Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, in the wake of the summer riots, the Prime Minister said:

“This is a problem that has deep roots in our society, and it’s a job for all of our society to help fix it”.


That was in the summer of 2011, and the Prime Minister in question was the one to whom the noble Baroness, Lady Porter of Fulwood, just referred: the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, who, at that stage, was talking about the broken society and the need to fix it. If it was broken then, my goodness, it is broken now.

In the meantime, we have had commissions and reports. The Library briefing gave us an indication of just how many bits of paper have been produced on the issue of social cohesion. Last year, the Church of England produced its report, Love Matters—of course it does; I have no doubt that Richard Curtis will make a film about it at some stage. The point is that society is still broken. From the relative comfort of these Benches, we are producing many more thoughts and ideas about what the problems are, but what we really need to start getting to grips with is what needs to be done.

We know the root of much of the problem. As the most reverend Primate indicated in introducing the debate, this year’s riots were concentrated largely in areas of sustained deprivation. Years of talk of levelling up have done absolutely nothing to improve their situation—indeed, in many cases, it has simply got worse. There are different problems, and various aspects of them have been spoken of today. It is not all to do with finance, although there is no doubt that more money for local authorities would make a difference. Properly used, it could lift living standards and bolster communities. But, rather than dwelling more on the problems, I will try to limit my remarks to a couple of groups of people where there are particular issues and I have small thoughts as to how we might begin to improve things.

The first group I will concentrate on are white working-class boys. They feel deeply underprivileged, and in many cases unloved. They do not know where they are going and they are fearful. How do they respond? Many of them look for leadership. Unfortunately, the leader many of them seem to have found is Andrew Tate. I do not want to dwell too much on Andrew Tate, but that appalling perpetrator of misogyny, and many other things besides, has a huge following, and many of them are young British men and boys. He is clearly not doing them any good, but nobody appears to have been able to take his place—and unfortunately, Nigel Farage says that Mr Tate is somebody we should all listen to.

If your Lordships do not think this is an important problem now, politicians soon will. A poll earlier this year showed that among 16 to 17 year-old boys, if they were given a vote—which of course they will soon have—35% of them would vote for Reform, and 35% of them would vote for Labour. Very few of them would vote for the Conservatives, but of course that may change. As it happens, the young ladies were rather more sensible: only 12% of them would vote for Reform. That 35% figure should frighten us. It is not Nigel Farage they particularly warm to; they warm to something different from what is being offered normally—to what has been the traditional politics of this country. They want change.

When there was a riot outside a hotel for asylum seekers in Manchester, a boy who was taken to court, a 12 year-old, had to wait while the judge summoned back his mother, who had gone on holiday to Ibiza the day before the boy was due in court. In one microcosm your Lordships have an example of this boy’s problems. He was a child of a single parent who thought it appropriate to go on holiday the day before he was due to be sentenced in court. No wonder he was described by the judge as showing

“the worst type of feral behaviour”

because what had he been shown? He knew little better.

What people such as that need is of course the six-month parenting course his mother was going to get, although I do not think that will change things. I suggest that sport may have the ability to do that, so I would like to see the Government doing more to get these disaffected youngsters into sport, which can be a force for good, showing them how to engage in teams and become a useful part of society.

The other group I would like to talk about is elderly people. Much has been said already about loneliness, but 2 million people aged over 75 live alone. More than a million of those, according to Age UK, go over a month without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member. It does not need to be like this. These are people who could be a useful resource. We saw examples after Covid of “granny friends”: elderly women and men being paired up with little children to try to get them to be sociable and to learn what they need to know—and they need to know quite a lot. One of the Government’s latest milestones is that 75% of five year-olds should be school-ready when they are going to school. The fact that 75% is the target tells you all you need to know. These children need help, and we have an army of elderly people sitting at home alone who could provide that help. Again, I ask the Minister whether he has a plan to mobilise the capacity that is there to help these children, to build families and to help rebuild our communities.

Public Sector Productivity

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for securing this debate and introducing it so effectively. With her experience of both the public and private sectors, she is well-qualified to point to where there might be scope for improvement. The figures she quoted for public sector productivity are indeed dire, but as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, has pointed out, it is not simple to measure public sector productivity.

I will not dwell on how notoriously difficult this task can be in the diverse sectors that we are looking at this evening—even within the health service, as we have heard, it is very difficult, and in the private sector, where the profit motive is a simple one in relative terms, there is still dispute over how effectively productivity can best be measured. Instead, I want to highlight two areas in which I think relatively simple changes could secure significant improvements in productivity for this country.

The first area is education, where I feel that an emphasis on traditional outputs—exam results in particular—is not producing the workforce that we require. That is not simply because the system is not producing enough computer scientists or engineers. The dramatic cutback in arts education, and particularly music, fails to acknowledge the need for a modern workforce to be creative and flexible in its thinking. We know of the close link between mathematics and music, for instance, and playing in an orchestra or band is a great education in being a team player, which is what is required in the modern workplace.

It is physical flexibility which causes me even more concern, however. A report from NHS England published late last month showed that 19% of 11 to 15 year-olds were obese. The problem, like the children, grows as they progress through school. Between two and 10, the average for obesity is 12% but by the final year in primary school it hits a horrifying 22.7%. These figures are based on 2022 research and had barely changed since 2019.

Childhood obesity leads to adult obesity and, as we know, obesity is a massive cause of ill health and thus a major contributor to keeping people either out of the workplace or not at their most effective. It seems to me that an important measure of productivity for the education system should be its effectiveness in producing healthy children—those who are physically fit and ready to join the workforce. This does not mean every child having to do dreaded cross-country runs or team sports, but maybe being physically active by dancing, swimming or doing yoga would be an important start. Physically healthy pupils will be more receptive to education. Does the Minister agree that schools would improve their productivity and the eventual ability of the workforce if they provided more exercise for pupils?

Also, I want to suggest a way in which productivity might be enhanced across much of the public sector, empowering individuals within it. Only today, I was talking to a staff nurse at a major London hospital. He was struggling to cope with an appointments system which had changed for the umpteenth time. “They are always changing things and we are always the last to find out,” he said. It is a refrain that I have heard repeatedly, particularly in dealings with the NHS but also from local council employees and civil servants.

The private sector acknowledges the importance of empowering employees—although sometimes more in theory than in practice. Nevertheless, empowerment is a proven way of motivating a workforce, and a motivated workforce is inherently a more effective one. The “us and them” of British culture persists far more in the public sector than in the private sector. There is undoubtedly a need for investment in technology but, as we heard repeatedly this afternoon, there is not a great deal of cash to be handed out. I am hopeful that the fiscal rules will be changed for investment purposes but, even without that, empowering the staff in the public sector would deliver cheaply and effectively.