Human Rights and Civil Liberties

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I put my name down for this debate, it was not because of the suggestion about changes to our legal framework but because of the reference to culture of civil liberties and human rights. As someone who has been concerned with disability, both inside and outside the education sector, for more years than I care to remember, I feel at the moment that that group’s hard-won rights are under threat.

We do not implement the rights that we have, and the big legal Acts are seen as great threats to get people to do the minimum. We are wasting huge amounts of time, effort and human resource running between those big rights at the front and their implementation on the ground. That is not a criticism just of this Government, but of probably every Government I have known since I came to this House—and I have been here for just over 29 years. All Governments pass a big Act and the politicians go, “That’s done, so now what is the next big Act?”, and we move on. We forget about implementation, and the “performance of duty” level is not considered. If we talk about taking away any strand of the overarching legal framework, even that which we have already got seems more and more vulnerable.

There is a great deal of implementation activity in education and special educational needs. We now have a good framework, which was slightly improved by the last Government through the Children and Families Act 2014—and I think that my own party made a real contribution to making sure that young people’s rights go on until they are 25 years old. We all know that the education system is something of a conveyor belt, so it is important to ensure that, if people have a problem, they are given a little more time to get themselves back on to that conveyor belt.

But if we have a culture where rights are taken away because they are inconvenient—people do not understand and say, “There is a little bit too much bureaucracy and it is getting in the way, and you just don’t understand the real world”, which is all part of the culture of interfering with regulation—you suddenly find that the people who are dependent on support in order to become full members of society begin to feel vulnerable. Add into the mix some talk of the “scrounger culture” when it comes to disability benefits, and we will be heading backwards. I saw the wheelchair protesters who upset Parliament a few days ago, something I have not seen since the early 1990s when that sort of action was required to get the first Disability Discrimination Act through. We are not giving the impression that we are taking care of people.

I turn to the other bits and bobs in this area. Education Ministers talk all the time about “catching up” and “maintaining standards”. Some 20% of the school-age population has some form of special educational need, so catching up is not on for many of them; it is about learning differently. Working hard in special lessons will not work because that just reinforces what has already failed. Indeed, the Labour Party tried very hard in this area by investing money in after-school literacy clubs and so on. They did not make that much of an impression for the simple reason that it is not about working harder but about working smarter. If we really wanted to do something, we would not be passing another law, we would do something radical like teaching our teachers how to deal with people who do not have mainstream learning patterns.

At this point I think I should restate my interest in this as a dyslexic, but doing so once in every three debates is probably sufficient now. We should be trying to encourage people to work more cleverly, and all the talk about red tape and needless intervention by the state will actually go against what we are doing. Why is dyslexia called the “middle-class disease”? It is because middle-class parents—or exam-passing parents—expect their children to succeed, and when they do not, they ask why. Those who come from a culture where people have not passed exams say, “Well, I didn’t, so why should they?”. It is that simple. We have discovered that dyslexia is passed down through families, so guess what we have got: a nice downward spiral. Unless we implement the Acts we already have and we intervene, we will not get there.

All areas of disability have this. We have had debates about bad implementation and, for example, how some police have not been aware of autism, and how they have interacted badly with someone and then been terrified to admit that they have got it wrong. Some hotel rooms simply are not accessible to someone in a wheelchair or even, perhaps, someone who just has bad knees and cannot get in. Hotels are supposed to have dealt with that issue for decades. Unless we address the implementation of law and stop saying that everything is bad if it comes in regulations, we will create more problems. We just shift the problems.

I now intend to get a bit of reflected glory from something with which I am associated only in name but not by deed. Microlink, of which I am chairman, has been working with Lloyds Bank. We have had a good, practical example in the business environment of how to help people. I should probably give the snappy title, which is the “Lloyds workplace adjustment case study”—I can see that tripping off everyone’s tongue. With Lloyds, we discovered that if management says, “This is important”, things happen. The management has to say to the line manager, “It is your problem, so deal with it—it comes out of your budget”. Things happen if you drive things from the top. The net result was that Lloyds got absenteeism down and saved money. If law is implemented across departments and you make sure that things happen quickly and easily, you will not always have to go back to the big beasts up there. After that, you might think about changing the law. Until you have done that and have a culture that comes down and drives forward, those big Acts are needed. Without them, nothing happens and there is no potential big stick and there is nothing to achieve results.

Let us look at the culture and make sure that it goes down through the legal framework. We must implement what we have and should not be terrified of making a regulation that says that something should happen quickly or saying to someone, “Another little regulation has come in—why haven’t you done it?”. People should not be allowed to say, “But you are interfering with a great structure and you do not understand the bigger picture”. When most people talk about the bigger picture, they are talking about their own very small one. They do not understand that it goes bigger than them.

If education changes are not implemented in a school because they are too expensive for the school budget, it is not the school which ultimately pays but the taxpayer because there are people on benefits for far longer than needed. That is what we are talking about. If we continue to attack the big pillars before we have something to replace them—and we may never be able to replace them—and fill in the gaps and make sure that things work, we will always have trouble. The cultural background is very hostile to taking positive action. Please can we make sure that we look at implementing what we have already said we will do? Unless we do that, we will have very little room for any form of manoeuvre.