Social Mobility Strategy

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, on the last question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Martin, I will certainly take that excellent suggestion to the House authorities. If we are going to lead by example as far as the Civil Service is concerned, as my right honourable friend said, we should also do so in the Palace of Westminster. As the noble Lord said, we see excellent craftsmanship at work in many parts of this building. To enable young men and women to obtain skills here would be a good example.

I also agree with the noble Lord on his first question. I always thought that the fall-off in apprenticeships in the 1980s was a waste and that we have had to make a great effort to catch up. It was a loss of real skills. The old apprenticeship scheme was a very valuable part of the skills base in our society. We are only just beginning to put that back. I agree with the noble Lord that there must be both on-the-job training and the use of the full benefits of further education. Another part of the strategy is that the study of an apprenticeship should have, where it merits it, academic recognition to allow somebody to go on into higher education. This is something that we are going to press with the authorities.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

My Lords—

[Lord Ryder of Wensum]

My Lords—

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[Lord McNally]

I listened to the Statement at the other end. Local authorities across the country are making cuts and it is very easy for people to leap up and say, “How does this strategy match what is going on?”. This strategy is trying to deploy the fewer resources we have in a much more focused way. We are going through a period of economic difficulty and it will be easy to pick up on the impact of the various changes, but today we have laid out a strategy that focuses resources on the most needy and addresses some of the issues that have been identified as causing a lack of social mobility. What we cannot do is return public expenditure to the level at which it was being run by the previous Administration—who were, as the noble Baroness knows, planning to make cuts as well.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

Does my noble friend agree that this is a highly important issue and social mobility is something which nobody on any side of this House or in another place has solved for a great number of years? It behoves us to find practical solutions to the issues rather than simply throwing insults across the Chamber. Today I received a letter from a parent in Greater Manchester who informed me that it previously cost 60p each way per day to send his two children to sixth form in Oldham. The fact that concessionary travel for 16 to 19 year-olds has been removed means that it now costs £3.90 each way per day. Is that what we believe to be increasing social mobility?

[Lord McNally]

No, it is not; but I thought that my noble friend was moving away from that kind of question when he opened his remarks. Funds being targeted at the neediest families will also address problems of travel. I am not standing here saying that there are no cuts or difficulties. I am saying—and I welcome my noble friend’s idea that, at least on some of these issues, we might try to establish a cross-party consensus—that the roots of social mobility have puzzled us as a society at least since the war. I believe that what my right honourable friend has given today, partly building on some of the work of the previous Administration, is a clear sign that we—rather like the Attlee Government after the war, who also faced very difficult economic situations—are not abandoning the causes of welfare reform, work reform or social mobility, or putting them to one side during difficult economic times.