Tackling Intergenerational Unfairness (Select Committee Report)

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this key report on intergenerational unfairness and this debate. It is a privilege to take part. I want to focus my contribution on three issues.

The first concerns education and training. I welcome the report’s perspective and recommendations; as others have said, they are even more relevant now. However, as we know, the landscape is shifting significantly beneath our feet because of the immediate demands of the pandemic and the likely longer-term shifts in working patterns created by the fourth industrial revolution. We are sorely in need of creative, imaginative, cross-party and cross-society intergenerational thinking on education for life, not simply for work.

Last week, I spent some time listening to colleagues whose role it is to support more than 280 Church of England schools in the diocese of Oxford, together responsible for the education of almost 60,000 children. While they reported the extraordinary creativity and commitment of their heads, teachers and governors, they also report that morale and energy in our schools are absolutely at rock bottom. Will the Government act to restore and build up the morale of the teaching profession at the moment? Will teachers be prioritised in the vaccination programme to enable schools to begin on-site teaching again more widely? Will the Government act to bring together the best minds of the day to focus on the challenge of all-age education through a royal commission or similar?

The second issue is that of the changing world of work and the rise of the gig economy. Many gig workers in our country are without rights; this disproportionately affects young adults. The proportion of the workforce in zero-hours and gig work is increasing. Low-paid workers in the UK are more than twice as likely to lose their jobs in the pandemic. The Government have accepted the need for a good work plan and have committed to legislating to improve the clarity of employment status. The need is even more urgent now than a year ago, yet there is still no new employment strategy and no apparent progress to remedy a situation that is getting worse every month.

The third issue is that of all-age communities. I welcome the survey and recommendations, especially the part played in the report by the people of Doncaster—part of my former diocese, Sheffield. However, the report and the Government’s response seem to be blind to the impact of churches and faith communities in building all-age social capital across communities and generations. The value of the services and support that church buildings alone provide, and the health and well-being that they create, has been calculated at £12.4 billion per annum. Churches were involved in running more than 35,000 projects before Covid, including food banks, parent and toddler groups, night shelters and breakfast clubs. Mosques, synagogues and gurdwaras are making a similar contribution within and across generations. Will the report’s authors and the Government give greater recognition to the vital role that faith communities play in the social fabric of the nation as builders of intergenerational fairness?