Young People

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when we talk about young people in a debate, we tend to go in one of two ways. One is, “It were tough when I were a lad. They don’t know what anything is about nowadays”, and the other is all gloom and dreadfulness. The answer is always somewhere in the middle. We are facing a world that is changing faster than anything anyone in this Chamber has experienced. Through the digital revolution, everything is happening more quickly. I think that the best thing the various bits of government could do is look at how we tell people what is out there and what the opportunities are.

At the moment, we have an entire society that seems to be going through something similar to the familiar story we hear in this Chamber from people who have held office about the red box with the one piece of relevant information tucked away at the bottom. You do not know where it is and you cannot find it. If you understand the systems you are dealing with, you will get the best out of society because the variety of information will come through in waves. If you do not know where to look, you will not. If you have guidance from family, friends and so on, it will help you to get the best out of society. It has always been the case that if you know what you are looking for, you will find it.

At the moment, the huge opportunities of the modern world are often missed because the people we are talking about have no one to show them where to look. There is a changing variety of opportunities in the types of work available in the creative industries, but we are not training people to tell young people how at least to get their foot in the door. If you do not get that sort of information, you stand very little chance of being in a position to exploit what will happen tomorrow. We must at least react to what is going on today.

In my experience, democratic government is at its best when it reacts quickly to what is happening now. Future-gazing has a bad record of getting things horribly wrong, but if we react to what is happening today, we tend to get better results. At the moment, we are not getting the best out of the environment around us because not enough people know how to get into it or access it properly. We need to accept that the old structure of careers guidance and advice, which asks young people what they want to do next, has to be better.

We may well have to provide better structures for lifelong learning in this rapidly changing world, but unless someone tells a young person what is available now and helps them to think about their jumping-off point, they will miss out. If we continue to underinvest in the knowledge of what is out there and the guidance to take people through, the groups with the least input from those around them in the form of family and close-knit support structures will continue to underperform on a massive scale. Unless people are at least informed about what is available, we will not get the best out of them.

I could go on for longer on this subject and one or two others, but I will leave it by referring to a debate from a few days ago. We found ourselves talking about another problem we face today: people going to the gym, pumping themselves up and taking drugs. I could not find anyone who could tell me exactly what these drugs do to you and why they are bad for you. I know that they are bad, but I could not find out how exactly. If that can happen to someone reasonably well-informed, heaven help a 17 year-old who has not been told anything about the subject.