Syria: Refugees
Debate between Lord Elton and Baroness Verma(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, this House has been frequently reminded that the established camps in the area are not regarded as safe places for Christians. Consequently, the Government’s efficient help, financial support and so on for the established camps is leaving the Christian community from several countries uncatered for. What steps are the Government taking to address this problem through the voluntary sector? What support are they giving there and what quotas are they providing for the admission of these most unfortunate fellow sufferers?
Baroness Verma
My Lords, my noble friend raises a very important and concerning issue. However, we work with local partners and faith communities on the ground and we provide support to people regardless of their religious background or ethnicity. We just need to focus on the most vulnerable; that is where we must target our support. However, this issue has come to me on a number of occasions and I have asked noble Lords to engage with us to see how we can better reach those vulnerable communities.
Electricity Generation
Debate between Lord Elton and Baroness Verma
Baroness Verma
We have enough capacity here. As the noble Lord is fully aware, Ofgem has worked very hard to ensure that the balanced reserves are in absolutely the right place. Yes, our margins have tightened somewhat, but that is not unusual; it has happened in the past. We currently have four gigawatts of interconnection. We are looking, through the least regret scenario, to introduce another five gigawatts of interconnection. Noble Lords should be reassured that this Government are taking that very seriously.
Nuclear Management Partners
Debate between Lord Elton and Baroness Verma
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I absolutely agree with my noble friend. I assure him that the Energy Act 2004 requires the NDA to consider those very impacts on communities that live nearby. On the example of Sellafield raised by my noble friend, more than 10,000 local people are employed by Sellafield Ltd and there is more than £1 billion of spend. According to the 2011 figures, one-third of that was on local businesses and the supply chain in west Cumbria.
Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, the letting and continuation of contracts is a highly sophisticated operation, which can have a huge effect on the amount of money needed to run an operation. Where does the Minister’s department get the skills to do this?
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I remind my noble friend that the skills in the department and the skills that we bring in from outside are hugely specialised in this area. We are gifted with having some of the greatest minds in the nuclear sector within this country, and we should be very proud of that. We have an absolutely fabulous regulator, which is seen in the world as one of the best. So I do not want to undermine the great skills that we have, but we draw on skills from outside the sector, too.
Transparency
Debate between Lord Elton and Baroness Verma(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Elton
My Lords, I beg leave to move the Motion standing in my name. I have to point out to your receding Lordships that, had things been different on Tuesday, I would now be moving a Motion for Papers and nobody outside this Chamber would have had any idea what on earth I meant. Now, following acceptance of Proposal 8 of the Leader’s Group on working practices, I am simply drawing your Lordships’ attention to something, and the rest of the world can understand what we are doing. Your Lordships are therefore already taking part in a miniscule footnote to a small sub-paragraph of history: a micromove in the direction of transparency; a tiny part of a much larger tide. Incidentally, the very next day, the House agreed the proposal from the Privileges and Conduct Committee to amend the code so as to remind Members that its underlying purpose is to provide openness and accountability.
Openness and accountability are not the same, and neither on its own produces the other. In an admirable report to the Cabinet Office on privacy and transparency, Kieron O’Hara points out that the,
“transparency philosophy contains two separate and independent agendas”.
He calls them,
“the accountability agenda … and the information agenda”.
The first, the accountability agenda, is gradually providing the means by which formal internal systems of maintaining accountability are supplemented by informal external means. This means that, as well as Permanent Secretaries breathing down the necks of Deputy Secretaries, the public are increasingly looking over the shoulders of both. The language in both cases is strictly figurative.
The wealth of information now available to the public —by the “public”, I mean principally the electorate—makes them increasingly able to judge the performance not only of the government machine but of Ministers who are driving it. So the coalition Government’s early commitment to what I regard as a breathtaking acceleration in the move towards transparency and openness in government was courageous. It was consciously courageous. They said:
“The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account”.
They claimed that, by so doing, they would also secure,
“significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites”.
The economic benefits of this appear to be part of the second O’Hara agenda. I shall allow that to distract me from the intricate, fascinating and sometimes opaque subject of central government transparency to which I am sure my noble friend will do ample justice in her reply. Some of us were a bit doubtful whether what emerged from the mill of transparency would lend itself readily to the sort of process, or have the sort of effect, that the Government expected. Sceptics remained doubtful when, at the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference a year ago, my noble friend Lady Hanham said that,
“releasing the data in its rawest state”—
your Lordships should note “rawest state”—
“will enable businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites which will make the data easier to understand”.
Did not the Treasury have to hold seminars for financial journalists on how to understand and interpret COINS before and after the publication of those data? Government, it seemed, was to produce data much as a mill produces flour—it would be for others to turn it into bread and cake.
We waited—really not very long at all—and they did. What is more, they made them easier to use as well as easier to understand. To take a small example: the Department for Transport’s parking database was not citizen-friendly material when it was published, but, today, if you put Transport Direct into your web search engine, you can find the nearest car park wherever you are on this island. That is useful not just if you are a holidaymaker; it saves time and therefore money if you are a retailer trying to find somewhere where customers arriving by car can park and get to your shop and spend money there. The same website has brought in data from other sources, both public and private, with a view to making it a tool to plan every aspect of a journey by road or rail, by public or private transport.
That example is outside the accountability agenda, so let me turn to one that falls within it. I quote the Prime Minister, who wrote in the Telegraph on 7 July that,
“five years ago, it was made far easier for the public to access, understand and use data on survival rates following heart surgery. And guess what happened? Those survival rates rose dramatically”.
In that case, transparency easily outperformed formal internal systems of maintaining accountability. Death rates for some procedures fell by 20 per cent or more. That is a figure to remember. The NHS extended publication of outcomes as a result to more areas of surgery and, today, it estimates that we avoid 1,000 deaths every year by doing so and acting on it. Opening the professionals up to the public also opens them up to each other. In any trade or profession, this identifies best practice and spurs emulation. Spread across the medical disciplines alone, results such as this can bring enormous benefits not only to patients but to the Exchequer and, eventually, to our own pockets and purses. Spread across the whole spectrum, not just of central and local government activity but across amenable private enterprises as well, they may well achieve the savings and the growth, predicted at £90 billion by some, expected of them.
Transparency can be a double-edged weapon. The protection of confidentiality disappears as completely as a net curtain disappears when the light is turned on in the room behind it. However, confidentiality is often both desirable and necessary. The patient who wants to know why his operation went wrong and who would benefit enormously if the outcome of all similar operations could be aggregated and published on a database is the same patient who very much does not want his personal details to appear on a public website. There are difficulties here, not just in deciding where the border between confidentiality and transparency should lie, but in retaining the confidentiality of anything that it is decided should remain behind it. Data on huge numbers of those operations can be aggregated and anonymised, but anonymising processes can be reverse engineered, and techniques for this keep evolving, because there is a market for the sort of personal information that we wish to keep private. All data sets are subject to this potential risk. Getting it wrong could have pretty dreadful results. I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell us what response the Government are giving to the 14 recommendations of the O’Hara report on this subject—perhaps not individually, as it would take too long, but in general.
From Monday’s debate on Amendment 20 to the Health and Social Care Bill, the Minister will be aware of the anxiety in this House over the balance between benefit and risk when it comes to imposing, for instance, a duty of candour on hospitals. There are major transparency issues also in the Localism Bill, which is also before the House. The public should take comfort from the energy and thoroughness with which this House examines these changes before deciding whether or not to accept them, and in what form. Had there been fewer people getting up at Question Time, I would have drawn attention to that when we had the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a few moments ago.
I spoke of the coalition’s early commitment to a breathtaking acceleration of this move to transparency. That was no exaggeration. In 2010, 2,500 government data sets were made available. This year, the number is already 7,500. That is a 200 per cent increase. I understand that this country now has more government data accessible to the public than any other country in the world except the United States of America, and they keep ahead of us only because they have a vast surface area and they count all the maps as data sets.
The move to transparency is an international phenomenon. A very important aspect, and one in which Great Britain has taken the lead, is the introduction to transparency in the giving of overseas aid—transparency not only at our end of the transaction, but at the recipient’s end as well. To get transparency at the recipient’s end is the present aim and is only just beginning. The International Aid Transparency Initiative —IATI—was launched in 2008 and started by establishing a common format of published accounting for aid programmes. In January this year we became the first country to publish DfID’s aid information entirely in this form. At the next meeting of IATI, in Busan at the end of this month, will Her Majesty’s Government be pressing other Governments to join the eight organisations now publishing in this format?
Next Tuesday, the first international aid transparency index will be published. We should be among the top three of the 58 donor countries included. We now want to establish the same procedures in recipient countries as we have here, a move which has been recommended by Transparency International among others. To that end, will the Government exert themselves to secure from the EU early legislation to make it mandatory for oil, gas and mining companies to publish in common form all payments they make to foreign Governments, disaggregated by project as well as country? Like Tearfund, I believe that there should also be a requirement to publish production volumes, pre-tax profits, employee numbers and labour costs. The people of countries from which immensely valuable commodities such as oil, copper, diamonds and so on are extracted by foreign or international corporations are often exceedingly poor. By these means we can, for the first time, bring to them the benefits that transparency is already beginning to bring us. When that happens, I will gladly seek once again to draw your Lordships’ attention to Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to transparency.
I have touched only the surface of the subject. I look forward to your Lordships contributions, especially that of the noble Lord, Lord Gold. I beg to move.
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I would like to remind your Lordships that all Back-Bench contributions are limited to eight minutes and that when the clock shows eight minutes, time is up.
Education Bill
Debate between Lord Elton and Baroness Verma(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Elton
I am encouraged to rise briefly after what my noble friend has just said. Something has been worrying me since I was Minister for Education in Northern Ireland back in the 1980s: the difference in esteem granted to academic and non-academic choices of our children going to school. It was forced on me because we were the part of the United Kingdom that did not sign up to the end of the 11-plus, so there was a very stark contrast. My job was to try to get parity of esteem between the grammar schools and the secondary schools. I have noticed that vein going on through education after the end of the 11-plus: the great esteem given to an academic career, even after it was the only entry into a white collar job.
It seems to me that the introduction and the success of the apprenticeship scheme is the answer to the problem that I was looking for 30 years ago. If we can give children, and in particular their parents and their parents’ generation, the perception that it is as honourable and as rewarding to follow a practical career as an academic one, it will have a great effect on the way the young of the future see the choices before them. We will get a proper balance socially, academically and economically where it is needed. I am very glad to support my noble friend’s amendment.
Baroness Verma
My Lords, I want to respond to the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young, and of course to respond to other noble Lords. I thank very much all noble Lords who have welcomed the government amendment. The previous Government, and the noble Lord himself, did a great deal to make the apprenticeship programme what it is today and gave us a strong foundation on which to develop our skills flagship even further. I would like to take this moment to reassure the noble Lord that the Government understand and share his concern for young people’s interests that lies behind his amendment. Indeed, our own amendment, discussed just now, underlines that point. However, the original offer to which the noble Lord refers would have meant that the chief executive of skills funding would have had to find jobs with employers for all the eligible young people who wanted an apprenticeship. While it is a noble aspiration, in reality the Government and their agencies simply cannot tell employers whom they should employ.
The redefined offer in the Bill constitutes a more robust deal for the same young people because we know that we can deliver it. It sets the right balance between the employer-led nature of the programme and the need for support from government that young people can rely on.
The noble Lord’s other amendments propose making apprenticeships a condition of government contracting and Investors in People status, as well as requiring the Government to publish numbers and targets for public sector apprenticeships. I understand why the noble Lord has tabled the amendments and that he wants to ensure that government do everything in their power to encourage employers to take on apprentices, but a great deal is already being done to achieve this. I know that my honourable friend the Minister for Skills met the noble Lord, Lord Young, in September to explain this and has written to update him since. The Government believe fundamentally in a voluntary rather than regulatory approach. However, I know that the Minister has also reiterated to the noble Lord his determination to explore every opportunity to do more, provided that we do not put extra burdens on smaller employers and risk any breaching of the law. I would actively encourage the noble Lord to continue those conversations with my honourable friend the Minister for Skills or with me. My door is always open.
The noble Lords, Lord Layard, Lord Willis and Lord Elton, spoke about clear vocational routes for young people. I absolutely agree. For far too long we have undermined the great skills that come through apprenticeships. We want to make sure that young people who have an aptitude towards these skills—usually a very good aptitude—get as much support as we can provide. That is why, from the £1.4 billion in funding that we have put in for 2011-12, £800 million has been directed towards 16 to 18 year-olds. We are absolutely committed to ensuring that we work with employers to give young people—who, as was mentioned, may not be able to go straight into an apprenticeship—access and a pathway to prepare them better. We would still see them as apprentices and ensure that within a maximum of six months they were ready to take on a fully fledged apprenticeship.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, talked about the support for SMEs, GTAs and ATAs. Two-thirds of apprenticeship opportunities are offered by SMEs, which is why we want to make sure that we are supporting the SME sector by simplifying the systems and reducing the barriers so that SMEs are able to offer greater opportunities for apprenticeships.
It has been a great success story. In fact, I was really pleased to hear noble Lords say that. There has been an increase in apprenticeships, which is of course what we want. We know that apprenticeships are a wonderful route into skilled employment. However, we must not see them as a panacea for unemployment. The scheme is there to train and fill a need that employers have. As the noble Lord knows, these apprenticeships are employer led; they are developed by employers because they are at the heart of knowing what they need. It would therefore be futile for us to impose upon employers restrictions and regulations that would bind them to artificial targets and barriers.
We offer incentives to employers to recruit 16 to 18 year-olds. We know that it is crucial that we help them into employment, and the noble Lord is absolutely right to say that too many of them are unable to access it. That is why the Department for Education is fully funding its apprenticeships, and that is why we are there to support them absolutely. However, we must not forget apprenticeships for those who are older because they also need to be able to respond to the needs of the global economy as it changes. More than 100,000 employers offer apprenticeships. That is not enough and we want more to happen, but they are in 160,000 locations; two-thirds are offered by SMEs, which form 99 per cent of all businesses; and large businesses have the capacity to offer apprenticeships in larger numbers.
There is much to be done, but we are doing and building on what has gone before. I hope that I have been able to satisfy the noble Lord because I really believe that he and the Government share the same wish: to ensure that our young people and older apprentices all get an opportunity to contribute fully to the life of this country and, in turn, to the global economy. The Government’s amendments will further enhance the deal that we offer young people by prioritising funding for their apprenticeship training. I hope the noble Lord will feel encouraged that we want young people to start their careers on a sound and positive basis through apprenticeships—as, indeed, the noble Lord said. We differ only in our view on the most effective way to achieve that, but I am pretty certain that the noble Lord will feel sufficiently reassured to withdraw and not press his amendments.
Pakistan: Child Welfare
Debate between Lord Elton and Baroness Verma(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Verma
My Lords, all of DfID’s funds are in line with the strict guidelines of the OECD.
Lord Elton
My Lords, is the funding of which my noble friend speaks delivered to the eventual beneficiary by agencies of the Government of Pakistan, by voluntary agencies or by other means—and, if so, what means?
Baroness Verma
I thank my noble friend for that question. All humanitarian aid is given through NGOs, but DfID government programmes go through a number of organisations, and some go through the Pakistan Government.