BBC: Resignation of Director-General

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement this afternoon.

This is, indeed, a serious crisis in an institution which is central to British life and whose output remains much loved and respected both here and abroad. It is vital that we in your Lordships’ House do all that we can to allow the staff and the trust the time they need to rebuild the institution and set it on a forward path. This is why, as parliamentarians, we should tread carefully in how we respond. Although, no doubt, there will be a range of views about the longer term role of the BBC, its internal structures and its governance, I hope that noble Lords will agree that this is not the moment for political point-scoring and micromanagement of the crisis recovery. I would go as far as to argue that we should work towards a cross-party response to the challenges now being confronted.

I hope we will also bear in mind that the real story behind this chain of events is a tragedy of sexual abuse of hundreds of victims by a BBC employee and by sexual predators exploiting vulnerable young children at the north Wales care home. It would be unforgivable if, as a result of this mismanagement, victims felt less able to speak out and be taken seriously. We should also acknowledge the understandable distress which has been inflicted upon Lord McAlpine, a former Member of this House, as a result of the poor journalistic standards displayed by “Newsnight” on this occasion.

We should bear it in mind that this crisis represents a small part of the overall BBC output, estimated to be more than 400,000 hours of TV and radio last year. As we speak, journalists and programme-makers around the country are continuing to deliver a high-quality output of sport, features, light entertainment and award-winning documentaries for which the BBC is rightly famous. The mission to inform, educate and entertain remains at the heart of its identity and purpose. It is vital that its morale and confidence is restored. The problems which the BBC is confronting now are not of the staff’s making; it is a fundamental crisis of management.

While not wanting to prejudge the outcome of the reviews, all the evidence that has appeared so far seems to show an endemic failure of decision-making and leadership. Time and again, there appears to have been a failure to take ownership of editorial issues and a lack of skills to make the important judgment calls. This needs to be addressed urgently, as the leadership reflects upon the lessons of the recent incidents.

In all the circumstances, it was right that George Entwistle should go; I hear what the Minister has said about the action already being taken on the level of his severance. In the mean time, I hope that he would echo our call for George Entwistle himself to reflect upon whether it is appropriate for him to receive that level of severance and to agree to limit the payment to that which is defined in his contract.

Secondly, there needs to be an orderly transition towards the appointment of a new director-general. Does the Minister agree that the new appointment should be made firmly in the context of the lessons learnt from this crisis? In particular, can we be sure, in the light of what we now know, that the job description is the same as before? Does the Minister share my concern about the press reports that the chairman intends to reinterview the failed candidates from the last round of appointments? Is there not a case for a rethink and a wider trawl of potential candidates next time around?

Thirdly, the Secretary of State was quick to take action in the early days of this crisis by writing to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, in what some felt to be inappropriate terms. Can the Minister tell the House what further letters, if any, have been sent by the Secretary of State to the BBC? In the light of the concerns, can he confirm that the details of any contact on this issue between the department and the BBC will be made available? Does he agree that the independence of the BBC is paramount and should not become the next victim of this crisis?

Fourthly, does the Minister agree that one way in which the BBC has demonstrated its independence in the past was its determination to pursue difficult issues through its investigative journalism? Does he agree that it would be regrettable if one outcome of this crisis was for the BBC to retreat from great, well researched, courageous journalism?

Finally, will the Minister make it clear that this Government recognise that the BBC is much-loved institution which plays an important role in the culture of this country? Will he and his colleagues commit to standing up for it in the future? Does he agree that the priority now is to support it in recovering the essential qualities of judgment, taste, decency and impartiality, which have been its unique hallmark?

Education: Conservatoires

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lipsey for initiating this debate which, quite rightly, has attracted a great deal of interest and informed debate from around the Chamber.

In the short time that I have available I should like to highlight three quick points. First, I do not doubt that, in principle, the Government are committed to the future funding of the conservatoires. However, the Government have to be judged not by what they say, but by what they do. As we have heard, the reality is that grants are being cut; there is insufficient recognition of the extra costs in providing one-to-one tuition and specialist facilities; and the Higher Education Funding Council rules for accessing the additional funds are overly complex. As we have heard, the funding is under review anyway.

Secondly, the Government have mismanaged the increase in student tuition fees. It was predicted that very few universities would charge the maximum £9,000 per annum fee but this figure has become the norm and, unsurprisingly, in order to cover their costs, all the major conservatoires have been forced to charge this maximum fee. As we have heard, the impact of the tightened rules for overseas students has also taken its toll. The result is that applications for places are down by as much as 14% and the conservatoires find themselves drawing on a more limited, perhaps more socially elite, talent pool. This undoubtedly will be compounded by Michael Gove’s refusal to include creative subjects in the EBacc as part of his curriculum review.

Thirdly, the Government have consistently undervalued the contribution that creative industries make to the UK economy. For example, the UK currently has the largest and fastest-growing creative sector in the EU. The conservatoires play an important part in this, thereby contributing to our economic recovery.

In conclusion, I say to the Minister that the issues raised this evening are a microcosm of a bigger concern about what will drive our economic recovery. We believe that the creative sector, based on our global reputation, has a crucial role to play. I hope that when he replies he will be able to reassure this House of the practical support and investment in conservatoires necessary to demonstrate that the Government share this vision.

Young People: NEET

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they intend to reverse the increase in the number of 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training announced for the third quarter of this year.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud)]

My Lords, we have a coherent strategy to reduce the number of 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training. This includes measures to increase the participation age and a new youth contract worth nearly £1 billion. The contract will provide more intensive support for all 18 to 24-year-olds, and builds on support that is already available through Jobcentre Plus and the work programme.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

I thank the Minister for that reply, but with a record 1.16 million young people not in education, employment or training, do the Government now acknowledge the folly of scrapping the future jobs fund, axing the educational maintenance allowance and trebling tuition fees at a time when the economy, through their own policies, was already slowing down? Despite the measures being announced today, is it not the truth that a generation of young people has been badly let down by a Government that is so out of touch that it did nothing for 18 months while youth unemployment continued to rise?

[Lord Freud]

I should like to pick up one aspect of that question, which is the nostalgia displayed for the future jobs fund. When you look at the results of the future jobs fund, you find that, two months after the period ended for a major cohort early on, about half of the people who took part were back on benefit. If you look at what happened under work experience, two months after the first cohort went through, roughly half of the people were off benefit—the same. The difference was that the future jobs fund cost £6,500 whereas the work experience cost £325—20 times cheaper. That is the difference of our activity in looking after youth. We are just as effective, but we are doing it cost-effectively.

Poverty

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Donaghy on her passionate and informed maiden speech. I would have expected no less of her, having known and admired her abilities for nearly 30 years. I first met her when we were both trade union officials in the university sector in London in the 1980s. Since that time she has had an impressive trade union career becoming the president of both her own union, NALGO, and then president of the TUC.

Following that time, as we have heard, she served as chair of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service for seven years, helping to make it into the modern and effective organisation that it is today. It was also one of the periods of the lowest industrial unrest in its history and, as she has indicated, I am sure these skills of bringing peace and harmony to potentially warring factions can be put to good use in your Lordships’ House, not least among noble Lords on the coalition Government Benches. Finally, lest anyone might think that her skills are on the soft side, she also served on the Committee on Standards in Public Life for seven years before becoming its interim chair. I am sure that she will play her part in keeping us all in line in the years to come, with her trademark reputation for intelligence, independence and straight talking.

I add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Boateng on his passionate and inspired maiden speech and very much look forward to the maiden speeches of other noble Lords in this debate.

Before I start, I declare an interest as the chair of Circle 33 housing association and record that I am a volunteer in The Passage homeless centre in Victoria. I, therefore, have some direct experience of the fine line walked by some of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society, for whom managing a weekly budget and staying out of debt is a constant trial and burden. It takes only one trigger—perhaps a partner leaves, someone falls ill or an employer closes down—for an individual or family to fall behind with their rent and face homelessness. When you are already living in poverty the financial margins are tight and the consequences of default can be devastating. I say that in the confident knowledge that the previous Government—my Government—both understood this fear and acted on it. They understood that you could be working but still poor and they introduced the working families tax credit to make work pay. They understood that a child brought up in poverty would bear the scars for life and so they increased child benefit and set a goal of ending child poverty completely by 2020. They invested in jobs and training to give people the skills to get secure and rewarding work.

Of course, not everything they did was perfect and not all their ambitions were achieved but I am proud of a Government who invested in public services, reduced unemployment and raised people out of poverty. We went a long way to creating a fair and benevolent society in which the poorest and most vulnerable were protected.

That brings me to this Government’s Budget and what it tells us about their values and beliefs. First, they seem to have abandoned the post-war Keynesian analysis that government fiscal and monetary measures can mitigate against economic recession. Instead, we appear to be returning to a rather alarming 1930s free market programme, which became discredited first time round and now risks driving the recession into a deeper and longer trough. Of course, there is a need for a clear deficit reduction plan and part of that will inevitably include tough choices on spending. But in the current fragile world economy, there is a particular imperative to prioritise growth as a precondition for economic recovery. That remains Labour’s strategy. It is based on sound economic modelling and was already proving to be successful in stopping our economy sliding into a recession. Therefore, the question remains: do the current Government have an alternative growth strategy or are they happy to let high unemployment and increased poverty act as the drivers for future economic policy?

Secondly, despite their election promises, they are intent on squeezing public services and cutting front-line staff. It is obvious to everyone that departmental cuts of 25 per cent or even more can be achieved only by wholesale services being abandoned. Those public servants who are lucky enough to remain will have their income and, therefore, their spending power reduced as a result of the freeze in public sector pay, while those who are made redundant will cost the country billions in lost tax revenues and increased benefit bills. The consequence of this policy is bound to have a further depressing effect and will, of course, particularly impact on the poorest regions where public services play a particularly valuable role.

Thirdly, they appear to be abandoning the goal of ending child poverty by 2020. At present nearly 4 million children are living in poverty in the UK. We know from previous research that child benefit has proved to be one of the most effective and popular ways of cutting child poverty so freezing it for three years will hit the very families who need it the most. Again, this will prove to be a false economy because respected research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has estimated that £17 billion every year could be saved from public spending if child poverty was eradicated.

Finally, to return to a subject particularly close to my heart, the cuts in housing benefit will cause hardship to many and may well push families in high-priced areas on to the streets. There has of course been a need to reform housing benefit for some time, but the cuts proposed in the Budget are not the solution. There is a myth developing that housing benefit claimants are wayward families bent on living the highlife. In truth, as Shelter research has confirmed, the vast majority are pensioners, those with disability, people caring for a relative, or hardworking families on low incomes, while only one in eight is unemployed. At the same time, nearly half of local housing allowance claimants are already making up a shortfall of almost £100 a month to meet their rent, so further cuts to this benefit could trigger a spiral of debt, eviction and homelessness.

Of course, at the heart of this problem is a critical shortage of affordable housing, which means that more and more families are forced into the private rented sector, often into inferior, poorly maintained properties with rents that are almost double those in the social housing sector. It is this lack of affordable housing that the Budget could have, and failed, to address.

This coalition Government have made the misuse of the English language into an art form. The use of words such as “fair” and “progressive” to describe a Budget that is blatantly neither of these things has rendered those words obsolete in their true sense. As the weeks go by and the consequences of the Budget are spelt out, it is becoming clear that the government agenda has at its heart an ideological drive to promote the free market, close down public services and hand over the remaining services to private multi-nationals. It is a policy that is increasingly saying to the poorest and most vulnerable, “You’re on your own. If you’re lucky, a charity or a private philanthropist will come to your rescue, but don’t expect anything from us”.

Interestingly, this attitude was notably absent in the election campaign. Prior to that, there was lots of talk of compassionate conservatism, but now there appears to be a view that compassion is for wimps. Budgets are inevitably about global statistics and calculations running into billions of pounds and affecting millions of people. But behind those statistics are real people, like the ones I work with at The Passage whose lives are on the margins of success and failure, for whom small shifts in their fortunes make the difference between a job start or staring at a wall all day, between paying their rent or being on the streets. These are the people I fear for with this Government’s policies, so I hope that the Minister is able to reassure me that my fears are groundless and that those at the bottom of the economy really will be protected in the years to come.