Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for calling this debate. I want to talk about SMEs and the army of young entrepreneurs being generated in the British economy, not only in London but across the north of England. Many of them are one-man or one-woman bands; many of them face a mountain to climb daily.

Over the last four years, I have been leading a programme in 10 towns and cities in some of our poorest communities across the north of England, which is now called Well North Enterprises. I declare my interest. In Denaby Main, an ex-mining town, we carried out over 400 conversations with residents in 2015. It was clear that the community was missing opportunities to thrive in an area defined by a dependency culture, long-term unemployment and double the borough average rates of employment support allowance. Get Denaby Enterprising was a way to offer non-traditional avenues into employment through self-employment, allowing young people to work and manage their condition.

By the end of year one, 24 SMEs were registered with HMRC and trading. A successful part of the approach was the establishment of a business club for new and established local businesses. The group grew quickly by word of mouth and relationship-building. The business club was used as a forum to celebrate these new businesses at the end of the first year. Each business was recognised for its hard work and success. In 2018, the programme widened to include four other communities across Doncaster, with 15 further SMEs. The business club continues to grow, with 32 members.

It is interesting how youth unemployment varies in the western world. The youth unemployment rate in the European Union averaged 19.05% from 2000 to 2019. Youth unemployment in Greece today is 39%; Italy, 33%; Spain, 32%; and France, 20%. By contrast, in the UK it is 11%, and in the US, 8.3%. This broadly suggests that those with the most regulated employment regimes have the highest youth unemployment. Why is this? Is it about unintended consequences or the awful paradox that, when Governments pass more regulations to protect workers’ rights and regulate the marketplace, the unintended consequence is often increased unemployment, especially for the young? This is not because legislators have the wrong motives; they have excellent motives. It is just that the consequences of some of our motives and values are often the opposite of those intended.

Total employment in SMEs in the UK is 16.3 million people, which is 60% of all private sector employment in the UK, contributing 47% of revenue to the UK economy. Damage this and you damage the employment prospects of young people for a generation.

I have been in correspondence with the Treasury over the last six months about a list of the 42 different pieces of red tape that I have discovered that any small single-handed business, church, charity or social enterprise has to pay attention to each day simply to operate legally. It is getting to the stage where hiring a local hall to run an exercise class, for example for two hours once a week, has become almost ridiculously complicated. Whether the person running the class is employed or not is now a highly complex question. What about their pension? Do they have a contract or holiday pay? What about tax and insurance? Have you complied with all the health and safety regulations? The list goes on.

I could imagine that hiring a hall will get caught up in regulations for the gig economy. Imagine you are going to sell food afterwards—another mountain of regulations to which we are about to add more. Imagine you make some sandwiches at home first—horror of horrors. If the class is going to involve children, forget it. Now imagine a young person wants to set this up, with little or no experience; it is likely that, after a few hours of research, they will just give up, or they could get it wrong and be hit by a disproportionate fine from HMRC. Imagine they are on universal credit and want to work out its impact on their benefits. Could any noble Lords in this Chamber work it out? These are the practical issues we are seeing in Doncaster and east London.

Those with family connections to help may find a way through but, if you come from a disadvantaged background like Denaby Main, and do not know anyone whom runs a small business who can help you, how likely are you to succeed? It is hardest for those trying to get going as young entrepreneurs.

Last week I was talking to a young builder in east London, whom I have known since childhood. Last Saturday, he was going to drive to Bristol and take out a large loan to buy a new van, because of the Mayor of London’s latest decree on clean air in the capital. Another young man I know gave up his own business in Hackney after 10 years and moved out of the country because, as he told me, every time he was starting to get a bit of a bank balance to help him grow the business, another bit of local, London or central government made yet another financial demand on him. Is that what the black cabs are trying to tell us with their horns each week, outside this building? It seemed, he said, like a hamster’s wheel that he could not get off. These things affect young people and their mental health. Those two young people cannot afford to buy their own homes where they grew up; one had to live with his parents.

This is the net effect of thousands of pieces of legislation—a salami-slice approach. Each one is perfectly valid in its own right, but the net effect can be completely stultifying. We are going to add a whole lot more: on zero-hours contracting and food labelling, and a ton of stuff around reducing carbon and online reporting to HMRC—to mention just a few.

What is it going to be like in a few years’ time for a young person in, let us say, Skelmersdale or Rotherham who wants to set up a small business? Is anybody thinking about them when we draft all this new legislation? Is anyone in the Civil Service interested in the cumulative effect of all this? We wonder why they do not trust Governments.

I expect that part of the problem is that most of us in the Palace of Westminster and the Civil Service have no experience of trying to run a business as a young person, and it is thus not surprising that the legislation does not work from their perspective. Perhaps we should involve those affected by legislation more directly in its drafting.

I suggest that this problem is partly because we have stopped listening to one another. If we are concerned about keeping a lid on the national debt and not passing it on to our children, we are accused of destroying communities through evil austerity. If on the other hand we are genuinely worried about the impact of reduced services on communities, we are unprincipled, unrealistic spendthrifts. The truth is that people hold both positions for perfectly valid reasons and they all genuinely care about our country’s future. Populist rhetoric on all sides seeks to amplify difference and simplify arguments, whereas the truth is often more complex and nuanced.

Is it possible to work together for the future for our young people, recognising the validity of a wide range of opinions and perspectives from across the political landscape? Can we all reduce the spin and talk and focus a bit more together on solving some of the practical problems that our young entrepreneurs face day in, day out? Would the Minister be willing to bring together some of his colleagues to look at these burdens placed on young businesses and explore how they might be reduced?

A Manifesto to Strengthen Families

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, for initiating this important debate. If I have a concern with this manifesto, it is an over-confidence in the role of the state over time.

In my experience, it takes a family and a local community to raise children well. My colleagues and I have been building a supportive entrepreneurial culture which has been supporting children and families in the East End of London at many levels for 34 years. Today the Bromley by Bow Centre employs 270 staff, is operating on 30 sites across east London, runs four health centres with 40,000 patients and hosts 2,000 visitors a year from across the world seeking our wisdom and practical insight into how you build, in reality, integrated responses and support networks with some of our most challenged families. To help them these families need us all to take the long view. Ideally they need cross-party support over many years rather than being the subjects of party political ideology, game playing and short-term initiatives. My colleagues and I have the long view, and we know and have witnessed on countless occasions what positive outcomes can happen if you take the long view and stay around over time with these families.

If the Government are serious about this manifesto, they might like to look back over the past 30 years and learn from the programmes the state has run—because in our experience government is not a learning organisation; it has little memory and this fact has many unintended consequences for many of our most vulnerable families. Thirty years ago in our area you had a rich ecology of providers of child care and often strong relationships with parents and families. Then, government said we will encourage children to enter school two years earlier, thus destroying the business model of many small nurseries and support networks—the older ones subsidised the younger ones, who needed much higher levels of care.

They then set up Sure Start and children’s centres; indeed, the launch of these centres was at the Bromley by Bow Centre. We were told that we were the model for what should happen nationally, and now of course they are saying that we cannot afford them. Being aware of unintended consequences and learning from what we have done is the first rule of thumb. The family hubs proposal is a great idea and absolutely in the right direction of travel, bringing services together and creating an integrated environment. The danger is that they will become the next shiny new thing for the next few years, rather than be embedded in communities.

One of the major causes of family break-up is poverty—arguments about money. Go on YouTube and listen to Paul McCartney’s interview with David Frost and you begin to get under the surface of what was really going on with Lennon and McCartney. On the housing estate where McCartney lived, he describes the endless rows he listened to among poor families that were all about money. He and John decided that the way out of this was to make money; it was not just the music that drove them.

Today, our experience and ideas about building integrated entrepreneurial cultures in poor communities are going national. I am leading 10 projects in 10 towns and cities in the north of England for Public Health England, through the Well North programme, in communities and with families that successive Governments have failed. I declare my interest. Here we can see all the silos of government at play, often undermining and contradicting each other and not working together, and yet we say that doing anything about the systems of government is all too difficult. Really? If it takes not just a family but a whole community to bring up a child, we need communities to take greater ownership of their areas. This is what we are seeking to do, and there are great examples in the north of people trying to do just this, if only we will let them. This is how communities become successful.

Post Brexit there is a real opportunity to do something about this operating model. Some of us are already putting platforms in place on which to build, but I wait to see whether this Government are interested in long-term, joined-up responses, in genuinely doing things differently and becoming an institution that can learn from their rich history.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, not for the first time, I find myself in full agreement with the good intentions in the gracious Speech and the sound purpose of a Government’s health policy. It seems to me that the desire to improve health outcomes for patients and to do that more efficiently and effectively are laudable twin goals and ones with which few could argue. However, I want to reflect on matters beyond these good intentions. In my case, it is not to question Her Majesty’s Government’s underlying purposes with their health policy but to challenge their narrow definitions of health and social care and, indeed, to suggest that they are simply not being radical enough.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot published his seminal report Fair Society, Healthy Lives in 2010. It was a comprehensive review of the causes of health outcomes and contained a damning indictment of health inequalities prevalent in many of our most deprived communities in the UK. One of Sir Michael’s key contentions—one that has not been seriously challenged—is that positive health outcomes are significantly more influenced by social determinants than clinical determinants; indeed, that our health is 70% driven by social determinants and only 30% by clinical factors.

Over the past few years I have been astonished by how little mainstream health policy takes the findings of the Marmot review and seeks to turn them into a new and radical approach to how we define health and deliver better services. Indeed, it feels like our attention has been deliberately drawn into an important but none the less constrained conversation about the merging of health and social care. It seems to me that this narrowly defined health and social care debate has had two consequences.

First, it has enabled the principal focus to remain—not exclusively but largely—on how the public and statutory systems talk to each other. I am constantly hearing about earnest initiatives that will pool health and social care budgets and force a new way of working. To my mind, this focus keeps us away from a more radical debate. Secondly, the health and social care debate has kept us away from the conclusions of the Marmot review. It has kept us away from the fundamental questions that inextricably link health outcomes with their social determinants. It keeps us from asking the awkward questions about how we unshackle the central control of health and unleash it into communities.

I am frequently reminded that the vast majority of health interventions happen in communities, not hospitals. They happen in primary care. Some 20 years ago, a young East End mother died of cancer in tragic circumstances. Her name was Jean and her death has had profound consequences for both my life and my work. There were two sides to Jean’s story. The first was that she fell through all the nets of statutory provision that we reasonably expect to be there for us. The health system did not work for Jean. The social care system did not work for Jean or her family. In short, everything that could go wrong went wrong. Jean was badly let down by the state.

However, the other side of Jean’s story was more life-affirming. Just as the state was busy letting Jean down, something very interesting—and very normal and human—happened. Suddenly there was a rota for going down the launderette and doing her washing, and people were going off to Tesco to get her shopping. Jean was inundated with offers of help. Jean was being cared for, not by professionals but by young mums like herself. She was being cared for by the community in the community. She was having the social determinants of her health addressed.

Some months later, there was an inquiry at the Royal London Hospital into the circumstances of Jean’s death. That in turn led to the building of the first healthy living centre in Britain in Bromley-by-Bow—the first health centre in Britain to be owned by the patients and rented to the doctors. Something had shifted in who owned health in that community. Critically, the initiative was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, who helped to navigate the tricky waters of an NHS for which this approach was radical and difficult.

My belief is that we need a different approach to health, creating centres of heath in our communities that address the full range of health determinants. We need a big purpose in our pursuit of a healthy community. Today the Bromley by Bow Centre—I declare an interest as founder—offers a vast array of services to its local community. These stretch from conventional healthcare for local residents to opportunities to set up your own business; from support with tackling your credit card debts to becoming a stained glass artist; from learning to read and write to getting a job for the first time or a helping hand up the career ladder. The centre hosts visits from thousands of visitors and health leaders every year from across the world who come to learn from its experience and who want to see the model in action first-hand. One health leader recently asked, “What do you think we learn from the Bromley by Bow Centre’s experience about how we should build health centres in the future?”. Our CEO Rob Trimble’s answer was very simple: “Do not build health centres”.

This is not an argument that denigrates clinical health. On the contrary, it positions it within a broad range of services that drive well-being in communities by creating a locally blended offer, where doctors sit alongside others, including patients and local residents, in high-quality buildings to provide what people need. Creating buildings which act as centres of the community, not just health centres, makes sense for so many other reasons, not least financial ones. Our friends who run successful businesses such as John Lewis will tell you that the idea of a well-run department store where you can offer a whole range of products makes complete sense for the customer and complete financial sense for the business. You can capture the customer and have the opportunity, in the convenience of one place, to offer myriad products and services. This is the same principle in integrated holistic centres, where health is about life and living, not just disease and illness. It is about sweating our community assets and ensuring that one investment in a new set of buildings creates benefits and savings across a whole range of Whitehall departments, not just the Department of Health.

I am led to believe that there are few avowed disciples of the silo approach left, yet in many parts of Whitehall it seems to remain the prevailing culture. We need more of the department store approach and less of the citadels of health and social care approach. I urge Her Majesty’s Government to be brave and back dynamic and radical local solutions—more human solutions—and to move on from old-fashioned silo thinking in Whitehall.

Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for introducing this important debate. It has particular relevance for me at the moment, given the practical projects that I am working on in east London that are focused on education, enterprise and economic growth. One of the great strengths of this House is that it allows those of us who have a life outside the corridors of Westminster to make a contribution from what some would call the real world.

With that thought in mind, I thought it helpful to share with noble Lords two practical projects that I am working on in east London that are seeking to make the link between high quality education and economic growth. The first is the St Paul’s Way Transformation Project. Here, I must declare an interest as director. Seven years ago the CEO of Tower Hamlets Council, the health service and the social housing company asked me to intervene in St Paul’s Way. There had been a murder and considerable violence in a housing estate 800 yards to the north of Canary Wharf.

Arriving at St Paul’s Way for the first time, I was not surprised to find that the school was failing and in special measures, with only 35 families applying per year. Police cars, angry black youths with dogs and a frightened head teacher hiding behind a large fence greeted me. The school was defined by a silo culture. It had no relationship with the two warring housing estates around its perimeter, nor with the health centre next door and its 11,000 patients. Some school staff, among them Oxbridge graduates, actively fostered an agenda of isolationism, convinced that the school stood separate from the world of business. Few pupils had walked 800 yards down the road to visit Canary Wharf.

Over the past six years I have worked with partners to create an entrepreneurial narrative for this street. The lead directors in each key public body, their middle managers and the leaders on the street have all embraced it. The results speak for themselves. A new £40 million school now sits on the demolished 1960s school site, complete with the first Faraday science centre in the country. This year, over 1,000 families applied for a place at the school. Exam results continue to rise year on year; the 2013 Ofsted inspection rated the school outstanding in every category; 60% of the sixth form this year gained a place at a Russell Group university; and a bridge programme provides pathways for the most talented students into Oxford.

However, rising exam results are not enough to secure a future for these students. Reading Latin at an Oxbridge college will not guarantee these students a job at the end of an expensive degree; reading engineering will. Professor Brian Cox, a patron at the school, reminds us that we are short of 1 million engineers in the United Kingdom. With that in mind, I have worked over the past two years with Brian to run an annual science summer school at St Paul’s Way. This year, 250 students attended the school for two days in their summer holidays to listen to presentations by leading scientists, engineers and medics from across the world. Speakers included those working on the Higgs boson at CERN, the commercial director from Virgin Galactic, the engineer designing the next Mars Rover and the vice president of the Royal College of Physicians, Professor John Wass, who is also a patron of the school. The event was sponsored and part-hosted by Siemens, which opened its Crystal building in the Royal Docks to participating students and staff.

The theme of the science summer school was how to ensure that Britain becomes the best place to do science and engineering in the world. The answer lies in St Paul’s Way and places like it. A new campus is growing there that connects education, science, enterprise, business and research through practical activity. An example of this is the Wellcome Trust sponsored licence, recently won by the school, which will engage its science students in undertaking real DNA research into diabetes, focused on the 11,000 local patients. The only fly in the ointment is that those same patients are currently being prevented from moving into a new £16 million health centre that currently stands empty across the road from the school because of an NHS bureaucratic impasse.

Without doubt, high quality education has changed the lives of the students of St Paul’s Way Trust School and it is essential for our economic growth to further this country’s reputation for academic excellence. Education, however, must not stand alone from business and enterprise. Education is not just about reading books; it is about translating theory into practical activity.

Following my experience of working with the education sector for the past 30 years, I have a few observations. First, education must step outside text books and the classroom into the street and engage with the real world. Secondly, high exam results do not automatically equip students with relevant life skills. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, and many other members of this House, I left school at 16 and developed successful businesses and organisations. School children desperately need to learn life skills, and often these cannot be taught in a classroom.

Thirdly, the often unconscious bias against business in the classroom needs to be addressed. Teachers are uncomfortable with their students trading and earning money in school. They are uneasy when you speak to them about profit margins and exploiting market opportunities. Unless this is addressed, the contribution of education to economic growth will be muted. Fourthly, an over-academic approach can be antithetical to the risk-taking involved in business and entrepreneurship. Too often, especially in government, we risk paralysis by analysis. Fifthly, practical experience and a track record of achievement should complement academic qualifications both in school and in the workplace.

As new science and technology businesses follow Tech City, BT, iCITY and Siemens on to the Olympic Park and across the Lower Lea Valley after the Olympics, there is a real opportunity to link high quality educational achievement with the development of practical skills that are needed there. The announcement yesterday that UCL and the V&A are moving into the park is a major piece of this jigsaw, and we thank the Government for supporting it. In the Royal Docks I am, with partners, starting to build a new secondary free school. This school, through a massive regeneration project, will explicitly link an isolated local community with the employment and enterprise opportunities present in ExCeL, the forthcoming Chinese ABP development, the new India Centre, City Airport and the Silvertown partnership, and here I must declare an interest. However, this will be successful only if the young people involved see that education is about innovation, enterprise and business as well as about reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I ask the Minister: what practical steps should be taken to navigate the blockages at the new health centre across the road from the school in St Paul’s Way? An educational opportunity, with significant economic implications, is being lost because of a bureaucratic impasse. I would be happy to meet the Minister to explain both the opportunity and the difficulties. In my experience, innovation needs both engagement and leadership, not bureaucracy.