Department for Work and Pensions: AI

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I will need to write to the noble Lord with those specific figures.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

The Minister has said repeatedly that he wants the public to have trust in the use of AI in the system. Can he therefore tell us what proportion of cases where AI has been used are subsequently checked by a human? Will he publish the results of that analysis to show whether the AI decisions are the same as human decisions, or perhaps better, or worse?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

I can give the noble Lord some reassurance on the processes that we have in place. AI is an evolving, iterative process and it is important to highlight the fact that we have a test- and-learn approach. We must proceed with extreme caution in what we are doing. Test-and-learn means that we need to get to a point where we are assured that this will work and that nobody will be affected detrimentally. Then we can accelerate our programmes.

Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

The noble Lord has clarified the situation, in that the Act came in some time after his then party came into power and the consultation took place prior to the general election that brought it into power.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Buscombe]

I want to progress, my Lords, and do not have to accept any more interventions.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I am sorry, but the Minister is misleading the House on a specific point which she chose to introduce on the passage of the Human Rights Act and the consultation on it. I was a member of a body set up called the Human Rights Act taskforce, which was designed to consult and involve stakeholders in how the Act should be implemented. There was consultation because I was part of it. I was not a Member of this House at that stage; it was something that the then Government did.

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, let me turn to the consultation that took place in relation to these statutory instruments. Other noble Lords have insinuated that there was no consultation. I made it clear at the outset that there was a form of consultation. As the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, made clear, there is in a sense consultation and consultation. We are talking here about consultation with those very closely connected with the industry. The Department for Work and Pensions engaged with a pension provider, an advisory firm and a trade body for occupational pension schemes, that trade body obviously representing a fair number of those in occupational pension schemes. Any suggestion by noble Lords that there has been no consultation is simply not true. I reassure the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York that consultation took place with those involved in the bespoke part of the industry concerning cross-border activity within the EU. These SIs do not have any policy intent. They do not change policy; they are minor and technical amendments. It is not our role to look at the implications of a deal or no deal; it is more about ensuring that there is preparedness for a no deal and legal certainty when we leave the EU on 29 March.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, for his support and to hear that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee decided that the regulations were clear. Of course, it was necessary to re-lay them when an incorrect reference to UK regulated markets was found, but we were very quick to do that. We withdrew the draft regulations and re-laid them on 3 December. It is about making sure that we can be agile and flexible and therefore respond with certainty when we need to. Any question of there not having been consultation with those in the industry whom the regulations impact is simply not the case.

As always, the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, asked the more challenging questions. I will do my best to reply, but, if I fail with regard to any aspect of these very technical regulations, I will write to her. These statutory instruments fix elements of the UK’s occupational and personal pensions legislation that will not work effectively after the UK departs the EU, including where distinctions have been made between EU or EEA member states and overseas entities, such as EEA central banks, that will no longer apply, where the UK is referred to as an EU or EEA member state, or where it is obliged to share data with EU agencies or member states under reciprocal arrangements that will no longer apply.

If someone lives in the European Economic Area and has a personal pension or annuity with a UK-based firm, the firm should have made plans to ensure that the person can still receive payments from the personal pension or annuity even if the UK leaves the EU without a deal. If the firm needs to make any changes to the personal pension or annuity, or to the way in which it provides it, it should contact the person. If the person has any concerns about whether they might be affected, they should contact their firm. The UK state pension will still be payable cross border into the EEA.

The European Union (Withdrawal) Act repeals the European Communities Act 1972 and converts into UK domestic law the existing body of directly applicable EU law and UK laws relating to EU membership. So, this body is referred to as retained EU law. The Act also gives Ministers a power,

“to prevent, remedy or mitigate … any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively, or … any other deficiency in retained EU law, arising from the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU”,

through statutory instruments such as these regulations.

We believe it is in the interests of both the EU and the UK for the UK to have a smooth and orderly exit from the EU, as set out in the withdrawal agreement. But it is our duty to continue to prepare for a range of potential outcomes, including no deal.

To answer the question from the noble Lord, Lord Warner, when companies invest in pension schemes it is up to those schemes and pension providers to think about their investment opportunities in future. It is not something that we can reflect through these statutory instruments.

I want to be sure that I have covered as much as I can to the best of my ability. Noble Lords have been concerned that we have not given these statutory instruments enough attention. I can only repeat that that simply is not the case.

GovCoin

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My noble friend is absolutely right that very interesting ideas can come from blockchain and other things. I do not want to expand further on that in this Question. We are dealing with just a small-scale trial here, designed to make life easier for certain benefit claimants and to make it easier for them to manage their money.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend talked about the need for an ethical framework underpinning the use of this sort of technology. Obviously, the Government have decided to go ahead with this trial in the absence of such a framework, but does the Minister agree that one is needed, not only for further developments in this area but for developments in the sorts of areas that have just been referred to by his noble friend?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, that might or might not be the case, but what we are talking about here is this particular trial. The important thing is that we achieved the proper consent of those taking part and we gave the proper assurances, as I have repeated, that there would be no release of information about how those individuals spent their money to the department or the Government more widely.

Pensions: British Citizens Overseas

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann]

The figures that I have been given from outside estimates are that the cost would be around £200 million a year by 2020. It is possible that the noble Lord is citing something for one year only.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not think that the Minister has fully answered two questions that have been put to her. The first was by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, who specifically asked about a commitment made on behalf of the Government by Oliver Letwin. Will she tell us the status of that commitment now? The second question was from my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition, who specifically asked about statements on the Minister’s own personal website. Does she resile from the statements on her own website?

[Baroness Altmann]

I have no information about any work that is going on in other departments. I can only report that in the Department for Work and Pensions no estimates are being made about the costs of uprating frozen pensions.

Universal Credit

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the NAO has recognised the savings to government of going the way that we are going, with a live service showing us how it works and a properly designed digital service coming out behind. The NAO has recognised that the savings to government of that approach are £2 billion.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, the Public Accounts Committee has pointed out that the Government are too trusting of quasi-monopolistic private providers such as G4S, which is to have a major role in the development of universal credit. Have the Government forgiven it for overcharging the taxpayer £130 million for tagging people who did not exist or had died?

[Lord Freud]

G4S has no role in the run-out of universal credit.

Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

That this House takes note of the Report of the Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, before we begin tonight’s debate, I express my delight at the calibre of those who have signed up to speak. The entire membership of the committee is participating, which does not surprise me as, throughout what was at times an intense inquiry, their diligence, enthusiasm and expertise helped the committee to get its job done. Even the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, served his time on the committee; our loss was the Government’s gain when he was promoted to the Whips’ Office in October. We are delighted that he will be responding to tonight’s debate. In addition, two valuable witnesses to the inquiry, the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, are joining us, along with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, another multiple Paralympic medal winner.

In that context, I should perhaps begin by declaring an interest, or rather a non-interest, in my own rather less than distinguished, not to say non-existent, sporting career. At the age of 12, I was expelled from the PE department of my school—or, as they put it, “Harris is excused games for the rest of his school career”—on the grounds of wilful lack of effort. As noble Lords can see, the rest is history. I stand before you as a nasty warning of what will happen if the Government fail to take our recommendations on school-age sport more seriously.

The committee, which I had the privilege to chair, was appointed in May last year to consider,

“the strategic issues for regeneration and sporting legacy from the Olympic and Paralympic Games”.

We were ordered to report by 15 November and, in the event, managed to do so a few days early. This committee was an experiment by the House. Rather than having the full Session to conduct an inquiry into one policy area, this year two committees shared the resources of one to complete two separate inquiries. Suffice it to say, given the breadth of the topic set by our terms of reference, this was a tall order, which we sought to resolve by packing as many witness sessions into six months as most committees would attempt in a year.

Tonight I shall speak to both our report and the joint response to it from the Government and the Mayor of London, which was issued, in my view rather inappropriately, while the Lords was in its February Recess.

We began our inquiry less than a year after the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games, which I think we all felt was early to try to gauge the legacy. As a result, we did not even attempt to make definitive judgments on what the end results would be but instead concentrated on whether credible arrangements were in place to deliver the maximum possible legacy, once the euphoria of the Games themselves had disappeared. We tried to see the most representative possible range of groups and bodies. We took formal evidence in person from 52 witnesses in Westminster and one in South America —by video conference rather than visit, I hasten to say. We sat for four days during the Recess in September and, importantly, spent one of those days very fruitfully visiting people in the host boroughs. That day included what I am sure was unique—a visitation by your Lordships’ House to an East End boxing club.

The tightness of our timetable meant that our work was necessarily compressed, and that many of our oral submissions had inevitably to take place before we had received the written submissions from the organisations concerned. Like all ad hoc committees of the House, there is an issue over how our report will be followed up. I know that the Liaison Committee is looking at this, but my colleagues and I are, like Barkis in David Copperfield, willing—willing to be recalled to review these issues in the future, should the House so request us to do.

I am grateful to everyone who engaged with the inquiry. Personally, I am indebted to my colleagues on the committee who were, between them, expert in so many aspects of the terms of reference. Our work would not have been possible without the superb support of our clerk team: Duncan Sagar, who has now switched seamlessly to covering modern slavery; Matthew Smith, who switched on the day of the report’s publication from being an expert on urban regeneration to being one on the taxation of personal service companies; and Helena Ali, who has now, I understand, been poached by the House of Commons. We were also ably assisted by our two advisers: Professor Ian Henry and Professor Allan Brimicombe.

The euphoria over the Games was justified. The hosting of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games was an outstanding success. The Games exceeded expectations and confounded sceptics by giving the world a spectacular example of what the United Kingdom is capable of doing, and, what is more, they delivered that major event on time and to budget. The evidence that we took suggested that legacy played a bigger part in the planning of the 2012 Games than for any previous Games and, again, this in itself deserves credit.

At a year’s distance, many of our witnesses argued that it was simply too soon to assess the legacy for the regeneration of east London. This will be seen only over decades and generations. However, the sporting legacy, or perhaps in some instances the lack of it, is easier to assess. The single biggest promise on the sporting side was for a much more physically active population. The UK faces an epidemic of obesity, which, on Budget Day, I should note costs an estimated £20 billion per year, as well as seriously curtailing health and quality of life. The promise of inspiring a new sporting generation was crucial and a tantalising part of that legacy aspiration. We found the evidence was pretty clear in this regard and, I have to say, rather disappointing. The envisaged post-Games step change in participation across the United Kingdom and across different sports simply did not materialise. If anything, sporting activity subsequently declined.

There were, of course, some honourable exceptions. Some sports, such as cycling, have used a succession of events and sporting successes, building on the Manchester Commonwealth Games and various victorious Tours de France, to have a really impressive and sustained boost in participation across the country, amplified by the heroics of Victoria Pendleton, Sir Chris Hoy and their teammates in 2012. However, across the board, the picture was one of a lack of legacy planning by sports, particularly for what would happen at grass-roots level. The links between sports governing bodies, the investment from Sport England, and community clubs, schools and facilities, are critical and need more investment. From the Government’s response to our report, it seems that this message is only now beginning to hit home. This may be, tragically, too late to secure a participation legacy from 2012. This was a missed opportunity, and we have to hope that it is not too late to leverage the coming decade of sporting events hosted in the UK, beginning with this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

The Games themselves were also an impressive example of what could be done to inspire volunteers, but here again there was a missed opportunity adequately to harness that enthusiasm. I have spoken to so many of those who were Games makers, who tell me that, with a little more encouragement in the immediate aftermath of the Games, they would have been ready to continue with that level of volunteering commitment.

To try to address these gaps in planning, as well as to ensure that sports governing bodies are reaching out to previously underrepresented groups, we called for more transparency through the publication of the whole sport plans, which each sport produces as a part of Sport England’s funding process. I was disappointed that the Government in their response did not engage with this recommendation positively. I hope that the Minister, when he responds, will give us a reason why these documents should not be put in the public domain.

The Paralympic Games seem to have provided genuine inspiration for more people with and without disabilities to take up sport. However, there are barriers in the quality of the facilities available in clubs, which affect disabled people looking to participate in sport. As well as boosting sporting participation for those with disabilities, an important hoped-for legacy of the Paralympics was the transformation of general public perceptions of disability. Extensive media coverage has certainly had a powerful effect on changing public perceptions of disabled sport. However, I have to say that there is less clear evidence that there was a similar impact on the broader perception of people with disabilities.

The adequate provision of sport for school-age children is essential, coming at that key moment in young people’s lives when an intervention can create lifelong habits and enjoyment of exercise. Our report supported the findings of the recent report for the Welsh Assembly by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, on sport in schools in Wales, in particular that PE needs a greater emphasis in the school day and that teachers, particularly in primary schools, need the training and skills to teach PE if we are to achieve meaningful progress. Our report called on the Department for Education and Ofsted to take more active roles in making this change happen. The Government’s response, including confirmation that PE will remain compulsory at all four key stages and that Ofsted is emphasising PE skills in new teachers, certainly talks the right talk. It is essential that this translates into meaningful progress.

Turning to high-performance sport, the biggest single controversy was over UK Sport’s “No Compromise” approach to funding, whereby funding is directed at those sports with the best medium-term medal prospects. Because of Team GB’s hosting of the Games, a number of Olympic and Paralympic sports received additional funding so that we could field teams in every event, including those that were not traditionally popular in the UK. Some sports, such as handball and volleyball, really caught the public imagination and had the potential to grow new participation bases on the back of Team GB’s displays. There is no question that the “No Compromise” approach to sports funding has clearly improved the top end of Team GB’s performances in the recent past, and the transformation in medal haul from Atlanta in 1996 to London in 2012 is a staggering achievement. However, we were concerned that it does not sufficiently help emerging sports. There is also a bias against team sports, a point put to us powerfully to in evidence by Sir Clive Woodward. Without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, we called for UK Sport to adopt a more flexible approach, which reflects this problem and enables sports to nurture a broader base and a wider pool from which future world-class talent might emerge.

I have been contacted—as, I am sure, have colleagues since the report’s publication by a number of those affected by UK Sport’s recent decisions. One of the most disappointing aspects of the Government’s response was their flat refusal to consider making the process more flexible. Will the Minister confirm whether the door is closed to rethinking the “No Compromise” approach in future? Certainly, today’s funding announcements by UK Sport hardly bode well for future participation in the sports such as basketball that have lost out.

Before turning to the second limb of our inquiry—the regeneration legacy—I want to say a word about the facilities built for the Games and their future use. We searched hard for the white elephants that have been the legacy of so many previous Games and we did not find any. The Olympic stadium itself will not be standing idle and empty but will be the home of West Ham United. That was not the original legacy concept, but it will be used.

Our view was that the stadium is a national asset and it remains important that the focus must be on making the best use of it for the community and the taxpayer. Last week, I met West Ham United, and I recognise the enormous efforts it is making to bring football “back to the people” with its Kids for a Quid scheme, its community sports trust, and its work with youngsters to reduce anti-social behaviour and provide out-of-school study support for underachieving children. The arrangements for the stadium’s use when West Ham is not using it must also be focused on delivering community benefit.

It is the local people who should stand to gain most from the legacy of the Games, and it is for this reason that the regeneration of east London was a major part of what was promised. Previous Games and other major sporting events around the world have failed to leave meaningful transformative legacies for local people. We heard from the vice-president of the IOC that regeneration is all about domestic palatability, and the promise to transform the lives and prospects of future generations of east Londoners was the biggest moral case for the Games.

The regeneration of east London is a huge, long-term task with a potentially great reward. The redevelopment of the Olympic park itself is led by the mayor’s London Legacy Development Corporation, or LLDC. We were pleased to find that the park will offer a mix of good-quality, new housing within the former athletes’ village, and in five new neighbourhoods that will be developed across the park. It is important that a fair proportion—at least the LLDC’s target of 35%—of this housing is affordable for, and accessible to, local residents. We recommended that the LLDC should take steps to manage and monitor this. We were a little concerned that, in the mayor’s part of the response to the report, the LLDC seemed to be focused only on affordability and not on the wider questions of suitability. Many local families are relatively large when compared with the UK average, and it is more common in the local communities than nationally for extended families to cohabit. If the housing is to work for local families, it needs to have a decent share appropriate for those larger families.

Outside the park, there is massive potential and need for further housing development in the surrounding boroughs. It is essential that the mayor, the GLA and local authorities work together to accelerate development on these sites and to ensure that the high standards so far achieved are sustained in subsequent development. The responses of the Government and the mayor contain a number of commitments to exceed environmental and sustainability minimum standards. I trust that they will stick to those commitments.

The development of the park and surrounding area will generate significant new employment opportunities over the coming decades. The perception of the local people whom we met during this inquiry was that, so far, they have not felt the benefits of these opportunities. Our report called on the responsible bodies to develop a co-ordinated programme through which new opportunities can be targeted at local communities. The LLDC has assured us that it is rolling out a programme of outreach and engagement events to ensure that local people are aware. However, this is only half the answer. The new jobs will be taken by locals only if the skills base of people in the area improves. This requires action and investment in the short term to secure the longer-term dividend. We were pleased that the GLA and the LLDC responded positively to our recommendation that a construction employment and skills programme be developed, and the corporation is now working on it.

Central to all this is the extent to which the Olympic park itself comes to embody the potential future of the East End—a future of aspiration and hope, and a future of technological jobs that will have a benefit not only locally but for the nation as a whole. The transformation of the former media centre will be central to this, and I know we were impressed by the way in which BT Sport has used the space that it has acquired. I was heartened also to see the news last week that Maker Faire, which the Observer rather unkindly called an “unashamed celebration of geekdom”, will come to the park next year—the first time it has taken place outside the USA—and is expected to draw 75,000 visitors over its four weeks during the summer holidays.

The transport infrastructure left in the wake of the Games will also be critical to that future development. We recommended that the Department for Transport take proper ownership of the unsolved problem of providing Stratford International station with international services. I was disappointed that the Government’s response showed no willingness whatever to engage to a greater degree to push this process along. In preparation for the Games, Transport for London made great strides in improving the accessibility of the London transport network, including for travellers with disabilities. The momentum of these changes must not be lost, and the successful joint working by transport operators must be maintained.

A number of initiatives also piloted during the Games allowed businesses, particularly SMEs, a platform on which to compete to provide services in support of the Games. We concluded that these initiatives were successful and need to be maintained to maximise the benefits to businesses.

In summing up, I come to perhaps the most important observation that ran throughout the various legacy programmes. The real-world pressure of a set deadline to host the Games and the political unacceptability of failing to deliver a world-class event meant that there was a healthy driver to ensure that the plethora of organisations—the veritable table Tower of Babel of competing voices within and outside government—were led strongly to a single common purpose. This leadership and sense of direction are equally important to delivering the legacy but they diminished after the Games passed. We were unconvinced that the Government’s current oversight arrangements represent a robust way in which to deliver the legacy. There is now confusion on the timeframes and targets involved in its delivery and a lack of clear ownership. We recommended that one Minister be given overall responsibility for the many strands of the legacy, working with the devolved Administrations to ensure UK-wide co-ordination. Otherwise, we cannot see much of a meaningful legacy outside London. In the same vein, we called for the mayor’s office to own the vision for the future development of east London and the creation of a lasting Olympic legacy in the capital—and for the mayor’s office to be given the necessary responsibility and power.

In their response, the Government overtly accepted only one of our 41 recommendations. They did not engage with the recommendation that a single Minister be given specific responsibility, beyond restating the role of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Time will tell, but the committee was convinced by the evidence we received that more coherence is needed if the huge and very real legacy opportunities are not to be missed. I commend this report to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, I am enormously grateful to all who have participated in this debate. It has been, as a number of noble Lords have commented, an extremely impressive debate which has covered many of the issues that the committee considered. The debate has also demonstrated why the committee was so effective and successful as the range of experience and expertise brought to bear in our committee has also been reflected in the Chamber today.

It is therefore disappointing—despite the Minister’s excellent presentation of the Government’s response—that the response is quite thin on quite a number of the detailed points raised. However, that does not alter the fact that no one is suggesting that the Olympics were anything other than an enormous success and that we have delivered far more legacy than any previous Olympic Games. It is just that we could have done it so much better and achieved so much more. Our hope is that it will be possible, even now, to capitalise on the Olympic Games and to take forward that legacy.

The Chief Whip will be delighted to hear that I am not intending to reprise all the comments that were made. I will pick out just one, from the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. He made the point that the reason why the Olympics were so successful was the cross-Whitehall working, bringing together the 18 different government departments. He made the point that this does not need to be unique. The message of this evening’s debate is that we do not want it to be unique. We want it to continue to capitalise on the legacy, to make sure that that legacy is delivered.

This is all about leadership—it requires leadership within government at the highest level. This is not a criticism of the current Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, but to corral all the different senior Cabinet Ministers together and make things happen requires the highest level of leadership within government. Within London, it requires the leadership of the office of the mayor to carry forward a vision for the East End and for London, to make sure that we capitalise on the spirit of 2012. That is what is required.

Motion agreed.

Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, clearly there are issues with housing. There is a great deal of overcrowding. There are various figures for this but between 250,000 and approaching 400,000 homes are overcrowded, and there are long waiting lists. Also, the economic signals seem odd. The provision of single-bedroomed homes falls very far short of demand, with 61% of people wanting, or meeting the size requirements for, one-bedroomed accommodation.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, has the noble Lord seen a report in one of my local newspapers, the Haringey Independent, where one Di Alexander, who chairs a housing association and happens to be the father of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said that the bedroom tax,

“is particularly unfair in that it penalises both our tenants and ourselves for not being able to magic up a supply of smaller properties”?

Has the noble Lord also seen the report of the Chartered Institute of Housing on the pilots of capping benefits in the London Borough of Haringey? It points out that,

“2,300 children live in households whose income has been capped”,

resulting in,

“instability in education, increasing tensions within the home, sudden relocation and loss of social and educational opportunities or networks”,

which, it says, is extremely serious. Will he comment on the fact that, according to that study, the cost to local authorities and others of achieving a saving of £60,000 per week was £960,000 over just a four-month period? Does that really make sense?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is simply too early to reach judgments about how the introduction of the benefit cap and the removal of the spare room subsidy bed in. The kind of savings that we were looking for from those policies seems to be being borne out by the very early initial figures that we are now seeing.

Human Trafficking

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My noble friend is right. The level of conviction in this area is sadly low, although there are other convictions. People may have committed trafficking offences, but their conviction is for other offences: rape and so on. My noble friend’s point is valid, and I share it.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, is it possible for the Government to give a firm commitment that vulnerable people, particularly children, who have been trafficked will not be deported back to the country from which they have been trafficked as they are then likely to fall back into the hands of those who have trafficked them?

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I refer the noble Lord to the point I made at the beginning about the UKBA now having a team dedicated exclusively to decision-making around victims, which is important in this area. In addition, it is important for me to be clear that the UKBA has a “victims first” attitude. We address the needs of the victim and investigate the crime against them before any consideration is made of an individual’s immigration status. That is secondary in situations such as this.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

I hope that the Minister will not accept this amendment because it seems to me that this is a good example of substituting reality with a bureaucratic answer. Surely what we are trying to do in this legislation is so to embed it in people’s attitudes and concepts that there is no need to have complicated bureaucratic form-filling and ticking-off. Most of us who run businesses would not dream of having a provision like this. However, most of us who run businesses would also be very insistent that decisions were made with a proper understanding of their impact on women as well as men and on minorities as well as majorities.

I hope the Minister will accept that many in today’s society consider that these issues should perfectly properly be dealt with in law—a law which I am happy to say looks as if it will be more inclusive than it has been up to now—but that people should themselves find the best way of handling them. The Government should not present people with a detailed arrangement such as appears in this amendment, which I am afraid very often becomes a substitute for action. People may say, “I have done my assessment and therefore I don’t have to think”. What we really need is for people to think creatively about how best to do these things. It is very much better not to lay down a recipe of the kind proposed in the amendment, which slightly reminds me of the nannying schemes which have made these provisions less popular than they ought to be. I am afraid that many people do not think of equality as a progressive and positive thing but rather as merely another drudgery which is laid on them. We do not want that; we want a society where equality is included as a natural way of looking at how you run a business, a local authority or a public authority. We do not want someone to feel that he or she has done their bit of homework, has ticked the boxes the right way and can now forget about it. I am afraid that the “I can now forget about it” syndrome cannot be legislated against but is very often the result of an amendment such as the one before us.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, having listened to all the debates today in your Lordships’ House, I am very conscious that there is a clear consensus among your Lordships on the importance of all organisations, particularly public sector organisations, working towards achieving equality. That has emerged in all the discussion that we have had. Core to that is the equality duty on public bodies.

I understand that the Government are reviewing all this but I hope that this evening’s debate will be influential in ensuring not only that they recognise the value of that general equality duty for the whole of the public sector, but also see the value of strengthening it in the way that this amendment seeks to do. My experience is that, if you are to achieve equality in the workplace—equality in terms of the way in which you provide services—it requires several things to be in place.

First, it requires visible leadership from those responsible for the organisation or in charge of it that shows that they believe that this is important. Secondly, it requires that policies are made in an evidence-based way; that information is used to assess how the policies are working, how the services are being delivered, who benefits and who perhaps is missing out. That requires the collection and collation of information, so that those in charge of the organisation can make the appropriate decisions. It also requires a degree of enforcement. But to say that you can achieve all of these things only by enforcement or only by one element of those different requirements is to set the arrangement up to fail.

I have listened with great interest to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who has highlighted that you do not want to create a tick-box mentality. That is absolutely right and is true in all sorts of areas. That is not what you want to achieve. However, if people are trying to apply the general duty on equality—or indeed what would be implied by this amendment in terms of the way in which equality impact assessments are concerned—in a tick-box mentality, then you will lose out entirely. This amendment sets a framework by which all public authorities can say, “We are doing our job properly and effectively”. How can you argue that there is something overprescriptive by saying that the duty of the public authority should be to assess and consult on the likely impact of its proposed policies? Surely that is sensible good practice. How can you say that that is overprescriptive? It is simply requiring public authorities to do what is right.

Similarly, requiring public authorities to monitor their policies for any adverse impact is again requiring that they do what is right. It is not being overprescriptive; it is simply saying to them, “This is what you should do to deliver your general duty on equality”. This is not an overprescriptive amendment; it is something that is there to provide a framework which public authorities can use.

I am also very clear that, in making decisions, public bodies have to look, check and see what the implications are. These assessments provide a framework which requires them to consider all the relevant factors in doing that. I know that when we make a decision on a public body we are required to consider all the relevant considerations and not consider those considerations which are irrelevant—I forget the precise form of words, but that is the standard rubric. This provides a framework to make sure that all the relevant considerations are being addressed. More importantly, it provides an audit trail, so that anyone looking at it can see how a decision has been taken and how the different issues have been factored in because there has been an equality impact assessment. That places quite a pressure on those making decisions that they have not only considered all the relevant factors but are able to justify what they have done. That is an extremely important and very good discipline for those who make public decisions.

The equalities duty has been an important step forward for public bodies in this country. Some of them still struggle with how to implement it and some still have a long way to go but, as a basic building block for ensuring that public services are delivered fairly and in line with the objectives that I think all of your Lordships have said they support during the course of various debates today, they have been extremely valuable.

I mentioned at the beginning that one of the requirements for delivering equality, whether at local level, public body or by government, is leadership. I hope that the Government will show clear leadership in agreeing that there is an importance to the public sector general duty on equality and accepting the importance of this amendment, which provides a sensible framework for equality impact assessments.

The Prime Minister is worried that this is going to become overbureaucratic. I suspect that by providing a framework in legislation for what is needed, some of those overbureaucratic elements will disappear simply because people are no longer trying to interpret what might be a necessary way of doing this and erring on the side of caution. This is a way of setting out a framework which will enhance the work that public authorities should be doing to promote equality.

[Baroness Prosser]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I was reminded by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, of something that happened a good many years ago when I was the national women’s secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. I was on a mission to include within the rulebook of the union requirements for each of our administrative areas to provide positive action programmes for women, and for sanctions to be introduced into the rulebook against those senior officials of the union who might be found guilty of harassment or bad behaviour towards women. “Attacked” is not the right word, but the response of more senior people in the union than me—men—verged on that. They said to me: “We don’t need a change in the rulebook, what we need is a change of culture”. I said: “Of course we do, I absolutely agree that we need a change of culture, but while we are working on the change of culture we will have a change in the rulebook so that outwith those rules you will not operate”.

We all know that large bureaucracies find it terribly difficult to shift. The idea that organisations out there—public sector bodies, services, et cetera—are going to be able to change their culture, and be willing or capable of doing that in any speedy fashion without some framework within which we require them to operate, seems to me to be cloud-cuckoo-land. I do not believe that if we remove the pressure for equality impact assessments to be the final step in delivering public sector equality duties we will see any change at all going on out there. I support this amendment and I hope that others will also do so.

BBC: Resignation of Director-General

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I would not wish to comment on any particular candidate. I presume that the noble Lord was referring to the search process that the chairman of the trust has said that he would carry out. I am not able to comment on that particular process at the moment. That is a matter, indeed, for the BBC.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate has rightly reminded the House that the people we should be most concerned about in all this are those who were the victims of abuse. Can the Minister comment on whether the Government feel that the frenzy around the existential crisis of the BBC is not really a distraction from concerns that there was very real abuse in children’s homes in north Wales and elsewhere; that there was an individual who, because of his celebrity, was able to abuse children all over the country; and that we are in danger of being deflected, which of course plays into the hands of those who would rather cover up what happened and the names of those who were ultimately responsible?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble Lord makes a very important point—that we must not lose sight of the awful events that have taken place and of why the BBC is in the position it is in at the moment. However, given a bit of calm and stability the immediate issues will, one hopes, blow over, and those who are now taking the right decisions will make those decisions and follow them through. I am sure that there will be a number of days of continued press reports but I absolutely take the noble Lord’s point that we must not forget the real issue behind these terrible reports.