Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I want to speak relatively briefly in support of my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s Amendment 56A. I find the procedure slightly odd—I am still trying to influence the Minister after she has asked for it to be withdrawn—but I will give it a good go.

The importance of financial education and financial literacy in primary education does not need too much arguing. I recall a friend of mine, Emily, who finished secondary with four A-levels about three or four years ago. She chose to become a successful actress rather than go to university. About six months after she started work—she got work very quickly—she was furious that her education system had not told her about taxation and that suddenly she had to put money aside to pay her taxes as a self-employed actress.

That reinforced for me that we have an education system that is really passive on this. I was delighted a couple of years ago, when I was working for a company called TES, to be involved with the Bank of England and the Beano on producing some financial literacy resources for primary schools, which were very well received. I also endorse the work of KickStart Money.

It has become particularly acute that we must do more in primary education because of the cashless nature of our transactions. According to a survey this month published by, I think, Yahoo, fewer than a quarter of transactions in this country are now paid with cash. Children no longer see and feel money exchanging hands. They are no longer adding it up and making sense of 1p, 2p, 5p, 20p, 50p, £1, £10 and so on because it is not part of what most of us handle any more. There are apps. My stepdaughter will be 10 tomorrow. We use an app for her called RoosterMoney, which helps her with some of these things. But there has been an impact for primary schoolchildren on their numeracy, their understanding of debt, and of how their school is paid for and how their teachers are paid, because it is taxation and public money. These are really important parts of citizenship.

While the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, was talking I thought that, although the amendment is about resourcing financial literacy in primary schools, I had better quickly check the primary curriculum to see what is in it. There are two mentions of “financial”. One is in respect of what the curriculum requires years 5 and 6 to do in terms of spelling. The noble Baroness asked whether there is something horribly wrong in the Department for Education. It is so obsessed with things such as spelling in English that you have to learn how endings that sound like “shall” are spelled, as in “official”, “artificial” and “financial”. The only other mention is in the context of maths. It says that studying maths is a good idea and “necessary for financial literacy”, so it gets a slight mention but that is it. There is no real requirement, but there is a little bit of a nudge that there is a good reason for studying maths. We have to do better.

This amendment, and putting something in statute, would give some priority and send a positive signal from government that we should do more on this. It would be able to fund some of the teacher training that is important to give primary school teachers better confidence and competence around how to link this in to various parts of the curriculum, because it is not just in maths that you can teach financial literacy. Of course, it could fund more of those resources so that it is not just down to the Beano, the Bank of England, KickStart and others and we have some properly evidence-based resources that help teachers to link across the curriculum in an engaging and interesting way for primary school students.

I urge the Minister to reflect and perhaps have a chat with some of her colleagues in the Department for Education—particularly the Schools Minister, who is obsessed with spelling, punctuation, grammar and maths but, frankly, is not really that interested in very much else in terms of what is specified in the national curriculum. We could do better.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his remarks. I absolutely do not deny in any way the importance of financial education, but the issue here is not the importance of any individual cause. The challenge we are faced with—or the privilege that we will all have—is to contribute to a conversation about the right cause for this particular stream of money, with its unique features, and that includes the existing causes that are funded. We will be putting the cart before the horse if we focus too much on causes to go into the Bill; rather, we should put the combined intellect of your Lordships and others into making sure that we spend future moneys in the best way possible.