Global Intergenerational Week 2024

Debate between Kirsty Blackman and Anneliese Dodds

Thursday 9th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a real pleasure to participate in this debate with you in the Chair, Mr Efford. I thank the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) for securing a debate on this subject.

I always say, and I really do believe, that being a Member of Parliament is the best job in the world, but I was delighted to hear the hon. Lady speak about her joy in being a granny, which is a very important job indeed. It is such a privilege to be here for the first time Parliament has debated this really important subject. Although Global Intergenerational Week was a few weeks ago, it is excellent to see colleagues gathered here to discuss it.

It is really important that we embrace intergenerational practice and relationships, whether that is as individuals, groups, organisations, Governments or political parties. We have heard many great examples during this brief discussion today, such as living arrangements bringing people together, as well as different projects and organisations, and oral history, which I agree is incredibly important.

The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) talked about children being brought into residential homes. My children also had that experience when they were attending a co-operative nursery. It was incredibly important for them, particularly as they do not have close relatives living nearby; I felt that was very important indeed.

As well as bringing people together, we also need to make sure that all people of different generations and age groups are protected from the kind of stereotyping that we are hearing about, and from discrimination. We need to ensure that everyone, regardless of age, is treated with dignity and respect, and treated equally in our society. As well as protections that apply to people of any age, the Equality Act 2010 enshrines in law protections against discrimination on the basis of age. No one should be discriminated against because they are or are not a certain age or in a certain age group. For 14 years, that landmark legislation, which many other countries have tried to copy, has protected people of all ages from direct and indirect discrimination, as well as from harassment and victimisation. It has helped to build understanding of the challenges that different age groups face. The hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw stressed that many of those challenges are common to different generations.

It was great to hear the hon. Member for Aberdeen North talking about some of the privileges we have as parliamentarians and the job that we do when we are seeking to represent everyone in our constituencies. I too had the privilege of seeing the Brownies at their first ever meeting in the House of Commons, which was very exciting.

Another privilege we have as parliamentarians—I am sure others will recognise this—is that people send us reading material. I was sent a fascinating book, “Generations”, by Bobby Duffy, who has done a lot of work looking into the stereotypes about different generations. The book comprehensively demolishes the idea that, for example, young people today are fixated on ephemeral issues, are only interested in having fun and that issues around the cost of living are not important to them. It shows that younger generations are concerned about the health, wellbeing and success of future generations. I am glad that the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act was highlighted. It is a great achievement of the Welsh Government, which ensures that the concerns of future generations are structurally represented in Government.

Some big challenges have been talked about this afternoon including mental health issues. In some cases, sadly, they carry across the generations. The issue of loneliness was rightly mentioned. For young people, social media use often exacerbates loneliness rather than brings people together to combat it. Lonliness is also a big challenge for many older people. Age UK has done wonderful work on this, but says that 1.4 million older people report themselves as often being lonely, which is a terrible statistic for us to reflect on, and surely—hopefully—to act on. It was great to hear about some of the projects combating loneliness in Motherwell. The Clockhouse Project in Blackbird Leys in my constituency also does great work bringing older people together. Clearly, though, we need to do more.

We need to do more across the generations when it comes to mental health, as well. In particular, we need to tackle the crisis in children’s mental health and the currently very long waiting lists for support. We need much higher staffing levels within the NHS, but we also need to ensure that this is integrated with schooling, so that there are specialist mental health professionals at every school. There must be much more open access to mental health care, whether that is for young, middle-aged or older people.

We have to break down barriers to opportunity at every stage. Today, unfortunately, inequality is entrenched across the country. We are seeing inequality that is regional, inequality that is racial, inequality between men and women, and class inequality. Traditionally in the UK, there has been a promise that we can tell our children and grandchildren, “If you work hard, you will be able to get on, no matter what your background is.” That increasingly has not been the case for many people in our society, unfortunately.

Many older people who have worked hard all their lives are in an increasingly difficult situation. The housing crisis was rightly referred to, and clearly that is a huge challenge for many young people, but as the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw rightly said, it is increasingly a challenge for older people, too. Lots of older people are now living in precarious, poor-quality, private rented sector housing. This is the first time that that has been the case for a number of decades, and we really need to be facing up to that.

We must consider all generations when it comes to big challenges such as combating violence in our communities. I pay tribute to the work of Age UK, but I was very concerned to hear that it was Age UK’s hard work that led to Government systematically collecting information about the rates of domestic violence against older people, and that the information had not previously been routinely collected. That is really concerning. It should have been routinely collected, because we need to learn from it to ensure that every older person is safe. Of course, we also need to understand new forms of violence and control. That means having a focus on the kind of online issues that were touched on in this debate.

We need to look at how, ultimately, the different generations are progressing or otherwise. There is a measure of that: income persistence. The UK currently has American-style levels of income persistence which are significantly higher than the OECD average. That means that your parents’ income determines a huge amount of what your income as a young person and subsequent generations’ will be. Other countries are far better at disrupting that persistence. We believe that we have to take action on this and that the Social Mobility Commission should be involved in recording and analysing data on it. We need to do that and to learn from analysis of other sources, such as the longitudinal education outcomes data, so we can ensure much greater intergenerational income mobility.

I feel that I cannot not mention the need to recognise the contribution of every single generation to our society and economy. One generation that I have talked about a lot is people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, particularly women. That group of women does not get talked about very much, and are not represented very much in the media. They do a lot, and though they tend not to complain very much, they are often squeezed at both ends. They provide huge amounts of care as sandwich carers. Many are trying to hold down a job. They are supporting children and often their partners or parents too, both financially and emotionally. Often they are experiencing health problems as well, and some are finding it challenging to manage menopausal symptoms alongside work that is not sufficiently flexible or suitable.

Politics simply has not kept up with the requirements of that generation. It should keep up, because the number of women falling into that generation and moving out of the labour market is very significant. We have calculated that our economy is losing about £7 billion in untapped potential because of those women being forced out of the labour market. Surely we need to do better there. We need to be acting on these issues.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I commend the hon. Member for highlighting that group of women. She is absolutely right: they do not get talked about enough. It is a responsibility of parliamentarians to ensure that we are talking about them, thanking them for their contribution and trying to make life better for them, or at least slightly more bearable than it currently is, so I thank her very much for doing so.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for what she says. It is important that Parliament is in step with society as well.

We have seen a huge amount of change, with much of the focus on these kinds of issues. We have seen significant positive change across the generations. It is interesting that the amount of childcare undertaken by both parents has changed substantially in recent years, albeit still not the progress we would like. We see it in shared leave, at nursery and school pick-ups, and in time off when the kids are ill or during school holidays. All those things are now viewed as part of the parcel of not just being a mother, but being a parent. None the less, much more progress is still needed.

There has been change over the generations, and, as I say, Parliament and politics really need to catch up on all of that. In doing so, we can work together across generations and learn from each other about what has changed things in a positive direction. That really gets to the root of what Global Intergenerational Week is all about. It was mentioned earlier that more diverse teams tend to have far better outcomes—particularly in business, but it applies everywhere. If we do not include every generation in our decision making, we will not take the right and effective decisions. The work undertaken by those who have been promoting Global Intergenerational Week really underlines that. It also enables us to celebrate the wonderful contribution of all generations—surely we should be doing that too.