Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, many speakers have already referred to the mess we seem to have got into on this, and the number of speeches we have listened to bears witness to that. It also seems to me, as the debate grows close to its end, that there is a common belief in this Chamber that it would all be soluble and the project would be easily realised if we could just move everything to another site. I think that is completely wrong.

Take, for example, the Imperial War Museum, which came up a number of times and is often cited in this context. The noble Lord, Lord Black, speaking in a personal capacity, said this seems to be an excellent idea. As a south Londoner, I strongly disagree. I invite noble Lords who still possess an A-Z to take a look at the pages that cover Lambeth and Southwark. They will see that if you start at Lambeth Palace, which has its own gardens, and go east, you basically do not get anything until you are way east of Tower Bridge at Rotherhithe and Southwark Park, except for one small piece of green, which is the gardens of the Imperial War Museum. It seems to me that, far from being an obvious and simple site for a number of reasons, there is rightly going to be considerable opposition and unease at having built around with steel and effectively losing one of the few, tiny parts of green that the whole of Lambeth and Southwark possess.

I talk about the Imperial War Museum simply because that is the part of London that I spend a lot of my time in and know very well, but the point is much more general. If you look across the river to this side, you will see that as well as Victoria Tower Gardens, which noble Lords all know well and value, which is on our doorstep, there are a lot of pieces of green here. There is the wonderful St James’s Park. There are also Whitehall Gardens, Embankment Gardens, which I love, with its playground and Vincent Square. Would those be fine? If we put the memorial there, would that solve everything? I beg to disagree. The point is that any green space in any part of London is going to have all sorts of pressures upon it, and you cannot simply say “Don’t put it in Victoria Tower Gardens. Let’s just move it. That will solve the problem”.

The other thing that I was slightly taken aback by during the debate is the idea that the security problems mean that we should put the memorial somewhere else and that if we put it in another site, there will not be an issue. I think that if we had been having a debate like this nine years ago, we would not have spent as much time on security. The awful 10 months we have just completed have made this an issue in a way that it was not when this was first discussed. After all, this has been a period in which the Wiener Holocaust Library has been vandalised, and the Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam has been vandalised twice, so there is an issue. It is an issue that we must face wherever we think about putting the memorial and learning centre, but it seems to me that, first of all, as Bob Blackman MP said in the other place, the threat to any memorial is not an argument for why the memorial is not needed, but the opposite. It is an argument for why the memorial is needed. I certainly feel that it is and that successive Prime Ministers have been correct in feeling this.

Whether or not the memorial is in Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster has surely to be the place that can offer security as well as being a place where we make a statement. I am sorry to keep harping on about the Imperial War Museum, which I adore, but it is not the same. Westminster is the centre of London, and if we want to make this statement and have this memorial, the real centre of London is where it belongs. This is a place which knows about security. I am deeply impressed by how well we manage to bring thousands of people through this precinct day after day.

Finally, I feel listening to this that the memorial and the learning centre are quite rightly separated in discussion and that that is probably somewhere where a lot of thought is needed, but I feel strongly that we are kidding ourselves if we think that everything will be fine if we just look for a brand-new site somewhere open and away from Westminster.

Intergovernmental Relations Within the United Kingdom

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for securing this debate and for his wonderful opening speech. I will focus on some specific matters, rather than the overall architecture of intergovernmental relations, and in particular on the lowest tier of the interministerial groups that focus on specific policy areas.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, noted, we can easily get so focused on process that we do not notice that devolution has meant growing divergence. Devolution means that things have happened and I am not sure that we take enough note of this happening or build it into our relations between Governments.

No one will be surprised that an example I want to focus on is education, but I apologise for the fact that my examples will be English and Scottish, because those are the two systems that I know well. We have always had major differences in our school systems. That is not only entirely acceptable but, in theory, a source of strength, because we can look at what works in different systems and they are alike enough that one can draw some useful lessons. We do not always do that, but it is a real opportunity.

But we have to remember that the United Kingdom has a national economy. Different parts of it may have different strengths, but we have a mobile labour force and young people take it for granted that they will have the freedom to move easily around the entire UK. This starts to be relevant when we think about our professional, vocational and technical education systems. Sometimes you have to have differences—for example, legal education has to be different in Scotland—but there are areas in the older professions where we have either natural or government-mandated mechanisms to ensure adequate alignment. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is the membership body for 24 medical royal colleges and faculties across not only the United Kingdom but Ireland, and the Nursing and Midwifery Council is UK-wide. But, once you go beyond the traditional professions, there is a surprising lack of join-up.

Ours is a world with a growing number of licences to practise. In England, we are trying very hard to revitalise apprenticeships and we have the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education. But there is no formal provision for IfATE or the Scottish Qualifications Authority to take note of each other’s standards. IfATE certainly has no resources explicitly to work with the SQA on aligning training expectations. Equally, the English Government are trying to develop a range of higher technical qualifications, but I do not know of any explicit attempts to take account of the much stronger provision in Scotland of higher national diplomas, over a wide range and with a lot of experience. There might be some informal discussions but there is nothing formal. This is something we should worry about.

The other example I will use briefly is higher education, where I must declare an interest as a professor at King’s College London. Here too we have a national system that we are not taking enough note of as things diverge. We have a national system of application to university in UCAS and a national body for student loans in the Student Loans Company. Again, the systems are diverging. That might be perfectly all right, but there is an assumption among all young people in all four of our countries that they can apply to national institutions—I think UCAS is an institution—and that they will be able to move around.

There is also the research economy, which is very relevant to our economic future because, if we do not maintain real research strength in this country, our future is genuinely grim. The UK Government recognise this by funding a large research budget, and specifically by running the research excellence framework: a four-country, UK-wide exercise that provides a periodic intensive review of the quality of research provision. It has certainly been a spur to action in universities and a major source of our international reputation as a very strong provider of higher education. It is run jointly by Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, the new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research in Wales, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland. England uses it as a way to target money into high-achieving universities to ensure that a certain number have the strength to maintain an international research reputation. In England we have to target because we now have 416 registered providers of higher education compared with the, in my view, more reasonable numbers of 18 in Scotland and 11 in Wales.

Devolved Governments do not have to spend any of that money on research; it comes under the Barnett consequentials. Again, that is fine, but it is also true that divergence is increasing, which has—in quite a short term, let alone the long term—some real knock-on effects for movements of staff between universities within the United Kingdom and for the future of a joined-up national UK-wide university system.

My point is not that the London Government should take back control, but that we are not discussing those growing divergencies in any systematic way. I was therefore extremely concerned to learn that the UK Education Ministers Council met only once in 2023.

In conclusion, I echo the comments of my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, and ask the Minister if we can please have some more information on how those meetings are organised, and whether there is any systematic effort to make sure that the four Governments take note of and address divergencies that may be very fruitful, but which, when they impact on the economy of a single nation—the United Kingdom—need to be addressed consistently and in depth by all four Governments.

Local Enterprise Partnerships: Funding

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right. In taking this decision, we conducted an information-gathering exercise with local authorities and LEPs to understand the impact of our plans. That identified great overlap between some of the functions discharged by LEPs, local authorities and combined authorities, as well as confirming a high level of integration of LEP functions in mayoral combined authorities. That is why we are taking the direction of travel that we are. The Government’s view is that there is likely to be scope for both greater join-up and efficiencies, and clarity for the private sector, by these functions being discharged in a joined-up way, and greater local accountability.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, LEPs and RDAs had in common that, while they referred to “local” and “regional”, they were, in fact, Whitehall appointed and Whitehall controlled. If their functions are gradually transferred to mayoral authorities, that will clearly take things closer to local enterprise, but it is not necessarily a great improvement if you move from a Whitehall bureaucracy to a mayoral bureaucracy. What is being done to ensure that these functions respond actively to local enterprises and to local and regional organisations, which are membership organisations and directly represent enterprises, businesses, communities and, indeed, consumers?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have published guidance for the transfer of LEP functions to local authorities. Further guidance will be issued in January. As part of our devolution settlements in different areas, there are also clear conditions around how business engagement should take place to ensure that the voices of local businesses and their representative organisations are well heard in those areas.