Tackling Intergenerational Unfairness (Select Committee Report)

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to participate in this afternoon’s debate. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register.

It was a privilege to serve alongside colleagues, many of whom have spoken or will speak this afternoon, on the Select Committee under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord True. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Price on his excellent introduction and on deploying so many stats to such good effect in it. Similarly, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Moynihan on highlighting three key issues: loneliness, the public realm, which he rightly championed, and social prescribing.

As colleagues have already noted, the report is as pertinent today as it was when it was published some 21 months ago. The recommendations therein remain so. The Covid context has merely added extra piquancy to the report’s findings. In many ways, Covid is emblematic of the whole, with intergenerational issues and complexity. The health crisis has disproportionately affected our older citizens and taken many of them well before their time. On the flipside, it has decimated businesses, employment and education, particularly that of our young people.

As our report set out, and as Covid has demonstrated, we as a state and a society need to do far more with data and far more in real time to get to grips with some of these extraordinary policy challenges, which, as noble Lords have mentioned, are people challenges. When it comes to education, how will we enable our young people, kept away from school from so long, to recover and not be scarred for life by this educational shutout? When will the schools go back? What action is being taken urgently to enable this to happen? What plans are we putting in place to superserve those people and enable them to be in the position they would have been in had their education continued?

As other colleagues have mentioned, the skills White Paper is an excellent intervention in this space—not least the lifetime skills guarantee, which cuts through that often generational issue and understanding around education and skills, and the greater role for business and employers to set the skills that we will require to grow our economy when we come out of this terrible Covid crisis.

I want to add something on the issue of unpaid internships and their blighting impact, particularly on young people. Will my noble friend the Minister support my Private Member’s Bill seeking a prohibition on all work experience exceeding four weeks? In a modern economy, there should be no unpaid internships.

Other noble Lords have mentioned housing, which is a key issue, not least with the highly inflated assets resulting from quantitative easing. When it comes to London, is it still sensible that we are shooting for a 10 million population for it? Londoners were never consulted in the first instance, nor was the nation. Would it make more sense for London, as the capital, to be right-sized rather than supersized? Similarly, when it comes to levelling up, there are so many brownfield sites in and around all our towns and great cities up and down the country. What efforts are the Government making to get more housing developed on such brownfield sites, not least with factory builds, which can put up quality housing at greater speed to address the extraordinary housing need that we currently face?

The truth is that we are all in this, but currently we are not all in it together. We have to ensure that we all emerge from this Covid crisis together or we will not really emerge at all. I believe that will come from the right combination of talent and technology, inclusion and innovation. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that the United Kingdom—the great fabric in the tapestry that runs through us all—is all about people, place and potential?