Covid-19: Charities

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dannatt]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to provide additional support to charities working with people who are self-isolating as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Dannatt I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, civil society organisations and volunteers are making a huge contribution to ensuring that the most vulnerable across the country are supported. However, we know that Covid-19 presents serious challenges to the sector. We are hearing concerns around income disruption, particularly for those charities where the bulk of their money comes from public fundraising, trading or investment income, and they will be hit especially hard. We are working with partners across government in the sector to gather a picture of the impacts for civil society, including for those working in frontline roles with vulnerable and lonely people.

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Reply. As chairman of the National Emergencies Trust, my noble friend has been pressing the Government to put a significant amount of money into the voluntary sector for two specific reasons. First, as the Minister said, general fundraising for charities has almost completely stopped, so that even the big ones, such as the Red Cross and St John Ambulance, are struggling to survive. Secondly, is the need to resource local charities that can help people on the ground now. The amount required —between £3 billion and £5 billion—is a fraction of the £150 billion put in to save businesses and jobs.

Last week, with the support of the Duke of Cambridge, the National Emergencies Trust launched a national appeal, which to date has raised over £5 million—a mere drop in the overall ocean—which will be distributed to where it is most needed by the community foundation. Will the Minister please tell the House whether and how the Government plan to support the charitable sector?

[Baroness Barran]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for this Question and commend the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, for the work that he has done in his leadership of the National Emergencies Trust. However, this is not a competition between funding for business and funding for the voluntary sector: both need to be funded. We need to keep people safe and make sure that the economy comes through this with as little damage as possible.

In terms of what the Government are doing, many actions have happened already, including the ability to furlough some staff offering of loans, which to certain parts of the sector—although not all, I appreciate—is important. But for some charities, demand is up sharply and income is down sharply, and we are working tirelessly and talking every day to the sector about how we bridge that gap.

Children and Young People: Digital Technology

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I join all those who have thanked my noble friend Lady Kidron not only for tabling this important debate and her masterly introduction but for her relentless concentration on the issue in legislation and on other occasions. I also thank Nicole Winchester for her excellent Library brief.

My contribution will be limited to two personal observations about which I have been asking questions ever since making them. In 1997, as Chief Inspector of Prisons during a thematic review of young offenders, I visited the only young offender institution in Scotland, which I was told had an outstanding governor. To my surprise, as we were walking around, he suddenly said to me that if, by some mischance, he had to get rid of all his staff, the last one out of the gate would be his speech and language therapist. Never having come across such a person in any YOI in England, I naturally asked him why. He replied, “Because the young people cannot communicate, either with each other or with us, and until they can, we cannot begin to know what problems and needs they have or how to begin helping them to overcome them”. He went on to say that too many of them had never been communicated with by their parents or sat down to meals as a family, being dumped in front of the television or encouraged to play on their electronic devices, leading to their being able to communicate only in “binary grunts”. Having met his wonderful therapist, I learned what she was able to do for both young offenders and staff. I have been campaigning ever since for such a therapist to be appointed in every YOI. This inability to communicate is the scourge of the 21st century, for which I hold the amount of time children and young people spend using digital technology partly to blame. As the Library briefing points out, the range of topics relating to the impact of digital technologies on the health and well-being of children and young people is vast and there is no clear agreement on the impact, positive or negative, of screen time on an individual’s well-being.

My second observation is based on my chairmanship of a criminal justice and acquired brain injury interest group, which has a particular interest in the effects of such injuries on the developing brains of children and young people. Possibly influenced by evidence of a possible link between brain tumours and excessive use of mobile phones, there are those who suspect that too much digital technology use may cause damage to the growing brain. Hard evidence is impossible to come by, largely owing to the technology being comparatively new. Two years ago I remember being shown two scans, one of a 10 year-old’s brain taken 10 years ago and one taken that year. You did not have to be an expert to see that there were differences, which might be because they were different people. Experts admitted that they could not interpret the difference or what it meant in the long term, but it was sufficiently worrying for them to say that, while it was too early to predict any long-term implications, excessive use of digital technology could not be ruled out as a possible cause.