Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I would like you to imagine how you would approach a Government, any Government, who always say, when you speak to them—they have to say it, God bless them—that they take the future into account. I spoke recently to quite a number of MPs and members of the Government. As always, they said, “Actually, what we are doing is probably enough”. I come along with a Bill that is nicked—stolen from our Welsh colleagues and made slightly different—and I say, “Well, actually we have to do more with the future, because the future is always being postponed.”

This is the problem that I have. How do I get the Conservative Government to look seriously at the future, in the way that the Welsh are seriously looking at the future, at the same time as trying to keep them onside, befriending them, being nice to them, being kind and thoughtful and never, ever telling them off? We know that as soon as you tell a politician off, they close their ears, in the same way that I close my ears when people tell me off—I am no different from anybody else. So, I have a problem. I want this Bill to go through and to be about the future today. I do not want the future to be continuously put off.

In my journeys around the United Kingdom, I talk to MPs, to charities and to local authorities—I talk to everybody. I am a bit like the Queen Mother; I go around shaking hands. I do not open supermarkets—nobody has asked me to do that yet—but I am a busy little lad and I go around. On one occasion quite recently, I was with a new MP—someone who came in in 2019 somewhere in the north of England, with a strong political record and a complete commitment to the well-being of their constituents. This young lady said to me, “What is your Bill going to do for my constituent who comes up to me in absolute terror or with an absolute problem? What is your Bill going to do?” I said, “Nothing”, and she said, “Well, why would I support your Bill, why would I vote for your Bill?” I said, “Ah! What would have happened if your predecessor, or your pre-pre-predecessor, had addressed the problems in the first instance that your constituent has to face now?”

Many of the problems that people face in their constituencies, and I face in my life, did not come from the future; they came from the past. In a way, had we had a future generations Bill 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago, we might have hesitated before we did certain things. In fact, we could rename my Bill. It does not have to be the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill; we could just call it the “Hindsight Bill”. Why do we not have a Minister for Hindsight? Very clever—somebody who can read the future or who can say, “Hang on, why are we always doing things that come back to bite us in the rear at some later stage?”

For instance, would we have charged our children to go to university? Would we have done that almost beautiful act of them and us-ism, increasing the divide between them and us? Many people I meet would love to go to university but are frightened because they do not have what the public school boys or grammar school boys have, or whoever it may be, whose mum and dad have got a bit of money put aside, maybe property and all that. Now, university is not everything, but the message was sent out, just after we rescued the banks, just after 2010, at the time of the coalition. Had there been a future generations Bill on the statute book then, maybe we would have said, “Hang on, what are you doing here? You are trying to solve an immediate problem, but you are being oppressed by the needs and demands of today and you are throwing tomorrow away.”

Would we, for instance, have closed down our mental health institutions in the mid-1980s? People like me, even before the Big Issue, were saying “Hang on, do you know what is going to happen? If you close the mental health institutions and have care in the community”—it looked as thin on the ground then as it does now—“you will have an enormous increase in people on the streets; the streets will fill up and the prisons will fill up.” If you go into a prison, you meet people who, 30 or 40 years ago, probably would have been in the mental institutions. That is a major problem. Being mentally ill now, you are worse off than in the days of the mid-19th century when the poet John Clare was locked up. He was first put in a private institution and then a public one.

You have people wandering around the streets. When the Big Issue started, we were inundated with Jesus Christs and Napoleons on the streets. We even had a few admirals as well, I assure you—I do not know whether they were admirals; they did not look like admirals, and they certainly did not look like Napoleon or Jesus Christ. I had people coming up to me and telling me that they were angels. That was probably about 50% of the people we were working with in 1991, because in 1987, I believe, the institutions were closed down.

With a future generations Bill, you would have something that I find missing in modern politics. When I came into the House of Lords—forgive me for saying this—I was chased hither and thither by Barons and Baronesses who said, “Look, there’s this problem, and this problem, and this problem. What will you do about this? What will you do about the homeless sleeping in stations?” All the time I was being pushed and pushed. I said, “Look, there are millions of people in this world obsessed with the crisis of now. They will continue to be obsessed with it, because the crisis of now never gets solved, because we do not think about the future.” I have come into the House of Lords to do nothing more than prevent poverty forming in the first instance, and not be controlled by worshipping again and again at the altar of the accomplished facts—that you have to do this. Of course, because we are always responding to emergencies, we think that that proves our humanity, but actually it does not. We cannot just keep responding to the emergencies; we must do much more.

I apologise, I realise that I have 10 minutes and I have only started. How are your Lordships? I hope that you had a nice Friday. I walked here. I walk everywhere; that is why I am so young and fit—and only 75. If you sit in the House and are not really a politician, you notice that we spend an enormous amount of time untangling legislation from former times. We are always undoing it. If you look at the facts, about 70% of the time of the House is spent unravelling the damage done by poverty—why have we never done this?—the damage done by lack of biodiversity and by industrialisation, and the damage done by closing down the mines, steelworks and heavy engineering jobs, largely up north, without putting anything in their place. Forty or 50 years later, we are still suffering the damage from the fact that we did not look at how the future would pan out when we did these things. The most graphic example was when I stood with many people who were mentally ill and brought them into the House of Commons 20 years ago. It was incredibly moving to be here and meet people who said, “I wish we had not done it.”

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Before I call the next speaker, I remind all noble Lords that I clearly stated that all of us in this Chamber, when we are not speaking, should be wearing face masks. I ask noble Lords to respect the House and everybody else and to wear masks when not speaking. I call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill has attracted a large number of speakers, partly out of the huge respect in which the House holds the noble Lord, but also because of the importance of the issue his Bill seeks to address.

Let us applaud the Welsh, and the noble Lord for his passionate introduction to the Bill. This is a wide-ranging Bill, it is ambitious and challenging, and I fear that some measures may prove too demanding for a Private Member’s Bill. I have not seen any costings—that may be my mistake—but the proposals seem so overwhelmingly positive that it may be that the funds will be forthcoming.

The Bill advocates a Joint Committee on future generations and a commission to be appointed by the Prime Minister. Here I have problems. We in this House have seen how prime ministerial appointments can distort the membership, so perhaps commission members could be generated by another method. The commission would need to be and seen to be non-political, and if they are prime ministerial appointments, there is a huge danger that they will be overwhelmingly party political. The well-being of our young people can only benefit by co-operation between government and across all the parties and the public bodies. It would be good to think that such dialogue already takes place, but I suspect that it does not.

I also applaud the proposal for a citizens’ panel of at least 50 people, a large and wide-ranging selection of people, which would need an exceptional leader or convener, but which could prove invaluable in bringing expertise from all parts of our community to this subject. The bigger prize would be for the next generations to have better prospects for rewarding employment and fulfilling lives, if we all work together in the way suggested.

The Bill greatly deserves further consideration and scrutiny, and I look forward to Committee and trying to ensure the well-being of future generations by exploring in more detail how these proposals would work in practice. I very much support the intentions behind the Bill and congratulate the noble Lord on all his endeavours, especially all the work he does to improve the lives of the less fortunate and the young. He may not be able to solve all our problems—as he has so modestly admitted—but, my goodness, he does an amazing job in tackling many of them.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, has withdrawn from this debate, so I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.

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[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to stand shoulder to shoulder with my noble friend Lord Bird, and I hope that we will see this Bill to its end. I believe that it is an addition to our responsibility on equality duties

We live in an unequal society between those who have and those who live in abject poverty and deprivation. The Bill desires an outcome in which our country is fit for the next generation. I am thankful for this opportunity to consider the challenges to improve its life chances.

The pandemic has forced us to examine long-standing divisions, in which millions of children experience food poverty, homelessness, a poor standard of education, digital inequalities, lack of equal opportunities for work and an endemic level of violence and abuse, with a third of violent crimes being committed against women and girls, including in our schools, colleges and universities. Eradication of violence, including knife crimes and brutalisation of our young black men within the criminal justice system, requires radical overhaul, such as through the urgent reconsideration of the Prevent strategy, which for so long has been seen to target specific communities and has done so much to demonise Islam and Muslims.

It is my fervent hope and prayer that, in looking towards the well-being of our future generations, we will champion and positively promote our multicultural and multifaith society to ensure that all sections of our communities have a voice and say in the way we shape our country. I welcome the well-being duty being placed on public bodies and the proposed Joint Committee, as well as the Minister for Future Well-being. These structures will have to be embedded across government, and the well-being agenda will have to be mainstreamed to work in partnership with the Ministers for children and women, and other senior government Ministers, to effect the changes suggested in the Bill. Such a constructive approach would integrate the levelling-up and build back better agendas, alongside the poverty eradication, education, housing equality and environmental commitments that have been so prominent within this Government, and among the many demands made by young people who have marched and protested throughout our country in recent months.

We have an informed generation of young people. Many have taken the decision to engage in political activism. I take this incredible opportunity to salute the many hundreds of thousands of children and young people who have marched for a better future and demonstrated that they are conscious of building a safer and more equal society and country; who have engaged in political acts and want their voices heard in dialogues and the process of decision-making; and whose consciousness, understanding and appreciation of protecting the environment, and of poverty, health, civil liberties, drugs, social justice, inequalities, racism and Islamophobia, as well as international conflicts, is most profound. They are an exemplar to each of us in this House and elsewhere. This debate is about safeguarding their future well-being. As we consider the merits of this Bill in its next phase, I look forward to elaborating these points further.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, is experiencing technical difficulties, so I will call her later, when she is able to reconnect. In the meantime, I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I support the principles of the Bill in the name of my noble friend Lord Bird, while questioning the extent of detail which could constrain this and future Governments in policy development. Any Government have a responsibility to both current populations and future generations. Many of the Bills being considered in this parliamentary Session are associated with trying to ensure that future generations survive and thrive in the UK—for example, the Environment Bill, referred to by many noble Lords.

The pandemic has sent a shock of seismic proportions globally, without sufficient preparedness even in G7 countries. An aim of the Bill is to enshrine in law a

“shift to a longer-term, preventative approach to policymaking”,

which would involve adopting new methods of risk analysis, planning and fiscal policy to ensure that future generations are respected and taken into account.

The need to improve the well-being of all our citizens remains a paramount responsibility of all Governments and is amply illustrated through the successful Covid vaccination programme. I fully support the concepts outlined in Part 2, but suggest that some elements are very prescriptive. Clause 4 in Part 2 contains such processes, which are the reverse of the intention of the Bill and could result in convoluted, time-consuming cycles of repetitive consultation, slowing down well-being policy-making.

While supporting the concept of establishing a future generations commission for the UK, Clause 4 makes no mention of England. Surely UK-level discussions need to involve all four countries and younger people, as was so ably mentioned by other noble Baronesses.

The vital issue that we face is that young people want and need to be able to access health promotion and ill-health services digitally, face-to-face and sometimes in hospital. However, I must disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Bird. We did the right thing in shutting the large mental hospitals but we did the wrong thing in not providing alternative suitable accommodation. They need high-quality education, safe and secure housing, and secure employment opportunities but, as the noble Lord said, long-term planning must involve listening and devising policies based on citizens’ stated desires coupled with scientific data.

Young people today will be paying off the debt associated with the costs of the pandemic for 50 years, if not a century. Unlike former generations, those going into higher education have student loans to redeem. The requirement to undertake future generations impact assessments, as outlined in Part 2 Section 11, is paramount. In summary, I hope that we can work to revise and simplify the Bill to enable nimble policy development, while fully embracing the best evidence relating to the future well-being of our population.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Her connection issues having been resolved, I call the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

May I remind my noble friend of the three-minute advisory speaking time.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton.

[Baroness Stroud (Con) [V]]

We must ensure that these issues are well examined. We cannot be content with the thousands of children who go neglected and abandoned in our cities and streets every year.

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[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Again, I call the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton.