Citizenship and Civic Engagement (Select Committee Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, as one of the several Members of this House who recommended the establishment of a committee on citizenship, I would like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and all members of the committee for producing an excellent report that deserves to spark off further discussion. I hope they will all, with us, continue to make the argument that citizenship as a concept is fundamental to a healthy democracy.

We are talking about citizenship, civic engagement and self-government. The difference between a democracy and other forms of government is that every adult member of the country is entitled to take part in the self-government of that country and to support a vibrant civil society. This is part of the implicit contract that holds a national community together: the state provides protection, support and education for its citizens in return for their loyalty and contributions to society and the state. That implicit contract has weakened. It is partly that the concepts of citizenship and the welfare state grew up at a time when the state wanted its citizens to provide national service in the military sense before the First World War and, of course, during and after the Second World War. Now that that is no longer the case, many people in what is called the elite or the establishment are no longer sure that we need the poor or the dispossessed quite as much as we did when we fought the two world wars. Efforts to shrink the state and the services it provides have left many outside alienated and embittered, with results that we saw in the anti-politics that supported UKIP and Vote Leave.

Government has been retreating from the provision of social welfare, which began in the years before the First World War. The libertarian view, current within the present Government, that the state should no longer provide services from general taxation and should retreat from fiscal redistribution from rich to poor and from wealthy regions to deprived ones weakens the whole concept of citizenship. Citizens’ responsibilities and rights are much less clear than they were 50 to 70 years ago.

We face a very divided country, and social segregation is worse than in many comparable countries. The report talks about social mobility cold spots, and I found the reports of the visits to Clacton and Sheffield interesting in that regard. The problem of the “left behind”—the white working class that those of us who live in former industrial cities are painfully aware of—is not just one of social integration of recent immigrants; it is a matter of social inclusion of people who feel that they are entitled to be regarded as having rights as citizens of our country but feel that they no longer receive them.

The report talks in its first paragraph of an environment,

“in which everyone feels a sense of belonging to the country of which they are a citizen, with a stake in it and a responsibility towards it”.

It then goes on to note that:

“Active citizenship is too often defined purely in terms of volunteering ... and too rarely in terms of ... practising democracy”—


that is, that democratic rights and democratic participation are a very important part of the concept. That too is weak and is a real problem that we face in this country. Communication between citizens and government and between government and citizens is poor. As the report says at paragraph 7,

“top-down … interventions are, on their own, unable to build a flourishing democracy”.

Therefore, we face widespread popular disillusion, with a sense that government is distant and remote. Party membership has declined, most of all in the Conservative Party, which I remember as being well over 1 million when I first went into politics. England now has the most centralised system of government of any large democratic country.

However, it is the shrinking of local government that should concern us most. In most other large industrial democracies, the smallest unit of government is a community of 5,000 to 10,000. In Bradford, where I live when I am not attending this place, the smallest ward has a population of between 10,000 and 15,000. The ward of the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, which I know well, has four or five distinct communities, which she has done her utmost to represent well but in which it is impossible for every voter to know their councillor and for every councillor to know their voters. That is not very local democracy. Add to that the slashing of funding for local authorities and the difficulties they have in raising taxes and, again, we face a further level of disillusionment.

In Saltaire, we are currently struggling to find a way of funding public toilets, which Bradford’s local authority has said it can no longer afford. As a tourist destination, we have busloads of people of a certain age arriving to look round the village and one can guess what their first question is as they get off the bus. We simply do not have the funds, although we are trying to create a town council. Incidentally, we do not have the funds because the local companies to which we could have gone have been taken over and are now part of multinational companies that do not have the same sense of local engagement. Therefore, part of the problem of citizenship and democracy is that the local is far too weak. As we know, all politics is local, and the revival of local democracy is essential to recreating the sense of belonging which is part of shared citizenship.

There is some excellent stuff on citizenship education. I well remember Bernard Crick and the Crick report of 20 years ago but successive Governments have failed to take it up. The Government’s response is disappointing. The evidence we have received for this debate from Young Citizens says that almost the entire support structure for citizenship education has been dismantled. The government response here is complacent. We have to go on insisting that citizenship education is a vital part of education for life. The report refers to the “civic journey”. One reason that I have become converted to the introduction of votes from the age of 16 is that that would form part of a civic journey in which, while you are still at school, you become a citizen voter, and with luck you then have the sense that you share responsibilities.

The National Citizen Service has shown us what is possible but it is really a pebble in the pond. We have to grasp the question of what new forms of national service we want to promote and whether there are ways of linking national service to, for example, writing down the loans that people have received for education. That would begin to mix our well-to-do people and our less well-to-do people, encouraging those from the south to go to work in public services in the north and vice versa, and so strengthen our national communities. After all, citizenship should promote a sense of a shared national community, and we need to think about how well we do that.

Lastly, I want to flag the section on the costs of citizenship, which raises wider questions. With another hat on, I have been much concerned at reports from the academic sector about the extent to which the costs of establishing residence—and even more so of establishing citizenship—deter academics and researchers from other countries from coming to Britain, let alone staying in Britain. I am puzzled that the Government’s response compares what they and other countries charge. Some time ago the Wellcome Trust gave me some evidence which suggested that the cost for a researcher and his family of establishing and maintaining residence in Britain over 10 years is nearly 10 times the cost of doing so in France. This is another question to which we need to return and on which we need to pursue the Government, because there seems to be no strong reason why the Home Office should profit from charges on those who contribute to this country and come to work and pay taxes here.

Having said that, and having been more critical of the Government’s response than of this excellent report, I end by saying that I very much hope that the many worthwhile recommendations in the report will be taken further and pursued by all Members of this House.