National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - part two): House of Lords
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to the Bill and thank the House authorities for arranging matters so that those noble Lords who also serve on the Charities Select Committee have been able to participate in the debate. Their contribution has been very helpful.

What a rich debate it has been, despite being—as one might say—a game of two halves or a debate separated by a new runway. We covered many aspects of volunteering and the contribution that charities and third-sector organisations make to our civic life. I certainly learned a lot about what has been going on out there.

Like many noble Lords, I, too, am grateful to the agencies and charities that have provided briefings and made very helpful suggestions for improvements that might be made to the Bill during its passage through your Lordships’ House. I also thank the Library for its very helpful note about the Bill and its antecedents in the big society.

The Minister said in his introduction that the National Citizen Service Bill is intended to secure the future of the NCS and make the NCS Trust more accountable to Parliament and the public. He said that the Bill, although slim, was large in aspiration. I have to say that the preponderance of comments have pointed out the opportunities missed and the lack of ambition in the Bill to solve problems in the broader area of civic engagement, volunteering and citizenship education. But we are where we are.

In May 2016 the briefing notes for the Queen’s Speech explained that a National Citizen Service Bill would,

“expand National Citizen Service by encouraging thousands more young people to take advantage of the skills building programmes offered”,

that it would be granted a royal charter and that the NCS would,

“benefit from a £1.2 billion cash injection”.

So the organisation is well funded and sufficiently well regarded by government to be given the benefit of the stardust—as I think it was called—of the special protection that can be accorded by a royal charter. I noted, as did a number of noble Lords, the reservations expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, with which I have great sympathy. I understand where he is coming from. Those of us who have been grappling with the BBC royal charter and the fallout from the Leveson report might well have good reason to pause at this point—but, by and large, it probably is a good thing that we are proceeding down this route.

My noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Maude—who did not need to dress up for this occasion; we are quite capable of doing this in a democratic and open way—raised the independence of the new organisation and whether it would be possible to arrange for the board and chair to be appointed independently of the Government. They wanted the organisation to be not so much at arm’s length but insulated from government. As my noble friend Lord Lennie said, there is concern about the role of the Inland Revenue, whose letters do not always bring good news and may be viewed with suspicion.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, that the key point here is the need to ensure that the organisation is both independent and seen to be independent of government; otherwise, as many noble Lords pointed out, it may destroy the possibility that it will become the rite of passage for young people that we all hope it will be. I am sure we will return to this issue in Committee.

A number of noble Lords raised the question of scale. The November 2015 spending review included funding to expand the NCS to deliver up to 300,000 places a year by 2019-20—which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, said, is an ambitious uplift even allowing for the fact that NCS is as much an enabler of other organisations to run their courses as it is a direct provider. Indeed, a number of noble Lords suggested that in future it should concentrate on being an enabler and not a provider—more Channel 4 than BBC, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, suggested.

Several noble Lords focused on one of the distinctive aspects of the NCS, which is that it seeks to bring together young people from different backgrounds, to help participants develop greater confidence, self-awareness and responsibility by meeting people they would not ordinarily meet. It is not the only organisation in the UK that does this sort of work but its determination to run mixed geographical and cultural groupings marks it out. I took the feeling across the House to be that the new organisation will have to use all the tricks in the book to do this, combined with what the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, called a relentless focus on those who are disadvantaged and a steely determination to ensure that they participate—not forgetting those with disabilities or those who live in rural settings, who often have their own barriers to participation, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth reminded us.

The introduction of the Bill gives Parliament and the country an opportunity to reconsider the potential of the title words: “national”, “citizen” and “service”. On “national”, under the Bill the NCS’s funding and current activities are restricted to England, as we were reminded by the noble Lord, Lord Wei. I support him in this. As he said, of course it is right to respect the wishes of the nations of the UK to come up with their own models but it seems strange that more has not been done to seek partner organisations in Scotland, for example, and to give them the carrot of an opportunity to have guaranteed funding and royal charter protection.

Incidentally, I assume that Barnett consequentials flow from the funding that is going into the NCS. Can the Minister help us here and point out where the money is being spent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland if it is not being spent on the NCS? After all, £1.3 billion is quite a lot of extra cash to be accounted for.

On “citizen”, a number of noble Lords took up my noble friend Lord Blunkett’s plea that the NCS should not and cannot exist in isolation from wider considerations of citizenship. As we have heard, the risk is that citizenship as a curriculum subject is going to disappear. Can the Minister see how this might be resolved in practice? I would be grateful if he could spend some time on this—or perhaps write to us if it takes the input of other departments to do that.

On “service”, it was argued by my noble friend Lady Royall and others that the NCS makes up part of a mosaic of volunteering opportunities for young people. The research done on the pilot cohorts shows that the NCS has had a positive impact on social integration and whets young people’s appetite for further volunteering. So it makes good sense to see the current NCS programmes as a beginning and not an end of opportunities to serve.

This raises the need for proper recognition for all young people who serve by creating a legal status for full-time volunteers, who are—in the eyes of many, and as we were reminded—currently punished for their efforts by an outdated legal set-up that considers them to be NEETs: not in education, employment or training. In America, France and Germany, full-time volunteering has a legal status and engages hundreds of thousands of young people every year. The figures are impressive: 75,000 in America, 45,000 in Germany and, in France, more than 100,000 places a year by 2018. Will the Minister share with us where the Government have got to on this issue, and whether this would be a fruitful line to take up in Committee?

On evaluation and monitoring, we have had reports from NatCen and Ipsos MORI, which have been reviewing and reporting on the pilot and the early rollout of the NCS. It is, however, unfortunate that the Bill has been introduced in the midst of an NAO review of whether the Cabinet Office is achieving value for money in its delivery of NCS. It seems to be rather germane to the issues that we are discussing. It remains to be seen whether the review, due to be published, it says, in winter 2016—it seems like winter now—will be available by the time the Bill goes into Committee in the House of Lords next month. Will the Minister enlighten us on this point?

Can the Minister also comment on the plea made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett and others that the performance measures to be used for this project should be outcome based and not simply raw throughput? If we want this to be a rite of passage for the youth of our country, and to change the way that young people engage with civic society, we have to allow the programme to find its place in the volunteering and civic engagement ecosystem. If we are to be truly ambitious, which the Minister asked us to be, we should allow NCS the space and time to work out what works, and give it the independence, the structure and the resources to do it brilliantly.

We on this side support the idea of the NCS and we will support the Bill. We welcome the work that the NCS has done so far; it has real potential to be part of young people’s journeys into adulthood and a starting point for more active participation in civic society. It could inculcate the habit of volunteering throughout their lives. For this potential to be realised, the social action element of NCS needs to be of consistently high quality and participants should be supported into other volunteering arrangements. The law must be changed to make sure that that is a viable way forward. This must be the focus of the Bill. We support the Bill, but we will—as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, enjoined us to—give it proper scrutiny in Committee. We look forward to a constructive dialogue with the Government as the Bill progress through your Lordships’ House.