Equality of Opportunity for Young People

Baroness Suttie Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that incredibly powerful and inspirational speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. I commend her for it and I hope the Minister replies to all the questions that she has put.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Grender on securing this extremely important debate. Investing in young people is a vital and all-embracing subject but I shall limit my remarks today to areas that I feel are particularly important: housing and homelessness, building resilience and the opportunities offered through international travel and exchanges. Twenty-five years ago, when I was 24 years old, I bought my first flat in Streatham in London. It was a two-bedroom flat with a small garden. I still remember the excitement of receiving the keys and knowing that I had my own place to call home. I was able to buy that flat without parental help and at a time when I was receiving a very modest Liberal Democrat salary. For most 24 year-olds nowadays, however, the very idea of buying a flat in London, Manchester, or Edinburgh is virtually unimaginable unless you have extremely generous parents or have inherited money. The same applies to rented accommodation. My young professional friends in their 20s and early 30s have to give up a huge proportion of their salaries renting a room in a flatshare, often with very basic facilities and with a long commute to work. In real terms, salaries have not remotely kept up with the increases in house prices or rented accommodation since the 1990s, when I was able to afford to buy my first flat.

All mainstream political parties agree on the urgent need to build more affordable housing but I feel that more radical and creative solutions need to be found if there is to be a solution to the current generational divide in access to housing. I should declare an interest as an ambassador for the homelessness charity Depaul International, which works with some of the most vulnerable young people in the UK and abroad. Last year Depaul UK worked with more than 3,700 people at risk of homelessness and rough sleeping, most of whom were under the age of 26. The number of people aged 16 to 25 sleeping rough in London has doubled since 2010.

Investment in tackling homelessness—for example, through the rough sleepers initiative—is reducing rough sleeping in some areas. However, the Government will not meet their own targets to end rough sleeping unless they do more to prevent homelessness and address problems with the welfare system. There are three particular areas where I believe that government action could make a difference. The first is bringing housing benefit for young people back in line with the cost of renting. In many areas there is no accommodation available that young people on low incomes can afford, even when they are receiving housing benefit. Like other types of housing benefit, the shared accommodation rate has been frozen since 2016. In the 40 local authority areas with the highest number of 18 to 25 year-olds sleeping rough, there are just not enough affordable rooms available. Will the Government consider returning the shared accommodation rate to a more realistic level in line with local rents?

Secondly, the current five-week wait for universal credit payments can result in young people falling into rent arrears and being unable to pay for travel to find work. This can very quickly lead to a vicious cycle of debt and despair and ultimately to sleeping rough. Will the Government now consider plans to give new universal credit claimants access to housing benefit payments to cover the five-week period, similar to those planned for transferring claimants next year?

Thirdly, short-term preventive services can help young people to remain in their family home or find alternative accommodation before they reach a crisis point and end up homeless. Homelessness family mediation services can help young people and their families resolve issues that might otherwise lead to a young person leaving the family home and sleeping rough. Will the Government consider substantially increasing investment in preventive and family mediation measures to prevent young people becoming homeless in the first place?

The second issue I would like to raise is looking at ways to help young people develop their skills and build their resilience. Research undertaken by CFE Research and LSE Enterprise on behalf of the British Council found that 82% of individuals with international experience were confident in their ability to adapt to new and unfamiliar situations. Respondents with international experience were also more likely to describe themselves as resilient.

On a personal level, I know that my three-month exchange as a 20 year-old in Voronezh in the Soviet Union in 1988 had a profound impact on my ability to deal with adversity and cope without the luxuries of living at home. It certainly improved my ability to communicate in the Russian language too. At present, international exchange programmes are mostly available to young people in the higher education sector, but I would like to see ways of making them more widely available, and not just to certain socioeconomic groups. We should investigate the current barriers to these international exchanges. We should also look at ways of encouraging young people from all backgrounds to participate in international programmes and school exchanges, as well as encouraging them to learn foreign languages. That becomes all the more urgent if we leave the European Union.

With the British Council, I have been very privileged to attend a great many events in the UK and abroad that help young people to develop their skills, confidence and resilience. The annual Hammamet Conference is one such positive example. It brings together young people from the UK and five North African countries from a variety of backgrounds to allow them to share ideas and experiences in a very practical way. For many of the British participants, it is their first opportunity to travel abroad and most certainly their first opportunity to visit the African continent.

The conference encourages active listening and listening to what young people really think, rather than what we think they think. I would like to see if there are ways in which such positive events can be scaled up to include a greater number of young people in future. I would be grateful if the Minister commented on this in his concluding remarks.

Investing in young people and allowing each individual to find a way to fulfil their potential is surely the single most important thing any society can do. Young people have so much to give and so much to offer if we are just prepared to listen. As my noble friend Lady Grender spelled out so powerfully in her opening remarks, we need to make sure that we find effective ways to tap into that rich seam of talent, in this country and beyond.