Love Matters (Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households Report)

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is to be congratulated on securing this debate and allowing us to explore the different aspects of this very important report, which we have all now had time to read. I found myself initially thinking that this is such a statement of what we must surely all want that it felt like it lacked a bit of grit and edge. When I got to the chapters on “Every Child Matters” and the life we live, some of that was corrected and I was able to form a more rounded judgment of the report as a whole.

Noble Lords have already covered much of the ground that I had sought to establish in my remarks, so I will observe the strict self-discipline of not going where others have already trodden. I will also endeavour not to fulfil the stereotype of the Methodist preacher who preaches very long sermons, in the hope that I may not speak for quite as long as one or two who have spoken already—time will tell.

The most reverend Primate has made ample reference to the Beveridge report and its provisions, and quite rightly. A pub quiz question which I put to many people in Parliament and other places is: if the welfare state consists of the implementation of the recommendations of Beveridge and covers six areas of our national life, with perhaps the Butler Education Act at its beginning and the health Act at its end, who can name the other four, and the person who directed them through our Parliament? That question stymies most people—I can see bewilderment on bishops’ faces even now. No—the most reverend Primate and I will talk about it later.

The person who put four Acts of Parliament on the statute book was Jim Griffiths, who was our Member of Parliament in Llanelli and who lived in Burry Port, where I come from. He began his life in the mines, worked his way up to be head of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, and went to the miners’ college in London long before he entered politics, because he thought he had something to say only once he had done all that. He then showed the most humane way, leading a debate here in this House—because at this time the Commons was sitting here—daring to ask the Government in time of war to debate the provisions of the Beveridge Act in March 1943 and to promise to undertake to implement its provisions once the war was over. I am very proud to come from a stable that produced such a man.

I will give just one little illustration from my early life of where those considerations played a very real part. I was raised in a single-parent family; like the most reverend Primate, I discovered late in life that the man I thought was my father was not my father. For all that, we—my mother and two boys—were thrown out of the family home. We lived in one room, a lean-to in a brickyard. If it were not for school meals, I would not have eaten meat until I was well into my teens.

The incident I wish to recount because of its illustrative value is the visit of a man from the National Assistance Board—I should have said that the four Acts we are talking about were National Assistance, Family Allowances, injuries at work and National Insurance Acts. We were visited by a man with a briefcase, wearing a suit, in our humble little abode, who wanted to question my mother as to whether she was entitled to benefits. She had suffered irreversible injuries carrying sheets of steel from one part of a tin-plating process to another in the local factory until it broke her body, and she could barely stand after that. This man’s questioning of my poor mother as to whether she was entitled to benefits and whether she should not make herself fit for work, was what a 10 year-old and 11 year-old boy could not tolerate any longer. With a wink exchanged between me and my brother, we set upon that man: we hit him, beat him and threw him out of the home. That has remained: it satisfied all of my pugilistic needs for the rest of my life—the antidote is still being played out.

For all that, I learned what threatens families from the side of officialdom. Again and again through my ministry, I have stood by claimants in offices that purport to be there to help people along, where, frankly, the atmosphere is foetid and the humiliation of the person making an application is total. That is what it did to my mother. I have learned that sweet talk about families, even when they seek to be good families, is sometimes threatened by external—and systemic—forces, very often imposed by people like us sitting in places like this. That was the first thing: a bit of grit that was stimulated by my reading of this report.

We fast forward a little now to my time as a minister in Essex. On Friday evening it was my job as an officer in the Boys’ Brigade to look after what are called the “anchor boys”—the tiny tots—between five and seven. So, every Friday, between 5 pm and 7 pm, there I was. I soon became aware of something transactional happening in those sessions. The mothers of the children would bring the boys, but the fathers would fetch them. It was considered to be a safe place in broken families where the children living at home during the week with their mothers could be handed over to their fathers. Therefore, in days when the Church has suffered more than most with all the stuff to do with safeguarding over the years, it was a marvellous thing to have that trust placed in one. But it also made me aware of the pressures under which families live, and under which they are broken. It is true that the housing shortage that we are currently going through was not, even in those post-war years, the problem it is today. How can even the highest-minded parent bring up children in the squalid conditions and under the inhumane provisions that are currently in force? I learned lessons about the pressures on families that way.

Finally—to fulfil my self-fulfilling prophecy here—mention has been made of long marriages: I heard 56 and 54. Well, we are at 55—yes, the same woman. We had three children and had the very happiest of times with them. The boys were born in Haiti, with Haitian doctors and nurses and in a Haitian hospital, with Haitian people in a similar condition alongside them. We had a fabulous time. All my three children can tell you the French word for a Jerusalem artichoke and all of them can sing the Welsh national anthem. But, curiously, despite all that was positive, two of my three children are on their second marriage. I will not recount chapter and verse, but I will say that, even in the best of circumstances and to the best people with happy memories, bad things happen. So it is important, in looking at the family and recognising that it matters, and at the place of love in helping to form the cement for that, for us never to forget that there but for the grace of God go any one of us, and that from one moment to another, things happen. We must therefore not feel that even the worthiest of recommendations we can produce will solve the problems we face easily.

A Methodist minister sits down after 10 and a half minutes and hopes to be commended for it.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, I suspect that we all knew that it would be an honour and a privilege to hear the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, but I would like to say that, at least in my case, it has also been a pleasure. The creative arts will indeed find a noble spokesperson for their cause and the voice of culture will be heard in a focused way because of his presence among us. His achievements in the world of music are truly prodigious: orchestral and chamber music; music for woodwind and strings; music for guitar and keyboard; and music for oratorio, ballet and film. You name it, and he seems to have done it. We salute him for his achievements, but we delight ourselves in the wisdom of those who bring him into our company so that we may benefit from them.

By happy coincidence, I am reading and reviewing at the moment a book about the poet RS Thomas. During the time he lived at Manafon, which is not far from Knighton, he wrote his first collection of poetry. The key poem in the volume is called, Out of the Hills. Since the noble Lord said that hill farming was one of his preoccupations, perhaps the same hills produced music in his case and poetry in the case of Thomas. I cannot forbear to read three lines of Out of the Hills; I know that noble Lords will tolerate this.

“Dreams clustering thick on his sallow skull”—

I had rather hoped that there would be a few more curls on the noble Lord’s head than there proved to be.

“Dreams clustering thick on his sallow skull,

Dark as curls, he comes, ambling with his cattle

From the starved pastures. He has shaken from off his shoulders

The weight of the sky, and the lash of the wind’s sharpness

Is healing already under the medicinal sun”.

I would love to quote the whole poem but I suspect that patience will run out. It is a joy, when we are preoccupied with finance, matters to do with the economy, politics and all the rest of it, that we shall have this other side of our being well represented by the presence of the noble Lord.

I suspect that his godfather would provide a mutual friend whom unwittingly we both might claim: a man called Osian Ellis, a professor of harp at the Royal Academy and a good friend of mine, now retired to the Llyn peninsula in north Wales. I remember talking to him about the art of harp playing and asking what pleasure he took from the fact that he had formed so many harpists in the course of his career and saved the art of harp playing for posterity. He said, “Ah, great pleasure. They are breathtakingly brilliant, but I have learnt to make the distinction between those who find the notes and those who find the music”. I suspect that in the case of the noble Lord we will hear both the notes played with great skill and the music beguiling us perhaps into wiser decisions than we would otherwise have made.

I can find a very easy jumping-off point from the preoccupations of the noble Lord to the subject on which I wish to entertain your Lordships for just a few minutes, which is education. I would hate to be the Cinderella in the discussions that we are going to have for the rest of the day. Education, education, education: the mantra is well known to all of us. In the gracious Speech to which we are replying, the first item states that,

“my government’s legislative programme will continue to focus on building a stronger economy so that the United Kingdom can compete and succeed in the world”.

I suggest that education, if it were properly viewed as an investment instead of a drain on our resources, would indeed be part of what builds a stronger economy. I would like to see education viewed in that way, rather than as something that costs a lot of money and has to be trimmed and cut back with greater and greater fierceness.

In the first couple of years of the present Administration a couple of Bills were railroaded through Parliament that gave impetus to the already existent and established academies. I have nothing against academies and I am strongly in favour of choice. My disaffection with the impetus to have more academies lies in the fact that it is sometimes at the expense of choice. Not all schools want to become academies. Why should they not choose not to become academies if in their view that is in their best interests? I am the chairperson of the Central Foundation schools of London. Neither of them is an academy and I promise noble Lords that both schools welcome their association with local authority wisdom. As more and more responsibility gets passed to governors, they find that they need the wisdom, experience and skill that they can call upon in the governance they are expected to provide.

The two schools in question are simply brilliant. When the national average last year for GCSE A* to C lay at 58%, these two inner-city schools provided 66% and 67% pass rates, without any of the so-called advantages of being academies. Yet they are in the poorest parts of the inner city of London. In Islington and Tower Hamlets we have two schools where over 70% of the pupils are on free school meals and where there are dozens and dozens of ethnic backgrounds—in the case of the boys’ school, not a single one constituting more than 25% of the population of the school, while in the girls’ school 80% are from Bangladeshi families and are all Muslims. We have this mixture of types, we are in the inner city, we are happy not to be academies and we are achieving extraordinarily well. Sometimes I think that we should salute those schools that do that.

Mossbourne academy is always held up as the example that we must all aim at reaching. We are told that it,

“is a model for 21st century education, pioneering opportunity, social mobility and the reinvention of the inner-city comprehensive”.

I promise your Lordships that the inner-city comprehensive is being reinvented furiously and wonderfully in the schools where I work without them having academy status at all.

So let there be choice. It is just sad that the market place is dominating the way in which schools are proliferating in the inner city. At 500 metres from the boys’ school, where we have just seen the doubling of the sixth form and with good results to match, a free school has been started where one is not needed. Islington has an over-provision of places at sixth-form level for its pupils, yet here we have a free school—to meet what demand? The school has also filched the head of the sixth-form consortium in Islington to be the head of the new free school. This is simply mad.

We must encourage the development of education without the red tape and control from the centre which, despite the rhetoric, suggesting a laying off of schools from that point of view, is actually increasing the amount of paperwork that head teachers have to cope with. We must go on asking ourselves whether we have got it right. Indeed, in the realm of education, where “further measures” are threatened in the Queen’s Speech—I dread those words, “further measures”—we simply have to recognise that sometimes we get the notes but that we do not always get the music.