Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, there is a lot of evidence that, once a certain standard of living is reached—economic security in particular—good relationships, happy families, and friends and community quite often follow, although not always necessarily, and both of these depend on skills and on the effort made by all of us on improving the quality of life, as the noble Lord said in his opening speech. There are quite a lot of both of these attributes, good skills and good quality of life, in the United Kingdom.

I do not go quite as far as Cecil Rhodes in his bombastic dictum in another age that to be born an Englishman is to have won first prize in the lottery of life. There may be one or two on the wilder shores of my party who have that view of life, but I will not tempt myself to name them today. However, it is a fact that lots of people want to come to the United Kingdom, which I am glad about—I do not speak of the dangerous lives of people seeking to come to our shores illegally. There are queues of people who wish to come here for the attributes that the United Kingdom has, and we should not just forget that and say that everything is a terrible problem.

I will give some examples. The City of London remains a destination ranked way above a Paris or a Frankfurt by generations of polls of those wishing to come to work in the financial services area, where I work. Our best universities remain a target, too, for undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to get proper legal entry into our best universities. We have some great universities, with always three and sometimes four in the top 10 and in the top 100—I forget the figure; doubtless my noble friend Lord Willetts will know what it is, but an awful lot of our universities are ranked in the top 100. We also always welcome a lot of outside direct investment. The UK remains the second biggest destination in Europe for foreign direct investment, and this is led by tough-minded investors from the US and India. These people must have spotted at least a few useful skills that we still have around.

Yet the paradox remains that, despite this, decent skill levels do not automatically lead to increased productivity, which is a mystery that I think the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referred to when he spoke of productivity. It is particularly poor in the United Kingdom. It is a genuine mystery, and a lot of very clever people are trying to provide the answer as to why it is there, but we have not yet got it. According to the Office for National Statistics in its report last week, the biggest drops in productivity are in the public sector, and they are in education and in health, which are critically important to all of us.

A lot of effort is being put in via policies of different sorts to improve this, notably by levelling up. However, a generation takes a long time, and we are often told that the levelling-up policy will take a generation. A generation is 20 or 30 years and change takes time. So I applaud the realism of the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, as reported by the Financial Times of 30 April, who said that it remains “work in progress”, describing the process as like “building a cathedral”—and they often take longer than one or two generations. So it is extremely important that we deal with the unsolved mystery of why our productivity is so low.

We must also recognise that skills have lots of attributes that are hard to teach formally, but, if they are not acquired or imbued in some way, all the doctorates or degree apprenticeships in the world will not benefit and bring the skills of life with them. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who said in a speech during a debate which he initiated back on 7 March that we had to be realistic about the problems that the university sector is facing. He is right, I think, that we are facing a bit of a sub-prime issue—I will not overwork it by calling it a sub-prime crisis—in a number of our universities, where we have seen, alas, a lot of sacking of staff and abolition of courses. This is always brought in with a lot of management speak, even by great universities such as Goldsmiths, which has announced that it has a “transformation programme”. Once you see a transformation programme coming and vice-chancellors running for the hills, you know there is trouble. We are facing, there and in a number of our underperforming universities in this country, a bit of a looming sub-prime problem, which the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, was absolutely open in saying that we have.

Higher Education

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, of the three key words in the very thought-provoking Motion before us, and following the provoking and thought-provoking speech we have just heard from the noble Lord, I intend to home in on productivity linked to how degree apprenticeships can fit into getting us a more productive country. It is one of the great mysteries of the age, at least to me, why in productivity we are such laggards. We all know the unsatisfactory trends that we have, but answers there are relatively few, despite an avalanche of words from multiple think tanks. Heaven only knows, we have enough think tanks in this country now, yet we still seek an answer as to why our productivity lags.

The ingredients in all this must include a bit more than just a lack of private and public capital invested and skills developed to explain away the faltering footprint of our national productivity. For sure, many universities do a good bit towards helping productivity; we even have the British Academy weighing in now with its thoughts. But even if some do not seem to be at the peak of productivity, quite a few universities do not seem to be good at managing their own affairs; hence we have at the moment a growing number of universities, unfortunately and sadly, reporting gravity-defying deficits and growing redundancies, sometimes with the closure of valuable units. Something is not quite right in the way that universities are running themselves.

Degree apprenticeships could do very much to help. They are making good progress. They were a great idea when first mooted, but they are not in the numbers necessary to correct the balance between traditional universities and higher education. There is of course that vocational tinge to it all. I do not say that everyone goes to university to follow a particular career or develop a vocation, but it is important that young people are taught to think. None the less, why has there been such slow development of degree apprenticeships?

Some people think that the very term “apprenticeship” is off-putting—that it gives the wrong image or perception. Maybe cultural conservatism is also there in our universities. Certainly, some schools do not think that an apprenticeship is quite what their brightest and best should be doing. I think that is wrong. Families also sometimes think the same for their own: that the brightest and best should not be going to apprenticeships. Maybe there is a poor selling of that concept, yet degree apprenticeships can be deeply satisfying for individuals and can greatly help productivity.

One example to illustrate this is of a young friend who started off in a school which was in measures and got into a sixth form later on. She came from a home that had never sent anyone to university before and where they are very proud of her. She told me that, despite getting the grades predicted and a place thereby in that excellent university, the University of Nottingham, she had decided that she was going to reject it. I asked why, slightly surprised, because the school had wanted her to do this. She said, “I don’t want to do that freshers week and have all that piling up of debt. I want to do something, so I want to go into a degree apprenticeship”. She has done that and gone into a big corporation, where she is very well treated and monitored. She is moving around its departments and, in the meantime, doing an excellent course of study with the partner university to that corporation.

That is certainly a choice which more people should be encouraged to take and are not being encouraged to take at the moment. We need more action on that front. Not only that, but this girl is now earning north of £20,000 per year. She has no debt whatever and is paying no fees. She can have a nice time and, by living at home, can make a contribution to the bank of mum and dad from the money that she is earning, rather than asking mum and dad for money. That might be a particular case, but I was very impressed with what she said and how she said it.

I hope very much that my noble friend—perhaps in her closing remarks, or if not then in a letter later—will explain what more the Government think they can do to promote degree apprenticeships.

Free School Lunches and Milk, and School and Early Years Finance (Amendments Relating to Universal Credit) (England) Regulations 2018

Lord Patten Excerpts

Tuesday 20th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I do not have a flinty heart, but I am not oversentimental. However, I was moved by what the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, said about his own circumstances and his hard-working mother and how people in working poverty suffer. I do not think there is anyone in this House who is not concerned about poverty and about dealing with it properly. But that always has to be based on fact and not on sentiment. What strikes me about what the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, said in his speech is that there is a huge gap, not just in alleged or asserted numbers but in credibility, between the alleged 1 million child losers to whom he referred and the assurances given, for example, in a Parliamentary Answer by my noble friend Lord Agnew of Oulton earlier this month that by 2022 there will be an increase in the number of children getting free school meals. There is a seven-figure difference between the Answer from my noble friend and the figures of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam. I am all in favour of building bridges —I would welcome building a bridge with the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, if I got the chance—but there is an unbridgeable gap here; a seven-figure gap.

The noble Lord may wish to reflect on his own time as a distinguished Labour Chief Whip. In Division after endless Division, he clicked away, totting up the votes, with the ever-helpful learned clerks counting up on their devices as a back-up—we all like our statistical fact checkers, and there is no hiding place for the eventual numbers of the contents and the not-contents. Yet there are lots of independent authorities which say that his figures asserting massive losses of free school meals are—forgive my uncharacteristic bluntness—wrong. Unlike some of my colleagues, I like experts, and these authorities and experts range from the UK Statistics Authority, which makes it clear that claims that universal credit causes poverty are wrong, through to the “Channel 4 News” FactCheck, which pointed out that no child currently receiving free school meals will lose their entitlement, but rather that more will benefit from the changes.

So, while I understand the strength of feeling, it seems that we have seen the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, with his new-found arithmetical freedom, transmogrify from being an obsessive bean counter—or perhaps I should say Peer counter—of those voting content or not-content into what some might think to be a statistical tearaway, albeit in a good cause. I do not doubt that it is a good cause, but, in the end, hard facts, rather than what some would think of as exaggeration, are best to rely on.

I certainly wish to see all children in all households that are in need get help. But if all children of all households on universal credit were to get free school meals, we would be talking about a cost of billions, and I am not making that up. I wonder what the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer thinks about that. By comparison, I congratulate Her Majesty’s Government on what they are doing. All children in years 1 and 2 will continue to get free school meals—this was not mentioned in the debate—and no child will lose out as universal credit is rolled out. With respect to the noble Lord, these are facts rather than assertions.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, it is good to hear the noble Lord, Lord Patten, recognising that on all sides of the House we are very concerned about the just-managing families. Two-thirds of all children in poverty live in working families that are working hard to make ends meet and to do the best for their children. It was encouraging to hear the Prime Minister talk so strongly after the Brexit vote about reaching out to those just-managing families in need. So I hope that the Minister will take this golden opportunity offered to us by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, to give moral support to children and families in poverty today, and to say from the Dispatch Box that, yes, there may be difficulties, but he will look at how we can ensure that all children in poverty get a free school meal.

This morning, I spoke with a mother who endured poverty for several years. She was a victim of domestic violence; she was in a refuge for three months; and, last year, she spent six to seven months in bed and breakfast accommodation, living in one room with her teenage daughter and infant granddaughter. That was a hugely challenging time for her and she needed her friends around her to give her moral support. This morning, she told me that she had been successful in a visa application. She is now in a financially better state, and has found a new relationship with a good man. We need to give support to families when they are struggling through difficult times—and these are difficult times for so many families after years of austerity. Her issue is extreme, but many of the families we are talking about will be suffering severe housing problems. Increasing numbers of children are growing up in bed and breakfasts or hostel accommodation, and even those with more secure accommodation lack clear security of tenure.

Over the weekend, as your Lordships will have heard, a British teacher won the accolade of best teacher in the world. She talked of her experience in Brent, where she was very concerned about housing—so many children living in an overcrowded home and having to work in the bathroom to be able to concentrate.

These families are coping with the stress brought about by years of austerity. They have lost their early intervention services as local services have been cut. This is an opportunity for the Government—yes, perhaps a difficult one—to think about how we can offer moral support to those families. Often, it is mothers bringing up their children on their own, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said at the beginning of the debate, giving them the confidence that their child will have a good, healthy, hot meal at the beginning of the day gives them one less thing to worry about. Surely we can reach out to these families and offer them that help. I hope that the Minister will give us that assurance today.

Marriage

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, these days in your Lordships' House we seem to have either feast or famine, filibuster or a 4-minute sprint, although we now have an extra minute or two, thanks to the indulgence of my noble friend the Chief Whip. In my few minutes, I have two points to make in what is a very packed debate which has attracted so many speakers. Like the right reverend Prelate, the whole House and I look forward to the forthcoming maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield.

One of the themes of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester was the need—I think he was speaking to the churches as well as to the secular world—for the churches to be bold in what they say. Over the years, I have had a sense that those in the churches have been very willing to speak to the converted and perhaps rather less willing to enter into the public policy debate about the importance of marriage generally. I happen to be a Roman Catholic, rather than an Anglican, but the Roman Catholics had a good run in the last Question before the debate started. I would encourage both churches and all religions to speak out much more boldly, to borrow the phrase of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, on the importance of marriage.

All that said, there seems to be an odd conspiracy of silence concerning the public promotion of the overwhelming evidence that marriage promotes everything from a decent level of sustained happiness, via helping to accumulate resources and so promoting independence from state help, to apparently reducing depression and slowing down the progress of Alzheimer's disease in later life. All these findings come from peer-reviewed academic journals, such as the British Medical Journal. They do not come from some right-wing think tank which has made it up to support this outdated institution of marriage. The evidence shows variously, through, say, the work of the Prison Reform Trust or the Centre for Social Justice, that young offenders are much less likely to come from married families. It is exactly the same with health.

The excellent and notable University of Exeter family study clearly demonstrated the huge disparity between the lower levels of health problems of those in intact married families and those who are outside them. I shall not go on through each government department looking at their areas of responsibility but, for example, I can find absolutely no evidence in recent decades that argues to the contrary that, for example, children from married homes generally perform better and have better life chances, although I recognise, as did the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, that such statistical generalisations mask heroic individual outcomes to the contrary from those who are not married.

That said, these I think are simple facts not judgments. Politicians and bishops should not be fearful of facts. I increasingly recognise what I think of in public discourse as marriage denial. There undoubtedly is that. Why is it politically and socially correct on the basis of incontrovertible facts to assert loudly that drunken driving is bad, yet people are generally so muted in saying that marriage is a personal and public policy good, based on similarly incontrovertible facts? To me that seems to be daft and to be the reverse of the boldness which the right reverend Prelate was seeking us all to take on.

My second point relates to what the Government should do in the current zeitgeist. They should fearlessly and to the public good promote knowledge of the facts. That cannot be denied, whatever personal views there are about marriage or individual life. Above all else, Governments should not send contradictory messages on marriage, as were sent out, alas, by the Family Law Act 1986, which on the one hand provided for support for marriage services, the subject of the debate in the name of the right reverend Prelate, but, at the same time in the same Bill, introduced what the tabloids accurately, if rather colourfully, called quickie, no-fault divorces—provisions which were, mercifully, repealed very quickly.

Alas, also, to avoid that trap is difficult in the face of the very different views on marriage of the coalition. We all know the dangers of surfing the web. I did a little light Googling on liberal views about marriage, but once I saw what Mr Clegg thought about the institution, I felt that it was best for me to ask my internet provider to block my access to such hard-core material in future. That said, by comparison, I know that I can look to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister to continue to say in the clear language that he is so good at that he supports marriage and to encourage those of his Ministers who feel the same way to pump out the facts again and again like hamsters on the oratorical wheel until they are more understood in the intervening years between now, when I believe that critically important expenditure reductions must continue, and when it should surely be possible to spend a bit more on marriage support in future, in exactly the way that the right reverend Prelate asks.