National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 16th November 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 18 and 26 but first, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, on his amendments. I shall not repeat his arguments but they are very well made and I hope that the Government will agree with them.

I thank a number of organisations, including the National Deaf Children’s Society, the Royal National Institute of Blind People, together with Sense and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists for their advice on my two amendments. I hope that the Minister will understand that our aim is constructive, but there is a need to include the amendments in the Bill to give it the necessary statutory force. Amendment 18 would ensure that there are ring-fenced funds made available for which NCS providers may apply to meet the cost of providing the support that disabled young people may require to enable them to participate fully in the scheme. Amendment 26 would put in place regular reporting about the participation of disabled young people. This will enable the NCS Trust, the Government and all those involved in the National Citizen Service to judge the reality of the scheme’s accessibility to individuals.

The Minister may argue that the Equality Act 2010 is sufficient, but I would say two things about that. First, it is not sufficient in providing access to the education system without additional funding. This has been generally recognised by successive Governments in a range of educational areas since 2010. Secondly, the Act provides insufficient protection for disabled people to access services because many organisations simply do not make the “reasonable adjustments” required by law to enable access for individuals to participate. As an example, many deaf young people can find it difficult to access mainstream extracurricular activities which can be vital for their personal development. With the NCS scheme being Government-funded and with £1 billion of public money going to the service, there will be no excuse for failure to ensure that young people with disabilities get equal access to NCS schemes.

On the reporting requirements under Amendment 26, as an example of the problem, the NCS website has few details about the support available for disabled participants. For example, subtitles have not been created for many of its promotional videos and there are no videos in alternative accessible formats such as British Sign Language. The duties of the NCS to act as a leader in support of young people with disabilities are clear, given the level of funding it will have and the responsibilities that the trust will carry.

In conclusion, it cannot be left to NCS providers to meet the cost of any support that disabled young people may require to access the scheme. A considerable proportion of the NCS budget will be spent on marketing the scheme and unless promotional materials are fully accessible to all young people, there will not be high take-up of the scheme by those with a disability. The NCS Trust will have to deliver its responsibilities to those who have a disability. These amendments would mean that, first, a duty would be placed on the NCS Trust to ensure that funding was available to cover the cost of additional support required by an individual and, secondly, an annual report to the Secretary of the State would address the extent to which disabled young people have participated in the scheme. I hope the Minister will be willing to look at these issues carefully. If the Minister feels a meeting might be helpful, I would be happy to take part in that, but I hope that there will be a response by the time the Bill reaches Report.

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 3, 18 and 26, and start by saying I am confident, given the dealings I have had with NCS and some of its providers, that it is absolutely committed to inclusion in its widest sense. The briefing to which my noble friend Lord Shipley referred suggests that some of the extra costs of including disabled people are perhaps not being entirely recognised. That is something we need to make sure is put right, as there are two potentially worrying outcomes: first, that there will be reduced participation by people with disabilities, and secondly, that providers will suffer if they have to carry extra costs in the way that my noble friend described. We heard about one particular sort of disability, but it is easy to imagine that there would be all sorts of extra costs.

We have to be careful about not creating a perverse incentive. It would be ironic if a local provider was very successful at dealing with the particular challenges of some disabilities and then found itself financially disadvantaged for being able to successfully recruit more from that group. We need something about recognising the costs and ensuring that they are met.

The provision for regular reporting is absolutely key. I am sure the NCS is monitoring this, and will continue to monitor it, as it would be a key part of its own performance, but there is a transparency issue. It should be reporting on what it is finding out about its own performance with regard to inclusion generally and disability in particular. That will help it to improve and see where it is perhaps falling down, and help Parliament and the outside world in judging how well the NCS is doing. This is not all negative. It is going to be tempting for some organisations to benchmark their costs against NCS and say, “Oh well, we are providing this much more cheaply”, but if NCS is working with harder-to-reach people with disabilities, and its costs are higher, it is in its interest to report that.

I wish to make two unrelated points about exclusion. First, we must always caution against models which assume that young people live in functional families where their parents do everything to support them, including for example paying the £50 and that sort of thing. It is absolutely key that, however this is delivered, it is possible for young people to access it without necessarily having to rely on parents who are supportive or even there and interested. There is a danger of imposing our model of parenthood on other people.

Finally, one group that probably needs this help more than any other but will need extra assistance is the very many young people who are carers. They lead very difficult and challenging lives, and the opportunity to get out from their caring responsibilities to be able to do something in a normal way with other young people is key. But there is no doubt they will need extra help, as if they are not there to care, someone else needs to do it. That is something that we should all recognise, and they certainly should not be disadvantaged for the role that they play.

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[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, Amendment 10 is in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Barker and Lady Scott, for whose signatures I am grateful. As is well known, I fully support the NCS programme, which represents an important rite of passage and will make a great contribution to social cohesion, social engagement and social mobility.

However, we must never forget that it is just a part, albeit an important one, of the tapestry of other voluntary activities through which our young people can develop, hence this amendment. The amendment would enshrine a third purpose for the NCS Trust alongside providing and promoting the NCS programme. It would establish a duty on the trust to ensure that its presence made a positive contribution to the sector, enabling a coherent journey of youth social action providers—a journey about which we said much at Second Reading and on which we all agree.

The amendment would mean that the significant public funding committed to NCS would help all parts of the sector rise together and enable it to support existing provision where doing so furthered the trust’s other stated aims, avoiding any situation whereby the trust’s actions or payment-by-results model systemically undermined existing provision.

I declare an interest as a member of the advisory council of Step Up To Serve, which is the umbrella organisation for increasing and encouraging volunteering from the age of 10 to the age of 20, and as a member of the board of trustees for City Year, a charity that transforms lives by placing young adults in schools that could benefit from extracurricular activity and peer support. Opportunities such as City Year and the ICS are exactly those that we hope would be taken up by the alumni of NCS—as I am sure they will—so that they might use their new-found skills and confidence to continue making a difference for others.

I am going to be a bit naughty here, but noble Lords will recall that at Second Reading I spoke about a year of service and called on the Government to establish legal status for full-time volunteers in the UK. I will not rehearse those arguments, but ask the Minister when and whether the Government will make further information available about a review of or a commission on full-time volunteering. I well understand that the wheels of government turn slow, but it is time for a signal from the Government that an announcement will be made—if it is not to be made today.

As someone who owes a great deal to the Girl Guides, I also commend the work of uniformed organisations such as the Scouts and the Guides, which work with children as young as six on building their skills for life and an ethos of service that will last them a lifetime. The success of organisations such as the Scouts and Guides will undoubtedly lead to more young people participating in the NCS at the age of 16. However, opportunities before and after NCS are key to realising the full potential of the programme and the significant investment of public money that comes with it. It is in the interest of the trust and the taxpayer that we should think of ways of ensuring, by putting it in the Bill or perhaps in the charter, that the NCS should never undermine existing opportunities for young people. I know that that is not what it is meant to do, that it is meant to be inclusive and that it is to be a commissioning organisation while other organisations deliver, but it is necessary for this somewhere to be stated so that people have trust in the NCS and can see that its purpose is to collaborate with other organisations.

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. In the interests of time, I shall be brief. We have to accept that one of the great things about this country is the way in which the voluntary sector works and the contribution that is made in local areas by many hundreds of voluntary organisations, some of which have existed for a long time.

It is quite easy to inadvertently destabilise that. I do not think a single one of us believes in any way that the NCS would do anything such as that purposely, but we have to accept that a new kid on the block on this scale could have that destabilising effect. The NCS needs to work with the sector as it exists—I recognise that it currently intends to do so—to benefit from it and to add benefit to it. For that reason, there is no harm in having it enshrined in the purposes of the organisation to make sure that as it goes forward—particularly when it starts to work at scale, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said on an earlier amendment—it never lets go of those principles that this is part of the lifetime experience of young people and part of the very rich community that we have all grown to admire so much.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. Recent research published by the University of Edinburgh highlights that members of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have been demonstrated to have significantly better mental health in adulthood than a very similar group of non-members. Whatever happens with the Bill and this very important work, it should not undermine in any way the good work of the Girl Guides and the Scouts. There is a 15% improvement in mental health for those who have experienced the Girl Guides or Boy Scouts.

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As I said, this is my first amendment. I hope I have handled it the right way—forgive me if I have not—but the point about the NCS, and what I find so interesting about it, is that it is a really beautiful launch pad to begin to change the way in which we bring up our young and get them involved in that rite of passage. I would not want anybody to have the rite of passage I had.

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market]

My Lords, I have one specific question and would be grateful if the Minister could write to me on it. At Second Reading, I raised the point about voter registration. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has raised it now, and indeed it is part of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bird. In the letter that the NCS wrote to me after Second Reading, it said:

“HMRC was chosen as the body best placed to send out letters to teenagers on NCS’ behalf because it has the most robust and complete dataset of 16 and 17 year olds”.

I had not known that before about HMRC. It had not occurred to me, and I just wonder whether we are missing a trick in terms of relying entirely on local registration offices to ensure registration to vote when there is an organisation that has better information. I would be very grateful if the Minister could write to me on that.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I have a deal of sympathy with all the amendments in this group. I too think that everybody should be registered. They should be registered at birth and then opt out at some stage if they wish. I also believe in compulsory voting but that is a very personal view; it is not my party’s view.

At Second Reading there was some discussion about citizenship education, which I believe is absolutely crucial to the well-being not only of individuals but of society. As the noble Lord said, it enables people to participate, which is key. If you do not have citizenship education, you do not know how to participate, so you cannot take advantage of your rights and responsibilities.

The Minister addressed citizenship in the letter that he wrote to all noble Lords after Second Reading. In it, he said that citizenship remains a compulsory subject in maintained secondary schools, but therein lies one of the problems. I firmly believe that citizenship should be a compulsory subject in all schools and not just in maintained schools. My noble friend Lord Blunkett pointed out at Second Reading that the number of people being trained to teach citizenship has fallen dramatically, and therein lies another problem. The Government really do have to grasp the issue of citizenship if, as they do, they wish people to participate more in our democratic system.

It was suggested at Second Reading that there should be a government review of citizenship teaching and the whole issue of citizenship, but we have not had a response to that. I hope that is something that the Government are looking at seriously. I very much like the idea proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, that there should be a sessional committee to look at citizenship, because I think that that would do society a good service. I would understand if these amendments were not accepted but I urge the Government to say something strong and positive about the review of citizenship teaching and about having more of a national citizenship ethos, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, suggested.