Tackling Intergenerational Unfairness (Select Committee Report)

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Price, for introducing the report. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord True, on producing it—clearly with an eye on moving into government, as there is nothing terribly radical in it. Despite that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, the Government still could not accept most of it.

The report is peppered with real and challenging questions. I hope that the Minister will have some answers, not least to its comments on death duties—which, as my noble friend Lord Chandos reminded us, the committee called “capricious”—as well as on national insurance contributions and benefits and how they affect intergenerational and wider fairness.

On re-reading the report, it is clear that the issues highlighted in it have become supercharged as a result of the pandemic. It warned of slow pay progression for young workers and, historically uniquely, lower lifetime expectations than the current generation’s parents and grandparents. Covid has worsened what was written in 2019. We have seen the gig economy, where younger workers dominate, more affected by Covid. As last week’s ONS report showed, UK inequality was already at its highest point for a decade when coronavirus hit. Since then, labour market shocks have particularly hit the under-30s, who are a third more likely to be furloughed than the general population.

The younger generation’s insecure rental tenancies and, for those studying, the massive impact on their education and future work prospects, leave them with a vastly different outlook on life than my generation had at their age. Their homes are more insecure, with a completely unsatisfactory private rented sector unable to meet the challenge. The PRS has grown substantially, now catering for 20% of English households, as it tries to fill the gap left by the lack of social housing. Housing for Generation Rent must be tackled urgently. It is partly about quality and quantity, but also about fairness of treatment.

The Government have said that they will agree to regulate property agents as recommended in the report from the noble Lord, Lord Best. Work is taking place; I declare my interest in that I chair a group drawing up a code of conduct for when the Government establish the regulator. Perhaps the Minister could inform the Grand Committee when we might see action on this. High rents, inadequate income and high house prices mean that young people cannot save even for the deposit to get on the housing ladder, as the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans noted. We cannot sit by and let this generation down, bequeathing them a life prospect vastly inferior to previous generations.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the age spectrum, the elderly have been badly affected by the virus itself, whether in care homes or through being physically more at risk than younger bodies. While in income terms the elderly have fared relatively better than those in work—with their pensions protected by the triple lock and most having been of the generation to retire at 60 or 65—their worries about their final years in older age are real and have yet to be protected by long-term social care provision, despite promises made by the Government. The current situation of these two ends of the age spectrum highlights pre-existing problems that scream out for action.

Clearly, as the committee stressed, better vocational training is needed—but so are rights at work, where trade unions have a role to play. The changing nature of work has made it harder for young people to be represented. Can the Minister confirm that, in all the Government’s interventions, whether on employment, training or industrial policy, they will fully engage with unions and encourage employers to see them as a constructive way forward in upskilling and respecting the workforce? Will she take note of the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Bird?

Apprenticeships need a higher priority. Labour’s 2019 ambition was to create 80,000 climate apprenticeships, especially as, even before the virus, some 750,000 young people were not in education, employment or training. Since then, missed apprenticeships and school leavers unable to get jobs will have added to that number.

It is not just young people; the pandemic is wreaking havoc across the generations, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, and the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, noted. My noble friend Lady Blackstone talked about lifelong learning, and the former MP Gordon Marsden chaired a commission on this, which recommended a right to paid time off to reskill, with retraining fully funded up to level 3, a national careers service and flexible structures to accredit a wide range of learning. We hope that the Minister will be listening to these sorts of ideas.

My generation—which was also that of my noble friend Lord Davies—was the golden one. Born in the NHS, educated for free—right up to and through university, for those few of us able to access higher education—the post-1960s cohort had access to a wide range of freedoms, access to the pill, which meant we could plan our families, a health service, and a pension scheme which, for me, kicked in at 60. But we should not take any of that for granted. We were the lucky ones, but when I started work in 1970, “pensioner poverty” was rife, partly as a result of industrial pensions not being inflation proofed, so millions who had paid in to a pension scheme for their whole working life found that what started for men at 65 was pretty worthless 10 years later. Government intervention removed that inequity, but we must ensure that similar disparities do not again creep into systems set up to protect people. We must also heed the wise comments of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on loneliness and an active lifestyle in later life.

Our society is based on the desire of different generations to support one another. Parents care for children, their working lives pay tax and pension contributions to fund current care and their own futures, and—yes—to provide for their own grandchildren. In their old age, their children and grandchildren in turn tend and care for them—a compact, I think the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, called it. So it is for the whole of society, but things have got out of kilter, with today’s younger people reaping few of the benefits in terms of secure jobs, decent homes or even the guarantee of pensions long into the future. For today’s children, a year’s loss of schooling and social development will demand a policy response to right the impact that the pandemic is having on their lives. This generation of pupils will need particular attention if they are not to face a life reduced by the Covid experience. As the Conservative Tom Tugendhat said:

“Closed schools increase inequality, expose the most vulnerable, and create gaps that cannot be filled”.


As my noble friend Lord Liddle said, we must also find the political will to fill those gaps and ensure that we do not have a lost generation, and that today’s lack of intergenerational fairness is reversed in the future. As my noble friend Lord Hain said, it is a moral imperative.

This week, as I celebrate the arrival of a new grandson, Zakariya, like many in your Lordships’ House, I am deeply aware that what I wish for him is what the whole of today’s society must wish for future generations.