National Citizen Service Bill [Lords]

Flick Drummond Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 15th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I beg to move amendment 1, page 2, line 2, insert—

“(c) In carrying out its functions under this Act, the NCS Trust may not act in a manner which has the effect of preventing a young person from working as a volunteer on a heritage railway or tramway as part of a programme which is provided or arranged by the NCS Trust.”

Amendment 1 is the sole amendment to the Bill. Let me say for the benefit of the House, the Clerks and the Whips that I do not intend to push this amendment to a vote. I also want to put on record my full support for the National Citizen Service and for this Bill. It is something that benefits young people enormously. I hope that more and more young people in this country will take part in the NCS. It is about not just how much money we spend on it, but the skills, the experiences, the friendships and the breaking down of barriers. It has been a pleasure to meet NCS groups in my own constituency and to see them in action.

I also want to declare my interest as chair of the all-party group on heritage rail and as a representative—as Member of Parliament for Loughborough—for the Great Central Railway based in my constituency.

I thank both the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson), for the conversations that I have had with him about this amendment, and the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work for offering to meet me and Lord Faulkner next week on the substance of this amendment, which is why I will not detain the House for too long this afternoon. I also thank the Health and Safety Executive, who have offered a meeting as well.

There are more than 200 heritage railways in this country, offering volunteering and work experience as well as contributing hugely to our local economies and to the tourism infrastructure in this country. The leading counsel advised the Heritage Railway Association last year that activities involving children are unlawful by virtue of a statute passed as long ago as 1920. The Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act 1920 expressly excludes the employment of children in an industrial undertaking. The definition of “industrial undertaking” includes railways and “child” is now defined by section 558 of the Education Act 1996 in effect to mean a person who has not yet reached 16. It had long been assumed that “employment” had its usual meaning of work under a contract of employment, but counsel advised that it extends to include work carried out in a voluntary capacity. The basis for his interpretation is the Education (Work experience) Act 1973. That Act, which is re-enacted as section 560 of the Education Act 1996, provided for children aged 14 to 16 to undertake hands-on work experience as part of their education. Although children undergoing such experience do so voluntarily, without payment, Parliament thought it necessary expressly to disapply the provisions of the 1920 Act to enable work experience to take place. By implication, therefore, it was considered that the 1920 Act otherwise extended to voluntary work performed by children in an industrial undertaking.

In this scenario, an entirely laudable motive in 1920, to stop women, young people and children being exploited, now stops an activity that we as a society and a country deem to be worthy. In my example, that is volunteering by young people on a heritage railway, from which they gain experience of work and working as part of a team, and often they are inspired to take up engineering or other customer service and retail opportunities. It seems that the only way around this anomaly is to change the law, hence the amendment tabled in the other place by Lord Faulkner. I have now picked up the baton in this House.

Although not changing the 1920 Act stops National Citizen Service participants falling foul of that law, this demonstrates why the law should be changed. The amendment in no way cuts across the need to safeguard young people who will be working or volunteering in heritage railways, or perhaps in other industrial heritage settings.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

We have a huge heritage site in Portsmouth dockyard. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that may be a problem if the Bill is not amended?

[Nicky Morgan]

A number of heritage sites could fall within the definition of industrial undertaking, such as shipyards and railways. I believe that canals and waterways were mentioned in the debate in the other place. When we see anomalies that are clearly a nonsense in the 21st century and we have the opportunity to correct them, this House has a duty to try to do so.

I do not expect the Minister to accept the amendment today or to commit to changing the law, but I will listen with care to his response to this debate and during my meeting with my hon. Friend the Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work next week. I hope that in due course the House can resolve the legal logjam. Those of us who want young people to be able to volunteer in industrial undertakings and gain vital skills will continue to press the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in support of the Bill. I should declare an interest, having taken part in a project organised by an NCS partner in Portsmouth: the Pompey in the Community team, led by Clare Martin and James Shannon at Portsmouth football club. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who is no longer in the Chamber, and like, I suspect, many other Members of Parliament, I was a “dragon” in the “Dragons’ Den” event organised for young people to pitch their ideas for social action projects to be run as part of the scheme. There were some brilliant ideas, and the service has led to the delivery by young people of some great projects in Portsmouth.

I have no doubt that the establishment of a royal charter body is the right way to develop the NCS. It will give the organisation a strong stature in the eyes of the public, and will help to define its independence. The intention is not to allow it to bully or dominate other organisations in the voluntary sector; it is to ensure that a public body, spending large amounts of public money, is properly incorporated. This is not a slight on community interest companies—I have the pleasure of working with several CICs, and I am a firm supporter of that business model—but a move to put the NCS on a firmer footing in view of its considerable public responsibilities. The change will improve our oversight of the organisation, and will allow us to measure it against some of the concerns expressed in the Public Accounts Committee report.

Portsmouth is a compact and diverse city, so we can draw on a real mix of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. It will be vital nationally for the NCS to be able to draw people together from across the spectrum. Getting hold of young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, is a challenge, but we are achieving it in Portsmouth. That is one of the reasons I think the service is so successful. Our target is 350 this year, and we already have 171 signed up. Ours is a compact city, and people have to work together wherever they come from.

While I recognise that some concerns have been expressed about clause 9 and the involvement of HMRC, I see no great difficulty with it. Being given their national insurance details by HMRC at the age of 16 feels like a rite of passage for many young people, and it makes sense to include information about the NCS at the same time. They should also be getting the message via their schools, and I am sure that every MP can help in that regard. No one would expect the main means of learning about the NCS to come in a buff envelope with the national insurance card, but that is an additional means of engaging young people with projects that can change their lives and open the door to the world of responsibility and adulthood.

I hope that the annual report from the trust will contain some commentary on how it ensures the integrity of its data processing. That should relate not just to its relationship with HMRC, but to all sources of personal data collected and held by the NCS and its partners.

The key issues in the Bill that still give rise to concern involve the measuring of performance and value for money. As we heard from the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), that concern arose from the PAC report. We look forward to scrutinising the business plan annually, and to seeing how the performance measures up. There must be no repeat of the unfilled places problem identified in the PAC report. We already know that 90% of the young people who are engaging with the service currently see the value of it, but I would particularly like to see how many continue to volunteer, perhaps even until the age of 21.

The challenge of the NCS will be to demonstrate the follow-on benefits of it as people get further into adulthood. We will therefore want to see in the annual reporting what the sustained impact is at age 21. This Bill reflects a desire shared in all parts of the House to help young people develop the skills they will need in adulthood, connecting them with parts of society with which they might not otherwise engage.

I have followed the debates about this Bill and its measures with interest, and I feel we have before us a Bill that should command the confidence of Members and the wider public, and I look forward to it becoming law in due course.