Welfare Reform and Work Bill

Baroness Nye Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, I support Amendment 69, to which my name is added. When I added my name, I received lots of really good examples of how apprenticeships can work for disabled people, especially when there was understanding of the needs of the disabled person and flexibility in some of the cases where it was required. As my noble friend Lady Campbell said, apprenticeships are really important. It is a massive opportunity for disabled people to develop their skills. But the barriers into apprenticeships can be very different from those into work, which is why this amendment is so important. One person who contacted me said that he wanted to offer an apprenticeship to a 19 year-old young man who has autism. The young man wanted a job and he was good with computers. He said that he wanted to get away from under his parents’ feet. He was offered an apprenticeship through a college. However, they then got stuck in the process of the assessments, which derailed everything. The college wanted to do the assessment in the college and not in the workplace, which made the young man feel very uncomfortable. He then went through this whole process of “dithering” and the young man pulled out because he could not get clear support for the opportunity he was going to be offered. It is a massive mistake and a real shame that young people are getting so close to being offered an apprenticeship but then feel that they cannot take it.

Another young man, who has a visual impairment, has lost out on two positions. He started working but lost out because his employers were unable to be flexible with the opportunity offered.

I have been sent many more good examples than bad examples; it is a shame that we are not using them. This amendment would provide an incredibly useful resource to help others and, if it is reported on in the right way, would help the Government achieve their aim of getting more disabled people into apprenticeships.

[Baroness Nye (Lab)]

Before I speak to Amendment 68A, I apologise for not being able to take part at Second Reading. I also take this opportunity to declare an interest as a trustee of the Young Women’s Trust, to which I am grateful for the briefing it provided.

My amendment calls on the Government to include in the report the number of apprentices disaggregated by protected characteristics. As I support the other amendments in this group in the name of my noble friend and others, I shall concentrate on young women and apprenticeships.

The Government’s target of 3 million apprenticeships by 2020 is to be welcomed because they can be an important route to skills development and work for all young people, but only if they are of high quality and reach those such as the under-25s who are in the most need. It is also welcome that the Government propose to report on progress each year, but it is important that the information contained in that report is useful and not just a pat on the back for numbers going through the system. The report should identify areas where more attention is needed and inform policy development, because evidence shows that apprenticeships are not working as well for young women as they are for young men.

The Young Women’s Trust aims to improve the lifelong opportunities for young women aged 16 to 30 with few or no qualifications, who might be unemployed or in precarious or insecure employment and who are on very low or no pay. Because of a lack of understanding, the Young Women’s Trust undertook a year-long inquiry into the problems of young women who are not in education, employment or training. It produced a report called Scarred for Life?, which was based on consultations with young women and other interested parties, as well as polling conducted by ComRes.

The polling showed that young women work in fewer sectors than men. Two-thirds of female apprentices work in just five sectors, while the same proportion of men work in more than 10. Female apprentices account for fewer than 2% of apprentices in construction, 4% per cent in engineering and still only 12% in IT and telecoms, but 93% of early-years childcare and beauty places are female. The IPPR has said that traditionally masculine areas may receive better-quality training and these sectors also lead to better employment and further education prospects. As young women are less likely to receive training as part of their apprenticeship, they are more likely to be out of work at the end. This is compounded by other research which shows that employment gains from further education are generally not as great for women as they are for men.

The apprenticeship wage also deters women without parental support from applying. Young women say they understand the logic of earning less before being qualified but the pay is just too low to support themselves. Young women also receive less hourly pay on average than men; they could earn £2,000 less over the course of a year. Apprentice equal pay day was marked on 28 October—for the following 64 days, female apprentices would be working for free.

Young women also recognised that when apprenticeships worked well they were a good route into employment. However, they were concerned about how to meet their current needs while training. There is insufficient flexibility to balance apprenticeships and other responsibilities such as caring. They therefore have different priorities in considering apprenticeships.

Data from the Skills Funding Agency and BIS show that 90% of apprentices are aged over 25, with a greater proportion of women in that age group. It is therefore likely that they have been recruited from the existing workforce and that opportunities are not being provided to young people who are just starting out or who are NEET. These challenges prevent thousands of young women making the most of their potential as well as meaning that the wider economy and companies miss out on a vital source of talent.

Destination data are especially important in measuring quality. Apprenticeships are worth while only if they develop skills in all young people and provide a good route into employment. Young women are three times more likely than young men to be out of work after completing an apprenticeship. University education has long been assessed against destination data. Similar measures should be applied to apprenticeships if the esteem in which they are held is to be raised.

If the figures in the Government’s proposed annual report were disaggregated, it would also give added impetus to employers to develop a diversity policy for their apprenticeship schemes; to monitor the protected characteristics of their intake; and to work with careers services, schools and others to attract a diverse workforce, which I believe would command support from all quarters. Without any measurement of the quality of the apprenticeships, the jobs that might or might not follow, or the impact on the reduction of low wages, they offer no real route out of poverty.

I will listen with interest to the Minister’s reply to the questions posed by my noble friend, but, given the lateness of the hour, I will not add to them.

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 68. The only thing that I wanted to add—all other noble Lords have eloquently put forward the reasons why there should be reporting obligations relating to apprenticeships—is that I note that gender is missing from the amendment. It was an oversight, rather than because we did not care passionately about this particular issue. Once again, I am pleading with the Minister: we really need to be able to differentiate between the different groups to see where apprenticeships fall and who is getting what apprenticeship. The noble Baroness, Lady Nye, made a very important argument relating to young women, but the same applies to disability, race and so forth. There are variations that we need to bottom out so that employers can then have appropriate strategies in place to address the anomalies.

Housing Benefit (Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2014

Baroness Nye Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nye (Lab)]

My Lords, I completely share the views so ably put by my noble friend Lady Sherlock and my other noble friends, so I will be brief.

On the anniversary of the introduction of the bedroom tax legislation, the Government are trying to close by statutory instrument a loophole without any understanding of how local authorities can identify the people affected or the numbers involved. Instead of trying to close this loophole the Government should finally do the right thing and scrap the bedroom tax altogether, because as the Budget figures show, it will cost more money than it saves. According to the BBC, due to the lack of smaller accommodation only 6% of those affected have moved.

I know that the Minister will have heard these arguments many times before, but they bear repeating. He will have heard that the bedroom tax discriminates,

“against the most vulnerable in society”,

and that the Government have shown,

“a lack of appreciation of the housing requirements of children and adults with disabilities and care needs”.

Those words are not from this side of the House but from the motion passed by his coalition partners at their annual conference last year. I welcome the words of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, and I hope that more of his colleagues will join us in the Lobby this afternoon.

The one thing the Government have managed to do is to unite the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, and the Liberal Democrats in the view that this bedroom tax will have damaging electoral consequences for both parties of the coalition. However, there are other voices, too. The chief executive of the CAB says:

“The Government’s solution to spiralling Housing Benefit costs is simply creating more problems. Thousands are being pushed into arrears, 96 per cent of people affected have no alternative smaller homes to move into and some housing associations”—

as we have heard—

“say they are being forced to demolish homes whilst 1.8 million languish on waiting lists”.

The United Nations says that the bedroom tax is taking a heavy toll on the most vulnerable and recommends abolition and that there is a,

“danger of retrogression in the right to adequate housing in the United Kingdom”.

The Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation has described the policy as an,

“unfair, ill-planned disaster that is hurting our poorest families”.

This retrospective “move or pay” tax simply is not working. For instance, in Merseyside more than 26,000 families are affected, but only 155 have moved. The Work and Pensions Committee has found that between 60% and 70% of homes affected by the change contained,

“someone with a disability and many of these people will not be able to move home easily due to their disability”.

It asked the Government to exempt anyone whose home had been adapted. Instead they are closing a loophole to bring more people into its remit.

Of the 660,000 people affected, two-thirds of those are disabled. The think tank Demos reports that £28 billion will have been taken out of disabled pockets by 2018 due to the cuts in DLA, ESA and housing benefit. Empty properties are increasing, in some areas by a third. In South Shields there are whole empty streets because people are afraid to move into larger houses.

If people end up in emergency accommodation, it costs the country more. But the human cost is huge, too. Grandparents cannot have their grandchildren to stay, so childcare arrangements are affected, and single parents are losing children’s bedrooms. Informal care arrangements for disabled people have come to a halt. A room is not a spare room when carers sleep in it, when couples cannot share a bed for health reasons, or when it houses vital medical equipment such as dialysis machines.

Now the Government have realised that they have been telling local authorities to take away housing benefit from people who were entitled to it all along, so they want to close that loophole. That will mean that local authorities will now have to spend more money and time trying to find out from their records—which go back to 1996 and which they may not have in electronic format—the identity of those people who qualify. It causes bureaucratic chaos and will lead to even greater chaos. This Conservative-led Government should be listening to what people—including their partners in the coalition—are saying, and scrap the whole sorry mess.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, as the Regret Motion makes clear, we have to understand these regulations in the context of the impact of the bedroom tax.

My noble friend Lady Sherlock quoted Esther McVey on Radio 5. I will take us back to her rather wonderful interview on Radio 4, in which the interviewer had to drag out of her that the Government’s estimate is that only 8% of people had moved—a whole two percentage points more than the BBC estimate which she had been contesting. She was asked if she was disappointed. She replied:

“Well no, because it wasn’t that you had to move house”.

How is that consistent with her statement in debate in the other place? She said:

“The reason that we are putting these measures in place is that we want to ensure we make the best use of our social housing”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/2/14; col. 311.]

In addition, how is it consistent with the constant refrain:

“How can we justify 1 million spare rooms when other people are sometimes crammed together in a room?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/3/13; col. 27.]

Can the Minister tell us exactly how many rooms have been freed up by this policy? As the Work and Pensions Committee report observed, it is,

“a blunt instrument for achieving this”

aim, and one that is causing hardship, as we have already heard from other noble Lords.

Why, then, have people not moved? As has already been said, it is partly because there is nowhere to move to. In the Independent, on 3 March, it was reported that,

“a severe shortage of smaller council homes across the country is being exacerbated by the right-to-buy scheme—leaving many victims of the bedroom tax with no choice but to accept reduced benefits”.

Also, many people do not want to move because they do not want to lose social networks that are very important to them—a point I have made over and over again in this House. We are not talking about housing in the abstract, but about people’s homes within communities that matter to them.

As Demos said, in a study it carried out on social ties,

“policies can serve to actively undermine the kind of self-help and mutual support that families engage in”.

One would have thought that that would be approved of by a Conservative-led Administration who believe in the big society. Reforms such as the removal of the underoccupancy penalty—dubbed the bedroom tax—have left people with a choice of either finding more money for rent from already stretched budgets or moving away from support networks that make life liveable for many.

We have heard about rising rent arrears, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this week I attended the launch of a report by Community Links on the impact of the first year of so-called welfare reform—although I would call it social security cuts—in the London borough of Newham. The person presenting the findings pointed out that many people prioritise rent for fear of eviction. Therefore, there may not be rent arrears, but what other impact is it having on what people can spend on other essentials, and how many people are turning to payday lenders or, even worse, to loan sharks? That morning we heard tales of utter despair—the result of the cumulative impact of this and other benefit cuts such as council tax benefit.

The suggestion has been made: “Let them take lodgers”. Do we know how many people have taken on lodgers as a result of this policy? Some noble Lords who are following the Immigration Bill will know that later this afternoon we will talk about its residential tenancy provisions. Anyone who takes a lodger as a result of the bedroom tax will be turned into a mini-immigration officer and will have to check the immigration credentials of their lodger. Do we really want people on benefit being turned into mini-immigration officers to prevent illegal immigration?

The Minister, Esther McVey, pleaded that the BBC report showed how complex this is. I can suggest a simple solution: follow the policy of the Opposition—which I hope will very soon be the official policy of the Liberal Democrats—and abolish the bedroom tax.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Nye Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nye]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, for her introduction to this debate. I also congratulate her friend, Julie, who I think will give the Co-op a run for its money.

As has been said, International Women’s Day gives us an opportunity to reflect on progress made and to call for change. To reflect on progress made, it is perhaps best to begin here in Parliament and in government. There are now 20 countries in which a woman is head of state or government or both, which is a small but upward trend, but fewer than one in five parliamentarians in the world are women. As someone has already said, at the current rate of progress a child born today will draw her pension before she has any chance of being equally represented in the parliament of her country.

In an IPU survey of women in parliaments in 190 countries, the UK has fallen from last year to joint 57th with Pakistan, even though the largest ever number of women candidates were elected in 2010, albeit only a 4% increase since 2000. There are currently only 22 women out of 122 government Ministers, four of whom are full Cabinet members. A third of those are actually in this House, and believe it or not I would like to see more of you here, albeit while we are still unelected.

The Minister mentioned the Prime Minister’s pledge to have a third of ministerial positions occupied by women by 2015, but sadly it looks as though that is not going to be met. It seems a distant time ago when there were eight Labour women around the Cabinet table. Sadly, this has not been the year when there might have been the possibility of change on the Bishops’ Benches. However, after the wonderful maiden speech by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry, I hope we will not be waiting too long.

With selections happening now for parliamentary constituencies, we must all work even harder to improve the momentum for political parties to improve the numbers of women represented in Parliament. Women in parliaments everywhere can make a difference. Two weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, parliamentarians from all parties joined the One Billion Rising campaign, which had organised a coalition of women around the world to sing and dance to stop violence against women. The theme of International Women’s Day this year is “A promise is a promise: time for action to end violence against women”.

Worldwide, 50% of sexual assaults are committed against girls under the age of 16. Over 600 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not yet considered a crime. Up to 70% of women in the world report having experienced physical and/or sexual violence at some point in their lifetime, and over 60 million girls are child brides before they are 18. The One Billion Rising campaign in the UK ran workshops to find out what would make the biggest difference in addressing domestic violence. The overwhelming majority thought that a change in attitude had to start with education to prevent it happening in the first place and that sex and relationship education should be statutory in all schools. I would include free schools and academies in that as well. They are not alone. Most of the agencies that work in this field, including the PSHE Association, have also been campaigning for this.

I know that the Government have conducted a review of PSHE, and I hope the Minister will assure us that they have taken note of these informed voices and will indicate when the outcome of that review will be published. We need to move away from sex education that focuses exclusively on the reproductive aspects of adolescent sexuality and recognise that sexually active and sexually abstinent young people need information in order to be able to make informed choices. Currently, parents can withdraw their children from sex education up to the age of 19, even though the legal age of consent is 16. Horses and stable doors come to mind.

Schools have a vital role to play in helping young people develop healthy attitudes and behaviour, especially when figures show just how routine sexual bullying and harassment are in schools. One in three 16 to 18 year-old girls say they have been groped or have experienced unwanted touching. One in three teenage girls have experienced sexual violence from their boyfriends. We need specialist staff who are committed, experienced, mature and comfortable with this obviously sensitive issue. A recent survey by Brook showed that more than a quarter of secondary school pupils received no sex and relationship education and over a quarter of those who did reported that the teacher was unable to teach it well, so a greater emphasis on PSHE education in initial teacher training and in qualification programmes for head teachers is also needed.

Access to technology has changed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, has said. Mobile porn has replaced internet porn. Young people need help to distinguish between healthy relationships and unhealthy ones, especially as many have no example to follow at home. Research shows that boys have a higher tolerance of sexual violence than girls and need to be challenged at an early age about what is acceptable behaviour. However, new technologies and new ways of communication can play a helpful role. Thanks to a Twitter storm at the weekend, Amazon was forced to withdraw from its website T-shirts with slogans promoting rape and violence. “Keep calm and knife her” was one of the nicer ones that I can repeat. The company involved claimed that the slogans had been automatically generated using a scripted computer process, but no T-shirts denigrating men were on sale. So now we know that computers are also misogynist.

We need to give our children the knowledge and belief that they can make informed choices and the confidence to say no. If financial education can be made statutory in our schools, which I support, then surely a healthy relationship is just as important as a healthy bank balance.

On International Women’s Day, let us celebrate acts of courage and determination by women everywhere who have played a role in the history of their countries and their communities.

Equality: EC Policies on Women on Corporate Boards

Baroness Nye Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, my first point is to reinforce what progress has been made since the Davies review on the recruitment of women to boards. Notwithstanding the point that my noble friend made, it is worth saying that the percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards is now 17.3%; that is up from 10.5%. However, my noble friend is right to say that progress in executive ranks is not as fast. More effort is needed in that area, particularly around what is called strengthening the pipeline, so that women are recruited from a wider pool of backgrounds to these executive posts and that we do not rely just on the kind of criteria that are normally placed on men who are recruited to those jobs.

[Baroness Nye]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the increase in the number of women on boards, but does the Minister agree that the voluntary code needs to be reviewed, as the evidence suggests that while the 30% target for female applicants on the long list is being met, these women do not make it on to the shortlist? Surely the code should be extended to include targets for the shortlist as well.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

As I said about the shortlist, the executive search companies are putting forward 30% of women to companies; clearly that is working in getting women into non-executive positions. However, more work is needed to target the executive ranks. As I explained, this will take longer. It is worth noting that in countries such as Norway where there are quotas, the quotas in force for non-executives have not led to a greater improvement among the executive ranks at the same rate. This is a difficult problem that goes much wider than the narrow point we are discussing.

Young Offenders: Employment and Training

Baroness Nye Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nye]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Healy for initiating this important debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Bates, said, there is consensus on all Benches; we all want a reduction in crime, a reduction in reoffending, and we want it to go hand in hand with a just system of punishment. This, as all Governments have found, is a very tall order. When Ken Clarke launched his “rehabilitation revolution” in the Breaking the Cycle Green Paper, it was warmly welcomed by reformers. The new Secretary of State uses more punitive rhetoric but still repeats that aim.

I hope that the Minister will tonight give us an idea of the direction of travel for that revolution, because while all sides of your Lordships’ House must and will welcome the reduction in the youth unemployment figures announced today, the background to that revolution is the fact that the long-term youth unemployment figure is still disturbingly high. While 18 to 24 year-olds make up less than 10% of the population, they constitute a third of those on community or suspended sentences and a third of those sentenced to prison every year. As my noble friend Lady Healy said, we all know that those young offenders are more likely to have mental health issues, to have spent some time in care and to have relatively few qualifications.

The Prince’s Trust report Down, But Not Out showed that one in five unemployed young people think that finding a job in the next year is “unachievable” and that three in five describe their inability to find work as “demoralising”. With graduate unemployment running at 20%, it is our responsibility to help those long-term unemployed young people make progress because that is in the social and economic interests of Britain.

We have heard about the third sector programmes which have had excellent success rates and I make no apology for talking again about the work of the National Grid programme. I am sure that Dr Mary Harris’s ears must be burning with the number of times we are about to mention it, but I mention it again because from small things, great success can happen. It started in 1998, training 50 young offenders to become fork-lift truck drivers. In 2002 a second project was established to train young offenders as gas distribution technicians. As has been said, the reoffending rate at that time was 7% and they have managed to bring it down to 6%, when the national rate is 70%.

In 2003, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in the Budget that he had asked Sir John Parker, the chairman of National Grid, to see how the programme could be applied nationally. As a result, as we know, that programme is now partnered with 80 leading companies and more than 2,000 offenders have benefited from it. In 2007 a Smith Institute pamphlet was produced that came out of a seminar held in No. 11 Downing Street. Sir John Parker described the programme as win-win—that is, meeting business and society’s needs—and he is absolutely right. Not only that, it is also of direct benefit to the taxpayer—for every 100 young offenders completing that programme, the savings are more than £17 million. That must be better than paying out taxpayers’ money to lock people up. While obviously it is not a universal panacea, it demonstrates that business can help address a difficult social issue while acting in its own interests at the same time. If National Grid and the other leading companies are able to see the business benefit of a progressive attitude to corporate social responsibility, then the Government should take the lead in encouraging other companies to join in.

One of the factors in the success of the National Grid scheme is the transition from prison to work. The training begins before offenders are released, thereby getting them used to going to work and establishing a commitment to that employer. Mentoring and help in finding accommodation are also important parts of the programme. I would like to mention briefly some other proposals from the Prisoners’ Education Trust and the Young Adult Manifesto of the Transition to Adulthood Alliance.

The Prisoners’ Education Trust evidence to the Education Select Committee inquiry on careers guidance suggested that there should be a career guidance package which would have information about training and education during and after release, have local links to the community and be able to signpost people to the right organisations. Young offenders are only too well aware of the difficulties of finding employment with a criminal record. The work of the Learning Matters advocacy project, which is part of the Prisoners’ Education Trust, found that what would make a difference would be more useful subjects, the same courses being available in different jails, more practical and vocational courses, more level 3 courses and more hours of educational courses.

The T2A manifesto calls for young offender institutions to be twinned with local further education colleges and for a national employment initiative to improve the chances of employment by the private, voluntary and public sectors, but the fact is that these are all measures that try to get young offenders not to reoffend through education and employment opportunities. We all share the aim of stopping young people offending in the first place. However, I am worried that with the Government cutting programmes such as Sure Start, youth club provisions, family intervention projects, Youth Inclusion and the Future Jobs Fund, the future does not look rosy. One of my concerns is that by abolishing the education maintenance allowance, the Government took away the incentive for young people at 16 to stay on in full-time education.

I know that the Government have introduced the youth contract but the Work and Pensions Select Committee has said that it alone is not enough,

“to address the current unacceptably high level of youth unemployment”.

I am, of course, aware that it is the responsibility of every individual to remain inside the law. There is no excuse for crime. I know also that getting a job does not always stop people offending and I know that plenty of people who have jobs offend, but all the evidence shows that a job and basic literacy play a crucial part in the rehabilitation process. Against the background of a double-dip recession, the programmes that could help being cut and with growth proving elusive, I would like to hear from the Minister how the Government will take forward the rehabilitation revolution.