Young People

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, for initiating this debate. I will focus on forgotten young workers; in so doing I refer to a report, The Forgotten Workers, which highlights the plight of young workers in our economy. Launched a couple of weeks ago, it captures research by Dr Jo McBride of Durham University and Dr Andrew Smith of Bradford University. It examines an emerging social phenomenon of low-paid workers who have no choice but to work in multiple jobs in order to make ends meet.

The beauty of this report is that it is dominated by the evidence of the workers, not the opinions of academics. These young workers cannot get enough pay or hours; they do not get sufficient opportunities to acquire decent full-time work. They are trapped in a cycle of multiple low-paid jobs because of the lack of secure, full-time, better-paid work. The report is not solely about young people but they form a large part of the sample. Most are overqualified for the work they are involved in; despite having A-levels, degrees and even master’s degrees, they feel pressurised into taking any job—anything available—regardless of their qualifications.

The young workers studied often had two, three, four or even five different jobs at once. One had five, as he could not get one decent full-time job with a reasonable salary to support his young family—and he had a master’s degree. McBride and Smith class these workers as “the underemployed” as they are low paid, cannot acquire sufficient working hours to make ends meet and yet are overqualified for the jobs they do. They also heard from older workers explaining how their sons and daughters were still living at home as they could not afford to leave. They were referred to as “boomerang kids”, as they could not afford rents or mortgages, given their low-wage employment.

The report brings to our attention that the rise in insecure, precarious work in the UK is reducing the chances of many people to attain decent, secure, better-paid work. The rapid growth of temporary, agency, casual, term-time only, seasonal and zero-hour contracts is reducing opportunities for our younger workforce to get full-time, secure jobs. These types of contracts are becoming more and more accepted as the norm; this needs to be addressed as it affects many of our people and has the potential to harm more young workers in the future. We all know that young people are finding it difficult to buy property. When they cannot get a full-time job, they also cannot get a part-time mortgage, rent, council tax, water rates or whatever.

The report recommends, among other things, that employment protection and policies need to be updated to address the changes that work and the wider labour market are undergoing. It also argues that there needs to be better regulation of wages and working time, with guaranteed hours and pay premiums restored for working non-standard hours. There also need to be more opportunities for young people to attain full-time, secure and better-paid work to make work pay. I will send a copy of the report to the Minister and place a copy in the Library for Members who would like to look at it.

On 20 November, I attended a meeting organised by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to listen to Sophie Howe, the Future Generations Commissioner in Wales. She spoke of her role as the guardian for future generations to meet their needs, and how she was engaging with and encouraging public bodies to take action to meet the needs of future generations. I was inspired, pleased, surprised and encouraged by this encounter; the British Parliament ought to have a look at the important work being done in Wales. If we do so, and if we look at the future with an objective eye instead of stumbling from crisis to crisis, we might be able to get the kind of future that is not set out in the report.

It is heartening to hear that we have our own Select Committee, which I was not absolutely aware of, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord True, looking at intergenerational issues. I am sure this will produce some helpful suggestions on matters covered in this debate. I wish the Minister good luck with reading the report. We look forward to hearing back from him and to debating it in the House.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has just crept into his place, because I want to say how much I enjoyed his speech: I see myself as more of a plumber than a poet. I know that the noble Lord did not mean any disrespect to plumbers in his lovely contribution. If any noble Lords might want bathrooms or kitchens fitted, I am not actually a plumber but I am pretty close to it. In later life I have been lucky, through diverse ways—not least of which was membership of your Lordships’ House—to get to be chancellor of Teesside University, of which I am extremely proud. It does an amazing job dealing with its part of the education sector. It tackles some of society’s big challenges but it strives for academic excellence at the same time and does a fabulous job. It is part of the University Alliance, a group of universities whose members are working to make a big difference in their cities and regions, as I am sure noble Lords know, and I agree with it that there is much in the Bill that we can support. But at Teesside University, we believe that the Bill could do much more to support universities and make a difference to our society and our economy.

In particular, I would like to see the new Office for Students have a duty to promote collaboration. This needs to be right at the top of the Bill, in Part 1, Clause 2, standing alongside the duty to promote competition. I emphasise that collaboration is an extremely important concept and I selected this feature because of the young people I represent. I cannot help but feel that I am a representative of my university. It is in my home region, near my home town. These young people are having a particularly tough time with paying tuition fees, housing and finding jobs. The right measures in the Bill, and particularly a strengthened right to collaboration, could work for them. I will make two points in support of this.

The first relates to access to higher education and widening participation. I welcome the requirements for universities to do more to reach people who might stay away from higher education. This work is not easy: it is intensive and needs expertise. Professionals in the sector call some of these groups “hard to reach”. The work is difficult and includes people who may have grown up in care; those who have no history of higher education in their families; and those who are completely discouraged by higher education concepts and fees. Reaching them can take years of dedicated work. Traditional marketing does not always work, nor do social media. There are huge barriers to climb in trust, culture and ambition. It is fair to say that many universities find this work quite difficult, but we urgently need them to reach those people. I hope consideration can be given, during the passage of the Bill, to how Parliament might help them to do this.

Some universities have built excellent practice. For example, at Teesside University we have expertise with young people growing up in care. I was taken aback that we were actually doing this. Young people in care being encouraged to go to university is quite a big leap. We share that with other universities and it is highly valued in the sector. This is another kind of thing we can look at to see how we can strengthen it. The more that universities are driven to compete and to guard their expertise from each other, the more we lose these groups. We must not add them to our lost generation. We need the Bill to include a duty of collaboration to ensure this does not happen. As other noble Lords have mentioned, employability is important, as are skills, lifelong learning and making sure that we look at the university road to jobs.

Like my colleagues in the other place, I welcome Clause 15, which will set up a standing commission on the integration of higher education and lifelong learning. That is a really good move. As other noble Lords have said, adult learners and part-time students have been hugely disadvantaged since 2010. Numbers of new part-time students have fallen over five years by almost 200,000. We cannot afford for this to happen and for people to be shut out of education in this way, just because they cannot take part on a full-time basis. It damages our economy and it damages them. We need to be able to access education throughout our lives. I welcome movement in this area and hope noble Lords will look at ways of strengthening it and taking it forward as the Bill passes through Parliament.

Childcare Bill [HL]

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord True, that this is a political Bill. It was in the election manifesto of the Conservative Party and therefore it is right and proper that it be acted on. I also agree with much of what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, with whom I had the pleasure to serve on the Select Committee.

When I wanted to know a little more about the Government’s intentions in relation to the Bill, which are not clear from the Bill itself, I looked at the letter that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, sent to all noble Lords a week or so ago. It said the Government were a one-nation government acting in the interests of all. Therefore, I take this to be a one-nation Bill for childcare and I welcome that. He also said it was essential for families, and for the economic development of the country, to improve children’s educational outcomes and to help narrow the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers and, of course, to help families and parents to work. All those aims are good and are what I will measure the Bill on as it works its way through the House.

I think they are the right aims. The Government now have to start fulfilling them and have first to be honest about the shortcomings of the previous Government’s policies and how they intend to deal with them and meet future commitments. We have to be honest with parents and say many of the things that have been said today, particularly that the present offer is far from perfect and where through underfunding the PVI sector cannot meet it, it is often subsidised by parents, both those who accept and enjoy the offer and others. We have to tell parents that the current offer is often low quality because it does not allow for qualified staff to be paid in some PVI settings. We need to deal with some of the shortcomings to give parents the belief that they will be addressed and, more importantly, to say what the current offer will mean for them.

I hope the new offer will do something about the scandal of low pay for nursery nurses in the PVI sector. It is a big issue but I do not think we can keep sweeping it under the carpet. In this week’s Nursery World there were nursery nurse jobs advertised at 30 hours a week for £9,000 a year, and 37 hours a week at £8 an hour or £15,000 a year—£8 an hour, of course, is £1 an hour under the national living wage. Try getting a plumber, roofer, gardener or anybody to come to your home for £8 an hour and you know what the answer will be. Yet this is what we are offering to pay nursery nurses in a brave new world. This morning I could engage a dog walker in Barnes for £15 an hour, which says it all. Will the Minister explain to the House how these rates of pay fit with the one-nation policies that he believes underpin the Bill?

The National Day Nurseries Association has just reported that 43% of nurseries are unable to find staff with the right levels of qualifications. The chief executive officer of the association said that,

“staff who picked childcare as their career choice are leaving because they can earn more”,

and work fewer hours in a supermarket. Again, I would like the Minister’s observations on that.

I hope the Minister will tell parents that the Government will not damage the maintained sector through their policy developments and that they will not try and move salaries down in it, thus endangering the long-term sustainability of the sector, which provides some of our best nurseries in some of the most deprived areas.

We are going forward to parents with an offer whose details we do not yet know. I accept that—I have to. We do not really know about the funding either, which I also accept. It could be £350 million or it could be £1.5 billion. I am not really bothered about that in a sense; what I would like is to see the offer being worked out comprehensively and the funding for the offer, which is the common-sense way of dealing with it.

I welcome the consultation, which is absolutely right. The consultation mentions providers, but little has been said about staff. The professional organisations, such as the trade unions, will need to be included in the consultation. I hope we will be able to do that, because it is the people on the ground who always have so much to offer and who know how it is. I hope the Minister will talk to the TUC and the CBI. They can help and have much to offer, and the Government need their experience in this consultation. They know, through their wide experience in all industries and sectors, how to get long-term sustainability. They could help with this sector, as well as with fair wages, with how to attract staff and with how to build sustainabilities. We should engage the TUC and the CBI in the discussions. I am confident they will want to help.

The Government should also engage the CBI and employers, probably even more than the TUC, as they are providers, which we tend to forget. A big change is taking place with employers and employees as to what parenting is about and how child development can fit in with being an employee and a parent. We are missing that, which maybe goes back to some of the contributions this afternoon asking whether it was all going to be about massive, monolithic state provision. I do not think it can be, and employers have a very important role to play and something to say. More and more employees and employers want to work this out together, and employers recognise the importance of highly skilled, highly trained and highly intelligent staff who say, “Actually, I want to spend some time looking after my children”. When I was young, I would have been told to go and jump in a lake if I had said that, but that is not so any more: employers are now much more receptive to this and much more prepared to work with employees on how to develop children. The Government should talk to the CBI and employers about this issue.

The Government have made this offer. It is the right offer and they need to fulfil it through this comprehensive debate that we are going to have. I welcome that and will be looking for the outcomes that will take everybody forward, particularly nursery nurses, who often get forgotten or not talked about properly, work for appalling wages and need some help. I am not saying the help will come overnight or that overnight they will go from £8 to £16 an hour, but we should have a long-term sustainable plan for raising the kind of salaries we can pay these people so that at least we can hold our heads high in some kind of respectable way, given that we have taken their contribution to our economy. I will be looking for outcomes that take staff forward, for sustainability and of course, most of all, for adequate funding.

Early Years Intervention

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Massey for introducing this extremely important debate. I have the good fortune to be a member of the Select Committee on Affordable Childcare, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, from whom we shall hear shortly. That experience has caused me to think about the subject of today’s debate.

I have been surprised at the complexity of the issues surrounding the case for government intervention in early childhood education. Within that complexity are the varying approaches of hundreds of academics, think tanks and other organisations. It is an extremely complex issue. However, through all that complexity, what I have learnt is quite simple. In order to help break the cycle of deprivation and to promote greater social mobility, intervention in the home/learning environment at the earliest possible opportunity is absolutely essential. That includes the development of early speech, language and vocabulary, and recognition by professionals and parents that working with the young to stimulate early learning is both socially advantageous and deeply rewarding for parents, professionals and children. That is the number one thing that needs to be considered and promoted.

I have also learnt that, in nursery and child-minding settings, getting the highest quality staff possible on the front line working with children from disadvantaged backgrounds is essential. That means accepting fully the recommendations of the Nutbrown review and investing in a better trained and qualified workforce, many of whom will need to work with disadvantaged children. The Government should target and champion the expansion of high-quality provision in the most deprived areas.

I spoke this week to the head teacher at Abingdon primary school in the centre of Middlesbrough, a town which has provided excellent nursery education, who is experiencing great difficulty in coping with an expansion of parent-led demand in the inner city. She is unable to meet the demand because there are physical space requirements which she cannot afford. This means widening the gap between the children in the more affluent parts of the town and the inner core and increasing the cycle of underachievement and deprivation. That is the sort of thing that the Government could help with because targeted funding would have a major impact and effect on helping children in the inner city areas. If we do not do this we create differences in ambition and achievement at a very early age which will never be recovered.

Government recognition of the problem and intervention will probably never be enough and the problems of the poor can never be resolved without the support of the better off. Although we received evidence in our committee that the cost of childcare in the UK is 33% of net household income compared to an OECD average of 15%, something tells me that there is not a lot of room for increased parental contribution from the better off. To get a better contribution from wealthier parents, we need to look more carefully at the way in which we organise work and at how we can enhance the lives of the more affluent. This means that employers should think a lot more about how professionals can do the job they are paid to do and also manage childcare at the same time. Good work is being done on this. Some companies are working more flexibly, with greater agility and sensitivity, so that people can fulfil their roles at work and also their family responsibilities. We all know about job sharing and reduced hours flexibility, but a culture where the success of a business is recognised by its having successful employees at work and at home is very important.

I stopped being a trade union official 20 years ago. At that time I started to think about these kinds of issues but not in the fully-developed way in which I think about them now. Today, in unionised and other workplaces, childcare and early education should be at the top of the bargaining agenda. I thought about it a little 20 years ago but now I am fully full steam behind it. As with sickness, health and safety, pensions and all the other things that enhance the lifestyle of people at work, the bargaining agenda, with or without unions, should involve the quality of their lives. That is very important. For the almost 7 million lone working parents with dependent children, it is almost a necessity. A recent survey showed that half of these parents are unable to leave work on time and cannot eat with their children, so for them this is a necessity, and for the growing number of young fathers who are resentful about their work/life balance, it is also a necessity.

We have a lot of work to do with employers, businesses and Government to try to get people to think a lot more about how they can be successful in their careers and also take full responsibility—men and women—for childcare.