Civil Society

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, what a lovely offering for Members of your Lordships’ House to have one Griffiths followed by another. It may never happen again and I hope noble Lords will make a note in their minds of the fact that they were here when it happened. In Fforestfach and in Burry Port the two Griffiths would be distinguished from each other, not by their political persuasions but because one is “Griff church” and the other is “Griff chapel”, so it is from a more angular view that I shall comment on the issues that have been raised.

I live near the Old Street roundabout, “Silicon Roundabout”, where buildings are going up at a rate of knots and high-tech industries are being created by the hundred day by day. Just up the road is the forthcoming development that will be so good when it happens—we have been disrupted for so many years—of the Crossrail station linking Liverpool Street with all the other places. At the Old Street roundabout—now no longer ours but until recently it was—stands the Leysian Mission. It was a mission outpost for the pupils and alumni of The Leys school in Cambridge—a Methodist school. Between the two wars the mission was a terrific place for addressing poverty. People would come in voluntarily to attend to the needs of suffering people during times of depression, offering clothing, food, recreation and a fight for justice. There was a poor man’s lawyer, a crèche and all those things. Thousands of people were helped.

The Second World War damaged the buildings and they were not quite as useful afterwards, but more importantly the welfare state made many of the services being offered no longer necessary or apposite. As I look back from this vantage point to the fact that such institutions—Toynbee Hall is another—lost their focus for proper reasons, I sometimes ask myself whether there was an unintended consequence of the creation of the welfare state. Let there be no mistake about it—I am a prime beneficiary of all the provisions of the welfare state, having enjoyed national assistance, national health, education and all the rest of it through all the instrumentalities that flowed from the creation of the welfare state. However, the unintended consequence is that it sort of diminished the perceived need for voluntary activity in community action and work. We have to work hard in the economic climate that we are now living through to rediscover and reinvigorate that sense of voluntarism. The voluntary sector is picking up, whether or not it wants to, on much of the work done by public institutions which are finding their budgets severely threatened. It is important to recreate this voluntary sector, as there will be a lot more work for it to do.

I want to focus on another side of the Silicon Roundabout. Right opposite diametrically is the Central Foundation Boys’ School. I am the chair of trustees for that and the girls’ school in Tower Hamlets. I want to point to the plight of a group of volunteers who serve as governors of that school. At the beginning of the previous Parliament, two education Bills were pushed through that made the academisation of our education system more rapid. The Queen’s Speech has promised another such Bill, which will make it almost impossible to stop the tide of this one-size-fits-all approach to solving our educational problems. I do not want to go into that for the moment. That school is not yet an academy—it may have to become one—but headmasters, headmistresses and governors are being given much more responsibility for running multimillion pound businesses without necessarily any of the skills or the salaries that go with that. They are accountable only to central government—nothing local at all. I simply warn your Lordships that there are impending problems in this area, as those who have not been trained to run businesses find themselves up against obstacles that they cannot solve. One of the glories of the voluntary sector in this country is the governance of schools—how many people give hours and hours of their time for this purpose—and the present economic and political situation will threaten this wonderful tradition in British society if we are not careful.

The last time I addressed the subject of the report Who Is My Neighbour? was, of all things, at Gray’s Inn, in the chapel there, when I preached the Mulligan sermon about a month ago. It is to remember a judgment made by Lord Atkin—another fine Welshman; I just wish his name had been Griffiths as well—as long ago as 1932. The rule he made to deal with a proliferation of precedents in the application of the common law was to prove foundational for all subsequent judgments. The Donoghue v Stevenson case had to do with someone who manufactured ginger beer, someone who sold it, someone who drank it and, to her consternation, discovered coming out of the bottle that she was pouring on to her ice cream a decomposing snail. Your Lordships can see that the opportunity to preach some pretty vivid sermons arises from these circumstances.

The point is that the dear Lord Atkin of Aberdovey concluded that there was a duty of care and a question of negligence in law not only between the manufacturer and his client, who sold it in the restaurant, and not only between the owner of the restaurant and the person who bought it, but also to the person who had received for nothing the gift from her friend, the bottle in which the snail was to be found. The dear Lord concluded that the duty of care—the laws of negligence—could not be applied in the courts other than restrictively and he longed for theologians and those into moral theology to look at the question of the unrestricted applicability of the duty of care and the question of negligence. It is the job of the church to do that. We want to point to the fact that this duty of care ought to apply generally, not just in the restricted way that the courts feel obliged to apply it.

It is the duty of politics, of course, to take those understandings and—since politics is the law of the possible—with its own restrictions address them. Who is my neighbour, the duty of care and the question of negligence are questions for British society as a whole and nobody should attack the church for raising them in a general way, even though we in politics must then see what we can do by way of response.