Queen’s Speech

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction. I should first draw the attention of the House to my registered interests, particularly as a former chair of Chapel Street charities and the current senior independent director of the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Today’s debate spans some crucial areas of government policy but underpinning the detail lies the much deeper debate—one about the role of the state versus the individual, the extent to which we are responsible one for another, our tolerance for inequality, and the nature of the safety net to protect those in greatest need. During the general election, I met too many voters who believed that they had been left behind: public servants who had not had a pay rise for years; people who had waited for hours in A&E, for weeks to see a GP or for months for surgery; parents whose schools had made teachers redundant, or sent begging letters home with the kids; disabled people who had lost Motability cars; working people using food banks; older people denied social care—people who felt that nobody was listening and the Government did not understand their lives or take their concerns seriously. This is a profound challenge for all of us. It needs addressing, and I fear that the Queen’s Speech is not equal to that task. To get there, we first have to acknowledge the scale of the problem, and that is our task here today.

On education, on the upside, I was pleased to see the absence of grammar schools in the Queen’s Speech and I hope very much that this means we will not see a new wave of secondary moderns sweeping England. I was glad also that there was no sign of the Tory manifesto plan to snatch school lunches away from infants; I am glad that the Government thought better of that as well. But that is where the good news ends. Put simply, there is no vision for education in the Queen’s Speech, no commitment to ensure that schools are fully and properly funded, no strategy to deal with the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, no plan to help the half a million children being taught in classes of over 30.

There are aspirations. The Government want to,

“make sure all children … get a world-class education”,

and for,

“every child to go to a good or outstanding school”.

That is excellent, but how will it be achieved when we have an unprecedented funding crisis in our schools? There is no point simply saying that we are protecting the budget or repeating record funding when the IFS has pointed out that the current plans would mean a further 3% fall in real-terms funding per pupil, bringing the total figure to 7% by 2022.

There is no cheer in the further and higher education areas either. The adult skills budget is down 32% since 2010. FE has been cut from the beginning of the coalition Government and the current promises simply freeze that cut. And where is the hope for HE students, when students face 50 grand’s worth of debt, drop-out rates for poor students are up again and even nurses have had their bursaries dumped in favour of student loans? The Labour manifesto by contrast offered a positive vision of a national education service fit for modern Britain. We committed to address class sizes, free school meals, funding for schools and post-16, student support and fees. But beyond the money is a deeper sense that education is a public as well as a private good, that we do not want just some kids to succeed—those whose parents can pay fees or hire tutors to help their children pass the 11-plus. We want everyone to be able to fulfil their potential, but we know that means investment, as it does in health and social care.

I should perhaps thank Theresa May for finally getting social care right back up the political agenda. But having done so, she needs to do something about it. All the key stakeholders have stressed repeatedly the crisis in social care. ADASS reports a £4.6 billion reduction in adult social care budgets in the five years to 2015-16. A quarter of a million fewer people get a social care package from their council than five years earlier. Over a million people over 65 do not get the help they need for essential daily activities such as washing, dressing or eating—up by half since 2010.

There is rising pressure on carers, many of whom are old themselves, and an increasingly fragile residential care system, with self-funders subsidising local government placements. We need a fair solution to funding social care which is sustainable in the short, medium and longer term. The Conservative Party manifesto announcement on social care was a huge shock to many people who were seriously worried about what would happen to them if they needed serious care at home as well as in a residential setting. And it wiped out in a few short paragraphs the three years spent in both Houses of Parliament poring over the then Care Bill, discussing what Andrew Dilnot’s care cap might mean and how that might work. That plan at least provided some clarity on care costs and had a hope of addressing the crisis in residential care. But even though it passed into law, the Queen’s Speech now pledges yet another consultation. I am glad the Government are listening; people have been talking for quite a long time. Listening is not the problem, it is doing something about it that is. And now the consultation goes out with another care cap of an unknown level. I ask the Minister: please, how will he hurry this along? Could he also tell us what happened to the £6 billion promised by the Government for implementing the Care Act, first for 2015-16, then postponed till 2019? Is that going to be repledged when the consultation document comes out?

Things are no better in health. Patients are enduring ever longer waits in A&E. The four-hour standard has not been met since July 2015. Waiting lists are back with a vengeance. The 62-day standard for starting cancer treatment after an urgent referral has not been met for three years, and the 18-week target for elective care has not been met for more than a year and has effectively been downgraded. It is getting harder to see a GP. Mental health provision remains desperately inadequate, despite all the warm words. And as for funding, hospitals in England ended 2015-16 with a £2.45 billion deficit—the worst on record. So what is on offer from the Government to deal with the worst crisis since the founding of the NHS? There are some non-legislative measures on mental health. Those are welcome. The Prime Minister said on 7 May,

“today I am pledging to rip up the 1983 Act and introduce in its place a new law”.

Since there is no mental health Bill in the Queen’s Speech, can the Minister tell us when the Prime Minister plans to rip up that Act, and act on the alternative? And there is a draft patient safety Bill. We welcome any measures to improve patient safety in the NHS, so we will look carefully at that.

But our health service needs more than that. Obviously it needs money, and the £8 billion is welcome, but, as the IFS pointed out, it is no more than was announced in the spring Budget. The health service needs investment in preventive work and public health, and it needs the proper joining up of health and social care, but crucially we have to deal with what the King’s Fund calls the “complex and fragmented” arrangements resulting from the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the fact that we now have a legal framework designed to promote competition, when it is increasingly obvious that what the NHS needs—in fact, all that will keep it together—is ever more collaborative working between different NHS bodies. Labour has always believed in the NHS. I have a challenge for the Government today: if the Conservative Party really believes in it, will it put its money where its mouth is and take some strategic action on NHS structures now? We need no less than that and we need it now.

I turn to social security. As wages have stagnated, the welfare state has failed in its duty to protect poor working families. Four million children have lived in poverty in the last year—two-thirds of those in a household with a working parent—and food bank use is at epic levels. And what is in the Queen’s Speech? There is nothing to address benefit cuts and delays or the escalation in sanctions, which are driving people to food banks and payday lenders. There is nothing to deal with the falling value of benefits and tax credits. In May, CPI inflation was 2.9%, but when inflation rises the poor just get poorer. Since the Budget in 2015, almost all benefits and tax credits means tested for working-age people have been frozen in cash terms, so when inflation goes up, nothing else happens. What is someone living on £73 a week meant to do when the gas bill and the price of food go up? How are they supposed to cope? There is nothing to restore work allowances in universal credit, which are there to make work pay—the whole point of this expensive and complicated reform. There is nothing for the WASPI women, who suddenly find themselves in reduced circumstances after a lifetime of work. Bizarrely, the only reason all pensioners are not facing a cut is because of the DUP.

There is nothing on the bedroom tax, Motability or the work capability assessment. There is nothing for bereaved families, nothing for kids with terminal conditions and nothing for people who need help. That is because this Government have no vision for the welfare state. People want to work, but simply telling them that work is the best route out of poverty does not change anything. The reality is that, because of cuts and changes to in-work benefits, work is no longer a guaranteed route out of poverty. Quite often, it is a route to a cul-de-sac marked “in-work poverty”. That does not work. Labour believes in the welfare state, we believe in a system that helps people to get and keep decent jobs, and we believe in supporting those who cannot work with dignity, and we will fight for that.

Finally, I turn to the DCMS. The Labour manifesto included a commitment to help young people easily remove content they shared on the internet before they were 18, so we will look carefully at government measures in this area. We will also look at the data protection Bill and the proposals for a digital charter. There was a Tory manifesto proposal for a levy on social media companies and service providers to support prevention and counter internet harm. Can the Minister give us some detail on that when he comes to respond?

There are other areas which I hope will get picked up in the debate concerning digital infrastructure, a fair deal for arts and culture, funding for grass-roots sport and, crucially, the review of gambling stakes and prizes, where I really hope we will see immediate action to cut the maximum stake in fixed-odds betting terminals from £100 down to the £2 that it clearly ought to be.

Enough, my Lords. I have given a catalogue of failures but they are more than a list: they are data points that describe the contours of our public services at the moment. Taken together, they send a message about the kind of country we are living in and the kind of country that we want to live in. The EU referendum and the general election revealed that too many of our citizens believe they do not count and feel that the system is stacked against them—people who are just about managing or are not managing at all. That is a problem not just for them but for all of us. A good society is one in which the flourishing of each depends on the flourishing of all, but getting there means taking inequality seriously.

As I said in a debate led by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury last year, Michael Sandel says:

“The real problem with inequality lies in the damage it does to the civic project, to the common good”.


That is partly because, as inequality deepens, the rich and the poor live separate lives. The rich use private, not state, schools, and private healthcare, not the NHS. They take out private insurance rather than relying on the welfare state, and use private gyms, not council swimming pools, and thus towns and cities get segregated by wealth. Addressing income inequality and guaranteeing decent public services matter because people matter, but they also matter because they are a prerequisite to our once again building a nation at ease with itself. Surely that is something we can all agree on.