Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 12th September 2017 Grand Committee

As I mentioned at Second Reading, we have a communications plan in force already to build on the reality of the flexible duties trial. I wrote further to noble Lords in mid-July to explain how the availability of flexible working is going to be made known across the services, and I hope I assured your Lordships that the MoD has an effective communications plan in place that is well under way with a range of activities delivered through a variety of channels and mediums aimed at key stakeholders. Our plan is designed to ensure that our activities peak at key moments as we progress towards implementation of these new arrangements in 2019. As well as informing our people about the new opportunities, the communications plan aims to influence military culture and attitudes to part-time working and enable the cultural change required to ensure that flexible working is successfully implemented. Service chiefs have been and will continue to be engaged with the process. They will oversee the cascading of communications down through their commands to ensure that service personnel are aware of the new opportunities that are being introduced. Therefore, given the amount of activity that is already under way and the additional activities that we plan to undertake, I do not believe it is necessary for the Bill to be amended. I hope, following those assurances, that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, will agree to withdraw his amendment.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, listening to the Minister’s comments and reflecting on the discussions on the Bill, I understand that the children of many service personnel have quite difficult journeys into adulthood, with a lot of disruption. Looking at the new provisions in Clauses 1 and 2, am I right in thinking that the Bill will make it easier for parents with young children to remain close to those children if they choose to do so, and might it reduce the disruption to those children’s lives? Might that be the effect of the Bill?

[Earl Howe]

Certainly. Although that is not the whole rationale, the provisions that we are proposing to introduce are designed to be family-friendly—for example, for women considering starting a family or those with caring commitments, or those who are bringing up a family and, for any reason at all, there are personal circumstances that create difficulties for them. That could be a very good reason for somebody to apply to work part-time on a temporary basis. So I agree with the noble Earl.

Armed Forces (Flexible Working) Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 11th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I too am most grateful to the noble Earl for the helpful briefing yesterday and for his introduction to this Bill. As treasurer of the All-Party Group for Children and a trustee of a mental health charity for adolescents, I welcome very warmly the Bill’s intention to strengthen service families.

The noble Earl referred to the general principle of a work/life balance. I visited the German Reichstag with a party of parliamentarians this year. We know how productive the German nation is, yet what was most striking to me was that a Berliner I spoke to pointed out that if one works beyond six o’clock in the evening in Germany one’s colleagues will say, “Well, you are not being very efficient, are you?” All shops in Germany are shut on Sundays. Indeed, businesses are not permitted to email office workers after working hours. In that example, it seems that by allowing people to have a good work/life balance they can be more productive and more effective. I hope we can keep that in mind more generally in the debate about productivity in this country.

What I say now is highly tentative. I note my deep inexperience of the armed services, so I pay great attention to the concerns of my noble and gallant friends and those of other noble Lords. I will certainly look to the Minister for every assurance on the important concerns they have raised on these matters. However, because of my interests I will say a few tentative words about the possible advantages of what is being offered. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, said most of what I would have liked to have said about families. Perhaps the Minister could say something in his response about parental leave: how does that apply to members of the armed services? Perhaps he might like to write to me on that point.

One issue that stood out for me in preparing for this debate was ex-servicemen experiencing mental health issues in their 40s and 50s. The noble Baroness talked about allowing relationships within families to be strengthened and allowing service personnel to spend more time with their families at times of family crisis. I can see how that might strengthen the family so that, later on, it is still intact. It might prevent more servicemen in their 40s and 50s encountering mental health difficulties. Another bonus of what the Government propose is that it might be possible to improve the transition from life in the armed services to civilian life. It might allow one to continue working in the armed services but to spend a day, and then two days, in civilian employment during the last year or so of service. That might help ease the transition. The Minister made an eloquent case for the advantages, but I listened with great attention to what my noble friends and noble and gallant friends have said and look to the Minister for careful responses to those concerns.

I was grateful to the Minister for indicating that he is taking on board concerns from the Royal British Legion about ex-spouses of service personnel. Ex-spouses are not given the same rights as spouses in terms of housing access. It is important that they should have such access. I am glad that the Minister is considering that. Perhaps he could confirm that this matter has been raised with him and that he is giving it attention. I look forward to his response.

Immigration Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 12th April 2016 Lords Chamber

On a more positive note, the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin said that he learned his love of music in the womb from his parents. Dr Henry Truby, an emeritus professor of paediatrics and linguistics, says that from 24 weeks the child moves in rhythm to the mother’s speech. Babies’ preferences for stories and music are first heard in the womb. I shall not go on at length, but we all know that these things are true. Therefore, do we want to subject women who are pregnant to these kinds of experiences knowing what the traumatic consequences could be, not just for the women but for their children as well?

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support this amendment. Before doing so, I highlight the fact that, following last year’s Maternal Mental Health Alliance report which highlighted the serious concerns about perinatal mental health, the Government made a very strong response. I think it was the noble Earl, Lord Howe, who did such good work in terms of ensuring that more mother and baby units across the country have access to the right mental health professionals to support mothers through that difficult time.

In the past, we had whole families for several months at Yarl’s Wood. Thanks to the important work of the coalition Government—the Conservative and Lib Dem Government—we removed those families. If they were detained, it was for very short periods of time. The Government recognise the principle that this is something that we need to be careful of, and it was good to hear on Report the careful and conscientious reply of the noble Lord, Lord Bates. However, it is disappointing that there is this loophole and an area that still needs to be covered. It seems to me to be so important. Looking at the Maternal Mental Health Alliance report, speaking to mothers who have experienced postnatal depression and depression during their pregnancy and having visited Yarl’s Wood three times myself over the years and spoken to mothers there, I know that, whatever the rights and wrongs of their situation, they are often very distressed and worried about being returned, whether they have rights to remain here or not. To have mothers who are pregnant in that situation is very undesirable.

As the noble Baroness said, there is no evidence that one returns mothers in these circumstances by detaining them. What we have found over time is that it is much more effective to build a relationship and provide services so that they can be returned in a good way. I hope that the Minister will respond to the concerns raised by this amendment.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, strongly support this amendment. I will speak briefly because much of what I wanted to say has already been said, and said very eloquently.

This is enormously important. As many noble Lords know, we run a drop-in for asylum-seeker families at my synagogue. In talking to some of the women, many of them pregnant, who visit with their small children, one thing that comes out time and time again is how they worry that the situation in which they are living—they are not detained—is so insecure that some of that insecurity may be transmitted to their unborn children. Of course, we know a great deal now about the transmission of anxiety and trauma to unborn children. If we extrapolate from that and from those women talking about it to women detained for what seem to be not very good reasons, it is really important that we have an absolute exclusion on pregnant women being detained. I hope that people will look at the evidence given by the Royal College of Midwives. That made it absolutely clear that unborn children may well be traumatised by the experience. I do not believe that we in this House would wish to take responsibility for that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, last week, the Centre for Policy Studies, a respected Conservative think tank, published a paper entitled Dangerous Trends in Modern Legislation. It warns that,

“the length of new Bills and the number of clauses they include is becoming so great that Parliament is unable to properly scrutinise them … There are often lengthy and significant parts of a Bill that receive no detailed scrutiny at all at any point in its Parliamentary passage”.

Clause 87 of the Immigration Bill provides a prime example of this problem. In the Commons it had five minutes in Committee and none at Report. We reached it late in Committee in the Lords, where the Minister was unable to answer the questions raised, telling us that,

“there will be an opportunity for an informed debate on the details”,

when the regulations—that had not yet been drafted—would be laid before the House. He specifically stated that,

“no decision has yet been made”,—[Official Report, 9/2/16; col. GC 174.]

as to the impact on healthcare of the imposition of the charge.

Those of us who took part in that debate received no further communication from the Government between Committee and Report, unlike the usual custom, and no invitation to discuss the issues raised. We reached this clause on Report at 12.30 am on 21 March, at the end of a very long day. The Minister did make a significant concession in his reply on exempting university-level appointments from the new levy, but he declined to tell us when the Government’s response to the report from the Migration Advisory Committee, on which these proposals rested, would be published or to answer other questions raised. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, did at least say that, “Given the hour”, he was,

“happy to put further thoughts in writing … if that would be helpful”.—[Official Report, 21/3/16; col. 2210.]

He then disappeared for a rather long walk. The noble Earl has indeed sent us a letter but it does not answer any of the points on the public sector or public sector training which we had raised. The noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, then moved, I assume on behalf of the Government, to oppose withdrawal of the amendment to shut off further discussion at Third Reading. The chairman of the MAC was allowed to brief parliamentarians on this charge on 22 March, the day after Report ended. The Government then slipped out their response to the MAC report two days later on the Thursday before the Easter weekend—a quiet news day.

This is not the way to make legislation, as the Centre for Policy Studies paper noted. The Government have not explained the implications of this significant new charge, and in particular its likely impact on the public sector; nor have they provided any coherent rationale for imposing it on the public sector. The Minister did, however, in responding to the debate, say that,

“I will give further consideration to when they”—

the charges—

“are introduced”.—[Official Report, 21/3/16; col. 2212.]

He specifically mentioned that they were looking at the issue of phasing in the charges on the public sector. This amendment returns to exactly that issue, asking what further consideration the Government have given this and whether they will now accept that the current provision to rush this charge into operation only two months after the Bill is passed—as Clause 96 states—is mistaken, incompatible with allowing an informed debate on the regulations that will have to be pushed through, and damaging to the finances of schools and hospitals throughout the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Bates, reiterated that the aim of this charge is,

“to bring about some behavioural change in the way that people think about recruitment”,—[Official Report, 21/3/16; col. 2210.]

encouraging employers to look for recruits from within the UK rather than from outside, and to invest in training those recruits in the skills needed. That is fine for the private sector. However, the Government are the employer in the public sector: they set the quotas for teacher and nurse training, and they encourage—or discourage—doctors to stay and work in the NHS rather than going abroad. So here we have the Government encouraging themselves to expand training to fill skills shortages in schools and hospitals by fining those schools and hospitals—out of government funds—for recruiting from outside the UK and the EEA. That is absurd.

There have been a succession of announcements of government policy that the likely impact of this charge will undermine. There are plans to expand and extend maths and technology teaching in schools, but no mention of the existing shortage of maths teachers in this country and of the active efforts that schools are making to recruit from Australia, Singapore and elsewhere. Hospitals have announced that they need to recruit some 15,000 nurses a year from abroad to fully staff their wards, from the Philippines, South Africa and so on. We have just read that the NHS is planning to recruit 4,000 doctors directly from India. These are large numbers of predicted immigrants, recruited to fill avoidable skills shortages within the UK—significant numbers pulled into the UK by our failures in skills training: 30,000 or so a year. The Government should therefore act to provide the training to reduce the necessity to pull such numbers in.

We have asked repeatedly what plans the Government have to increase incentives for maths teachers and to launch crash courses to train them, but there appear to be no such plans. We have also asked about rapid expansion in nurse training and efforts to improve retention of nurses in post. Again, there are no plans to do so yet. So within the next 12 months the Government will start to fine schools and hospitals £1,000 a year per skilled person recruited from outside Europe—fining them from the funds that the Government have just given them.

The noble Lord, Lord Bates, suggested on Report that,

“schools … can seek maths teachers from the whole European Economic Area market”,

to avoid the charge for recruiting them from outside that market—to do that, it was implied, rather than to have to train more of our own or to pay British teachers well enough to stay in post. The Daily Mail will love that as a proposal from a Government who are supposed to be trying to reduce the pull factor in immigration from within as well as outside Europe, but I leave that to the Government to answer.

We were assured on Report that:

“The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has confirmed that it will continue to consult with stakeholders”,—[Official Report, 21/3/15; col. 2211-12.]

which in this case presumably means to negotiate with the Department of Health and the Department for Education on how to limit the damage to school and hospital budgets. But BIS, the Times told us last Saturday, is planning a major cost-cutting exercise, shrinking the staff of the Commission for Employment and Skills and the Skills Funding Agency by 40% to 50%. So it is likely to lack the capacity to manage the expansion of training schemes which the Government have promised us, either for the public or the private sector.

In short, the Government have failed to make any case for their proposed rapid implementation of this ill-thought-out scheme. Their failure to answer legitimate questions raised in Committee and on Report, in spite of promises so to do, has fallen well below the normal standards of this House. I hope that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, gallantly stepping into the breach, will concede that this has not been well done and will accept the rationale for delay which justifies our amendment. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I attended a meeting of maths teachers earlier this year in Parliament and was sad to learn of the serious shortage of maths teachers in this country, of so many of our children being taught by people with very low qualifications in maths, and of physical education teachers trained up to teach maths desperately trying to fill the gap. The recent concerns expressed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that our children should have a good understanding of maths brought home to me the real concerns raised by those maths teachers about the inadequacy of supply of maths teachers. So it concerns me to hear the noble Lord say that schools will be penalised for the shortage of maths teachers. I am afraid it does not seem to be the schools’ fault but somebody else’s. This is not a Department for Education debate, but my experience in this matter coincides with what the noble Lord has expressed. Certainly, one should not penalise schools for a shortage they are not responsible for.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, the principle of the immigration skills charge is not in dispute. It is absolutely vital that the skills of our own workforce should be improved if we are to achieve the major reduction in immigration which the public so anxiously wish to see. The main issue is one of timing as to when it should come into effect.

The Migration Advisory Committee, to whose work I pay a warm tribute, gave three reasons for its strong support for this scheme. First, to raise the cost of immigrant labour so as to reduce the numbers; secondly, to contribute to the extra cost involved for public services; and, thirdly, to compensate for what it described as the,

“rather modest efforts to upskill UK workers”,

by those firms employing Indian IT workers. All those matters need tackling as soon as possible.

I certainly accept that there may be some loose ends in respect of some of the public services, but we need to get on with this. The Government have announced that they will bring the measure into force in April 2017. That seems a reasonable way to get this moving in a vital area.

Tax Credits (Income Thresholds and Determination of Rates) (Amendment) Regulations 2015

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Monday 26th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher]

That is exactly the point I just made. The important point is that if we pass these regulations the debate in the House of Commons—the elected House—will be an irrelevance. The Government can say, “We have got our regulations. We can press ahead with our cuts. The elected House can say what it likes, we will not have to listen to it”. I am not saying they will say that, but they certainly could say that. The important point is that we need to protect the democratic process. The only hope for the Government is that the bullying tactics may persuade Conservative MPs and our colleagues to avoid defeat. At the moment, the situation in the elected House is that eight Conservative MPs have put their names to a Motion which means that the Conservative Government do not have a majority in the other House.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, does my noble friend not find it interesting that the Government are currently taking a Bill through this House that will remove the democratic choice of local people about whether their local school should become an academy? Indeed, during the introduction of academies, academies were taken out of the responsibility of local authorities and placed with the Secretary of State. In this Bill, in future local people will not be able to vote on whether they wish to have their local school turned into an academy. This is a very substantial change because, as I understand it, they are so concerned that the education of our children is so important that no coasting school should be allowed to continue. Therefore, they will take all means possible to ensure that our children get the best education possible. In this case, my noble friend is not asking for that change. She is asking merely for a delay so that the other House can think again. That is a much more minor change to make. Does she agree?

[Baroness Meacher]

I thank my noble friend Lord Listowel. I should mention that a petition signed by 270,000 members of the public over the weekend was handed to me this morning. There is huge fear and anger about these cuts. I am very grateful for the support of the public and the media—believe it or not—and their appreciation of the efforts in this House, although I personally never sought any of it. That is a rather important point to make: I am really not here to grandstand.

I support the Government’s raising of the tax threshold, the increase in the minimum wage and free childcare for three and four year-olds, but those measures will not protect the most vulnerable. The Institute for Fiscal Studies makes clear in its analysis that the biggest losers from the 2015-16 tax and benefit changes, even by 2020, will be the poorest working families. The very poor will hardly gain at all from the increase in the minimum wage or the national living wage. Very poor self-employed people will not gain at all from the increase in the minimum wage. I have had a pile of emails from self-employed very poor people. The biggest gainers from the increase in the income tax threshold and the higher rate threshold will be those earning £43,000 to £121,000 per year. We seem to have a massive redistribution of income here, but it seems to be going the wrong way.

The Government have for five years urged unemployed people to take a job. The sanctions regime has been extremely brutal, but having said that, it is, of course, much better for people to work, if they can, than to remain unemployed. The main justification for the Government’s policy has been that work pays. Yes, and working tax credits achieved that objective. Working tax credits prevented unemployment soaring in the recent recession.

Finally, I repeat that the aim of this amendment is to support the democratic process to enable the elected House to hold the Government to account. That is the duty of this House. If we cannot do that, we might as well not exist.