Intergenerational Fairness in Government Policy

Lord True Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness on introducing the debate. It has been diverting to hear about intergenerational fairness from the Benches opposite who have just elected a new leader aged 75. Could they not find anyone younger?

I agree with so much that has been said by so many but, like my noble friend Lady Altmann, I must take a different tack, because I dislike this rhetoric of intergenerational fairness. Others may respond that it is not about division but all about fairness, but calling for fairness implies that some unprincipled people are in clover at the expense of others. What increasingly echoes back from the wall of social media are the cries “unfair”, “older people are to blame” and “let’s take it back”.

My noble friend Lord Willetts, who spoke so brilliantly, as always, today, marred his important and thoughtful book with a deliberately provocative title. In it, he likened our generation, so-called baby boomers, to a “selfish giant” and said that we had, “taken our children’s future”, a phrase rehashed very swiftly by the Guardian as “stolen”.

We should be careful to avoid political rhetoric, as my noble friend lately said, that sets group against group. In particular, I deplore anything that, wittingly or unwittingly, provokes the old people of the future against the young people of the past. The excellent report of the Work and Pensions Committee in another place rightly ended with a strong warning on adversarial language. I know that is not my noble friend’s intention or that of anyone else who has spoken—quite the reverse: what an intelligent and interesting debate we have had—but what we need is not the sledgehammer of a potentially divisive soundbite or the stereotyping of groups but the scalpel of intelligent and targeted policy, at which my noble friend and so many others who have spoken excel.

“Fairness” can be measured in many varied ways and cannot be analysed in arid economic statistics alone. Young people today, and how good that is, have opportunities and advantages that young baby boomers, or indeed the silent, never had. I give a small example. For some reason, my noble friend’s Intergenerational Commission’s latest interesting publication has guacamole on its cover, coming from a continent, South America, that none of us at school ever dreamed of being able to see. In fact, I find that avocados were first sold at Sainsbury’s in 1962 and at Marks & Spencer in 1968. It goes to illustrate that the cornucopia of food choices that we have today was simply not available.

Thank God that this generation has not—yet—had to contend with 9%, 10% and far higher mortgage rates that we selfish ones did. Today, too, we have all the benefits of an information and technological revolution unknown to those of us who waited months for our first landline from the kind of state monopoly that the party opposite wants to bring back. Frankly, how infuriating it has been for so many older people to watch on while Governments led by those who are now our juniors ravaged the pensions system, stoked a housing asset bubble—as the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, said, through quantitative easing, pummelling savers along the way—and piled unimaginable quantities of debt on future generations. There are two recent Chancellors whom I will not name who bear a heavy responsibility for that.

Let us not fall for a lump of prosperity fallacy to be addressed by taxing Doris to pay Dan. High tax is part of the problem for us all. Most older people want to see what they have built going to help their children and grandchildren, but inheritance tax take is projected to rise by 30% in the next five years, with the state destroying £27.7 billion of potential family support by 2022.

Housing is an issue. I agree with many of the things said by the noble Lord, Lord Best. By the way, I would look at allowing councils to give themselves planning permission to build on unused public sector brown land where the owners are unwilling or require execution of planning permissions given. High stamp duty, as others have said, has been a disaster. In many areas, starter homes have disappeared as people have extended up and out rather than move out and pay the tax. Indeed, the small, two-bedroom house where I started a family with my wife is now a 4.5-bedroom house, inaccessible to a young family for this very reason. The take from this distorting tax is planned to rise by over 60% by 2022, with the Treasury grabbing £74 billion in the next five years from the aspiration to own a new home.

I would not have introduced or sustained the triple lock. I would have ended the extension of the welfare state to the well off through universal winter fuel payments, universal free school meals and so-called free 30 hours of childcare. I would look at a capital contribution to the cost of care at home. Parties opposite, as well as the incompetence of my own party, bear a heavy blame for the shameful role they had in stifling discussion on such options. There is much, as so many in the debate have wisely said, that we can and should do, but let it not be couched in the language of “we woz robbed”.

As I face sitting down again with an attack of sciatica, I recall the end of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, where the main character is overheard musing on the tragedies of youth. A passer-by comments, “There is only one tragedy for youth”. “And that is”? “Age”, said the stranger. Youth and age are concepts experienced by all who are fortunate enough to live long in the same mind and the same body. We are all one. Each generation and each age group faces its own varied and diverse challenges, measured against diverse attitudes and aspirations, as does each person. For all its indignities, even old age today is enriched and eased today by things we never had in the past. How bitter a gall it would be if, by provoking fear of so-called intergenerational unfairness, we set the youth of the present against the youth of the past. That would indeed be a tragedy, for youth and age alike.