Policy-making: Future Generations’ Interests

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, in his wise words. We clearly have to rebuild the spirit of cross-party consensus and ensure that the public thoroughly understand the workings of Parliament. The buck does stop here. I am a little concerned that, if we farm out responsibility to commissioners and others, we might not work so hard to build consensus on the way forward—although I can also see virtues in the other approach. I am most grateful to my noble friend for securing this important and highly stimulating debate. I noted what the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said about the social infrastructure. Back in the 1950s in Stepney, families were facing the outcome of the Blitz on low incomes and with insecurity. But grandmothers, and their daughters, held those extended families together. When those families began to move out, they became less resilient and began to break down.

In protecting the interests of our children in the future, we would do well to consider how we make the best possible childhoods for them. What can we do now to ensure good childhoods for our future children? Part of that is being more coherent and consistent in policy and more consensual in what we do. We make up and then undo; we build and unbuild; we invest and disinvest. We cannot build a good future for our children if we cannot find a more consensual approach. Most basically, children need stable relationships. In the earliest days, they need a strong attachment to their mothers. They need important people in their lives who stick around. They need secure housing and schools that they can rely on not being moved away from.

This is thoroughly recognised in the care system. So many times over so many years I have heard young people in care saying that the most important thing to them is a stable, long-term, benign relationship. This is recognised in policy: it is called permanence. So there is a push towards more adoption and longer-term foster placements. There is a push towards staying put—allowing young people to remain with their foster carers until the age of 21. There is a push towards staying close—allowing young people to remain near their children’s homes when they move out of them. We recognise that. The trouble is that in our culture as it plays out today, everything seems to militate against the stability that we need for our children. The law in this country, for instance, is based on an adversarial system; politics is based on an adversarial system. This is very different from many of our continental neighbours, who are far more willing to compromise. In this country, “compromise” is a dirty word—but on the continent any politician realises that one should never get all one wants; it is not helpful always to get all one wants.

I will give an illustration. Sure Start was announced by Gordon Brown and launched by Tessa Jowell in 1998. To paraphrase her words, the first three years of life are so important, I believe we should invest in this way. It was a very welcome introduction, yet a parliamentary briefing tells us that between 2015 and 2017 a large number of children’s centres—I think it may have been 308—closed down. I spoke to health visitors earlier this week who were bemoaning the fact that there are few clinics that are easily accessible to mothers. They have responded to that by developing telephone services, which is a way of responding, but it is certainly not as good as being able to see mothers face to face. On the other hand, there is the situation with health visitors. There was a rapid decline in their numbers in the 2000s, a rapid building up in the early 2010s, and now they are declining by a quarter. This investment and disinvestment is so unhelpful: our children need stability but our political system does not give it to them—not as it currently stands.

If we look to Germany, we see a country with long-term, stable coalition Governments, which I think is very helpful. We can look abroad and try to learn lessons. I cannot give any answers as to how we can change, but I can tell noble Lords that I was present when the research evidence on Sure Start was presented at the Institute for Fiscal Studies two weeks ago. Naomi Eisenstadt and Leon Feinstein, important researchers and practitioners, were also present. The main theme was that it is not any particular Government; whenever there is a change in Minister or a change in Government, everything is turned upside-down again. So if we want stable lives for our children, we need stable policies and we must work harder to co-create policies so that when one party comes in, it does not undo what the others have done.

In Finland decades ago there was a political consensus that education was important and that the best way to give children a good education was to recruit and retain the best teachers. Finlanders were not even aware of how good they were, but in 2000 PISA discovered that they were the best in maths, the best in literacy and the best in science. They just stuck to their guns and recruited and retained the best teachers. If we are to do better for the children of the future, we need to be more consistent.