Tackling Intergenerational Unfairness (Select Committee Report)

Baroness Tyler of Enfield Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD) [V]]

My lords, this has been an excellent debate, ably opened by the noble Lord, Lord Price. It is also overdue. Like many noble Lords, I do not find it acceptable—pandemics notwithstanding—that we are debating this very important report and government response nearly two years after their publication.

Intergenerational fairness is the notion of different generations supporting each other throughout their lives. From giving children the best start in life to caring for people in their old age, it is fundamental to our entire social fabric and cohesion. As we have heard today, we live in a time when the notion of intergenerational fairness is threatened. The accepted post-war norm had been for successive generations to experience better lives than their parents’. That is not true anymore for the younger generation. Instead they are experiencing worse outcomes in terms of pay, job security and housing. Now, as we have heard today, we must also factor in the devastating impact of the pandemic, particularly on younger people.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to serve on the select committee under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord True, who sadly is not present today, and to wrestle with these big, complex and interrelated areas of social and economic policy. I associate myself with the sentiments expressed by other noble Lords on the very sad loss of Professor Sir John Hills, with whom it was my privilege to work over many years on a range of social policy issues.

I sympathise with noble Lords who have raised the issues of intragenerational fairness and how they play out with intergenerational fairness. I simply say that that was not within our committee’s remit.

I cannot pretend to feel anything other than deep disappointment at the Government’s response. They responded to 29 of the committee’s 41 conclusions and recommendations, rejecting 21 of them. That left a grand total of two recommendations that they accepted. I always try to remain positive but at one point I was left wondering why we had bothered. However, I was cheered up when I noted that the Office for National Statistics had accepted the committee’s recommendations, and it has already begun publishing new intergenerational analysis of the data that it holds. I join other noble Lords today in thanking the ONS for its very positive response. I was heartened by that. It might all sound rather dull and technical, but I felt it went to the heart of what we were proposing in terms of both government and external commentators having the data to assess the intergenerational impact of the Government’s tax-and-spend decisions and their ability to take long-term, sustainable spending decisions. In short, we called on the Government to accept the principles of inter-generational accounting, and I repeat that call today.

When we launched our report in March 2019, we found out that this is not always an easy issue to debate. Unless carefully handled, it can stoke up all sort of anxieties and resentments. I think that we on the committee were very careful not to pitch generations against each other. I was therefore pleased when I looked back at the statement in the front of the report:

“The relationship between older and younger generations is still defined by mutual support and affection. However, the action and inaction of successive governments risks undermining the foundation of this relationship. Many in younger generations are struggling to find secure, well-paid jobs and secure, affordable housing, while many in older generations risk not receiving the support they need because government after government has failed to plan for a long-term generational timescale.”


I asked an Oral Question in May 2019 about the specific steps that the Government were taking to collect regular data on the intergenerational impact of tax and spend decisions. In responding, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said:

“One of the ways of reducing intergenerational unfairness is to take further steps to reduce the deficit, and the report explains exactly why it is unfair for any Government to go on borrowing and borrowing and load on to subsequent generations ever higher debt.”—[Official Report, 20/5/19; col. 1773.]


As the noble Lord, Lord Price, said at the start of the debate, given the unprecedented level of borrowing to deal with the immediate impact of the pandemic on people’s livelihoods, it is worth noting the example of Quebec, which has set up a generations fund dedicated exclusively to repaying Quebec’s debt with a strong focus on royalties from sustainable water power and private producers of hydroelectricity. I am not for one minute saying that that precise mechanism is directly transferable, but the concept is interesting and worthy of further exploration as we start to grapple with the huge debt that we are facing.

A key finding of our report was that young people were being held back by an education system that is not preparing them for a changing labour market and longer working life, setting them up to face major challenges in finding stable employment and good housing. There was too strong an emphasis on higher education; at the same time, the Government have restricted choices for young people by consistently underfunding further education. We noted that, since 2010,

“sixth forms have faced budget cuts of 21 per cent per student”.

This reiterated the argument of the Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility, which I also served on and which drew attention to the major funding disparities between further and higher education. By far the starkest statistic was a roughly £6,000 difference per student per year between those who study higher education courses at university and those who study further education courses at colleges—a staggering figure and, in my view, a major social injustice.

I welcome the direction of travel and many of the proposals contained in the Government’s Skills for Jobs White Paper, published last week, to improve access to vocational learning and match skills development to the needs of the local economy. That is part of a longer-term and very overdue move towards real parity of esteem between academic and vocational routes. What is needed now, as our Select Committee report clearly calls for, is funding for further and vocational education on a scale that matches the boldness of the proposals and continues to reverse decades of under-investment in FE. What assurances can the Minister give us about the action that the Government are taking on this point?

The pandemic—particularly how to pay for the immense but very necessary increases in public spending and crisis income support—throws the issue of intergenerational fairness into even sharper relief. Various external commentators and think tanks have already been sounding alarm bells, including the Social Market Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, which underlined that the virus is having a dramatically different effect on different generations. Old people are much more likely to get severely ill but young people are taking a much worse economic hit. In partnership with the Nuffield Foundation, which is now producing an annual generational audit, tracking changes in the balance between the generations, this first assessment shows that, if you turn the focus from physical to mental health, the virus is actually having a severe health effect on young people too. I join other noble Lords this afternoon in saying that we must not let coronavirus exacerbate Britain’s inter-generational inequalities still further.

Finally, on social care, which some of us will debate later in the week, the funding of social care is yet another of those wicked policy issues that is generally put in the “too difficult” file and left to fester. I believe that we should look for a solution for sustainable funding for adult social care through the lens of intergenerational fairness. No one pretends that it will be easy, but we need to develop a way of providing sustainable funding for adult social care in which all generations contribute but no generation feels unfairly treated. This will be vital to ensure greater buy-in across generations. I also feel that a bold move in this direction could make it easier to reopen the deeply contested debate about some of the age-related benefits that our report showed are no longer targeting the issue that they were intended to solve or are simply going to sections of that age group that just do not need them—something that the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, powerfully set out. I also hope that it will provide the scope to look again at the case for individuals over state pension age who choose to continue to work making national insurance contributions, as the committee recommended.

I conclude by joining the noble Lord, Lord Price, in asking the Government to review and reassess all the committee’s recommendations in the light of the unprecedented circumstances we find ourselves in. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, they remain as relevant today as they were two years ago.