Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Giddens Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 13th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I also warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on having got his Bill this far. It could be even bigger than the Big Issue, which you would think is big enough for most people—but not for him. Anyway, I much enjoyed his warm introduction.

As noble Lords have said, we live in a world of quite dazzling change. For us, the future is here in the present in ways that were never true before. Examples of that are everywhere. I can pick up my mobile phone, which is not just a phone but a supercomputer more powerful than those that sent humans to the moon a generation ago. I can call someone in Australia, see them on my device as they can see me and talk to them seemingly for nothing—although not really for nothing, as we know.

So much else is new, in historical terms, including machine intelligence, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Howarth. No doubt AI is a huge part of our future, but its trajectory is essentially unknown and very difficult to calculate. As in so many other areas, we face something of an unknown future. That is all the more reason to look ahead and think long-term, in the way in which this Bill proposes.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, the climate was once fixed, determined by Mother Nature. Today, we live in what climate scientists call the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activity is the dominant influence on our weather and the wider environment. This is amazing and disturbing.

To be topical, coronavirus, as was just mentioned, has spread more rapidly, and globally, than any other pandemic before. We simply do not know at this point how disruptive or otherwise its impact will prove, but its economic impact could be huge. We have to learn from this experience to try to act pre-emptively in the future and to connect the short and the long term.

The Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Bird, focuses on the well-being of future generations; it is an invitation to think positively, and I 100% approve of that. I have focused so far on risks, but I am not pessimistic about the future. The world in which we live today is a high-opportunity, high-risk world. The opportunities are at least as great as the risks, especially if we can learn to anticipate and manage them properly. We just do not know how the balance between the two will pan out, but I deliberately put the notion of opportunity first.

Consider once more coronavirus, which never goes out of our consciousness these days. It is much more global, as I said, than any previous pandemic, yet science and medicine are now global too. AI can help us break down the genetic composition of a virus—the Chinese have made some progress on this—and perhaps lead much more rapidly to treatments or antidotes than was true in the past.

The framework proposed in the Bill is well thought through, drawn as it is, in some part, from the Welsh experience. As has been noted, around the world, we see discontent with the framework of western democracy. The public see politicians like us squabbling over day-to-day decisions, while the world seems dislocated and even dangerous. The thinking embodied in the Bill can, I hope, contribute to remedying this situation, especially when coupled with the direct participation of citizens in the way that is proposed. I give it my strong support and hope that the Government will seek to pilot it into law. I hope that it gets wide cross-party backing.

Brexit: European Investment Bank (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I also begin by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, on having chaired our committee so effectively and introduced this debate so tellingly. I also thank everyone else involved in the production of this excellent report.

I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I take a lateral approach to these issues. Today is a very notable day: the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo mission to the moon. The moon landing was an evolutionary moment for the human species—more than just a giant step. After thousands of years, we were no longer earthbound. Much more recently, in January 2019, again for the first time ever, a robotic lander and rover touched down on the far side of the moon. Like Apollo, the mission was named after one of the gods, or rather goddesses, Chang’e—I hope noble Lords will forgive my Mandarin pronunciation—the moon goddess. Its objectives were largely economic. The space economy is seen by states and entrepreneurs across the world as the next big thing—the next huge thing in the case of China, which has massive plans.

In case noble Lords are wondering, the EU has by no means been left behind. The European Space Agency has 22 member states, one of which is the United Kingdom. It is an intergovernmental organisation but deeply integrated with the EU. These connections include the Galileo and Copernicus programmes and much else besides. Crucial to the success of the ESA has been the role of the European Investment Bank. Since the year 2000 it has invested €5.4 billion in the space and aerospace sector. The returns in terms of commercial applications alone have been huge. The space economy has grown five times faster than the overall EU economies since 2000.

The UK Space Agency has been allocated a central role in the Government’s industrial strategy and I would say quite rightly so. The country has in some ways been a pioneer. Yet as it leaves the EU, the UK is likely to lose access to EIB investment in this, as in all other areas. A no-deal situation, as everyone knows, is now a distinct possibility. Will the Minister confirm that, if the UK leaves the EU without a deal, British businesses will be unable to bid for any future work in the development of Galileo or other geostationary navigation systems? The Government have spoken of investing £92 million in a UK satellite navigation system, but that funding is trivial when compared to the sums the EIB is able to provide. Moreover, in July 2018 the EIB signed a new agreement—a formal arrangement—with the ESA for further large-scale funding of the space economy. In case this sounds oblique and marginal, it is in many people’s eyes the most significant future area of economic development globally.

I do not want to get lost in space. Back on dry land, as the report makes clear, the EIB and the EIF have been of core importance to a whole range of projects in the UK, especially those concerned with infrastructure, including in this category huge levels of investment in my main area of concern, higher education—many billions, in fact. As is noted in the report, EIB funding in the UK has fallen by not far short of 90% since 2016. The Government seem to have said very little about their plans for a future relationship with the EIB. Maybe the Minister will elucidate the Government’s position on this.

One main area of support where the role of the EIB has been particularly crucial is renewable energy. Green bonds have been deployed to help fund ecological development projects. Very substantial investment will be needed to radicalise some of these projects if the Government’s stated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is to be realised. What plans are in place to progress towards this goal in the likely absence of EIB support? Without them, this is just an empty commitment.

The report makes quite a few important points in its concluding summary and I hope the Minister will respond to most or all of these. I draw attention to just one or two. First, one of the great strengths of the EIB is its capacity to think long-term and provide stable funding to do so, so that, as I just said, there is no empty posturing. What mechanisms are the Government proposing to achieve such investment, which certainly cannot be funded from taxation alone but involves a massive influx of other forms of capital? Secondly, what could we learn from the example of KfW in Germany, testimony from which impressed some of us on the committee? It certainly impressed me. As the report observes, KfW has been called “the world’s safest bank”. Would the Government seek to set up some kind of analogue to this in the UK as a way forward?

Finally, will the Government acknowledge the crucial importance of an impartial Civil Service in working with financial institutions to think long-term? Bureaucracy gets itself a bad name, especially at a time when populist politicians peddle snake oil recipes for the future. Yet it is the condition of not only a stable democracy but effective forward-thinking and planning. I hope the Minister will agree.

Cyberattack: UK Defences

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Giddens]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the vulnerability of the United Kingdom to organised cyber-attack.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)]

My Lords, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in his speech to GCHQ on 17 November, despite a huge amount of investment, effort and world-class tools and capabilities, we are not where we need to be, particularly given the pace of innovation in cyberspace. Since 2011, we have invested £860 million in a national cybersecurity programme. As announced in the national security strategy and strategic defence and security review 2015, we plan almost to double investment in cybersecurity over the next five years.

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very helpful reply. One of the most serious threats we face is that of a co-ordinated cyberattack against the UK financial sector. The Bank of England has shown that individual banks, especially the large banks, are pretty well protected but there are huge vulnerabilities in the connections between the banks and the rest of the economy, which some people say could lead to panic. One quite seasoned observer described the possibility of financial Armageddon—the meltdown of the system—given that most money today is electronic and no longer held in the form of cash. This is a matter for the Government, not just for the Bank of England, so what concrete steps are the Government taking to address this issue?

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord and a number of other of your Lordships in this area. On the specific point, the financial sector, including the City of London, has undertaken a number of exercises in recent years: Waking Shark I, Waking Shark II and the Market Wide Exercise, as well as the more recent Resilient Shield exercise between the US and the UK last month. In June, the FPC agreed that the Bank, the PRA and the FCA should also establish arrangements for CBEST tests to become one component of regular cyber resilience assessment within the UK financial system.

Social Mobility

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to take my noble friend Lord McFall’s question seriously and ask: what is the relationship between inequality and social mobility? There are often problems when a technical concept enters popular and political discourse, and that has certainly been the case with the notion of social mobility. There are many misunderstandings about it. If one does not sort them out, it is almost impossible to make proper policy.

For example, the idea has taken hold that there has been a serious decline in social mobility over the past three or four decades. To quote the Observer, social mobility “has ground to a halt”. It was this concern that prompted the Milburn report and a range of other publications. However, there are two problems with this view. First, it seems to be substantially false. It has been subjected to a powerful critique from John Goldthorpe and his colleagues at the University of Oxford. Secondly—I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for being an academic about this but it is essential—the current discussion of social mobility fails to grasp the crucial distinction which sociologists make between absolute and relative mobility. We cannot understand current patterns of mobility if we do not grasp that notion. It is an essential distinction to make.

Absolute mobility refers to the proportion of people from specific class backgrounds who move upwards: in other words, the number of people who move upwards. Relative social mobility is a very different notion. It is the one that many people equate with social mobility, but that is wrong. Relative social mobility means the chances of individuals becoming mobile. In other words, it is a measure of social fluidity. It refers, if you like, to some individuals succeeding at the expense of others. It means that if there are high levels of relative upward mobility, there must be high levels of downward mobility as well. They are two very different notions and we have to sort them out.

The results of Goldthorpe's work are interesting and instructive for policy. They show that rates of absolute mobility from one generation to another across the 20th century in the UK and elsewhere have actually been quite high and remain high. The reason is simple: there has been an expansion of white-collar and professional occupations at the expense of less skilled manual jobs. The main reason for the apparent fluidity of our society is that structural change has produced a lot more opportunities at the top. Goldthorpe also shows, interestingly, that relative mobility has remained static across that period. In other words, contrary to what one might assume, the UK did not become a more fluid society over the past 40 or 50 years; there was not more fluidity and movement. Almost all the movement was upward mobility going into the jobs that were created.

Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, described, individual capacities make a difference as to who gets into those positions. However, the dominant feature is structural mobility over that period not, if you like, a more just or equal society.

Obviously, that does not mean that the plethora of policies contained in the Milburn report are without value but, as Goldthorpe says, no matter how gratifying those policies may be, politically their impact is likely to be quite limited. He is right to say that. In other words, more advantaged groups are often able to draw on their resources to negate the policies introduced with the best of intentions for introducing more relative mobility. That is a serious issue for such policies. For example, you might introduce a policy to help kids from an inner-city school to get into a higher level of the system, but middle-class parents can easily mobilise to negate that because they are not stupid and they know what is going on, too. So there is a powerful dialectic in all of this.

The conclusion that I draw is similar to Goldthorpe’s conclusion, which is that we must place the emphasis on equality rather than mobility. Social mobility in everyday talk these days functions as a kind of relatively seemingly painless equivalent for equality. As the noble Lord, Lord McFall, stressed, equality comes first because without greater equality we cannot improve social mobility. Equality not only trumps mobility, it is the main source of achievement. I do not see what policies the Government have for limiting the structural inequalities that were so well defined in the opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord McFall.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Giddens]

The time when those organisations were dominant was a time when mobility was lower than it was later, for the reasons that I mentioned.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Yes, there was selective mobility, and that is part of the issue that we have. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, talked about her father and her grandmother. My parents-in-law were the youngest in a working class family and their eldest brothers and sisters paid for them to stay at school through Bradford grammar school and university. There was in those years very small-scale social mobility for a small minority of the bright poor who got out, so to speak.

[Lord Giddens]

That is much more like it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Precisely. Britain’s situation also reflects the historic anomaly, of which I am very conscious as I have just come from a meeting of the advisory board on the centenary of World War I and have been reading into early 20th century history, that we have much more continuity of social structures over the past 150 years than many of our comparators. We still have the structure of private schools, which supported the Empire. We still have an unelected House of Lords. We still have a social hierarchy which is remarkably resistant to change, whereas in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and, to some extent, also in France and Italy those old structures were swept away, which made it easier to have a more mobile and mutually respecting society.

The coalition Government’s social mobility agenda is something which we see as a cross-party, cross-government exercise, and it starts from the assumption that there has to be a partnership between economy, society and state—we have to get all those things in balance. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that we shall be working on that against a number of very difficult global economic trends and against the challenge of the next round of economic and technological change, which may well sweep away a very large number of basic white-collar jobs, thus raising all sorts of issues about moving towards a society in which there are a number of extremely successful, very well paid people and, at the other end, a number of poorly paid, poorly skilled people. Dealing with that will take quite a lot of effort in our turn.

I should tell the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that when I was an undergraduate, my most inspirational teacher was a graduate student called John Goldthorpe, so I have a great deal of respect for everything that John has written and continues to write. However, as the noble Lord knows well, perfect equality is not achievable; a reduction in the degree of inequality is. That is, after all, what a liberal society should attempt to work for. This Government are mounting an attack on tax avoidance. We face the problem of what I have to call the rootless rich, who have escaped the boundaries of nation states and thus managed extremely successfully to avoid tax. We need taxes on wealth, which is much less mobile than income. At the bottom, we have increased the threshold at which people start to pay income tax. There is the move towards universal credit and in encouraging more people into work. We are extremely happy that the level of youth unemployment is now on a downward trend, and we are doing as much as we can to ensure that that continues.

International economic trends help us. The Financial Times had an interesting article yesterday which suggested that there is now a downward trend in excessive executive salaries after the excesses of the past 20 years. We are affected by what is happening elsewhere, and we have to push very hard to provide for our own deeply interdependent society as much of a social compact in the global economy as we can. I worry about the impact on British society and the British economy of the influx of the super-wealthy from non-democratic states. That ought to be of concern, particularly to all those who live in London and the south-east of England.

We have now reached the stage where we all realise that the state cannot deal with a problem like that alone; the state cannot provide everything and our taxpayers are unwilling to pay for much more of what is needed. They want the services, but they are deeply resistant to higher taxation, so we have to talk about the role of independent social initiatives—what I still like to call the big society—the role of local communities and local action. Incidentally, we have to think about planning and building communities which hang together. Living in Saltaire, which is a very dense village where it is impossible not to know your neighbours, and having canvassed when I was the local candidate for Shipley in a number of the new housing estates where you do not know your neighbours, the husband has gone out in the only family car and the wife is marooned on her own, I am very conscious that the way in which we build communities in Britain also deserves a great deal more attention. We need more local government and local engagement and, as we have said about other areas, we need to persuade more of the young to vote and become engaged, because we know that all our political parties are pooled towards supporting the old and not putting enough money into the young.

On equality of education, the Government are now extending the pupil premium. In September 2014 we will extend 15 free hours of high-quality early education to 40% of two year-olds—not an easy task when at the same time the number of two year-olds is rising quite sharply. We inherited Teach First from our predecessor Labour Government and we have continued to expand it. The Teach First teachers that I have seen in various schools in West Yorkshire are absolutely first-class. We all know from what the All-Party Group on Social Mobility has said that raising the quality of teaching is a very important part of all this. Intergenerational equity, putting more money into children at the early stage, is very much part of what we need to do.

The noble Lord, Lord McFall, also mentioned the professions. I have to say that the figures on professions are deeply worrying, and I hope that whichever Government come in next time will look in particular at the question of recruitment into the legal profession as the one that sticks out most strongly as an inherited one.

Aspiration, character and resilience are clearly extremely important; I think that we have all now gripped that. Providing children with a sense of self-worth through school, careers guidance, music, sports, volunteering and mentoring is important. I am an extremely strong supporter of the National Citizen Service; I am about to ask the Cabinet Office whether it will be willing to provide an introduction to the NCS to any Member of the House of Lords who would like to see it, because I became enthusiastic when I had seen one or two courses myself. Through partnership with business, the Government now have a business compact. The Deputy Prime Minister has just given Opening Doors awards to a number of businesses that have been extremely good at pulling people into work. Apprenticeships are important, and I have to say that the apprentice that we had in the Government Whips’ Office was a classic example—a young woman who had been a hairdresser, and had not thought that she could be anything else, who blossomed in the six months that she was with us. All these things help to give young people a greater sense that they can do things. That is a very large agenda.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said, we have to be careful to get beyond the idea that it is all about everyone getting to the top. The importance of the apprenticeship schemes, which I am extremely proud of this Government expanding, is that they are giving a number of young people a sense of self-worth in craft skills. That is a revival of an old mutuality of respect that we clearly need to do. Unfortunately, we cannot provide the independent business that also used to be part of the business of respect. I come from four different families and my great-grandparents were all small shopkeepers, so I am incredibly petty bourgeois. The mutuality of respect is part of what we all now need to rebuild.

We are out of time but we could have debated this for a great deal longer. I thank the noble Lord for raising this issue, and I repeat: I hope that we will continue to address this subject as a very broad long-term issue for this country over the years to come.

Antarctic Bill

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Friday 1st February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery, on having introduced this Bill and on his succinct definition of environmental catastrophe. He is one of the few people who could get a laugh from such a thing. It was good to see him deal with it so ably.

I am happy to support the Bill, even if it is slightly surreal, since no one owns any part of the Antarctic, which is as it should be. Seven nations have claimed territory there. The claims are legal according to the laws of the nations in question, which makes this Bill worth pursuing. However, some countries do not recognise any national claims on the Antarctic; others assert their right to make claims in future. The Antarctic Treaty 1959 has been conspicuously successful, so far anyway, in preserving the region as a continent for science, as I think has already been mentioned. Long may that continue. Today, there are more than 40 scientific research stations dotted across the vast continent, attracting scientists from many countries.

I enjoyed reading the debate on this issue in the Commons from 2 November last year, where the Bill achieved impressive cross-party support. Amazingly, one or two Eurosceptic contributors managed to get in some obscure digs against the EU, even though it has no connection at all to the proposals, although it did liven up the debate. As a whole, the discussion in the Commons was good and balanced.

I spoke in the debate in your Lordships’ House to commemorate the centenary of Scott’s second expedition to the Antarctic. Many of us in that debate took it as an opportunity to oppose the plan to close down the British Antarctic Survey. As with those who spoke in the debate in the Commons, virtually everyone took the same view, I am happy to say. It is a relief that the BAS has been saved, even if there is work to do on the issue.

As has been said, the UK has long been the dominant scientific presence in the Arctic and, if anything, research in that vast frozen land and sea mass has become even more important than it was. Current research spans biology, geology, oceanography, medicine and many other sciences. The Antarctic is a laboratory for the study of climate change, and it is very interesting what is going on there in that respect. Some areas of the Arctic are becoming more frozen, not less, as a result of violent winds that circulate in the centre of the land mass, yet other areas are becoming warmed in a very significant way. The BAS research shows that the level of warming on the Antarctic peninsula,

“is among the highest seen anywhere on Earth in recent times”.

It is likely to have a profound effect on the ecosystems in the local area, but more disturbingly—

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, this discovery of a great warming and how it happened was the joint effort of many universities and the British Antarctic Survey.

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I stand corrected, although I endorse the quotation, which does come from the British Antarctic Survey. Of course, almost all research in the Antarctic is collaborative, as the noble Lord points out. That is a good part of the British presence there.

I was about to say that the changes going on in the Arctic peninsula and the rest of the Antarctic could also have profound impact on wider world patterns. That is why it is so important to have a very strong scientific presence there. The significance of the Bill is that it shores up the UK’s treaty obligations and makes them part of British law. One clause applies the polluter pays principle to those operating in the Antarctic, and environmental disasters include cruise ships bashing into icebergs, which one or two of them have already done. Numerous other instances could be mentioned. This part of the Bill includes the need for insurance provision in relation to such incidents, while another part helps to provide protection for indigenous flora and fauna, as the noble Viscount said.

I endorse the Bill on the understanding that it is a contribution to the safety and sanctity of the Antarctic as an international zone of peaceful research. I do not support any geopolitical claims that might be drawn from it as giving the UK special rights that other nations might not have.

Biological Threats

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, this is a cosy and intimate debate given the seriousness of the risks that we are discussing, but I still want to congratulate my noble friend Lord Harris on having set it up and on his excellent introduction. There are three sets of factors which make biological threats far more menacing than they were for previous generations. The first of these, as my noble friend has said, is work in scientific laboratories that is designed to unpack the basic building blocks of nature but which can have spin-offs of a dangerous kind. I shall say a little more about that later. Secondly, there is the disruption to or destruction of the world’s ecosystems, releasing pathogens from their normal hosts. The process is normally known as zoonosis and it is one that is fraught with implications for human beings. Thirdly, as my noble friend also mentioned, we have globalisation which can transmit pathogens almost immediately from one side of the world to the other.

This is an extraordinary package of innovation for us to have to live with. As the science writer David Quammen notes in his book, Spillover, the consequences appear,

“as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases emerging from unexpected sources, raising deep concern and deep foreboding among the scientists who study them”.

Such diseases can spark global pandemics which are all the more dangerous because they feature pathogens for which there is no known cure or treatment. Just as ominously, they can be used in warfare or in terrorist activity. The emergence of terrorist groups willing to inflict damage upon millions of people and who may be indifferent to their own survival is a chilling thought.

The SARS outbreak of 2003 was contained partly because of quick diagnostic work—there is something to be learnt from that—and partly because rigorous quarantine measures were taken in the key cities involved. But there was also a large element of luck. SARS is unusual in that the symptoms appear before a person becomes highly infectious; in other words, there is a space of time for detection and intervention that does not occur in most other diseases. The nightmare scenario for the UK is what would happen if a new strain of disease should form the basis of a terrorist attack, especially a disease with no known cure.

I have three questions for the Minister. The first concerns the Biological Weapons Convention. It seems to be only obliquely relevant to stopping such an eventuality, while more generally it is a relatively weak mechanism. So-called confidence building measures are supposed to be crucial to its operation, providing for the sharing of knowledge and strategies, but since the late 1980s only eight states out of 116 signatories have supplied CBMs every year. How could the BWC be further beefed up?

Secondly, we know that scientists are our guardians in this area. We cannot depend on political leaders because only scientists can calculate where diseases are likely to emerge and identify new types of bio-weapons. Scientists work in a variety of national and international organisations such as the WHO and scrutinise emerging trends in the production of pathogens. However, as was said earlier, at some point the public must be involved in relation to public understanding of the risks and threats. What role do the Government see for public education here?

Thirdly, what do the Government make of the interesting controversy over research involving H5N1 influenza—in other words, bird flu—which has been much debated over the past couple of years and to which it is difficult to seek a resolution? This research led to a strain that could be transmitted between humans through the air. In January 2012, the New York Times published an article called, “An Engineered Doomsday”, imploring scientists to abort their research and destroy the strains produced. In the view of the Minister, should there be some controls on the dissemination of scientific studies, or even on such studies themselves? If so, where should the lines be drawn and by whom? As the noble Lord will know, this controversy continues in the scientific community without, so far, a clear outcome—although there seems to be some progress. This is a prototypical case; that is, the more new diseases emerge from zoonoses, or as the by-product of scientific research, the more we are going to face this dilemma over whether there should be limits to research and the publication of research. These lines are extremely difficult to draw.

--- Later in debate ---

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, asked me about H5N1 and what we as academics know is the delicate issue of whether one can publish all academic research, or if it would be better not to publish some aspects of biological research in this area. This is a very complex area and it would be better if I wrote to the noble Lord.

[Lord Giddens]

The noble Lord will forgive me, but what he said before moving on my point seemed like a bunch of truisms. We are dealing here with issues that are going to be extremely hard to control. For example, we have had no success in controlling the current flu norovirus. If it had been a really noxious virus, one would have seen how vulnerable we are. That is a long way from saying, “We are going to try to persuade other nations to help us”, which, of course, we are. It is a situation of much more extreme vulnerability, one that we have never been in, to a whole range of new global risks. I would like to be convinced that the Government are taking the uniqueness of these risks seriously enough, especially those of which we have no experience. They could come from anywhere.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Briefly, I can only assure the noble Lord that we are acutely aware of how rapidly pandemics can spread around the world and how rapidly a potential biological attack might spread from one country to another. We have seen this with the flu virus and we are certainly aware of it. A lot of research is now under way. The biology profession itself has paid a great deal of attention to it. However, there are tremendous holes in what we are capable of doing. Much of the world is governed by regimes that do not wish to co-operate with this. It is part of the gap between the global governance that the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, would like to see and the national sovereignty under which we have to operate. Her Majesty’s Government in no sense underestimate these risks. Several government departments are putting co-ordinated efforts into combating this risk, and we are working with others through the global partnership.

[Lord Giddens]

I do not want to keep the debate going too long, but it is a short one. The general population and many political leaders are not really aware of the radical nature of new dangers that never existed before because we could not do many of the experiments that we can now do in altering the genetic make-up of human beings. We have never interfered with animal life in the way we are now by destroying their natural environments and forcing viruses to look for a host, the most available of which is human beings. Truisms are not enough; we have to do a lot of thinking about how we handle risks. The obvious thing for the ordinary person to say is, “Well, it has never happened yet”. It only has to happen once, and then it is too late. There are so many new risks around, of which nuclear weapons were the first, that handling them is going to be very puzzling and problematic. We should be thinking very carefully and in depth about how to do so.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have already seen the Ebola virus and a number of other potential pandemics coming out of Africa. What I should say to the noble Lord is that this is the sort of topic into which it would be highly appropriate for a sessional Lords committee to undertake a detailed inquiry. There is a certain amount of valuable expertise in this House which could look at it and that is a way we could go forward. If a sufficient number of Members of this House would like to have a Government briefing, I daresay that could be arranged, but let us discuss that further. Having, I hope, given a response which in no sense wishes to close the subject—it is something which the noble Lord, Lord Harris has previously brought attention to—I shall finish by saying that we need to keep on challenging our Government and even more so other governments. I thank the noble Lord for opening the debate and I am happy to go on discussing how best we might continue to raise public awareness of this issue.

European Union Committee Report

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, having heard the excellent speeches of other noble Lords, I have had to scrub out parts of my speech and modify others. As you can see from this document, I will be lucky to make any sense of it at all.

I applaud the decision to hold this debate on the report of the European Union Committee. As other noble Lords have said, it demonstrates the extraordinary range of work carried out by the committee and its sub-committees. It is a fundamental part of the contribution that the House of Lords makes to our wider political life.

If the Committee will forgive me for being slightly didactic, I have points of reflection and the Minister might want to comment on one or two of them. The first one is to underline that the environment that we have to respond to in Europe in the future will be very different from that of the past.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I am not a member of the European Union Committee but a happy little member of Sub-Committee D. Essentially, these comments occurred to me on reading through the report. As I have mentioned, there are five of them but they are fairly short. The first is very important to me; namely, that the environment to which we have to respond in Europe in the future will be very different from that of the past.

Most reports of the EU committees have been oriented towards the European Commission but the Commission is no longer where the power is, if it ever was. For the moment, for better or for worse, power lies in the hands of three or four EU national leaders and Mr Draghi. They are pushing through very rapid changes. Even though everyone says that the European Union is moving slowly, the changes that have been introduced are very rapid in historical terms. We all know that the EU has to move fast: it is a case of either much more integration or bust. The eurozone has to become far more integrated, opening up a distance from other EU members. A tangle of complex problems and opportunities will result.

Secondly, this suggests to me that the EU Committee will have to be more proactive than in the past and less Commission driven. It should anticipate likely events in the eurozone and consider implications for a range of possible futures. One could offer many examples; for instance, it is likely that the eurozone might have its own budget. What will the implications of that be for the eurozone and for the rest of Europe? There are a whole range of other issues, such as that which Joschka Fischer famously called “finality” in a very well known speech about 15 years ago; that is, what should the outer boundaries of the EU be? It is hard for me to see that you can have a federal system, which is what is being proposed for the future of the EU, without clearer boundaries than the EU has at the moment. At least the boundaries issue will be raised again forcefully.

Thirdly, there is no mention of media strategy, although some noble Lords have commented on aspects of this. It is clear that some reports deserve wider attention in the media—by which I mean in the European media and not just the UK media—than they get. I know that individual noble Lords go out proactively and give speeches about the reports. However, it is not clear to me that there is an overall strategy. If there is such a strategy, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, or the Minister would say what it is.

Fourthly, partly in regard to what the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, said, some thought might be given to preparing a more accessible document for a wider public. The public’s perception is that the EU is an arcane bureaucracy. If one looks at this document, certainly it would tend to confirm that to the legendary taxi driver who was just mentioned. To any pro-European, it is clear that the EU provides a whole range of opportunities for British citizens, which could be brought much more clearly into the open. Why not think of having a shorter, more accessible document for public consumption?

Fifthly, I do not know whether it is legitimate for me to raise this—I will be prepared for the Minister to humiliate me—but I am not clear how noble Lords get on these committees. By that, I mean in the context of the European Union and the other sub-committees. I am not referring to the rules but to the practices. Is there a systematic and public procedure?

I have been on two EU sub-committees and I do not know how I got on them. It just seemed to eventuate. Are there more people than needed—or perhaps there are not enough—to go on these committees? It is a mystery to me how I managed to get on them, although I am very happy to be on them. Is there a place for more transparency in the ways in which noble Lords come to be members perhaps not just of the EU committees but also the other committees of the House?

EU: UK Membership

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is not complete nonsense. I am sure that when the noble Lord was a special adviser to Tony Blair he was often rather disappointed by the then Prime Minister’s unwillingness to make the case for Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.

[Lord Giddens]

Perhaps I might push the noble Lord on his answers. Does he agree that as a condition of its survival, the European Union must become more integrated politically and economically? Notwithstanding what the noble Lord said, does this not inevitably mean that the UK will be progressively marginalised and, in the end, without significant influence within Europe?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the eurozone may well have to become rather more integrated, but the European Union as it exists is not a simple first-tier/second-tier issue. In a couple of months’ time, we will debate the new Irish protocol. There are Czech protocols, Danish opt-outs and Irish opt-outs. When it comes to defence and foreign policy, Britain and France are very much at the core and Germany is occasionally on the edge. So it is not a simple matter of insiders and those on the fringes.

Behaviour Change: Science and Technology Committee Report

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, and her colleagues on the production of this report. It is excellent work and right up there in the top echelon of reports produced in your Lordships’ House. It is a shame that it has not drawn in more noble Lords to discuss it. However, the saving grace is that the ones who are here are notably distinguished and therefore we can anticipate a high-level debate.

The topic is manifestly extremely important as there are so many areas in which Governments want to promote behaviour change. Public health, as mentioned in the report with the case study of obesity, is a good example, but there are dozens of other fields. Today one might want to include bankers, for example, as all parties now want to produce a new culture of responsibility in the City. If that is not a massive behaviour change, I do not know what it is.

The work of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein is quite rightly given central place in the report because of the impact that their work has had, especially the book Nudge, which has been mentioned, which was a bestseller in the United States—it was right at the top of the New York Times list. Since then, Cass Sunstein has been working in the Obama Administration trying to debureaucratise American business, among other things. As noted in the report, the book has had a strong influence on the coalition Government here.

I find Sunstein’s work, in particular, interesting and I have followed it for many years. As most people here will know, he is a distinguished legal theorist. For example, he wrote a devastating critique of the precautionary principle in environmental politics which, for anyone who is interested in that, shows why there is no such thing as a precautionary principle.

I think everyone here will agree that the book Nudge is packed with provocative ideas and vignettes. For example, there is one about estate agents. If you are buying a house you should watch out because one of the things that estate agents do is first of all show you two rather crummy properties before they show you the one they want you to buy. This establishes a frame of tolerance, in Sunstein’s language. It demonstrates what they are writing about because it implies some degree of covert behaviour influence. In other words, if you knew what the estate agent was doing you would be in a position to block off that influence. The covert element of their work has received a great deal of critical attention in philosophical literature, as has the notion of their philosophy, which they describe as libertarian paternalism. Many people think that that is an oxymoron but they vehemently deny that it is. I do not share that political philosophy, even though I recognise the wealth of examples that have developed in their writings. I agree with the fairly heavy objections to it, which are developed in the report. They are more consequential for the Government than the noble Baroness implied, for reasons that I will come back to.

The report took a lot of evidence and concluded that the Committee,

“were given no examples of significant change … having been achieved by non-regulatory measures alone”.

The report also rightly questions whether non-regulatory measures are more respectful of the freedom of the individual than ones involving regulation.

The Government have often taken an activist and interventionist role to secure beneficial behaviour change. The one thing that we can all agree on is that purely informational approaches—this is documented in the report and many other sources—do not really work. For example, ads or literature spelling out the dangers of unhealthy diets do not work by and large, or they have only a marginal impact on those whom they are supposed to help. The report is lacking in a kind of analytical pattern, so I offer my own on why it is so difficult to change lifestyle habits, as it is almost always difficult to do so.

I have three points to make. First, most lifestyle patterns are not individual traits; they are embedded in wider cultural settings. We cannot persuade people to change their behaviour without altering the cultural traits that drive it. This is often extremely hard to do and almost always takes time. To my mind it universally involves regulation. If we go back to the case of corporate culture in the City when talking about a big deal, it is obvious that you will not do much nudging there; you need systematic restructuring of what happens in the City and it has to be pretty penetrating. It is true that in lifestyle patterns such as alcohol consumption or smoking there are ordinarily strong cultural factors involved in the groups in which the individual is a member. Not many individual traits of behaviour are individual at all.

Secondly, some forms of behaviour that Governments may wish to change are deeply addictive. As someone who has a long–standing interest in addictive and compulsive behaviour, I know that these elements apply to many lifestyle traits in contemporary culture. It is true, for example, of most harmful eating habits. Some are involved in obesity, or in its opposite, anorexia in which I have had a lot of interest through all the phases of my career. People starve to death in the middle of a society in which there is too much food to go round. The compulsive element of that habit system is very apparent. It means that the underlying emotional sources of such lifestyle forms of behaviour have to be grappled with. For that reason nudging might be useful in certain specific contexts, but it will not allow someone to change such behaviour. In my view, obesity has a strong addictive as well as a cultural component to it. It is true of many traits of behaviour that a Government might want to try to change.

Thirdly, in trying to change behaviour we often have to confront systems of power and established interests. By and large only Governments can do that. Smoking is an interesting example as it is one area in which we have made a difference. There has been a substantial reduction in the proportion of people smoking—not in the world, where it still goes on, but in several of the industrial countries. However, it took 30 years to achieve that and about 24% of the people in this country still smoke, nevertheless. One reason for this is the resistance of the tobacco industry and the long-standing battle that it fought, and that is very true of a whole range of areas where we need to secure behaviour. If we do not confront established interests and do not recognise that there is a power system involved, we are not going to get very far.

The report calls for more effective connections between policies in the social sciences. As a social scientist, I very strongly support that and this leads me to a couple of questions for the Minister. First, I repeat the question that was asked: what happened to the famous chief social scientist? It seems to be an important position to reinstate, as I understood it would be. Secondly, in spite of what the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, says, this report demolishes a good deal of the Government’s ideological position in that the reason why Nudge was so attractive to the Government was that it seems to indicate that you can downplay the roles of government and legislation and yet achieve significant change by other means. The report shows that, by and large, this is not the case and I do not therefore see how the Government can really endorse it with equanimity.

Finally, on obesity and other dietary concerns, I return to the issue of power. We live in a society where there is highly developed corporate power, which takes the form of corporations influencing people through advertising, especially children. Corporations do not pick up the social and medical costs of what they do. It is the NHS that picks up the costs of the obesity epidemic, which is staggering in its consequences for type 2 diabetes and a whole range of other disorders. Should not the food industry be taxed more substantially, in order that it makes a bigger contribution to the very harmful forms of behaviour over which it has so much influence?

Voluntary Sector and Social Enterprise

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, on having secured this debate and on the illuminating way in which she introduced it.

The advent of a so-called age of austerity is an invitation in the industrial countries to think again about how we live. Rather than simply talking of a return to growth, with its premise of endless consumption, we should be considering more profound social goals. In place of austerity as a negative value we should be talking of sustainability, both economic and environmental, as a positive one. There is a great deal of discussion at the moment—rightly, in my opinion—about rebalancing the economy in terms of manufacturers and finance. However, we should also be discussing how to rebalance the economy in terms of social and moral objectives.

I do not really like the somewhat crummy term “big society”, which seems to be an ad man’s notion, but there is no doubt that we should be thinking creatively about how civil society can be revitalised. To me this does not mean denying the importance of the state or of markets; it means working creatively with them. Following the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, I shall concentrate on social enterprise rather than on the voluntary sector as such.

Social enterprise is conventionally a Cinderella when it comes to funding. The challenge today is to try to mainstream it. One can define a social organisation, at least roughly, as a firm in which surpluses are created for directly social purposes rather than the desire to maximise profit for owners or shareholders, which of course does not mean that such organisations cannot themselves be very profitable. According to official statistics, there are about 62,000 social enterprises in the UK, most of them small. However, some very interesting recent research shows that there are probably five times as many so-called hidden social enterprises. These are nominally for-profit enterprises in which social and environmental purposes loom large and which reinvest a substantial part of their surplus to achieve these purposes. In other words, there is a large hidden stratum of socially and morally motivated companies beyond the orthodox measurement of social enterprises.

Hidden social enterprises, the research shows, have superior growth patterns compared with organised businesses. In the research in question, each of them created nine jobs on average in a two-year period compared with six for straightforward smaller enterprises. Interestingly, twice as many hidden social enterprises have been set up by women rather than men. As the researchers observe:

“This research places entrepreneurs exactly where they should be—at the centre of the debate on the way business moves forward after the financial crisis”.

Can all this be mainstreamed? It can and should, and we should be thinking of the large corporations here, not just the small ones. Take the example of the fast-food corporations, which pay only a tiny amount of the costs that their advertising and the resultant changes in diet have in the population. Obesity is a global trend which is directly integrated with advertising that is aimed initially at children in this country and elsewhere, and it is the National Health Service and other state-based organisations that have to pick up the costs. The fast-food companies themselves should be obliged to cover more of those costs through taxation, as is happening in some parts of the United States at the moment; but surely it will also demand more active, energetic and farsighted business leadership from the larger corporations too.

In conclusion, social and environmental concerns should become a driving force also for big companies so that it is integral to what they do and is not just hived off to a tiny department of corporate responsibility that has been set up purely for public relations purposes. Companies that are in the vanguard—and we have quite a lot of evidence of this from farsighted corporate strategies—might find that such an outlook increases their own survival value.