Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change

Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York for his powerful and thought-provoking opening remarks. With any Motion this broad, there are multiple angles to discuss, and I agree with many of the points already raised. From individual families to local charities, many bodies in society deserve credit for binding communities together, but one essential group has been largely overlooked: the business community.

In a few weeks, many of us will be heading out of London for Christmas. I will be returning to Barwick-in-Elmet, a village on the outskirts of Leeds, less than 20 miles from York Minster. If one considers a village such as Barwick as a microcosm of the country at large, it is easy to see the importance of local businesses to community life. With its three pubs, two grocery stores, a fish and chip shop, a pizzeria, a café, a hairdresser and even a bike repair business, it is a hive of entrepreneurship. In contrast, other villages nearby do not contain any businesses supporting the immediate local community and feel like soulless commutervilles as a result.

Why are these businesses important? All too often, we forget the invaluable role that local businesspeople play in these communities—the corner shop owner who checks in on your elderly parents and notices when they do not pop in for their regular Saturday newspaper or midweek pint of milk, or the publican who throws regular social events to bring the local community together, which help alleviate the loneliness of people living alone. Understanding the role that businesses play in local communities is therefore an essential component to properly understanding how to promote social cohesion. This observation is not limited to villages. As villages grow into towns, and towns grow into cities, the important link between economic change and social cohesion becomes even more paramount.

We can tell a lot about the economic fortunes of an area from its architecture. I was in Liverpool in September for the Labour Party conference—and, yes, my attendance did raise a few eyebrows. I used the opportunity to revisit both the city’s cathedrals, and it struck me that both buildings very much track the prosperity of that great city through the 20th century.

Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral represents a desire by Victorian and Edwardian grandees to build the largest cathedral in the country, with the largest pipe organ to boot, whereas Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral had similar ambitions—to be the second-largest church in the world, with the largest dome—but had to be scaled back to a more modest, modern structure when Britain’s financial difficulties after the war became very apparent. You can see similar juxtapositions across towns and cities in the north of England: impressive Victorian town halls standing alongside more modest buildings as areas became less affluent. What application does this story of transition have for building strong community life?

First, let us examine a more recent economic transition. In the 1980s, the Government of the late noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, moved away from the previous model for funding Britain’s coal industry, where high state subsidies kept the sector afloat. Privatisation had many merits, but the process had a devastating impact on the communities involved, and the way the transition was handled has been a source of regret for the architects of those changes. For example, in 2009 the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, wrote the following, which is worth quoting at length:

“Those mining communities had good working-class values and a sense of family values … Many of these communities were completely devastated … The scale of the closures went too far. The damage done to those communities was enormous”.


In this one example we can see how rapid economic change, while potentially necessary on a macro level, can have dramatic negative impacts on a local level. The key is to properly manage the transition. For this specific sector, I draw your Lordships’ attention to the Coalfields Regeneration Trust, which has done tremendous work supporting the towns and villages affected by the pit closures.

I now turn to the present day. Our society is facing two profound economic changes. The first—much discussed in this House, including in my noble friend Lord Sharma’s passionate maiden speech—is the transition to a net-zero economy. The second, very much underdiscussed, is advances in automation and AI.

At this year’s TUC Congress in Brighton—one I did not attend, sadly—it was notable that both the GMB and Unite unions raised strong concerns about the net-zero transition on the grounds that there are not as yet equally skilled and equivalently paid jobs for workers in the oil and gas sector to transition to. They described the Government’s proposals for North Sea production and the extending of the energy profits levy as “premature and irresponsible”, and their position was summarised in the pithy slogan, “No ban without a plan”. Rather than merely considering the net-zero transition on a national level, we therefore need to have a much more honest conversation about the impact of this transition on individuals, families and communities on a local level.

This transition will affect not only Scotland. We are already seeing the effect in Wales, where Port Talbot saw the loss of 2,800 jobs this year, and in communities right across the country, often in areas that are already poorer than average. We therefore need to factor in these societal consequences when we discuss the net-zero transition.

We also need to consider the effect that automation and AI will have on the economy and our society. At the UK’s AI Safety Summit in 2023, Elon Musk predicted:

“There will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to … for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything”.


A recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research suggested that without adequate management, the AI transition could result in 8 million job losses and no benefit to GDP. Its best-case scenario, though, was no job losses and a 13% boost to GDP.

I am confident that we can ensure the best-case scenario occurs, but the transition will require careful thought and proper planning—otherwise, the impact on community life will indeed be grim. More broadly, we need to do more to properly acknowledge the positive role that the business community plays in creating prosperity and engendering social cohesion. After all, economic transition is one of the biggest changes facing the country.

Strong, supportive communities are immensely important to us all, but unless we properly acknowledge the crucial role of the business community in our society, we will be ignoring the essential glue that binds us together—the businesses that pay our wages, pay tax to fund our public services and train people and offer them a ladder of opportunity. That is why we must always remember that successful societies require successful businesses.

Public Sector Productivity

Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for securing this ever-topical debate ahead of the Budget. Public sector productivity has long been a special interest of mine. I published my first book on that topic back in 2006, and I am pleased to say it can still be bought second-hand on Amazon for a very modest £3.29.

Being interested in this subject, I was pleased to hear the Chancellor announce in the public spending statement in July that she would launch a drive to boost public sector productivity. This is not a novel idea. ln the 2000s, we had the Gershon efficiency review; in the 2010s, my noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton launched the productivity plan; and last year the previous Government announced plans to save billions of pounds through greater use of data and AI. Public sector productivity is, therefore, a perennial issue, which Governments of all stripes have tried, and largely failed, to improve in recent decades.

Because time is limited, I will focus my remarks on one specific area: the impact of compressed hours and a four-day working week on public sector productivity. In recent months, we have heard Ministers mention four-day working weeks as part of the broader debate around flexible working. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, stated that

“flexible working is actually good for productivity”,

including the kind of flexible working that involves compressed hours.

I think we can all agree that, if a four-day working week were demonstrated to improve efficiency across the public sector and save taxpayers money, we should all support it, but the evidence for this is thin. Take, for example, South Cambridgeshire District Council, whose flagship trial of a four-day working week concluded earlier this year. The original report analysing the trial suggested that 22 of 24 key performance indicators had either improved or remained the same and that cost savings had been achieved by having to recruit fewer agency workers. This all sounded very encouraging. However, when the correspondence between the council and the consultancy evaluating the scheme was released following a freedom of information request, a very different picture emerged. It suggested that senior council officials had edited the review of the scheme to make it sound more positive. For example, a section that detailed how over half of employees had struggled to access council offices during this period was deleted, and the actual cost savings were significantly less than the ones published.

Equally, there is no evidence from the private sector to suggest that a four-day working week can help to improve productivity. Bigger businesses—the ones most organisationally comparable to government departments and local authorities—are certainly not rushing to embrace compressed hours or the four-day working week. If these changes were so beneficial to productivity, surely businesses, driven by profit maximisation and shareholder value, would have seen the light and taken this up for their employees. If we are to proceed further down this route of compressed hours and a four-day working week, we must have more concrete evidence that they will improve productivity.

I look forward to hearing the concluding remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds. Having been born and brought up in Gledhow, an area of Leeds that I know is close to her heart, I know first hand from my regular visits there—still—that, under her leadership, she ran an efficient and effective council. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain the evidence on which the Government are basing their assumptions that compressed hours or a four-day working week would lead to greater public sector productivity. If there is no evidence base, why are the Government encouraging this course of action? I hope we can all agree that improving public sector productivity and ensuring that taxpayers get good value for money should be at the forefront of our minds when considering this important question.