National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Barker and Earl of Listowel

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 2 from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, to which I have added my name. It provides an important protection to avoiding any inadvertent damage to the very important charities working in the youth area.

In Committee, I drew the attention of your Lordships to the recent research into the impact of the Scout Movement on the mental health of adults; a significant difference in the mental health of adults has been demonstrated in research recently. As vice-chair for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, I am very well aware of the chaotic lives that too many of our children experience. Yesterday with Gracia McGrath, the chief executive of Chance UK, a mentoring organisation working with primary school children, often those with behavioural difficulties, I discussed the experience of too many children in this country. They may not have a table at home at which they can sit down for meals together; there may be very poor communication in the family, and no consistency about rules. A parent may say, “I will punish you for doing so and so”, and then the child will not get punished but will then find themselves being punished all of a sudden for something that they know no reason for. Often there is violence in the home; that kind of violence becomes normalised, and when such children go to school they find it hard to make friends, because friends do not understand when they get hit all of a sudden for no reason. I remember working with an eight year-old Traveller boy many years ago, blond and blue-eyed and much younger than the other group of four boys with whom I was working at the time. He was full of obscenities, hitting me and the others, but in an affectionate sort of way; it was the only way in which he really knew how to communicate affection towards us.

Going back to my discussion yesterday, Gracia McGrath talked about how she started to help these children, mentoring five to 11 year-olds and how she would often encourage them to join the scouts or cadets. There they would get the solution that they needed, a sense of purpose, a set of rules, maybe a father figure, and a uniform that they could be proud of. So I strongly support the noble Baroness’s amendment. The NCS is a giant already and is going to be even greater; we must take every precaution that it does not inadvertently disturb the delicate ecosystem of youth charities working in the area already. I hope that the Minister can accept this amendment and I look forward to his reply.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 8 in this group stands in my name. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said that this legislation was not controversial. The purpose and aim of this legislation is not controversial; there is agreement that the outputs such as those the NCS exists to deliver are ones that we all welcome. However, as I said at Second Reading, the decision to make this organisation permanent, to make it a royal charter body and to invest so much money in it is highly controversial. What this House has done, or what we have certainly tried to do from these Benches, is to draw to your Lordships’ attention the very many flaws within the basic design of this legislation and in its detail. We do so because we have seen in recent memory programmes of this kind, such as the Work Programme, fail to deliver in their own terms as well as doing damage to the rest of the sector.

I know that, on the one hand, the Minister wants to establish the NCS as a body that is completely insulated and isolated from the rest of the voluntary sector, not bound by the same rules and accounting obligations. On the other hand, he has to accept that if the NCS as a commissioning body is to deliver on its objectives, it will have to work very closely with the rest of the sector. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, is absolutely right: at this size, the new body will have a profound effect on those other organisations. The Minister has, all the way through, elegantly batted off any suggestion that this organisation should be required to be accountable and report in any greater detail than that which is set out in the original Bill, but I put it to him that the requirement in my amendment to report on how many young people have gone on to participate in other social action opportunities and the impact that the NCS programmes have had on the wider social action sector should be fundamental parts of the raison d’être of the NCS. If it cannot do that, then we as parliamentarians have to question why so much money is being invested in it.

I think that this is a very modest requirement. If the Minister says that this is too much of an imposition upon the NCS Trust, I am afraid that, yet again, we will be forced to wonder whether the NCS is being overrated and overstated as an organisation and whether it really is safe to invest this much money in it. I hope that the Minister will accept this amendment.