Children in Care

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, unfortunately there was not the usual 12-week consultation period due to the particular circumstances that we were in. The department consulted the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, as I have said, and local authorities’ principal social workers. There is always engagement with stakeholders. Ofsted was also closely involved, because routine inspections of local authorities have been paused but risk-based inspections will continue. They are an important safeguard for local authority practice during this period.

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, last month’s figures show that some 2,100 people with learning disabilities are living in assessment and treatment units. Families have expressed concern about the impact of this crisis on their care, including suspension of quality inspections, cancelled family visits, increased use of solitary confinement and excessive restraint. How many planned moves of children and young people with learning disabilities from those units back into supported living environments have been delayed by coronavirus? What steps are being taken to ensure their complex needs are being met while they wait?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, Transforming Care activity oversees such situations to ensure that there are not unnecessary in-patient admissions and that quality of experience while people are in-patients is maintained, subject of course to safety and the need to self-isolate. The chief executive of NHS England wrote to NHS trusts yesterday to say that care and treatment reviews should carry on and should be on a digital platform. I shall write to the noble Baroness regarding her request for statistics.

Innovation Economy: Skills

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Bull]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of (1) the skills required for a successful innovation economy, and (2) whether the education system is structured to deliver a workforce equipped with such skills.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government want the UK to be a science and research and development superpower, increasing our research and development spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. The Government are constantly assessing the skills required to deliver this ambition. We are prioritising STEM, digital and technical education; creating a new £3 billion skills fund; and reforming the global talent visa so that we can create a fast-track scheme for top scientists, researchers and mathematicians.

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, the innovation foundation Nesta and the OECD have identified three skill sets required in an innovation economy: technical, behavioural and creative-thinking skills, the process by which we generate, critique and refine ideas. Their research shows that pupils who study art at school are more likely to develop these skills. Do the Government recognise the contribution of arts-based learning to the wider innovation economy? Given that creative thinking is identified as a core innovation skill, will she commit to reviewing the department’s decision to opt out of the PISA 2021 test for creative thinking?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, as part of our ongoing commitment to arts in schools, we are continuing funding of about £85 million a year for a range of music and cultural education programmes. Cognitive science shows that a knowledge-based curriculum is then the foundation for stimulating the critical thinking and creativity that we need. That is why the focus of our curriculum is on getting that bed of knowledge on which all students, including arts students, need to build. The Government believe that the short, online, intensive survey by PISA is not sufficient to give us a realistic indication of creative thinking in our students.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, it is always an honour to speak in this Chamber, but never more so than in this annual debate, among a roster of inspiring noble Baronesses, and indeed some noble Lords. I join others in congratulating the Minister on her new role, and the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, on his maiden speech.

I will speak to one of the six missions associated with this year’s theme, #EachforEqual: the mission to increase the visibility of women creatives. Given the many types of discrimination that women face, Members of your Lordships’ House may well ask why this particular mission matters. They might imagine, as many do, that the creative industries are genuinely meritocratic, with women accessing the same opportunities as men. Unfortunately, research proves this not to be true.

Across the nine sectors of the UK’s creative industries, the workforce is deeply unequal. The usual factors underpinning gender inequality are at play, as they are across society, but there are key structures of the cultural labour market that shape the life decisions of women in the workforce, and they impact particularly on women of colour and women from working-class backgrounds. Women are present, of course, but in areas such as theatre, publishing and museums they are largely absent from high-profile positions. In television and film, the lack of women is striking. According to the British Film Institute, among the 11,000 credits for directors of British films over 100 years, just 5% were women.

It would be easy to focus on motherhood as a reason why women drop out of the creative workforce. It may be a factor, but it is not the whole story. In too many parts of the creative economy, there is a pervasive sexism at work. This is not all on the scale of the high-profile sexual harassment cases that sparked the worldwide #MeToo movement, but rather a series of ongoing micro-discriminations that see women given lower status, while senior roles are assumed to be the work of men. This can leave women uncredited, or excluded from the creative process, and see women labelled as “risky”—not just because they might leave to have children but because of a persistent industry assumption that men, and male-led stories, make for better box office.

Underpinning these biases is a set of structures that disadvantage women: unpaid internships, temporary contracts and jobs offering low, or even no, pay. Working hours are long and unpredictable, with evening events the norm. The importance of networks and connections in accessing job opportunities in a sector that tends to favour informal hiring practices means additional socialising, outside office hours. These are challenges for workers of all genders, but when they interact with sexist assumptions, or when women try to combine caring responsibilities with work, they present greater barriers to women than to men. It is hard to disentangle these biases and structures because each reinforces the other.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that women leave the sector early, or that they are far less likely to climb the ladder to leadership positions. The situation is better in the not-for-profit sector, where 53% of the UK’s museums and galleries are led by women. But this optimistic statistic hides further evidence of inequality: the higher the annual turnover of the organisation, the less likely it is to be female led. In London, in 2018, 75% of organisations receiving over £1 million in funding had male directors at the helm.

These depictions of the cultural workforce go beyond questions of inequality to reflect enduring struggles over value and worth. In this, the creative industries are simply a microcosm of society as a whole, which still values women’s labour at a lower rate than men’s.

Your Lordships will be glad to hear that there is some cause for celebration as we mark International Women’s Day this year. Recent analysis by the policy and evidence centre of media reporting of women in the creative industries found that since 2013, references to females had risen to 40%. This means that the amount of space give to women in the media now exceeds the proportion of women actually working in the creative industries.

However, like all silver linings, there is a cloud attached. The media reports placed much more focus on the sounds made by women, such as laughs, cries, giggles, even coos, or non-verbal reactions, such as smiles, grins and nods. Words that imply creative achievements and leadership roles, such as “directed”, “performed”, “designed”, or “managed”, “founded” and “launched” were more likely to refer to men. When Hansard reports this speech, it may be tempted to add here, in quotation marks, “she sighed”.

I chose to speak about gender inequality in the creative industries today for two reasons: to highlight the structural issues and biases that disadvantage women creatives, and to highlight the consequences of this beyond the demographics of the sector. Films, television, books, theatre, music and art are there to tell us who we are, and if the workforce is skewed, the message is skewed. Women have important perspectives to bring and narratives to share, and if their voices are missing, a whole range of stories and experiences are excluded from cultural representation. That matters, because representation matters.

Women in the creative industries are empowering and inspiring not only the next generation of female creatives but the next generation of women. I hope that everyone will join me today in committing to celebrate them and their achievements, not just on International Women’s Day, but every day throughout the year.

Trade Bill

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, on Report your Lordships have already voted through an amendment that creates a process for Parliament’s involvement in setting a mandate for future trade deals and for helping to approve a final deal. Separately, your Lordships have made clear a strong preference for the UK remaining in a customs union. In part, this amendment is the third part of that and is intended to set the scene for the long-term future relationship between this country and the EU. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for their support for this amendment.

The amendment sets out an objective for a future EU trade deal: a mandate to include,

“a mobility framework that enables all UK and EU citizens to exercise the same reciprocal rights to work, live and study for the provision of trade in goods or services”.

That reciprocal nature recognises one important fact: not allowing or enabling EU 27 people to work and trade in the United Kingdom will mean no such rights for UK people in the EU. By voting for this amendment, your Lordships would create the best possible chance for talented men and women in the UK to work, and continue to work, and offer their services within the EU 27, and of course it would be a win-win scenario. On the other side of such an arrangement, we would continue to welcome into this country people who contribute positively to our economy and our social fabric. Their skills make a positive difference.

In Committee, I outlined at some length, and according to the Government’s own advisers, the positive role that people from the other 27 EU countries play in this economy. Noble Lords will be relieved to know that I will not replay those arguments today, in part because in no measure were those facts challenged during that debate. There has been a net benefit to the UK from the activities of EU 27 citizens here. My speech also acknowledged that issues were thrown up by migration in some communities and that those issues have not been sufficiently recognised and dealt with by successive UK Governments. The benefits of those EU citizens working in the UK have also been insufficiently recognised publicly by successive Governments.

In Committee, the Opposition Front Bench spokesman, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, spoke about the appearance rather than the reality of unbridled immigration, and that refers back to the point that I have just made. Although I recognise that this perception is very important and that Governments have to do something about it, I do not believe that we should be put off from doing the right thing and supporting the amendment. I hope that, by doing so, we will demonstrate the value that we place on mutual agreement and on the mutual opportunities that we can create for our people, our businesses and our communities.

As for the Government, I did not notice a great warming to my argument in Committee, although I always foster hopes. However, I appeal over the heads of the Front Bench to your Lordships to see the value in this amendment. Supporting it would be a major step towards setting out the mandate for UK negotiators. It would signal what sort of country we want to live in and it would reject one of Mrs May’s red lines. Opposing the amendment or sitting on one’s hands would pander to the false picture of the role of immigration in our society and would impair the UK in so many ways, not least in trade. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment because I believe that it is vital to preserve mobility rights and, in doing so, protect some of the UK’s most productive sectors.

I have noted before the relative silence on trade in services in the Brexit conversation. Attention has been focused on the at-the-border issues associated with trade, rather than the more complex behind-the-border issues of domestic rules, regulations and qualifications, which are germane to trade in services. As I have said before, this silence is particularly hard to understand, given services’ contribution to the UK. They account for over 40% of total exports, 80% of the UK’s GDP and four in five jobs across the country. The largest single destination for UK services is the EU, worth £90 billion annually.

If services have been treated like the second son, mobility has been the Cinderella of the story, pushed from the start to the wrong side of what some of us see as a wrong-headed red line. There is, of course, an inextricable link between mobility and services. Services provided in this country, such as tourism or higher education, depend on inward mobility. Service packages linked to goods, such as maintenance contracts, depend on outward mobility. Services delivered in the consumer’s country are often provided on a fly-in, fly-out basis, and the scale of this trade is significant. The CBI reports that employees of just one firm undertook 17,000 trips from the UK to the EU and 10,000 in the opposite direction in a single year.