Student Tuition Fees and Maintenance Loans
Lord Kerslake Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lord Bates
As I said, the Augar review is due to report during 2019. It was set up in February 2018 by the Prime Minister and it will report to the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and, of course, the Secretary of State for Education. Regarding the assumptions, the ONS still has some work to do, as it said in its announcement; it will not come out with the correct figure until September next year. The working assumption on the amount of loans that will not be repaid, as used in the current calculations, is 45%. It is a matter for the OBR and the ONS to review that when they make their recommendations, which we will follow.
Lord Kerslake (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Sheffield Hallam University. This is a welcome change to clarify the proper accounting treatment of what is a loan but not a loan in reality. This is the right way forward. Could the Minister clarify whether government policy on the Augar review will change in any way? It would be inappropriate for what is an accounting change to influence the policy decisions that come from that review.
Lord Bates
The review will continue. Its terms of reference were set out by the Prime Minister in February, and they remain that inquiry’s terms of reference. To that extent, this is a separate issue. These factors might be taken into consideration in the wider debate on the shape of post-18 education. It is perfectly possible to do that.
Economy: Budget Statement
Lord Kerslake Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Kerslake (CB)
My Lords, I first declare my interests as president of the Local Government Association, chair of Peabody, and chair of Be First. My other interests are listed in the register.
In my contribution to this debate I will talk about two issues: first, the wider economic context to the 2018 Budget, and, secondly, the specific implications for local government. There are common features to both issues—some welcome short-term actions that demonstrate the Government have listened, but, at the same time, some very significant longer-term issues that have still to be properly addressed.
Taking first the wider context: this was necessarily a short-term and contingent Budget, given the uncertainties of Brexit. The Chancellor had the unplanned benefit of higher receipts and lower spending than originally anticipated, and he has chosen to spend all of this benefit, particularly on increased funding for the NHS and bringing forward the planned increase in tax thresholds. But we should not be in any doubt that a bad Brexit would quickly wipe away all of those gains. The Financial Times has calculated that the UK economy is already 1.2% smaller than it would have been without Brexit. That is equivalent to £870 per household per year. A bad Brexit, as others have pointed out, would dramatically increase the economic cost and require a fundamentally different approach to the Budget.
Brexit or no Brexit, however, there are deep and long-standing issues with the UK economy that the Budget does not adequately address. These were laid bare in the recent report from the Commission on Economic Justice, of which I was a member. Put simply, the UK economy has stopped working for most ordinary people. We have had a decade of stagnant earnings and low growth, as the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said, along with low investment and productivity, rising house prices and widening inequalities of wealth. As the noble Lord, Lord Wood, pointed out, we do not at the moment have a sustainable, long-term taxation policy to fund our public services. To have any chance of addressing these deep-rooted issues, we will need to see many more radical policies than we have seen so far.
The commission report sets out in some detail what those policies might be. What is clear is that once we are clear of Brexit—in or out—we need to develop a long-term economic plan that promotes both prosperity and justice. It will not be a quick task. We have taken a while to reach this point, and it will take us a while to get out of it.
That brings me to the second area that I want to talk about—local government. By common consent, local government has borne the brunt of austerity. The Budget contained some welcome news for local government in the additional £650 million funding for adult and children’s services over the next two years, and the additional investment in transport infrastructure. I personally was also very pleased to see the speedy lifting of the cap for local authority borrowing on housing and the increase in the Housing Infrastructure Fund. These are important steps towards building more genuinely affordable housing—necessary, if not sufficient. But we should be in no doubt again that, apart from lifting the cap, these measures are short-term and one-off.
Austerity continues for local government, and we have still to resolve the long-term funding challenge for social care. Local authorities have been able to manage the damage of austerity by moving away from annual budgeting and introducing long-term financial planning. This is welcome, but I have talked to a lot of local authorities and pretty much all of them say that their position will become unsustainable over the next few years unless there is action on funding and social care.
The LGA has calculated that social care services will still face a £5.8 billion funding gap by 2024-25 just to cover the costs of the national living wage and to maintain existing standards—so no improvement, just to stand still. Adult and children’s services combined represent over half of the local authority budget. If they are going to defend those care services, as they all want to, they have to make disproportionate cuts in other universal services such as street cleaning, street maintenance and libraries—which are the very services that the public think they pay council tax for. Bluntly, there is a democratic deficit.
The LGA has called for the forthcoming Green Paper to be bold and ambitious—it is right about that. It should build on the excellent Green Paper produced by the LGA itself. It also needs to be published soon; we are now some seven months beyond the planned publication date. We must have some indication of the Government’s intended direction of travel on social care well before the conclusion of the 2019 spending review, likely to be not until the autumn of next year. My view is that we need a hypothecated health and care tax, linked to a repurposed national insurance. If we have to spend a higher proportion of our national income on health and care—and there is general consensus in the House that we do—any party will find this hard to deliver unless it can say that the money is going towards health and care. That is why I support a ring-fence.
Finally on local government, I want to raise an issue that is in some sense tangential to the Budget but very important—the fair funding review. It is hard to argue against reviewing the funding formula to make it fairer, but it adds another huge level of uncertainty to the sector at a very difficult time. There are bound to be winners and losers in this review, and that will be incredibly hard to manage with falling, or even static, resources. The existing plans and provisional timetable look very challenging—unless significantly more funding is planned for local government. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s view on this issue. In my view, it is a ticking time bomb.
The Chancellor may now be regretting his decision to move away from a spring Budget, as it has greatly limited his room for manoeuvre. Despite the rhetoric, there is a great deal of difference between actually ending austerity and moving towards ending it, particularly for those working in local government and in public services outside the NHS. Brexit or no Brexit, we desperately need a longer-term and more radical plan for renewing the UK economy.
Windrush Generation
Lord Kerslake Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, for repeating the Statement made yesterday in the other place by her right honourable friend the Home Secretary. As the noble Baroness said, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, many people came to this country from around the Commonwealth to make lives here and help rebuild Britain after the war. Before that, many of them fought in the British Armed Forces to defeat both Nazi Germany and Japan—people such as my friend Sam King, who served in the RAF during the Second World War. Sam came back to Britain in 1948 on the “Empire Windrush”, served his local community as a postman, was the first black mayor of the London Borough of Southwark and was awarded the MBE for his services to the community. Sam loved this country very much. He sadly passed away at the age of 90 in 2016. It is people such as Sam King who have been treated in such a shameful way.
Despite the apology from the Government and their admission that a terrible wrong has been done to the Windrush generation, no Minister is taking any responsibility whatever for these gross abuses of the Windrush generation’s rights—their rights denied, their rights taken away and people who are in the UK legally being treated appallingly by the country they call home. So my first question to the Minister is: when is a Minister of the Crown going to accept responsibility for this scandal and resign? The noble Lord, Lord Bates, offered his resignation because he turned up late for Questions earlier this year—quite rightly, it was not accepted by the Prime Minister. This is a monumental scandal and what is offered here does not go far enough. A Minister or Ministers have to accept responsibility.
The Government’s hostile environment for illegal immigrants was badly designed and put together, with no thought given to how to ensure that people who are here legally would be protected and not caught up in that environment. People here legally should not be at risk of losing their jobs, driving licences or homes or be threatened with deportation. Does the Minister accept that some of the people who are here legally will actually be scared to come forward to the Home Office, having heard the terrible reports of abuses and denial of rights? What is she going to do to gain the confidence of these individuals, who need help and support but will be worried about coming forward?
At the bottom of my copy of page 2 of the Statement, the last sentence reads:
“Instead, the caseworker will make a judgment based on all the circumstances of the case and on the balance of probabilities”.
Can the Minister be crystal clear about exactly what she means here? That statement does not appear to be an unequivocal guarantee that people who came here as part of the Windrush generation will not have their rights taken away or be denied justice. They are still at risk of deportation from the country that has been their home for decades. Who is bearing the civil standard of proof? Is it the person or is it the Home Office? At the top of my copy of page 3 of the Statement, it says that, for some of the Windrush generation, the burden of proof,
“to evidence their legal rights was too much on the individual”.
Other than saying that,
“we are working with this group in a much more proactive and personal way”,—[Official Report, Commons, 23/4/18; col. 620.]
which I hope we would expect to be the norm, what has actually changed here? How are other people being treated when they enter the system? This is not shining a very good light on how Ministers run the Home Office.
In paragraph 6 on page 3, it says that a new customer contact centre will be “staffed by experienced caseworkers”. In paragraph 7 on the same page we are told that 50 senior caseworkers will be put in place to help junior members of staff who are unsure about a decision. Surely we should ensure that these matters are dealt with by experienced staff in the first place. Will the Minister comment on that and tell the House how the experienced staff at the contact centre relate to the junior members of staff mentioned in paragraph 7, who are making the decisions, and how the 50 senior caseworkers fit above that? That part of the Statement seems very confused.
I agree that it was never the intention that the Windrush generation should be disadvantaged by measures put in place to tackle illegal immigration; but they were, because of poor implementation and development of policy at the Home Office by Ministers. Because of that, people who deserved better have been treated badly by the state. They have been treated appallingly, and someone in the Government should take responsibility for that.
Compensation is referred to on the last page of the Statement. Other than saying that people will be compensated and a scheme will be set up, run by an independent person, there is absolutely nothing about compensation. Will the Minister give the House some more detail on what this will look like? We do not want to read in the media about people who, having been denied their rights, are being made to jump through hoops to get the compensation they deserve for the abuse they have suffered.
This is a shameful episode and it is about time someone in the Government took responsibility for it.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I too thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. My noble friend Lord Paddick very much wanted to be here but is precluded by circumstances beyond his control. Not only he and I, and these Benches, but many others feel frankly ashamed to have discovered what has been going on. The Minister, whom I believe to be a compassionate, caring person, must be very uncomfortable too. She will understand that this is not a matter of what people “deserve”—the term used in the Statement—but of their rights.
We are told that the Home Secretary is committed to resolving the situation with “urgency and purpose”. They are, indeed, needed, and more widely than on this issue. The position of the Windrush people—citizens who seem retrospectively to have become migrants—is a symptom, not a cause, of the problem. The cause, as we see it, is the culture within the Home Office, an attitude that one cannot avoid saying must come from the top: hostility or compliance—which seems to be the substitute term now—and certainly carelessness, by which I mean “care-less”, as in lacking in care.
That seems to be why every immigration lawyer to whom I have spoken says that the first thing they do is ask the Home Office what information it has on their client, because so often they find that it is wrong. That is why the Home Office has such a poor record before the tribunal. The Minister will not be surprised by this: it is why I sought to remove the Home Office exemption from the Data Protection Bill, which can be applied in the interests of effective immigration control—a matter others are now pursuing. The Home Office might say that it can choose not to apply that exemption or that it will be applied only when it is relevant, but it is the Home Office that has to assess these aspects.
My first question to the Minister is therefore a question and a plea. Before the UK finds itself in an even more embarrassing position—which I assure her I do not want—will the Government reconsider whether the exemption is just, wise or even common sense?
My second question is about staffing, to which the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has referred. Are the officials concerned being redeployed within the Home Office, or is the establishment being increased? If so, may we have details of this? It has appeared for some time that Home Office officials are really overloaded. As regards the customer contact centre, or indeed any part of the work, is this being outsourced to the private sector? Again, may we have details?
Thirdly, what information will the Home Office publish so that we can see the whole picture systematically, rather than as a series of individual stories, and not just about deportations?
This affects many, many people. Another cohort, of course, is the 3 million EU citizens in the UK. They raise it in their current 128 questions on settled status. It must affect UK citizens abroad as well. Manifestations of the Home Office policy are very wide, but I will mention just two. One is the right to rent, on which the chief inspector has recently reported less than fully positively. One of his recommendations mentioned quality assurance checks. Another manifestation is immigration detention, to which people unable to prove their status have been consigned.
Immigrants might be legal, they might be illegal or perhaps they cannot prove their status, so the Home Office makes an assumption, if not a presumption, that they have no rights. This issue is more extensive than—I do not want to say “just”—the Windrush generation.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Lord is so keen to get up that I was going to give him the opportunity, but he will get the opportunity. I thank both noble Lords for their comments, and echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, on the endeavours of the Windrush generation, who rebuilt this country after the war. Some of them actually fought in the war, and I pay tribute to the noble Lord’s friend Sam King: what a truly rich and fulfilling life he clearly led in his time in this country.
The noble Lord makes the point about no Minister taking responsibility. I have to say that when my right honourable friend the Home Secretary stood up yesterday, apologised and made very clear that she was going to put right this wrong, she took responsibility. It takes a big person to stand up and say, “Sorry, we’ll make this right”. So she firmly took responsibility yesterday, as well as in the weeks preceding.
On compensation, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said yesterday that she will set out further details on its scope, but she made it clear that it would be run independently of government. Details will be set out in due course. The noble Lord also made the point about a hostile environment, which was made yesterday as well in the Question I answered. This country should be a hostile environment to illegal immigrants but it should not be a hostile environment to people who are here as of right, which is the whole point of what the Home Secretary is putting right here. These people are welcome in this country and we are not hostile to them. If anybody feels scared about coming forward—I hope none of the scaremongering is being generated within these walls—they should come forward. The Home Secretary made very clear yesterday that there will be a sympathetic and human approach to the help these people will get.
The noble Lord also commented on the balance of probabilities. I hope he appreciates that the Home Secretary yesterday made it clear that people can produce a wide range of evidence, including school and parish records. The evidence people will need to produce will be treated in a sensitive and light-touch manner. As regards the contact centre, experienced staff will deal with these cases. The point about the junior staff is that in every set-up there will be junior and senior staff, and where there is any difficulty in determining a case it will be passed to a senior member of staff. All the staff in the contact centre, as well as in the task force, will be trained, and nobody need feel any fear about approaching members of the task force or the contact centre, nor need fear the hearing they will get.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said that this was not about what these people deserved but about their rights, which were established when they came here as part of the Windrush generation and of course more recently. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary made it clear that perhaps the Home Office is sometimes too focused on cases as opposed to humans; she made it very clear that this is a human consideration.
As regards the immigration exemption, I hope we will not conflate immigration rights with the cases of the Windrush generation, who, as the noble Baroness says, are here as of right, and we just need to regularise that status. Therefore I will not go into the immigration exemption in the Data Protection Bill. However, I will go on to discuss EU citizens, because that clearly points to how it is absolutely right to be proactive about having a system to establish settled status and to plan it well, which the Home Office has done. Those rights will be established early on rather than waiting 47 years beyond the point when people’s rights were naturally given but not documented in all cases. The noble Baroness asked about Home Office staff in the contact centre. There will be Home Office staff, and they are trained to a sufficient degree to deal with the cases that come forward.
I reiterate the words of my right honourable friend yesterday. These cases are being dealt with very sympathetically, and I hope that anyone who should come forward or knows of anyone who should come forward will be encouraged to do so.
Lord Kerslake
My Lords, third time lucky—my apologies. I should first like to declare an interest. I am chair of Peabody, and if noble Lords have read the newspapers recently, they will have read of one case, reported in the Guardian, involving a well-regarded caretaker, Hubert Howard, who was forced to be dismissed from his job with Peabody in 2014 under these rules. He came to this country at the age of three. His only crime, if you can call it that, was to seek to return home because one of his parents was ill. This is a practical example of how organisations have contributed to the misfortune of these individuals.
The Minister has rightly said that the state has let these people down. In my career I cannot think of many examples where we have seen such a shameful and terrible miscarriage of justice. It makes me personally feel ashamed that this has happened in my country. I think we must acknowledge that, without the work of Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian, and indeed the work of David Lammy, we would not be having this debate today. Those cases would have carried on as injustices.
After what has been a painfully long period—even two or three weeks ago, the Government were still saying that this was a process where people have to go through the normal applications—the Government have recognised the wrong that has been done and have taken steps to address this. I think this is very welcome and we should acknowledge the scale of change in the Government’s position, but I fear there is a risk of further injustices happening. If we are to deal rightly with the Windrush generation, and with similar situations from other communities—this is the thing we must not lose sight of—there are some important questions to answer.
First, there is much talk of a change in culture and practice, but very little talk about a change in policy. Unless that happens, the practice will always be trumped by the policy. We know that the restrictions on illegal immigrants grew over time, but the dial was turned up very considerably with the 2014 and 2016 Acts. The environment was changed very considerably, too. My first question is: do we really stick with a very hostile environment in circumstances where we cannot be confident, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has said, that we have got the answer right on individuals? They suffer the injustice of us getting the proof wrong, or their proof not being clarified, and then we apply draconian policies. I ask the Minister: in the light of what we have learned here, should we not be seriously be revisiting the existing policies?
My second question is: how will Parliament know it has made progress on the Windrush generation? Where will we get that information from? Are the Government willing to consider an independent third party verifying the progress in tackling those cases? Given the scale of the injustice, that is something the Government should sign up to.
Thirdly, are the Government going to take a proactive approach to tackling those families identified in the Guardian and other newspapers, rather than just waiting for them to come to the call centre? I would personally like the opportunity to speak to Mr Howard to see whether we can offer him his job back.
Manchester Arena Attack Review
Lord Kerslake Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford
I pay tribute to the noble Lord and the part that he played in the Metropolitan Police. He must have some incredible experience of such things. He is absolutely right about the immediate aftermath, which is why there are various phased processes for the police and emergency services to go through afterwards. On the terrible possibility of a secondary attack, he is completely right to point out that communication is key, and the joint emergency services interoperability principles come into play. Events such as the 7/7 bombings, through which I am sure the noble Lord was operational, identified the need to improve that joint working between the emergency services. The JESIP, as it is called, was set up to improve how the police, fire and ambulance services work together when responding to those multiagency incidents when they are not specifically CT focused. That was not the case in this instance; it is most relevant in major incidents involving mass fatalities and significant numbers, such as those seen in Manchester and London last year—therefore, providing a key component to the UK’s ability to adequately prepare for a terrorist incident.
Lord Kerslake (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her response to the Urgent Question. I add my praise to the emergency services and indeed, to the people of Manchester, who responded magnificently to this terrible event. As we say in the report, there is a lot for Manchester to be proud of, but clearly there are some important lessons to learn. They are lessons for Greater Manchester, but they go well beyond that to the country as a whole, and we would all hope that a similar attack does not happen.
At what point will the Minister come back on the eight recommendations we made to the Government? It would be extremely helpful if a letter went directly to the Mayor of Greater Manchester. In particular, will she give her thoughts to the question of mental health service support for those who are injured as a consequence or indeed, for bereaved families? The people who were injured and the families who were bereaved came from across the north of England, not just from Greater Manchester. Does she agree that it is unacceptable that they had a different level of service according to where they lived and that we must have a co-ordinated response?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I thank the noble Lord for his report. I did not quite expect him to be in his place today; I was looking round for him. In terms of aid for victims, which was the first point, it is very important that victims are able to access a range of financial assistance, not least from the incredible efforts of the charitable sector, but also through the criminal injuries compensation scheme. The Ministry of Justice is working closely with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, its executive agency, which administers the scheme to ensure that this process is as smooth as possible. On another note, I thank the local communities who were involved in giving so generously to the charitable efforts in the aftermath of the attack.