Social Mobility Committee Report

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I feel somewhat uncomfortable following two former Secretaries of State for Education. I hope that the Minister will take this debate very seriously given that it features such senior figures from the educational world. I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Fraser of Corriegarth, and add my thanks to those expressed to the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, the chair of the committee, and the committee members for an excellent report.

The noble Lord, Lord Baker, expressed concern about the lack of continuity on this matter, there being no further committee to look at social mobility. I remind him and your Lordships that 22 December is the deadline for proposing ad hoc Select Committees for next year. If any of your Lordships wished to propose a committee on such a subject, I would certainly support it. Social mobility is so crucial when one considers the increasing development of China and India and the advent of automation. As the report clearly lays out, we cannot be so wasteful of so much of the potential of our young people. This matter is crucial to the future of this nation.

One particular revelation in the report was the quality of careers advice. For many years, I have heard concern expressed in your Lordships’ House about the quality of support for the development of careers advisers. Only this weekend, I was speaking with an administrator who has regular contact with careers advisers. He highlighted to me his urgent concern about the deficits in their knowledge. In his line of work, but also more widely, the world is changing very quickly and careers advisers are not being trained to keep up with it. He argued that they should have annual training in his specialism to be able to keep abreast of what is happening. I welcome what the Government have said in response to this issue, but I hope they can go further and meet the concerns raised today.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, referred to this but I would like to focus on care leavers—young people leaving care—and their transition from school to education. One issue that has not been raised so far today is their housing needs. There has been much welcome progress from successive Governments in better meeting the needs of those in care and leaving care. I pay tribute to politicians on all sides for making those in care and care leavers a priority. However, housing for care leavers remains an issue. The challenge here is that often nowadays, they are placed in private accommodation and receive housing benefit to sustain that. Yet when they seek work, their housing benefit is reduced or removed so they are caught in a trap. Every incentive they have is to stay on benefit and not get into work, because they will have a secure home. Of course, these are young people who have experienced insecurity in their home lives. We disincentivise them engaging in the work market by not finding secure housing for them.

I was approached a couple of months ago by a care leaver, Jordan Morgan, who is a very successful specialist in foreign affairs. He struggled greatly with this issue of the housing trap for care leavers. He consulted various care leavers and produced a report about these issues, which I am glad he raised with not only me but Edward Timpson, the Minister for Children. He also introduced me to ambassadors from a charity, the Drive Forward Foundation, which supports care leavers, at a meeting two or three weeks ago.

I was introduced there to someone I will call Yasmin, a remarkable young woman with an apprenticeship in a City firm. She had to downgrade her accommodation to manage doing the job she wanted. She moved into private accommodation and just about made enough each week to sustain herself and pay the rent, but she had to not tell the truth to her landlord. She could not tell him that she was on housing benefit because he would not have such people in his property. However, recently he discovered this and gave her notice to quit. Last Thursday, I had an email from Drive Forward saying, “What can you do to intervene for young Yasmin because she will be made homeless very shortly?”. Fortunately, I had another email saying she had taken the initiative and found accommodation through an application called SpareRoom. The only response the local authority gave to this young woman was, “Wait until the bailiffs arrive and then you can be statutory homeless and we can help you”. A further issue with this poor young woman is that she suffers from a disability—macular degeneration. She is a remarkable young woman, struggling against all odds to get into work and further herself.

I was pleased to meet recently with Crisis and to hear of its campaign, Home – No Less Will Do, which is for the generality of single homeless people but would particularly help these young care leavers. The campaign is supported by London Councils, the National Landlords Association and the Residential Landlords Association. It calls for the Department for Communities and Local Government to fund help-to-rent projects across England. It asks the DCLG to establish and underwrite a national rent deposit guarantee scheme to support homeless people to rent in the private sector. A help-to-rent project supports tenants and landlords to set up, de-risk and sustain tenancies. There has been some piloting of this. From 2010 to 2014, with the help of the Government, Crisis ran the private rented sector access programme. A rent deposit guarantee offers a written commitment from a private help-to-rent project which covers certain types of costs that the landlord may incur at the end of a tenancy, including damages and in some cases rent arrears. Some 59% of landlords with experience of letting to homeless people said they would consider letting to homeless households only if backed by such interventions.

Will the Minister seek to persuade the Treasury and DCLG to furnish the House with their view of this approach and campaign from Crisis? Will they give us information on whether they are considering funding these two initiatives? Finally, would the Minister or the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, or both noble Lords, consider visiting a help-to-rent scheme with me? I am sure that any noble Lords interested in joining us would be welcome. I warmly welcome this crucial report on social mobility and helping young people who are overlooked and left behind. I hope we can have a further Select Committee on social mobility soon in this House, and do even more to help care leavers better themselves and make better prospects for their children, in full recognition of the great work successive Governments have done in this area. I look forward to the Minister’s response.