Spending Review: Intergenerational Fairness and Well-being

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean

Monday 20th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I commend the noble Baroness and her colleagues on the Select Committee on Intergenerational Fairness and Provision for its report. It has just come out and I read it over the weekend. I like the sentence in paragraph 3:

“Policy based on the expectation that future generations will disproportionately pay for present or past consumption cannot be considered just or sustainable”.


I agree with that. One of the ways of reducing intergenerational unfairness is to take further steps to reduce the deficit, and the report explains exactly why it is unfair for any Government to go on borrowing and borrowing and load on to subsequent generations ever higher debt. I hope that that part of the report will encourage support for the difficult decisions that the Government may have to take on public spending.

On the specific question about publishing a distributional analysis of the impact, I understand that that is quite difficult to do. If, for example, the Government decide to spend more money on high-quality childcare, would that score as an advantage for the child, who is getting the benefit of the childcare, or as a benefit for the parent, who would then be able to go out to work or who would not have to pay for that childcare? There are some real issues about definition before we can go too far down the road of identifying a solution along the lines suggested by the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that one of the most important problems here is the enormous debts that young people are building up through university charges? Our generation did not face such huge debts but the next generation does. As far as I can see that is one of the most important issues. I wonder what the noble Lord thinks about that point.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Steps were taken last year to raise the threshold at which debt starts to be repaid. However, as I said in my original reply, one of the report’s recommendations is to take this issue into account in the spending review. However, we have seen a huge reduction in unemployment among young people, with the rate among 16 to 24 year-olds having halved since 2010, which is a good record.