Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, there are many speakers here this evening better equipped than I to talk about the sporting legacy of the Olympics. I was a member of the committee and it was a very enjoyable experience, as others have said, helped by a very able chairman and a back-up team who were excellent. I think it better if I restrict myself to some aspects of the broader legacy, particularly in employment, skills and trade.

The Olympics demonstrated that Britain is indeed Great and gave credence globally to the campaign being run by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to market this country and what we can do. However, parts of Britain are not in some ways as great as others. Unemployment in the host boroughs was, as we have heard, prior to the Olympics some of the highest in the region. The massive project of the Games and the regeneration programme has improved the situation a little, but not enough. There is a continuing challenge to ensure that the boroughs get the new jobs that they need.

The Stratford City development as a whole is due to create 30,000 new jobs. Westfield at Stratford has already created 10,000 jobs and of those, a third went to local people who were previously long-term unemployed. There are those who carp that the Westfield shopping centre was going to go ahead, come what may, but it certainly happened sooner than it would have done without the Olympics and, for those who are working there, time of course is money. Meanwhile, of the people now employed at the Copper Box—the first venue on the Olympic park to reopen to the public and a wonderful facility for local people and schools—more than 90 per cent are local. Admittedly, this is a small number but the principle is encouraging. Equally encouraging is that the Copper Box is being run by a social enterprise and that several other businesses now operating within the Olympic park are social enterprises, giving people who work there not just a job but a sense of ownership.

At iCITY, which was the communications hub during the Olympics and Paralympics, tenants are being asked to have a quota of jobs for local people. This is a particularly exciting prospect because iCITY is to be home to some of the digital and communications businesses that are the future of this country—the real engines of growth. As your Lordships have heard, we were lucky enough to go along and visit the BT Sport centre. We saw the state-of-the-art studios that it has built in what was the communications centre during the Olympics. The studios are fantastic and were opened in record time, and they are taking on local people as well. New jobs are being created down there and yet the evidence we heard indicated that there was a degree of doubt, verging on cynicism, about whether the upsurge in job opportunities that is part of the Olympic legacy would benefit the local people.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, pointed out some of the reasons that that might be. One can sympathise with the belief that in getting the stadia ready and finished on time for the Olympics, getting there on time was more of a priority than training locals in the skills needed to create the buildings. However, there are now signs that that is changing. The legacy corporation is already working with local jobs brokerages but we recommended that people needed to be skilled up and that there should be a concerted effort by the Mayor, the host boroughs and employers to invest in developing a construction skills programme. There seems to have been great progress on this front and, as my noble friend Lord Stoneham pointed out, it is great news that not one but two university technical colleges are being built in east London to provide vocational training to lead 14 to 19 year-olds into careers in the construction and engineering fields.

We heard wonderfully cheering news today on the jobs front generally, with the Budget speech revealing that youth unemployment has been falling faster than at any time since 1997. That may, in part, be part of the Olympic legacy but we also heard about the Government’s determination to help businesses flourish and drive exports. There are some businesses which had hoped that their involvement in the Olympics would provide them with a major advantage in winning future contracts, but which have been disappointed. The Olympics provided a fantastic showcase for what Britain could deliver and UK Trade & Investment has done—and continues to do—a great deal to help many of those companies, big and small, that were involved in the 2012 Games. This was the first time that the International Olympic Committee had been persuaded to allow a supplier recognition scheme, which has allowed more than 770 companies to gain official recognition for their contribution to the Games and use it to promote themselves.

It is no fault of the Government that there are many other businesses which are precluded from taking this route. Many of them are in the creative industries, where the UK excels. According to PLASA, the trade association for the professional entertainment technology industry, some of the companies that were responsible for developing the most memorable moments in the opening and closing ceremonies, including the iconic Olympic rings, cannot boast about the fact that they were there and they did it. The reason is that the supplier recognition scheme is limited by the draconian Olympic no marketing rights protocol. The protocol is intended to protect the giants who are the major sponsors of the Olympics, so companies are excluded from the supplier recognition scheme if they are involved in—it is a broad-brush approach—audio, video and audio-visual equipment.

Our committee recommended that the Government should work with the British Olympic Association and suppliers to narrow the list of exclusions. The Government’s response to our recommendation was somewhat disappointing, albeit perhaps realistic. They said:

“There is no scope for changing these categories”.

While I acknowledge that the IOC is not always prepared to compromise—perhaps that is putting it mildly—it is surely worth encouraging the British Olympic Association to press further on this point. To put massive handicaps on David in order to protect Goliath seems to lack a bit of the Olympic spirit.

Let me give you just one example of how these broad-brush restrictions work in practice. Baldwin Boxall is an innovative business which provided the London Olympic stadium with a special voice communication system that would help disabled people in the event of an emergency, particularly a fire. It is for use in emergencies only. The system does not broadcast. Yet the company has been unable to use its involvement to market what it did in 2012 to help it pitch for Sochi or Rio. The reason is that Panasonic and Samsung are among the sponsors who need to be protected. Baldwin Boxall is an innovative business, but it employs just 45 people and has a turnover of around £5 million. Does Panasonic, with around 300,000 employees and revenue last year of $76 billion have anything to fear from Baldwin Boxall? Should Samsung, with 427,000 employees and revenue last year of not £5 million but $269 billion be frightened by the little company from the Wealden Industrial Estate in Crowborough?

Companies such as this helped the UK deliver a superb Games. They ought to be able to reap the rewards and, in so doing, they ought to be helping to boost British exports. The British Olympic Association surely needs to do better in battling for the little guys against the protectionism of the IOC.

Welfare: Cost of Family Breakdown

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

There seems to be a difference between the two sides of the House on the importance of marriage. This side believes that marriage is a valuable institution and we are going to support it with a marriage tax break.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, I believe that the Government are increasing the work they are doing with the country’s most troubled families, getting some of those families into work for the first time in generations. What does my noble friend the Minister expect that to do for family stability?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is vital that people get into work where they can. That is the only way to solve poverty in the long term. We have managed to get more families into work—under this Government, 300,000 more have gone into work. I should also point out that fewer families with children are in poverty under this Government. That figure has gone down by 100,000 since we came in.

25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the others who have thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for securing this debate and launching it so comprehensively. It seems impossible to believe that it was only in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee presented his bosses at CERN with a paper that foreshadowed the web. He got it back with the comment scrolled on the top: “Vague but exciting”. How exciting it turned out to be.

The world wide web has changed lives, generally for the better. It has fuelled revolutions and shrunk the world. I speak as a trustee of the British Museum. The world wide web has made the contents of that museum available to anyone anywhere. There are 3.5 million objects now online and they are visited all the time. The web site traffic grew last year by 47% to 19.5 million visits. Yesterday, the museum celebrated its 255th birthday with a record number of visits, fuelled by a Google doodle.

However, we need to be discriminating. This is no comment on the Lords of the Blog or the noble Lord, Lord Soley, but there is quite a lot of rubbish on the web. One of my favourite cartoons was in the New Yorker and it showed two dogs looking at each other. One says to the other, “Do you blog?” The other says, “I’ve stopped. I’ve just gone back to incessant stupid barking”. There is some wonderful stuff on the web, but there is also a lot of rubbish and policing is never going to work. The net will always be ahead of those who try to police it. Perhaps that is why even some respectable news organisations seem to apply different standards to what they put online to what they put in print.

Wikipedia of course is a wonderful source, but it is not infallible. The users of the web have to learn to discriminate. They have to apply their own judgment. Nevertheless, it is an amazing force for good. It has changed lives for the better, not just by enabling people to shop the world, but to educate themselves and entertain themselves. As the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, explained to us, it is also a wonderful way for some people, who may be housebound, to combat the loneliness that affects so many.

I have only one question for the Minister. In the internet age, why on earth are we providing free television licences for people, taxed or not taxed, when perhaps we should be offering them subsidised broadband?

Universal Credit: National Rollout

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I am not aware of any such mathematics. We have always said that we will introduce universal credit in a safe way and that we will adjust the timetable in the light of experience. We now have Howard Shiplee on board, and he is immensely experienced. He produced the Olympic Park on time, and he is working to make sure that we have a plan that will introduce this programme effectively.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, our welfare system is broken. If it takes a little while longer than we had originally hoped to put it right, surely it is right that we should take the time. Universal credit is a massive step in the right direction. Does the Minister agree that the real tragedy would be if benefits claimants were reduced to such desperate circumstances that they had to superglue themselves to benefit desks?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, when you introduce a big programme of change, the important thing is that you test and trial it thoroughly. We have a major programme of testing and trialling, whether it is the intensive-activity programme, the in-work conditioning pilots, the housing demonstration projects or the 12 local authority pilots. I am hoping soon to publish the next issue of the local support service framework that is designed exactly to make sure that there is a support network for people who might otherwise look for the superglue.

Welfare Reform Bill

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, asked questions about the morality of the current situation. I should like to ask this House, following the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood: is it moral that we are deliberately pushing families with children below the level of income that Parliament has decided is necessary to meet their most basic needs? Research shows that that money is not sufficient to meet those basic needs, as determined by the wider population.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on the government Benches, have asked questions about costs—I had a wonderful vision of the noble Lord wearing his “Action for benefits” badge in front of the mirror. In the other place, the Minister said that this is not primarily a cost-saving measure. What is it? He said it is primarily about changing behaviour, but my noble friend Lady Sherlock pretty well demolished those arguments.

The Minister also said that this is about restoring the credibility of the welfare benefits system. However, that credibility is being undermined by the misinformation being put out by Ministers about that system—in particular, the way that they slide between talking about average incomes and average earnings as if they are the same thing, when they are not. The median family in work receives £33.70 in child benefit as well as various other in-work benefits. The point was made that child benefit replaced child tax allowances. If that had not happened and we still had family allowances and child tax allowances, the median earnings of the average family would be that much higher because of the effect of child tax allowances. It is therefore really unfair that we are not comparing like with like and, as my noble friend pointed, when the Minister was pushed on this issue in Committee regarding how he could justify the fact that we are not comparing like with like, he simply did not have an answer.

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords, I did not join your Lordships' House in order to kick the underprivileged, particularly children, but I did believe that the Government were committed to healing the broken society. I do not think that any of us can doubt that society is broken, and we would all agree that there is a need to heal it and that dealing with the dependency culture is an important part of that. That is something that I believe in absolutely. That is at the heart of this legislation. To my mind, the worst sort of child poverty is poverty of aspiration.

[Baroness Whitaker]

I apologise for interrupting the noble Baroness, but she used the term “broken society” and said “I think we all accept that it is”. I am really surprised to hear her say that. Can she give us her evidence for the broken society?

Child Poverty

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is important to look at what the figures have shown us. Last year we put an enormous amount of money into tax credits and the benefits system. The amount increased by 6.7 per cent and is the sole reason that we had income growth in this country in that year. It is not sustainable to do this by income transfers. Our aim is to try to transform the lives of people, and that must mean a renewed emphasis on getting people back into work, making them independent and leading their own lives. That is our strategy and that is how we have reformulated our poverty policy.

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords, any reduction in child poverty is to be applauded but, on the day those statistics were released, it was also revealed that the difference between the rich and the poor in this country had remained at the record levels of last year that it reached under the previous Administration. Does the Minister share my concern about the dangers that are inherent in that?

[Lord Freud]

Yes, my Lords. One of the peculiar things about what happened under the previous Government was that the Gini coefficient went up to an all-time record. It has moved slightly in the past year but not in any meaningful way. It is important that we address that as part of the context of looking at our poverty approaches but, as noble Lords opposite will know, this is not an easy thing to do.