Life Chances Strategy

Lord Fink Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fink (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on securing this important debate on life chances. I know how passionate he is on the subject and on enhancing life chances in general. Transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged is not just a strategy of this Government but is the mission of many charities, some of which have been talked about today, and of philanthropists.

My poor health in childhood—especially severe asthma—which caused me to miss some school and much sport, was transformed by NHS treatment and later by neural surgery, and my family’s fortune was transformed largely by education, so I will focus my speech on these areas.

All the research I have seen on transforming life chances shows that the key to breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty is for a member, or possibly two members, of a family to get a worthwhile job. Two of the barriers to this goal—my noble friends will talk about many more—are poor childhood health and lack of good academic qualifications. As someone who benefited from the NHS on the former and from a scholarship, left by a benefactor in the 16th century, to Manchester Grammar School for the latter, while I cannot claim to have ever been one of the most disadvantaged, I have personally benefited in these two areas.

As my favourite actor, Kevin Spacey, said recently at a charity gala, if you are fortunate enough in life to reach the top of your profession or to earn significant income from your chosen career, then it is your duty to send the elevator back down. So, starting with children’s health, I refer to my non-financial interests shown in the register, which include being president of the Evelina London Children’s Hospital at Guy’s and St Thomas’. Not only is the hospital treating some of the most vulnerable children from the poorest boroughs to the south of London, but it is using valuable resources provided by our Government and philanthropists to intervene with babies who are most at risk of being born disabled, either by very premature birth or by risk factors identified in the pregnancy of their mothers. A team led by Professor Edwards has pioneered treatments, including the cooling of newborn babies’ brains, that significantly reduce or eradicate several of the disabilities that these babies often suffer. There is also groundbreaking research at the hospital to identify the underlying cause of peanut allergy and to treat it successfully. The early results of the research carried out by Professor Gideon Lack and his team have demonstrated how this debilitating and, sadly, sometimes fatal allergy can be overcome. The Government’s commitment to protect health spending and to continue to fund research has been valuable in making a difference in these areas and in many people’s lives. Will the Minister tell the House about the Government’s ongoing commitment in these areas of research?

I am proud to be a trustee of Ark, an educational charity which runs one of the most successful chains of academy schools in England. It has managed to reduce the shameful achievement gap that plagues the most disadvantaged children. Those in receipt of pupil premium are much more likely to fail to get five good GCSEs and in fact many schools really give up on them. Looking at the tables published in 2014 ranking schools by the amount of progress made by the most disadvantaged students between primary school and the age of 16, I was proud that Ark had four academy schools in the top 50 of 6,500 schools. That is a remarkable achievement that shows that the attainment gap can be closed.

The academy I chair has a valuable relationship with the local diocese as it is a Church of England school. I believe that my noble friend Lord Farmer’s school is also a church school and that he works in partnership with the local diocese.

The work that my right honourable friends Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan have done in building on and expanding the original concept of academy schools from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has been inspirational and genuinely transformational. I applaud the excellent work done in this area by my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham and several other noble Lords who are committed to academies. However, good schools go beyond the academic measure of GCSEs. We work harder on getting good-quality work experience, which is one of those advantages that middle-class parents and kids take for granted, and we try to get access for most of our students to visit universities. Many of our students have never had a family member go to university, and in some cases no one from the predecessor school went to university.

In my view, the acid test of whether many of these strategies work—a point that I made at the start—is the number or percentage of children growing up in workless households, because role models really count. When the Government took office in 2010, almost one in five households had no one in work, and around 1.4 million people had been on benefits for most of the previous decade. Since 2010 the number of workless households has fallen by over 680,000 to its lowest level since records began. This clearly demonstrates that the whole range of policies has already started to deliver on the strategy to transform the lives of many of the most disadvantaged.