Open Public Services White Paper

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My noble friend should feel reassured first and foremost that it is not about just a sell-off. It is about introducing a much wider and more diverse provision of service so that people are able to enjoy a much more flexible response to their needs rather than, as so often, a stringent delivery of services through local authorities. Often as not, my noble friend will find that within an independent delivery service there is always capacity built in. It is often a prerequisite required of those who deliver services when they buy from the public sector to deliver, because it has to be delivered in their service plans in the first place. So I do not have a worry about capacity.

It is important that we are able to ensure that people who are going to use these services will be able to have a greater say in how those services will be delivered, whether those services meet their needs and, if they do not, how we can have recourse to get those services made better in responding to those needs.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, will the Minister accept that many of us are extremely disappointed with this so-called White Paper? It seems to be a Green Paper because it consults on a range of things without any precision on what the Government’s intent is. When I saw the coalition agreement saying that there would be an opportunity for millions of workers to be their own boss, I was expecting more from a White Paper than simply, “We will continue to support mutuals and the public sector workers in them”. The lack of ambition is staggering.

Will the Government now seriously address the manner in which they can reform and change public services? They are getting a bad name now for their lack of ambition on reform and their inability to deliver it. On things like mutuals, they need to answer the questions put by my noble friend on the Front Bench, particularly around pensions and pension entitlement.

[Baroness Verma]

I am sorry that the noble Baroness feels that this does not address public sector reform. Public services are being reformed. This is an exciting and comprehensive paper. I suggest that if she takes the paper away and looks at it in detail, she will see that we are genuinely working across government to ensure that there is a proper reform of public services so that they are delivered to ensure that people have choices, are able to have their needs met and have a say in how those choices are delivered. These reforms will take time because we want the process to be evolutionary and we want to get it right, but it is a build-on to what was happening already. I hope that I leave the noble Baroness assured that we will be working hard with public services to ensure the best delivery.

UN: International Year of Youth

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, on securing this debate. It is not often that we get the chance to debate issues of this nature. First, I should declare the interest of the many organisations for which I act as a trustee. The three that are relevant to this debate are the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and Voluntary Service Overseas. I am on the international board of VSO, which is an enormous privilege.

Inevitably, the priorities in much of the developing world are different from ours. Among many policy-makers in this country, the ageing society is talked about as one of the greatest challenges that we face, with questions of how to adapt our public services and so on to meet the needs of that ageing society. However, in the developing world, the absolute opposite is true. I have had the opportunity to go to several countries in Africa. The challenge faced in Sierra Leone is the number of young people involved in the war who have lost their parents and become incredibly emotionally damaged. The question is how to deal with the sheer number of such children and how to find meaningful work and activities for them. I visited Tanzania to work with an education organisation which is working to improve quality in primary education. It has done remarkably well in increasing the number of children going to primary school, and we congratulate it on achieving much of the millennium development goal on education. However, many girls are being taken out of school to do domestic work and so on.

I could go on but I want to talk specifically about the role of the International Citizen Service—the new programme being introduced by the Government that will begin later this year. Potentially, it can play a very important role in development and particularly in providing opportunities for young people, not only in this country but in developing countries, and I hope that the Government proceed with ICS in this manner. This new initiative will be run in this country by six specialist development organisations led by VSO. All six agencies are currently working in development, using volunteers as their main instruments. It is very important that these agencies’ primary concern is development through volunteering, rather than simply giving people from this country a good experience.

More than most in this Committee, I can give testament to the value of volunteering for individuals in this country. It changed my life; the most important two years in my life were the two that I spent in Kenya. However, that is not enough; we have to approach this with the vision of development. VSO will do it through youth exchange, involving young people from the developing world as much as young people from this country. I urge the Government to keep faith with development and not to be tempted to turn this into what some might call gap-year tourism. It is not that. It needs to be a significant experience in development for children and young people in the developing world. I hope that the Government will learn from VSO about how to do this.