National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Shipley

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 14th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde)]

My Lords, on Report, I committed that the Government would bring forward an amendment adding to Clause 6. I have listened to the points raised by noble Lords. The noble Baronesses, Lady Barker, Lady Scott and Lady Royall, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, have, over the course of these debates, made the point eloquently that we must do all we can to ensure that the NCS is accessible to disabled people.

The Government have put this amendment forward so that Parliament may see clearly, on a year-to-year basis, how the trust is performing in this area. The only way the trust will be able to report positively on the number of participants with a disability will be to work proactively with its provider base. I thank noble Lords for the worthwhile debate on this matter, and for making valid observations throughout. I hope that the House will support the amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for this amendment, which, as he said, has been brought forward following discussion in Committee and on Report. The amendment is reassuring in that the Government and the NCS Trust will formally acknowledge the importance of equal access to NCS projects for young people with a disability. We look forward to seeing the guidance that will be given to those running projects. I hope the Minister has taken on board the concerns expressed at previous stages of the Bill that, when reporting on the numbers of disabled young people participating in the scheme, it will be necessary to have a breakdown by type of impairment, because disabled young people are a very diverse population.

Secondly, I still have some concerns about funding. The Government have previously suggested that the current funding system would be maintained where funding for meeting additional needs is paid out on a discretionary basis. I hope the Minister will think further about creating a more transparent system so that it can be scrutinised to ensure that the sums are sufficient.

I thank the Minister for meeting us and listening very carefully to the arguments made at previous stages of the Bill. I fully support this government amendment.

National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Shipley

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

I do not think it is appropriate to do that on Report. The purpose of the amendments and of putting these things in the royal charter is so that it is absolutely clear what the duty is, so that the members of board of the NCS Trust are very clear about what their duty is. They have to have policies and procedures to make sure. I cannot guarantee it, but I imagine there will be a complaints procedure as well, but I will have to confirm that, so I will write to the noble Baroness and circulate the letter.

[Lord Shipley]

I thank the Minister for his assurances about reporting and look forward to discussing it further and seeing the amendment when we reach Third Reading. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Shipley

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 16th November 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to debate on this important part of the Bill.

I start by addressing the question of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, in the previous group, and the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, about refugees. The Bill is clear: you are eligible for a place on the programme if you are resident in England or receive education or training there. That brings me to refugees, who are welcome on the NCS. Guidance has been circulated among charities on making NCS available to them.

I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott, Lady Barker and Lady Royall, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who have spoken about an aim that is at the heart of the NCS: that it must be accessible to all. If it is not, it is simply not NCS. It must be available to any young person who wants a place. The royal charter stipulates that the trust must ensure “equality of access” to the programme: that is a clear requirement that can never be watered down. The NCS Trust will need to take all reasonable steps to meet that obligation and to report every year on the extent to which participants from different backgrounds have taken part. This means demonstrating that individuals from varying circumstances have come together in NCS groups, and I commit to noble Lords that this will include individuals with disabilities. NCS is a universal offer, and the trust must report on how it has made this a reality. I confirm, therefore, that we want to ensure that there is a place on National Citizen Service for every young person who wants one. We are currently working closely with the NCS Trust to ensure that it is fully accessible. The trust is currently developing a detailed inclusion strategy to ensure that over the longer term there is consistent and high quality for all.

Already, many NCS providers reach out and offer support to those with disabilities. For example, the largest provider, The Challenge, has worked with the National Deaf Children’s Society and adapted the programme for young people, including providing dedicated support workers. Across NCS, young people with special educational needs have personal coaches and one-to-one support workers alongside staff members. That brings us to the question of resources. It is the trust’s job to ensure that providers can make the programme accessible to all young people. Providers can work with the trust to access more resource. The Bill puts the requirement to make NCS accessible to all firmly in the charter.

The Government mean to take seriously their duty to hold the trust to account for meeting these requirements. If they do not, they have Parliament to answer to. The Government must provide the trust with the means of fulfilling its legal duty on this point: sufficient funding to allow people with disabilities to take part. That is why the Bill also enables the trust to deliver the programme to individuals as young as 15 and as old as 24. While the core demographic for NCS is 16 to 17 year-olds, this ensures that providers can be flexible for those with additional needs, such as people with disabilities. Clause 3 provides for the Government to fund the NCS Trust. The grant agreements drawn up between the trust and the Government will specify particular requirements on an evolving basis. We can assure the Committee that the trust will continue to work flexibly to provide any reasonable additional resource or support that a provider may require to deliver the programme.

Turning to reporting, the Bill requires the trust to report on how far it has met its strategic priorities, including the requirement to ensure that the programme is accessible to people of all backgrounds. There is an additional specific requirement to report on the extent to which people from different backgrounds have worked together. We have not listed all the specific categories we intend to cover, but people with disabilities is one of them. If we mention one category, we should list all of them, and that is unnecessary detail for the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, mentioned the Equality Act. They are right that the Bill will make the NCS Trust subject to the Act. It includes far-reaching duties to consider the need to advance equality of opportunity between people with a protected characteristic and persons without that characteristic, which of course includes disability.

I note that both noble Lords expressed worries about the limitations of the Act, and of course I will go back and look carefully at what they said, but that is in addition to what I said before about it being available to all, which is in the charter.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, would add to the functions of the trust to foster social integration and have special provision for the hardest-to-reach groups. The more complete list of the trust’s functions is included in the royal charter. These include an objective,

“to promote social cohesion by ensuring equality of access to the programmes by participants regardless of their background or circumstances”.

I hope that the noble Lord agrees that that covers both those points. To ensure equality of access, those with additional needs will in some cases require special provision.

His other amendment would change the requirement to enable participants from “different” backgrounds to work together to participants from “all” backgrounds. I think in this clause “different” backgrounds carries the stronger meaning. Although we want the programme as a whole to cater to all backgrounds, in each individual group we want a mix of different backgrounds.

The noble Lord asked how we expect the NCS programme successfully to achieve that in future and how successfully it brings people from different backgrounds together. Last year, 17% of summer participants were eligible for free school meals, compared with 8% of young people of the same age in the general population; and 30% were from black, mixed, or Asian backgrounds, compared with 19% of the general population. We think that the NCS Trust is doing quite well at the moment, but we certainly expect it to continue with plans in that area.

[Lord Shipley]

Perhaps the Minister could clarify the point about equality of access being an objective of the Bill. It clearly is, but the draft royal charter which accompanies the Bill makes no specific reference to young people with disabilities, which is the objective of my Amendments 18 and 26. Article 3.4.a refers to an objective of the trust as ensuring equality of access regardless of background or circumstances, and that can indeed be interpreted as including young people with disabilities, among many, but the amendments strengthen the accountability of the NCS Trust in this respect.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The charter says that the programme is available to all regardless of background, and “all” obviously includes people with disabilities.

Local Democracy in the United Kingdom

Debate between Lord Ashton of Hyde and Lord Shipley

Thursday 28th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, first I declare my vice-presidency of the Local Government Association, and perhaps I may thank in advance those who are taking part in the debate and say that I am looking forward particularly to hearing the three maiden speeches. My purpose today is to enable us to discuss local democracy, its condition and its importance. I hope that we will be able to assess what is happening to it in practice and what we can do to enhance it.

I am becoming increasingly concerned that under the guise of devolution, be it devolution to the nations or devolution within England, we are actually seeing a creeping centralisation which is disempowering people and their elected representatives at a local level. I was struck while reading the Scottish edition of the Times on Monday that there is a row taking place in Scotland between the Scottish Finance Secretary and the Scottish local authorities over who is responsible for deciding levels of council tax across Scotland. The president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities said that the financial constraints imposed by the freezing of council tax required by the Scottish Government were,

“an affront to local democracy”.

This difference of opinion is but one aspect of the difficulty we face right across the UK. Who is in charge of making decisions, not least decisions on levels of taxation? This is a pressing issue which I will return to at the end of my speech.

Two weeks ago, this House passed the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill. It is a welcome Act because it enables decentralisation and devolution from Whitehall and Westminster to take place in England. It could herald a significant shift in power, but it will succeed only if it is used as a means of encouraging greater public participation. A few years ago, shortly after the Prime Minister announced the arrival of the big society, I attended a seminar on the thinking behind it in the Cabinet Office. On the face of it, the big society is a good thing. If it engages more people in more activities in the voluntary and the third sector, and across public life, that must be welcomed.

In the course of this seminar, I was surprised to hear from a senior civil servant that the future was all about little platoons. Power would be devolved from government, be it national or local government, to groups of people who would have responsibilities for given areas of policy and its implementation at a local level. Hence, in health, education and local enterprise partnerships, for example, power would reside with small groups of people who would derive their ultimate authority from Whitehall.

The concept of the little platoon comes from Edmund Burke, who said that,

“to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind”.

But, of course, for Edmund Burke, the little platoons reflected one social group, not something that could be joined. Burke’s concept, updated to reflect today’s civil society, has led to lots of little platoons being created. It is time we assessed the policy more closely in the context of what is happening to local government and its elected members whose powers are gradually being eroded.

At the seminar I attended on the big society, I questioned what would happen when these little platoons bumped into each other, which inevitably they would. I recall this causing much merriment. I found myself wondering who would provide the necessary strategic leadership, the co-ordination, the review and the scrutiny of all these independent bodies—and, in truth, I am still wondering. A platoon is normally composed of between 15 and 30 people. In contrast to many elected bodies, that is not many, but at least it has the advantage of being more than a single person—which takes me to the rise of the commissioner.

I want to look first at schools. The last five years have seen a dramatic change in the schools system, with the creation of academies and free schools. Some of it has been an improvement, some of it has not. The DfE has confirmed that of the 20 biggest academy chains, only three perform above the national average when assessed using added value. On the other hand, almost half of councils perform above the national average. Because of that, some 16 months ago the Government appointed eight regional schools commissioners in England to hold academies to account. But their remit is too widely spread geographically and their role is not understood by the general public. Commissioners handle only academic standards of course and not matters of strategic planning, finance and safeguarding. Nevertheless, they are very important.

Last Saturday, I noted in my local morning paper, the Journal, an article with the headline, “The most powerful schools chief you may never have heard of”. The article explained how a single person was accountable for decisions affecting 257 secondary and primary academies in the north-east of England and Cumbria. Since the Government’s desire is that many more schools should become academies, this could mean that a single person will end up with a huge degree of power over local educational provision.

Where does this leave local education authorities? The answer is that they are becoming an endangered species. To whom is a commissioner accountable? Certainly not to parents, since PTA UK, the body representing parent-teacher associations, complained to the House of Commons Education Select Committee recently that just 10% of parents knew about regional schools commissioners, who are formally, of course, civil servants responsible directly to Whitehall.

Further, the responsibilities of regional schools commissioners were expanded a few months ago to include responsibility for assessing and improving the conversion of underperforming maintained schools into academies and deciding on their sponsors. In this, they are advised by a head teacher board of between six and eight people—in practice, a little platoon. Of those six or eight people, four are elected by academy heads. However, once those elections have been held, the regional schools commissioner has the power to appoint replacements on behalf of the Secretary of State and no further elections are required. In addition, these regional schools commissioners will have a performance measure for their own performance on how many schools they convert to academies. As an example of a centralising structure with inadequate local accountability and power residing in Whitehall, this is hard to better.

We should be grateful to the chair of the Education Select Committee in the other place, Neil Carmichael, who said in a report on regional schools commissioners published last week that regional schools commissioners,

“are a product of the department’s ‘acting first, thinking later’ approach”,

and that the DfE needs to establish “a more coherent system” and “proper accountability for schools”. I agree. It is to the council that parents go when there are issues that they wish to raise. Councils are the elected local bodies and they have a responsibility for educational standards. Why, given their good record, are they being denied the power to do so in the case of academies?

I move next to police and crime commissioners, which are another example of acting first and thinking afterwards. Because it was rushed legislation, abolishing police authorities in the process, the general public did not understand what problem they were supposed to solve at the ballot box. The consequence was a 15% turnout—hardly a democratic mandate for those who topped the poll. Following the passage of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill, we will now face, before long, elections for mayors of combined authorities. Those who top the poll will have a democratic mandate in the sense that they will be elected, but I worry about turnout levels. Unless national and local government act to explain to the general public what is happening and why it matters, I fear a low turnout for these posts as well. That would not be good for local democracy, when those elected will have enormous powers over such matters as economic development and regeneration, transport, strategic planning and housing, policing, fire and rescue, and aspects of health and social care—all this without anything like the scrutiny system provided in London by the GLA.

With colleagues, I suggested in Committee on the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill that we should elect members of the combined authorities by proportional representation. This was not supported generally in your Lordships’ House, but I still feel that we may need to revisit this matter before too long. Combined authorities will have huge powers, and they will need to engage with and be accountable to the general public. I doubt that the general public will put up with less.

During the passage of the Bill, I explained my concerns about the creation of one-party states, in which a first past the post electoral system denies plurality in representation. Council leaders, members of the combined authority and an elected mayor could all be members of the same political party, with every possibility that they will have absolute power on substantially less than 50% of the vote. I do not think that this is healthy for democratic accountability. I wonder why it is that we are so reluctant in England to learn from the Scottish experience, where proportional representation has been in existence for local elections for many years. For that matter, can we not learn from Scotland of the advantages of votes at 16, which has had a dramatic effect on the general engagement of young people in politics?

I am grateful to the House of Lords Library for its briefing for this debate, and for the inclusion in it of the Hansard Society’s 2015 Audit of Political Engagement. It is instructive reading. We learn from it that just 20% of people say that they feel at least some influence over local decision-making. This figure has declined six percentage points in the last year. It is possible that it is a statistical blip, but I suspect that it may not be; and anyway, we cannot disregard the fact that it is the lowest level recorded in the audit series.

There are similar concerns about the declining numbers registered to vote and whether people feel certain that they would vote at an election, even if registered. But it is the first one which, in a local context, gives cause for concern. It is incumbent on us to do more to engage people with voting. They need to feel that their vote could make a difference. So what can we do? Proportional representation would help, because it would make every vote equally important and avoid the low turnout caused by safe seats. It would limit the emergence of a one-party state. Devolving more powers over taxation would help. When I see reducing government contributions to council spending and reduced allocations by other departments—for example, culture and transport—I think that we have to empower local government to devise other means of raising income beyond the conventional council tax and business rates. A further devolution, closer to neighbourhoods, would help. Such devolution is currently weak, in the sense that not all areas have parish or town councils, and some of those that do could benefit from enhanced powers. Neighbourhood planning may be well developed in some areas but is not in enough places.

I mentioned earlier the discussion in Scotland about who controls the level of council tax. I am grateful to the Library brief for reminding us that in March 2015 the then Secretary of State in DCLG, in reviewing DCLG achievements since 2010, said:

“The Labour Government increased taxes by stealth, forcing councils to hike council tax and charges. We have stood up for hard-working people”.

We may be forgiven a wry smile about that, as it becomes increasingly clear that while the central government grant will be held down over the life of this Parliament, the expectation is that council tax will rise significantly to meet the rise in bills, perhaps by as much as 20% or even more.

I conclude from all of this that we urgently need a constitutional convention on local democracy. It could look at the implementation of the Localism Act and assess what is missing. It could include the centralising tendency in local government itself to concentrate power in the hands of a few leading councillors, rather than to spread it through committee structures and thus involve a broader range of people. But it needs to go further. It needs to address the critical questions around who is responsible for what and in terms that the general public can engage with. For that reason, the convention proposal matters. It could look at all aspects of local funding as well—the level of resources, including the equalisation of resources in the face of 100% devolution of business rates, which may benefit some areas to the detriment of others. Inevitably, it will need to look at structures, not least because of the new tier being introduced through combined authorities.

In conclusion, the Government need to think very carefully now about how to move ahead. It is one thing to devolve in principle through legislation but another to get Whitehall joined up at a local level. That of course is why local democracy matters. I am confident that local government is up for the challenge. A convention would move us to the next stage. The work of the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, in his enquiry into devolution for the whole UK will be highly relevant.

I look forward to hearing all the other contributions to this debate, either on matters I have raised or on the many related matters. I thank those contributors again for their participation. I beg to move.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde (Con)]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords that we have no spare time. If noble Lords go over their time limit, we will eat into the Minister’s reply.