Access to Cash
Lord Aberdare Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Naseby (Con)
My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the great worry experienced by 17% of our citizens about their virtually permanent need for access to cash? Against that background, has my noble friend found time to see and read the Which? report, the submissions made by Age UK and the rather heavy tome produced by Access to Cash Review? If he has, that is a happy coincidence. If not, will he please make sure he does so? Is he also aware—
Lord Naseby
My Lords, 17% of our citizens are suffering. Against that worry, is he aware that, while the Post Office and Nationwide are helping, the rest of the mutuals movement is handicapped by the Government’s failure to implement fully the Mutuals’ Deferred Shares Act 2015?
Prevent Strategy
Lord Aberdare Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I do not think the independence of the IICSA chair was ever in doubt. Some of the concerns were around—
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Process, absolutely—I thank the noble Lord. Independence was not in doubt, but for the reviewer to have confidence is of the utmost importance.
Education: Foreign Language Teaching
Lord Aberdare Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, I am pleased that the motion refers to “mandatory” rather than “modern” foreign language teaching, since I shall talk mainly about Latin and Ancient Greek. I, too, echo the tributes that have been paid to my noble friend Lady Coussins for her leadership in this area.
First, I congratulate the Government on making foreign language learning compulsory at key stage 2, with Latin and Ancient Greek included among the languages available. As we have heard, from an early age children have an enormous capacity for learning languages. My own granddaughter, aged just five, who lives in Moscow, is the most fluent Russian speaker—in fact the only one—of all four members of her family, having spent some two years in a Russian school; and her English-language skills have certainly not suffered.
Classical languages, especially Latin, are particularly helpful in learning about how languages work. I can think of no better way of getting to grips with grammar—as the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, and I experienced—and Latin is directly relevant to the study of a whole group of modern European languages, so many of whose words and idioms derive from it. Beyond that, Latin and Greek can open a window into a much wider realm of literature, history, drama, law, philosophy, science and culture. They can combine well with other languages at primary level, each feeding off and reinforcing the others.
There are excellent materials available for teaching Latin at this level. The Minimus course, developed by Barbara Bell of the Primary Latin Project, has sold more than 130,000 copies and is widely and successfully used in schools teaching Latin to seven to 10 year-olds. It features a Roman family living near Hadrian’s Wall, including their slaves, a cat and a mouse, Minimus. The resources available include books, games, songs, a musical, comic strips, animations, finger puppets and more. Minimus is even on Twitter, although I imagine he should squeak rather than tweet.
I am encouraged by the fact that there seems to be growing enthusiasm among schools—including state schools—to offer classical language teaching, which has for too long been seen as the preserve mainly of independent schools. This has been very much down to the efforts of private organisations such as Friends of Classics, Classics for All, the Primary Latin Project, the Iris Project, the Mayor of London’s Love Latin scheme, Classics in Communities and others. These offer encouragement, support and resources, including financial, to schools wanting to try teaching Latin or Greek.
One project, started with a grant from Classics for All, has sought to introduce and embed Latin into a cluster of schools in North Walsham in Norfolk. This has employed four teachers, working with other suitable adults, to deliver the Minimus course at the primary schools. A further, important part of the project seeks to enable students from the primaries to continue with Latin up to GCSE level at the secondary school. The project has now spread to two other clusters.
There is much good work going on, but projects like these face some challenges, which I hope the Minister may seek to address. First, children studying Latin, let alone Greek, at primary level have only a one in four chance of being able to continue at secondary level. Again, excellent resources are available, notably from the Cambridge School Classics Project. Both Latin and Greek can count towards the EBacc qualification at key stage 4 but there is something of a black hole at key stage 3. Secondary schools cannot offer Latin as a language within the key stage 3 national curriculum, only as an option outside it.
Secondly, not enough new teachers are being trained to deliver Latin and other classical subjects, and there is little or no government support for training such teachers. Much teacher training has to be carried out by volunteers. The Norfolk project has had to make use of retired teachers, teaching assistants, governors, parents and others with suitable basic skills, as well as existing staff, including teachers of modern foreign languages. I hope the Minister is willing to look into ways of working with the classics community to tackle these issues. Perhaps he, or an appropriate ministerial colleague, might consider meeting some of the leading promoters of Latin teaching in primary schools to understand the challenges they face and to explore ways of meeting them, in order to ensure that the welcome inclusion of classical languages in the mandatory language teaching programme achieves the success it deserves.
Tourism: Music
Lord Aberdare Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Aberdare
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who has done so much for the cause of live music. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on obtaining this debate and introducing it with such flair. He considered starting with, “Yeah, yeah, yeah”, and I might just go with, “Hear, hear”, because I have agreed with so much of what we have heard so far.
This is an important and wide-ranging topic covering a plethora of related issues, which has proved quite challenging in thinking about how to focus my remarks. Music is a major element in the UK’s tourism offer, both for tourists within the UK and those from overseas. UK Music’s 2011 report on music tourism tells us that UK music festivals and concerts in 2009 attracted more than 7.7 million music tourists who spent more than £1.4 billion, boosting the UK economy by at least £864 million and sustaining almost 20,000 jobs. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, told us, although only 5% came from overseas, they accounted for 18% of spending.
It is clear that this is one of the UK’s tourism strengths. We have five major festivals in the international top 20 led, of course, by Glastonbury. The Showcase guide lists 578 music festivals in the UK. Wales, the land of my fathers, attracted 252,000 music tourists in 2009. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, also mentioned the musical focus of the Olympics and Paralympics ceremonies last year. He rightly asked what was happening to build on that in terms of a music legacy.
Focusing on classical music, my personal passion, we have six major opera companies covering Wales, Scotland and the north as well as London and the south-east. But in addition, we have a seemingly ever-growing number of smaller opera companies putting on a wide range of high-quality performances at all sorts of venues. Only recently, I attended the Wagner “Ring Cycle” in a former chicken shed in Longborough. There are some 70 established professional orchestras and ensembles, and between them they put on more than 3,700 concerts a year in the UK, as well as some 450 abroad. We have a number of fantastic classical music festivals. Among them are: the BBC Proms, with over 100 concerts attracting more than 300,000 people last year; Aldeburgh; Edinburgh; the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod; the Three Choirs Festival and, of course, the recent BBC Cardiff Singer of the World event.
It seems incontrovertible that music is important to tourism and that the UK does it well, but that raises two questions in the context of today’s debate. First, could we do better, as the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, asked, and, secondly, are there barriers to our success that could be removed? One of the difficulties of addressing such questions is that,
“the benefits of music tourism do not always show up as distinctly music-derived”,
to quote a recent report relating to Scotland. Success in this field is the product of a complex and interlocking infrastructure. That includes the organisations that provide the music, such as the orchestras, opera companies and festivals—not forgetting an enormous range of commercial bodies in the popular music arena, including the performers and musicians themselves.
One of the causes of our strength is surely our whole music education system, with nine world-leading conservatoires at its pinnacle. As the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, reminded us, they not only train UK students to world-class standards but attract talented students from overseas. The ability to hear top performers from all around the world is another factor that boosts UK music tourism. I would also like to mention the National Opera Studio, which runs master courses for young opera singers and pianists—repetiteurs. I would challenge your Lordships to attend an opera in the UK without finding at least one NOS alumnus among the cast.
Other elements of the infrastructure for music tourism include suitable venues for concerts and events—such as the country houses that have become such a feature of the opera scene—hospitality and catering, transport facilities, marketing campaigns so that potential visitors are made aware of the musical opportunities available, and all the necessary ticketing and access and customer support facilities. I understand that the Arts Council of Wales is looking at a possible digital music resource to provide information about music across Wales to help increase music tourism.
Let me suggest a couple of things that might enable us to do better. First, I am not aware of any mechanism—or at least I was not until the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, mentioned one—for taking an overall look at how to maximise the UK tourism benefits of the music sector across all the areas that I have mentioned. I gather that some other countries and regions, such as Ontario, have been successful in adopting a more strategic approach. Perhaps that might be achieved by designating a Minister with specific cross-departmental responsibility for promoting live music tourism, or even appointing a live music tsar.
Secondly, music tourism is disproportionately concentrated, as is so often the case, in London and the south-east, areas which attract almost half of all music tourists, whereas Wales accounts for only 3%, and Scotland for only 2%, just ahead of Northern Ireland. Could VisitBritain be encouraged to give greater emphasis to promoting music tourism outside London, working in a joined-up way with regional bodies such as Visit Wales to ensure that the benefits of such tourism are more evenly and widely spread?
Another question relates to removing barriers to success. There has been some good progress in this area, not least as a result of the Live Music Act, championed by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. I was going to say that the issue of visas for musicians seems to be less vexed than it has been, although two noble Lords have mentioned that as a continuing concern. I would mention two specific issues in the hope that the Minister will be able to comment on them. The first relates to VAT. The UK is one of only four EU countries that do not take advantage of the option to apply a reduced rate of VAT on visitor accommodation and one of only nine to apply the full rate on admissions to cultural attractions. So tourism, our sixth largest export industry, is the only one subject to VAT. Other countries, including competitors such as France and Germany, have gained additional investment, employment, particularly of younger people who are disproportionately represented in the tourism sector, and growth through applying reduced VAT rates in this area. It has been calculated that every pound invested by the Treasury in this way would generate £18 of extra inbound tourism revenue and other significant growth benefits.
The second issue relates to the carriage of musical instruments on aeroplanes. Musicians need to travel to perform, quite often by air. Yet there is no consistent policy about carrying even smaller instruments on airlines, and the ISM has collected more than 1,350 individual reports of difficulties faced by musicians when travelling with their instruments, including cases of valuable instruments being damaged beyond repair. I appreciate the Government’s reluctance to intervene in commercial matters, but even if they do not go as far as the US Government, which have now issued regulations to allow small musical instruments as hand baggage, they could at least put pressure on airlines to follow the welcome lead of easyJet in this area.
This debate focuses on the contribution of music tourism and the economic benefits that that can bring, but let us not lose sight of the ultimate value of music, as described in a quote attributed to Plato in the Times last month. Sadly, I have not been able to track down where he said, “Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate and eternal form”. We need more of that in the UK, even if it did not bring such significant tourism benefits with it.
Wales: Economy
Lord Aberdare Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Aberdare
My Lords, I put my name down to speak in this debate—on the securing of which I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord German—with some trepidation, as I would not lay claim to any particular expertise in economic matters. However, I was encouraged to do so by the second part of the Question, about ensuring that the Welsh and UK Governments work closely together in the interests of the Welsh—and presumably UK—people; and by the fact that I recently met the Vice-Chancellor of Swansea University, Professor Richard Davies, who told me about a project at the university that in my view provides a test case for such co-operation. I shall focus on this project in my remarks.
Other noble Lords described the challenges facing the Welsh economy better than I could. They include a paucity of large global businesses and of business investment into Wales. Partly as a result, there is no infrastructure of dynamic, innovative smaller companies to provide the supply chains for those larger businesses, sometimes by forming high-tech clusters around large research universities. Evidence shows that links with world-class research and teaching are a major factor driving investment by large knowledge-driven companies. The UK Government have introduced technology innovation centres—sometimes described as “catapult centres”—to bridge the gap between universities and industry; but there do not appear to be plans for such centres to be based at any of the Welsh universities.
The Welsh economy still has a greater emphasis on arts and media, as well as on the public sector, than on science and technology. It is not clear to me that Wales attracts as large a proportion of UK research funding as one might hope. These are major challenges, and both the Welsh and UK Governments need to be engaged in a co-operative way to provide a favourable and supportive environment in which they can be met.
Swansea’s planned science and innovation campus seems to me exactly the right kind of project to address the goals of both Governments. Swansea already has a strong reputation for research excellence, and a track record of collaborating with businesses large and small, local and international. It has recognised strengths in engineering education—mentioned as an important area by the noble Lord, Lord Jones—and has developed an innovative and well established co-location model that intermingles academia, students, industry and research on the same site, and even in the same buildings, so that the university acts as a live research arm for industry.
The new campus will extend this model, capitalising on the university’s interactions with major international knowledge-economy companies, including Airbus UK, Alliance Boots, BAE Systems, BP, Huawei Technologies—I hope I pronounced that appropriately— IBM, Rolls-Royce and Tata Steel. As well as student facilities and residences, it will include an innovation hub, the laboratory space and facilities of which will be available to local SMEs. The hub will act as a centre for partnership activities involving direct undergraduate and postgraduate interaction with industry, for example in a project with Rolls-Royce to test materials for the aerospace and aero-engine industries.
The university already has a number of such projects, including one with Tata Steel to develop new coatings on steel and glass that are capable of generating, storing and releasing energy, with the result that the buildings could in effect become power stations. Another example is Wales’s premier purpose-built medical research facility, in partnership with the Welsh Government, Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, IBM and others.
The new campus will combine an outstanding experience for students, a high-quality skills pipeline for industry and shared resources and facilities for research and innovation. The development will take place on a 25-hectare site in Swansea Bay that was formerly owned by BP. The value of the first phase of the project amounts to some £250 million. Much of the funding is already in place, including a £60 million loan from the European Investment Bank, £30 million from the Welsh Government—£15 million of which comes from European funds—and substantial support from industrial and private partners, as well as almost £12 million from BIS to build an energy safety research institute on the new campus.
Over a 10-year period, all development is expected to bring an economic impact of more than £3 billion and the creation of some 4,000 direct jobs plus an even larger number of indirect jobs. The construction process itself will generate more than £400 million of economic activity, the great majority of it within Wales. This is likely to become the largest knowledge economy project in the UK and one of the top five in Europe. The CBI in Wales has described the project as,
“an exemplar of how universities should work with industry, to enable the development and commercialisation of world-leading research”.
Of course, it is also fully consistent with the model suggested by the noble Lord, Lord German, for promoting the involvement of Welsh universities in research and development partnerships.
I agree with the CBI assessment. This is an outstanding example of the right kind of project to tackle the challenges facing the Welsh economy. It will be a transformational project for Wales, helping to address the deficiency in science and technology research in Wales and to drive economic regeneration and create employment opportunities as well as the skills to fill them, not least for engineers. But it is also an extremely important project for the UK as a whole in terms of attracting global business and investment, developing technology and innovation skills and enhancing our competitiveness in the knowledge economy.
My concluding question is exactly that posed by the title of the debate: how are the Welsh and UK Governments working together to maximise the benefits of this project and others like it that have been mentioned by other noble Lords? Is the project getting the support that it needs from the UK research councils and the UK Technology Strategy Board? Should there be one or more Catapult centres in Wales to foster projects linking universities and business? Is the project known to and being promoted by UK Trade and Investment and by the UK's diplomatic missions abroad? Is it recognised and supported as a significant contribution to the Government's growth agenda?
It would be good to see Her Majesty's Government and the Welsh Government closely aligned and ensuring that this exciting project realises its full potential in both countries. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in what I understand will be her first response to a debate such as this from the Front Bench.
Health: Cancer
Lord Aberdare Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Northover
The noble Baroness is right; there has been that decline. Of course mortality is extremely important, but you have to look at incidence, survival and mortality together. She will also be aware that much of that decrease in mortality is because of the decrease in men smoking. Men took up smoking in larger numbers than did women. The numbers of men smoking started to decline in the 1950s, and that has had an effect on the decline in the number of cancer deaths.
Lord Aberdare
My Lords, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, accounting for about 5 per cent of all cancer deaths. A recent report by Pancreatic Cancer UK found that survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients in the UK—only 3 per cent are expected to live for five years or more—are worse than in most comparable countries and have not improved in 40 years. What assurances can the Minister give that the NHS will continue to work to improve results in all forms of cancer and that pancreatic cancer sufferers will not just be written off as a lost cause?
Baroness Northover
Pancreatic cancer is an extremely difficult cancer to diagnose. As the noble Lord knows, when it is picked up it is often very advanced and survival rates are very poor indeed. The Government are well aware of the problems here. My honourable friend Paul Burstow in the other place is meeting Pancreatic Cancer UK shortly. I hope that the noble Lord will feed into that. If he has an association with that organisation, can he put his questions to it so that they can be fed to Paul Burstow, or alternatively to me?