Coronavirus Bill

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued) & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, we are all immensely grateful for the selflessness and professionalism of everyone responding to this pandemic and for the reasonable, calm heads of those in government. I associate myself especially with the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Scriven, Lord Blunkett, Lord Robathan and Lord Alderdice, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

There is a need for tighter scrutiny, a shorter timeline—three months has been mentioned; I strongly support that—and reasonable balance. We need not to fall into a collective consciousness of consent. We need dissent for democracy to continue to flourish. We continue to need to ask hard questions and not be rolled over by fear but instead, with reasonable wisdom and proportion, keep this thing in balance.

I will make a few specific remarks about areas of the Bill, particularly paragraph 7(5) of Schedule 21, which refer to the powers to be given to the police and immigration officers for detaining and holding people on the basis or assumption of their ill health or of the coronavirus being present. We have had a number of warnings from Liberty; in its briefing, it rightly points out that the consequences of some aspects of the Bill are too grave and far-reaching to be simply nodded through. One dimension of paragraph 7(5) of Schedule 21 states that the police and immigration officers may detain and, if necessary, remove someone for testing and, if possible, have a health official present. I do not think “if possible” is good enough, especially coming from a community where people are very frightened of being tapped on the shoulder or even asked to their face by police to come with them. In a prospective detention or if someone fears the possibility of exposure on an immigration case, they are more likely to abscond—which now becomes an offence, according to the requirements in Schedule 21.

We all want to have the utmost regard and respect for the police and immigration officials at this time. I do not want to unnecessarily conflate two things, but I draw the attention of the Minister and the House to the comments made in this House and in another place last week. On Thursday, at the tail-end of business here, the Minister repeated a Statement on the Windrush report from the Home Secretary, who used the words:

“Ministers did not sufficiently question unintended consequences”


of their conduct, behaviour or decisions. In particular, she referred to the fact that there was institutional

“ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation”.—[Official Report, 19/3/20; col. 1615.]

I have had many representations from people in the black and minority communities who still feel that nothing has changed between last Thursday and this afternoon. The very department with responsibility for police and immigration—the Home Office—will probably help to set the tone of how officials, without health professionals, will go about detaining people and holding them, even though for only short periods of detention. The presence of health officials ought to be a fundamental requirement in an amendment to this Bill: a health official must be the decider, not the police or immigration officials.

There is a need for some elements of reasonable societal caution. However, too much suspicion of people who fit into categories that are uncertain and unclear leads people towards greater fear. Liberty says that there is a real prospect that groups may be targeted on the basis that they are effectively proxies for characteristics such as income level or race and especially in light of existing patterns of discrimination in police-public interactions, as identified by the Lammy review.

I hope we do not blunder into causing further, unnecessary fear in communities all over this country where black and minority-ethnic people are or where immigrants feel they may be holding out, by adding to police powers without ensuring that health security is the decision-maker, not the individual constable—there are constant references to constables, not senior officers, in the Bill. That places too much burden on those individuals.

Mental Health of Children and Young Adults

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am deeply grateful to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, for allowing us to have this important debate in which many personal experiences have been shared. I start by referring to a conversation that happened yesterday. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, is no longer in his place, but he brought us towards understanding the pain and pressure of suicide. Yesterday afternoon I met a young man who graduated from Manchester University with a first-class degree in politics and economics. He spent the week immediately after Easter with nine others in Tenerife. They were working with an established church which every year seeks to cater for the thousands of young British men and women who go to Tenerife to have a drink-filled funfest over seven days. In the course of that week, three guys and one girl aged 17 to 20 committed suicide. They were meant to be relishing the freedom of economy and opportunity. They all had exceptional grades from school but none of them were happy enough to survive a week away.

Much has been said in this debate about the importance of families and the vital need for communities around our young people. I recently looked at two Gallup surveys. One was on global purpose and asked hundreds of thousands of people around the world, including in the UK, what they felt about the value of their lives. The other, which has just been published, is based on the world happiness report. The statistics from the Gallup survey on purpose reveal that just over 80% of people in the world, mainly adults, say they do not know what their purpose in life is. In Europe, 22% of people say they know what their life is about and why they exist. In other words, there is a severe deficit of purpose among adults. This will translate on to the next generation. When it comes to happiness, interestingly, communities and countries with the highest levels of happiness are in the south. Patagonia is the happiest place in the world. Latin American countries, Africa and parts of Asia show higher levels of happiness than North America and Europe. What is this telling us? It is telling us that people feel that the complexity of our well-heeled lives in the western, richer world is not giving us the community of well-being that allows that essence of strong families, good relationships and strong coherence that is more easily experienced in poorer communities. That raises the real question: what is wealth and what is it for?

A report was published a few months ago by the Legatum Institute: The Maker Generation: Post-Millennials and the Future they are Fashioning. The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, is chief executive of the Legatum Institute. The report refers to the good news and, as the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, has just indicated, there is good news. There has been a 71% fall in the number of young people sentenced for criminal offences in the past decade; teenage pregnancies are down; the use of drugs among 11 to 15 year-olds has halved in the past decade; and underage drinking is declining. That is the good news. However, Legatum says:

“Britain has developed an adolescent mental health crisis”.


All the statistics that we have heard about and referred to clearly indicate that that is the reality. Its report is based entirely on government analysis and says:

“The proportion of children living in lone parent families has tripled, to 25%. A recent study found that only just over 50% of 16 year olds are living with both their biological parents. The change in family life, and for some the absence of a father in particular, means that many new parents have not had the role models previous generations relied upon to teach and guide them”.


It goes on to talk about the absence of cohesiveness in neighbourhoods, which drives severe well-being and mental health pressures in addition to the many other factors that have been referred to in the absence of services.

Therefore, we live in a more conflict-based society, and in the last week ITV has been coming to terms with what that means. The complexity of society brings huge pressures. Our communities are less secure, relationships and long-term commitments are less coherent, and our sense of endless risk divides people. Excessive over-concern about risk separates communities, but that is not the case in the happiest nations in the world. We need a review of our risk reality, and we also need to look at a different form of citizenship that encourages active community, which brings well-being.

Mental Health: Young People

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am deeply grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for allowing us to debate this issue. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for framing the very remarks I would have made myself so I shall admit to needing to refer to similar matters.

This debate has given me the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be the parent of an adopted child who came from a severely drug-disabled parent and therefore spent the early months of his life in an incubator without contact with adults and then developed significant distress disorders, which we live with now in his adult years. That led me to look at the detail of the research and to realise that mental disorder is often picked out as being about the distress that a young person or individual may feel, rather than necessarily being about a strict form of behaviour. Anxiety and distress lie behind the statistics from Young Minds, which I found very painful, of the high levels of male and female suicide—tragically, the girls are slightly beaten by the boys. That led me to reflect on how as parents we have responded to the needs of our youngest son.

In my son’s distress and confusion, and very often in his pursuit of answers, more than just parents have been necessary to assist him. As I looked at the report, I realised that there may well be a limitation on how we understand the role of parenting as defined as those who have a direct birth or adoptive responsibility. In our case, the wider community of parents—those from the church community, the local garden centre, the café and the Outward Bound community; those connected to the school; those who have been adoptive uncles and good friends in the wider area and those whom he can drop in on in the shops—those people do not fit the category of “parent” but they are parenting. They are providing a context of security, a relationship and a place of identity, and it is that network of identities that gives security to young men and women who long to find a place in which they can reveal their minds and hearts and release their distress. I hope that we will begin to move away from the liberal consensus that defines security only in relation to those by whom a child is cosseted for their protection to a more open approach to allow our communities, as would be the case in more traditional societies in other continents, to love a child in a community.