by Great British Nuclear of the small modular reactor technologies at the moment, but British companies are involved in development. It is just worth noting that Rolls-Royce has a contract with Czechia to produce a fleet of nuclear reactors in that country. There are many other opportunities as well.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, spoke about the issue of green jobs. We reckon that around 640,000 people are employed in green jobs in the UK. That is a rise of 20% even from 2020 to 2022, which I would have thought those in the party opposite would wish to acknowledge; it happened under their stewardship. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, suggested that we wanted the fewest, highly productive jobs, and I agree with him. But these jobs are often very high-quality jobs in a growing sector and are very well paid. We surely need to embrace that. One of the issues we face is that, in many of those sectors, there may now be a shortage of people coming forward. We need to work very hard to make sure we have enough people who can contribute in those sectors.
I have responsibility for the nuclear industry in my department. We have a target; we need 40,000 more people in that sector by 2030. The national nuclear skills council projects that, by the 2040s, we will need well over 100,000 people. That is a huge opportunity for really high-quality skilled jobs. They can be at apprentice level, graduate level or, indeed, PhD level. It is an industry which, like many other low-carbon industries, really has a future.
The noble Lords, Lord Offord and Lord Strathcarron, were critical of our approach to oil and gas, specifically oil and gas production in the North Sea. North Sea oil and gas production will be with us for many years to come and we will need oil and gas for many years, but as the noble Lord, Lord Offord, knows, the UK continental shelf is described as a super-mature basin. Since 2000, its production has gone down by about 7% to 8% per year on average. The key challenge for us is to maintain that field, because of its strategic importance, but to allow it to transition as we change the energy structure. I totally agree with the noble Lord about the people working there and their skills. He is right that many of them have transferred to the offshore wind sector. I believe they can transition to other skilled jobs as well.
I was asked a number of questions about the externality of carbon emissions. The UK prices emissions in the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, but I will write to noble Lords with some of the details of that.
Are we confident about private sector investment? Yes—all the indicators we have show that many private sector companies want to invest in this new agenda.
Many other points were raised. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, that I asked my officials for quick advice on using the ark, but answer came there none. I have already referred to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on nuclear. On his point about data centres and advanced nuclear reactors, we have recently seen some exciting developments in the US. It would be good to see similar developments here, and we clearly need a much more flexible siting policy to allow that to happen. We are working on that. I have met a number of companies that are very interested in investing in AMRs, linked to either data centres or industrial centres. They have told me that they do not need any government money, but we will see.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, made some telling interventions on rural issues. I take their point about farmers, food security and the need to embrace them in this agenda. We worked with the NFU on that when I was a Defra Minister many years ago, and we clearly need to carry on doing so.
The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in particular, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, raised electric vehicles. We had a debate on this last week, and the points raised there are being taken forward by the Department for Transport. If the noble Lord and the noble Baroness read Hansard, they will see that their points on issues in rural areas and on the differential in charging were very much picked up.
I of course understand the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, about the grid. No one really likes grid pylons but we have to do something about the grid network—we have to invest in it. I take her point about local incentives. I recently went to Biggleswade solar farm in Bedfordshire, where the company makes a contribution to local community projects each year—churches and things like that—which goes down well. We are looking at that issue.
This has been an excellent debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for his willingness to raise sometimes challenging issues. We believe we are delivering on our manifesto commitment. We need decisive action on both climate change and energy security. We will have a big positive impact on jobs and prosperity. We must press on and we will.
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who has made fantastic contributions to this excellent debate. I pay particular tribute to the Government spokesman, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, whom we have just heard. His response to everybody and everything that was said was one of the most fair-minded and constructive that I have heard, not least in fairly representing what I was trying to say—though I am not accusing him of agreeing with me.
I want also to congratulate my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead on an outstanding maiden speech. It was noteless; it was witty; it was compassionate. We are aware, obviously, of her other great legacy on modern slavery. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, reminded us of her concern for the just about managing in our own country, and she emphasised her concern for the poorest, who are the greatest victims of climate disasters—when you are hit by a flood, it does not matter to you whether they are more frequent than floods in the past; they are still a disaster. But the reason the poor are vulnerable is that they are poor, and the reason that they are poor is that they do not have the access to cheap energy that makes us rich. If we deprive them of access to cheap and affordable energy they will remain poorer for longer. Even if we in this country think that we can afford excessively high energy costs, we should not try to impose them on the poor and slow down their growth.
I next thank the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who offered my greatest support for what I had to say, since, because he could not refute a word that I had said, he chose to criticise things that I had not said. He criticised me for saying, allegedly, that we should not make any contribution on this front. What I actually said was:
“I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution”.
He went on to say that I had said something in Cabinet under Mrs Thatcher, which is simply untrue. I remind him of the exchange we once had in John Major’s Cabinet, which was not about this but about statistics, when he was wrong.
The noble Lord did not respond to the points about why he needed to take costly legal action to prevent publication of the analysis that his committee had done on the cost of climate change avoidance in 2050. My general view is that when people do not want to publish facts it is because they think the facts are rather weak. I assume that is why he did not refer to them.
On the general issue of costs, with the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, almost nobody who was enthusiastic for doing more and spending more and who generally goes around saying that we can do that in a costless fashion commented on the costs I gave. None of them referred to the fact that we have the highest costs of electricity for our industry of any country. One can only assume again that they are embarrassed by the facts. Likewise, when it came to new industries, apart from small nuclear, which I mentioned and have advocated for a long time, nobody gave detail of how these industries are going to generate new prosperity when we have doubled the amount of onshore wind, trebled the amount of offshore wind and quadrupled the amount of solar or whatever it is, when that has not happened so far.
There were a couple of important arguments that it is important for me to address because they go to the heart of the issue. One was on the issue of external costs, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Browne. Theirs was the logical response to what I am putting forward, which is to say: “Yes, you’ve got to balance the costs of doing something against the damage that would be done if you don’t, and the logical way to do that is a carbon tax”. If we take the American Government’s estimates, for example, which say that the carbon tax should be $51 per tonne, which is about the equivalent to $10 per megawatt hour, it does not make any difference to the fact that renewables would still be uneconomic in this country.
Then came the most difficult issue, which people who take my position have to face up to, and that is the threat of existential crisis. If continuing to do nothing—I am not proposing that we do nothing—were likely to result in the extinction of the human race, or even its immiseration, almost no costs would be too great to avoid it. I accept that.
I put down a Question some while ago to the Government asking whether they knew of any peer-reviewed science, or science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose job it is to consider the science—which forecasts that, if we do nothing over the coming centuries, it will lead to the extinction of the human race or even its immiseration. They said that no, there was no such peer-reviewed science, so those who invoke it are invoking something that is not peer-reviewed science, although that does not mean to say that it is wrong. Some things can turn out to be right that have not yet got through the peer review process. But let us not pretend that we are dealing with a threat that scientists have declared to be existential—they have not.
We are left with the central core of the debate: should we have an honest discussion about the costs and benefits of pursuing the path of net zero? I am glad to say that the Church was on my side on that front—that we want an honest debate. We can do that only if the Government and bodies such as the CCC, the National Grid and the Royal Society have the honesty and integrity to admit that about their information. The Royal Society—or the author I cited—has admitted that his figures were underestimates. We can have that debate only if we have that information from those sources in an unbiased way rather than in a campaigning way. I am grateful to everybody for contributing to the beginning of that debate for the first time in Parliament.
Hospices: Funding
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Farmer
To ask His Majesty’s Government whether they plan to review how the state funds hospices.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords contributing to this important and timely debate. Hospice care, which of course includes hospice-at-home care, began 60 years ago and is one of the UK’s greatest achievements. The first voluntary hospice in 1967 paved the way for the modern hospice movement, which spread across the UK and around the world. This movement has profoundly, and I hope permanently, changed how people are treated when they have an incurable condition.
Dame Cicely Saunders’s hands-on medical experience taught her the need for a dedicated place where end-of-life care could be provided. She pioneered and oversaw St Christopher’s Hospice in London where, I believe, my noble friend Lord McColl, the eminent surgeon and professor, who is in his seat today, also practised.
Voluntary sector beginnings are still very much in evidence, with many good partnerships between charities and the NHS alleviating much pressure on the latter and giving freedom to the former. A review of funding would find a highly variable model for hospices; some are run by the NHS, with large annual charitable grants from local friends of the hospice, and others are run by a charity that gets some funding from the NHS. A common hallmark is a holistic, bespoke and patient-centred approach that values their relationships.
Dame Cicely said:
“You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life. We will do all that we can not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die”.
We should not forget that all receiving hospice care are on the edge of eternity, and dying peacefully also requires spiritual palliative care.
Why do people matter until the last moment of their lives, and why should we spend scarce resources to help them live until they die? It comes down to human dignity, a word that occurs five times in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and refers to the special value of human beings. However, the way it is used needs to be teased apart as it can be deployed to argue both for and against hastening death. Logically, hastening death cannot mean the same thing as helping a sufferer live until they die. The American medical ethicist Daniel Sulmasy identified three different basic meanings of dignity. For time and simplicity, I will focus on the two that can end up being used antithetically to each other in debates over whether end-of-life care should focus on hospice care or assisted dying. Many will say, “But it’s not either/or” and I will come to that. Sulmasy describes intrinsic dignity as the worth or value that a person has by virtue of being human. It is the basis of human rights, equal across all people and, as he says,
“does not admit of degrees”.
Attributed dignity, on the other hand, is a value that we confer on others or ourselves and very much admits of degrees. People can have varying amounts of it, as it depends on the esteem in which they are held in their or other people’s eyes. Importantly, attributed dignity would not have any ethical basis or exist at all without its root in intrinsic dignity.
When those who support assisted dying argue that dependence, loss of control and their self-perception of being a burden diminish that sufferer’s dignity, they are referring to attributed dignity. Opponents of assisted dying do not downplay that threatened loss of attributed dignity but give primacy to a sufferer’s intrinsic dignity. They uphold the moral obligation to bolster their humanity to the utmost, regardless of double incontinence, uncontrolled dribbling and the like. They reduce as much as possible the suffering, but not the sufferer.
Assisted suicide and euthanasia turn a somebody into a nobody. Those who morally justify eliminating a human on the grounds of concern about their attributed dignity undermine the foundation of human rights—namely, respect for the intrinsic dignity and worth of human beings. This is the basis for palliative care and why hospices were set up in the first place. The philosophy of palliative and hospice care over 60 years rests on a sound and logical understanding of the relationship between attributed and intrinsic dignity. It is precisely because the dying’s sense of self-worth and significance can be so ruthlessly challenged when the end of life draws near that their intrinsic dignity needs to be just as, if not even more, ruthlessly reinforced.
Hospice and palliative care professionals’ central concern is to improve, sustain or slow down the loss of quality in a dying person’s life, and that quality is multi-dimensional. When they sense that they are experiencing unconditional love, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that quality might be priceless despite severe pain. In 2023, however, Quebec passed provincial law mandating that medical assistance in dying be available in all hospices. Not only is this one of many measures that bulldozed medics’ conscientious objections, but it is a warning that, down the line, hospices could lose any state funding that they receive if they are not willing to evolve into a completely different service.
Given the financial pressures on the hospice movement, and of course the wider NHS—I am sure that many speakers will articulate that very clearly—we really could be looking at a brave new world where choice for ordinary people to end their own lives today becomes necessity for them tomorrow. Poorer people and those from ethnic minorities already have far less access to hospices than wealthy celebrities and other elites. Yet, if these elites change the law, they will still have choices but might inadvertently narrow them down even further for the less well-off, if hospices and other palliative care begin to wither on the vine. This has happened in jurisdictions such as Canada that have introduced and widened access to assisted dying.
Earlier this year, a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hospice and End of Life Care found that many hospices and the essential support they provide to dying people, their families and the wider health system are already in funding famine. The Health and Care Act 2022 legally requires integrated care boards—ICBs—to commission sufficient palliative and end-of life care for their population. However, the report found that the funding that hospices receive from ICBs still varies significantly across the country, and hospices describe it as “stubbornly insufficient” and “flat”, while costs rise. Where hospices had seen a change in their funding following the change in law, this had been for the worse, with some reporting a deterioration in funding from commissioners.
Notwithstanding the high value that many hospices place on the independence that flows from being mainly or partly charitably funded, will the Minister explain what her Government will do to ensure that ICBs uphold the Health and Care Act in this important regard? Further, what progress are they making to implement recommendations of the APPG report, particularly the development of
“a national plan to ensure the right funding flows to hospices”,
requiring a review of the state’s own role and responsibilities?
I will finish with an observation from a hospice matron with 20 years’ experience in end-of-life care. She has found that a decision about how someone wants their life to end taken when they were still well, or not too ill, can change when faced with the nearness of death. Paradoxically, the human spirit, she says, often wants to fight on. At present, and most thankfully, hospices facilitate that choice to fight. Will this Government commit to sustaining that choice, and improving how it is delivered, as long as it is within their power to do so?
Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate and for his excellent speech reminding us of the philosophical basis of hospices. My remarks are focused more on the practical.
In the past six months, I have visited two friends who were in hospices as their lives came to an end. Both were being cared for in the way we would all like in similar circumstances—with skill and compassion and with support for them and their families. However, in both cases the hospices were operating only at half-pace. Each had 50% of its beds unoccupied for lack of money. It was also a source of regret to the staff that they had not only had to close beds but to curtail the outreach services which are so vital to patients and their families—proof, if any were needed, of the crisis in funding faced by hospices. Emergency funding is needed now to supplement the extraordinary fundraising effort volunteers and support groups put in, but this is a short-term solution. In no other area of health would we tolerate such dependence on charitable activity.
Hospices need to be incorporated into the NHS and dying needs to be seen as as much a part of life as being born. This does not negate in any way the voluntary principle on which hospices were founded—I had the privilege of meeting Dame Cicely Saunders and talking to her in the early days of the movement—but builds on it, harnessing that support and good will and enabling anyone who is need of a hospice place, or indeed hospice services in their own home, to access them. I hope that the assisted dying debate, as it proceeds, will highlight the need for more and better palliative care. Of course, hospices are not the only places providing such care, but many of them have expertise and experience from which the whole of the NHS could learn, and I hope that this learning will be encouraged by the Government. That expertise goes beyond the specialist medical care to manage pain and other symptoms over the short stays or those of longer duration with which we are familiar. It also includes research and innovation to improve palliative care services wherever they are provided.
We should not forget hospices’ important links with their local community, for which they are famed. They mobilise volunteers and voluntary efforts so that local communities are familiar with their services and able to access them, for the benefit of patients and their families when their own time comes. Many a bereaved person has been helped to recover from their grief by, in turn, becoming interested and involved in volunteering at a hospice—a two-way street, indeed.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and I declare all my interests in relation to hospices and palliative care, especially in Wales.
In 2008, the Welsh Government Health Minister Edwina Hart commissioned a strategy for palliative care. That report recommended that there must be fair access to specialist palliative care as a core service, available at all times, wherever the patient is, with patient information. I had the privilege of being asked to lead this work, and I had a budget of just over £2 per head of population. Together with my colleague, Dr Andy Fowell—who, tragically, died recently in a cycling accident—we created a funding formula to plug gaps and move specialist medical staff on to NHS contracts to ensure that they could integrate with oncology, surgery, anaesthesia, emergency departments, and so on. We stipulated a minimum number of actual or virtual beds for a population, and minimum staffing levels of specialist care in the community and in-hospital support teams. We set quality standards for rapid response to referrals, stimulated research and ensured education and training. I pay tribute to my colleague Dr Robert Twycross, who died just a few days ago. He was at Oxford and he was one of the great pioneers in research and education. The strategy has driven patient-centred care that meets the needs of every person and their family, especially when children are facing bereavement.
With encouragement, my wonderful colleagues moved on to seven-day pooled rotas to cover nights, weekends and bank holidays. As a colleague said, “We got rid of frantic Fridays and mad Mondays”. Our specialist nurses realised how many crises at nights and weekends could be intercepted when working a weekend or a bank holiday. Work with pharmacists and paramedics is improving access to just-in-case medication and care. For many years, through the Marie Curie Hospice, we have run a 24-hour all-Wales helpline for any health or care professional to get advice on a difficult situation.
In Wales, we created a floor—a minimum—but, of course, it is not enough and we still have workforce gaps, although Welsh Ministers have been unfailingly supportive of hospices and palliative care teams in Wales, despite competing demands, financing that becomes difficult and provision that is especially hard in remote and rural areas.
Research has repeatedly shown that good care costs less than bad care. No one should be told that there is nothing more that can be done. Seeking help and advice from colleagues, and being humble enough to questioningly review a situation, can find solutions to make each day better, accepting the inevitability of death for us all. Will the Government look at the Welsh data to comprehensively review the whole model of such services in England, to ensure that people’s needs are better met and hospices can once again flourish?
The Lord Bishop of London
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for introducing this debate. I declare my interests as outlined in register, particularly that I am patron of Hospiscare in Exeter.
I suspect there has never been a more important moment in time to discuss the funding of the hospice sector, which is facing extreme challenges. It is also important to remember that hospices deliver excellent care to a significant number of people who are dying well. However, according to Hospice UK, the sector is facing the worst financial crisis in more than 20 years.
The state provides on average only a third of hospice funding. A large proportion is found by fundraising. Those who live in affluent areas are more likely to financially support their hospices than those in deprived areas. That will have a direct impact on not only access but quality of care to those in the deprived areas.
It also entrenches the worsening inequalities in health, as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, not just between regions but also within them. In addition, the funding given to ICBs for palliative and end-of-life care is highly variable, and sometimes disproportionate for the demographics of their population. In the absence of any long-term plan, I echo the request of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and ask the Minister what support the Government are giving to ICBs as they make their commissioning decisions in this area.
As already indicated by the contributions made, noble Lords are aware of the introduction of the Private Member’s Bill in the other place which seeks to change the law for those who are terminally ill. How can we consider this if we do not give enough funding to hospices, palliative care and palliative care research, so that people dying receive the best care—the care that they need to make life worth living and, in the words of Dame Cicely Saunders, to live life until they die?
I hope that we are not prioritising the care of those who need it based on their contribution to our economy. This is contrary to how God values each one of us, contrary to the principles on which the NHS is founded, and contrary to human dignity. How the Government choose to prioritise palliative care matters very much. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the Government’s plan to secure a sustainable future for hospices, palliative care and palliative care research.
Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)
My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on securing this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, whose close association with and support for the hospice in Devon I know of and is widely appreciated. I declare my interest as listed in the register as vice-president of Hospice UK, which I had the privilege of chairing for eight years.
The dire situation—the crisis—in which so many hospices find themselves today has been described by others during this short debate, coupled with the need for an immediate infusion of money to ease their plight. There is a crisis now, and more money is needed now. However, encouraged by the recent admission of the Secretary of State, in the context of the debate on assisted dying, that palliative care in our country is inadequate, I want to make a proposal which has the potential to transform this regrettable state of affairs. I start with some uncontroversial propositions. Most hospitals, which see their role as being the curing of patients, are not very good at palliative care. Far too many people die in hospital; they do not want to die in hospital, and they need not die in hospital. They would have a far better death if they were in a hospice, or at home cared for by a hospice.
When I was chair of Hospice UK, we worked up a detailed plan which involved identifying those patients in hospital who were unlikely to be cured and arranging for them to be discharged to a hospice or to their home, where they could be looked after by a hospice. We estimated that up to 50,000 people a year could be helped in this way: helped to have the end-of-life care they deserve and the dignified death to which we all aspire. It would, of course, need an infusion of resource from the NHS, but it would save the NHS much more than it would cost. It costs much less to look after someone in a hospice than it does in a hospital, and it would free up all those hospital beds; it would be a real win-win.
I gather that the implementation of the plan was scuppered by the pandemic, but that Hospice UK is considering working it up again and putting it to the Department of Health. I urge it to do so, and I urge the Secretary of State, now that he has recognised the problem, to grab this proposal with both hands; it would make a real difference.
Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for allowing us to shine a light on our hospices. They deserve all the help we can give them in return for all the help they give us and our families.
My son, Daniel, died earlier this year under the palliative care of the doyenne of British hospices, St Christopher’s, which has already been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer. I told Daniel’s story in the current edition of the House magazine and in a note to all Members of Parliament. Daniel also features in an award-winning ITV documentary, “A Time to Die”—as does the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay—which most people regard as very fair. St Christopher’s created a wonderful atmosphere of warmth, compassion and love at a very difficult time, and my family and friends and I will long cherish it. Daniel quipped near the end of his life, “I am being looked after better now than I ever was when I was ill”. That was not a knock at the local hospital—for the reasons the noble Lord, Lord Howard, gave, hospitals are so hard pressed—but hospices have a standard of care that few hospitals can match.
Many hospices are, like hospitals, under acute financial stress and desperately need more help, and I hope that the Minister is listening carefully to our plea. We all know that there are many demands on the public purse and that the Government face, like the female blackbird, many hungry mouths clamouring to be fed, but every effort should be made to stop hospices falling down the long list of health priorities. Regardless of our views on assisted dying—an issue we will probably come to early next year—we must make the end-of-life experience as good as it can be, and hospices do just that.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for securing this debate and the noble Lord, Lord Monks, for sharing his story so well.
How many times do noble Lords hear guests of the Palace of Westminster being told that no one can die here as it is a royal palace; people always legally die across the river at St Thomas’ Hospital. However, if you live in, or in the vicinity of, the Palace of Westminster and need end-of-life care, you are more likely than not to receive it from my local hospice, Royal Trinity Hospice in Clapham. The NHS contributes only 25% to 30% of its funding per year, but over half the people needing end-of-life care in the catchment area of south-west and central London use Royal Trinity Hospice. What is clearly an NHS service should be properly funded by the taxpayer. Whether in the vicinity of a palace or in social housing in the most deprived area of the country, there should be a national minimum standard of provision, as outlined in the excellent APPG report on hospice funding.
I also agree that ICBs should be made to look at a multiyear contractual term, as I often wonder how much charitable time, energy and money are spent bidding for money from the ICB. We know that the demographics show that there will be an increase in demand for hospice care over the coming years, so the sector should be free to plan to deliver more, not to fill in more bidding forms.
I am sure that no one would want the hospice movement to be solely government funded, as vital flexibilities and community relationships are built due to the inclusion of the charitable model of funding, raising about £1 billion a year. In fact, this is the perfect time to have this debate, as we are days away from the Budget. Although it focuses mainly on tax and spend, it is also normally the place where changes are outlined to any of the benefits for charitable giving. Legacies are a large proportion of hospice charitable funding, including around £2 million a year for Royal Trinity Hospice in Clapham. Many of these people will already be payers of inheritance tax, and if you leave 10% or more of the net value of your estate to charity, you can reduce the rate you pay from 40% to 36%.
Why are there not the same benefits for other estates that are smaller and that do not pay inheritance tax, and for whom the gift is often a greater sacrifice? If the policy is to look at income, capital and wealth on a more equal level, why is there no gift aid on small legacies? Also, why do you get more tax allowance if you are a higher-rate taxpayer and claim gift aid, but no benefit if you are a standard-rate taxpayer? I know the Minister cannot give detailed answers to those questions, but I hope she will agree with this focus: that if there is more wealth to tax, surely, we should also incentivise people further to give that wealth away.
Lord Sentamu (CB)
My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate. I have experienced the amazing work and care offered to many people at the end of their lives. I have been patron of and fundraiser for St Leonard’s Hospice in York, and as Archbishop of York I supported in numerous ways Martin House Children’s Hospice, founded by the Archdeacon of York, the Venerable Richard Seed, supported by the generosity of thousands of people who raised the money.
Aisha, the mother of our two foster children, George and Davina, died of breast cancer and was superbly cared for by St Christopher’s Hospice. My mother, Ruth, spent three weeks in Royal Trinity Hospice, where she lost her battle against throat cancer. Her peaceful death inspired our little children.
Hospices are homes providing the best end-of-life care. As charities, they depend on constant fundraising and people’s generosity. The question of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, invites His Majesty’s Government to put hospices on a sure income footing and foundation. I invite His Majesty’s Government to apply to the funding of hospices the lesson of the RA Butler 1944 Education Act, which was replicated in Scotland in 1945 and in Northern Ireland in 1947. It repealed all previous education legislation, belatedly raised the school leaving age to 15 and made secondary education free and universal. The terms “voluntary aided” and “voluntary controlled” appeared in the Butler Act. Before this was enacted, the voluntary schools provided by churches were largely funded from the income of historic trusts or from the giving of the parishioners. In voluntary-aided schools, the church is responsible for only 10% of the cost of the upkeep of the building; the rest is provided for by the state.
Could His Majesty Government reimagine the funding of hospices in a similar way to the funding of voluntary-aided schools, not the voluntary-controlled schools, which are entirely funded by the state? Hospices need not be funded entirely by the state. A mixed funding model could work well, provided that government remains the last person standing in terms of funding. Hospices could become voluntary-aided hospices.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I echo yet again the thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for initiating the debate and for the very thoughtful speech with which he introduced it. I declare an interest as the joint chair of the All-Party Group on Together for Short Lives, which is a charity devoted particularly to babies that are born with what are seen as incurable diseases. If a baby is born in that situation, it is a great shock to the parents because they are not generally expecting it, and when the baby is born there is a huge traumatic effect. We are to have a debate on assisted dying, but we have noticed that for little babies there is already assisted dying, because the consultants can ask for medicines to be withdrawn. From time to time, there are very sad court cases where hospitals go to court to get permission to withdraw medicine against the wishes of the parents. I would like that to be looked at more thoroughly in terms of whether we have even yet got it right. We got some minor changes under the last Government together with my friend and colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, but there is still a lot to be done in this area.
In so far as the funding of hospices goes, I would like the Government to look at the system outlined in Wales and see whether we can get some sort of agreement on a system and a way of going forward in this country. The fact of the matter is that the charitable raising of funds for hospices is a popular way of raising money—we have one in our area that is well subscribed to—because people like giving, but we must not let everything rest on charity. The points made by my noble friend Lord Farmer about dignity, including intrinsic dignity, and ethics were extremely important; I hope that they will be borne in mind.
Finally, I ask the Government to have a look at the way in which integrated care boards disburse their funding because the variety in disbursement is greater than should be acceptable, even in a partially devolved system.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, there has truly been a depositum of wisdom in this short debate, illustrating an area of concern that we all share in and indicating a degree of urgency by which we should all be impressed. I offer the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, my true thanks for his opening remarks and daring to set up this debate in a philosophical way; he has given us a framework within which we can test our ideas out.
My noble friend Lady Pitkeathley reminded us of the practical applications of good hospice care and the plight of hospices at this present moment. In a sense, I have less to contribute to a debate such as this than the experts who have already spoken, except that I do come across hospices. My noble friend and I have, I think, visited the same people—Members of this House—in hospices.
I am shocked to see from the briefings that we are in this situation of financial difficulty in an area of life where the good being done is so obvious that it is hard to understand why people do not back it. In the charitable sector, endless efforts go on in little shops, on the streets and so on, but what about the one-third and two-thirds?
Similarly, the supreme irony of the fact that we are soon to debate assisted dying—I make no comments about that debate now; there will be time for that—is that it is being put forward as wanting to offer options to people at the end of their lives. Hospice care is an option at the end of people’s lives. It is tried and tested, with proven in-person experience from the offering of one testimony after another. Is it not ironic that we cannot see the two together? We must stiffen our resolve, influence all we can and stand up for investing in hospices as a responsible way of dealing with people at the end of their lives. We must then let the other debate happen, with that already a commitment on our part.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for initiating this important debate. For most of my professional life, I have been associated with hospices such as St Christopher’s, the Mildmay in the East End of London, the Mildmay in Uganda and the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice in Surrey. I have learned a lot working in these places.
I remember, for instance, a lady of 28 with an inoperable cancer of the throat. She was in pain and a lot of respiratory distress and needed relief from these symptoms. I explained to her that I could put a needle into her vein and titrate her with analgesics until all her symptoms had gone. She agreed to this. I gave her a surprisingly large dose of heroin, which not only did not kill her but relieved all her symptoms and gave her three weeks of symptom-free life. During that time, she was able with a clear mind to say goodbye to her friends and to tidy up all those loose ends. Some people accused me of hypocrisy, saying, “You’re really killing them and just saying that you’re relieving their pain”. Well, anyone who thinks they know what is in my mind has delusions of grandeur.
Cicely Saunders and I were contemporaries as medical students. Her work on relieving symptoms in hospices was very important indeed. She established without any doubt that the right way was to keep a constant level of analgesia in the blood rather than give patients doses only when they had the pain. If you do this, you require less of the analgesics overall and so the patients are more awake and able to enjoy life. That was a very important contribution. The present laws against euthanasia and assisted dying are like a huge dam preventing great enthusiasm for euthanasia and assisted dying. That dam can sometimes develop a crack for those who want to legalise euthanasia. Once you have a little crack in the dam, the whole thing can give way. Cicely Saunders’s work was an extremely important aspect of this.
As far as the funding of hospices is concerned—
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
Can the noble Lord wind up, please? His three minutes are over.
Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
There is an urgent need for more funding, as has been said many times, and a partnership between government, charities and local authorities is required.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for instigating a vital, enriching and at times personal debate about the outstanding work, compassion and care that the hospice movement provides and the perilous state of the funding platform that it sits on. Wonderful examples of hospice and palliative care within the sector have been given. I add my thanks to the staff and volunteers who provide the services, including those at the wonderful St Luke’s hospice in Sheffield, a place where warmth, compassion and outstanding care are given to those at the end of life and the loved ones around them. Indeed, it is a microcosm of the hospice sector. In the last few years, it has been
“‘routinely’ budgeting for annual deficits”,
to quote its chief executive. The ICB funding accounts for just 26% of its £12 million annual budget. The examples of St Luke’s and others outlined in this debate show that unless short and medium-term action is taken by government on funding for hospices, services in some areas will be in serious decline or could collapse.
I say to the Minister that two things could happen, possibly in the short term, regardless of the budget. The first is that when NHS pay increases are made, they should be automatically applied to the in-year contracting values that the hospices receive, so that those extra costs can be absorbed without having to cut services. The other issue is that there should be parity of funding per person who uses a hospice and palliative care, regardless of the setting. It should be an equal base, whether it is in the independent hospice sector or in an NHS setting.
In the medium term, we need to introduce a fair funding deal for hospices and to include palliative and end-of-life care services in the priorities and planning guidance for the NHS. Will the Minister look at that and ask NHS England to implement it?
Investing in hospice care not only enhances quality of life for people who are receiving the care but supports families during incredibly challenging times. To ensure equitable access to comprehensive palliative and hospice care, we must ensure that the Government adopt fair and equitable funding for all who provide services.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for balloting this QSD.
As we have heard, the modern hospice movement was pioneered by Dame Cicely Saunders at St Christopher’s Hospice, who told her patients:
“You matter because you are you. You matter to the last moment of your life and we will do all we can to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die”.
Every year, hospices in the UK assist nearly a quarter of a million people who live with a progressive or terminal illness and then support them more closely as their lives draw to a close. We must support these hospices.
Let me share some concerning statistics with your Lordships. More than two in five deaths occur in hospital, with 41% of that group dying alone. While it is impossible to quantify the monetary value of giving people the opportunity to die with dignity, hospices can play an incredibly important role in both providing excellent end-of-life care and, at the same time, freeing up expensive hospital beds in a material saving for the NHS.
The Minister for Care repeated just this month that the Government are determined to shift more healthcare out of hospitals and into the community, including to hospices. However, currently the amount spent on children’s hospice care, for example, varies widely—from £28 per child in South Yorkshire last year to £511 per child in Norfolk and Waveney. Can the Minister explain how these disparities are occurring and how she will address them?
Last year we committed to extending the £25 million children’s hospice grant. However, in a response to a Written Question on 31 July, the Government stated that they
“are currently considering the future of this important funding stream beyond 2024/25”.
Can the Minister please give us a cast-iron assurance that this vital funding stream will be carried forward?
Currently, around a third of hospice income comes from the state and the rest is made up from charitable donations and fundraising. Do the Government intend to move to a model in which the state delivers the majority of funding for hospices? If so, will the Government seek greater control of hospice provision across the country? With increased government funding, Ministers may seek corresponding increases in control over services, so can the Minister confirm that the Government will protect the independence of our hospices, which they value so greatly?
Investing in co-ordinated community palliative care services such as hospices, to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and provide superlative end-of-life care, should be a top priority for this Government.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful for the thoughtful and constructive approach that noble Lords have taken to this important issue and for a number of considered proposals, which I will share with my colleague, Minister Stephen Kinnock, who is responsible as the Minister for Care. I know he will be interested.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, not just on securing this debate but on the way he set out his thoughts, which enabled the debate to be so constructive and sensitive to the issues at hand. I share the thanks given by a number of noble Lords, and take this opportunity to thank all those working or volunteering—as my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley highlighted—in the palliative and end-of-life care sector, including in hospices, for the invaluable support, care and compassion that they provide to people and their loved ones when they need it most.
Like the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and other noble Lords, I pay tribute to the contribution of Dame Cicely Saunders. She was indeed—and can be regarded very much as—a pioneer. Many people in this Chamber and outside have also played their part, and I thank them too.
Approximately 600,000 people die each year in the UK and that figure is set to increase as we have an ever-ageing population. That will mean an increase in the number of people who need palliative and end-of-life care. As we have heard today, palliative care can help in the hardest of times. It is care that makes a real difference. It can make something that seems quite unbearable a bit more bearable. It can give dignity. I was very interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, state his definition of dignity. For me, dignity is crucial at all times and never more so than at the end of one’s life. It also makes it more manageable for not just the person being cared for but their loved ones too.
As a Government, we want a society where every person receives high-quality, compassionate care, from diagnosis through to the end of life. While the majority of palliative and end-of-life care is provided by NHS staff and services, we recognise the vital part played by voluntary sector organisations. Many noble Lords know that it is difficult to quantify how much palliative and end-of-life care is being provided at national or local integrated care board level, because care is provided across multiple settings, including in primary care, community care and hospitals, as well as in hospices. It is delivered by a wide range of specialist and generalist health and care workers, who provide care for a wide range of needs. These include, but are not always exclusive to, palliative care.
I recognise that there are more than 200 charitable hospices supporting more than 300,000 people in the UK with life-limiting conditions every year. As noble Lords have observed, most hospices are charitable, independent organisations that receive some statutory funding for providing NHS services. On the point about funding, in England integrated care boards are responsible for commissioning palliative and end-of-life care services to meet the reasonable needs of their local populations. On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and other noble Lords, ICBs are responsible to NHS England, which has published statutory guidance on palliative and end-of-life care to support commissioners with this duty. It includes specific reference to ensuring that there is sufficient provision of specialist palliative care services and hospice beds, and future sustainability.
The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London and the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, raised the issue of variation by ICB area. It is important to note that this is in part—I emphasise “in part”—dependent on what is already available in terms of services, along with local needs. Noble Lords will recall the Health and Care Act 2022, which was a key moment. I remember the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, being very involved in getting palliative care services added to the list of services an ICB must commission in response to the needs of its local population.
In addition to the guidance and service specifications, NHS England has commissioned the development of a care dashboard. The relevance of that is that it brings together all the relevant local data into one place and it will help commissioners to understand the needs of their local population and give them the ability to filter the available information—for example, by deprivation or ethnicity. That is meant to enable ICBs to put plans in place to track and address the improvement in health inequalities.
I will refer to the highly sensitive area of assisted dying, which was raised by the noble Lords, Lord Farmer and Lord McColl, and other noble Lords. I reconfirm to your Lordships’ House that, if the will of Parliament is that the law on assisting dying should change, this Government will work to ensure that it is implemented in the way that Parliament intended and is legally effective. I add that, irrespective of whether the law changes on this matter, we will and must continue to work towards providing high-quality, compassionate palliative and end-of-life care for every person who needs it.
I shall briefly look to the future and say to my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley, who raised the matter of research, that through the National Institute for Health and Care Research the department is investing £3 million in a new policy research unit in palliative and end-of-life care. The unit was launched at the beginning of this year and it will build evidence in this area. To respond to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, it will have a specific focus on inequalities, which I very much welcome.
Noble Lords will be aware that this Government have committed to developing a 10-year plan to deliver an NHS that is fit for the future. We will be considering a whole range of policies, including those that impact people with palliative and end-of-life care needs. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, that one of the three shifts that the plan will deliver is around the Government’s determination to shift more healthcare out of hospitals and into the community. The noble Lord referred to a plan by Hospice UK and said it was looking to update it. We will certainly be pleased to hear from Hospice UK on that matter. Palliative and end-of-life care services, including hospices, will play a very big part in that shift from hospitals to the community.
I turn to some of the additional points that noble Lords have made. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, who has made such a big contribution in this area, and the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who has been a strong advocate, particularly in respect of children’s hospices, that we will indeed be delighted to look at the Welsh experience. Just this week I had a meeting with the Welsh Minister, so I will be following up on that.
The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, asked whether there will be a move to implement the recommendations in the APPG report that would ensure that funding flows to hospices. As I have said, we are determined to move more towards community healthcare and we will certainly work with hospice providers to understand their views as part of this work.
I am sure that we were all very moved to hear my noble friend Lord Monks share his experience of the sad loss of his son Daniel; my sincere condolences to my noble friend and to his family and friends. I heard what he and so many other noble Lords had to say about the quality of care received in hospices, and I too will pay tribute.
I will of course take up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, on gift aid with my colleagues in the Treasury.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and to other noble Lords that my colleague the Minister of State for Care has recently had meetings with NHS England to look at a way forward in the whole area of providing services. I know that he also met the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. We are particularly anxious to reduce inequalities and the work going forward will look at that.
I will review the debate and if there are particular questions that I have not answered, I will of course do so. I will also address the comments and suggestions made by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. I thank all noble Lords, and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for leading us in this debate.
Special Needs Schools
(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest
That this House takes note of the contribution that special needs schools and specialist education colleges make to the education sector.
Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as set out in the register. It is a privilege to lead this debate on a subject that concerns me both personally and professionally. Team Domenica, the charity that I started in my daughter’s name, is, among other things, a specialist further education institution which provides training for students with learning disabilities, with the aim of transforming their lives through paid employment.
The 130 specialist further education colleges typically cater for people with more complex disabilities, whose needs cannot be met in a mainstream setting. However, there is no definition of such needs. The needs of my daughter, Domenica, as a young woman with Down’s syndrome would not necessarily be described as complex, but she is one of a large cohort for whom a mainstream setting cannot be reasonably adjusted.
Large general further education colleges, typically with over 3,500 students, are not always the best environments for these individuals. These colleges, incorporated under the 1992 education Act, were reclassified by the Office for National Statistics in 2022 as public sector bodies, and as such are out of scope of the pernicious new VAT policy, a tax on learning that we have never known in this country. However, specialist further education colleges are being treated as private schools, although all the students have an EHC plan and are therefore publicly funded. Yet these colleges will still be liable for VAT if they have pupils aged 16. As I have stated previously in your Lordships’ House, I hope that this is just an oversight and one that can be remedied as soon as possible.
Several of our candidates at Team Domenica have come from mainstream settings. One of them said: “At Team Domenica, I am treated fairly with respect—more like an adult. I used to fret a lot at the last place. I don’t feel that here”. One of our parents wrote: “When my daughter started with you she needed one-to-one support, but now she is a very much more independent young lady. She has learnt to fail without feeling like a failure, so if she doesn’t meet a target she tries again and again and again, and eventually she does reach the target. It has been an incredible journey”.
These specialist colleges, which offer a holistic approach, are such an important part of the education system but are all too frequently seen as an expensive adjunct. The alternative for this disfranchised group is a world of isolation. Institutions such as ours give them a chance to emerge from that bleak prospect.
Some of the larger general further education colleges cater for more than 3,000 students with special educational needs. They do a wonderful job. However, they are coming under increasing pressure to take students whose needs they cannot meet, which is a misuse of the duty to admit. Students are being placed against the advice of these colleges, as there are behaviours that the colleges know they will not be able to deal with. These decisions are bad all round. They are bad for the college but, of course, they are particularly bad for the young people involved.
The Government tend to have a focus on the general further education colleges, often to the exclusion of other types of provision. This can be frustrating. We see this in the apprenticeship sector, where around 70% of the provision comes from private training providers yet they are frequently overlooked in policy discussions. I emphasise the role that specialist independent institutions play, and point out that general further education colleges cannot, as they themselves admit, meet all the needs. Of course we need both: an inclusive mainstream and a thriving specialist sector.
I suggest that specialist colleges not only contribute to the education sector but play a critical role in the skills agenda, particularly in supporting people into employment. One area of concern is apprenticeship access. SEN students who are capable of and keen to pursue apprenticeships can be disadvantaged by their requirement to achieve a level 1 in maths and English. These subjects used to be embedded in the programme but are now stand-alone qualifications.
People with learning disabilities can do the practical aspects of training, but for many the academic side is completely beyond them; abstract is not what they do. The result is that some students are unable to pursue this apprenticeship route even though they excel in their practical skills. Why can we not just value the skills that they have and that businesses need, and let them develop at their own pace, making their own unique contribution? The system is setting people up to fail and undermining their hard-won self-confidence. I also see this in the jewellery business, where I have made my career. Apprentices for silversmithing and jewellery making are very hard to come by without adding these unnecessary qualifications. Superb craftsmanship is its own language, which requires no translation and certainly not an English exam.
The Government have announced some flexibility for people with special educational needs, allowing an exemption if they can demonstrate an evidenced judgment of reaching entry level 3. This is a positive step, but I am concerned that the process still remains too unwieldy, complex and costly, which will continue to disadvantage these students and add unnecessary burdens on the college—believe me, we have enough already.
The tribunal system is not working. Some 96% of parents who are turned down for an EHCP by the local authority win their tribunals, but this comes at a huge financial and emotional cost. Unfortunately, the process is protracted and some parents cave in under the pressure; they do not even get to tribunal or, if they do, it is too late for the start of the academic year. This, therefore, is a year’s savings for the local authority, but it is all too frequently a year without education for that young person.
In the academic year 2022-23, just 136 of the nearly 8,000 appeals that went to a hearing upheld decisions by councils. A study by Pro Bono Economics estimated that councils wasted £46.2 million on tribunals in 2021-22. An inevitable consequence of VAT on fees will be a significant rise in tribunal cases, as parents struggle to find the right setting for their learning disabled children. It will be the sharp elbowed who have the best chance. Yet again, it will be the most vulnerable, the isolated and those parents who struggle to fill in the forms who will be forgotten and fall off the radar.
The Government should commit to an independent review of the VAT policy after six months. There has not been a full consultation on the plans or on their impact on SEND provision. Last year, the Department for Education had to pay the courts more than £13 million so it could deliver these SEND tribunals—double the figure the year before, and it will undoubtedly rise much further as a result of the impending education tax.
The system is broken and unnecessarily adversarial. Kate Foale, SEND spokesman for the County Councils Network, said:
“There desperately needs to be action at a governmental level to ensure local authorities and schools have the funding required to meet the needs of all children and young people”.
Councils are already struggling to fund SEND provision. The Local Government Association and the County Councils Network published a report in July, noting that SEND costs will increase to £12 billion by 2025, having doubled over the past decade. They say that this puts council finances on a “cliff edge”.
We are in a divide-and-rule situation whereby local authorities with a statutory duty to fund are at odds with the providers, and the providers end up fighting on all fronts. I have first-hand experience of this, and it wastes an enormous amount of time and energy. We need to work together. I know the Minister is fully aware of how important this is, and I thank her for her intervention on our behalf last month.
The current high-needs funding system came into place in the academic year 2013-14, which is when it was decided that local authorities should both undertake the assessments and provide the funding, thus becoming poacher and gamekeeper—a clear conflict of interest. Before that, assessment and funding decisions were handled separately. The Department for Education maintains that bringing them together was necessary because of spiralling costs, with needs being identified without any thought of the money involved. But it has not published any data demonstrating that the separation of these two processes, rather than increased need, was causing the spiralling costs. It also has not commented on the fact that, despite bringing the two together, costs have spiralled anyway. What it has done is made it much harder for families to get an assessment, because the councils know that, once they have assessed, they have a statutory duty to provide.
The Secretary of State for Education told parents that the SEND system is “fundamentally broken”. She also said she is “serious” about reform and “determined to do it”. She added that she would like to do this on a “cross-party basis” and
“listen to parents and staff”.
I stand here in that spirit of co-operation, determined that, above all else, the interests of learning-disabled people be accorded the highest priority.
When I look at the lives of our many candidates, post-college and in paid work, I see the difference it has made—how much it means to them and to their families, and how much it impacts their well-being and sense of self-worth. That makes me even more determined to fight on their behalf. I will continue to raise my voice in your Lordships’ House on behalf of people with learning disabilities.
One of our candidates died last month, in his early 20s. He was part of our story, and we became part of his. His father told us that he would be buried in his work uniform because it meant the world to him that he had found a job and a life beyond his family, in the community, where we all belong and where his life, lived to the limit of its capacity, touched so many, fulfilling his potential. What more could one possibly want for any of our children or anybody with a learning disability?
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on bringing this topic to our attention and on her speech. I was lucky enough to hear her maiden speech some weeks ago, when she addressed this issue. There is no better advocate for not just speaking about this issue but actually doing something about it, which is quite an important extra. I am grateful that we have had the opportunity to discuss this today. I say to my noble friend the Minister that I hope the Government may provide time, during the department’s consideration of the future of SEN policy, for us to have further debates and make further contributions.
The noble Baroness talked a lot about specialist colleges. They are important, because she is absolutely right that the alternative to that is staying at home. It is not a poor or inadequate school that gets you out of the house. We have let down younger adults with disabilities for many years. It is as though we assume that life stops when they reach the end of compulsory schooling, so I appreciate that point.
However, I want to start on two more positive points. There has been a transformation in special schools over the past 20 to 30 years. It is worth making note of that because it shows that progress can be made. In my lifetime, the law described this group of people as ineducable; that is what it said in the Education Act. Now, when we go to special schools or specialist colleges, we see young boys and girls and young men and women doing what anybody in any school does: working hard, hoping for better things, playing with their friends, sharing things with their teachers and family, and wanting to get on and be part of society. We have made improvements. What has changed most of all is our understanding of what can be achieved. It is society; it is education; it is politicians; it is all of us who have put the lid on the achievements of this group in the past. At least now when we see some excellent special schools and specialist colleges, we see that there can be change, but there is a lot more to be done as well.
There is a second area where I want to point out good things that I have always taken from this sector. When you go into a special school, you try to work out what is different from a mainstream school. To me, it is something like this: the teachers are very well trained in their specialism; they know what they are talking about and are practised in delivering that. When you look around the staff, you see that it is not just teachers but physiotherapists, play leaders and assistants; it is people with a range of professional skills trying to meet the needs of the child. They invariably have close links with parents. Special schools are interesting in that social class does not matter; social class does not choose the children who attend, so you often get socially mixed schools. Each child has a programme tailored to meet their needs, and there are partnerships beyond the school. Teachers who know their subject and can deliver it, working with a range of other professionals so that a range of needs can be met; precious and close links with parents; and working with a community that wants to provide support—that it is a definition of what we should have in every school, special or mainstream.
When I was a Minister in the education department, a lot of the work we did on classroom assistance, extra administrative help for schools and using the school as a location for people with other skills was modelled on the best of special schools, so they have a lot to teach all the other schools in mainstream education.
However, there is no doubt that these are troubled times for the whole SEN sector, and there will be opportunities to discuss that. There are a number of policy challenges in respect of special schools which I ask the Minister to reflect on. First, I welcomed the Prime Minister’s announcement at the Labour Party conference about level 2 apprenticeships—that will help this group—but for all the good that goes on in special schools, the assessment and qualifications framework in which they are asked to work does not meet their needs. I chair the Public Services Committee, which has recently produced a report on the transition from education to work for young people with disabilities. The story is one of doing well in schools and being blocked from thereon in. Part of that is expectations, but a lot of it is the qualifications for which they are encouraged to study not being fit for purpose in moving them on to the next stage of their lives.
I have two more points to make. I have met a lot of people with special needs children who think we ought not to have special schools at all and that the inclusion debate ought to be such that every child’s needs can be met in mainstream community schools. It is not a view I take, but we should acknowledge that that debate across the sector about where all children with special needs are taught is a live one, and we have to work it out. To my mind, the easy decisions are that those with needs that cannot be met in mainstream schools should be in special schools and that if they can be included in mainstream schools and their parents want it, every effort ought to be made to remove any barriers that may exist, and that may be something as little as physical obstacles.
It is the ones in between who are at the borders, where there is no agreement on whether special schools or mainstream schools would be appropriate. That is where the debate is difficult—it is about the numbers of people with EHC plans who are trying to get to special schools, when the authorities think that their needs might be met in mainstream education; that is where the difficulties lie, and where we let down a lot of children. What I am absolutely sure about is that no one should have to want a special school because of a poor mainstream school that they are trying to turn their back on. It should be because the child needs the special school, not because we have no mainstream schools that are catering as well as they can for special needs children.
We have not got this right, and it is not easy. If you look across the 24,000 schools making up our school system, we have a very small number of special schools. Most of them are mainstream schools. We have never been sure what the role of the special schools should be in the whole education system—but all the talent, all the highly qualified teachers and all the experience are in the special schools. What we have always tried to do is to find a way of using their expertise across all schools to benefit all children with special needs. Of all the solutions that we have come up with over the years, whether it be collocating special schools on the same campus as mainstream schools, having units in mainstream schools without specialism or having teachers who move from one school to another, I have seen excellent examples. But nowhere do I see a cohesive and coherent plan about how the offer from special schools sits easily in the whole education system so that we can meet the needs of those who have needs that can be met in special schools and those who do not, as well as the many in between who just want the best of both.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on an excellent introductory speech, on acquiring this debate and on championing the issues of special educational needs and disability so effectively, before and since she came into this House. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who was Secretary of State for Education in 2001-02. You can hear the wisdom and experience that flows from her in her speech, and it is an honour to follow that. I also thank Ashmount special school in Leicestershire for the helpful information that it gave me ahead of this debate.
I will come at the contribution that special needs schools and specialist education colleges make to education by referring to another often overlooked part of the system: the parents. Across the school system, school-level factors account for just 20% of the variation in pupils’ attainment, and pupil-level factors, including the home and the community children come from, account for the balance. Half of that 80% is determined by family factors, particularly what parents do. So working hand in glove with parents wherever possible can make or break whether children fulfil their potential and flourish while at school. This is particularly the case when children have special needs.
The closer one is to a family with a special needs child, the more one realises how profoundly every member is affected, especially where those needs are at a high enough level to make them eligible for a place at a special school. Parents’ and siblings’ own needs can be considered by special schools in a far more developed and bespoke way than mainstream settings permit. Far from cosseting them, this whole-family support is indispensable if special needs children are to attend, engage and meet appropriately ambitious educational expectations. To quote one special needs teacher:
“You know it’s going to pay off if you are supportive to the parents because working together is so important for this child’s emotional and behavioural regulation which make their education possible”.
Many schools also take steps to help parents build a support network with each other. The House of Lords Library briefing identified frequent contact with parents or carers and close tracking of children’s progress as one of the important benefits of attending special education. That contact often starts before a child has had their first day at school. Early home visits help to identify the whole family’s needs and particularly their psychological state.
When children start at special school, there is awareness that parents are on a grief curve, which needs to be respected and accommodated. This includes trauma, emotion and stress about things that might seem insignificant but are highly significant to them. First, many had to fight to get the child into special school in the first place and disagree with professionals, which is rarely easy. It is an early priority to relieve anxiety and assure them that they no longer need to convince anyone that their child cannot be in mainstream. Secondly, they are often experts in their child’s needs, including their medical needs, and fear something being missed in case it means the difference, quite literally, between life and death. Many special needs children have had life-threatening conditions, requiring long and complex operations. Parents have handed their children over to anaesthetists and surgeons, unsure whether they will survive. As many conditions are ongoing, sending a special needs child to school is far from straightforward.
Easing families’ burdens can include helping parents fill in the complex paperwork for school transportation, where needed, and for disability living allowance. Such extra cash is essential as it is very hard for both parents to work when care needs are so high, but forms can seem overwhelming when time is cut short by myriad health appointments and associated administration. It is not unusual for profoundly disabled children to have two hospital appointments a week, which might be in different cities.
A child’s education, health and care plan routinely requires special schools to work with multiple professionals, such as speech and language and occupational therapists, social workers and medical consultants. They write letters to GPs on the family’s behalf and make referrals to child and adolescent mental health services. Many special needs children are doubly incontinent, for genuine medical reasons, and teachers literally get their hands dirty providing personal care. Some schools allow parents to use a child’s direct payments to fund a staff member to give respite care on a Saturday afternoon or after school. Teachers’ deep involvement in health and social care means that they are, in effect, triple-hatting in a way that a mainstream teacher would find impossible in a much larger class size where they are required to be driven by data and development deadlines. Ministers have said that they will improve mainstream inclusivity and pick up special needs earlier, but do the Government agree that we will always need special schools?
To reiterate, parents are vital to the education sector. Teachers with experience across both settings refer to a significant lack of understanding in mainstream about what life is like for parents. Will the Minister confirm that this will also be an area for improvement?
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I too strongly welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, on her eloquent speech. I will focus on the general situation facing specialist colleges in a rather broader sense—including but not confined to those that we think of as special needs—which cater to small, specialist groups of students of various different kinds. I want to urge the Minister to ensure that this population and this type of institution receive more targeted and coherent attention and support at national level than has been the case.
Of course, much of this debate will focus on the large and important group of children and young people with learning difficulties for whom the mainstream curriculum is unsuitable or who struggle to cope with formal settings. We know that there is a real crisis here, especially in catering to those with complex multiple needs.
However, there is also an important and diverse group of students for whom the issue is not that they struggle and will probably always struggle with the mainstream curriculum or the classroom environment, but rather that they belong to a rather small group with special, distinctive requirements, which is widely spread across the country, so in any given area there will be only a few of them. This means that we need specialist institutions with wide and national catchment areas.
We actually do quite well at school level, albeit largely because of a legacy of charitable and privately established institutions. Central government has then done a pretty good job of recognising and incorporating these into the national schools system. I grew up near one of the most famous, the Mary Hare School for the deaf, which sends pupils on to a range of extremely demanding academic courses at university level. We have music schools, such as the Menuhin School and Chetham’s School, where more than 90% of students get financial assistance, including through the DfE’s music and dance scheme.
Where things are not going so well is at college level. Education does not end with school—less and less so. We need to recognise areas of specialisation that cannot be offered in each and every locality or even region, but which are none the less vital. We cannot just rely here on our inheritance of a few well-established institutions, such as the Royal National College for the Blind or, indeed, the wonderful sounding college that the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, helped to establish. We need to think more coherently and creatively about what sort of specialist colleges we need for this older age group and how they should be funded and run.
Noble Lords may know the sad story of the specialist national colleges. This was actually a very good idea, trying to create national institutions with specific areas of expertise. But, although lots of money was put into capital, there was no coherent thinking about how they would recruit and be funded. I remember visiting one early on and being horrified that it was expected to operate, recruit and fund itself as though it was just another local FE college with a particular, small catchment area. Not surprisingly, most of the national colleges have now closed.
We do not make clear provision for scarce and valued crafts and trades with small workforces. Training in some, such as musical instrument making or clockmaking, have clung on by being turned into fully fledged residential honours degrees in a couple of institutions, but the lack of national planning is evident. College-based courses have closed. In other countries, we would have apprenticeships, with specialist colleges providing the off-the-job training, and there is no mechanism somehow, in our central government, for thinking about and providing these.
Another group which suffers from being small and low-profile is our rural population. Agricultural and land-based colleges, which have to offer residential accommodation, are often struggling. There was supposed to be a proper review of these colleges a few years back. If it happened, it certainly never saw the light of day outside DfE. Specialist adult colleges survive in London; outside, there is just Northern clinging on by its fingertips. We have a construction skills crisis and only one of our specialist construction colleges is left standing. All this has relevance because it points up that, at college level, there is no real mechanism for thinking about specialist groups, of which one of the most important is young people with learning difficulties and physical challenges. But they are not the only ones and their colleges are not catered for, because we have no proper national mechanism for thinking about such specialist provision. I urge the Minister to ensure that, within her department, more focused attention is paid to looking at what national provision is needed for post-school college opportunities.
I also want to raise a very specific issue, because I think it speaks to the current absence of dedicated attention. Many specialised colleges are not standard public sector institutions, and many rightly offer qualifications ranging right through to levels 4, 5 and 6, which is higher education. At present, there seems to be real confusion over how the new VAT requirements for private school fees will apply to higher-level qualifications in institutions that also offer lower-level ones. This issue has been raised with me and other noble Lords, with respect to the dance and drama awards, but the lack of clarity speaks to this general point I am trying to make.
Our higher education sector also has a multiplicity of institutions and, as far as I know, there has been no discussion of introducing VAT on fees in higher education, which would, of course, feed through to student loans. My sense is that the lack of clarity on what is happening in specialist institutions—which would have a knock-on effect—comes from the fact that nobody is in a position to demand and get clear guidance. Can the Minister ensure that the Government clarify this particular challenge?
I also have a much more ambitious request. For what we normally think of as the special needs population, but also for the other small, spread-out, critical, specialist and often needy groups, we need to think far more coherently about specialist college provision across the country as a whole.
The Lord Bishop of Lincoln
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Baroness Monckton, for securing this debate and offer my admiration for her commitment and eloquence in this field.
I formerly served as the chair of the National Society, as the lead bishop for education. In that capacity, I was given a very wide view of the brilliant provision that is made where specialist schools and colleges exist. I can point to such a school in north Wiltshire where teachers were so dedicated they were prepared to face a 150-mile round trip every day to serve in that special place.
I am also the bishop for the L’Arche community in the UK. With the Church of England, L’Arche, as part of its vision, seeks to educate people to live well together in a community. That seems to me something that is—or should be—a special part of any school, not least our special schools.
Along with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I want to see an integrated ecology of special and mainstream schools. When I was Bishop of Ely, we won a bid with the DfE to have a single campus with a free school in partnership with a special school on the same site. I appreciate that there were expense issues in relation to that, but it seems to be an excellent model of an integrated approach.
I understand that the Minister in the other place talked this morning about wanting to have most children with special needs in mainstream schools so they can be with their friends. Of course, if you had an integrated campus, you would not only have friends but perhaps siblings meeting in the same setting as well.
We cannot get away from the fact that, at the moment, 150,000 young people across England attend specialist schools and colleges, but there are 1.9 million children and young people who have special educational needs—a figure identified in January 2024. The special schools we have, doing a marvellous job under huge pressure, are systematically underfunded and underresourced. In its report published today, the National Audit Office calculates that the demand for education and healthcare plans has increased by 140% since 2015. There are simply not enough places and this needs to be addressed in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, eloquently described. Individualised and complex support cannot be provided in blanket terms in mainstream schools. Nor can mainstream schools provide what I have witnessed broadly: the key importance of college places for people with a disability up to the age of 25, and all that has already been said about how important that is for accessing employment and, as part of the vision for education that the Church of England sustains, how we exercise a proper understanding of the rare dignity of all people, not least those living with disability.
The deficit in special needs education in mainstream schools is also very clear. I recently opened a new building at one of our 142 Church schools in the diocese of Lincoln: St John’s, Spalding. The school is experiencing a serious rise in the number of children with profound SEND needs. Clare Robinson, the head teacher, emphasised to me the impossible position that her staff face when SEND funding is entirely insufficient to cover the cost to employ the requisite personnel with training and expertise. This is also where specialist schools come into play, as they can actually send out experts to support mainstream schools in the delivery of special education in those other places. Clare and her colleagues have gone to extraordinary lengths to support their students. For instance, this has involved making a new multi-purpose area to serve as both a kids’ club and a space for interventions with SEND pupils. I saw this for myself, and it is a marvellous development, but the measure merely scratches the surface of what is needed because the school can cater for only its youngest students in this way.
I plead that the Government make sure that special schools not only continue and grow but continue to offer the specialist medical care, occupational and physical therapy, small class sizes, and all the activities and bespoke support which provide and ensure consistency of care for children and mitigated stresses for families.
As I said, the Church is committed to educating for dignity and respect. Given that Church schools are in such demand, I hope that it is possible for the Government to consider the Church being allowed to engage in developing special schools, not least because of falling school rolls and the reallocation of Church school buildings, which could become Church-based specialist schools. This, I hope, would help to improve the access for children in any kind of need.
I submit that denying children and young people with special needs the access to the specialist support they need is in fact a fundamental issue and affects everyone’s human rights. I am delighted that the Government are determined to continue to expand their work in this area, and I look forward to full developments brought to us very closely in the near future.
Baroness Hazarika (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, for organising this important debate. She is clearly such a passionate and moving advocate for her cause. In fact, a very dear friend—my best friend—who is a parent of two children with special educational needs has just messaged me to say that, watching the noble Baroness’s opening comments, she feels tearful that this is being debated in such a serious, sensitive and meaningful way.
The debate is also very timely. As has just been mentioned, the National Audit Office has just published a report which says that the special educational needs system is simply not delivering for children and their families, and very importantly, nor is it
“preventing local authorities from facing significant financial risks”.
I begin by paying tribute to the many excellent specialist schools and colleges across the country and their staff. They do such vital work for children and young people of all ages and backgrounds, many of whom have complex needs. As we have just heard so eloquently from the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, they provide a safe, compassionate, respectful, and—we forget this word—fun environment for the individual to develop and learn. They are often a lifeline for parents and families. Many also have a real focus on practical, vocational skills, to help equip a young adult for future life, to get into the workplace and get a job. That is so important.
When we have these discussions about children and young people with special educational needs, we often talk about them as though they are a different species from a different planet. I say this as a journalist, and I think my profession can be very guilty of this. We often use negative, hostile language, calling them a “problem” or a “ticking time bomb”—but they are human beings, just like anyone else, and they are someone’s precious and much-loved child or grandchild.
We should also want every child to have the best chance to make the most of themselves. Not only is it the right thing to do but it is the right thing for wider society. We want people to find suitable and sustainable work and to make a contribution. On a very basic human level, we want people to be able to build a good life.
Many children and young people just cannot access all these specialist facilities. That is why, like many others, I will move the debate on to what is happening in mainstream education. Many children with special educational needs who end up in a specialist institution will have often started out in mainstream education, so that part of the jigsaw cannot be ignored.
There are around 1.9 million children who have special educational needs, although this figure is probably much higher in real life. Whether you like that figure or not, we have to accept that there is real demand for special educational needs and that we all have a stake in improving the situation, because the current system is not working.
It is also unhelpful is to make comments such as those made by one of the contenders vying to be the next leader of the Opposition, who endorsed a pamphlet that argued:
“If you have a neurodiversity diagnosis”
and if
“you are a child, you may well get better treatment or equipment at school”.
I am afraid that idea is woefully out of touch with the lived reality and experience that so many parents face. Most parents in this situation are absolutely exhausted; they have been ground down and are tearing their hair out, trying to navigate and battle their way through this punishing, broken system. As we have heard, trying to get an education, health and care plan can become a full-time job. I know so many friends who are parents—most of whom are mums—who have had to stop working to battle away on behalf of their children. That is a loss of income for that family, a loss of a job for that parent and a loss for the economy. What about the parents who do not have the time, stomach or ability to take on the system? Do their kids simply get left behind? That cannot be right.
Having spoken to some parents and excellent teachers in preparation for this debate, I have a few ideas that they have put forward and that I hope my noble friend the Minister will consider. So many people have said that transport is absolutely critical. It sounds like a small thing, but it makes all the difference; it is something that can really help to get children to school. Yesterday in this Chamber, we discussed absenteeism and we all agreed, across the House, that it is so important to get children into school.
Teaching assistants also came up in my conversations. Again, they can make a massive difference to support teachers and pupils in schools. Perhaps now is the time to start treating teaching assistants with greater status and make the role more like a graduate job—giving them greater respect and maybe paying them a bit more—so that they can specialise in special educational needs, such as speech and language therapy.
We also need more resources in mainstream schools. Some very good work has been done on secondary schools, but we must also focus on primary schools. Early detection and intervention are vital, particularly at key stages 1 and 2, to help with identification, which will help children and their parents.
We also know that better mental health provision is important here and that waiting lists have soared post Covid. Getting mental health services into schools, and making them hubs, is important. This new Government are keen to do that, and I am sure that we will all welcome it.
The fiscal climate is incredibly difficult right now and we are of course waiting for the much-anticipated Budget, but we simply cannot afford not to fix the system. It is not all about throwing more money at the issue; it is about how it is used. As one excellent SEN teacher told me, money alone will not fix this; having the right people in place is what will make a difference. This is an important debate, and I hope that there will be agreement across the House that the hallmark of a good society is the welfare and education of all our children.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, special educational needs, or SEN, and special education needs and disabilities, or SEND, cover a wide variety of needs, including dyslexia and autism.
Two out of four of our children are dyslexic. When our younger son Josh was in kindergarten, it was spotted by a teacher. His next school gave up on him by the age of seven, and he went to a specialist school across the river, Fairley House, where they tried, and then he went on to Bruern Abbey at the age of nine, a boarding school near Oxford, which specialises in dyslexia and dyspraxia. He entered that school barely able to read or write and was innumerate—he could not even hold his pencil. He left four years later, coming top of the school in his common entrance, and scraped into what is—whether you like it or not—one of the best schools in the world, Eton. At that school, where they mark you out of the whole year, he came 262 out of 262 in his exams in his first couple of years: bottom of the school. With special-needs, one-to-one help at that school and everything else it offered, he left Eton with three A*s in his A-levels, entered the London School of Economics and has just graduated with a first-class degree in international history.
Why was that possible? First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, said, it was because of early detection: that teacher who spotted it when he was in kindergarten; and, secondly, intensive help, which was provided to him at Fairley House, at Bruern Abbey and at Eton. What are the Government doing to encourage those two things? For early detection, we should train every teacher in this country to be able to spot dyslexia or dyspraxia and to provide the special needs.
I qualified as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young—EY—here in London, which produced a report in conjunction with Made by Dyslexia called The Value of Dyslexia: Dyslexic Capability and Organisations of the Future. There are a couple of quotes in there. Steve Hatch of Facebook said:
“Dyslexic thinkers are often able to see connections that others may miss, and create narratives that can simplify complex products or tasks”.
There is another quote from Jonnie Goodwin, whom I know:
“Dyslexia should not be viewed as a disadvantage, but a strength”.
The report summarises the top dyslexic strengths and trending competencies in all industries that they are exceptional at: active learning, originality, spatial abilities, idea generation and reasoning abilities, creativity, social influence, innovation, and leadership. I have seen this at first hand.
I am privileged to know one of my heroes, Dame Stephanie Shirley—we call her Steve. She is the biggest benefactor of autism in the world and has set up a school in memory of her son, who was severely autistic: the Prior’s Court school. When I asked her what her school does that helps autistic children, she noted: specialised education, which can
“help mainstream schools to support autistic learners”;
inclusive expertise:
“Special schools often act as centres of excellence”;
holistic support:
“Integrate education with mental and physical therapies, reducing call on public health services”;
vocational training; advocacy for student rights:
“Raise awareness of rights and needs”;
assistive technology:
“Specialist school pilot of the use of assistive technology”;
parental involvement:
“Support the child within the family”;
and structured environment:
“What is essential in special education is good practice generally”.
She is 90 years old and is still going strong.
By the end of 2023-24, there were 1.6 million children in England with SEN—the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, gave a figure of 1.9 million—and of these, around 434,000 had an education, health and care plan, with autism being one of the most common situations.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, for leading this debate and for her excellent opening speech. In special education settings, if you have smaller classes, specialised staff, tailored equipment and focus on life skills training, 90% of parents whose children attend special schools feel that their children are well supported compared with only 59% of parents with children in mainstream schools. We need more special schools. The Government have spent £2.6 billion on SEND provision; I point out to the Minister that we surely need to spend more on this. In addition, by May 2023, two-thirds of special schools were operating at or above capacity, leading to further strain on the sector.
This debate is very timely. On 21 October, just a few days ago, the Financial Times ran an article headed “The funding crisis threatening England’s special needs education”, which said:
“The Department for Education said it was focused on ‘fixing the foundations’ of local government, providing long-term stability through multiyear funding settlements and ending the need for councils to spend time and money bidding for pots of government cash. However, with the number of children with EHC plans in England rising to more than 434,000 over the past eight years, surging Send deficits leave many councils with near-impossible choices to meet their obligations”.
Do the Government recognise this?
The article went on to say:
“Sam Freedman, a former government education policy adviser, said the rapid rise in EHC plans reflected a decade of cuts to other Send support in mainstream schools, such as specialist teachers and occupational therapists. This had led to a ‘vicious cycle’ in educational funding as parents turned to EHC plans to get support. ‘The lack of early-years intervention and a lack of other kinds of provision means that the only way for parents to obtain help and funding is by obtaining a statement, which means more money is sucked into plans, so there is less money for everything else,’ he added.
Demand has far outstripped the capacity of state-funded special schools, forcing councils to pay for much more expensive privately run alternatives … The Department for Education said children with Send had been ‘let down’ by the system and it was determined to tackle the issues with better inclusivity and expertise within mainstream schools. … Freedman said any solution must involve giving parents other options than seeking a Send plan for their child, although he admitted this would be challenging at a time of fiscal belt-tightening”.
Surely the Government realise that the solution is more funding overall for government schools, including special needs schools.
Just yesterday, my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister about the proposals for VAT on independent schools’ fees. Of course, this issue affects all private schools specialising in special needs as well. I quote the noble Lord’s letter, with his permission:
“It is true that from December 2018 to December 2023 there has been a 20.4% increase in independent school fees but this is over a six-year period during which the average yearly increase in fees was 3.4%. Similarly, since 2005 there has been an increase in independent school fees of 77.2% but the average yearly increase from December 2005 to December 2023 has been 4.06%. It is, therefore, complete nonsense to conclude that this provides the evidence of the ability of independent school parents, having coped with these small yearly increases in fees, often being matched by increases in their wages … It will cause great damage to the Government, which you lead, to have launched a policy which provides no benefit to the state sector and much suffering by pupils and their parents of ordinary working people whose only ‘sin’ has been, at their considerable cost, seeking to provide for their children a better education”.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests in the register, including as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. I thank my noble friend Lady Monckton for this debate on the important contribution that specialist schools and colleges make to SEND education.
I want to focus a bit more on the broader landscape and the valued role that they play as part of the SEND system. As many noble Lords have mentioned, the SEND system is failing. It is failing children, parents, schools and local government. We have a system that is hugely expensive, is complex, is adversarial and delivers poor outcomes.
I say “system”, but I am not sure that it is a system. That is the problem. Although there are many good parts—noble Lords have mentioned some great special schools, individuals who work hard to deliver great outcomes and parents who do their best to support their children—it does not operate as a system. It is not coherent. Not all parts are working together co-operatively and coherently to achieve the best outcomes for children.
The facts speak for themselves. Since 2014, we have seen the number of children with EHCPs more than double. The national high needs block funding for SEND has increased from around £5 billion to nearly £10 billion. Councils are spending an additional amount of nearly £1 billion on top of that. School transport costs have ballooned. The cumulative high needs deficit has risen from £300 million five years ago to more than £3 billion now.
Despite investment in special schools, it has not kept pace with demand. One noble Lord said that there had been an increase in demand of 140%. We have seen a 51% increase in placements in state-funded special schools and a 164% increase in non-maintained special schools over the last 10 years. This leaves those special schools under huge pressure.
Despite the increasing numbers and a significant increase in investment, there have not been improved outcomes. If anything, it has got worse. Young people with SEN with achievement at level 2 at 19 are declining faster than the mainstream average. Other indicators such as employment have not improved, despite some great examples in certain places, as my noble friend Lady Monckton mentioned.
In a survey by Isos of people working in the system, 97% said that the system is not working well in supporting children and young people with SEN to achieve good outcomes. The system is broken. We have moved to an exclusive rather than an inclusive system, with more pupils attending specialist schools, which is appropriate for some but not necessarily for everyone, often some distance from where they live, increasing numbers of specialist payments and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, pointed out, an alarming increase in the number having home education with specialist, bespoke packages.
It is a system based on legal frameworks that has driven a complete lack of trust. Schools find themselves lacking resources and specialist support for SEN pupils, and hence are incentivised to get an EHCP to get more resources or to offload a high-resource pupil. Parents seeking support for their child find that it is not available and can be achieved only through an EHCP. The noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, mentioned the difficulties of navigating this complex process. Local authorities have responsibility but neither the resources nor the levers to support SEN pupils, leading to rationing. There is a lack of capacity in mental health support, educational psychiatrists, speech and language therapists, specialist SENCOs and so on to deliver what is needed. The legal framework is vague and open to interpretation. It encourages an adversarial and legal-based approach, with prescriptive plans delivered through legal argument rather than being focused on children.
The system is opaque and hard to navigate for parents. The pushing of pupils to special schools means that there is a shortage of capacity for those who most need it, and the financial costs are simply unsustainable. In short, it is a system with perverse incentives that has led to a vicious circle, encouraging a legal-based, specialist approach. It sucks resources away from much-needed mainstream support and support to enable those needing more specialist support to receive it, as my noble friend Lady Monckton pointed out.
It can be done differently. It happens in some parts of the country and there are many good examples in Europe, so it is not impossible. We know how to fix this system. We need a system where inclusion is the norm, where parents and schools do not need an EHCP to get the support they need, where local authorities have not just the responsibility but the resources and levers to deliver, and where there is clear understanding for all parties of what support to expect and the confidence that it will be delivered. We need a system that does not require resorting to legal process and with a clear focus on delivering improved outcomes.
This will not be easy, not because it is technically or financially difficult—as I said earlier, successful models exist—but because there has been a complete breakdown of trust in the current system from all parties, which understandably are very protective of what they have. This mould needs to be broken, and it needs to be done on a cross-party basis.
Fortunately, there are good proposals on the table as to what can be done, as outlined in some of the proposals from the previous Government’s SEND review and the recently published Isos report commissioned by the LGA and CCN. What do we need? The Government should set out a new national ambition based on two core principles—promoting inclusion in education and preparing young people for adult life. We need a clear framework that describes levels and types of needs, including reform of the statutory framework so that it is clear what support should be available for each level of need, whether that is mainstream or in special schools. We need a clear framework for how partners will work together, aligning responsibilities with delivery and aligning transition points, and including, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln pointed out, linking specialist schools to mainstream so that there is mutual support.
We should be ambitious for our children. All plans should seek to improve outcomes and support the transition to adulthood. As noted by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, early identification is important and we need to get it right. We need to move away from a legalistic, tribunal-based system, which does not help anyone.
While it requires upfront investment to build capacity in mainstream schools and additional specialist support—such as for speech and language, with educational psychologists and in specialist schools and colleges—the savings from reducing higher-cost placements and transport, legal and other costs would more than compensate, while delivering better outcomes and sustainability. This will enable special needs schools and colleges to fulfil their important role as part of a positively functioning system. The Government’s proposals to require all schools to co-operate with local authorities on SEND admission, SEND inclusion and mental health support are a positive first step, but we need to go much further.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I remind the House once again of my declared interests. I am president of the British Dyslexia Association and chairman of Microlink PC, an assistive tech company that had an interest in education historically.
This has been a much wider-ranging debate than I was expecting. I felt that the original thrust from the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, was on a more specialist and important part of this thing—the areas of special educational needs and preparation for adult life—but we have ranged widely here and on to territory that we covered in my Question this morning. But there is a degree of consensus, which happily the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, put his finger on.
I believe in the cock-up school of history. The idea of having a nice, special, personal entitlement to deal with the problem has fed the lawyers and no one else. It has meant that the government system has, in effect, become dependent on the private sector to fulfil some of its needs. We have a big problem here.
One of the things that will help—I do not think I disagree with anybody here—is early recognition, particularly of mainstream conditions. The consensus is that in most cases they can be dealt with in the normal classroom, or at least within supported units in the school. Dyslexia undoubtedly fits that, if you allow it to.
The first thing to say is something on which I and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, have crossed swords—although I felt that she probably had a sword in her own back at the time. It is the fact that you must have flexibility to allow somebody to succeed. Those with dyslexia learn differently. We always tend to go to our own little area first, and this is very true of the dyslexic. I hope, for instance, that at some point in the future the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, announces that the Government have removed the requirement to teach English in only one way. Systematic synthetic phonics overloads the short-term memory, which means that many dyslexics and other groups do not find it a friendly process and many cannot learn by it.
We equip teachers to give specialist support in different ways because, if you have failed once with some teaching process by which the majority pass, it means that you are not absorbing in that way. Giving a child more help in that line will just undermine them further.
We have ways of dealing with that, such as with technology. I bet that in all noble Lords’ pockets is a device that you can press a button and dictate to. True, the AI does not quite match up to my vocabulary on all occasions yet, but it is getting there. That is available on computers, but we need to make sure it is better available. That means a slight reordering of the classroom, but we can do it at university—indeed, it is a legal requirement—so why do we not bring those bits of knowledge together?
It has been said that the system is not joined up. I have spoken about this on so many occasions that many of the veterans of this Chamber will probably be able to start quoting me back, but the fact of the matter is that we have to be flexible to allow this to happen. This requires different uses of resources and capacity within the school system to spot and implement change for most of the most commonly occurring conditions at certain levels. If we get that right, these people stand a chance of getting the skills to progress through to training and other activities.
I talk about dyslexia too much because I know about it. I also know that I do not know that much about the other groups. We need a lot of expertise—more than can be provided by one person. Relying on the SENCO has to be a thing of the past. SENCOs might co-ordinate a group of experts but they will need more people, more resource, more knowledge and the authority to tell that teacher in, for instance, a maths class that bad short-term memory means that someone with dyslexia will not remember equations and formulae. That means they can understand a concept but will not be able to implement it in classroom tests. Do most maths and physics teachers know that? No, not because they are essentially evil but because they have not been trained.
I will now get away from my particular hobby-horse and go back to where the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, brought us in. Other groups will have different requirements. If you have major problems with life skills or learning difficulties or autism, you have other requirements and might need better support. That is one thing that was built into the education and health care plan; I did not think I would ever say a good word about it, but support until 25 is a good idea as you will need it later. How will the Government make sure that we continue to give that support and prepare people to be able to function as independent adults in later life?
There is one thing that we often forget when we talk about this. It is that the people we are talking about are going to grow up. Let us hope that they will grow up and be able to function as individuals with technology, approach and flexibility, and are told how to ask for help. Even if an institution is prepared to help, being told how to ask for it is essential. We have to make sure that people are prepared. People learn at different levels and at different rates. How have they got this going forward?
A group that will talk to you about this is the parents. They live with a little nagging doubt, which can grow to a huge fear on their shoulder, about what will happen to their child as an adult when they are not there. Think about it: they will not be able to function, to go forward, or to have normal lives. Unless we interact with that fear to support them, we will let down everybody involved. This sector is still driven by tiger parents. I hope the Minister will be able to announce reforms and changes that will start to stop that, but at the moment it is. We have so many parents who are worried about the future of their child, and whose entire lives become driven around supporting their child. I hope the Minister will be able to start this process. I do not expect all the answers today, but she could start the process of engaging with it, because it has been known. None of this should come as a surprise to anybody who has been around this for any length of time.
We have to make sure we have a process whereby there is support in the education system and in training people to ask for help. Dyslexic people will not ask for a spelling check or a place to quietly go and process something, because they think that means weakness. I had two interns, and both had the disabled students’ allowance, for different reasons. Only once they saw the work that I was doing here were they prepared to admit that they had that help, and a slight change in working processes went through. I thought I had “dyslexic and disabled-friendly” stamped in the middle of my forehead, but they were still frightened of mentioning it. Just think about that.
How do we approach this issue? How do we go forward? How does the Department for Education encourage the other bits of society to become more user friendly? How do we stop saying, “Oh, that’s a problem that is dealt with in only one place”? This is a big topic, but remembering that education lasts a lifetime, and that the Department for Education is only the first step down that path, will be a real step forward. I hope we hear about those first steps today.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest on securing this important debate, on the truly dignified way in which she made her remarks and on combining such practical examples with deep expertise and understanding of this topic.
This has been an excellent and wide-ranging debate. We have heard from across the House that every one of your Lordships wants an education system that helps all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities to thrive, fulfil their potential and lead fulfilling lives, whether they are in special schools or mainstream education. We recognise the important role played by our special colleges, which support young people with special educational needs both academically and in order to make the transition to more independent living, to reduce isolation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, pointed out, and indeed to remove stigma, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Addington.
We have heard this afternoon that, as we knew before we came into the Chamber, this sector faces many challenges. Perhaps the most immediate that we heard in the debate, from all noble Lords, is the rising demand for specialist provision and the pressures that places on funding. It was in recognition of that growing need that the last Conservative Government increased the high-needs budget to £10.5 billion in 2024-25, which was a 60% increase on the figure in 2019-20. To help to increase capacity, £2.6 billion is being invested from 2022 to 2025 to fund new specialist places and improve existing provision. When complete, that investment in special schools will provide an additional 60,000 places.
As we all know, though, the level of need continues to outstrip that, with real consequences for parents who are looking for a place for their children, and for their children. It was the lack of consistent support and outcomes that led to the development of the SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan that we published last year, which was designed to ensure high-quality early support for every child regardless of where they live. At its core was an attempt to deal with the feeling that too many parents are having to battle with the system to get help, that too many parents have lost trust in the system, that we are not offering them the confidence that their children can realise their potential and, as my noble friend Lord Jamieson said, that the system needs to be on a financially sustainable footing.
There are two key areas within that, so that children can get the right support in the right place and at the right time. One is about having a national system with national standards to deliver consistent, clear and early support. The second is about moves to improve the timeliness and quality of education, health and care plans by adopting a standardised and digitised template to deal with some of the burden and stress that parents face, as we have heard, when they try to make those applications. It would be reassuring if the Minister could just comment on whether the Government plan to continue with those two initiatives, particularly given the level of consultation that underpinned those decisions.
The pressures that we are seeing on special schools, many of which we know are operating over capacity, also make the Government’s proposal to impose VAT on independent schools from 1 January 2025 even more misguided. We know that around 100,000 children and young people without an EHCP receive specialist SEND support in independent schools. Putting VAT on their fees risks disrupting their education, particularly as it is being in brought part-way through the school year.
As the Minister knows, on these Benches we think the Government should drop this policy in its entirety or, at the very least, delay it. But I suggest the Government should look at a particular area: the position of the 130 specialist FE colleges that provide training for young people with complex needs. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, and my noble friend Lady Monckton pointed out, all of their students are publicly funded through the high needs system. If these colleges are required to charge VAT, the purchasing local authority would simply reclaim it, resulting in no actual financial benefit to the public purse but considerable bureaucracy. I would be grateful if the Minister would consider reviewing that.
We know that our special schools and colleges perform a crucial role but it is also the case that the relationship between special school and mainstream provision is important, as we heard in particular from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln. We are concerned that the demand pressures that have built up in recent years, which were also highlighted in the National Audit Office report today, are leading to other impacts, including a worrying increase in the number of home-educated children with special educational needs. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who is not in his place, and the Minister have plans for legislation in this area. I look forward very much to those debates.
We support the principle of assuring that all children receive a suitable education. More broadly, we look forward to hearing more from the Government in the coming months about how they will improve their use of data in this area, as also recommended in the NAO report, in predicting changes in demand for special educational needs and disability provision, and how they will build on some of the excellent work which officials had already started, to ensure that expansions in capacity are done in the right place.
There is one topic which I think has not come up in your Lordships’ debate this afternoon, which is alternative provision. The previous Government intentionally brought together our strategies for children with special educational needs and disabilities with those in alternative provision, given the very high incidence of special educational needs among those children. In fact, my first visit as a Minister was to a school near Bristol for children who had been excluded from other schools. Some were as young as five and it was clear that they needed many things from the system, but two stayed with me.
First, for very young children, it seems obvious that they need a clear route to return to mainstream education. All children should have access to integrated care teams so that all their wider needs can be met and again, where possible, they can return to mainstream. My understanding is that there were some encouraging results from the DfE’s specialist task force pilot—only the DfE could come up with that name—where there was a multiagency response for those children. I would encourage the Minister to consider continuing with that.
To conclude, there is unity in this House about the desire to ensure that the SEND system works better and provides the support and outcomes that children and people with special educational needs and disabilities deserve. I think we are also in agreement that this is one of the hardest areas of policy to get right—although I was encouraged by my noble friend Lord Jamieson’s remarks in this regard. I would like to reassure the Minister that, in opposition, we will work constructively with the Government to try to get this right for children and their families.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, as others have, I will start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, for securing this debate on the contribution of special schools and colleges. The noble Baroness and I did our maiden speeches on the same day and she has continued to be, as she was then, an enormously important advocate both for the project that she leads and for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
I am also grateful for the excellent contributions today from across the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, there has been a breadth of discussion. There has also been an understandable use of personal experience and an emphasis on the experiences of individual children. As my noble friend Lady Hazarika said, this is about how we ensure that every child gets the best possible start in life and the best possible opportunities to achieve their potential in life. That is why we said in our manifesto that we were committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity, so that every child, regardless of their background, their family circumstances or their needs, is supported to achieve and thrive.
Sadly, that is not happening in our special educational needs and disability system at the moment. We have inherited a system in crisis. As others have identified, it is a crisis of provision and a crisis of confidence. Outcomes for children and young people are often poor in a system which can be adversarial for parents and carers to navigate. This was reinforced this morning with the publication of the National Audit Office’s report referenced by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln. The NAO report on the SEND system exposes the full extent of the failure. It reveals a system that has been neglected to the point of crisis and, consequently, has failed children and families with special educational needs on every measure.
I also identified that the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, in a broad speech, concluded that the one answer was more money. Of course it is important that this area receives the resources it needs, but one of the most worrying things about the National Audit Office report was that it identified that, although the annual budget has risen by 58% in a decade, this has not led to better outcomes for children with special educational needs. Money is not enough in this case. I think that is because—as I the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, very ably spelled out—we have a whole range of pressures and a whole system that is broken. Therefore, we need to take a systemic and radical approach to the way in which we think about special educational needs and disabilities.
It is both a cause and an effect that, in recent years, we have seen a significant surge in demand for SEN support in education, health and care plans, and in special school placements. The number of children and young people with EHCPs has increased markedly, from 330,000 in 2021-22 to 400,000 by 2023-24. That rise is particularly pronounced among specific need types. Over this period, the number of children and young people with autism recorded as their primary need grew by 27.9%. Similarly, those with speech, language and communication needs have seen an increase of 36.4%, and those with social, emotional and mental health needs have risen by 25.4%. Those sharp increases highlight the growing pressures on the SEND system. As noble Lords identified, they also demonstrate the need for not only an education-wide response but a government-wide response, where the contribution of health, for example, will also be important.
The Government’s ambition is that all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or in alternative provision, receive the right support to succeed in their education and as they move into adult life. That is why we are committed to taking a community-wide approach, improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream settings, as well as ensuring that specialist settings cater to those with the most complex needs.
My noble friend Lady Hazarika talked about the experience of many families and children in mainstream schools, where their failure to get the support necessary drives them into this battle for an education, health and care plan. Today, we have published independently commissioned insight that suggests that, if the system were extensively improved, using early intervention and better resourcing in mainstream schools, that could lead to tens of thousands more children and young people having their needs met without an EHCP, and having their needs met in a mainstream setting rather than a specialist placement. That is what is at stake here. We are determined to rebuild families’ confidence in a system that so many rely on. There will be no more short-termism when it comes to the life chances of some of our most vulnerable children. We understand how urgently we need to address this, but the reform that families are crying out for will take time.
I say to my noble friend Lady Morris that that will obviously mean that there will need to be a further opportunity for debate—in this House, yes, but also across the country, with the families, the children and those who are supporting them also having the opportunity to take part. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State is absolutely determined to engage widely as we do this.
The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, made an important contribution when he talked about the role of parents—the significance of the support they provide to their children, the crucial relationship they need with the schools and, of course, their contribution to the debate. Their voices and concerns must be heard as we take forward systemic reform in this area.
We also understand that people are impatient and we have already taken several steps to deliver on this vision. We have restructured the Department for Education, with much more focus on support for children and young people with SEND as part of our schools provision. The part of the department that does the core work on SEND and alternative provision has moved into the schools group, so it sits under the Schools Minister and the schools director-general. It is being considered as a central component of that wider schools work, including school standards, curriculum and assessment, and the operation of the education system as a whole.
We have begun the work to address the serious workforce challenge facing the school system. We are recruiting an additional 6,500 teachers while providing support to areas facing specific recruitment challenges. We are investing over £21 million this year to train 400 additional educational psychologists, ensuring better support and education for our young people.
The noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria and Lord Addington, and others rightly emphasised the need for early intervention and identification. We are similarly determined, therefore, that the early years sector receives the support it needs to grow and to develop further skills. In September, the department published a new, free online training module and SEND assessment guidance and resources for early educators aimed at supporting children with developmental differences and with special educational needs and disabilities. In the new core schools budget grant in July, we provided special and alternative-provision schools with more than £140 million of extra funding to help with the extra cost of this year’s teachers’ pay award and the outcome of the pay increase negotiations for support staff. This is important to support the recruitment, retention and development of dedicated specialist and support staff, ensuring that they continue to play that crucial role in providing high-quality education and care for pupils with SEND. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, special schools and colleges employ a high proportion of such support staff. They play a critical role in the education of the children and young people with the most complex needs, building that team around the child that is so crucial.
We also know how vital it is that all our children have strong speech and language skills. That is why this Government will roll out early language interventions to make sure that all our children get support at the earliest possible point, including continuing the support for the 11,100 schools registered for the Nuffield Early Language Intervention programme, because it is important that we make a difference when our children are young.
The noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about the contribution of technology support for pupils with SEND, with rapid improvements in the accessibility features built into standard devices. Schools now have more access to assistive technology than ever before, and evidence shows that when used effectively it is a key component of high-quality teaching for pupils with SEND. The Government are committed to helping teachers use technology to support their students with SEND, and we are embedding evidence-based practice, broadening the effective use of assistive technology through research, training, and guidance.
My noble friend Lady Morris and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, rightly talked about the importance of the curriculum and assessment in how we support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. In launching the independent curriculum and assessment review chaired by Professor Becky Francis, we have been clear that the review will look closely at the barriers to progress and how we can achieve good outcomes specifically for those with special educational needs and disabilities. Last month, the review launched a call for evidence which will give stakeholders in the SEND sector an opportunity to have their say on the curriculum and assessment system, including what currently works well and where things could be improved.
Several noble Lords talked about the importance of preparing children and young people for adulthood, and that has to be at the heart of the SEND system. We know that, with the right support, the vast majority of young people with SEND are capable of sustained paid employment and living full lives, and they should be supported to achieve that outcome. To help with this, we are supporting schools and colleges to work in line with the Gatsby benchmarks to address individual needs and to raise career aspirations.
The noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, raised the issue of how we can ensure that young people with SEND are able to access apprenticeships. I strongly agree with her about that. We have already expanded the flexibility of English and maths requirements for apprentices with learning difficulties or disabilities, allowing those without an EHCP but facing barriers to achieving level 2 qualifications to complete entry level 3 instead. We are also investing £18 million to March next year to double the number of supported internships, and we are testing this model with young people to support even more young people to achieve, thrive and transition into employment. However, I take the noble Baroness’s point about further flexibility in the apprenticeships programme, and I shall certainly reflect carefully on that.
In thinking about further education, it is of course the case that lots of general further education colleges are doing very good work in the area of special educational needs. But, for young people whose needs cannot be met in general further education colleges, specialist post-16 institutions play an integral role in providing that specialist further education provision. In 2024-25 there were 118 of those institutions for students receiving high-needs funding. It is also worth saying that young people with SEND who choose to progress to university should also continue to access high-quality support. As of the most recent data, almost one-fifth of English higher education students had a disability. Under the Equality Act, all HE providers have a responsibility to make reasonable adjustments for their disabled students, and the Office for Students requires registered HE providers to take all reasonable steps to ensure that students are supported. In their access and participation plans, providers must also outline how they will improve opportunity for underrepresented groups, including disabled students, to access, succeed in and progress from higher education.
Ultimately, we want more children and young people to receive the support they need to thrive in their local mainstream setting, reducing the need for them to travel a long way to access a specialist placement and, as several noble Lords have said, enabling them to learn alongside their friends. Many mainstream settings are already going above and beyond to deliver specialist provision locally, including through resourced provision and SEN units. But there will also always be a place in the system for special schools and colleges for children with the most complex needs.
As we have heard today, special schools and specialist post-16 colleges make an invaluable contribution to the education of nearly 200,000 learners, supporting them to achieve and thrive. Their staff work tirelessly to support children and young people and I take this opportunity to thank them for their dedication. I recognise the point made by my noble friend Lady Morris about how the range of staff and the skills that exist in specialist schools and colleges can inform teachers in all our schools. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln said, that role of staff and where possible that collocation can enable everybody to benefit. Specialist staff across schools and colleges play a fundamental role in educating children and young people with SEND and supporting their preparation for adulthood.
We have also seen some really positive partnerships between specialist and mainstream colleges that enhance the educational experience for children and young people with SEND. For example, Orchard Hill College and Crawley College have collaborated to support learners with complex health needs, enabling them to access mainstream courses with tailored care plans. Similarly, Newfriars College and Newcastle and Staffordshire Colleges Group are working together to create new supported internships and work placement opportunities, open to students from both settings. Those are the types of partnerships that enable the very best specialist, understanding staff and provision to be shared for all to use.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, talked about other specialist colleges and I take her point about the need for us to have a view about how more broadly specialist colleges need to be organised and contribute to the system. I shall certainly take that point away and take up the challenge to look at that provision.
Several noble Lords once again took the opportunity to raise the issue of VAT on independent school fees. I reiterate, as I have said on every single occasion, that local authority funding already supports the vast majority of pupils with EHCPs who attend independent schools, and they will not be impacted by the introduction of VAT for private schools. Next week, in the Budget, the tax information and impact note will include the impact on special educational needs. I assure noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, that the Treasury has been considering how VAT might apply to post-16 institutions; the Government will publish the results of that consultation soon.
For too long, the education system has not met the needs of all children and young people, including those with special educational needs and disability. Educational outcomes for children and young people are too poor, after years of councils and parents being pitted against each other. Special schools and specialist colleges, such as Team Domenica, make an enormous contribution to the education and care of thousands of children and young people, helping them to learn, achieve and prepare for adulthood.
We will work to restore parents’ trust that their child will get the support that they need in a mainstream setting if that is the right place for them, and that there will always be a place in specialist settings for children and young people with the most complex needs. That is central to improving the life chances of children and young people across the country, and I look forward to working with noble Lords to make that vision a reality.
Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for pointing out that special schools have improved—when you are mired in it, it is a very difficult thing to remember—and that we have come a long way since we used the term “ineducable”. That is very important. She also pointed out that the assessment framework—the exams taken—needs to focus much more on the purpose of getting people into work. That needs to be looked at.
I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for saying that parents should never be forgotten. Parents are absolutely key; if you do not have parents on board, it is very difficult to do what is necessary for the young people. They really need to be on side, and to be looked after. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, said, they are absolutely exhausted most of the time—I speak as one; it really is very tiring a lot of the time.
I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln for what was the most important phrase of the debate: the rare dignity of all people. That is what it is. I think too of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said about social mobility. When you are with somebody with a learning disability, they do not care who you are, they do not know who you are, and they do not care what you earn or where you come from. It makes you strip off mask after mask, until you are there in a proper shared humanity—that is what it means.
I am not going to go on—I have never done this before—but I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. I am very grateful.