Queen’s Speech

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, in these debates. I shall to try to draw on her remarks as I make mine. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register of Members’ interests.

I welcome the proposals in the Queen’s Speech. It is refreshing to be devoting a day to these crucial areas of domestic policy. Of course, Brexit hangs over this debate. Be one a remainer or a Brexiteer—thinking back to the debates that we had in this very Chamber on Saturday—one lesson from the referendum is that millions of people in this country feel left behind and do not feel that they have participated in the economic growth of the past decades. Regardless of whether one thinks a sensible response to that is to vote for Brexit, there is a message for all of us in the importance of the domestic policy issues that we are focusing on today.

I want to begin briefly on education. The Minister referred to technical education and T-levels, one of the notorious weaknesses of our education system. I very much hope that T-levels are a success. There are, however, some significant doubts about how well they will do. They appear to depend on unrealistic expectations of employer participation and contribution. There are already stories around that if T-levels do not secure the level of support we hope, one reaction from Ministers will be to try to close down the alternatives such as BTECs. It would be marvellous if we had an assurance from the Front Bench that existing provision—which is popular and which young people go for—will not be an unexpected victim of any problems that may face T-levels.

It is also important that people have the opportunity to participate in university education—again, I welcome what the Minister said on that. Going to university is a widespread aspiration. There is a narrative around at the moment that too many people go, but at every stage of the growth of participation in higher education, from 5% to 50%, we have had this narrative. If too many people go, it is a social problem concentrated in some rather unusual parts of the country. It is an acute problem in Winchester and Guildford, but, fortunately, in Hull and Bolton they are successfully resisting the dangers of going to university. The Government have committed to spread access to university with some bold ambitions for increasing participation from disadvantaged groups. This raises an interesting challenge. Are these extra students to go at the expense of the middle-class students from advantaged areas who are already going? If so, what steps are Ministers taking to reduce this excess rate of applications from some of our most affluent areas and most prestigious schools? Or does it mean in reality that more people in total will be going to university in future? Will the Minister confirm that one estimate is that simply achieving the Government’s own objectives for more participation from disadvantaged backgrounds, together with demographic change, would mean 300,000 more students by 2030?

I want briefly to touch on welfare and employment. The Government have a fantastic record of increasing employment. There is of course a striking contrast between the generosity of benefits and welfare for pensioners, protected by their triple lock, and the freeze in the value of working-age benefits. The working-age population does not have an advocate as eloquent as the next speaker in this debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. Will the Government look at the way that benefits for working-age people work, in particular universal credit? When universal credit was designed, the preoccupation was with workless households, and it was designed to incentivise the first person in the household to go into work. The good news is that the number of workless households has fallen, but the problem is poverty and low incomes in families where someone is working. Here, universal credit has exactly the wrong effect: it penalises the second earner and people who increase their hours. A reform of the work allowance would help tackle that problem.

Finally, I very much welcome the pensions Bill. A particular proposal in it—the regime for collective DC pensions—is an excellent compromise between the generous, old-fashioned final salary schemes, where all the risk was borne by the employer and the pension scheme, and the pure defined contribution scheme, where individuals find themselves taking all the risk, with no sharing across fellow workers or other generations. I support this excellent initiative. The evidence from the design work that has been done on the Post Office CDC scheme—the most ambitious proposal—is that it is important for these schemes to be generationally fair. The danger is that the rights of existing pensioners are protected and the adjustment is all borne by younger workers. The regulatory regime set out in this legislation needs to tackle that problem.

Overall, I welcome the Government’s proposals in this Queen’s Speech. I have not had time to reflect on the social care proposals, apart perhaps from taking another lesson from the Brexit debate: just get on with it.