AI-generated Public Services

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure citizens are not excluded from accessing AI-generated public services.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises an important point, because the shift online and the use of AI are irreversible. They offer substantial opportunities, but problems could arise for some disadvantaged groups. That is why departments are required, by the Government’s service standard, to provide support via alternative channels for all their online services. Our road map for digital and data, updated on 29 November, focuses on enabling the confident and responsible use of AI to improve efficiency and services.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that, but the latest Ofcom study of internet use in the UK showed that 7% of people have no access at all and 18% have access solely via their smartphone. That is fine for most tasks, but less helpful when filling out complex forms or seeking support. The ambition of providing better public services through a digital revolution is a good one; however, what works for most people will not work for everybody, so what is being done to ensure that this small but important group, who are being left behind when attempting to access essential public services, can access them in the future? If they cannot, we will not have a universal service.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

This of course is why the Government are committed to ensuring that everyone has affordable access to public services, whether online or offline. Departments are required, by the service standard, to provide support via alternative channels for all their online services to all users, including the disabled. That can be by phone, through face-to-face meetings, by letter or via web chat, which is important for the unsighted. The system of assessments is co-ordinated by the CDDO in the Cabinet Office, and these requirements cannot go on to GOV.UK without assurance secured.

COP 27

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

It is the case that Alok Sharma is no longer a Minister nor in the Cabinet. However, the Prime Minister has appointed him as COP president, and that provides continuity and retains his expertise in this important role. I have been struck by his tireless work over the past year, and he is always particularly focused on implementation and the international perspective, as well as other issues. The thing is to get COP 27 done in a brilliant way in Sharm el-Sheikh from 6 to 18 November 2022. I cannot comment on appointments by the Prime Minister.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, should we not get our own house in order to earn the respect of all the other countries that will be at COP 27? Just as an example, we already have a commitment to have 30% of land for nature by 2030. So far, the statistics are that we have only 3%, so we have a long way to go before we can hold our heads up at COP 27 and earn the respect globally that we deserve.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I understand from my noble friend that we lead the campaign for 30/30.

Housing and Planning Bill

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Liverpool (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak—with the greatest brevity—in support of these amendments. My only reason for doing so is that I raised this matter at Second Reading. For those who are prepared to read my views—although I do not expect that many of your Lordships will—they are at cols. 1222-23. I very much hope that the Government will look with sympathy on this amendment because it is of great importance to ongoing developments that we address this very serious problem, which causes a lot of suffering to millions of people. Sorting out the flooding that took place last year cost between £1.2 billion and £2.2 billion. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to endorse the comments made by noble Lords from around the Committee on these amendments. The recent floods brought into sharp focus that the damaging effects of climate change are not being matched by our skills in managing increased water flows. Both the Government, through their establishment of the national flood resilience review, and the Environment Agency are being forced to reconsider their flood management strategies.

In the mean time, there are steps that we can take that will make a difference, and we have heard examples this evening. It is now commonly accepted that the removal of trees and hedges has reduced the absorbency of our land. In urban areas, the paving over of gardens and green spaces has left nowhere for excess water to drain. The building of new dwellings connected to the existing sewerage system takes no account of the need for increased capacity. At the same time, it remains literally incredible that housing developers apply to build new homes in areas designated as a flood risk by the Environment Agency, and even more incredible that some local authorities continue to grant planning permission in these circumstances.

So we very much support the concept of sustainable housing development, and these amendments are important in bringing some sanity back into the planning process in this regard. Sustainable drainage systems need to be a core feature of future planning, using green space and natural water features that can mimic the known advantages of natural land drainage and help return water flows to a natural equilibrium.

Whether these principles should be applied cannot be left to local interpretation. Sadly, what we have learned over the past few winters is that inaction in one place can often have a catastrophic effect further downstream, so localised decision-making is not the answer. The rules have to be applied consistently, and this, of course, is what Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act attempted to achieve. It remains inexplicable that the schedule was not enforced in the first place; I hope that the Minister will be able to explain the reasoning behind that. Now is the time to put that matter right.

Amendment 120 is an excellent attempt, once again, to try to rein in the perverse activity of developers building homes on designated flood areas. When this happens and properties subsequently flood, we are all drawn into the net of supporting those communities and helping them turn their lives around, whereas the developers can simply walk away, having pocketed their profit. They do not even have a responsibility to warn potential purchasers of the risk inherent in the purchase of those properties.

This amendment, therefore, puts the responsibility and the financial risk firmly back in the hands of the developers, which is where it belongs. It will hopefully be a tool to encourage more responsible and appropriate housing development in the future. A number of comments have been made this evening on the technicalities of that amendment, and I know that some more work will need to be done on it, but we very much support the thinking behind it.

[Lord Porter of Spalding]

My Lords, I do not know how to add this new interest into the debate, but at some point, I will have another company set up that will put me back into doing small-scale development with my son-in-law. The accountants are working on it now, and I am going to put this in the register as soon as it is done, but noble Lords need to know it now, because I am going to speak specifically from a developer’s point of view—even though, technically, I am not yet a developer. I am also going to speak as the leader of South Holland District Council, which covers an area that, if we were not allowed to build on flood plains, would become a ghost town, because we are on a flood plain. We would build nothing anywhere in my patch if we followed the idea that, notionally, the designation of a flood plain by the Environment Agency was true and accurate.

We have not flooded since 1947; adequate flood management schemes can deal with it. Amendment 120 would create companies set up to build one development that would then go bankrupt—and, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said, on that basis we would have to insure against that, so that would add more expense in some areas disproportionately to others.

If I remember rightly, where we are sitting now is also on a flood plain, so all of the people around this area would also be moved out of town if we applied that. We cannot be frightened by water; we have to manage it properly. We cannot retreat from it. We are people and we can deal with it, and we cannot deal with it just by saying, “You can’t build anything anywhere”, which Amendment 120 would have us do; or create perverse incentives to get people to set up businesses that are going to go out of business every time they earn some money.

Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill [HL]

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I feel that I could not have put the case for these two amendments better than the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan and Lord Wallace of Saltaire. I also echo the comments of my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley. Like them, we very much hope that the arguments will not fall on stony ground. Indeed, in a previous debate in this Room, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, agreed with our direction of travel, saying:

“It would be nice to see the independent and state sectors collaborating more”.—[Official Report, 27/11/14; col. 991.]

As we know, though, encouraging words are simply not enough in themselves. Despite being subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of some £700 million over the course of a Parliament, only 3% of independent schools sponsor an academy, only 5% loan teaching staff to state schools and only one-third allow pupils to attend lessons on their premises. That is not sufficient to show that they are providing “public benefit”.

I agree with noble Lords that there are pockets of good practice but I also very much echo their view that it is not consistent. As Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, has described it, it feels like public schools are offering the state sector only the “crumbs off your tables”. So independent schools with charitable status must do more to develop partnerships with state schools by sharing their resources and skills.

It is in all our interests, public and private, that every child has access to a first-class education with the skills to succeed in the global marketplace, and this is certainly one way of delivering that. We would envisage much deeper partnerships than has been the case in the past, not just by the sharing of sports, art and music facilities—important though they are, and an important case for that has been made in the debate—but also by the running of summer schools, mentoring schemes and giving access to networks for careers advice, work experience and internships. All these issues are equally important in a future partnership scheme.

It is important for independent schools to engage in these activities with the state sector as an equal partner rather than as a tokenistic gesture. I will give an example of this. I visited a school recently which on its website talked proudly of the relationship it had with the local public school. When I went to speak to the sixth form, I commented that the students must feel proud to have access to all the facilities in the school down the road, but I have to say that those students looked at me with completely blank faces. They did not know what I was talking about. An awful lot is said about this without it being acted upon on the ground in a way that young people feel is delivering for them. This is why we have called for a new schools partnership standard against which independent schools will be measured. Furthermore, we believe that the Local Government Act 1988 should be amended so that private schools’ business rate relief becomes conditional on passing that new standard.

Amendments 23A and 23B provide a start by identifying at least three areas, sports, drama and music, where facilities and expertise can be shared to the benefit of pupils from both sectors. I would say to the noble Lords, Lord Lexden and Lord Hodgson, that independent schools which are already involved in such initiatives have nothing to fear from these changes, while, quite frankly, those which have not kept up with the times will find it difficult to justify why they should continue to be subsidised on the pretence that they are providing a public benefit rather than a private benefit for just the few.

That brings me to the second part of the two amendments, where we totally concur with the view that the Charity Commission should be required to set out the minimum necessary for the public benefit test to be met. No other agency or individual is allowed to mark their own homework and decide for themselves what their standard is and whether they have met it. Without some kind of independent and transparent guidance, it is impossible for taxpayers or their representatives to review and test the standard, or to check that it has been met in each case. Even auditors cannot justify themselves that the requirement has been met since there is no standard against which they can benchmark any particular charity.

We have tolerated the corrosive effect of the divided school system for far too long. It cannot be right that public schools account for only 7% of all pupils in England yet provide more than 50% of our CEOs, Lords, barristers, judges, QCs, doctors and even journalists. We very much welcome the amendments and the analysis behind them as a first step towards a new model of accountability and partnership in education. It may well be that the wording does need to be finessed before Report, but I am sure that the proposers of the amendments will welcome any constructive suggestions in that regard. While I am sure that the Minister agrees with these sentiments, I hope he will also agree with our practical proposals, and I look forward to hearing his response.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, I should start by saying that I am very much on side with my noble friend Lord Moynihan and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in their intention to encourage more sharing of facilities and expertise between charitable independent schools and local communities, including state schools. Indeed, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Moynihan on all the excellent work that he has done on this, including during the Olympics. I have to say that I am not an accomplished sportsman myself—indeed, the words “accomplished sportsman” and “Bridges” do not go together. I try to pull myself around Battersea Park once a week, but that is as far as it goes, so I look with awe at what my noble friend has achieved in terms of encouraging more people to take part in sport.

As I said, I sympathise with the noble aim of these amendments. However, although we may agree on the aim, where I differ is on the way in which we achieve it. In direct response to what my noble friend has said, I would argue that the Charity Commission already has the tools to do this job and to do it consistently. Public benefit has long been a concept at the heart of the definition of charity, as all noble Lords know. It is not enough that charities have a charitable purpose; they must further their charitable purpose for the public benefit. However, how they do so is rightly a matter for a charity’s trustees—a point made eloquently and forcefully by my noble friend Lord Lexden?

The Charities Act 2006, now consolidated into the Charities Act 2011, gave the Charity Commission a statutory objective of promoting awareness and understanding of the operation of the public benefit requirement. It also required the commission to publish statutory guidance on the public benefit requirement, as noble Lords will know. The published guidance as it applied to charitable fee-charging independent schools was challenged in the Upper Tribunal and was found to be overprescriptive. I just want to remind your Lordships what the tribunal found.

The tribunal summarised the two strands to the public benefit test as follows: first, what is provided must be of benefit to the community; and, secondly, those who benefit must be sufficiently numerous and identified in such a manner as to constitute a “section of the public”. On the first point, the test was satisfied, in that the delivery of a standard curriculum to school-age children was for the benefit of the community. On the second point, providing that more than de minimis or token provision is made for the poor, there is a range of direct, indirect and identifiable wider benefits that schools provide to the community that can be taken into account. The test is to look at what a trustee, acting in the interests of the community as a whole, would do in all the circumstances of the particular school, and to ask what provision should be made, other than the provision of education to fee-paying students, over and beyond the de minimis or token threshold.

As with all charities, the trustees of charitable independent schools are required to report on their public benefit activities in their trustees’ annual report. It is worth pointing out that the Charity Commission provides guidance on how the public benefit requirement can be met by charities, including schools. As I am sure your Lordships know, this is set out in Public Benefit: The Public Benefit Requirement. I repeat that this matter should be left to the discretion of the charity’s trustees operating within the Charity Commission’s published guidance. In practice, charitable independent schools are likely to use a combination of ways of providing opportunities to benefit people who cannot afford the fees. Such schools have widely varying circumstances and assets which can affect what benefits, other than an education for pupils at the school, they choose to give.

As my noble friend Lord Moynihan alluded to, much is being done in terms of partnership. According to the Independent Schools Council, 93% of ISC schools are in mutually beneficial partnerships with state schools and local communities, sharing expertise, best practice and facilities to the benefit of children in all the schools involved. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, we need to encourage them to do more. The ISC states:

“The best partnerships develop between Heads or teachers really wanting to work together, out of genuine local relationships and enthusiasms, not dictated from the top”.

In addition to sharing expertise or facilities as set out in the noble Lord’s amendment, other examples might include allowing pupils from local state schools to attend certain lessons or other educational events; collaboration between independent schools and state schools, including academies—a point that has been referred to—an independent school working in partnership with a non-fee-charging school overseas to share knowledge; the formal secondment of teaching staff to other state schools or colleges—for example, in specialist subjects such as individual sciences or modern languages—and supporting state schools to help them prepare A-level students for entry to universities. Those are just a flavour of the different ways in which a charitable independent school can work with the wider community and the state education sector to further its charitable purposes for the public benefit.

However, I wish to return to my main point, which has been made before, which is that charities are independent and their trustees must be able to make decisions in the best interests of the charity, taking into account the needs of their beneficiaries and individual circumstances of their charity. We must be careful not to fetter their discretion with prescriptive requirements that will not be appropriate in all circumstances.

As my noble friend Lord Lexden eloquently argued, we need to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Therefore, I entirely share the sentiment behind this amendment and the view of my noble friend Lord Moynihan that we need to do more to raise standards in the teaching of sport and music in state schools while encouraging independent schools to do their bit.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to Ofsted. Indeed, Ofsted has looked into this matter, as I am sure she knows. I remind your Lordships what was said in its report Going the Extra Mile, which was published in June last year. It states:

“Of course, many independent schools enjoy financial advantages not available to their state-funded cousins. As this report makes clear, it is not resource that is the key to independent school success but attitude. Children are expected to compete, train and practise secure in the knowledge that teachers will go the extra mile to help them. … As things stand, many state schools treat competitive sport as an optional extra or fail to offer it any meaningful way. They get on the bus but fail to turn up on the pitch”.

The report goes on to say:

“The time that PE staff, other teachers and coaches dedicate to organising sport before, during and after school and at weekends is one of”,

the “fundamental reasons” why some maintained schools and academies match what independent schools do.

An Ofsted music report said that, as regards the provision of music:

“The root of the problem lay in a lack of understanding, and low expectations in music, among the schools’ senior leaders and their consequent inability to challenge their own staff, and visiting teachers, to bring about improvement. More often than not, they evaluated the quality of music in their schools too optimistically”.

I am not for one instant saying that we should not encourage independent schools to do their bit and to do more. Clearly, we need to do that and clearly there is work to be done. I know that my noble friend Lord Moynihan is encouraging us to do a lot of work in the state sector, but there is a lot of work to be done on both fronts. However, while the activities covered in these amendments are worthy, there may be many others which have equal value or may be more appropriate in the particular circumstances of the school. Trustees will want to take into account the needs of their beneficiaries and be able to develop innovative responses to such needs. It would be wrong to restrict their discretion in the way proposed by the amendments. I look forward to meeting my noble friend Lord Moynihan before Report to discuss his proposals in more detail. However, on the basis of what I have said, I hope that he will feel able to withdraw the amendment.

Deregulation Bill

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, those of us who were involved in the early discussions about the possible privatisation of areas of social work were assured at the time that child protection would not be something that went off the radar and that, in particular, we would see registration of child protection services take place, along with a proper review. Why have we suddenly had that foreshortened? I really do not understand that.

Other areas of childcare have registration—and it works. The noble Baroness just mentioned those. Surely this is the highest-profile area as well as the one where most of us would be deeply concerned. A lifetime in child protection work tells me that we must deal with this with the utmost care. I am not saying that in the long term we will not find services that work but rather that we need to view them with the utmost care at the moment and that registration and a review of it will help to ensure that we do not take the wrong step at the wrong time. A standard answer this afternoon on this would not be good enough. We have the national inquiry going on and child protection on the front page of every newspaper, and on television and radio. Yet here we are suggesting that we remove the safeguards from one area of child protection. That is just not good enough.

I am often on the receiving end of contracts with local authorities in other areas. As we heard from both noble Baronesses, local authorities are exceptional at child protection. We have had some extraordinary failures, which are in the papers at the moment—and we all deeply regret them. However, day in, day out, thousands of children on child protection registers are looked after and cared for by social workers up and down the country, usually working hours way above those they are contracted for and putting themselves at risk because if they get it wrong they will not only endanger a child but destroy their career overnight. As someone who has sat through two child abuse inquiries, and survived them, I know just how painful that can be for those involved.

We acknowledge what social workers do, but the local authorities’ contracting services are still in their infancy. One thing that local authorities tend to do because of the pressure they are under is look for what might be the cheapest rather than the best- quality service. I hope that they would not do this in child protection, but I see it in the delivery of adult services, because local authorities are under so much financial pressure at the moment. I do not criticise them for trying to find the best way to deliver their services.

My other concern is that if Ofsted does not have time to do the registration, as we have been told, however will it find time to do the right kind of inspections of these services? We have heard in other places that Ofsted is under extreme pressure. Again, I am not being critical. I understand that; I have been a regulator in another important place. But if we are committed to quality and to truly protecting our children, and if we recognise where this is on the national agenda, we will surely take a little more time—that is all the amendment asks for—to evaluate whether this is the best way forward. I ask the Minister to consider that very carefully in the interests of the nation’s most vulnerable children.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the arguments made this afternoon by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and my noble friend Lady Donaghy. At the heart of the concerns raised by everyone is that the Government have not presented an adequate case for why the changes to social work regulation are necessary. The Minister does not need me to tell him of the perilous state of social work provision in the country at present. Demand for intervention is increasing massively, particularly in the wake of the new focus on child abuse cases. Meanwhile, children are being put at risk because about 11% of social work posts are unfilled. A recent NSPCC report warned that social workers are,

“frequently operating without the support, time, knowledge and training they needed to ensure the identification of sexual abuse and the protection and well-being of extremely vulnerable children”.

Those concerns apply not just to social workers employed in children’s departments but across the spectrum, including the charitable and private sectors. Only yesterday, the Home Secretary said:

“With every passing day and every new revelation, it is clear that the sexual abuse of children has taken place, and is still taking place, on a scale that we still cannot fully comprehend”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/2/15; col. 658.]

So why are we making these changes at this very sensitive time?

My co-signers to the amendment have rightly identified that there is a chorus of opposition to the proposals from those involved in the sector. The changes are opposed by the Local Government Association, the College of Social Work and Unison, which represents those working in the sector. All have identified the risks of reducing regulation in the sector. Their concerns have been echoed by the Children’s Commissioner, who is the independent voice protecting the welfare of children in England, who stated:

“We consider all delegated social care services should be required to have formal registration with Ofsted in addition to an expectation that they will be held to account by rigorous and expert inspection, just as local authorities currently are”.

We should be taking heed of these voices.

If the reason for the proposals is to save money, it would be helpful to know just how much the Government believe will be saved. As has been said, it may well be that Ofsted feels that it is overworked and does not have the resources to carry out the regulation function adequately—but then we need to address that issue head on, rather than simply allow it to walk away from the role. If the intention is to transfer responsibility for regulation of those providers to local authorities, it would be helpful to know whether they will be given the additional funds to carry out their work—I rather suspect that that is not the case.

However, fundamentally, this is not about money, it is about risk. The Government have provided no evidence that they have weighed the risk of removing regulation from third-sector social work organisations. I remember raising concerns with the previous Government about the reduced regulation of private care homes. It has taken many years and a lot of suffering—even deaths—before we realised that we, the state, had an overwhelming responsibility to protect the most vulnerable, whoever is providing the service. Let us not make that same mistake again

Ofsted already inspects local authorities and in-house children’s services. It already regulates the private and charitable sectors providing social work services. This includes checking that they pass the fit and proper person test. Of course, we could be talking about very large companies, so local authorities may have very difficult relationships with them. Why would we want to lose those skills at this critical time for the sector? The role being assigned to local authorities is very different from that of a regulator. They are not the regulator. Their function in contracting out social work services is focused on procurement and contract compliance. We would end up with a fractured line of accountability for the services provided by contracted-out social workers.

Our amendment would provide a crucial pause in the Government’s proposals. It would provide time for the Government to have further talks with those who continue to have major concerns about the changes. Most crucially, it would allow the Government to carry out and publish a proper risk assessment, so that we can all be sure that child protection functions will be protected under their proposals. The consequence of getting this wrong is just too traumatic. We need to take the time to get this right, and we have the responsibility to do so. I hope that noble Lords will support our amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I suppose that I should declare an interest: my son has lived and worked in the United States for seven years and his American wife is a qualified children’s social worker. She has worked in Boston and is currently working in Chicago, so I have learnt a certain amount about the Massachusetts and Illinois systems of privatised provision of child protection. I am not completely unaware of some of the delicacies in this area. I am of course also acutely aware of the sensitivity of the issue of child protection in British political debate at present.

I thank the noble Baronesses for raising this issue and for coming in to discuss further with my noble friend and officials some of the underlying issues at stake. I am well aware that the College of Social Work has strong views on this, although as I understand it the area of social work is not entirely of one mind in how far one needs registration as well as inspection. The questions of registration and inspection are related but not identical. The system of delegation is purely permissive. Local authorities may continue to provide their own services or, as the noble Baroness suggested, delegate to third sector providers or commercial providers in the field. Some do so; many others continue to provide their own direct services. The removal of registration does not mean the removal of inspection.

National Voter Registration Day

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, in this country, it has not been compulsory to vote or to register to vote. That would raise all sorts of questions about civil or criminal penalties, and some fundamental questions about the relationship between the citizen and the state. This country has not wanted to use compulsion where it can possibly avoid it.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, might I take the noble Lord back to the original point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which is the Northern Ireland experience? When individual voting was introduced there, there was an alarming drop-off in the number of young people registering, so we already know that that is a threat on the horizon. Northern Ireland came up with a good solution—the schools initiative—which effectively dealt with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, raised about formally registering all pupils. Surely, on the basis of the experience we already have from Northern Ireland, we should embrace that initiative and get schools to register all pupils when they come up to the age of 18.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government’s mechanism encouraging schools to use Rock Enrol!, a slightly different package, has so far received a fairly good take-up from schools. We very much want schools to encourage their pupils to register online, but we are having a dialogue about it with schools and teachers.