Poverty

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has in his own right done something extremely positive by creating a mechanism whereby individuals can find their way out of poverty and, hopefully, reach a point where they can be gainfully employed.

Poverty, as has been said, is not easy to define, but anybody who has run a constituency advice centre in a deprived area over the years very soon learns that it is made up of a range of components. There are people who are solely dependent on benefits, there are people who have the capacity to work and can earn money themselves and there are people in the middle who need a bit of both. Of course, it is a cycle, as was said, because the same group of people is never necessarily always unemployed. The last job I did in government was as Employment Minister; every month we would get the figures, and there is a churn. Some people are unemployed this month, but they may not be unemployed again for another six years, 10 years, or six months—they come and go. But there are people who, for a variety of reasons such as disability or mental illness, just do not have the capacity to work. A growing number who become carers are probably excluded from working, even though they have the personal capability to do so. We understand the dilemmas. Some people recommend raising the level of benefits, but that would probably mean that another group of people would not find it worth their while to work. It is a tremendously difficult subject.

The Motion asks us to take note of the case for tackling the causes of poverty, and I should like to focus on one issue about which I feel very strongly. What is the point of spending billions and billions of pounds on further and higher education and on the most immensely complicated scientific research if people still leave school unable to read and write? Let us not say that we have no literacy issues in this country—that is not true. In my last job I only dealt with children post-school, but I at least ring-fenced the funds after 2008 to try to keep a focus on that. It is immeasurably more complicated to teach a person beyond school age to read and write, but there are ways. The Union Learning Fund, which a number of noble Lords will be aware of, goes into workplaces to teach people in their 40s and 50s to read and write. They are taught under the umbrella of computers so as not to embarrass senior people—after all, some are grandfathers. What are we doing as a country if we are still allowing people to leave school unable to read and write? Can anybody explain to me what the options are for such people? There will always be people who can live on their wits and find a way of making money, but let us face it, folks—my Lords—it is the general ordinary person we are talking about, and if that child coming out of school does not have those basic skills, they are unemployable, effectively, for life.

We pride ourselves in this country on the help we give to the international community and we spend lots of money on defence and other worthy issues such as social security and health, but we still allow—I think this is a national scandal—people to come out of school without the basic literacy and numeracy skills. The Motion is asking us about tackling the causes of poverty in the United Kingdom, and I submit that that is one cause. It is preventable, largely. It is an emergency, in my view. There is a cure if we get our schooling system right. We all know what can happen in a classroom if there is a bit of bullying or a pupil is picked on—the teacher may be overburdened with 30 or 40 pupils—they are stuck at the back, they will not admit it, they become rebellious and they turn to anger in their teenage years out of frustration.

I hope the Minister will take this to his colleagues in the Department for Education. It is a fundamental opportunity. If we concentrate on that issue, we could prevent an entire generation of young people going into the system where they will never succeed or reach their full potential. I accept that it takes time, but the Motion talks about tackling the causes, and lack of literacy and numeracy is one of the causes of poverty. We have not solved it in this country and I hope we will put our minds to it, because we have proved in the past on other issues that, if we put our minds to it, we can succeed.