Representation of the People Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak in favour of Amendments 23 and 43. Following on from my noble friend Lady Lister, I know that my noble friend Lord Blunkett would say that the new curriculum, in which citizenship will be made a compulsory subject for primary schools, with a stronger emphasis on the subject in secondary schools, should be introduced in 2027 rather than 2028. Can my noble friend the Minister say whether it might be possible to change the curriculum and introduce the changes in 2027?

I understand that the citizenship GCSE is really rather good and I encourage all schools to ensure that the maximum number of students can study for that GCSE, but I know that there is a dearth of citizenship teachers. Can my noble friend the Minister say what we are doing to ensure that there are more teachers qualified to teach citizenship? As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said, that is the way to ensure that it is properly taught, and taught impartially.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 24, to which my noble friend Lady Meyer added her name, as well as my Amendments 280 and 287.

At Second Reading, I spoke against plans to lower the voting age to 16 on three grounds: evidence on brain development; the confusion that these plans bring to our policy approach to maturity; and the Government playing to the imperative to give ever more stuff to voters, in this case young people. Young people face far more pressing issues which are far harder to resolve; progress on these would lead to much more substantive and beneficial change.

Today, I will focus on the first of those grounds. I tabled Amendments 24, 280 and 287 partly in response to the Minister’s reply. I am grateful that she found time in her closing remarks at Second Reading to refer to my speech, but what she said concerned me as to how clear I had been. She mentioned the scientific evidence I gave against 16 and 17 year-olds being able to vote, saying that

“we do not give people the vote based on their intellectual or cognitive abilities, and that applies to 16 and 17 year-olds—as it does to all our voters”.—[Official Report, 14/9/26; col. 1058.]

I had not at all been arguing to restrict voting to those with sufficient cognitive and intellectual ability: that would be elitist. I was not talking about what a 16 year-old understands. My remarks were exclusively about maturity. I mentioned how staff across the Youth Custody Service always refer to 16 and 17 year-olds as “children”, not because of their cognitive ability but to remind themselves of their relative immaturity.

Neuroscience has quantified and plotted on a graph what brain maturation looks like at 16. I cited the much-respected developmental psychologist Professor Laurence Steinberg, whose studies have found that, across all demographic groups and both sexes, resistance to peer influence increases in a linear fashion between the ages 14 and 18 and seems pretty set for the majority at the end of that period. Hence, typically, by 18 most young people have developed the capacity to stand up for what they believe and withstand peer pressure.

I highlighted other studies of the brain’s control system or executive functions, which enable young people to regulate their emotional reactions, perhaps to a shared reel or video short, and make independent judgments. They stabilise to adult levels only in late adolescence—at 18 to 20 years old. As the researchers of a key study say:

“Results provide a canonical trajectory of executive function maturation that demarcates the boundaries of adolescence”.


Lowering the voting age tramples these boundaries and appears evidentially indefensible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I wish the noble Lord well for his rehearsal and look forward to coming to one of the concerts in due course.

Noble Lords may recall that a similar amendment to this one was debated in Committee in the other place. Our position remains that a statutory reporting requirement is not the right way to approach this issue. The amendment would require the report to cover three areas: raising awareness, civic education and electoral registration. I will address each in turn.

First, on raising awareness, I agree with noble Lords that young people need to be aware of their new democratic rights. The Government are already working alongside the Electoral Commission, local and devolved government, the electoral sector and civil society organisations to make sure that young people are aware of the changes. Raising awareness will be a collective effort, involving organisations with different roles and responsibilities. A report from the Government would not provide a complete picture of that work. It would also not be right for the Government to report on behalf of other organisations involved in this work, particularly the Electoral Commission, whose independence from government is so vital and which already publishes its own research and analysis on some of the areas covered by this amendment.

Secondly, on civic education, I have no hesitation in agreeing with noble Lords on the vital importance of preparing young people to exercise their democratic rights. This is an area where we will continue to work with the devolved Governments and other partners. The Department for Education leads on education policy in England, while education is devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. All partners will need to work together to support young people’s democratic engagement. I will say more on that when I respond to my noble friend Lady Lister’s amendment. Given these different roles and responsibilities, I do not believe that a statutory report from the UK Government is the right mechanism for assessing progress in this area.

Finally, on electoral registration, substantial information is already publicly available. The register to vote performance dashboard provides aggregate data on applications to register to vote, including breakdowns by age. The Electoral Commission has also conducted studies of electoral registration trends, and the Government are separately planning to monitor and evaluate the implementation and impact of votes-at-16 measures, which will assess evidence related to the awareness, education and registration of young people. We do not believe that a further statutory report is necessary. I hope I have reassured your Lordships that the Government share the underlying objectives behind this amendment and are already taking forward work to support young people as the franchise is extended to 16 and 17 year-olds.

I come to Amendments 24, 280 and 287 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer. I point out to noble Lords that these amendments would prevent voting rights being extended to 16 and 17 year-olds until the assessment has been published. The noble Lord raised similar concerns about the maturity and decision-making capabilities of 16 and 17 year-olds during the Bill’s Second Reading in this House. Indeed, he quoted my response to him at the time, which I still hold to—that we do not give people the vote based on their intellectual or cognitive abilities. That principle applies to 16 and 17 year-olds as it does to all other voters. I am sorry to repeat back to him what he has already quoted, but that is the case.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Can I just finish responding, then I will happily give way? Our focus is on delivering this manifesto commitment—on which this Government were elected—which recognises that 16 and 17 year-olds have views that deserve to be represented and that young people should have a say in decisions that affect them. I simply cannot agree that young people at 16 and 17 do not have the cognitive reasoning to make decisions that impact on their lives. Indeed, as I set out on Monday, we have already asked them to do so. The question is not what else you can or cannot do at 16 but whether 16 is the right age to vote.

The point of this process of engagement is to introduce the concept of critical thinking. Indeed, young people of this age now have grown up having to develop their own ability to filter a whole plethora of social media in a way that my generation certainly did not.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

I was not talking about cognitive ability. That was what the Minister mentioned at Second Reading, and I was trying to say that I was not talking about that. I was talking about the maturity of young people to withstand peer pressure and to make a reasoned decision. As we have heard today, electing a Government is a very important and responsible decision. We had the evidence from Professor Laurence Steinberg that it is at 18 that young people are able to make their own judgments, withstand things such as TikTok and peer pressure at school and make a reasoned political judgment independently. It is maturity I am talking about, not cognitive ability.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I have heard what the noble Lord has said. In my view, requiring such an assessment before these changes can be implemented would introduce a completely unnecessary additional step and could delay the delivery of a very important manifesto commitment on which, as I have said, we have done a good deal of research with young people.

The noble Lord, Lord Leigh, made some points around safeguarding and political canvassing. We have taken steps within the Bill, as he will know, to say that attainers—14 and 15 year-olds—will not be canvassed by EROs, but I understand that the point he is making is around political canvassing. I am sure that political parties will be developing their own safeguarding response to the provisions in this Bill.

Representation of the People Bill

Lord Farmer Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I was sad to hear from the right reverend Prelate that this was his last contribution in the House and that he is retiring at the end of the month. I served with him on the Council for Christians and Jews—he was a chairman and I was a Christian vice-chairman—and I was thankful for his leadership, wisdom and kindness. I wish him well in his retirement.

I will speak mainly against plans to lower the voting age to 16, on three grounds: evidence of brain development; the confusion they bring to our policy approach to maturity; and their reinforcement of shopper politics, where building the good society matters less than giving ever more stuff to voters. Young people face an array of wicked policy problems, and successfully tackling just one of these would make a far more tangible difference to their outcomes.

I am concerned about registering 14 year-olds as attainers, given the extra layers of safeguarding required for those at confidential addresses who have fled domestic abuse or other threats. This will intensify bureaucratic burdens without guaranteeing safety. The more systems in which an address is recorded and the more people who may lawfully access it, the greater the potential for error or unauthorised disclosure. The Government consider such data to be sensitive enough to require the special non-disclosure regime laid out in Clauses 7 to 14, but can the Minister explain why they should collect and maintain electoral registration data on children two years before they can vote, putting an additional younger birth cohort at risk?

In Committee in the Commons, the Minister pleaded consistency with current arrangements where 16 and 17 year-old attainers are on the register—yet lowering the voting age is profoundly inconsistent with other policy areas. Staff I meet across the youth custody estate punctiliously refer to 16 and 17 year-olds as children, precisely because of their relative immaturity. Practitioners who support 16 and 17 year-olds’ mental health tell me that they have so many other life issues that they are trying to come to terms with. Military recruitment of under-18s demonstrates that they are not fully autonomous adults but require special protection. They need parental permission, are not sent into combat and are still considered to be in secondary education. Lowering the voting age increases the risk that young people, especially young women in some communities, are pressurised to vote in a family bloc, as we have heard elsewhere.

During Commons stages debates about reducing the voting age, one supporter pointed to young carers having already carried onerous familial responsibilities for over a decade. But what has that got to do with it? Their exceptional hardships are, thankfully, not typical. Neither are the under-18 youth mayors, held up as exemplars for giving all 16 and 17 year-olds the vote. Worthy anecdotes are not evidence of cohort-wide maturity.

Ironically, neuroscience has heightened awareness, as never before, of how very much more maturing the brain still needs to do at 16. World-renowned developmental psychologist Professor Laurence Steinberg found that the sweet spot for resistance to peer influences is 18. By this point, the majority have developed the capacity to stand up for what they believe and withstand peer pressure to do otherwise. Other studies show that the brain’s control system or executive functions that help young people manage their thoughts, behaviour and decisions in pursuit of a goal grow rapidly from late childhood to mid-teens, stabilising to adult levels only in late adolescence, at 18 to 20 years old.

Executive functions govern how effectively a person can regulate their emotional reactions—perhaps to a TikTok video, as we have heard—evaluate the effects of different influences and decide independently. Voting at 18 means that as many as possible are able, as far as possible, to make independent judgments, hold competing arguments in mind, resist others’ views and consider longer-term consequences. The noble Lord, Lord Macintosh of Eastwood, in his commendable maiden speech, highlighted the higher turnout in Scotland, but many 16 to 18 year-olds are still embedded in families and schools where peer pressures can be considerably amplified.

The Commons Minister said that the voting age should be lowered simply because young people are “our nation’s future”. That argument is simply unsustainable. We invest in the first 1,001 days of a child’s life because infants are also our nation’s future. Lowering the voting age means taking an evidentially indefensible step in terms of child protection, requiring a complex legislative and bureaucratic underpinning, perhaps solely for political advantage. More feel-good shopper politics will not solve the problems facing this country, and especially our young people.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Farmer]

82: After Clause 18, insert the following new Clause—
“Provision of information and collaboration on housing for prison leavers(1) The Secretary of State has a duty to—(a) ensure local housing authorities receive the necessary information, and(b) facilitate effective collaboration between local housing authorities, HM Prison and Probation Service and other relevant organisations,to prevent prison leavers at risk of homelessness from being unable to access housing.(2) The Secretary of State must, by regulations made by statutory instrument, publish—(a) requirements for the nature of the information that must be shared with local housing authorities,(b) the timescales on which the information must be provided to local housing authorities,(c) the timescales within which local housing authorities must respond, including when they need to confirm whether or not housing will be available,(d) requirements for local housing authorities to respond to the person or body which made the social housing referral for a prison leaver, and(e) guidance for local housing authorities on their responsibility to provide further information as required.(3) Within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, and annually thereafter, the Secretary of State must publish a report setting out the number of prison leavers provided with social housing by local housing authorities on release from prison. (4) The Secretary of State must lay the report under subsection (3) before Parliament.(5) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that local housing authorities receive information and effectively collaborate with other organisations as necessary to provide housing to prison leavers at risk of homelessness. It also to require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on social housing provision to prison leavers.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 82 is in my name and I support the three other amendments in this group, tabled by my noble friends Lady O’Neill of Bexley and Lord Jamieson. Amendment 82 augments my Committee stage Amendment 94, and I thank MHCLG for two meetings with officials which have helped me refine what I think is needed. Summarising briefly the arguments I made in Committee, which are still all valid, I would say that this amendment does not require local authorities to house ex-prisoners but aims to improve their rehabilitation by prisons and local authorities working better together to prevent post-release homelessness. Releasing prisoners into homelessness, and especially rough sleeping, makes their rehabilitation almost impossible. Unsurprisingly, they will be more than twice as likely to reoffend as those released into settled accommodation.

They are also far more likely to die. In an investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman into 137 deaths after release over a two-year period, almost one-third of those dying within two weeks had been released homeless. The PPO described homelessness on release as “a considerable issue”. It is also a growing issue. Last year, there was a 28% rise since 2021 in the numbers of deaths within two weeks of release. Greater pressure will shortly come from the 10 monthly tranches of early releases from English and Welsh jails, starting on 2 September 2026, of an estimated 6,000 prisoners. HM Inspectorate of Prisons told the Commons Public Accounts Committee in November 2024 that, at some prisons, the limited housing stock available for those released had been

“overwhelmed by early release schemes”.

The Government are aware of this. Ministry of Justice data shows almost 13,000 people left prison homeless or as rough sleepers in the year to April 2025—a 39% rise from the previous year. Its national plan to end homelessness states that this

“could have been prevented had better coordination and planning been in place”—

hence the timeliness and needfulness of my amendment. It would ramp up accountability on local housing authorities’ compliance with the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, because some are far better than others, under similar stock pressures, at finding ex-prisoners accommodation. Effective partnerships with prison, probation and other organisations are key to successful operation of the Homelessness Reduction Act’s duty to refer, which should kick in 50 days prior to release.

My amendment would tighten up the existing legal framework, as it is not delivering as it should, and its reporting requirements would reveal how local authorities compare with their statistical neighbours. It would enable regulations to specify more clearly how and when local housing authorities must respond to referrals. Prisons are also not consistently complying with the duty to refer; hence, regulations would also tighten the process at their end.

My new amendment explicitly refers to the need for effective collaboration between all relevant agencies, for reasons that I will now explain. Given the urgency, I am pleased that there has already been promising news on its direction of travel. First, the new Prime Minister —and I sincerely wish him well—has promised to end rough sleeping. Over half of all “duty to refer” referrals to local housing authorities are from criminal justice agencies, highlighting just how many of those threatened with rough sleeping are prison leavers. I met Andy Burnham when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester and asked if he had ever visited what used to be the city’s notorious HMP Strangeways. He had not, but he mentioned that practically all the men he saw sleeping rough on the road down to his office from what is now HMP Manchester had recently been released from there. Symbolically, they had barely moved on. Given today’s remarks, he clearly remains profoundly exercised by this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. I thank my noble friend Lady Eaton and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, for her support, particularly in highlighting the variability of councils’ responses to notification that homeless prisoners will be coming out on their patch, and how councils right next door to each other vary from one to another. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for her contribution.

I thank the Minister for understanding this amendment. I am slightly disappointed, but I am aware of the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm and that quite a lot of work could be done on this in the Summer Recess. It is quite a simple amendment. Therefore, in view of the timescale that the Prime Minister has put on this—by the end of this Parliament—I ask that the Government use the Recess usefully to tidy up this amendment, maybe to come back at Third Reading with their own government amendment. In the light of that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 82 withdrawn.

Social Housing Bill [HL]

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. I will be following along with her arguments but will speak to my Amendment 94. I start by thanking the Minister for the helpful meeting I had yesterday with her officials.

Amendment 94 does not require local authorities to house ex-prisoners but aims to improve their rehabilitation by prisons and local authorities working better together to prevent post-release homelessness. This is the point of the amendment. About 10 years ago, I started working with the Ministry of Justice on prison reform, specifically conducting two reviews on how prisoners could maintain family and other key relational ties to prevent their reoffending. I am still involved in the implementation of the recommendations of those reviews, but I am beginning to feel a little like an IPP prisoner with no set date for release.

My amendment would contribute to a collective refocus on offender rehabilitation, which is much needed if we are to have any hope of reducing our prison population and the criminal justice budget. Reoffending costs this country £18 billion a year. Releasing prisoners into homelessness, and especially rough sleeping, single-handedly undermines any rehabilitation activity they have ever undertaken. Their proven reoffending rate, 76%, is more than twice that for those released from custody into settled accommodation, at 36.4%.

I have been told that existing legislation to prevent homelessness is adequate. However, there appears to be very little accountability regarding local housing authorities’ compliance with that law, which I will touch on briefly. Some are far more effective than others at finding accommodation for ex-prisoners. This is not simply about available housing stock, but the processes they follow and how well they work in partnership with prison and probation. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman reports, for example, that several London boroughs are frequently problematic, while others with very pressured housing markets are not. Similarly, in 2025, the London Assembly Housing Committee reported inconsistent practice across London boroughs with weak co-ordination between prisons, probation and borough housing teams.

My amendment seeks to tighten up the rather loose legal framework, which is not delivering as it should. Ministry of Justice data says that almost 13,000 people left prison homeless or as rough sleepers in the year to April 2025—a 39% rise from the previous year. My amendment’s reporting requirements would reveal how local authorities compare with their statistical neighbours. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 introduced a duty on public authorities, including prison and probation, to refer those at threat of homelessness to local authority housing teams, because they would be released within about two months and have nowhere to go. Looking briefly at how that should work, statutory guidance says, rather weakly, that

“Housing authorities are encouraged to … acknowledge receipt of any referral”,


which

“may be in the form of an automatic email reply”.

If that is all the prison is getting and there is no feedback loop, the referral may have simply entered a bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle. Non-statutory guidance says:

“The duty to refer will help to ensure that services are working together effectively to prevent homelessness … It is also anticipated”—


which, again, sounds a little weak—

“that it will encourage local housing authorities and other public authorities to build strong partnerships which enable them to work together to intervene earlier to prevent homelessness through increasingly integrated services”.

However, the local housing authority is merely required to contact the prisoner being referred. The guidance also states merely:

“It is good practice for local housing authorities to go beyond referral procedures and work with other public authorities to prepare a comprehensive assessment of need”


for the prisoner. Where is the grip on local authorities? They are paid from the public purse to obey the law. They are, or should be, accountable for spending and saving public money. Reducing reoffending by just 1% would save £180 million.

My amendment would enable regulations to specify how local housing authorities must respond to referrals. Regulations would specify response times they would need to work to, including when they would need to notify a final decision, and require them to inform the prison or the Probation Service as well as the prisoner. Prisons have a strong legal duty of care towards prisoners and are responsible for pre-release planning. They also need this information and cannot rely on prisoners passing it on to them. The London Assembly Housing Committee found that prisons are not consistently complying with the duty to refer, with late referrals from prison contributing greatly to uncertainty; hence, the regulations are tightening the process at their end as well.

To conclude, currently there are many gaps in the system that we need to close so that soon-to-be-released individuals no longer fall through them. Without accommodation, as we have heard from other noble Lords, they cannot seek work, restructure their lives or take ownership of their rehabilitation. It can be a matter of life or death. Just last month, a Guardian investigation reported record numbers of deaths within two weeks of release in 2025, a 28% rise since 2021. The primary driver, according to experts, is a rise in prisoners being released into homelessness and falling through “trapdoors to crisis”. The duty to refer was designed to prevent this wherever possible. Almost 10 years on from the Act that introduced it, we must acknowledge that it is not working as it should be for ex-prisoners. The Bill provides the perfect opportunity to fix it.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak to these amendments, and it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Farmer: he is one of the most indefatigable and persistent champions of the family and of the education and rehabilitation of prisoners, and I commend the work he has done over many years.

As a constituency MP, I had a prison in my constituency. I was once critical of what I thought was the cushy lifestyle of the women’s wing of the prison—it was a coterminous prison, men and women—because it provided aromatherapy in the gym. I criticised this, as the local MP, and of course the Sun put it on the front page, with the immortal headline, “In for a stretch”, which was quite amusing. The serious point is that we can spend very significant amounts of money to make sure that prisoners can read and write, understand civic engagement and have meaningful work, but that is all completely wasted if, when they leave prison, they go back into the clutches of the nefarious and criminal classes, particularly drug dealers.

I commend both noble Baronesses on the Liberal Democrat Benches. The noble Baroness, Lady Teather, will not remember, but we worked together, many moons ago when she was Children’s Minister in the other place, on the rather niche subject of children with Tourette’s syndrome—she did a great job in that role in the coalition Government. Both noble Baronesses are absolutely right that we need to focus. These are permissive amendments to focus on collecting and collating as much data as possible on both ex-offenders and Armed Forces personnel. That is all that these amendments ask for and I heartily concur with all the later amendments in this group.

Domestic Abuse Refuge Spaces

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 21st June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

In April 2021, the Home Office provided £1.4 million of support for a migrant victims scheme to provide the support that the noble Baroness talks about because they have no recourse to public funds. A pilot has been run by Southall Black Sisters and their delivery partners, providing a really good wraparound support service for migrant victims of domestic abuse; this has included offering them sustenance, helping them, counselling them and giving them legal advice. During the pilot, the scheme supported 425 migrant victims. We have allocated another £1.4 million this year to continue to fund this pilot; we are going to take on board the lessons learned by Southall Black Sisters.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, the Office for National Statistics has found that a third of domestic abuse victims are male, yet there are very few refuge spaces for men and children in London, the Home Counties and the east of England, although there are places elsewhere. I recently visited a men’s charity in Kent, where there are none at all. How will the Government encourage local authorities to bridge that gap?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My noble friend brings up an interesting issue. Yes, we talk more about women than men but there are men who are victims of domestic abuse. The problem is that the numbers are smaller so it is difficult to get a lot of refuges across the country. Under the safe accommodation support duty, tier 1 local authorities are required to assess the need for, and provide support for, all victims of domestic abuse, including male victims. The male victims’ organisation that keeps an eye on this is called ManKind and provides expert input into monitoring these duties as part of the domestic abuse safe accommodation national expert steering group, which is chaired by my colleague, Felicity Buchan. The voice of the man who is domestically abused is there at the centre; we ensure that they get the support they need.

Inclusive Society

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for the opportunity to debate this important issue. I will focus, as did my noble friend Lord Dobbs, on the report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. I declare my interest in that currently two-thirds of my grandchildren are of mixed race.

I was disappointed by the shrill, vituperative inaccuracies of many of the criticisms of this report. They contrast starkly with the calm, nuanced and reasoned tone of its conclusions. At the heart of the controversy are different expectations as to what will drive change and improve outcomes for the disadvantaged and excluded. As the BBC reported:

“While the Left ‘emoted’ on race, the prime minister wanted a data-driven report”


which recognised the complexities driving disadvantage, and for the commission to make practical recommendations.

The Cabinet Office’s Race Disparity Unit, set up in 2016, built a comprehensive database on race and ethnicity which the commission is the first major independent body to use to investigate how ethnicity and other factors impact on outcomes and deeper underlying causes of key disparities. Surely it would be more surprising if access to this rich new seam had not generated new insights and a more productive narrative. Ideology cannot be allowed to negate these, as Trevor Phillips explained in the Times:

“Depressingly, a minority want the debate about race to continue as a medieval contest of faith, in which the catechism—‘institutional racism’, ‘white privilege’—is mouthed unthinkingly, without understanding. Those who deviate are lashed as heretics … it is the self-proclaimed radicals who are, in fact, least keen on change. For the zealots to justify their revolutionary aims … ethnic minorities must remain in suffering.”


Specifically, this report’s data-driven conclusion was that family structure contributes more than racism to outcomes. One commissioner described the key moment in the whole process as when all 10 said, with one voice, that family was what distinguished the success stories from the failures. This was the first government-commissioned report to engage seriously with the family, and it does so respectfully but unapologetically, rejecting

“both the stigmatisation of single mothers and the turning of a blind eye to the impact of family breakdown on the life chances of children.”

Father absence is linked to criminality and imprisonment, and family breakdown to gang membership of both girls and boys. The great attraction of gangs is that they provide families, albeit highly dysfunctional ones that can be lethal.

Sadly, such insights are not new. A thematic review by Croydon’s safeguarding children board found that fathers of over two-thirds of children of concern did not live at home and a father walking out was frequently the turning point in a child’s behaviour. Three-quarters of the boys were involved with gangs and over half the girls known by police to be violent, with almost two-fifths suspected of knife crime.

To conclude, ignoring or vilifying this report will not build a more inclusive society. Getting behind its practical, evidence-based recommendations will, however, enable us to build on the hard-won progress of generations of ethnic minorities, many of whom came to our four nations seeking a better life. Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that the Government will further support family hubs and give the green light to the important “support for families” review, as the commission recommends?

Levelling Up

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I completely agree that education is very much the engine of social mobility and addresses the points that were raised. We need to judge our levelling-up agenda against a package of measures that could also support skills development through things such as the new community renewal fund and the UK shared prosperity fund.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, can the Minister confirm whether the levelling-up fund will accept bids containing social infrastructure elements such as funding to transform family support into a family hubs model? Transformation typically requires revenue funding to redeploy senior staff and backfill their roles, the development of missing services et cetera, as well as capital funding to refurbish buildings. Is this fund open to both capital and revenue funding bids?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, local government does tend to separate capital and revenue, and the UK levelling-up fund will have more of a capital focus. However, this could include community spaces important to local areas that support the family policies that my noble friend has raised.