King’s Speech (4th Day)

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I join colleagues in the House in congratulating my noble friend Lord Vallance on his maiden speech. I felt after listening to him that this is a Minister who will be happy engaging with Members of this House; we welcome that. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Petitgas, on a lively and fresh contribution. We look forward to many more from him in the months to come. I also look forward to the winding-up speech of my noble friend Lord Livermore. He and I go back a long way, to a time when we were working with Gordon Brown in the early days of the Labour Government in 1997.

I take this opportunity to raise the matter of support to help young people with learning disabilities and autism gain employment; the noble Lords, Lord Shinkwin and Lord Holmes, have already touched on these matters. If we are to meet the Government’s ambition to grow our economy, we can ill afford to ignore the skills and talents of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens who cannot get a job because they have a learning disability.

Seven out of 10 people of working age who have a learning disability are unemployed—denied the opportunity of an independent life and the sense of life-fulfilling achievement that work brings. Businesses across Britain are denied the benefit, enthusiasm, skills and commitment of this group. More than that, helping them find work reduces a cost to the Exchequer.

The Fair Shot café in Covent Garden, which operates a training scheme exclusively employing people with learning disabilities and autism, said in an impact report that its programme had saved the taxpayer £210,000 in benefits.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

Good coffee too.

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

Yes, there is very good coffee there too.

For years, Governments have sought to reduce the disability employment gap. In 2017 the last Government set the goal of helping 1 million disabled people into work by 2027. To be fair, there has been progress—but it is not enough. I desperately hope that this Labour Government will do two things: first, launch a major drive to encourage employers to offer jobs to people with learning disabilities and autism. There are many good examples of businesses that have done this, and we need them to provide mentors to encourage others.

A good start would be to look at a recent report on employment with autism written by Sir Robert Buckland, who as an MP chaired the All-Party Group on Autism. One of Robert’s key recommendations was explained under the heading “changing employer behaviour”.

I have spoken to many businesspeople. In almost every case there is a willingness to employ a person with learning disabilities, but also a reluctance: how will my staff cope working with a person with learning disabilities? What if they do not fit in? What support do I have to provide to them? Is there any financial support to employ a person with learning disabilities? Are there any examples of where employing a person with learning disabilities has worked out? These are perfectly reasonable questions. I urge His Majesty’s Government to launch a programme of recruiting mentors who have run businesses that have employed people with learning disabilities and autism. With their co-operation and support, I am sure we will persuade more businesses to do the same and help grow the economy—a key objective of the Government.

Secondly, we need to improve the operation of the Access to Work fund. This fund helps people with learning disabilities and autism get the right support to get into work, but its budget has been underspent in three years out of the last five. The Government need to work closely with supported employment providers. In partnership with employers, schools and colleges, they help to create supported internships. A supported internship is often the catalyst that gets a person with learning disabilities into work. It provides the opportunity and support to turn their potential into practical work skills that help them to start a career and further develop their social, emotional and self-advocacy skills. Access to Work plays a vital role in facilitating these internships. Its funding is a key part of the service offered by supported employment providers.

However, employment support providers are facing considerable difficulties with the process. While initial stages work well, including planning for funding approvals, they experience considerable delays when other things are to be processed. In addition, they are facing significant issues when they come to processing claims and receiving funding. There are issues about basic things such as timesheet requirements and concerning the receipt of paperwork. I could go on. I have to say that Access to Work is also a poor communicator with the people it is supposed to be helping. Should he wish, I can give my noble friend the Minister more information, but it would take up too much time for me to do that now.

We need a nationwide scheme to make real progress here—a national strategy with clear and achievable objectives. That objective can be summed in one sentence: to change employer behaviour. That would do more than anything to reduce the disability employment gap, and if we do that we will grow the economy.

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[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I join the welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Vallance. He has earned the trust of the British people and, frankly, there are not many of us in this House or the other place who could make that claim. We welcome him and his excellent speech. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Livermore. In economic debates, we have become so used to the noble Lord and the excellent noble Baroness, Lady Vere, being our two final speakers, but it will no longer be in the same order. I welcome him to his ministerial post.

To the noble Lord, Lord Petitgas, I say that he should not worry about having French origins; we are multicultural here. There are many of us who can show him ways to avoid the Royal Gallery and the paintings of Waterloo and Trafalgar—we would be glad to do it.

This has been an extraordinary debate. In using the term “consensus”, the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, expressed a lot of the common ideas that were being shared across the House. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked about “fresh air” and managed to exactly capture the feeling I have had that there is a sense that, no matter which Bench noble Lords are sitting on, we are moving into a new time—a much more positive time, I hope.

As the first of the winders, I begin by saying that I wish the new Government well, but we face very challenging times, and the noble Lord, Lord Birt, basically took us through the situation that we face. The King’s Speech outlined a series of actions, and I very much hope that these will shift us back on to the front foot in growth. But the questions will arise: what is the detail, and will these measures be sufficient?

My colleagues on these Benches have outlined a series of steps that we think are critical; let me emphasise just a couple of them. The noble Lord, Lord Fox, talked very firmly about the need for an industrial strategy that provides long-term certainty, and that was shared by noble Lords from across this House. The noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, and the noble Lords, Lord McNicol, Lord Mair and Lord Gadhia, expressed similar points around the importance of a long-term and certain industrial strategy.

The AI revolution needs a strategy, but we also need to recognise its extraordinary complexity. That will not be an easy process. We heard about that from the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Holmes and Lord Fairfax, the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville—and I have probably missed a couple of names along the way. We heard about the significance of infrastructure from the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Fox, but also very specifically on the transport agenda from the noble Lords, Lord McLoughlin, Lord Bradshaw and Lord Berkeley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. That is all essential to our discussion.

I join with the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, in stressing the importance of ending the two-child benefit cap. It is often seen just as poverty alleviation and as such perhaps not significant in a growth debate, but with that kind of pressure on families, the chance of getting them to turn and focus on the future with hope and energy is very low. We empower people when we allow them to be in the appropriate economic setting, and the deprivation of children is not consistent with that.

We have to rebuild our workforce—many have said that—to end the crisis and the long-term waiting list in the NHS. That also requires fixing the care system. On that I join very much with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth; I am so glad that we have found something in common in this Speech. My greatest disappointment with the King’s Speech was the lack of focus on social care, and others raised this issue in the course of their various speeches.

We also know that for the workforce we have to reform our apprenticeship schemes to give people of all ages real opportunity. Even with those steps, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Fox, that our clear shortage of workforce and our high dependency ratio mean that, at least for the immediate future, we will need skills from abroad. That means a proper sector-based migration strategy.

We all share the aims of growth and prosperity, but there is a choice: do we do this from the top down, or build from the roots up? My party argues very strongly that community should be engaged in leading development. I loved the words used by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, “locally designed”; the words of the noble Lord, Lord Best, focusing—again— very much on community and engagement; and those of my colleagues. In places such as Eastleigh and the London Borough of Kingston, community-led development, including social and genuinely affordable housing, has gone at great pace with strong local support. By contrast, where projects are developer-led, the plans submitted are so often quite frankly abusive. It is no wonder that projects end up in disputes for years; we need locally led development to build not just housing but our commercial services and manufacturing backbone. Community engagement is key.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and have a long list of needs, including prompt payment. I am mortified that for so many, access to finance remains utterly inadequate. The noble Lord, Lord Sarfraz, addressed this with the AIM market, which has been in decline, but I want to go to something even more basic. Challenger banks, fintechs and alternative lenders, even allied with open banking, have not solved the problem of loan funding for small businesses. We have an absolute valley of death in this area.

Why are we not aggressively building a layer of community development finance institutions across the UK? This is the mechanism that built up small business in the United States and provided resilience through two major recessions and other crises. The CDFI sector in the US has $452 billion in assets and is absolutely key to the US economy’s resilience. We need a community reinvestment Act here, like the one that created that sector in the US. Will the Government bring it forward?

Let me pick up some of the words on small businesses and exports. I think our small businesses are desperate to reclaim a place in the European supply chain. The number that have dropped out of exporting altogether post Brexit and because of the deal that was framed is shocking. We will press the Government to negotiate away red tape and to create the potential for us to rejoin the single market, even if not in this parliamentary term. At the very least, will the Government respond to the needs of the creative industries and enable proper travel and functioning for the creative industries across Europe?

Lastly, on small businesses, I want to address the issue of business rates. No one has mentioned it, but few steps would more rapidly drive the revival of town centres and communities across the country than scrapping the current structure of business rates and replacing them with a much fairer levy on commercial property owners: a form of land value tax.

I am close to the end of my speech because I am out of time, but we on these Benches are not out of ideas. Your Lordships heard the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, talking about procurement, which is critical, and the noble Lord, Lord Lee, on the stock market and investing in financial education. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked about the same issue, as did others, on the significance of the creative industries, and the noble Lords, Lord Morse and Lord Davies of Brixton, the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, and the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, addressed the whole area of pensions and providing finance into that investment in the future.

However, I want to put down one marker on that issue: the protection of people with small pots of investment. Putting their money into illiquid, high-risk investment without any guarantees and protection leaves them very exposed. Therefore, be careful as you structure this change in the way in which pension investment is made, and remember that there is a responsibility—I think I am echoing the noble Lord, Lord Davies, here—to the people whose pensions these are: to the actual savers and users.

There is so much more to say, but I am coming to the end of my time. I thank your Lordships for the opportunity to wind. I hope that this will be an exciting portfolio and that we will all meet again very often to discuss these issues.