Schools: Financial Education

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I can extend the list of desiderata from my noble friend Lord Sarfraz. I would like every pupil, by the time they leave school, to have taken note of some counterintuitive precepts—things that you have to be taught because they do not come naturally. For example, prices are not intrinsic in the way that volume or weight is. That seems an obvious point: if a travel agent puts up its prices during school holidays, it is not because it is being greedy but because it is responding to supply and demand. I feel that I have to say that, having listened to the questions earlier today when people were talking about price gouging and profiteering—vocabulary that I used to associate with authoritarian regimes.

Secondly, imports are a prize, not a concession. Buying high-quality stuff for less money frees up your assets and frees up your time so that you can spend it on other things, buy other stuff—that is what drives the entire economy. It is amazing how many people are against xenophobia in every context except honestly produced, good-value imported goods.

Thirdly, jobs are a burden rather than a gain—or rather, they are a means to an end. The end is to live well. If we can live well working shorter hours as a result of extended supply lines and globalisation, that is a good thing. I wish politicians did not feel the need to defend every deal by saying that it “creates jobs”. You can create jobs by employing people for the state—that does not create wealth. What creates wealth is innovation.

Finally, and most importantly, opportunity costs are real. Things have consequences, even the things that we do not immediately see, what Frédéric Bastiat called

“ce qu’on ne voit pas”—

the unseen things. If, for example, you are strongly in favour of supporting Ukraine, fine, but do not then complain if there is a rise in energy bills. Things have a cost. If you are strongly in favour of preserving unspoilt land and stopping housing around you, fine, but do not then complain if house prices rise. If you strongly supported the lockdown, do not complain about inflation afterwards. If we grasped those things, we would be more informed voters, we would be more fulfilled citizens and, by the time that we came here, we would be more useful legislators.

Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a visiting professor at Buckingham University, many of whose customers are adult learners. What a pleasure it is to follow those two outstanding maiden speeches. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield spoke about his scholarly immersion and his pastoral immersion, although he did not call it that, and gave us a distilled version of all the things he had learned. I hope it will be the first of many such contributions.

It is an immense pleasure to speak after and to welcome my noble friend Lord Sewell of Sanderstead. If one of the functions of this Chamber, and one of the purposes intrinsic in its composition, is to bring us a diversity of perspective and complementary skills and backgrounds then, as we have heard, he will be an outstanding contributor, enlarging our view and ennobling our debates. As we heard, he is the son of Windrush generation settlers who had the courage and enterprise to leave everything behind and start from the bottom in a new country, which should be honourable enough. I am conscious that Thursday is the 75th anniversary of Windrush, and it is slightly bizarre that we have to pretend that this was some kind of gap-year poverty tourism to help the post-war UK. There is nothing sordid about wanting a better future for your family; it is a very good thing. We are very lucky as a country to benefit from the energy and enterprise of people so motivated.

My noble friend then became an inner-city teacher, again not in any spirit of poverty tourism but because he wanted a job and was in the inner city. He became a successful role model to generations. There, he had the initiative to set up his STEM charity, initially getting black boys into STEM subjects. He has now widened it to cover underprivileged kids from all communities. Generating Genius is a terrific enterprise.

Something that your Lordships did not hear about him is that he was also a columnist and regular contributor to the Voice in the 1980s, when that newspaper was a model of intellectual diversity, variety and pluralism. There were meaningful debates about the role of family, the role of employment and so on, in a way that in our clickbait age almost every newspaper could learn from. We have become a lot more siloed.

He was also the author of that report, of course, and came in for a lot of flak, including from one or two Members of your Lordships’ House. But it is worth mentioning that the report he chaired was written by ethnic-minority Brits, all of whom had achieved distinction and excellence in a field other than the race industry. They were there because they were outstanding educators, economists, scientists or whatever. It is a glimpse of a future Britain where individuals from every background are judged according to their success in whatever field, rather than everything being dragged back into the old paradigm of race, although as we saw in the response to the report there are one or two who still want to drag us back there.

I support the Bill for the reasons that we have heard on all sides. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, gave an outstanding history of how lifelong learning has been a tool for the betterment of people throughout this country down the centuries. If they do not mind me saying this from the outside, the proudest boast of our labour movement in this country, in its broadest political sense, was the way in which it saw politics as a way of raising people up rather than tearing people down.

At the end of last week we had a debate on the role of freelancers. To repeat a point I made then, I look at my own children, one of whom is just starting school and one of whom is leaving university, and do not think that either of them will have a job as we understood that word in the 20th century. They will go through life constantly reskilling, freelancing and adapting to accelerating technology.

The old model we had, in which you go to school, work and then retire, has gone. We need to adapt in all sorts of ways, with all sorts of policy responses in how we see social security, pensions and employment law. But, above all, we need to change the model of learning. As artificial intelligence spreads, as the turnover of jobs speeds up and as more positions become obsolete while others are created, the need will increase for people to come back in, briefly, to learn the requisite skills. The role of government here is to facilitate; it is not to provide but to remove obstacles.

Had it been up to me, I am honestly not sure that I would ever have gone down the road of limiting fees in universities. How did the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, put it? He had a nice phrase about it being tailored to the circumstances of the student, not the mode of learning. I would have looked for ways to support individuals, but that debate has been and gone. Within the world in which we exist, the Bill removes some anomalies, tidies things up and creates a fairer opportunity for those coming later. I am conscious of the point my noble friend Lord Willetts made about the difficulty that older people have in taking on new loans but, in an age when people need to learn cutting-edge skills, there must surely be ways for Governments to provide that support.

The big picture, on which noble Lords from all sides agree, is the need to rethink the role of education. We need to create a kind of model in which people, at any point in life, are able to switch and reskill as needed. Doing so makes us not just more employable but more interesting and interested. It makes us more engaged, rounded and content.