Employment

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for putting this debate before the House and I share his pleasure at the good news within the employment figures. However, my noble friend Lord Haskel—who, as usual, gives us the benefit of his experience of working in industry and being an employer in the past—is right to point to the dangers of low productivity and low wages. My noble friend Lady Donaghy also made some very forceful points. The Minister might have found her attack slightly critical but if he looks at the figures she produced, I think he will see that they bear further examination.

I say in passing to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that yes, the previous Labour Government have to accept responsibility for not regulating the banks and the finance industry much better than they did. However, I would be more respectful of that argument if every other political party, not just in Britain but throughout the western world, had argued for greater accountability of the banks and finance industry. If you strip out the effect of the banking finance collapse you will find that this country's economy has not been in a bad position for a very long time. We need to acknowledge that and get some of the rubbish out of this debate.

I want to focus my comments today on the difficulty that all parties share in addressing the problem of those, particularly young people, but not just young people, who have difficulty in finding a job or maintaining a regular work pattern. My comments follow the direction set not just by my noble friend Lord Haskel but also by the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria and Lord Giddens, because the science and technology aspect is vital. Changes in science and technology have been a factor in driving the economy forward since the Industrial Revolution but such change is an even bigger factor now.

I do not usually bore the House with my own experiences in life but I should say that my own experiences are one of the reasons why I have always looked sceptically at the unemployment and training issues. I left school at the age of 15 in 1954 and with an appallingly low educational achievement. The first thing that the school’s job officer, as they were then, said to me was, “You look like a nice young man. Why don’t you work in an office?”. So I went to work in the solicitor’s office that he sent me to. The first thing I did was to make the tea and the second was to run messages. That went on for a year.

The great advantage of the 1950s, at that stage, was that there were still plenty of jobs, so after a while I got fed up with my first job and left. You could earn much more on building sites and in factories, and that is what I did. I am not sure that some of those building sites would be open these days after a visit from a health and safety officer. I was quite relieved to discover that one building I worked on in Essex was still standing some years later, although I have to confess that it has been knocked down since. I just hope that that had nothing to do with the young man who was mixing the cement. The reality was that there were plenty of jobs and you could switch around. However, some of the people I knew at that stage did suffer quite long-term unemployment. They were not getting into the job market. Often, it was because of a lack of educational skills.

Just over 100 years ago, in the middle and late 19th century, people became aware of the fact that the abilities to read, to write and to do basic arithmetic were not only good for them but, above all, good for the economy. Those skills enabled them to use the emerging new technologies, and to develop them very effectively. In no way do I want to undermine any attempt to ensure that people leave school with good educational abilities in reading, writing and arithmetic. However, it is a digital economy now, so we need to make sure that everyone who is struggling to get and maintain a job has those skills.

My main question for the Minister is: can we look rather more creatively at how we involve people—not just young people, but particularly young people—in digital training? I do not think that any young person who has had a history of uncertain employment—let us use that phrase rather than “unemployment”—should be allowed to go through the employment agencies without addressing the questions, “What skills do you have and what skills can we give you?”. The same applies to many of the other government departments and the organisations that work with government on this. The same questions should be asked. Do they have the basic skills? “Basic skills” does not mean just being able to use a computer. It does not mean just being able to search the internet. It means an ability to operate in a much more complex area, including the increasingly important one of coding.

I can give a simple recent example. Some youngsters I know who had literally just left school and did not have jobs painted T-shirts and shoes which they had bought and on which they then applied special designs. They sold them at school fetes and charities for anything up to £100. It was pretty impressive. They were certainly able to use computers and they knew how to use the internet but they did not have the digital skills to design a website where they could sell these items. We need to remember that many of the new industries can be run from home; it is much easier to do it now, but not easy unless you have those digital skills. With some basic training, could not those young people have done it? They had computers at home, so they had the technology sitting there, but they could not design websites and therefore promote sales in that way. That is one of the ways forward. I had a conversation the other day with the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, in which she drew my attention to an organisation called Go ON UK—which I know has been in contact with the Government. It is saying that that is precisely what we need to do. When young people—or older people, because we should not describe this issue only by age—go to a jobcentre or other government agency and their technical skills, such as coding, are assessed, training should be offered immediately to those who do not have the necessary skills.

I would go so far as to say, given the Minister’s involvement in the benefits area, that there ought to be a way that we can offer financial help or recompense—I would almost dare to call it a bribe—for such training. A lot of this is about a lack of confidence, which is particularly true of older people. If you do not have the confidence to use the internet well or to use IT to create, run or work for an existing business, the right training can give you the confidence. As I said, financial support might be needed to encourage that. We need to look much more creatively at this because, for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, gave, we are looking at an economy which is much more driven by science and technology than ever before. Perhaps I may expand on my example of the late 19th century, when people began to recognise that reading, writing and arithmetic was good, and speculate that if we fast forward a hundred years from now, people will look back and say that we were only just becoming aware in the early 21st century of the importance of digital skills.

There is an opportunity here for Governments and for political parties of all persuasions to look at the way in which new technologies are used to enable people to earn an income wherever they are in life. I want my own party to look into this and it is very encouraging that it is doing so. We have got very much better at this with people with severe disabilities. There is now much greater help in this area. No person should get through an employment agency or some of the other agencies without us gaining some idea of the digital skills which that person has, what more could be offered to them and how they could be encouraged to take up those skills.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Freud]

Not by that much—not by a factor of 30, or whatever it is.

The noble Baroness, Lady Turner, spoke of her concerns about childcare. We have also been concerned about childcare. Clearly, not only will she have seen the announcement yesterday about the money for taxpayers but she will have also spotted that within universal credit the rate will now be 85%. I know that she and a lot of other noble Lords will welcome that.

My noble friend Lord Soley mentioned skills. I am sorry, he is not my noble friend: I quite like the noble Lord, Lord Soley, but cannot call him a noble friend. On skills, our priority must be to get English and maths training first. One of the things we are doing with universal credit is ratcheting up the requirement for getting people to the basic level of digital involvement. We are doing a lot of work currently to work out how to help people to get to that basic level. The noble Lord is looking at a slightly higher level—into coding. That would be something separate.

[Lord Soley]

I understand what the Minister is saying. However, many people who are not good at reading, writing and arithmetic actually have quite good keyboard skills, but that does not get picked up. You can see that with kids. My noble friend on the Front Bench leading for the Opposition referred to ex-prisoners. If you look at their digital skills they are actually very good but they are not targeted in a way that enables them to do jobs.

[Lord Freud]

That is a very good point. I looked a couple of years ago at a scheme that went very specifically for youngsters who had failed in the conventional exams-based syllabus. They were given a chance by various companies to work on computers. Actually, some of them did very well and it was a new recruitment line because they were just tuned that way. There is something very real there that one could probably expand.

My noble friend Lord Shipley—he is indeed my noble friend—raised procurement. That is a matter for the Cabinet Office. I will not predict anything for the next year.

On zero hours, people are more likely to be satisfied than dissatisfied with their hours, mainly because the flexibility suits their current circumstances. While there has been an increase in the estimate, that does not mean there has been a recent increase over that period in the number—as the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, would accept. The implication is that, even using the very largest estimate, we are talking about only three in every 100 workers. We are looking currently at making sure that the zero-hours system is appropriate and not abused. That is in hand at BIS.

We accept the point on the enforcement of the minimum wage. Employers who fail to pay can now be publicly named and shamed. That is on top of financial penalties, and civil and criminal proceedings for the most serious offenders. The minimum wage will rise by 3% from October this year to £6.50. That will produce a pay increase for more than 1 million people—the largest cash increase in the minimum wage since 2008.

It is clear, as my noble friend Lord Shipley said, that the Government inherited a very damaged economy, with high levels of unemployment and inactivity. We are now getting back on our feet. The better news on the economy is feeding through to an improving picture in the labour market. As a result, the number of people in work has now exceeded 30 million. We have record numbers of men and women in work and the highest female employment rate on record. As I said earlier, excluding students, we are now at an all-time peak in the employment rate and inactivity is the lowest on record. Given the context of what we have been handling in terms of the recession, that is an extraordinary achievement.

Despite the difficult global economy, over 1.3 million people more now have a job than in 2010—600,000 more than at the peak before the last recession. There are 1.7 million more people working in the private sector. Despite contrary perceptions, the rise in employment—both over the year and since the election—has been dominated by full-time permanent jobs. Things are still looking up. According to the OBR, the economy is expected to grow by 2.7% this year and the number of people in work is expected to increase by 3.3% by 2018. That does not take us quite to the figures I was working with when I wrote my report in 2007, but it does not leave them that far short.

25th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

The opening speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, was an inspiring one. I hope it is widely disseminated. The first thing I would like to do is to echo her call on the Government to find a way of recognising the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. This is, after all, the country that invented the industrial revolution, the second one that changed mankind out of all shape following the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s step is another giant step on the road for this country and we ought to recognise it as much as other countries do, where you often see public memorials to him even before he is dead, which is quite an achievement. I congratulate him again on that.

My second point is that this moves very fast. I started my blog as a Member of Parliament in the early part of this century. There were just three of us who did it. I then moved it here to the House of Lords under “Lords of the Blog” and it is still going, but I slipped off the edge a bit and I need to reinvent myself. One of the beauties of the world wide web and the internet is that you can actually reinvent yourself. As someone said earlier, you actually can stimulate your own mind in doing so, although I might need the assistance of the noble Lord’s 94 year-old friend to give me a leg up on the situation. I might have to give him a call.

We have talked a lot today about how the web and the internet will change the way everyone works. We do not talk enough about how it will change this place and the way we do politics. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, touched on that point. We really have not thought that through. I give a simple example: the argument about security and privacy, which came to the fore with the revelations about the interception of messages. The Bill that we passed five or six years ago was out of date technologically before it received Royal Assent. Many of the Acts of Parliament that we enact now are also technologically out of date. We have to find a way for Parliament to modify laws as we move on. We have tended over the years to have a system where we simply added amendments or changes or a new Act every five, 10 or 15 years. The speed of change is so great, however, that on anything involving technology, we get left behind.

My last message is to the political parties. I am no longer involved in drawing up manifestos, thank heavens, but all the parties need to have a very clear statement about science and technology in their manifestos for the next election, particularly on how they are going to approach the privacy and security of the world wide web and the internet. It is profoundly important. There are very exciting possibilities here. We really can change the way we do politics and involve people in the political process much more effectively than we have done in the past. It is not easy to work out how to do this, but we need to respond to how people are thinking about things and how we can create politics out of ideas and movements rather than just carry on with political parties in the older form.

Employment

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, that is, of course, a reference to the Bank of England’s target of 7%. Unemployment has been falling pretty dramatically: it fell 0.3 percentage points to 7.4% in the latest three-month period. It is not the job of a government Minister to predict when unemployment will hit any particular rate; all I can say is that these trends are immensely encouraging. We should all look for them to continue to improve and I have no doubt that they will.

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

Bearing in mind his first Answer, can the Minister tell us what discussions there are in government about the relative economic merits of raising the minimum wage?

[Lord Freud]

There are two distinct factors. The higher the minimum wage, the more people will not go into the market. Estimates show that if we were to go with the recommended living wage, we would lose 300,000 jobs, particularly among youngsters. On the other side of the argument, there are benefits in terms of pay, particularly for the Government, because—as my noble friend mentioned—the tax credit system boosts the pay of low-paid people. That is the balance of the debate.

Atheists and Humanists: Contribution to Society

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

In his very welcome and detailed introduction to this debate, my noble friend Lord Harrison gave many explanations of what humanists have achieved over the years and I will not add to those details. However, I want to support and expand on the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, about religions which claim to be religions of peace ending up fighting among themselves and killing large numbers of people. That problem has to be addressed, but I also want to consider why it happens. One of the reasons is that religion is similar to political ideology. If you lay down a set of assumptions, statements and beliefs that have to be accepted in order to become a member, you inevitably invite conflict and division. I am not a member of any humanist society, but I speak as an atheist and a natural humanist. The basic, underlying assumption of humanism, which is its strength and the reason for its great contribution, is that human problems are best solved by reason. If humanism made the mistake of trying to list the many things that would make you a humanist, it would risk doing exactly what happens with religion and some political ideologies. It would create structures where division and conflict become almost inevitable.

In debates like this it is useful to bear in mind that there is a difference between God and religion. You can believe in God without being a member of a religion. God is an idea: religion is a government structure and a social control structure. Neither of those is bad. I would absolutely agree with the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, about where religion comes from. To human beings struggling to understand a world with terrifying natural forces like thunder, lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, the idea of God or gods was a very useful way of achieving social control. You needed social control because, in order to survive, you needed to co-operate. Co-operation needs social control, so you build on it. If you then make the mistake of making all these assumptions things that you have to accept, nobody should be surprised if divisions rapidly occur.

One advantage of humanists is that not only do they not fight and kill each other in large numbers, they do not have problems about the roles of women and men, sexual identity, disability or any other similar thing. Trying to solve human problems by reason is the strength of humanism. I would disagree with my noble friend Lord Morgan that we have not had religious conflict. It may not be as bad as other countries but for a short time during the Civil War women had to cover their hair fully and were stopped in the streets by soldiers if they did not do so. The great advance brought by the Civil War to this country and the rest of the world was that it threw out the idea that the King was the representative of God on Earth. You no longer had the idea that you could not challenge your leader. In Iran at the moment, the Ayatollahs play that exact role. It will fail for similar reasons: ultimately, there will be a dispute about the correct interpretation. We get around that by having elections to throw out the person who thinks they have the right interpretation. If you are using a religious or God-based structure, you cannot do that. You have to rely on other things. It is amazing how we have, over the years, adjusted ourselves to this argument. I am a great fan of the sophisticated, politically astute sovereign, Queen Elizabeth I, who, struggling to prevent more and worse religious wars, came up with the wonderful phrase:

“I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls”.

She was trying to allow people to believe within a political structure which she had to manage but within which she opened up the possibility of tolerance. Such things are terribly important.

The problem for those who have an idea of God is not so much a scientific one. You can always move the boundaries back: the Earth was the centre of the universe at one time until that was disproved; the Earth was considered to be only a few thousand years old until that was disproved; and when we go back beyond the Big Bang, the boundaries will be moved again if you are looking for a scientific argument. The problem for people who believe in God is actually a moral one. The moral issue is that you have to accept that God created life in a form that has to survive off other forms of life. The malaria mosquito that stings the child is not doing it in order that the child can have a better life in future or can somehow rise above it; it is doing it because it has to survive and reproduce.

That was Darwin’s big contribution to us all; he showed that it was actually evolution. A question that has always fascinated me, and this is why I would have loved to have had an interview with Charles Darwin, is: why, when he realised the importance of evolution, did he suddenly go from being a religious person to being a non-religious person, or certainly a person who did not pursue religion, and go quiet about the whole issue? It was probably because he recognised that the survival of the fittest meant that life had been created—if that is what you believe—in a form in which it had to live off other forms of life.

That is the fundamental problem for anyone who believes in God, with or without a religion: it means that you no longer have a way of avoiding the problem that maybe yours is a cruel or, at best, a careless God, or something of that nature. A far better explanation is that in fact there is no God. The great strength of humanism and atheism, to my mind, is that they recognise that we do not need to worry about things like that so long as we recognise that human problems can be solved by reason. Built into that approach is the possibility of tolerance. I put this also to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries: tolerance is what takes you forward.

I do not share the rather dismal view of young people today; in many ways they are far better than my generation of the 1940s and 1950s. Obviously there are problems in some areas, but there are many good examples, too.

Leveson Inquiry

Lord Soley Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

Freedom of the press has never been, and should never be, allowed to become the power of rich, powerful organisations to trash the lives of individuals and, as my noble friend Lord Morris has said, minority groups. In fact, in its origins, the press did exactly the opposite. I will make a few points about the report itself and then, if I have time, I will talk a little on the relationships between politicians and the press, an issue on which we need to spend much more time.

First, let us put to bed another issue. The press deviously and dishonestly, during the course of the inquiry and immediately after the report, tried to lead people to believe that Leveson was introducing a statutory system. As has been said, it is not. Leveson calls for an organisation that would verify the strength, independence and fairness of the body set up by the press itself. That is what we are all talking about here. In this context, I remind noble Lords of the importance of the code. In my long years of dealing with the relationship with the press, the code has been crucial. It was drawn up by and, in my view, for the editors. Much of it, if you read it in a simple way, seemed good until you looked at the small print; we all look at the small print. Here, you have quite a good description of the “public interest”, and then there is an exception:

“There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself”.

That is the get-out clause. The other one, of course, is:

“The PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the public domain, or will become so”.

So all you had to do was to get one of your friends or colleagues to put something on the internet, zap it around a bit, and the press would start reporting the fact that it was on the internet and, finally, report the thing itself. Frankly, that is why you need something to oversee a body: to say, “That is not fair. It is not strong”. That is the case for the body that Leveson is proposing.

Also in that context, Leveson was not asked to look at the internet. Nor is it important, because the difference is in the nature of a large, corporate organisation trashing someone and individuals putting comments on the internet. There is a problem emerging about internet coverage of people’s private lives, but it would not get in the way of what we are discussing today.

In respect of those who do not sign up for the new system, I would suggest not only that court proceedings would be more heavily against those newspapers, but we should also look at the option of tax breaks of various types, precisely because the press is a declining industry. While I agree with other comments that have been made about this, it will not die out: it will change. Giving them tax breaks would not be a bad idea in recognising that they have signed up to a quality code.

I do not want the body concerned to be Ofcom; I think that would be the least good option. Neither do I think there should be a royal charter. I do not have time to go into it in detail, but my personal preference is still very much for an independent body. There is an issue about how we set that up which requires quite a bit of thought and discussion, but it is not beyond our ability to do it. As my noble friend Lord Lipsey said, there are already models available showing how to set up independent bodies, both in the public and private sectors and in the joint public-private sector. We have to examine how we do that and then set it up, but it is not impossible to do it.

I turn to the history of the relationship between politicians and the press because when I introduced my Bill on freedom and responsibility of the press in 1991, I conducted hearings in the same way as Leveson. The response was interesting: I was attacked from all sides. I have no problem with that: I am a politician and am not exactly unused to it. The interesting thing to me, however, was the number of people who said to me that I was putting myself at risk. My own partner actually said to me at the time, “I am more worried about you taking the press on than I was when you were doing Northern Ireland from the Front Bench”. I thought, “By God, I didn’t think it was that bad”. That, however, was the view.

When I wrote the book on this issue together with Professor O’Malley, it was described as an attempt to gag the press. There was a problem in my Bill—I acknowledge that—and it was that I had not cracked the issue of how to set up the independent body. However, Peter Preston said in a recent article that Leveson had picked up my Bill and applied it. I do not think that is quite right, but that was Preston’s view. My own view is that, if the press had taken on board what we were talking about 20 years ago, we would not be where we are now. I say this to the previous chairs of the PPC and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt: I know you have tried individually, but I have been saying for many years—and I was not alone in saying it—that you presided over a weak and ineffectual body that had major failings within it. The case for proceeding with it was very poor indeed; there was actually a case for simply resigning from it and saying, “It is not working”. It would have helped if we had had that.

I had an alarm, which grew in the 1970s and 1980s, about the nature of the relationship between the press and politicians. The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, might want to think about this. When Tony Blair decided to go to see Murdoch, I approved of that, though the late Ian Mikardo MP said to a group of us together, “If you are going to sup with the devil, sup with a long spoon”. My view was that we had to do it because the press were increasingly seeing themselves as holding not just the Government to account, but politicians as well. It devalued Parliament, so parliamentarians stopped having their speeches and comments reported. One of the first things I did in the 1970s was to recognise that I was not going to get speeches in the press anymore; I had to form relationships with members of the media in order to get stories in. Tony Blair and other party leaders had to make an approach to those leaders of the press. My noble friend Lady Liddell is absolutely right: this was a massive failure of management within the media industry, and particularly in the press. We should bear in mind that the News of the World was, until relatively recently, a good newspaper that did good journalism. It went off the rails, and the newspaper was closed down, but Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch stayed in post. What sort of responsibility is that?

I ask the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, please to recognise his own responsibility in this. There were stories, and I used stories, in the press about the failure of media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch, who were refusing to take responsibility for the bullying, sexual harassment and racism that were going on at the Sun. His paper, the Daily Express, was one of those which refused to publish it. The only newspapers that used it were the Guardian, the Independent and the BBC. Then the story was killed. That was happening over and over again.

If the press had been good at holding the owners, editors and some journalists to account, not only would they not be in the mess that they are in today, at least we would not be able to say that it is grossly hypocritical for them to turn around and say, “Oh, it is the politicians or these other people in the public eye—footballers, actors and so on”. No, it is not: it is the nature of the way in which the press has been operating with unaccountable power for a long time. I believe that Leveson is right. Broadly, we should go down that road and, fairly soon, we should discuss in rather more detail the relationship between politicians and the press.

Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Yes, my Lords. The OECD report was another useful wake-up call for us in an area in which we have not been doing as well as we should. That is precisely why we have combined our child poverty and social mobility strategies. We need to make sure not just that there are fiscal transfers to address poverty but also that the life chances of children are improved.

[Lord Soley]

Will the commission be able to look at the loss of the child trust fund, or baby bond? It was a serious mistake by the Government to cut that, because it was one of the best ways of enabling children in very poor families to find a way out of poverty in the long term and of encouraging saving. Can we have a guarantee that the commission will be able to look at a replacement for that?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, the job of the commission will be to hold the Government to account for their strategy. It is the job of the Government to set the strategy and we will look at all the areas in which we need to improve performance.

Pensions: Deepwater Horizon

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, whether to pay a dividend is a decision for BP, which is due to make that decision on 27 July at the appropriate board meeting. Anyone who reads the press will know that the company is coming under enormous pressure in the US not to pay a dividend. Indeed, the political pressure may be greater than the financial pressure, because BP is financially soundly based at this juncture.

[Lord Soley]

Are the Government talking to BP about this, bearing in mind the very real pressures on the company in the United States that could put it under even more pressure? Is not BP in need of help and support from the British Government? Is it being given that?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I understand that the Government are in touch with both the US Administration and BP senior management on a regular basis. Clearly, BP is a private company and one would not want to make public any discussions in that area, whether they were or were not happening.