Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, yes, diversity of governing boards and businesses is indeed a strength. We obviously agree that people should be paid in accordance with their work and that there should not be an ethnic pay gap. However, it is the mechanism by which we get there that I believe we are in disagreement on. The report states that, when companies publish ethnicity pay gaps, they should also publish action plans and diagnoses as to how they are going to close that gap.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am sure the Minister recognises that the ideology that puts race and gender as always subservient to economics and class, which seems to underlie this report, was developed in the now discredited and defunct Revolutionary Communist Party. Given that the commission was appointed by No. 10, is the Minister proud that it is the ideology of the RCP that is now driving social policy at the centre of this Government? It does not understand what is going on in our society and people are rather offended by that.
International Women’s Day
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am really sorry for you all, but I will follow on from the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins. VSO changed my life. It gave me opportunities to learn about myself and the world, and to commit myself to a lifelong interest in the developing world and how we change things, particularly for girls and women. I went on VSO when I was 21 and spent two years in Kenya. I have subsequently done other things with VSO: I also did the parliamentary scheme in Tanzania in 2008 and I served in VSO’s governance for over 10 years until a couple of years ago.
VSO is the primary development agency used by this Government for volunteering. It is the primary development agency for pushing volunteering around the world. I had the honour to be in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia for the signing of the first memorandum of understanding with the African Union two years ago. The African Union recognised the sustainable development goal on volunteering and saw, with so many young people in Africa without jobs and almost without opportunity, that volunteering was critical.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, said, despite the pandemic, VSO’s work has continued on tackling Covid and those things that women and girls have been particularly susceptible to in recent months and years. There are some remarkable examples of the work it has done. I have talked to volunteers who were back from the ICS programme but still keeping in contact with people in the developing world, and to some of the national volunteers in those countries where VSO works. Those national volunteers were working in their own communities, reaching out to women and girls about gender-based violence, and reaching out to their local communities about what Covid really meant, trying to demystify all the myths that had grown up. We know about them here too.
The reality is that young national volunteers are transformed by their experience of being trained and supported by VSO to work in their local communities. I have met groups of women, mainly from east Africa, but also from other places in Africa, who are now absolutely determined to make a difference and to be leaders in their own communities and countries. The Government are in danger of throwing this away because they do not recognise the importance of making a decision quickly. This decision has been hanging on for more than a year; VSO was expecting to get approval in January 2020. Now the money will run out at the end of this month—and nothing. There is no commitment, just, “Oh, we don’t want to close you down but we’re not ready to take a decision.”
VSO will go by default if the Government do not take a decision because it needs the money to do the work. That will have enormous consequences for people involved in the developing world who work on this, but also for Britain’s reputation because VSO is, rightly, working with Governments around the Commonwealth: in Africa and India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere, including Nepal. It is very well respected and loved there, and the Government are not ensuring its continuation. I suspect they will say, “We are not closing you down, we’re just putting it on pause”—
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I remind the noble Baroness of the four-minute speaking time.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
I am sorry I have gone on. It matters to me; I hope it matters to the Government because they are making a real problem for themselves but they could sort it.
Social Mobility
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, yes, the report highlights how important education is, but says that it is not the only factor, particularly in areas with great disparity in household income. I agree with the noble Lord on the ethos in schools. That is why, in addition to the opportunity areas, a specific school programme called Opportunity North East is being run by the department, focused on secondary schools in the north-east, where we see that primary school attainment is around the national average, but it drops off at secondary school, so we are intervening directly in schools as well.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, this is a very sobering report, which recommends a place-based approach that, yes, has education interventions but much more than that. We know that the pandemic has made things much worse for children in poor families and their communities. Can the Minister assure us that there will be further place-based interventions where the money is awarded with integrity, based on sound data and not, quite honestly, with the bad taste of political interference that still lingers over the last round of the Towns Fund?
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I can assure the noble Baroness that local enterprise partnerships are, as the report outlines, one of the solutions here in opportunity areas. They are funded by a grant to the local authority, so it is up to the local authority to then put the stakeholders around the table, and the LEPs are very much involved in that. We are also trying to support disadvantaged children nationwide by developing a national tutoring programme.
Education Settings: Wider Opening
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Berridge
My Lords, it is incredibly sad to think about the lack of the protective good for children in schools during this time. I am pleased that the £1.6 million for the NSPCC helpline has been useful to it. We are also pleased that among vulnerable children in contact with a social worker, we have now seen a considerable increase in the numbers in school. There are 47,000 of them in school, up from 37,000 on 21 May, which is to be welcomed. As I say, the teams reacting on the ground are working closely with local authorities’ children’s services, so that information about children who are not in school is passed on. We have redeployed Ofsted staff to bolster local authorities where they have needed it. While it is not possible to replace the protective good that school is for those children, we are seeing a steady increase in the numbers going to school.
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I had the opportunity to hear from the Chief Inspector of Schools and the Children’s Commissioner yesterday at a Select Committee in this House. They found the Statement disappointing and said that it lacked urgency and creativity. Is it not clear that, despite the attention with which the Minister feels that she and others in the department have been addressing these issues, the measures to prevent some children falling behind are failing at the moment? We need a detailed action plan, with stakeholders involved to get those falling-behind children into school before September, and for the Government to act with that creativity and urgency which was sadly lacking from this Statement.
Baroness Berridge
My Lords, it is a great regret that the scientific evidence on social distances does not allow us to achieve our ambition of getting all primary schoolchildren back before the summer. However, as I say, more vulnerable children are in school. We have also acted with specific initiatives on behalf of, for instance, those transitioning from alternative provision at 16. We recognise the risk that they could drop through the net, so we have announced £750 per year 11 pupil in alternative provision. We are obviously aware that it is unprecedented to be in the Department for Education at a time when we had to close schools. There is urgency and a plan to catch up for those children.
Children and Families: Early Years Interventions
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I too congratulate the right reverend Prelate on securing this debate, which is timely given the other things going on.
All children learn and develop quicker in the early years than in the rest of their lives. By the time they are two, the brains of babies will have a different shape and size which reflect the nurture, care and stimulation or the neglect they have had. When you look at scans of two year-old babies’ brains, it is terrifying to see the difference between someone who has been severely neglected and someone who has had the sort of loving care and stimulation we all want for our own families. It is, therefore, in the interests of all of us to pay attention to the needs and opportunities of children in their very early years.
We need to look at this again. The nature of family and community life has changed drastically in my lifetime, and our services need to understand and reflect that. We hear stories this week of the rising costs of childcare. It is now a problem for most families. I have not come across a family with young children that is not talking about it. The noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, addressed this complexity and lack of coherence, but it is also very challenging, so we all have to look at this again, and do so seriously.
When I was appointed to the Cabinet Office—and this reflects my old age—in 2006, I was given the social exclusion brief. The Prime Minister charged me with looking at why the Government had not succeeded in really changing the life opportunities of the bottom 2% of our society. I will not talk about the rest but about that bottom 2%. We had set up and started the Social Exclusion Unit in 1997 and, 10 years later, were really frustrated that we had not shifted this bottom 2%. Anybody who had any engagement or work with the different benefit systems for single-parent families, people with disabilities and so on was able and encouraged to access other services, such as Sure Start, and received tax credits and the minimum wage. That sort of package made an incredible difference to their lives.
Sure Start was part of a package to improve opportunities across the board, but we also knew there had to be systems within it to recognise not only the best start for every child but those who were going to face particular challenges, so they could be picked up early with appropriate interventions and just to keep hold of them. My work was to ensure that the most disadvantaged had the most effective interventions and opportunities. Spotting or identifying these children and beginning the intervention cannot wait until school. People now talk about school readiness, because they know that, if we do not enable children to start school with a chance, we are making it clear that, for the rest of their lives, they will struggle to keep up.
I insisted that there was someone from the health service based in every Sure Start centre. It was normally a health visitor, because they have a statutory responsibility to visit every family in the early years. I would like to see more health visitors, but that is part of their role. I looked around the world at all the different interventions for disadvantaged families to find the most effective. Coming back to the speech from my noble friend Lady Wilcox, I discovered the Incredible Years in Wales. It was an international programme, devised in Canada, but taken up by an inspirational educational psychologist in Wales, who persuaded the Welsh Government to train every Sure Start in how to introduce the Incredible Years parenting package. It had fantastic outcomes.
I also learned from other evidence-based programmes and introduced 10 pilot programmes of the nurse-family partnership—we now call it the family nurse partnership. It is expensive, because it starts six months before birth and then works with the mother and newly born child until the child is two. The 20-year analysis that we looked at showed better outcomes than anything else in the world, in terms of the amount of money spent for the return, first by the time the child was seven and then when they were 15. All Governments say it is great to introduce programmes like that, but they are virtually disappearing in this country, because we are not paying for them. It goes back to that: if we make the right investment, at the right time, we will save a lot of money down the road. I do not care what the Government call any intervention but, for goodness sake, do not throw everything out because it was done by a different Government. Learn from what works and make sure kids get those opportunities.
Trade Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Swiss Confederation
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, as a member of the sub-committee chaired so well by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I am glad of the opportunity to pay tribute to him for his work as chair and to the work of the staff of the committee. A tremendous amount of work goes on and we, as a Chamber, are indebted to all the chairs who undertake such long and often painstaking work, over long hours, to ensure that the proper scrutiny goes on and that the work of the committees is effective.
In many ways, what we have before us today is a test vehicle, because many other treaties will follow and some of the points that have been made already, which I shall not repeat in detail, need to be dealt with now to ensure that we move things forward effectively. This matter is of interest to us all, whichever side we take on Brexit; we have to get the system to work whatever the settlement may be. I am very committed to the European Union, but I have to accept that it is important that we get things to work properly, whether fairly soon, after 31 October or whenever.
One question that clearly arises is our capacity to handle all these changes and all the discussions and investigations that have to go on—the capacity within Parliament on an elected level in the House of Commons and in our Chamber here, but also within the Civil Service. Do the Government have the capacity to handle things to the timescale within which they will have to be undertaken? Getting it wrong has a material effect on people involved in manufacturing, in trade and in services, so we have to get it right. It is better to get it right a little later than to be rushing in and getting it wrong soon.
The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, referred to getting the devolved Administrations involved. That does not mean just sending an email down the road to them and saying, “This is happening. Send your reply within three weeks and we await to hear that”; it means engaging with them and making sure that there is proper buy-in at that level. We need a harmonious approach so that some of the problems that may be seen from the devolved Administrations’ perspective are dealt with at the right time and do not trip us up later.
I stress again the question of differentiation between goods and services. I always thought that this was an artificial differentiation. It is even more so now, because we cannot just draw a line between them. We need a system that works not just for now but as things move forward. As what we have regarded as services in the past become an integral part of the goods that we may be dealing with, we have to ensure that our treaties are robust enough for those circumstances.
Will the Minister give some commitment as to whether the Government can deal with the trade implications of a no-deal scenario on 31 October? God help us that it does not come to that but if it does, can we realistically deal with it in a way that is fair and reasonable for all those diverse interests in our economy who depend on the answer?
Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)
My Lords, I too am a member of the European Union Select Committee—not of the same sub-committee as my noble friend Lord Whitty but of the External Affairs Sub-Committee. That committee has been considering several of the trade agreements. None of those that we have looked at deals with anything more than 0.1% of our trade. When I am feeling really cynical, I think that the amount of money we have spent getting to this stage of bringing the treaties to the House will probably be more than any of them bring in trade. Then I wonder at all this talk about saving so much money by coming out of the EU. Everything I hear contradicts that in all sorts of ways.
We are agreeing these treaties as emergency procedures to make sure that, if there was no deal, there would be some ability to continue to trade, but we have not had a real debate about what sort of relationship the Government foresee between this country and the rest of the world through trade. We have to think only of the Corn Laws and the huge divisions there were then: I often think we are in the same sort of period now, even though the world and trade have changed a great deal since the Corn Laws. We know that some members of the Government are speaking very loudly about totally free trade, where we can trade on our own terms with elsewhere in the world. I think that that is a fantasy; none the less, that is said by some Ministers, whereas others keep reassuring us that we will have regulatory standards that will protect the environment, food standards and so on.