National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker]

If the noble Lord will allow me to finish, I am going to come to the point about commencement, which is what this amendment is about.

I simply wish to say that the level of financial and other reporting which the NCS Trust has given so far has been found to be inadequate by the Public Accounts Committee, which has asked the trust to provide a timetable and an action plan to put in place the governance, leadership and expertise necessary to deliver the expansion of this project.

We have argued from these Benches that citizenship and civic participation are important, but we raised these questions throughout the passage of the Bill and we did not get answers. They are fundamental to the capacity of the organisation to deliver this scheme.

The Bill should not be commenced. Its commencement should be delayed until all the recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee have been fulfilled and a report has been provided to Parliament, and until the governance, management, planning and performance of the National Citizen Service Trust and the Challenge Network have been independently evaluated and a report produced. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee should hold an inquiry into the role of Ministers and officials, just as it did with Kids Company. The transformation of the NCS into a royal charter body should be delayed until its eligibility can be proven.

In the meantime, the trust should be enabled to run its 2017 programme and it should be informed that its tenure and the remainder of its contract will be subject to the fulfilment of the criteria I have just mentioned. The National Citizen Service is a worthwhile enterprise. The body it has been entrusted to is not yet fit for purpose and a great deal of public funding is going to be staked on an organisation which so far has proven itself unable to deliver. On that basis, the Bill should not go ahead.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my registered interests in this area as a board member. The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, has raised some rational points in relation to the Public Accounts Committee, and they should be taken seriously. But to say that these matters have not been addressed and then to say in the next breath, “I have addressed them throughout the passage of the Bill and did not receive answers”, beggars belief.

I sat in Committee and on Report, as other Members of the House did, and heard the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, quite rightly, repeatedly raising the questions she has raised this afternoon; raising the comparative issues—which are not comparable—with regard to the Scouts; and raising issues in relation to contracting out by the National Citizen Service, which is a commissioning body and contracts out the actual delivery of the service to dozens of organisations in the voluntary and not-for-profit sector. The very reason the Bill is before us—and I welcome the two technical amendments —is precisely to ensure that the lessons of the past four years have been learned and will be taken forward.

That is why the noble Baroness’s speech today, together with her numerous interventions in Committee and on Report, which she is perfectly entitled to make, would make a very good speech in favour of the Bill. As I understand it, she welcomes the National Citizen Service, questions the value for money, and raises issues from the Public Accounts Committee, which have not yet been answered, but raises one absolutely fundamental issue: that the long-term outcome measures of the investment in young people engaging with voluntary service and the week’s residential course cannot yet be proved. That is a non sequitur. How can you prove the long-term outcomes at this stage of measures that have been in place for only four years?

On that count alone, and on the count that the measures that the noble Baroness questions have been questioned—even though this afternoon she says they have not been, and have not been answered—we should progress with the Bill, which will set in place an entirely new board and structure. I will not be part of that, but I wish the National Citizen Service well because, although it was not my idea and did not spring from my party, it is a fundamental investment in the well-being of our country and our young people.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not detain the House for long at all. I declare my interest as a serving councillor and as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association. I rise simply to ask for some reassurance—it may have been given, but I have not seen it—that the new duties comprised in Amendment 1, which is a perfectly sensible amendment that I support, will be regarded as falling within the new burdens doctrine so that, if local authorities are required to expend more on providing the services identified here, they will be reimbursed by government in accordance with that doctrine.