Armed Forces: East of Suez

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th March 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proportion of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces will be deployed east of Suez, in the light of the Foreign Secretary’s speech in New Delhi on 18 January.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, a significant proportion of the UK’s Armed Forces are deployed in the Gulf. As the Prime Minister said last December, Gulf security is our security. This figure fluctuates according to operational demand. However, with the advent of major exercise programmes, British defence staff in Dubai, the regional land training hub in Oman and the UK naval facility in Bahrain, we will have the permanence and presence to deepen our partnerships in the region.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, it is 50 years since the then Government announced that we would withdraw from east of Suez. They published a White Paper and there was substantial debate in the Houses of Parliament. The Foreign Secretary, first in Bahrain and then in Delhi, has spoken of deploying an aircraft carrier group to the Indian Ocean and of Diego Garcia being a major UK and US base. I am told that to maintain an aircraft carrier group in the Indian Ocean would take almost half the surface vessels available in the fleet. Presumably, there would be a significant air and land element on Diego Garcia. Will the Government bring this major shift in policy to Parliament, or does the MoD think that the Foreign Secretary was speaking a little out of turn and a little unbriefed?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

My Lords, there is no question but that the UK and US military facility in Diego Garcia contributes significantly towards regional and global security. The UK footprint may not be major in size, but it represents a significant contribution to our bilateral defence and security relationship with the US. At the moment the Royal Navy has 41 personnel permanently deployed in Diego Garcia, with a capacity to surge that for contingent operations in the wider region from 2021. That could include a carrier strike task group, should the situation change.

Education: Maintained and Independent Schools

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interests: I am chair of a musical education charity, Voces Cantabiles Music, and my wife is a director of a multi-academy trust in Bradford.

I became involved in this issue partly because I had to answer for charities and I worked with charities when in the coalition Government, but I also followed the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, in tabling an amendment to the charities Bill in 2015. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has asked me to give his apologies today as he is unfortunately not able to be with us as he has to leave for a foreign visit this afternoon.

Since then, the situation has moved on. The Prime Minister made an astonishingly strong speech last September:

“Through their charitable status, private schools collectively reduce their tax bills by millions every year. And I want to … enact a tougher test on the amount of public benefit required”.


She noted that,

“these schools have become more and more divorced from normal life”,

with a rapidly rising percentage of pupils with rich parents from overseas countries.

Paragraph 7 of last September’s consultation document, referring to independent schools, states:

“We should expect these schools to assist the state-funded sector more directly … by building capacity in the sector”.


A later paragraph states that,

“these requirements will be built into existing agreements, so that … the ability to … maintain the key benefits associated with independent schools’ charitable status, is explicitly linked to doing more”.

If a Labour Government had said that, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph would have been all over it, but I note that this was a Conservative Prime Minister, and I agree with her. The Independent Schools Council has depicted this as a threat: I would call it much more a reminder. If a school is a charity, it should be fulfilling charitable purposes. A great many of our best independent schools were founded as charities and have moved some way from their original objectives at their foundation.

Independent schools have responsibilities, apart from being charities, to the well-being of this country—their corporate social responsibility, if you like—and to their communities. The best independent/state school partnership I have seen, in York, is partly because the independent schools in York are Quaker and have a very strong sense of their social responsibility and of their responsibility to their community in particular.

I am conscious that there is a great deal of variation across England. The situation of independent schools in London and south-east is very different from that in Yorkshire and the north of England. I am also conscious that the partnerships I have seen and heard of depend very much on individual leadership. A good person pushing something does extraordinarily well and then when he or she retires things very often fall away. It is a patchy record, but I welcome the Government’s encouragement of more active engagement. I hope the Minister takes that fully on board.

There is resistance on both sides. We have seen that, and I have heard from people in independent schools about unfortunately or unintentionally giving the impression of being patronising. I have heard from left-wing teachers in state schools that they do not want anything to do with the independent sector, et cetera, but in a number of places, partnership now works extremely well. The one I know best is Westminster Grey Coat—a foundation of two state schools and three independent schools—in which the director of the foundation says very strongly that they have mutual benefit and learn from each other all the way across. I was at Emanuel School the other week for the foundation’s sixth-form essay prize, in which the boys from Westminster City School, a state school, won more prizes than any other school. It was very impressive and pleasing. That is precisely the sort of thing one should be citing.

Social awareness and social integration within our divided national community are part of what this is all about. There is no single model. Different forms of co-operation will fit different communities and different circumstances. The best model is certainly not to sponsor academies or to offer free places, although in some areas where sixth forms are in short supply, experimenting with providing free places for sixth-formers might be part of the way forward. Jointly funded bursaries are not a priority either, although, again, in rural areas for able students one might perhaps experiment. Fundraising for bursaries at independent schools is part of the way forward. Those that have endowments are, in a number of cases—Eton College being the most striking one—funding a number of scholarships of this sort and perhaps more should be done in this way.

There is excellent best practice from, for example, Rugby, Eton, York and Wimbledon: specialised teaching; extra subjects and topics, such as “masterclasses” in York, which I have sat in on; shared music, drama and sport; shared school governorships, as in the model of Rugby and others; and sharing of teaching best practice. This could develop further, with shared careers advice, shared attachments to local employers for work experience, and so on. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, said, there is resistance from parents and governors in what one might call the second division of private schools—I will not name the schools where I have heard this. They say that they have paid good money to buy educational advantage and they do not see why others should share it for free. It is a sentiment that I have heard particularly in Yorkshire, which would probably not surprise noble Lords.

There is a schools partnership across Bradford, but when I was talking to head teachers at state schools there, they said, “That’s fine; if a private or grammar school wants to come and join us it is welcome—but it had better ask first”. In fact, independent schools in the north of England are not as well plugged into this network as one would like. I regret that we do not have as much evidence as possible on what is going on— I look forward to the ISC survey coming out.

I was upset, I have to say, when talking to the head teachers of a number of state schools, to hear them saying things such as, “If I had the spare capacity or the spare money for this, I would love it, but I am more concerned about how I prevent my school going bankrupt in the next three years and how I avoid losing half a dozen teachers because of the squeeze on our budget”. Of course, there are similar pressures on a number of independent schools, particularly those outside the south-east, and boarding schools.

I conclude from this that we are in a changing situation—the structure and situation of independent schools are themselves changing—but we nevertheless want to encourage partnerships of this sort as much as possible. I am glad to see that the Government are doing this and that charitable status—charitable schools—is a part of this. But it is not the only part, because we expect all schools to share the responsibility for what happens in their communities and in our society as a whole.

Social Mobility Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, it has been an excellent debate and I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Fraser, in his maiden speech. I came to the debate, having read this excellent report alongside the State of the Nation report from the Social Mobility Commission, from a concern about the “left behind” and a set of questions about why so many of the left behind whom I have canvassed over the years in Bradford and Leeds voted to leave the European Union as a sort of, “Sod off to the lot of you; we get nothing out of globalisation and nothing out of the state. We are fed up with the world as it is”.

I have to say that I share very strongly the views of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that I am not sure social mobility is what we now need to talk about. My father-in-law is a classic example of the old social mobility. He was the youngest child of a mill-working family who got a scholarship to Bradford Grammar, became a schoolteacher, then an Army officer and then a university teacher. That was the old social mobility—one or two people out of each working class community got out and up.

That is not what we want any longer. What we want is to teach life skills to everyone, including the left behind. We need to recognise that these are not the undeserving poor—a phrase that, as the right reverend Prelate rightly said, is creeping back into our discourse these days. They are part of our national community and our citizens, and we have to make sure that life chances for all in a national community which consists in its turn of strong local communities is what we are about. There will be some social mobility. We have to tell the people at the top, incidentally, that they also belong to the national community and have obligations to the national community, starting with paying tax. That is the different discourse that we need to talk about.

A number of other reports have been mentioned in this debate which are highly relevant—the State of the North and Growing Up North reports and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation studies. We will be debating some of these—on 12 January we have a Question on the State of the North report—and I hope this House will continue actively to follow the debate. In terms of sessional committees, I am aware that there are two proposals to look at the content of citizenship as such, and I think it right that we ought to look at some other aspects of life chances because these are all fundamental issues.

There are four key points in the whole transition area. I have been most concerned with two to five year-olds. Children in north Bradford arrive at school already a long way behind their fellows from the middle classes in literacy, social skills, numeracy—the lot. If you have lost out by the time you are five, you start structurally behind. Then there is the transition from primary to secondary school. I visited a summer school being run in north Bradford this summer by local Liberal Democrats, dealing with 10 to 11 year-olds from vulnerable families who do not get regularly fed at home. They had not learned to read or count properly in their primary schools and there is a lot of evidence that that is the point at which aspiration and ambition begin to drop off—as they go to secondary school—if we are not careful.

Then there is the transition from school to work which this excellent report is about. We must not forget—maybe this is a subject for another sessional committee—the very difficult transition from a first career to a second. People in their 40s and 50s will lose their jobs because of technical change but will be expected to go on working until they are 70 in our new world. They will need the opportunity for part-time education and retraining—all the things they are now dropping. The number of people in part-time education has dropped quite radically in the last three or four years. I had some interesting figures from the Open University the other day and it is something to which we absolutely need to pay more attention.

My concern here is with intermediate skills in particular. I noted paragraph 73 of the report, which says:

“The most recent UK labour market survey found that ‘Jobs with intermediate skills demands tend to have high shares of skills shortages. These include skilled trades’ roles in manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, and hotels and restaurants. This partly reflects longstanding shortages of skilled construction trades workers such as plumbers, electricians and carpenters, and skilled chefs within the hotel and catering industries’”.

That is a scandal, and we have come to rely on immigrants to fill the gap. I tried to interest Migration Watch in looking at the linkage because I am conscious that the pull factor in immigration, particularly from eastern Europe, is precisely in the intermediate skill areas—above all in construction and building.

The apprenticeship scheme I know best is the Bradford social housing association Incommunities, which now trains 10 apprentices a year. Last year it had only 400 applications; the previous year it had 500 applications. That is 40 applicants per place, compared to Oxford and Cambridge, which have six to eight applicants a place. That is absurd. The figures on the overall apprenticeship scheme in the report suggest that in 2014-15 there were 1.5 million applications for just under 200,000 apprenticeships. That is an 8:1 ratio, which is higher than the ratio of applications to most Russell group universities.

It shows that the demand is there from people who want to have apprenticeships, but the supply is not there. We know from the extent to which companies are recruiting directly from abroad that the demand is there. It is not quite such an hourglass. Agencies do recruit from Slovakia and Poland for builders, long-distance truck drivers and for nurses, chefs, and others. There are some interesting questions about why companies find it cheaper and easier to recruit from abroad than to train their own. Incidentally, I was told this morning that in British universities 20% of technicians are from abroad—above all from eastern Europe. That also suggests that universities should be looking at how much they train the people they require for their intermediate skills—perhaps paying more attention themselves.

My anecdotal impression from across Yorkshire is that companies have been finding it much easier to recruit people already trained abroad than to put the effort into training and motivating people from this country. I am sorry that Migration Watch has not taken this up because it does not fit its anti-European narrative. This applies to the public sector as well as the private sector. I am very grateful that, when I was ill in June, Portuguese nurses in St Thomas’ looked after me very well and Polish physios in St George’s did my rehabilitation afterwards. But there were not many British-trained nurses there. The Government’s new scheme for training nurses has lifted the cap, which left us structurally short of trained nurses, and has imposed loans instead, which has apparently led to a reduction in young British people applying for nursing.

The report talks about the underlying bias in the English education system—the cultural preference for arts and finance as against engineering and crafts. That is not new. When I first became a university lecturer in Manchester, I remember the dean of my faculty telling me how he was trying to close down our evening degree because it was only really for teachers and was not what an international university should be doing. Since I had spent five years at an American university which had several Nobel Prize winners on its staff and a department of home economics and a school of hotel administration, that seemed a little odd to me—but it is there in too many of our universities. Happily, some few of our new universities bridge the gap between the academic and the vocational.

As several noble Lords said, we neglect our FE colleges and we are squeezing the funding for them further. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, is quoted in the report as suggesting that we may be facing a “downward spiral” in the ability of the further education sector, which would be disastrous for all these people who need to train, and for the secondary schools, some of which, certainly in my part of West Yorkshire, rely on their partnership with FE colleges to offer the spread of courses in the sixth form that they want to offer.

Some of this is down not just to the Government but to corporate responsibility. We have to say to companies that it is their responsibility to train our own—to train young people. I am horrified by the cynicism that I have heard in West Yorkshire about the new apprenticeship scheme: that it will be used by large companies to rebadge their existing management training rather than bringing in new youngsters and giving them new skills. I hope that that is not the case, but the cynicism is out there, and I hope that the Government are aware of it—that it will be about quantity and rebadging and there will not be much that is new or that improves skills or, crucially, brings in new young people from the left-behind and equips them with the skills that they need.

The report is very valuable. The Government have provided, as all noble Lords have said, an extremely inadequate answer. They are a Government for whom reinventing grammar schools is a greater priority than funding secondary schools, particularly in their sixth form, or thinking about the future of FE colleagues. This does not provide the right incentives. What we need is a partnership between schools, FE colleges and companies, large and small. That, I hope, would provide an answer to our problem of the structural skills shortages that leave so many of our youngsters behind.

Independent Schools: Free Places

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

This proposal is about encouraging independent schools to help the state sector, and the money will therefore be flowing towards the state sector, not away from it. As the noble Baroness knows, we have protected the core schools budget, but we will be talking about the national funding formula shortly.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will recall conversations with the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and myself about encouraging independent schools to demonstrate their public benefit by sharing their facilities for sport, drama, art, music and so on with their local state schools. I understand that a survey is being undertaken to see what the best practice is in the sector. Is his department following that survey, and will he repeat in public his private promise that, when it has been completed, we will have a debate in this Chamber on its results?

[Lord Nash]

We are certainly following these issues, but I cannot promise a debate because it is not in my power to do so. We have encouraged the independent sector to show its good practice and we have helped it to set up an interesting website called Schools Together, which now has more than 1,200 examples of co-operation between the state and the independent sector. Clearly, a lot is happening in this area.

Education: Polish A-level

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord that our relations with Poland are extremely important. We are determined to ensure that a wide suite of languages is available for students so that they have the freedom to choose whichever language they wish to study.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, spoke of the deep historic ties between Britain and Poland. I recall that the Poles produced the largest non-British contingent of pilots in the Battle of Britain, and several squadrons in the RAF and at least two armoured divisions in the Second World War. Britain seems almost entirely to have forgotten about that. I understand that the Prime Minister was unaware of it when he visited Warsaw last time. Could we not do something to symbolise the contribution that Poland made to the British victory in the Second World War, for example by encouraging a visible Polish presence at the next Remembrance Sunday commemorations?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point about the deep debt we owe all the pilots in the Second World War, particularly the Polish pilots who fought so ably, especially in the Battle of Britain. I will take back the point that he makes.

Education: English Baccalaureate

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am delighted that the noble Lord supports our belief in the importance of those subjects.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that those concerned with music education are worried about the impact of the EBacc on music education in schools. That is partly because schools faced with hard choices on budget priorities are less concerned about recruiting music teachers. Is he willing to speak to people from the music education industry about those concerns?

[Lord Nash]

I would be delighted to do that.