Environment Bill

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the Environment Bill, which aims to address one of the greatest policy challenges of our time—that of climate change and the future of our planet. I wish briefly to address two issues today. The first is the role that local authorities should play in addressing this challenge. I declare my interest, as noted in the register, as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The second issue is longevity and demographic change, and the impact that they will have on our environment. Here I declare my interest as chief executive of the International Longevity Centre-UK.

The Bill takes the important step of establishing the office for environmental protection, which will hold the Government to account on environmental protection. One cannot ignore the fact that much of the work in protecting our environment must be delivered at local community level. We know that many poorer local authorities and parish councils struggle to play their part, because of financial and other resource constraints. As part of the Government’s levelling-up agenda, will they consider supporting local authorities to improve things such as local recycling or tree-planting initiatives? Will they consider establishing a community environment fund to support local authorities and parish councils in this way?

Many of us are living longer: according to the ILC-UK, one in three girls born this year will live to 100. Because of this longevity, people’s life courses are changing, which impacts on where they live, where and how they work, and how they interact with the natural environment. We also know that—because of immigration, which is essential to our economy and enriches our society, and various other factors—the population of the UK is set to increase by 9.7 million, and will reach 74.3 million by 2039.

In the Civitas report authored in 2020 by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, called Britain’s Demographic Challenge, the noble Lord makes the point that that population increase is equivalent to 3.5 times the population of Greater Manchester, or 1.7 times that of the West Midlands conurbation. If the current distribution of the population continues, the ONS figures suggest that, to house that projected population increase, Norwich and Guildford will have to build about 1.4 houses a day for the next 25 years, Stockton will have to build 1.2 a day, and Dundee will have to build just under one a day.

One of the key focuses in the Bill is water quality, and strengthening the powers of the regulator, Ofwat. As part of this, will the Government consider how the projected population increase will affect the demand for water and put far greater pressure on our environment?

The Bill is welcome, and is an important step in addressing climate change. Most of us accept the scientific advice that the current climate crisis is the result of human activity. Therefore, we as humans cannot ignore the fact that longevity and demographic changes to our population will have a significant impact. We must also ensure that local and central government have the strategies and the resources to address these very important and difficult challenges.

Integrated Review: Development Aid

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Greengross (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and to the late Lord Judd, who inspired so many of us over the years.

When we discuss development aid, we are not talking solely about an act of charity by the UK for people in less well-off nations. By not investing sufficiently in such aid, especially in the area of public health, we undermine our own national security and, indeed, our public health. At a time when we have participated in such a successful vaccination programme, it is a tragedy to cut development aid funding, which strengthens work on clean water and other public health initiatives. These cuts could impact on poorer countries’ fight against Covid-19 or allow an even more deadly virus to take hold, putting everyone in many countries, including our own, at risk.

I want to highlight another recent change that may also impact on our delivery in this area. In 2020, the Department for International Development was moved into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Also, the Government Equalities Office has recently been moved from the Home Office to the Cabinet Office. The rationale for these changes is not clear. The organisation Widows for Peace through Democracy has raised further concerns that they could weaken this country’s leadership in championing women’s rights, particularly widows’ rights, as previously well-resourced teams run by experienced civil servants will not be funded or supported as well in future. Does the Minister have any more information about this?

I also wish to highlight the Government’s decision last week to cut £143 million from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office research budget. This year, the UK will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference—COP 26. Yesterday, I attended a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Corporate Responsibility Group, which I co-chair. We heard about efforts made by the Bank of England to take leadership, both nationally and internationally, to move the climate change agenda forward. It is extremely disappointing that, while we see this sort of leadership from organisations such as the Bank of England, we see this decision regarding FCDO research funding, which is likely to have—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry to cut the noble Baroness off but this is a time-limited debate and we have to be quite strict with the two-minute speaking limit.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross (CB)]

My Lords, as chair of the all-party group on responsible business practice, I look forward to being involved in legislation related to business and enterprise. However, today I will confine my remarks to the two Bills related to pensions. I welcome any changes designed to improve the circumstances of people in later life. However, I am not sure that these two Bills will achieve exactly what the Government want, as they are rather contradictory in their aspirations: one seeks to bring flexibility, the other certainty. It can be very difficult to provide both.

The pensions tax Bill will let older people with defined contribution pensions withdraw their savings and spend them as they wish. No one will be required to buy an annuity. We all hope that any funds so withdrawn will not be included in the means test for publicly funded care provision. Can the Minister clarify the position regarding the non-inclusion of any cash withdrawn in the care fees means test?

The private pensions Bill will encourage people into new defined ambition group schemes, where members’ contributions are pooled and, rather than any form of annuitisation, the pension will be paid as income from the collective fund. These schemes are still a long way from the defined benefit guaranteed gold standard, as the payout on retirement remains uncertain. Critics complain of a loss of control for the individual investor. Others have warned that with DA schemes the benefits of scale are rather exaggerated. What is certain is that there are no guarantees—not even the certainty of a fixed income you get with an annuity.

How does such a scheme decide how much pension to pay each member? It would be obliged to maintain records of each individual entitlement, just as it would for conventional DC schemes. I hope the Government will be able to tell us where they anticipate any DA scheme operational savings will be made. Also, how do the Government propose to ensure take-up of the DA schemes, given the support for DC schemes implicit in auto-enrolment? DA relies on scale, but achieving scale may be challenging, given that DC schemes are now the main vehicle for the occupational pensions market. Who will provide the DA schemes? Perhaps we can also learn about that from the Government.

Bearing in mind the low level of financial capability in the UK, many commentators might argue that, for individuals to benefit from these new freedoms and minimise their exposure to risk, the degree of advice surrounding DA and DC schemes and pension fund transactions may need to be very extensive. If the Government agree, do they have any proposals as to who will provide and pay for such provision?

On this contradictory point, and underpinning the major emphasis on DC schemes, under the pensions tax Bill the Government want pension savers to have unrestricted access to the money in their DC schemes. This could not work with defined ambition pooled funds because no set sum of money is assigned to each member, who has no personal pot. Can the Minister clarify remarks attributed to the Government which imply that significant cash sums can indeed be withdrawn from DA schemes?

Finally, there is no mention of the coherence of DA schemes with care fees funding, which is very important, and the absence of a personal pot could make such compatibility difficult to achieve. How are the Government going to achieve that compatibility? I hope that the Minister can enlighten us.

United Kingdom: Future Demographic Trends

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on initiating this debate. I listened with much interest also to the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Looking across the world, demographic change is increasingly a reality. I declare an interest as head of the International Longevity Centre in the UK and co-president of the family of ILCs across the world—there are 14, soon to be 16, of them. I am extremely privileged to have some insight into the trends that demographic changes are bringing everywhere.

Along with everyone, I want to be able to celebrate this demographic change. It is wonderful. We can all expect to grow old, which is a new phenomenon. It has never happened before in the history of mankind. Longevity is a good thing, provided we adapt to it and change our institutions and services accordingly to meet the challenge.

I have just come back from Japan where I was working for a few days. Recently, when I was privileged to chair one of the Ditchely Park conferences, a statistician reported that statistically, actuarially, even if not realistically, it is possible to calculate when the last Japanese man or woman will live in Japan. This is because Japan has not encouraged immigration and the population is static. The Japanese have very few children, and its population is ageing more rapidly than that of any other country of the world. There is a huge warning there that we need to balance our population ageing so that we can reap its benefits and plan for the huge challenges that ageing brings with it.

Recent medical advances have been so successful that we have conquered or controlled many of the serious illnesses that used to kill people. People can go on living for a long time with chronic conditions, and therefore we have the enormous challenge of dealing with the different types of dementia in all countries. Dementia is a huge challenge. This morning, I was at the dementia village at the innovations conference at ExCeL, which is looking in a novel way at innovations that enable us to live a quality of life with the different forms of dementia. That is a wonderful innovation because this is perhaps the greatest challenge that we all face. We know that one in three of us who reach old age—85 or over—will have some form of dementia, and we must prepare for that by bringing the correct services across the board to serve people who have dementia.

We have to look more widely if, across the world, we are to look positively at the ageing of the population: productive ageing. That does not mean that everybody has to be in the workplace, but it means looking at what older people bring to society. We know that various political parties in this country and in other advanced economies could not survive without the older volunteers who maintain them, particularly before elections. We know that in Africa without the older population many more children would grow up without any adult care, supervision or help because of the ravages of AIDS. We know that in many countries, you still do not talk about a retirement age but go on working until you die because there is no such thing as retirement and an awful lot of people depend on your activity for their livelihood. Whatever age you are, you depend on the older population for much of your welfare and productivity.

Ageing is not a disaster, it is a triumph, but in this country and elsewhere we have to adapt very fast if we are to keep up with the change. That means looking across the board, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, insisted. For example, we have not designed our built environment, our housing and our homes adequately for an ageing population. Transport has not come to terms with the fact that the travelling public will rapidly become much older than they are now. On education, with adequate IT or television, perhaps in your own home or in the village community centre, you can watch a lecture given by the leading professor of whatever subject you are studying. Why do we retain absolute age identities when we are learning? Why cannot a 14 year-old and a 64 year-old learn a language or history together? Why do we segregate people ruthlessly according to their age? It is of another era.

We should look again at our education, as we look at employment. We must bring the skills and experience of older people into the workforce along with the innovatory ideas and new approaches of the young. We must encourage multi-generational working and all forms of education. We must realise that older people can learn, retrain and adapt as our retirement ages increase, and can continue to work much later in life. We must design our buildings and places of work accordingly. There must be much more flexible working and cleverly designed buildings and methods of working to cope with the ageing of the population.

There is an ethical imperative to address the ageing issue correctly and to work so that, in all industrialised countries, we sort out the imperatives of adequate pensions and benefits. We realise that the ageing of society is changing everything.

Today, the excellent report from the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, is published. It looks at some of the challenges posed by an ageing population in this country. We know that, as yet, we do not have the cohesive approach to ageing that we need. Governments still work in silos. We still do not bring the different systems together. I hope that the draft Care and Support Bill—for which I have been pleased to work on the pre-legislative scrutiny—will help if we have government support to bring things together so that we are not separating healthcare, social care and housing in the way that has happened up until now. It is only with a co-ordinated approach, difficult as it is with the legal responsibilities of different departments, that we can tackle that. If we do not, we will not meet the challenge of an ageing population. We have the opportunity to do it now, and we can.

With the best will in the world, the Government are now making encouraging efforts to co-ordinate care under the banner of well-being and outcomes. Other Governments across Europe and beyond are doing the same thing. It is a marvellous moment for us to celebrate the ageing of the population. If all countries together get this right, we can celebrate and be delighted that we can all hope to live to a great age.

Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross]

My Lords, I start by thanking the most reverend Primate for choosing this issue for this debate and say what an immense privilege it is to take part.

I declare an interest as heading up a think-tank, the ILC, which looks at helping societies to plan for the future in the light of demographic change. I start by emphasising that. This is the first time in the history of mankind on the planet that we can hope to live a long time, to a great age, and that is something to celebrate. It also means that we have to change the perception of older people. We have to work towards what I would call an age-neutral society, because there will be 25% of us aged over 65 by 2035. People who retire will face about 20 years in retirement. There are great discrepancies because of where people live, their income levels and other advantages or disadvantages in life, but those are the average figures.

That all makes an enormous difference to the way we view each other when we must get used to the fact that a huge number of people around us are going to be older. It will not be something strange to look at and we will not be able to say, “Isn’t he or she old to be doing this job?”. We will just have to get used to it because life and society have changed. We also have to try hard to reduce the dreadful discrepancies. In the north-east, the average number of disability-free years for men and women is 45.3, while for those in the south it is 51.5. That is quite despicable and cannot go on.

I shall start by looking at employment. We know that there is some good news and of course the equality legislation is beginning to help, although not enough at the moment. However, 12% of older people now work, compared with 7.6% in 1993. The changes are very quick. The number of people working beyond the state retirement age has risen by 85% to nearly 1.4 million.

Many older people are self-employed. Contrary to many attitudes, those self-employed older people are much more successful, especially in setting up new businesses, than younger people. They are more reliable in coping with the finances involved and more successful in the work that they do. Some employers are now beginning to consider their older workers to be a valuable asset, but it is still very difficult for older people to get into work. It is hard, for example, to get a job when they are above 60. That is a bit illogical because research has shown that if an older worker at the age of 60 says, “I will give you five years”, he or she will do so, whereas a young person joining a workplace for the first time will probably be gone in a year or two. Given the cost of replacing and retraining people, that is a huge amount for an employer to find, so it is good to hang on to those older workers because they will repay the employer very reliably.

Because the nature of work is changing so fast, as is the whole system of how we work, it is worth training people—though this is what tends not happen in the workplace—right through their careers, even at 60-plus, because they can, contrary to many opinions, retain new knowledge and adapt their work patterns to suit the new society that we live in. That society is very conducive to older workers because much of the sort of employment that we are talking about relates to IT and does not involve a huge amount of physical hard labour. Financially, socially and economically, it makes sense to work with older people.

The most reverend Primate mentioned volunteering. We know that older people are the bedrock of many of our social community endeavours, including political parties, which could not manage without their older volunteers—no one would fill the envelopes or go around campaigning if we did not have them. Aviva recently did some work showing that today’s volunteer army provides about 104 million unpaid hours of work each week. That would be worth about £643.8 million a week at national minimum wage so that contribution, as the most reverend Primate said, is worth a huge amount to all of us and is not always recognised. A huge number of 65-plus people, 10.4 million, give up more than 10 hours a week to volunteer. This is an important part of our economy, including of course the huge contribution of older carers, very often caring for young people but also caring for people older than themselves as well as their own families.

Educational establishments have to change their attitudes towards older workers. There is the University of the Third Age and there are some wonderful progressive universities, but many colleges and universities make it quite difficult for older people to enrol, to retrain, to be involved in courses and to pay for them. We have to change our attitudes towards this and ensure that, again, we are age-neutral.

I want to mention another change of attitude that is necessary. We have to take a citizen approach to ageing. We tend to patronise older people by saying that they have contributed a lot during their working lives so now we must support them in retirement. However, it is important to have a reason for getting up in the morning, however old you are, and one of the reasons is to go on contributing and to go on being recognised as being able to contribute. We have a duty to do that for as long as we can, not always to be passive recipients of nice thoughts and kindness but to be a person, an adult, in our own right and to say that, however old we are, we must recognise our duties as citizens in society. We have a lot of entitlements but we also have duties. Perhaps we have a responsibility now to remain in the labour market for as long as we can, and older people therefore have a right to support from employers to make that possible.

We must not infantilise our older population. An age-neutral society means recognising the skills that people have and making sure that they can use them. Age should not be the reason why we stop being active in society; chronological age really tends to be irrelevant these days. Look at people’s capacity and their fitness, ability and willingness to do things. We would all benefit from this because older people are adults with a great deal to contribute and they need to be encouraged, not stigmatised, when they try to be full citizens in society. None of us wants to be patronised; that leads to infantilisation. One of the problems with saying in care systems, “Adult care plans are like this while older people’s care plans are like that”, is that we differentiate between older people and other adults. We do not stop being an adult when we reach 65; we are still adults and we go on being adults. We may not be physically fit and we may be mentally unfit, but we remain adults until we die. That is terribly important.

We need to ensure that our older population are recognised as equal contributors to society and are a mainstream part of it, and to recognise that if people are going to live for 20 years in retirement we all have to have things to do. Are those of us who are here not fortunate? We have interesting things to do, to think about and to work on every day. Let us make sure that all our older citizens have the same advantages by being recognised as serious contributors to our society.