National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Lord Wei Excerpts

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

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I speak today with a tremendous sense of delight at the arrival of this Bill and its reception so far. I declare an interest as one of those who helped early on to establish the groundwork for what became the Challenge Network charity before the 2010 election, creating one of the original pilots of the National Citizen Service programme where I was involved from as early as 2008, and then—as part of the team—to write the policy into the 2010 Conservative manifesto, after which I subsequently advised on it from within the Cabinet Office under the coalition Government.

I remember being first approached by members of David Cameron’s team in opposition in my previous role as a founding partner of the Shaftesbury Partnership —I am currently re-joining it in a non-executive capacity and so declare an interest. We were invited to design a working prototype to accompany, refine and road test the original policy idea proposed by David Cameron—and before him many others from across the political spectrum over the years—as part of his leadership campaign. It was a memorable time, helping to put together the original design brief and to cultivate the charitable angels and private donations for the research study and subsequent pilot, and then pulling together the senior team to help design the business plan and run the pilot. The donors—I will not name them all today—must none the less be thanked. Without their generosity, we would not have been able to learn what we now know, insights that have been shared more broadly throughout the NCS programme and community. It was all in all a textbook example of social innovation at the time and everything seemed to go ahead relatively smoothly, such was the support and favour behind the idea.

I must remember here to also thank the staff and trustees of Absolute Returns for Kids, who at the time released me to work part-time on projects such as these through Shaftesbury. Much credit in particular needs to go to Patrick Shine, co-partner of the Shaftesbury Partnership, who went on to chair the Challenge Network charity in those early years, as well as to Craig Morley, who we recruited following a successful career in Proctor & Gamble and as a mentor with the Prince’s Trust to help lead the project. He became the charity’s first CEO. I also highlight the work of Jon Yates, who had a strong background in youth work and was a McKinsey consultant previously, as well as Doug Fraley, who came out of the world of Google and brought tremendous experience in HR.

While we played a role in getting pilots going in those early, riskier years, it was important from the beginning that the charity had its own independent footing and cross-party support. It has since grown to be, through the efforts of many others, a successful provider of the National Citizen Service, incubated by but now separate from the Shaftesbury Partnership.

Of course, a huge amount of work has been carried out since then both in government and at grass-roots level. Ministers present and former, as well as the team at the NCS Trust led so ably by Stephen Greene, Michael Lynas and his team, and the existing and past providers, should feel proud of having been part of something truly special and ground-breaking. We are now witness to a phenomenon that has cross-party support and produced tremendous impact and social outcomes, particularly in that much-needed area of creating social capital across wealth and social divides in an age of social isolation, and at a scale achieved without much or any compromise in quality but in a short space of time.

The policy united many behind it from a diversity of political and other backgrounds: leaders of charities, faith groups and businesses, politicians and members of the media—an amazing achievement given the level of debate and differences of opinion in other areas of our body politic these last few years. As I found at Teach First, this is a programme that found many fathers and mothers—and rightly so, and the more the merrier. There was perhaps no greater sense for me that this had arrived as a truly national programme than when, a few years ago on holiday in the Lake District, my family and I happened to bump into a Challenge NCS team on a mountain of all places, totally by accident. I remember at the time being struck by how you could almost go anywhere in the country and there would be people whose lives were being touched and affected by the scheme. In light of this, it is only appropriate that we now bring forward this policy on to a longer-term basis. As a result, I wholeheartedly welcome the Bill.

I will make a number of remarks relating to the Bill based on my experience of the scheme and will look to the future to ensure that it continues to make the impact that others highlighted. First, I will cover the reasons behind bringing it on to a statutory footing, then deal with areas on which to ensure a continued focus, and finally tackle a number of questions and concerns raised about the policy over the years.

First, on the appropriateness of bringing the policy on to a statutory basis, over the years I and others sought to work to bring about what used to be called social reform in the days of my great hero the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, but which we sometimes call social innovation today. In days past, and still sometimes today, this takes place through parliamentary procedure —think about Wilberforce and his efforts to end slavery, and more recent efforts to end trafficking and its ill-effects. At other times, reform and scalable social innovation took place outside Westminster and government through the creation of campaigns, movements, charities and social enterprises that ultimately became of sufficient impact and scale that government could not ignore them.

This latter approach, which arguably was instrumental in bringing about the successes Wilberforce and others in his era enjoyed, catalysed by the likes of Granville Sharp many decades before Wilberforce’s arrival on the scene, is the one I have felt the most affinity with. Social innovators should work to bring about change through piloting and developing outside government and then seek to see how these ideas, once tested, can be rapidly designed to scale and brought into contact with and affect government policy where appropriate. This contrasts to the default thinking that Governments should seek to take on the role of innovator from the inside out, which does not always work, especially in today’s highly media-driven environment.

What is powerful about the Bill and this policy is how the two have come together, with politicians recognising the historic benefits of national service and calling for some variant of it to be brought back, and social innovators and philanthropists taking the risk to develop, pilot, test and scale prototypes—with government support—not just to create a rite of passage but to forge new links between young people from different backgrounds, and then to create a pool of citizens ready to play their role in our democracy and in society. Having tested this policy over the past number of years, it is appropriate, given the benefits it brings to the country and to communities within it, and given the public spending involved, for it to be brought on to a long-term accountable footing—but with the caveat that the innovation and experimentation that led to its realisation from a policy idea to a workable national programme is not lost as NCS becomes, in effect, a new national institution. The seventh Earl himself voiced concerns when the pioneering work of charitable educationalists was nationalised, and it has taken many years and much effort to bring our education system to the point where new ideas and approaches are accepted once again, through the academy and free school movements.

I certainly hope and expect that the Bill will enable new entrants and smaller providers with fresh ideas to continue to bring their innovations and approaches into the programme. This brings me to the point I want to make about the Bill’s emphasis. It is very important that in bringing the NCS on to a statutory footing we do not create a huge bureaucracy, and I am glad that the approach that is being taken is apparently one that seeks to strike a balance between accountability and being sufficiently hands-off to allow the trust to get on with the job. It is important, for example, that the National Audit Office does not look just at past success, which ultimately may favour larger providers, including the Challenge Network, but has a remit to explore the degree to which smaller and newer providers are allowed to come in and innovate, experiment and tailor to different audiences and niches while maintaining the focus on building social capital across different social groups. Will my noble friend the Minister reassure us that this will be considered in the Bill and that there may even be exemptions for new and smaller organisations in the commissioning process to counteract the risk aversion that can sometimes reign, effectively drawing up the ladder behind the early providers who already know how to meet commissioners’ demands in terms of track record and measurement? What has begun through a process of partnership and innovation ought to continue, even as we seek to bring the scheme to a wider, national, institutional level.

It is really important that, over time, effort is put into working with the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland and Welsh Assemblies to bring this policy to all young people across the United Kingdom. While I respect and understand the competence of each part of the UK to oversee its work in this area, one of the greatest benefits of having young people from around the country engaged in the NCS is the creation of a strong sense of service to both the local community and the wider world. At a time when politics is perhaps becoming uglier and more fractious, more and more of our young people want to be part of something bigger, and it would be a shame to lose the sense of camaraderie that I know was enjoyed by Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English young people during the era of national service in the early 20th century, and of mutual respect. No matter what the future may bring for the destinies of our respective nations, I would be glad to hear my noble friend the Minister’s thoughts on this.

In my remaining time, I want to turn to some of the questions that have been asked about this policy over the years, and I am keen to see how the Government will address them. The first concerns the relationship between the NCS and other youth charities and providers. I have noted that many different charities and groups have been involved in the provision of the programme—some 200 at the last count. It has been good to see how close links have been established to enable those such as the Scouts and other groups to benefit from NCS alumni becoming mentors and supporters. I would like to know how the Bill could help to support this partnership between NCS and large and small youth charities and groups to bolster their efforts to bring improvements to their communities and people, while avoiding, for example, a situation that has at times characterised the relationship between the BBC as a national body and other television channels and media organisations, with the one at times competing against the others rather than being a source of impact and unique programming. How will the Bill and the principles enshrined in it and the NCS charter or equivalent ensure that the work focuses on that which no other private body alone could do?

The next question that is often raised is one of cost. I am glad that funding has been allocated until 2019-20, and that any young person who wants to be involved in the NCS programme will be granted a place. It is because the public policy requires a significant amount of funding that we are now engaged in bringing it into statutory accountability. Equally, from my understanding of the programme’s design, there is a necessary cost to creating a deep change and bond in the lives of those young people from affluent and low-income backgrounds participating through the residential activities that first take them away from their day-to-day lives at a key moment of transition in their lives and then help gradually reinsert them back into the communities of which they are part. Every study that I have read in the design phase indicated that it was key to bringing about the social benefits that have been reported from the programme in the years so far during which it has been in existence.

We will need to have courage to continue to fund this necessary cost so that we can see the benefits longer- term in society. This will ultimately have an impact on government spending in the form of greater social cohesion, greater community participation, lower crime rates and better educational and vocational outcomes. I recall the stories of those who served together historically, in the years of national service, side by side in training and in the field. This cannot be replicated simply by funding a few hours a week, important though that is, but can be through a sustained initial training period, one which NCS exemplifies. Will the Minister tell us how the Bill will safeguard beyond 2020 the spending on this policy and prevent future short-sighted Governments from seeing this programme, with its many long-term benefits to the country, as a quick way to balance the budget in future?

We have come a long way in the past decade on this journey to creating a National Citizen Service. There remains a tremendous amount to do in the decades to come, not least in designing policies around other key transitions in our lives, not just in our youth. In the light of this, I welcome this Bill as another milestone in ensuring that this innovation, built on the experiences of the previous century, will enable many young people to become, I hope, citizens and even the social reformers and innovators of the century to come.