Queen’s Speech

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness the Minister for setting out the Government’s plans, and I should like to echo her good wishes to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth on the occasion of his valedictory address to your Lordships’ House. I have often enjoyed his enlightened contributions, not least on the economy. He will be missed.

After all the hype over the weekend, what we heard yesterday was, to put it mildly, an anti-climax. Indeed, it is a legislative programme more notable for what is not included than what is. There is nothing on adult social care reform. The Prime Minister said in 2019 that he had a ready-made plan. So where is it? The Government absolutely must deliver plans for social care reform in this Parliament. There is also nothing on protecting the rights of 16 and 17 year-old children in care, a matter on which the Government are facing legal action.

Ministers speak of a so-called “levelling up” agenda. Implicit in that is a trashing of their own record, because the undulating landscape that is life in England today has been carved out largely by 11 years of Tory and coalition misrule. “Levelling up” is a suitably vague term but, if it is necessary, then who is to blame? It is Tory Governments, responsible for politically driven austerity policies—policies which hit the disadvantaged hardest, blamed the poor for their poverty and punished people for their disabilities. Now, apparently oblivious to the inherent hypocrisy, the Government want to level up. Really? I have to say that I doubt it. This programme involves the Tories cleaning up their own mess—I pray in aid the health and care Bill, on which my noble friend Lady Thornton will have much to say later. Noble Lords may have noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has ducked today’s debate and will speak in Monday’s. I wonder why that might be?

We welcome the skills and post-16 education Bill and its lifetime skills guarantee because investment in lifelong learning is needed more than ever, given the impact and aftermath of the Covid pandemic. I also welcome the fact that the Bill will begin its journey in your Lordships’ House. But, since 2010, further education and skills have borne the brunt of government funding cuts; access to learning has been restricted and maintenance support for younger learners abolished, resulting in fewer studying in further education and fewer workers able to retrain and upskill. The number of apprentices has also plummeted, with new starts down by over a third compared to five years ago.

Yet, nearly a million “priority” jobs will be excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee, exposing the Government’s empty rhetoric on creating opportunities, as the Loyal Address fails to deliver for young people hardest hit by the pandemic. The country is facing a skills shortage in jobs such as vets, architects and computer programmers, with the Government designating those jobs as a priority for work visas. I hope that the Minister will explain why these sectors are excluded from the lifetime skills guarantee offer to help adults gain a new level 3 qualification. Will the Government’s good intentions be backed by the resources necessary to make them effective? Developing the skills that the economy needs will work only if people can afford to live while studying through a mixture of loans, grants and social security support. Without that, the legislation simply will not be meaningful or far-reaching enough.

There is another education Bill, of course, but it is not one that addresses priorities in the education portfolio. There is a yawning gap where a Bill to rescue the early years sector should be. According to the Government’s own data, more than 2,000 early years providers have been lost since the start of this year alone; yet they offer no plans to address that. It is widely accepted that children’s first years are crucial in shaping so many aspects of their lives. But, to the Government, early years settings seem to be little more than a means of allowing parents to return to work, rather than essential building blocks in the development of a child’s learning and basic life skills. Of course enabling parents to return to the job market is important, but nurseries are first and foremost places of education, not simply childcare facilities.

The Loyal Address is shamefully silent on measures to tackle child poverty. No change, then, from a Government who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to provide free school meals during the holidays, while too many children were left without the resources to learn at home. At least the Conservatives have been consistent—they have treated children as an afterthought throughout this pandemic.

Health inequalities feed into education inequalities, and that includes universities. Uncertainty leads to anxiety, which leads to issues that impact on mental health. One aspect of that is the Secretary of State for Education’s dithering on school exams. He must avoid a repeat and should remove some of the stress now from this year’s year 10 cohort by announcing that they will have centre-assessed grades next year.

We will not be able to “build back better” if the generation who will be the foundation for the future are weakened by poverty and a mental health crisis. This generation have had their childhoods and life chances disrupted and damaged by the pandemic. So, it is a failure on the part of this Government to see so little on greater support for children in their plans. Perhaps that should be placed in the context of a Government led by a Prime Minister whose concern for children does not seem to stretch even to being certain how many he himself has. That underlines the necessity of the Minister for Children being returned to Cabinet status.

The learning gap between children on free school meals and their peers had not narrowed in the five years before the pandemic, and all the evidence suggests that the impact of lockdown is delaying young children’s language and social development. Yet Ministers have announced just a single-year catch-up plan, amounting to a paltry 43 pence a day per child over the next school year, with no specific support for well-being or social development. Despite warnings from experts that the pandemic is leading to an increase in mental health conditions, the Loyal Address went no further than to say that:

“Measures will be brought forward to … improve mental health”.


There was no mention of support for children’s mental health or well-being. In responding to this debate, can the Minister set out what advice he would give to children, students and adults suffering with mental health issues now and who need support now, not at some indeterminate point in the future?

Rather than addressing those urgent matters, the other education Bill announced today deals with a subject that grips the whole country: freedom of speech in universities. To prioritise such legislation is a blatant attempt to continue the culture war that the Government are determined to wage. Their focus on manufacturing an argument over free speech on campus is an attempt to distract from their failure to support students and universities through this pandemic. Students are seriously worried about getting the skills and experience that they need for the workplace. Despite Labour’s calls, Ministers did little to support the graduates of 2020 who entered a shattered jobs market; they simply must do more to secure the futures of the class of 2021.

A glaring omission from the Loyal Address is an employment Bill, first promised in 2019 to

“protect and enhance workers’ rights”.

That commitment has been repeated by Ministers on no fewer than 50 occasions, yet workers’ rights are mentioned only once in the background briefing to the Loyal Address. Worse, there has been a significant change in language from 2019, when the Government said they would “enhance workers’ rights”; now, there is merely a whimsical aim of “upholding workers’ rights”. What rights, I wonder? The Loyal Address of 2019 said that an employment Bill would provide

“better support for working families”

and

“enhance workers’ rights, supporting flexible working, extending unpaid carers’ entitlement to leave”.

Yet there are no such landmark reforms to zero- hour contracts or the gig economy. So much for levelling up; what we are seeing is a levelling down on employment rights. The Prime Minister recently described the iniquitous practice of hire and re-hire as unacceptable —but not, it seems, sufficiently unacceptable for his Government to do anything to prevent it. When he replies, will the Minister explain why the Government have now abandoned working families during a pandemic?

Covid has closed much of our economy, but the Conservatives, in effect, crashed it. Their ineptitude and capriciousness has left Britain with a record: the worst economic crisis of any major economy. Yet they plan a return to the same old policies that left us exposed to the virus, and organisations from the IMF to the OECD have warned the Government about the dangers of slamming the brakes on too soon; I hope that they will be heard. People are desperate for the security that a resilient economy brings: a good job, a reliable wage, a roof over their head and the confidence that comes with all those things. As we recover, Labour would take responsible action to secure jobs, support our high streets and strengthen our communities to deliver that stronger, fairer, regionally balanced economy that Britain so desperately needs.

Over the past decade the Government have wilfully underfunded local authorities, forcing them into a choice between charging people more or slashing services. Now they are allowing family incomes to be hit by rises in council tax which are not the fault of cash-strapped councils. Why have the Government learned nothing from the austerity years dating back to the coalition?

The legislative programme set out in the Loyal Address is not the bold and expansive agenda that might have been expected from a Government with such a majority. Even today’s Times—normally a cheerleader for them—describes it as lacking ambition. That is what has characterised this Government and, in the months ahead, we on these Benches we will use the opportunities presented by the Bills listed in the Loyal Address to set out how we believe they can be improved. There are opportunities that we will exploit in a legislative programme that could and should have been much better equipped to prepare the country for the serious challenges that lie ahead.