Debate on the Address

Baroness Jowell Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dame Tessa Jowell (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said, we should judge the Gracious Speech by the extent to which it is fit for the job that this country and the people of this country so desperately need it to do. We must therefore begin by addressing the important fact, which is very uncomfortable for us as politicians serving in this House, that there has not been a time in the 40 years that I remember of active politics when the level of public engagement with the relevance of politics has been so low. We saw that to a very great extent in the local election campaign.

I am enormously proud of my party’s achievements in the local election campaign, but I know that all of us, including myself, who campaigned in different parts of the country regularly, met people who were angry—people who felt that politicians were deaf to their concerns and that politics offered them no solutions. When we judge this Queen’s Speech by whether it is fit to meet the challenges of modern Britain today, that is a very important test.

Perhaps what has created the anger and unease— I think this underpinned so much of what the Prime Minister said in his response today—is the fact that our political narrative has been characterised by a view of the worst of our national human nature rather than the best. Let us turn that around. What follows if we believe that we live in a country where the majority of the million young people who are out of work desperately want the chance to work, to realise their potential and to fulfil their ambition? Mothers, fathers, young and older men and women come to all our surgeries with a sense of growing desperation that they are running out of solutions to the circumstances in which they now feel themselves to be.

So these are the challenges, and many of the remedies are very simple. When we were in government, we demonstrated that people did not have to languish on jobseeker’s allowance for weeks into months. If we apply what we know—that for every week people are out of work, it gets harder for them to get back into work—and if we provide people with support and retraining, and maintain their confidence that they will get a job, the chances are that they will get off benefits more quickly. But if we hollow out the services that are designed to achieve that change and galvanise that human ambition, people are on their own.

[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

On that subject, will the right hon. Lady at least acknowledge that in only two years this Government have created 1.25 million jobs in the private sector and have helped to create 250,000 new small businesses and 500,000 apprentices in the past year alone, and that the strategy proposed from the Opposition Front Bench would jeopardise this by borrowing more in a debt crisis?

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[Dame Tessa Jowell]

On behalf of the whole House, I wish the hon. Gentleman a very happy birthday, and I thank him for his intervention. By scrutinising the figures on mothers who no longer feel it is worth staying in work, he will see that very many of those jobs, welcome as they are, are not full-time jobs that enable an adequate income to come into the family home.

[Mr Newmark]

rose—

[Dame Tessa Jowell]

I will not give way again as many other hon. Members want to speak.

There is much in the Queen’s Speech about welfare and the future of the welfare state. It is not a welfare policy to pop up on television every other Sunday with another bit of tinkering with the welfare state. We have a welfare state which is founded on three principles— the contributory principle, the universal principle and the discretionary principle. Richard Titmuss famously observed—and this is the warning to those who seek to dismantle a universal welfare state that has at different times of our lives relevance for all of us—that services only for the poor are poor services. I challenge Government Members to think of a single service which is used only by the poor that they would be prepared to use at a time of difficulty or trouble.

Remembering the simplicity with which many of the terrible human conditions in which people now find themselves can be resolved, two principles should be upheld: do not hollow out those services that are the practical, direct contact with those individuals, and steer away from a principle for our public services or our welfare state which reduces its scope, making it one that is only for the poor. Stigma follows.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Lady agree that a fundamental principle of the welfare system should also be that work pays more than welfare? That is the system underpinning universal credit. Does she welcome that?

[Dame Tessa Jowell]

Yes. I sat around the Cabinet table when we discussed precisely putting in place the policies that would ensure that people earned more in work than they would on benefit. That is another change. That is why, incidentally, we introduced the national minimum wage and why our alternative Queen’s Speech lays such emphasis on enforcement of the national minimum wage. That is why there is now an important opportunity to reduce, progressively and systematically, the very large cost of in-work tax credit by linking incentives for employers seeking public contracts to pay a living wage to people right across the country, which is something the best employers are already adopting.

Let me touch briefly on what I think will be one of the most publicly important, and in many respects welcome, announcements in the Queen’s Speech, and that is in relation to social care—but I think we should go further. In Committee we will press hard on the paradox that £800 million is being taken away from local authorities’ ability to fund social care at a time when the responsibilities and burden on families are increasing. It is very hard to find those families who would not prefer their elderly relatives to be loved and looked after in their own homes. Therefore, that should not just be the rhetorical aim of the policy; it should be the organisational and administrative means by which that hope is realised. Again, that is not difficult, but we must start with the individual and their needs and build the structure and organisation of the service around them, rather than, as so many elderly people find is their lot, making their needs conform to predetermined rules that have little to do with their circumstances.

Therefore, it is through the welfare state, and by increasing the responsibility of employers in relation to the living wage and by recognising that good care for people at home means building relationships and relevant support around the individual, that the source of help might begin to match the circumstances of individual families and their needs. That is the only way in which confidence can be rebuilt. I am intensely proud of the efforts of so many Labour councils, in particular, across the country that are pioneering approaches to that. A Queen’s Speech designed for the whole country would learn a lot from some of those beacons of light at an individual and local level. I commend those proposals to the House.