Tackling Intergenerational Unfairness (Select Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I first saw this report on the Order Paper, I felt that I should make one or two points. They were about points (2) and (3) in the summary, regarding housing supply and education and training. Of course, about two minutes later, we discover that the Government’s White Paper on lifelong learning is coming out and we have a Statement tomorrow. I will therefore restrict my remarks on the education facet to ones of a general quality.

We have a society that is obsessed with home ownership and in which we encourage people to take up home ownership. This means that if you cannot do it, you have effectively lost out. We have been told for many years that this is the way we should be living. Unless we get back to a situation where renting a house is normal, you are not discriminated against for doing it and you have some security when you are doing it, we are always going to have this problem. In the light of what has been pointed out here—it is a very recognised problem; there is no way that this is news to anybody—what are the Government going to do about securing the tenure of renters and making it economically advantageous for landlords to provide long-term tenure?

At the moment, with low interest rates and rising property values, it is always going to be tempting to sell a property or get rid of tenants and re-let. This means that the person who is renting is always going to be under pressure and looking over their shoulder because they do not know whether they have security. This does not encourage them to do anything on a fixed-term basis. It will discourage them from, for instance, getting married, having children and securing places where they can go to school. It does not help. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some idea about what the Government intend to do here.

It is a recognised problem and this Government have to deal with it. It is a real problem and has been there for a long time. We need to know what the thinking is and how that ties in, for instance, with other government activity. One of the points you could raise in almost any debate is: what is the cross-departmental attitude and approach to it? How are the departments communicating? We all know that cross-departmental approaches happen only if some people at the top of both groups make sure that they do—preferably the Prime Minister, but at least Secretaries of State, making a fuss. Otherwise, people sit in their little silos—I say that as I sit in my little goldfish bowl here, slightly more isolated and looking at what is going on.

Furthermore, one of the most depressing things about the report was discovering that I am a baby boomer and not part of Generation X. We must look at the training profile of what is going on here. I know that the Government are responding but I am not sure whether the Minister will respond tomorrow on this subject; I suspect not, but it is possible—we may find that out in the summing up. If we are going to encourage people to get trained for the jobs they are confronting at the moment, we must have a much more flexible approach. I see that this is suggested in the initial discussions on this. How does this tie into this structure? A job for life is something that is no longer there.

We have encouraged people towards other models of training in the past. A few years ago, everything was solved by making sure that everybody was a graduate, possibly because all the people who were proposing it were graduates and they had done okay. Then apprenticeships were the answer. They promised great things. Apprenticeships have a horrible problem of disappearing when economic problems come up or you are not recruiting. At the moment, we are hitting a depression—not caused by government action but maybe encouraged by it—so you will not get many apprenticeships coming up. The current government approach seems to be that of lifelong learning. Will the Government give us a general assurance today that if, for instance, you get a degree—a level 6 qualification—you will be able to get qualifications at lower levels, levels 4 and 5, to make yourself more relevant for jobs as they occur and change?

I mentioned my age before. I am of the age to have hit the depression of the late 1970s and early 1980s when the huge structure of production line jobs disappeared. We went to white-collar, retail and support jobs. Those jobs are disappearing now for other jobs based online. Will we take a flexible approach to make sure that people can retrain again? Otherwise, we are going to repeat the problems of the past.