Intergenerational Fairness in Government Policy

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, it is great honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, who is a leading authority on so many of the topics encompassed by this debate led by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham.

It interests me that the two groups in society who feel very unhappy at the moment and who want things to change are highly educated young people and less well-educated older people. Clearly they are using different vehicles to express their desire for change, but both these groups feel that their views are not taken seriously and that they are somewhat misunderstood.

In my remarks, I shall focus in particular, certainly initially, on older, less well-educated people. I might describe them as working-class pensioners, but when I say that I do not mean working-class pensioners who are currently poor but those who have worked hard and struggled to achieve their modest financial security. If we need to rebalance the economic situation between the old and the young described by my noble friend Lord Willetts and many others today, we must understand why some older people feel ignored and disappointed, even though they have a better financial situation now. The answer to that is twofold. One part is that we do not recognise and discuss often enough the challenges that they overcame to succeed. I know there has been passing reference to this today, and I shall come back to that. The other thing we do not do is see how their experience and knowledge in overcoming those challenges would help us support young people better to meet their needs. As has already been said, older people want to help younger people, and they have a lot of knowledge, experience and wisdom that could be put to good effect.

I was born in 1967 and grew up in the 1970s, so I think that means I am a young Generation X. I lived in a place where the factory at the end of the street employed thousands of people. My parents and my friends’ parents worked there or in the building trade. Their purpose in life was to provide security for themselves and their family. In trying to do that, they had to battle with a lot of things such as the three-day week, petrol shortages and factory closures. They were trying to fulfil that purpose in the face of quite a lot of difficulty, but they succeeded, and a lot of them were the first generation of their family to buy a house. They got there, and they made it.

When we talk about people’s property, particularly people who have gone through that kind of experience to get to where they are, putting their property at risk to pay for their care is quite hard for them to cope with. It undermines the fundamental purpose that they were trying to achieve because it puts their security at risk. In a way, it is worse than that because successive generations since, such as my generation or younger baby boomers, who are better educated and have taken advantage of other opportunities, have dismissed or diminished the things that people such as my parents and their generation relied on to become successful, such as financial prudence, avoiding debt, saving, the importance of skills, a vocational education and their family. For some of them it must feel as though we are asking them to pay the price for our incompetence. We have to find a way of acknowledging how that must feel to them, and at the same time we should be seeking their advice on what we should do in future.

It is rather insulting to suggest that people such as those I have just described are nostalgic or want to turn the clock back. When I talk to my parents and their friends, I do not find them nostalgic at all. They will tell you that there was no such thing as the good old days. They very much recognise that this is all about the future. When they think about the future and the challenges for young people, they will say that their needs are the same as theirs were. Young people want work and housing, they rely on their friends and their family, and they want that sense of belonging and purpose. It is interesting that research shows that young people want things such as honesty, clarity and respect for others. These standards and values are as important to young people as they are to older people.

When we think about all these complex issues that we are trying to address when we look at different policy areas, we must not forget that if we are to rely on each other—which we evidently need to do—we need not just to acknowledge the challenges those who went before us overcame, but to seek their advice more than we have and recognise that some of those standards and behaviours that they relied on to succeed are the same things that young people need now, and that the people who are letting them down are often those of us who are sandwiched in the middle. Like my noble friend Lady Jenkin, when I talk to young people I feel very heartened by their attitude and their aspirations for their future.