Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Grender said so powerfully in her excellent opening speech, it has long been considered a given that each generation would have a better quality of life than the one before it. According to the Intergenerational Commission, more than half the individuals in every age group believe that each successive generation should have a higher standard of living, but we live at a time where this is no longer the case. Since the recession, young people have overwhelmingly faced worse outcomes than did their parents.

As well as facing mounting inequality between the generations, as we have already heard, young people now face great inequality within their generation. According to the Social Mobility Commission’s recent State of the Nation report, as already referenced, social mobility has been stagnant for the past four years and,

“Inequality is … entrenched in Britain … from birth to work … Those from better off backgrounds are almost 80 per cent more likely to be in a professional job than their working class peers”.

This entirely echoes the findings of the recent report Closing the Regional Attainment Gap produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility—of which I have the pleasure to be the co-chair—which showed that, without policy changes, we are more than 40 years away from closing the gap between the educational attainment of disadvantaged children and that of their more affluent peers, with that gap varying wildly across the country.

The failure of successive Governments to tackle the underlying causes of such unequal life chances was laid bare in a hard-hitting report from the IFS, published this week, which exposed the ever-widening inequalities in pay, health and opportunity in the UK which are undermining trust in democracy.

As a member—and the original proposer—of the Lords Select Committee on Intergenerational Fairness and Provision, which published its report just after Easter, I was struck by the evidence that we heard about the number of challenges faced by many of our young people. The picture that our report paints is deeply worrying, with too many young people facing barriers at every turn. The report demonstrates starkly that our post-16 education and training system does not provide those in further education with anything like equal opportunities. Too many young people are being held back by schooling which does not prepare them for a rapidly changing labour market and a considerably longer working life. Once they move into the workforce, young people are disproportionately faced with insecure employment, low pay with few prospects of progression and little prospect of owning their own home.

It is perhaps, therefore, no wonder that young people’s well-being has fallen dramatically. The Intergenerational Foundation’s 2018 index found that young people’s overall well-being fell by a whopping 10% over the last two decades. The message here is clear: we need to improve young people’s opportunities or risk damaging their mental health and well-being—a subject covered comprehensively in the excellent debate in this Chamber this morning.

When it comes to education, the paths that young people take are not equal. Further education and vocational training provide a vast range of opportunities; they are fantastic resources for those who do not wish to pursue other, more academic routes. Yet our report found that further education and vocational training have been chronically underfunded. That means that students taking this route are simply not getting a fair slice of the cake when it comes to educational resources. That is why the report included a recommendation to rebalance public spending to put higher education and further education on a more equal footing. For this to happen, the Government must reverse the cuts to further education. Will these deeply unfair funding mechanisms be looked at in the forthcoming spending review?

We also need to ensure that young people receive an education which equips them for the real world. It is worrying that many young people feel they are leaving school without the life skills they need to function as adults. For example, there is no statutory requirement to teach young people about housing in their PSHE lessons. However, the young apprentices in our contact group who gave evidence to the Select Committee as part of its work told us that their key concerns were housing and homelessness. They told us that they did not know enough about how renting worked or what their options were if they had trouble affording housing. How are young people supposed to navigate the complexities of renting and housing if we are not giving them the knowledge and skills to do so? This is why our report also recommended that the Government should increase housing and financial education in PSHE lessons.

Once young people leave education, the barriers to opportunities do not end. Instead, as the House has already heard in this debate, too many young people are faced with insecure employment. Indeed, the proportion of individuals who are self-employed, on zero-hours contracts or involved in the gig economy has rapidly risen among young people. Many companies propagate a myth of self-employment to avoid providing their workers with the rights and protections they are entitled to. By denying young workers access to vital employee benefits, insecure employment can have a huge impact on their financial stability. As recommended in the Select Committee report, it is vital that the Government act to ensure that there is a default presumption of worker status when people are employed. This will help tackle companies rebranding their young employees as “freelance contractors” to deny them the worker’s rights and employee benefits to which they are entitled.

Not only are many young people in insecure employment, but they are also not getting paid fairly. According to the Financial Conduct Authority, in 2017 real earnings for those in their 20s were 5% lower than they had been in 2008. Poor pay not only has negative consequences for young people’s well-being; it also has serious consequences for their relationships and family life. This is starkly demonstrated by the results of a 2018 YouGov survey of young workers between 21 and 30 years old. It found that over one-fifth of the respondents had put off starting a family because of a shortage of money. Another quarter had put off changing careers and over 40% had had to ask their family or friends for financial help due to a shortage of money.

An exacerbating factor is that young people are spending a rapidly rising proportion of what they do earn on housing. Our report on intergenerational fairness highlighted that young people born between 1981 and 2000 spend one-and-a-half times more on housing at the age of 25 compared to previous generations. That might be acceptable if young people were getting housing which is one and a half times better than previous generations. Instead, we were shown evidence that they get less floor space and longer commutes. As my noble friend Lord Shipley has already said, a recent estimate by the Resolution Foundation suggested that one-third of millennials could still be renting privately at the age of 65. This is a really major shift in how society is living.

Tackling the issues raised in this very good debate this afternoon will take sustained government action and political will. Solutions do exist, we have heard many of them this afternoon and I totally endorse the excellent package of proposals set out by my noble friend Lady Grender. Let us just hope that the Government are listening.