National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, when, halfway through the coalition Government, I found myself translated into being the only Cabinet Office spokesman and Minister in this House, I thought I had better find out a bit about some of the things I would be responsible for. Among other things, I asked if I could visit a National Citizen Service scheme in Bradford, not far from Saltaire, given my initial scepticism about the scheme.

On arrival, the young people running the scheme said, “It’s tremendous to have you here. You’re here for a long afternoon. We’d like you to teach these children how to give a public speech”. After a good two minutes’ panic, I got down to it. By the end of the long afternoon I had persuaded several of them, from their starting positions that they absolutely could not do it, that they could—and they did. I came away thinking that they had gained an extra skill and a bit of extra confidence. The way the course was managed was first class. This was a cross-section of teenagers from all the rough schools in Bradford—there were not very many from the posh schools around, by the way—and I became a strong supporter of the National Citizen Service. I think that all of us who have come across the scheme know that it does something that is very worth while.

Our questions are much more about how it fits into a wider context of what others have been doing and continue to do and how it relates to opportunities that follow—local voluntary organisations and the role of local government and the like. I think that several of us were a little worried when we read the briefing from The Challenge where it said that large-scale provision was the answer, because we want it to be rooted in local communities with local charities and therefore also with local government.

I was also struck by one briefing which said that the scheme sets out to deal with the challenges of social cohesion, social mobility and social engagement. That is a pretty large agenda and this is a pretty modest initiative as part of that. If we are to tackle those huge challenges, we have to implicate the concept of citizenship, which involves ideas of empowerment and political as well as social engagement and starts, as has been mentioned by several noble Lords, with citizenship education in primary and secondary schools. We will therefore want to take advantage of scrutinising this Bill to challenge the Government on these wider questions.

My own perspective comes from my involvement in politics in west and north Yorkshire, from visiting schools in and around Bradford and, above all, from working in the former council estates of Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and Wakefield, where government funding for local authorities had been cut, often by closer to 40% than to 30%. I have just checked: Bradford is cutting its youth services by 60%, which means closing a lot of the non-statutory youth services. Incidentally, youth services have been cut across the country; it is estimated that in London spending will be cut by 90%—Westminster Council is cutting its spending on youth services completely and setting up a new foundation to encourage voluntary initiatives

In the former council estates of west and north Yorkshire, there is passive alienation. You blame the council and the Government for not doing anything for you. There are lots of troubled families and very little outside engagement. I spent a long afternoon in the middle of August looking at a local, Liberal Democrat-led initiative to mount a summer school for children between primary school and secondary school because the council no longer provides any support for them in that crucial period. There was of course a massive vote for Brexit in those areas. It was a vote against London as much as against Brussels—a vote against political elites and the rich; a vote against all outsiders; in other words, a massive “sod off to the lot of you”.

So this is one initiative that deals with this massive challenge in our divided country. When I first read about it, I thought, “Private Eye would call this the David Cameron Memorial Big Society Trust”. That is a little unfair, but Private Eye always is. When it comes to justifications, we have to ask the Minister how, when the Government are cutting related funding, they can justify funding this; and how it relates to other government and voluntary initiatives such as the Scouts, Guides and City Year UK, and to what schools and local authorities and other local bodies do.

My own involvement in another area of this, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and others will know, is with partnerships between independent schools and state schools. If one is talking about social cohesion—introducing the socially excluded to the socially exclusive, if you like—that is a very important thing to do. I spent a day with a magnificent scheme in York, led by the Quaker-founded independent schools there, where a number of Saturday schools take place ending in a week camping together in the Lake District for children from different schools in the area. It is a really worthwhile scheme.

Depressingly, in other areas I have been told by independent school heads that their parents resist such schemes because they say, “We pay for our children to come here and why should we allow others whose parents don’t pay to come and share our facilities, let alone our teachers?”. On this point, having been persuaded not to move an amendment to the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Act, I have got much tougher on the charitable status and obligations of independent schools. That is something that I, the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and others will not give up on.

I mention in passing that if one wants to reintroduce grammar schools we might raise the question of how that affects social cohesion. I also mention in passing the question of pay, which plays quite a large part in this Bill and is sensitive for all trusts and charities—as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and others will know. My own strong view on this is that acting as a non-executive director of a trust is volunteering for the well to do and should not be remunerated. Perhaps we will come back to that in Committee.

On the wider context of citizenship and social engagement, I got out the Goldsmith report on citizenship of 2008, which deserves not to be forgotten. It talks about citizenship education—as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and others did—and longer-term periods of citizen service, allowing for certain diminutions of tuition and other fees for those who undertake that. The issue is out there. It is a question of how far we wish to take it up again.

The report also talks about citizenship education throughout school, an issue that successive Governments have funked over the years. That means political as well as social engagement. Again from my own perspective, the removal of local democracy affects most of our northern cities, in which there are somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 electors per ward, so that your local councillor is not really local and has no chance of being engaged with the local communities there. That raises large questions about whether we need to reinvent local democracy, urban parish councils and the like. I am also persuaded that a reduction in the voting age to a point where you would begin to vote while still at school is one way to engage people in the political process at an early stage. Clearly, in this deeply divided country we must re-engage people in constructive, democratic politics.

Social engagement is also very important here. I trust the Minister will be able to tell us something about the Government’s thinking on longer terms in the citizen service and whether they are reviewing this whole area. If not, some of us might wish to suggest that there should be a Lord’s committee to review it in the next Session. We very much wish to promote a cross-party approach to all this. If the Government are to fulfil their promise to bring the country together and govern in the interests of all, they have a very broad agenda to follow and a hard task. We on these Benches offer a welcome, but a cautionary one, to the Bill. It is only a small contribution to what this country needs to bring back the concept of citizenship, social engagement and social cohesion.