Retail Sector: Unemployment

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I agree with the noble Lord. It is very important that we try to do all that we can to retain town centres and high streets. They are a vital outlet for many businesses and are well loved by the public. We have the levelling-up fund and the towns fund so we are doing all we can to assist the sector in these very difficult times.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

At the Covid-19 Select Committee yesterday, both the Fabian Society and the British Independent Retailers Association gave startling evidence to our inquiry. Both said, quite rightly, that this would disproportionately affect women, who traditionally have held many more roles in the retail sector. Many of these roles are now going towards distribution centres, where, as we know, the gender balance is different. What are the Government measuring in relation to this question and what actions do they plan to take to mitigate the impact on women?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness is correct, sadly. We recognise that many of those losing their jobs in this sector are likely to be younger, low-skilled female workers, hence the importance of higher universal credit payments, the Kickstart programme and JETS, and, from January 2021, the Job Finding Support service. We have temporarily increased universal credit by around £1,000 a year and are doubling the number of work coaches to 27,000 in 2021.

Climate Change

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I met the chief executive of the committee only about two or three weeks ago. I am not aware of any comments or otherwise that the committee has made on trade agreements.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet. Nearly half the recommendations made by the climate change committee require some kind of behaviour change by the general public, yet a recent BEIS survey showed that only 5% of people understand in detail what net zero even means. What concrete plans do the Government have to urgently educate citizens about actions that they should take in order to reach government targets?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Baroness is of course correct to highlight the importance of behavioural change. Getting to net zero will require action from everyone—as I said earlier, people, businesses and governments—across the whole of the UK. It is vital to engage the public in this debate on the challenge, and we intend to do that in the run-up to COP 26 later next year.

Clean Growth Fund

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Of course, my noble friend is correct to be sceptical, but we want to capitalise on the opportunity presented by the growing low-carbon global economy and we want to capitalise private investment into the UK clean growth sector.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB) [V]]

I declare my interest as a director of the Peers for the Planet group. A Resolution Foundation report out today states that 20% of 18 to 24 year-olds are likely to face unemployment, yet there are huge potential opportunities for employment in the clean energy and climate crisis innovation areas. What are the Government doing to make sure that these young people are able to have the skills that they need to take up what will be an enormous amount of potential job opportunities?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I agree with the noble Baroness that there are tremendous opportunities, but we have a number of other government funds outside of the one that we are discussing today. For instance, the Green Homes Grant scheme has a training element within it, with several million pounds of grants allocated to training providers to provide jobs in exactly the sector that she mentions.

Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I know that my noble friend takes a close interest in matters in Northern Ireland. These schemes are available to businesses across all regions of the UK, and many lenders acting in Northern Ireland have received accreditation. However, we are working to get more lenders fully accredited as quickly as possible. Fourteen lenders have now been accredited for the bounce-back loan scheme and we are seeking to get more approved as quickly as possible.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

Smaller companies will rely on the future fund for support, yet the Government have said that companies are required to have already raised £250,000 to be eligible. This will put both diverse funders and locations outside of the south-east at an enormous disadvantage. How will the Minister ensure that the future fund will neither deepen existing inequalities nor perpetrate new ones, particularly when, as I understand it, all 13 advisers to the fund are men?

[Lord Callanan]

We have introduced a comprehensive package of measures designed to support any business facing difficulties in this period, including the various loan schemes and grants and support for the self-employed. Start-ups may be able to access CBILS or the bounce-back loan scheme if they fulfil the eligibility criteria. We keep them constantly under review to ensure that as many businesses as possible receive the support that they need.

Trade Unions

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as noted in the register, most particularly as founder and chair of Doteveryone, a small charity championing responsible technology, and as a board member of Twitter. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, for his fantastic introduction. I was so delighted that technology played such a central role in the way he expressed the past and future of the trade union movement.

As with everything, the world of digital is blowing apart with a tidal wave the ways of working and the sectors in which we have operated in the past. Some of this is miraculous. I am sure that many in the Chamber have enjoyed the extraordinary services of Deliveroo to their front door. I bet many noble Lords have jumped in an Uber, and, considering the quality of the speeches this morning, I think many might put their work on freelancewriting.com, where you can get cheap speeches written for you by experts. We have seen many gains as a society and as consumers from the fantastic pace of change and the flexible and independent nature of work today. But, as I hope to argue in my short remarks, there are many perils. We underestimate them at our very grave risk.

Some 4.5 million people are employed in the so-called gig economy right now. That is one in 10 workers. This is a huge number of people without the stability of employment. While this can be fantastically empowering if you can work on the terms you wish for, it can also be fantastically stressful and make you feel insecure and anxious. Often these barriers fall on the most vulnerable people already; I particularly think of women and those with children or in solo care of a parent, child or other relation. These are complex challenges. I am 46. People of my generation will have around 12 careers in their lifetimes. My first cousin is 25. She is more likely to have 22 careers in her lifetime. If you are 10, half the jobs that will be open to you have not even been invented yet. This is a dramatically changing world, as many noble Lords have highlighted, a world in which it is hard to reflect on how we should help and protect people who want to work in new ways and who face the challenges of the dramatic shifts in workplace.

This is why we face a huge hotchpotch of regulations and attempts by unions, not just here but all over the world, to come to terms with these brave new ways of working. I am sure noble Lords are aware of some of the changes in Scandinavia, where there is no minimum wage but where individual collectives have negotiated with employers—a different model, but one that perhaps reflects more easily the changing nature of work.

Here we have struggled deeply to come to terms with some of these new and extremely powerful organisations. I pick Uber as an example. I have mixed feelings about this company. My own charity, Doteveryone, did some research on how consumers felt about some of the new platform-based businesses. One woman told us that she had been punched in the face twice by Uber drivers, yet continues to use the service nearly every week, for me a profound metaphor for where our relationship with technology sits. We seem to have a reactive view of this company in particular. They are taxed massively, even though most of the fleet are electric cars, while diesel taxis parade around London with no barrier to the exhaust fumes they let off into society. At the same time, we know that an Uber driver’s average wage is about £5 an hour, yet we seem unable to enforce the minimum wage for its hundreds of thousands of workers.

I say this not just to pick on Uber, but as an example of the complexity around how we unpick some of these new ways of working and new businesses. It is not just the so-called gig economy. Even in the main technology sector, the fastest-growing bit of our economy relies deeply on freelance and temporary workers. I have to reflect on Twitter—a company whose board I sit on—Facebook, YouTube and many other content-driven businesses that use a huge number of contractors, not full-time employees, to do the essential work of content moderation. As was exposed most recently by some journalists in the US, their work is often done in unfathomably bad conditions. They are exposed to content that none of us would want to see once in a lifetime, let alone many times an hour.

Again, these are complex problems to unpick. I would like to raise three challenges for the Minister and suggest three small solutions. First—and I am afraid that if you have heard me speak before, I will sound like a cracked record—we desperately need to build the digital skills and understanding of the most vulnerable in our society. This has not happened at the pace we need to build resilience in a strong economy in the future. Many millions of adults still cannot use any technology at all, or have no access to it or ability to pay for it; there are also several million more who do not have the next level of understanding and literacy to be able to look for work and find the opportunities that many of us take for granted. Some 90% of jobs are advertised only online, yet we still have many millions of adults who do not have access to the internet or the ability to use it. We have to keep fighting to build digital skills among our entire working population. I would love to hear the Minister’s thoughts on this.

Secondly, there are specific things that I believe we can do to help the workers in the so-called gig economy. One of the things that Doteveryone looked at was the portability of data. It may sound technical but is actually very important. If I work for one or other of the platform-based services, such as Rated People, as a builder, a plumber or whatever—a fantasy if you look at me, I know, but if I were able to be that skilled—I have no ability to take with me my working history. I can walk out of here and get a reference; none of the people in these platform-based businesses can do that. We argue that it is essential to think of exciting new ways to legislate around how people can move between these different jobs, especially if you think about the number of times people will have to shift careers in future. There need to be specific pieces of legislation, and not everyone has ideas about that.

Finally, as mentioned here many times before, we need to reinvigorate the trade union movement, build its digital skills and understanding and come up with creative new ways to help empower people. I believe deeply that the UK has an enormous global opportunity here. While I salute many people in our Government who stand up and say that we are going to have the biggest AI sector in the world or that this will be the best place to start a digital business, I am afraid I do not believe it. We have to look for other opportunities. We are a small country with a relatively challenging level of digitisation in our society. Protection of workers, clear frameworks of legislation and forward-thinking, digital-based legislation are where I believe we can triumph in the new world.

Climate

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, yesterday on social media, there was a small, viral video of two deer battling in the foreground, while far in the distance —as you could determine after watching it for a few seconds—a lion slowly emerged that, in one efficient movement, jumped on these fighting deer, killing them both. I draw a parallel: I feel as though the debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, today is that lion, while many other debates in this building are the deer in the foreground.

I was determined to speak this afternoon, because I have been through—to use a word from my own sector, technology—a pivot over the last six months, partly on the back of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report, and partly because of my partner’s establishment of a marine conservation charity, which has meant relentless tussles at home. I now feel it is not only the responsibility but the only moral thing that somebody with any small voice can do to constantly challenge and question why the climate emergency/climate crisis is not debated in public opinion in the way it should be, in the sectors I see, on the boards I sit on—certainly within technology, and with the inventors and innovators of the future. To give an example, I use Twitter, and after watching deer being devoured by a lion yesterday, I used it to ask what percentage of venture capital around the world was given to climate-related businesses. It would be bad if it was under 50% right now, because venture capitalists look to the future, imagining the solutions for the things we should be most concerned about. Imagine my horror at discovering that the percentage of venture capital investment in climate-based innovations has just decreased year on year. In Europe, it has gone from 3% to 2%, and in the US—get this—it has gone from 2.5% to 1%. This is a complicated number—there are investments across healthcare that you might determine are a climate issue, or possibly in fintech and so on—but even if it is 10 times that, it is half as much as it should be.

This is just one example of where it feels that we are wrestling deer in the corner, when the lion is approaching us from behind. As a technology innovator, I feel that we must demand more of the people that think they are inventing the future, because they are not inventing the future that I want to be a part of. We have to make sure that social media companies manage disinformation about the climate on their platforms; I declare an interest as a board member of Twitter. We have to demand that venture capital companies invest in solutions for everybody. This is fundamental, and these will not be challenges we can solve if we do not deploy all the weapons at our disposal. These are people who have proven in the past that they can solve complex problems, but the debate is not happening at the level that it needs to. That is why I could not support more whole- heartedly the notion of a climate crisis and emergency declared by the Government, because Governments lead and people follow, and that is what we need to encourage this Government to do.

Businesses: Start-ups

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

The noble Lord is overcynical. It is quite obvious from all the figures we have, whether we take them from Companies House or wherever, that a large number of new companies are coming into existence. My noble friend quoted the other figures, which show just how well they are doing, and how well compared to other countries throughout Europe. The noble Lord should welcome that and be grateful that entrepreneurship flourishes in this country because the Government create the right environment for it.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, publicly available data shows that 93% of funding goes to male-led start-up businesses and that one in 10 people making decisions in financial institutions is a woman. Do the Government track this data, and what are they planning to do about it when so many people are being left out of the entrepreneurial revolution?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I was not aware of those figures but if the noble Baroness is correct, they obviously give us some concern. It is not for the Government to create new businesses—as I said earlier, it is for the Government to create the right environment in which businesses can start up. However, if 93% of them seem to be male led, we should look at that to see what is happening and whether, in creating the right environment, there is anything that the Government can do to make sure that women feel they have an opportunity to create their own businesses.

Fourth Industrial Revolution

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I shall not make any firm commitments about that review, which was published only at the beginning of the month. Noble Lords will know that we have already had a Question dealing with it. I confessed that I had not yet read the full 246 pages of the review, but I am making progress under the advice of the Leader of the Opposition, who recommended that I read it with a mug of cocoa. I will look at all recommendations. I will not make promises about the north-west of England but the noble Lord will know I have a particular interest there. I would welcome going back up there as often as possible.

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, arguably the biggest challenge facing Governments globally at the moment is the disconnection between policy, legislation and the pace of technological change. Will the Minister give the House a sense of how the Government are approaching closing that gap and, to use a trendy tech word, disrupting their own policy-making processes to keep abreast of developments?