Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Bird Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Democracy, the rule of law, freedom, individual worth and respect for the environment —I can honestly say that I was not born into that world, I did not live in that world, and it took me a long time to get into that world. I would like your Lordships to imagine a boy who is in a prison cell at the age of 14. He is offered dinner. He does not want it. He is given the dinner but, instead of eating it, he puts it on the door so that it falls all over the next person to come in—a police officer or somebody else who has been charged. That person was a person who was outside democracy. That person was a person who was outside the rule of law. That person was all sorts of things.

We are coming at this the wrong way. We are talking about education. Education is a great changer, but we have another problem. The same boy goes to school at the age of five, and his Irish mother says to him, “Get in there and behave yourself”—not “Get in there and learn things”, not “Get in there and become a different person”, not “Get in there and get away from the poverty that you were born into”. He is the same boy as me. I was blessed, as I keep telling everybody, by the restorative justice of a prison system that looked after young people and give them the chance to earn and learn and get educated while they were banged up because they missed it when they were in civilian life.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, makes the point about populism. We all are worried about populism. People stir it up, but populism largely comes from economic indecision and economic fear. It comes through the loss of jobs, the growth of a powerful China where all the jobs were exported from America —creating a situation where people did not know where the next loaf of bread was coming from. Unless this House and that House wake up to the dominance of poverty in everything, we are not going anywhere. Unfortunately, we now have a Government who follow the same lines as the previous scattergun Government, who talked about ending poverty but never did it in a convergent way that could make poverty history.

King’s Speech

Lord Bird Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I welcome the new Government. It is a great relief, I have to say. We all need a change, and we hope the change will lead to the kind of delivery that we need socially in this country.

But I have a problem. My problem is that over the years I have dealt with many Governments who have come in with many promises, and most of them leave not as new brooms but as old brooms. Therefore, I worry and will really engage in trying to guide the new Government into doing things that people do not normally do when there is a crisis.

In 1940 we had a crisis. We did not know whether Great Britain was going to survive, but at that very moment in the beginning and the middle of the crisis, Beveridge was dug out of retirement and laid the foundations for the 1942 report that led to the creation of the welfare state in 1948. While we were in a crisis, we did not just work on the basis of responding to the crisis.

There is a crisis around children. We know that many children are in poverty and are inheriting poverty from their family. There is the crisis of our prisons. On Monday this week the Guardian announced this enormous crisis in prisons, and the new Government did not know it was going to be so bad. I do not blame them, but that crisis in the prisons is largely because 90% of those people in prisons failed at school and 90% of them inherited poverty. So when are we going to address poverty? When will we move away from a situation in which the NHS spends 50% of its money on people suffering from food poverty? When will we stop leaving police officers to sort out poverty, because they largely deal with people who come from poverty? When will we move away from teachers having to cope with poverty? All we are doing is weighing down government departments that have no skills or ability to tackle poverty.

I do not think anybody in government really knows. It is not just this Government; it is the previous Government and the Government before. They do not know because they do not converge their energies around poverty. They do not concatenate and bring together. Eight government departments deal with poverty. That is why the NHS, the DWP and the Prison Service all suffer from the weight of poverty which they are not trained to address. If you go to a doctor and say, “I’m very ill”, the doctor is not going to say, “You’re suffering from poverty, so I’m going to get you out of poverty”. That is not the doctor’s job. I hope that the Government will look carefully at my Private Member’s Bill, which is about a ministry of poverty prevention. Let us bring together all the examples of people who have broken through poverty and the government departments that actually do some interesting work. Let us have an audit of what works. Let us have a government department that will help us dismantle poverty in the same way as in 1940 we said, “We are in the middle of a crisis, but we are not going to simply keep dealing with the effects. We are not going to deal with the crisis continuously; we are going to try to turn the tap off”. In my opinion, that is the best thing that this Government could do. It may mean standing back and saying, “We’re not quite sure what to do”, but that is not a bad place to be because then they can start to create the thinking that will bring about change.

Ethnicity Pay Gap

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend is right: there are particular groups that have not only a larger ethnicity pay gap but a larger employment gap than other communities. The Government have worked with specific communities. My noble friend raised the Afro-Caribbean communities but there are also, for example, significant barriers to employment and pay differentials for Bangladeshi women. The Government have a number of programmes to address those.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

While we are at it, can we congratulate PwC for taking people from prison? I think that is a great sign. We must remember that people from ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the prison population.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Of course. I welcome all employers, including PwC, working with those who have been in the criminal justice system and in prison.

Schools: Food Standards

Lord Bird Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As I think I have tried to say in response to earlier questions, the school food standards are part of a much wider picture of what impacts on childhood obesity, which I agree is at very worrying levels. This Government have introduced universal infant free school meals, we have robust school food standards that are set in legislation, and we have made a number of other moves to make sure that children get a healthy diet and are educated in a way to understand what that is.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Are we aware that one of the reasons why children eat a lot of sugar is that their parents do? There is inherited bad performance when it comes to food and your social position. When will the Government get behind my Bill, which would create a ministry of poverty prevention so that these things can be dealt with? We cannot just keep expecting people suddenly to wake up to the fact that sugar is not good for them. Until we hit poverty, we are not going anywhere.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have a strong record in this area, with changes to the eligibility for free school meals for families in receipt of universal credit. I hear the strength of the noble Lord’s feelings, but, as he will have just heard in the King’s Speech, I am afraid the direct answer to his question about when the Government will support his proposal is that it will not be in the near term.

Cultural Education Plan

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, would the Government agree with me when I say—

[Noble Lords]

Order!

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I do not understand.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, let me explain to the noble Lord. Again, could the noble Lords in question come to a gentlemen’s agreement on who speaks first?

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Do the Government agree with me that one of the best ways of emptying our prisons is by investing in our youngsters who go wrong and using art and culture to bring about social transformation in their lives? I am a living embodiment of that: if it was not for culture in my early years, I would not be here.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord speaks with great authority on this. I absolutely agree with him that art and culture, as well as other extracurricular activities such as sport and other opportunities, are critical for young people at risk of offending or in prison.

Prison: Support for Dependent Children

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As the noble Baroness understands very well, on one level we know the impact of separation, which is a very traumatic event, particularly for the child. We also know that separation is likely to be associated with a number of other very serious traumas for a child, including maternal mental health issues and substance misuse. We look at addressing those in the round, which is why we are working on a fundamental reform of children’s social care, to make sure that these children get the support they deserve.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Can we also look at the fact that 68% of children whose parents go to prison end up in prison themselves later on? Where is the prevention? We really need to prevent it happening again in 10 or 20 years.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Of course, we need to focus on supporting those children and trying to mitigate some of the terrible scarring effects of the trauma that they will have suffered. That is why there is an increasing focus on early help and making sure that we get consistency in that help. That is what we will be testing in the pathfinder projects, which we will launch shortly, following our review of children’s social care.

Child Hunger in Schools

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Since day 1, the Government have been clear that our absolute priority is levelling up opportunity across the country, including, of course and importantly, in the north-east. I understand the noble Baroness’s concerns, which are shared by my ministerial colleagues. But I point her to the £12 billion in direct support that we are targeting to the most vulnerable families in 2023-24.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

The point that more people now have school dinners is actually wrong because, when I was a young boy in the 1950s and 1960s, we had free school dinners, olive oil capsules and milk—all the things that children need now. So could the Minister consider going back to those old days?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord reminds a number of us of our schooldays, although I cannot remember the olive oil capsules—anyway, they sound very healthy. More seriously, the Government are thinking about this, not only in term time but in the holidays with our holiday activities and food programme, making sure that the children who need it most get the support that they need.

Family: Protective Effect

Lord Bird Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

More than 150,000 children live in kinship care, so the noble Baroness raises an incredibly important point. The Government recognise the need to support kinship carers more, and we have made early progress. We have invested £2 million to develop 100 kinship peer support groups for kinship carers; this summer, we set up the first dedicated policy team in the department focused on kinship care; and obviously, we will be responding to Josh MacAlister’s recommendations on that point.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Will the Government be looking at the full costs of knocking £50 billion out of the social economy when we move into this period of austerity? Removing £50 billion could well cause hundreds of billions of pounds-worth of damage, especially to our families.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord raises a much broader point. Bringing it back to the review, the Government are very excited about and look forward to the second stage of the Children’s Commissioner’s review on the protective effect that families can offer.

Education: Philosophy

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right that philosophy is not on the national curriculum, but citizenship is. It equips pupils with exactly the skills she sets out—namely, to research and interrogate evidence, to debate and evaluate viewpoints, to present reasoned arguments and to take informed action.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Does the Minister agree with the work of the Philosophy Foundation, which is already working in our prisons and schools to sharpen people’s thinking? We are lost if our children do not know how to think correctly.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not familiar with the work of the Philosophy Foundation, but I absolutely welcome all those charities working in our prisons and our schools to support our children.

Schools: Creative Subjects and the English Baccalaureate

Lord Bird Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We very much welcome the partnerships from the independent sector in music and many other areas, and my noble friend is right to highlight them. However, we also have a responsibility and an ambition to make sure that our children have a strong music education, which is why we will be publishing our updated national plan shortly.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

Does the Minister agree that, if we are to create a world of resilient workers in the next generation, we need to look at how we create these people through a resilient education system? We are in a bigger crisis than we believe. We need to reinvent a holistic form of education, because that is how the world’s businesses are going.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord raises a large, broad and important issue. Of course we need a resilient education system and resilient children, and in the announcements in our schools White Paper and the special educational needs and disability Green Paper published this morning, we have set out exactly how we plan to do that.