Building Safety Update

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Brinton

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I thank the Minister. She answered my question, and I look forward to hearing from her on PEEPs in the future.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have three interrelated questions, and I am going to relate them to the 1,100 buildings mentioned in the Statement, not the rather breathtaking figure from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, of 13,000 buildings. The Statement rightly says that leaseholders will want work to start without delay on all 1,100 buildings, which are, by definition, significant buildings. Are the Government confident that there are sufficient skills and ability, as well as the sheer workforce, to deliver this in any meaningful kind of timeframe?

Although most of the focus since the awful tragedy of Grenfell has been on external wall systems, there are also huge and quite complicated problems that have been discovered with fire-stopping systems, particularly breaches of compartmentalisation in the way buildings have either been designed or built. Fixing that is not going to be a simple matter of taking some cladding off and putting some cladding on; it is going to require a very high level of skills to make sure that you are genuinely fixing the problem and not, goodness forbid, making it worse.

In that context, the Health and Safety Executive recommended the golden thread principle, which I think probably applies here, of ensuring that there is a responsible person who is in control, really understands what is happening and has all the necessary documents and understanding.

I also note that this week the consultation closes on what is known as approved document B, which is the new and improved iterative process of fire safety standards. That is only going to apply to new buildings and will not affect existing buildings. Are the Government really committed to ensuring that we get the best possible standards in these buildings? People have now been living in fear for years, and they need the confidence to know their buildings are as safe as possible.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Brinton

Committee stage
Wednesday 26th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, being aware of the hour, I will be extremely brief, but I just want to express support particularly for Amendment 441, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis. I think we have to look at this in the context of, as the Committee may be aware, the current movement in relation to the Energy Charter Treaty and the way in which increasing numbers of states—most recently France but also the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Italy—have found that this treaty that they entered into years ago has really restricted their ability to act on the kind of environmental, social and labour matters identified here. It is really important that we do not bring in new laws that create further restrictions.

On the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, there has been lots of criticism of the CRaG process and that it was essentially designed for long ago when trade treaties were something very different from what they are today. Just to illustrate that point, this morning I was with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association for a visit of Canadian lawmakers. We learnt then, very interestingly, that Canada had wanted to include the issue of frozen pensions—the fact that the UK does not uprate its pensions for people in Canada while it does so for people in the United States. That is the kind of way in which trade deals can become far more complicated today. Unfortunately, on the account we heard this morning, the UK Government refused to countenance this being included in the trade deal, but it is really important that we see how broad trade deals can be today and that they have the maximum democratic scrutiny. That is what I think this amendment seeks to achieve.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 436, from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and to my noble friend’s Amendment 441. It is a pleasure to follow both of them.

I want to talk a bit about some of the problems that we face inside our own government structures and Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and I spent quite a bit of time earlier this year on the Health and Care Act. Indeed, there was a section in there about healthcare arrangements with other countries. But that was the end of a story, and at each stage from 2014 onwards we kept finding people trying to relax the EU directive on procurement rules, which we had to abide by then, in order to enlarge the gift that we could give under a treaty. For health, this is an extremely important matter.

The EU procurement directive, which governs all public sector procurement in member states, defines fair process and standards to ensure that all businesses, including the NHS, have fair competition for contracts. It also, incidentally, prevents conflicts of interest through robust exclusion rounds and protects against creeping privatisation. It is that latter point that is really important in particular for the NHS, but there are other sectors of the public realm where that matters too.

On 18 November 2014, I asked the noble Lord, Lord Livingston of Parkhead, whether the EU procurement directive protected the NHS. He replied:

“Commissioner de Gucht has been very clear:

‘Public services are always exempted ... The argument is abused in your country for political reasons.’”

The noble Lord, Lord Livingston, went on to say:

“That is pretty clear. The US has also made it entirely clear. Its chief negotiator—

this was in relation to TTIP—

said that it was not seeking for public services to be incorporated. No one on either side is seeking to have the NHS treated in a different way … trade agreements to date have always protected public services.”—[Official Report, 18/11/14; col. 374.]

Again in 2018, I raised these points with the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, in a debate and he said:

“I can tell them that we have implemented our obligations under the EU directive. The Government are absolutely committed that the NHS is, and always will be, a public service, free at the point of need”—


and the current Government repeat that point.

“It is not for sale to the private sector, whether overseas or here. That will be in our gift and we will not put that on the table for trade partners, whatever they say they want.”—[Official Report, 29/3/18; col. 947.]

That was very helpful because it came in advance of President Trump’s attempt to broaden what could be in a possible trade agreement, which would definitely have included health. Those of us who are concerned about these matters therefore relaxed a bit, until the Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill came before your Lordships’ House, which was intended to replicate the reciprocal healthcare arrangements that we used to have under EHIC. The problem was that it had a clause that also gave rights under international trade agreements for health services to be part of those trade agreements, with no reference back to Parliament. It was an expedited process but, during the passage of that Bill, we managed to revert to it being just about reciprocal healthcare arrangements in the European Economic Area and Switzerland.

However, this year, we went through exactly the same process again when the Health and Care Bill was introduced, as it contained a much looser series of clauses that would have allowed health to become part of trade agreements. During the Bill’s passage, a cross-party group of Peers fought very hard and were really grateful that the Government recognised the risk that they were putting the NHS under and conceded. Now, the provisions under the Health and Care Act are the equivalent of EHIC but for other countries.

I wanted to raise these points because it seems to me that we must have Parliament’s involvement before things are signed and sealed. We also need to let those people who are negotiating our trade agreements understand where some of the clear red lines remain across Parliament—and certainly across this nation—for certain public services, including the NHS.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Brinton

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I start by saying that my noble friend Lord Storey is unable to be in his place today, so, as a co-signatory to his Amendment 8, I will introduce it on his behalf. Why is it important to have mental health specified in Clause 1(2)(b) in relation to standards? In parentheses, we have just discussed three groups using the telescope to look up to the night sky, trying to see the strategic issues related to the Bill, and I am going to follow the opposite route of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and look down the microscope at one very particular issue that I think needs to be in the Bill, despite all our concerns about these clauses on academies.

Why should standards need to specify mental health? It is very straightforward. It is because, in the pyramid of support for children and young people with mental health problems, schools are absolutely on the front line of a universal service, and teachers and staff are often the first to be able to identify worries. They are also the non-specialist primary care workers. Over the last 10 years, we have seen a substantial series of policy announcements—at least 19—which cover or include mental health, starting in 2011 with the strategy paper No Health Without Mental Health, which recognised the importance of early intervention and pledged to improve access to psychological therapies for children and young people.

A year later, the No Health Without Mental Health implementation framework was published, describing how different bodies, including schools, should work together to support mental health. In 2014, there were four further policy actions; there were five in 2015, including early intervention funding. In 2017, the Green Paper on children’s and young people’s mental health was published and included incentivising schools to identify and train a designated senior lead for mental health, funding for new mental health teams and a pilot for a four-week waiting time for access to specialist CAMHS teams.

That Green Paper was a start, but most people agreed with the Education and Health and Social Care Committees, which published a joint report saying that it was going to fail a generation. So, before Covid even struck, we already had a very public recognition that various parts of the public sector were not serving our children and young people with mental health issues well, including schools, principally because they were not getting the financial support or formal guidance they needed.

In a YoungMinds survey, three-quarters of parents said their child’s mental health had deteriorated while waiting for support from child and adolescent mental health services. In total, less than 1% of the NHS budget is spent on children’s and young people’s mental health services. The number of A&E attendances by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition has almost trebled since 2010. So, even before Covid started, many children and young people struggled with mental health problems. It is not that they were not there before Covid, but now lockdown and the various other pressures that children have had to face have exacerbated those underlying problems and they are now very evident to schools, to parents and, above all, to children and young people themselves. In fact, 83% of children and young people in a survey by YoungMinds reported that the pandemic has made their mental health condition worse.

I come back to this pyramid of support for children and young people. Its absolute firm, solid base is the role of our educators and associated staff in schools. The long litany of government papers shows that there needs to be action. Just subsuming mental health into a general health standard will go exactly the same way as all the other papers—strong on words, very light on action. My noble friend Lord Storey and I are arguing that we need to specify mental health here; otherwise, it will not be the priority it should be, not just for schools but for our local authorities, for local NHS bodies—whether they are CCGs or not—and, above all, for government to provide grants to make sure that it can happen.

I also support Amendment 37, which strengthens our amendment by referring to guidance by the Secretary of State to schools, and strongly support Amendments 9 and 11 in the names of my noble friends Lord Storey and Lord Addington. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 21A in my name. We are again addressing Clause 1; I will put to one side the whole question of whether it should be there at all. We had a discussion earlier about what schools should be—that we should be talking about not just structures but what they should be doing and how they should fit into our broader social framework. This amendment is an attempt—a preliminary one, I stress—to look at how we might see schools as part of a community, not just as institutions turning out pupils to go into the workforce at the end of their time in them. With that in mind, there are three elements to my attempted draft.

First, proposed new paragraph (u) suggests

“consultation, engagement, and co-production with pupils, parents and the wider community”

on what the school is. As many noble Lords have said, with multi-academy trusts potentially scattered all around the country, as some of them already are, how do they get embedded in the community and how does the community contribute to the trust? This is an attempt to write the setting of standards into Clause 1 to say that the school must be part of a community.

I went through the Bill and analysed the appearances of the words “pupil”, “parent” and “community”. Interestingly, “pupil” appears 58 times, quite often when the Bill talks about safeguarding and welfare, both things we could not possibly disagree with. There is also quite a lot about attendance at schools, which I will get to later. However, nowhere does the Bill talk about what role pupils might have in deciding their own education and having a democratic role in the structure of their own school. My representation to your Lordships’ Committee is that, if we want to be a democratic country, we want democracy to start in schools. Those most expert in the experience of being a pupil at a school are the pupils.

The word “parent” appears seven times. Two are in the context of the rights of parents with children at religious schools. There is a duty to explain the attendance policies of schools and a duty on parents to provide info to schools. However, again, there is nothing about the role of parents in running, deciding, guiding or acting in schools. I know that amendments to other sections of the Bill will try to ensure that there are parent governors; that is one way of doing it, but it is by definition only a very small number of people. This is an attempt to say that parents should have a much bigger, broader role. I have been a governor and seen parent governors facing huge wodges of paperwork; not every parent will be able to engage as a governor, but they should be involved.

Particularly interesting is that “community” appears only a few times in the Bill and that every reference is to the category of “community schools”. There is no reference to the actual community in which a school is placed.

That is what this amendment is seeking to do. Proposed new paragraph (u) looks at seeing a school as a co-production of all the parts of a community. Proposed new paragraph (v) looks at academies and proprietors reflecting the needs of the community, so it is dealing with the structures and what the multi-academy trust and trust governorship are doing. Proposed new paragraph (w) looks at the contribution the school makes to the whole life of the community. The school at which I was a governor served a very poor, disadvantaged and diverse community, and as a practical example of the kind of thing that a school can do on a very small scale, it organised a number of events where parents got together and shared their different craft skills. Many of these parents had no language in common, but this was a way for people to make friendships within a community across different language groups and backgrounds, so the activities of the school were helping to build a community. That is the sort of thing a school needs to be doing.