King’s Speech

Lord Mann Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Lab)]

The Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, explained the Government’s priorities yesterday: to “right past wrongs”, to “rebuild … trust”, to

“make sure that systems work as they should and to restore fairness and predictability”.—[Official Report, 18/5/26; col. 163.]

So I am bringing this week a new case of injustice—not new, but new for government to act on. I have met with a group of the victims of this injustice: Sean Davis, Brian Deane, Rod Wallace, Craig Short, Tommy Johnson, Paul Williams, Michael Thomas, Danny Murphy and Andrew Cole. They are part of the V11, some of the top footballers this country has ever produced.

They did what was right. They followed the government advice on the film schemes to promote the British industry, established by Chancellor Gordon Brown 20 years ago. Rather than squander their money, they invested it as government advised, with a company called Kingsbridge Asset Management. What is unique about them, as opposed to large numbers of other footballers, famous and non-famous, is that they were mis-sold. It is not just them; most footballers were mis-sold. Tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions, has disappeared. That money is gone, but, with those in this group, HMRC decided that it would pursue them in addition for tax on money that they have never had and never seen.

I have met with this group. They were persuaded in the dressing room by major football organisations and football authorities—people they trusted to invest their money in the way that government advise people to invest their money. They lost that money—huge amounts. But what really gets to their soul is that they are constantly pursued and have battled for 14 years with the financial advisers who mis-sold. The City of London Police describe it as “financial fraud”—those not my words but the police’s. It is not just that they cannot get the money back from there but that government, through the HMRC, then pursues them and continues to pursue them for taxation.

That is not fair or reasonable when you have done your best for your family. When working-class people suddenly get into money, be it footballers, sports stars or musicians, HMRC should have a direct hotline for tax, like they do for MPs, to help them pay their tax and not have the secondary scammers advising them, ripping them off even more and leaving them in the state they are in. The Government have a responsibility to get in and solve the problem. Working-class people making good, wanting to do the right thing, should be allowed to do the right thing. This should be part of, and will be part of, the Government’s agenda.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Mann Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am perplexed by this Bill and how it is worded. I am beginning to think that some deal has been done to promote the concept of an elected House of Lords because, if everything goes to statutory instruments and regulations, I am not sure of the purpose of the current revising Chamber. Perhaps some reverse Henry VIII amendments should be put in to assist that process, because this kind of business is as bad as it gets in that context.

In referencing my voluntary rather than unpaid interests, while “morale” has been mentioned, I home in on this question of the practicalities within schools. Can the Minister confirm whether any schools or larger multi-academy trusts have requested the inclusion of education and thereby schools in this legislation? If so, what rationale have they used to request that inclusion? Schools are struggling with the complexity of negotiating the additional contact hours that the Government are requiring of teachers.

My experience is primarily within the red wall. I am bemused at the politics. I have always found a Government of any colour, flavour or party picking on a particular section of the electorate and giving the impression that they are targeting them to be quite bad politics. Therefore, I am perplexed at what this is meant to do. Certainly, the parents within the red-wall areas of the country are in no way antagonistic towards a group such as teachers occasionally taking industrial action. It is very rare, but I have never witnessed or heard any antagonism in relation to that. There is sometimes sympathy, and often an agnostic position, but of the hundreds of thousands of emails that I have ever received, there has never been one on this issue. I have never heard it from a single person, even when such disputes have been in play.

That perplexes me, but something else really worries me. Can the Government confirm that the absentee rates in English schools are at the highest level in our history—27.5% on average? Is it true that in the more deprived areas, which would incorporate the red wall and beyond, it is at 33.5%, so one in three is not attending school at the moment? There are many reasons, particularly the aftermath of the pandemic and lockdown, but the behavioural issues are with younger children rather than older children, in secondary school years 7 and 8, which has not been the norm historically. Do the Government agree that with this absenteeism level, the critical factor is the good will of teachers and the flexibility of teachers to work beyond normal contract hours with those families and pupils to get the pupils back into school or to hold them in school?

That is the experience that I see and hear coming through very powerfully, and it correlates further—to elaborate a little on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady—in that, the more successful a school is, the more motivated the teachers tend to be. The more motivated the teachers are, the more flexibility they have and the more successful the school is. Those little bits on the side that teachers do, assisting individual pupils, are critical to how a school performs in the league tables and to what we deem a successful school.

We are in a crisis of the worst absenteeism in our schools in recorded history. How does that fit into the Government’s strategy on this? It seems to me that the inclusion of education—indeed, the whole Bill—makes no political or legislative sense. From my point of view, the inclusion of education will have the reverse impact to what the Government want on a system that is in crisis, because of the pandemic, in a way that it has never been before.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mann, in many respects. I began teaching in 1973 and I can count on the fingers of both hands—probably not even using them all—the number of times that I have been on strike. One of the reasons why I was not on strike in the early phases of my career was because we had sectoral collective bargaining: we could make an impact on what was happening with our pay and conditions. I very much regret the loss of collective bargaining in education because it has had a material impact on the way in which teachers are able to pursue issues with their own pay and conditions.

However, let us move on to what the Bill would do. The noble Lords, Lord Mann and Lord Fox, are of course right: there is a very serious situation with regard to recruitment and retention of teachers. That is one of the reasons why there is such a high rate of parental and carers’ support for the action that teachers are taking. To take just one example, one in eight maths lessons in schools in England is taught by someone who has no qualification in mathematics. What chance do we have of providing coherent maths teaching to the age of 18 or 19, as the Prime Minister would like, if we cannot provide it for all the children who have it at the moment?

I cannot tell you how many emails, messages and phone calls I had after people read the WhatsApp messages. The notion that a Secretary of State would say that all teachers were work-shy and did not like or want to go to work beggars belief, to be honest. For anyone who has never been a teacher, I can tell you that teaching is not for everybody, and there are people who voluntarily leave teaching because going into a classroom every day and not being successful is devastating. That is why lots of people leave the profession—because they cannot manage the stress of not just the teaching but all the accountability measures. We really need to hang on to the teachers we have, who are still going to school every day and, for the most part, enjoying their jobs, notwithstanding the terrible levels of pressure that they face. We really need to make sure that we have a proper retention system.

It seems to me that threatening those teachers with the possibility that they will be sacked if they have legitimately voted for and taken industrial action, very much as a last resort—as I am sure everybody in this Chamber knows and as has been said by Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted, the joint general secretaries of the NEU—will not only risk the possibility of more people leaving teaching, but I cannot imagine that anyone is going to want to come into teaching when there are so many difficulties and challenges that we have at the moment.

On the other issue about cogs and wheels, I am not in favour of the fragmentation that we have seen in our education service, but fragmentation we have. The idea that we can have a minimum service level across 26,000 or 28,000 schools, not accounting for alternative provision and so on, simply is not workable. Much more importantly for me, it is not desirable. It conveys exactly the wrong impression to teachers, and we need to be talking up teaching—I am very prepared to do it—because even on a slightly bad day it is a wonderful job when you are actually in there with the children. It is not so great when you are dealing with Ofsted, and when you look at your pay at the end of the month, but it is fantastic when you are actually dealing with children and young people.

This is absolutely the wrong place to be going. I oppose this Bill in its totality, but I certainly oppose what is being said about education in this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

It is the employer, so the employer in the case of a local authority-maintained school—which is about 60% of our primary schools and about 20% of our secondary schools—would be the local authority. It would be the academy trust in relation to academies and free schools. The specific trust is the employer, and therefore it would be the board of the trust.

In relation to teacher morale and the impact of these potential minimum service levels on teacher morale, I would not want to generalise about that, but there are a number of issues that are clear from surveys, research and talking to teachers that really matter to them. One, of course, is salary; the second is workload, and the third is the behaviour that they deal with in their schools. All three are very important, but some noble Lords—I am guessing that the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, is among them—will have seen the same survey that I saw, which showed very clearly that teacher morale matched very closely to levels of behaviour and/or the calmness within an individual school. Within the department, we are working really hard on all those issues.

Those also connect to attendance, which the noble Lord, Lord Mann, raised. I do not entirely recognise the figures that he quoted. He might have been referring to frequent absence, rather than daily attendance. Most recently, on an average day, in our state-funded primary schools, 93.3% of children were in attendance; in secondary schools it was 92.2% and in state-funded special schools it was 88.3%.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

The Minister is absolutely right that those are the government statistics, but are they not the worst in our history? That was my point: through no fault of the Government, but because of the pandemic, we have a major crisis in schools and this has been thrown on top of it. Why worsen the situation?