Social Mobility

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, this has been a great but very short debate. I am so sorry that I have only four minutes in which to respond, so I cannot possibly comment on the many wonderful speeches. However, there was some clear consensus around the Committee today. First, we all think that social mobility is good. We must also acknowledge that if we allow inequality to continue at the current level, it is inevitable that social mobility will require some people to go down as well as up, and perhaps go down quite a long way. Perhaps I can tempt the Minister to depart from his brief briefly and look at the way that someone like John Rawls might have encouraged us to think about the circumstances in which, given a choice of an equal or an unequal society, but with no way of knowing where we might end up in the distribution, most of us would come down firmly in favour of a more equal society. What might that tell us here?

With the possible exception of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, there was also a recognition that social mobility is in trouble in Britain. After my first visit to the United States, I came away both impressed and shocked, feeling that I had come across a country which had very low social mobility but believed passionately in very high social mobility—hence the American dream. As my right honourable friend Ed Miliband said in a speech last year on this subject, the reality is that if you want the American dream, go to Finland. One of the challenges we have in Britain is that our social mobility is pretty poor by OECD standards, and slowing. We therefore have a problem; so what do we do?

I think we have all agreed that education is crucial. I will not repeat the many interesting ideas that have been put forward there. Most of us would agree that early intervention is also crucial. The previous Labour Government were very committed to this, as I am sure noble Lords will accept. We created Sure Start and invested in thousands of children’s centres. We also provided support for early years education and for disadvantaged pupils, and the attainment gap narrowed as a result. I worry about some of the changes in recent years. I am concerned at moves such as the scrapping of education maintenance allowance and the closure of children’s centres, and what that might mean down the track for opportunity.

I was pleased to hear both my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby draw attention to some of the really severe barriers at the bottom where, with the best will in the world and even with lots of character, there are some pretty huge hurdles to overcome if one does not even get enough to eat, never mind having the kind of support that comes in other homes. That point was also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. I, too, was hugely impressed at the great lineage that has produced the noble Baroness, Lady Perry. That clearly explains why we see such a force of nature here among us today.

I was also very interested to hear about the question of character because, aside from all the other questions, character and resilience are clearly important. I did a stint on the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, which was set up to look into the 2011 riots. One thing we found was clear evidence that as well as enabling young people to take advantage of opportunities, character and resilience could mean that when a split-second moment of crisis came and someone had to make a choice that could be life changing, they would be enabled to make a good choice at that moment and not a bad one. It has real benefits both ways round. Given the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, to whose work and that of her All-Party Parliamentary Group I pay tribute, about the formation of character being as important—if not more important—than the acquisition of knowledge or other things, do the Government feel that that is reflected in their approach to the curriculum? I would be interested in the Minister's response on that.

I am with the right reverend prelate the Bishop of Derby on this: we need to be quite careful of being overly utilitarian. If we want to invest in character in order to get certain results, there is a slight danger that that is like trying to become happy, when it is by doing other things that one becomes happy. In that respect, in preparing for this debate I looked at various sources, including the Lexmond and Reeves 2009 report for Demos. I was childishly thrilled to find that they began with Aristotelian ethics. It was a fascinating notion. When Aristotle wrote about ethics, he was trying to set out the ways in which people could become better or pursue the good. However, they also told us that the closest translation of ta ethika was not, in fact, “ethics” but “matters to do with character”. In other words, character represents a set of life skills, not a moral disposition.

That tells us something quite exciting, I would suggest. It takes us to a view of character as a shorthand for a set of personal capabilities that research shows to be linked to a range of interesting positive outcomes. The report describes it as well-being. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said, that needs to be understood as well-being in its broadest and deepest sense of human flourishing. If we have people who are flourishing, we will find people who are more likely to succeed, make the right decisions at crisis points, do better in exams and get more fulfilling jobs, but they would also be better people and would build a better society. That is the prize really worth having.

The Big Society

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I am pleased to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Wei, that I and many others on this side are passionate believers in civil society. Whatever the big society is, at the very least it must depend upon people giving voluntarily of their own time. We can agree on that much. I believe in civil society because I believe that the ties that bind our country and our people together are not in fact big threads woven by the state but are made up of lots of tiny, overlapping threads. Those are woven out of the individual encounters we have with people around us, especially people unlike us.

I spent a number of years in the voluntary sector, most recently running the British Refugee Council. When I arrived there, we had 400 paid staff but even more volunteers. Yet people do not volunteer by accident. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, pointed out so eloquently, the support required to get volunteers in more than pays itself back. I watched people arriving in this country who had been welcomed in, having been traumatised and in many cases tortured by their own states. They were moved almost to tears by the fact that individual British people would give of their time to come in to teach them English, to mentor them, to help them take up a career and to integrate. So moved were they that they would almost always go on to volunteer in turn, passing that down the generations. What we are doing there is not only reaching out to each other but creating and reinforcing a set of values which make our country what it is. We also create the next generation of volunteers.

I am delighted to hear that the Government want to invest in community organisers. Four thousand sounds a wonderfully impressive number. Yet what is the point in investing solely in new ones if we are, in practice, taking funding away from the hundreds of thousands of people out there who are involved in charities and who got there through the support of the Government? I am trying really hard not to make a cheap political point out of this but I have spoken to so many people in charities, as I know other noble Lords have, who are seeing the programmes that they have built up over years falling apart. It took so long to develop those volunteers and pull them together that it would take them years, if not generations, to rebuild them.

I urge the Minister to think carefully and to reassure people on all sides of this House, who I think share those worries in one way or another. How can we make sure that the values of the big society and of civil society are embraced not only by new people coming in? We should show how grateful we are, and how much we care and are thankful, to all those who have been doing this for generations.