Queen’s Speech

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer]

My Lords, I would like to speak briefly about social exclusion. I do not think it is necessary to persuade the House of the need to tackle this issue. My right honourable friend Alan Milburn in the previous Labour Government, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Education Secretary in this Government, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, in an interesting and helpful speech today, have all made the case, which does not need to be repeated. Instead, I welcome and commend to Members of the House the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility which has been published in the past week. What I like about it is that it adopts what I would call an holistic approach to the problem. It recognises seven key truths about social mobility.

The report states that the point of greatest leverage is what happens between birth and three years old primarily in the home, through to education, emphasising the importance of good-quality teaching. It then looks at the after-school culture, the role of higher education and what are described as post-education pathways. Finally—this is the point I want to say something about today—the report looks at personal resilience and emotional well-being among those who are socially excluded in our community. The report reckons that this is an area which has not been fully explored and it asks questions about what might be done. I would like to offer some feedback in this respect.

The report suggests that the way forward is to try to replicate confidence in young people along the lines of fostering what it describes as “public school confidence”. I think that that is the wrong approach. What you have to do with young people who are struggling to climb the education or employment ladder is to work with individuals and with the community in which they find themselves. In other words, an individual’s confidence must be built up within the community they come from. To pull in something from outside, like “public school confidence”, in my opinion would be to send the wrong message.

I will never lose sight of the fact, particularly considering the area of the north-east where I come from, that these communities were once proud and confident. Now they have problems because of economic change and unemployment, but they are still communities and they do not want to be told what to do by anybody from outside. In their own way they are still proud, with their own culture, humour and way of life. What is important in helping to overcome social exclusion is to work with the grain of these communities on the things that the people value and understand.

In order to help gain confidence, self-esteem and ambition—all the things that we have all probably tried to help our own children to achieve—we need to emphasise the importance of people working together. There are organisations that could help a lot more than they do at present. I was thinking about the TUC—what a terrific track record it has of helping people to overcome social exclusion. Can your Lordships think of any other voluntary organisation where a man who began life as a postman could end up as a Cabinet Minister, or that a woman from my union, Jane Kennedy, who started out as a care assistant, could become a government Minister? That is a real pathway to achievement and success. If harnessed properly, the trade unions could be a great asset in helping to overcome some of the difficulties of social exclusion. I hope that colleagues and friends who are involved in this work will give that some thought.

I was also thinking about football clubs. The greatest cultural icon in a very deprived area of Middlesbrough—where, incidentally, I am the chancellor of the university—is the football club. If we can get footballers to go out to talk to young people and try to give them confidence and self-belief, even if it is only in being a good footballer, that will be massively important. Parliamentarians could engage in a dialogue with the owners and managers of football clubs throughout the country, certainly in the Premier League, to try to do something about social exclusion.

I thought about my time with Britannia Building Society after I ceased to be a trade union official, and what a great business it was and how hard it tried to give its employees confidence and personal growth and development. It was always trying to help people from Leek, a small town in Staffordshire, to become the best in the world. What a great thing to say to somebody who comes to work in Leek: “We want you to be the best in the world”. That is the sort of thing that we need to do. We do not need to look to the public schools; we need to look to our own organisations and communities, the things that are already around us, and we need to look at ourselves. There is a lot that people in this House already do, and a lot more we could do.

When I speak to the students at the university, I always tell them that they can be the best in the world. The fact that they did not go to Oxbridge or to a Russell group university, the fact that they come from poorer homes, the fact that they have really had to struggle to get to university is something that they should be proud of. They should be as confident and as proud of themselves as anybody from any other walk of life. That is really the message from that part of the social exclusion report.

Of course, social exclusion is about the whole seven-point agenda, but if you are going to focus on confidence, self-esteem and ambition, and building those things into young people who may not have the right mix at any time in their lives, it is important to do it with authentic organisations and people in the communities who they can relate to, so they can get some feeling that it is possible for them to achieve what they need to in order to do better in life.