Queen’s Speech

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow that excellent maiden speech from my noble friend Lady Blake. There is no doubt that the House will benefit from her rich experience of local government and I look forward to debating the merits of Leeds United with her in the years to come. Let me also start by reminding noble Lords of my interests as entered in the register, in particular my education interests and my work with Purpose on climate education.

The pandemic crisis has held up a mirror to our country. It has shown the extraordinary resilience, community spirit and capacity for innovation and compassion of the British people. It reinforced our love of our NHS, while showing the impoverished state of the care sector. It has also shown us crushing levels of food poverty and the new phenomenon of digital poverty.

The mirror of the pandemic can also be held up to this gracious Speech. Why is there no care Bill? Just putting the words “social care” in the title of the health department does not mean that the problems go away. They include the lack of PPE for care workers, infected patients discharged into care homes during the pandemic and families having to go to court so that their relatives could get out without requiring two weeks in solitary confinement. All this and the omission from the gracious Speech show a blatant disregard for this critical sector that now needs answers from this Government on how it is to be funded sustainably, thereby enabling a universal lifting of quality for patients and staff. I say to Ministers: time is running out. This is such a difficult problem and the political window for making difficult decisions is closing before the next election becomes too imminent.

Like others, I was also expecting to see an employment Bill, as promised. There is no sign of it or of doing something about workers’ rights that, in the age of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, are so sorely needed. If they are serious about levelling up, Ministers need to rediscover that priority. If there is to be substance beyond the levelling-up rhetoric, we need a place-based approach to skills and proper funding for employment outcomes, not just qualification outcomes. Instead, we have a Bill offering debt for skills to the least qualified. We have a Bill that puts a cap on one’s ability to access that funding if one has already achieved a level 3 qualification. This flagship Bill in the legislative programme ignores the realities that more disadvantaged people are more nervous of taking on debt, and that technology will be deskilling plenty of people with A-levels, BTECs, higher-level apprenticeships and degrees. We need instead to properly delegate funding and strategy to a local level, as my noble friend just said—as did the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, in his fine speech. That funding and those strategies should be delegated to mayors or local economic partnerships to allow them to integrate skills and employment policy, and build talent pipelines for the sectors of the economy that those areas are choosing to target.

I welcome the setting in law of the target to reach carbon emissions of 78% per cent of 1990 levels by 2035. That means we are rapidly moving towards all jobs being green jobs and we need our skills and schools to reflect that. A child starting school this September will leave school in 2035. By that time, she or he will need the knowledge, skills and mindset of carbon zero so that when they enter that workforce in 2035 they are good to go in what will be a very different world, in which we are consuming food, travelling and working differently.

Just pretending that the same knowledge-based curriculum that we have had for the past 70 years—the same pedagogies and the same qualifications—is sufficient would fail our young people. A better and fairer school system is not achievable through just catch-up of learning loss. That can be done only through significant root-and-branch reform that develops cognitive intelligence equally with social, emotional, physical and technical skills—starting, of course, with the early years.

This gracious Speech reflects the Government’s priorities. They prefer to put disenfranchising electors over fixing the care sector. They put curtailing the right to protest over secure jobs for low-paid workers. They put attacking judicial review over a coherent approach to regeneration through education. I look forward to the debates in this Session.