Education: Conservatoires

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Lipsey both on securing this debate and on his recent appointment, which I had not known about and am delighted by.

I remind the House of my own interests. I have spent all my professional life working with people who have come through conservatoire training; I have observed them, employed them and advised them and for a short while I was in charge of them as, briefly, principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Furthermore, both my children are conservatoire-trained, so I think I may say that I have seen this kind of education close up, and these are some of the things I know. First, conservatoire training is intense and rigorous, and requires tremendous dedication. For musicians in particular, the road is not only hard but long. Secondly, it is therefore expensive to deliver. Thirdly, students who secure the few available places do so in the face of fierce competition and are often highly skilled before they even start. Fourthly, conservatoire graduates are central to the continuing worldwide success of UK arts and culture, which is critical to our economy.

There is currently, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Lipsey and others, a damaging degree of confusion and uncertainty about whether the necessary special funding for conservatoires will be properly secured. I should like to quote from a letter I received recently from the principal of one of our leading conservatoires in this country. He puts it thus:

“What we have at present is a cocktail of inadequate formula funding with various stop-gap supplements plus an institution-specific supplement that is subject to review every four or five years. It’s a mess. HEFCE do a really good job of making do and mending but ... this has never been translated into the price group structure that has underpinned HEFCE funding for many years. They allocate conservatoire training to a low price group and then wonder why the fee plus teaching grant doesn’t meet the costs and needs a supplementary discretionary top-up”.

He goes on to say:

“What we need is a structure that recognises ... the legitimate high cost and length of training required”.

Of course that is what we need. Why can we not do this when we can do it for other disciplines such as medicine, which also requires long training and high-cost teaching?

The noble Viscount, Lord Younger, is, I know, something of a performer himself. I am sure he perfectly understands these issues, and I hope that when he winds up, he can give the conservatoire sector some hope that they may be resolved.

Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

I am grateful to the Minister for that statement; I take a degree of comfort from it. It is a pity that he cannot speak definitively, because that might have truncated some of our discussion. Notwithstanding what he said, I will deliver my script—or bits of it, anyway—because others want to contribute to the debate. Do the Government accept the conclusions of the report by the noble Lord, Lord Low?

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall)]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt but before a debate begins the amendment needs to be proposed.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

In which case, I beg to move Amendment 86DD.

Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

No, they are not behavioural.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

My Lords, I hesitate to interrupt but noble Lords will see that there is a Division in the Chamber, so the Committee will adjourn now and resume in 10 minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Drake]

I do not accept that defence because tax relief on pension savings is not taking money away from people; it is giving them their tax back.

The other point is that even on ISAs, those who are well off can take every member of their family, their spouse and children, and give them ISAs, thus taking taxpayers’ money for the incentivised advantage that that brings. So the taxpayer supports all sorts of people, some of whom are more worthy than others. On that basis, if the exam question is whether the taxpayer should support someone who has £50,000, I should like to get the whole list of incentivised savings and do some comparative analysis.

The effect of this policy is that people in hard-working families will be disincentivised to save and will face greater risk in managing a labour market that the Government themselves want to deregulate further but do not want to support people in managing that deregulated labour market. As my noble friend Lady Sherlock has said, there is not just the issue of the £16,000. For all those low and moderate-income people who have more than £6,000—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness again, but a Division has been called in the Chamber. The Committee will now adjourn, and resume in 10 minutes.