Third-party Election Campaigning
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in view of the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, on those of us who may not understand charities, perhaps I should start by declaring that I have been a trustee of one musical charity for some considerable time and have been the chair of a musical charity that concerns not just musical performance but education and some campaigning for improved musical education. When I was chair of the trustees I did my best to observe the rules for which, as a Minister, I had been responsible; namely, that one should not serve for too long as chair of trustees. I made speeches on the sad decline of music teaching in schools and the need to reverse it. That is advocacy; that is one side of the line between advocacy and party-political campaigning. I think that actually the line is not too difficult to see.
This is familiar territory for me. I recall many long discussions with the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and the Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement when, as a Minister, I piloted the transparency of lobbying Bill through the Lords five years ago. We argued then that they were misinterpreting the purposes and potential impact of the Bill, which was concerned to protect the integrity of the electoral process from incursions of money from outside, and from single-issue groups targeting specific candidates and parties on the scale that we were already observing in other countries, most evidently in the United States. We had witnessed that in previous British elections, after all; for example, I remember the fox-hunting lobby vigorously working to unseat a particular Liberal Democrat MP several elections ago, which contributed to her defeat.
The Act was not aimed primarily at charities. It was aimed at all third-party campaigners from all political perspectives and social and economic interests. Reviewing comments from the NCVO, the Electoral Commission and others on the impact of the Act so far, I am struck by the frequency of references to “misplaced” or “erroneous” perceptions, “exaggerated” fears, or even—from the review by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson—“fundamental misunderstandings” from the charitable sector. The NCVO reiterates in a comment from 2017 that:
“The growing potential for third parties to improperly influence elections by spending lots of money on advertising means that we do have to regulate non-party campaigning”.
The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, noted in his review—I hope he will not mind my quoting it—that,
“a number of third parties appeared not to have appreciated that Part 2 of the 2014 Act was not a ‘new’ piece of legislation, rather an expansion and tightening of the rules already existing under Part 6 of PPERA. In meetings held in the course of this review, more than one organisation recognised that they probably should have done more to consider their legal obligations at the time of the 2010 General Election under the pre-existing regime”.
During the lengthy discussions on what became the 2014 Act, I became increasingly sceptical about the motivations of some of those resisting the legislation. I recall being told in a meeting with staff from several leading development charities that they did not want to have to register because, “That would tell the little old ladies who give us money that we are a campaigning organisation as well as working for the poor in the third world”. I did not yet know that some development charities were also bending the rules in pursuing those little old ladies for funding. If they are campaigning organisations, they should be transparent about that and not attempt to hide it from those whom they pursue so hard for funds. I also remember charity executives admitting then that they had never bothered to read the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 or to understand what obligations they had under it.
My conviction that large charities need careful regulation—however benevolent their underlying objectives may be—was sharpened further when I served on the inquiry into charitable fundraising two years later. We listened to the head of one major charity explain to us why his charity ignored the Telephone Preference Service—because the need is so great, we were told—and another admit that he had never looked into how the commercial telephone agency that his charity employed to fundraise operated. As the House of Lords Select Committee on Charities declared:
“Accountability and transparency are essential for charities to ensure they function properly”.
I welcome the proposals in the review of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and regret that the Government have not found time to introduce some amendments to the legislation. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that the Government will do their utmost to find time for the modest amending Bill required during the next Session. Here, as in so many other policy areas, all other measures are currently consumed by Brexit.
It is clear that we need to revisit and adjust the regulations covering political campaigning on a regular basis to keep abreast of what the Russians call “new political technologies”, which are transforming campaigns, such as data mining, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, suggested, the use of targeted social media and other forms of online campaigning and advertising. We saw the use of those techniques in the 2016 referendum and the difficulties that the regulators face in keeping up with what is going on. We also saw in that referendum a classic example of a regulated campaign organisation getting around the rules by transferring surplus money to a third-party campaign.
We have not yet resolved the issues raised by questionable behaviour during the 2016 referendum campaign, including the use of data mining and social media. That demonstrates the weaknesses of the UK’s regulatory structure for campaigning. Continuing changes in political technologies and the exploitation of new media make it clear that we will have to revise and tighten the rules further.
There are other changes in charities and electoral regulation that we need to consider. The absence of a legal obligation for transparency in reporting significant sources of income allows foreign donors, companies with strong economic interests and others to fund think tanks and educational and religious charities that promote their vested interests without the British public understanding what is happening. That has been an issue with some Muslim charities in the past. It is still a live issue with libertarian think tanks.
I recall an article on funding for the Conservative Party that remarked that non-British sympathisers who wished to donate to the party were frequently advised to give their money to right-wing think tanks instead. That way, they could gain influence and credit with influential insiders without having to declare their donations. But many of these think tanks in effect act as third-party campaigners in British politics or even as lobbyists for the multinational companies and foreign billionaires who fund them. The Institute of Economic Affairs, for example, does not publish its sources of income, but publishes papers against further restrictions on tobacco and in favour of cuts in corporate taxation.
I would love to know where the funding for the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Global Warming Policy Foundation has come from, and in particular how much of their funding has come from wealthy right-wingers across the Atlantic. I note that the Global Warming Policy Foundation has an affiliated US funding foundation, while the Koch brothers, who are politically engaged American billionaires, are reported as having funded at least some of the activities of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. However, their websites and annual reports do not tell me more. Transparency in funding should be required of them, too, as influential players in the British political debate. This calls for legislative changes the next time Parliament addresses charity regulation and third-party campaigning.
The register of third-party campaigners for the 2015 election campaign is a useful indicator of the case for regulation. It includes bodies that campaign for right-wing and for left-wing causes; Conservative Supporters Ltd and the Conservative Muslim Forum are classic third-party bodies, with the Independent Schools Council, Hope Not Hate and various animal rights groups on different sides of that impassioned debate. These and many other groups contribute constructively to our public debate, but there is a line between advocacy in the public sphere and the targeting of particular candidates and parties that is not too difficult to identify and which the Electoral Commission should rightly police.
I accept and regret the fact that both the Electoral Commission and the Charities Commission are underfunded for the regulatory tasks they are asked to fulfil. I note that innovation in campaigning techniques is running ahead of regulation and needs to be revisited regularly to keep up, perhaps through a parliamentary inquiry after every general election. I hope that the Minister will take that back to the Cabinet Office to consider. I also accept that some elements of the transparency of lobbying Act would benefit from amendment, in the light of experience so far and in the light of the helpful review by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in particular on the reduction in the regulated period from 12 to four months. But I also contend that the chilling effect which the commission chaired by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, warned of has not emerged and that the case for transparency and regulation of third-party campaigning by right-wing and left-wing bodies and from both domestic and foreign sources remains strong.
Advisory Committee on Business Appointments
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
I join the noble Lord in paying tribute to my noble friend Lady Browning, who chairs ACOBA. Until I read its annual report, I had not realised quite how much work it did—some 230 appointments in a year—or how complex some of the cases were. The noble Lord suggests that the system should be statutory. ACOBA has been non-statutory since it was established in 1975. I see two problems in making it statutory. First, it would be much more difficult to amend it and bring it up to date—it would become less flexible; at the moment it can be updated overnight. Secondly, if you make it statutory I suspect that decisions would take longer to deliver but, crucially, they would then be justiciable: they could be challenged in the courts. I think there is a real risk of crystallising a potential conflict between the rules of ACOBA and the common-law right that individuals have to earn a living in their own right.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Ministerial Code clearly states that,
“Former Ministers must ensure that no new appointments are announced, or taken up, before the Committee has been able to provide its advice”.
It goes on to say,
“Former Ministers must abide by the advice of the Committee which will be published by the Committee when a role is announced or taken up”.
Of course, there is a minimum three-month waiting period on resignation. Boris Johnson breached all these elements of the Ministerial Code, which explains the very strong tone of this letter. Should there not be some comeback when Ministers who have signed the Ministerial Code breach it within days of leaving office?
Lord Young of Cookham
The noble Lord refers quite rightly to the stern rebuke from my noble friend in her letter to the Foreign Secretary:
“The Committee considers it to be unacceptable that you signed a contract with The Telegraph and your appointment was announced before you had sought and obtained advice from the Committee, as was incumbent on you on leaving office”.
The former Foreign Secretary should not have treated with such insouciance the rules, which had been brought to his attention and which he acknowledged he had read as recently as January this year. I am not an apologist for the former Foreign Secretary—that requires a portfolio of skills that I do not have. However, in his defence, the rules are designed to prevent a Minister, using the knowledge he acquires and the relationships he develops in the department, from rolling the pitch for a lucrative job subsequently in a related organisation. In the case of the former Foreign Secretary, after two years he reverted back to a career in journalism, a career for which his qualities are perhaps better suited. Therefore, while I do not in any way undermine the seriousness of his offence, what he did was not quite the revolving door that one normally sees—and the revolving door ended up with him back where he started.
Referendums: Parliamentary Democracy
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in discussing referendums we have very much to put our discussions in the context of declining popular support, in this country and elsewhere, for parliamentary democracy. It is a real problem we all face, and we see it as it stretches across the rest of the democratic world. In Britain, we have a situation in which the people—and newspapers—who campaigned very hard for the restoration of British parliamentary sovereignty have, for the past two years, insisted that the “will of the people” as expressed in one referendum must override parliamentary scrutiny and further debate. We have disillusion with elites and with the establishment—with representatives, as such—and the rise of “authentic” charismatic figures who are seen to represent the people, even though they usually do not come from the people. We see that not just in Britain but elsewhere. When I see the Daily Mail giving large coverage to Jacob Rees-Mogg attacking the establishment as a man of the people, I feel that we are almost in a surreal world. But that is where we are, and the public school-educated journalists of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph busily attack the metropolitan elite, even though they are all members if it; meaning, of course, that what they are attacking is those who think that evidence, debate and discussion are important to democratic politics and not simply emotion and gut feelings. That is the problem that faces us and into which context we have to put the future of referendums.
Membership of political parties has declined. In 1970, 5% of our voters belonged to political parties, the largest of which was the Conservative Party. In 2010, it was 1%. It has recovered a little since then, although in some unpublished figures, the Conservative Party is now the fourth largest political party in Britain after the Liberal Democrats and the SNP. It certainly ought to worry us that the governing party has become a central political machine funded by large donors without the roots it used to have among the population.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That is a matter for the noble Lord.
We have a broken two-party system. In many other countries, the old parties have begun to break up and new parties are emerging, but ours are held in place by a voting system and by their privileged access to funding. We have a situation in which political education in this country is extremely poor—almost absent. The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, said that we believe in parliamentary democracy. However, my experience of the referendum campaign is that many people expressed deep confusion about the quality of democracy and the issues at stake because we have not tackled the question of how to educate our masters, as Disraeli said we needed to do, so many years ago. One reason I have been converted to the idea of the voting age being 16 is that it would encourage schools to get into political education in a much more active way. We all know how delicate and difficult that is, but we need enormously to prioritise citizenship, an understanding of the rights and obligations of citizenship, what we mean by the rule of law and what we mean by representative democracy.
It does not help that local democracy has been undermined and its funding cut back, and that we now have fewer elected representatives in England than in any other democratic country. We have seen the professionalisation of political campaigning, the rise of what the Russians call political technology, and the very slick way in which the anti-AV campaign and the Brexit campaign—both led by Matthew Elliott—used the peripheral, almost irrelevant, question of funding for the National Health Service to discredit other matters. That was very well done and very clever, given that it was not central to the issues. The influence of big funders—often offshore and occasionally foreign funders, and occasionally also dark money—is clearly something that we need to look at.
Where does that take us? Like the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, I have read the various reports. I was very impressed by the Independent Commission on Referendums and I strongly agree with many of its recommendations, including that referendums are best to ratify a decision which government has taken rather than to start a debate about what we might do if the population expressed a preference for X rather than Y. The last thing one should do, of course, is have a referendum to avoid the governing party having to take a decision first. That is what happened two years ago and is, after all, what happened in 1975.
I also agree with the commitment that referendums need to be embedded in a longer process of debate and negotiation, as far as they can be. Citizens’ assemblies and other things are mentioned, and in Britain we face the problem that we have a more highly educated electorate but they are less interested in politics. They want to listen to us on the radio or television only for 30 seconds at a time, rather than the two to three minutes we used to get 20 or 30 years ago. There is a real problem in getting complex politics across. I also agree that referendums need to be restricted to major constitutional questions. I further agree that referendums need to be tightly regulated. The report says rather optimistically that they need to be fair, but what we have seen in the context of the last two referendums—most recently in 2016—is that regulation needs to be not only clear but quickly imposed. Here we are, two years after the referendum, and the questions of where some of the money came from and whether the limits were exceeded still hang in the air.
Where are we as a result of all this? Referendums have become a part of the British constitution—we cannot take them away again—but they should be used rarely. Our democratic system is much shakier than it used to be, and politicians across all parties need to co-operate to repair and strengthen it. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: parliamentary democracy is the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others. And I am not at all sure that plebiscitary democracy is any better than parliamentary government.
Official Statistics Order 2018
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I too welcome this statutory instrument. We now have a good and robust system of gathering national statistics and it is excellent that this degree of independence has been established and is being maintained. We all know, particularly in the debates on Brexit, that statistics are thrown about and are interpreted and misinterpreted. Given that, having an independent authority which does its best to hold those together is highly desirable. When I read first the Times and then the Daily Mail on the latest economic statistics and I am given entirely opposite interpretations of what is happening in the economy, I realise that it is impossible to reach a completely mutual understanding of the statistics, but at least this gives us a baseline that we must do our utmost to maintain.
I have to admit that when I looked at the full list, I was puzzled by it. The Explanatory Notes explain that some bodies are charities, others are regulatory bodies, while some are agencies of government departments. Some consumer bodies are included but I am aware that other such organisations are not. One research council is on the list, but not others, as is the case with some regulatory bodies. Perhaps the Minister can write to explain the rationale for inclusion on this list and why it is that some bodies appear on it while others do not. Is it because some have higher standards than others and that the standards of the latter bodies have not yet reached this level, or whether there is a different set of criteria because other government regulatory bodies such as Ofwat and Ofcom do not appear on it. That may reflect my limited understanding of the area, but having said that, of course we welcome the order as a way of reinforcing the independence and authority of our statistical system.
Lord Young of Cookham
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for the interest they have taken in this instrument, the time they have spent scrutinising it and for their support. I apologise for my opening speech not being zippy. It would have been a real challenge to make this issue something that will appear on “Yesterday in Parliament”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, produced examples. I am sure that if I wanted to I could have gone back a little further to show that previous Administrations may have made similar mistakes. The important point that she made is that the system is working, all the correspondence is in the public domain for everyone to see and the Government are rightly held to account by an independent body.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked about the basis. Part of the answer to that lies in paragraph 7.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum:
“Bodies included in the list are those which produce, or will produce, national-level statistics which (a) inform the public about the social or economic position of the country, (b) are likely to be used to judge government performance or targets or (c) the government considers it is otherwise important that the public has particular trust in”.
I gratefully accept his suggestion that I write to him in more detail about the specific issues he raised. I commend the order to the House.
Elections: Electoral Commission Recommendations
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
My noble friend makes a valid point: there is a small number of noble Lords who can have some claim to democratic representation. Whether my noble friend would extend that argument to the argument that we should all be elected, I very much doubt.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, perhaps I may pursue the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Garel-Jones, on foreign funds coming in to influence British politics. The Minister will recall that the Foreign Secretary suggested last weekend that the CBI’s receipt of EU funds discredited the remarks it was making. The CBI receives I think 1% of its funding from the European Commission. If one were to apply that test to Vote Leave, or perhaps even to the Conservative Party as far as Russian funding is concerned given the donations to it, it would raise awkward questions. Could the Government look at the requirement for even greater transparency in political donations, and donations to think tanks and charities of one sort or another, where foreign Governments and foreign sources, whether in the Gulf states or among right-wing millionaires in the United States, come in to affect British politics and society?
Lord Young of Cookham
The noble Lord raises a serious issue. I do not know whether he has had the time to read the Electoral Commission’s report on digital campaigning, subtitled Increasing Transparency for Voters, but it makes recommendations on the specific areas he raised. There are a series of recommendations about foreign involvement in the democratic process and recommendations about transparency on where money has come from, with particular injunctions on the social media to make it clear, when they put advertisements on their sites, who has paid for them. This is an important issue and to some extent it is embraced in the report I just referred to.
Capita
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his questions. I will try to answer all of them. On the question of a strategic approach, he will know that a new chairman, Ian Powell, was appointed last year and a new chief executive, Jon Lewis, in December. Jon Lewis has made it clear that he is in the process of putting together what he calls a “transformation programme”. Yesterday’s announcement was part of that process. The market’s response shows that it now has confidence in the new leadership team at Capita.
The noble Lord then asked why the Government are wedded to Capita. I have looked at the major central government contracts that have been awarded to Capita: 20% were awarded by the last Labour Government, just over 50% by the coalition Government and the balance by the current Government. So, it is not the case that we are more wedded than previous Administrations to the concept of using private providers and outsourcing contracts to get the best value for money. Appropriate contingency plans are in place for each contract. They depend on the nature of the contract—that is, whether others could immediately take over if there was a problem. Major contracts have terms that give contracting authorities the freedom to act in the event of supplier failure, including financial distress. I assure the noble Lord that appropriate contingency plans are in place for these contracts.
Turning to the noble Lord’s question about small providers and SMEs, the Government are anxious to break up these large contracts wherever possible to enable more SMEs to bid for them. During the Easter Recess, the Minister announced a whole raft of measures designed to boost opportunities for small businesses to gain government work. He is right to point out how important SMEs are. They provide 16 million jobs in this country and we are committed to ensuring that they are treated fairly by large suppliers. The Government have a target of HMG spend on SMEs. It was 25% but is now 33%, so I think we are at one on that issue.
On paying subcontractors promptly, Capita is currently paying 80% of invoice value to SMEs within 30 days and has plans to raise that to a higher percentage. I hope that deals with the thrust of the noble Lord’s questions.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, are the Government considering an overall review of the privatisation and outsourcing process? This is not just about Carillion and Capita. I have been reading about the problems that Serco has been going through and the recovery programme that it is now undertaking. I have been reading a little about the problems that G4S has had over the past few years in delivering some of the services it promised. There seems to be an underlying problem of large and diverse outsourcing companies, which are extremely good at drawing up contracts, managing to crowd out SMEs.
When I was a Minister, I remember being told that SMEs lose out because they are not as good at preparing contracts and spending the money in presenting them—so they end up as the subcontractors—and that we are therefore facing an oligopoly of diverse, major companies that successive Governments have allowed to grow, as the Minister said. What can be done to encourage more SMEs to become prime contractors? If I may say so, allowing more local authorities to take responsibility would help a great deal because more local suppliers would then be able to do so. The centralisation of these diverse outsourcing companies means that decisions are taken in London and small outsourcing companies in Leeds, Manchester and elsewhere end up as subcontractors. That is very bad for local enterprise. Are the Government now considering an overview of the sector and considering that competition policy needs to be rather more active here?
I have one final comment. I am very conscious that there is a problem of oligopoly in a number of sectors, with accountancy being a major example. Do we not need now to break up some of these oligopolies?
Lord Young of Cookham
There is nothing ideological about this. Governments of all persuasions have found that outsourcing certain activities enables them to focus on the key functions of government. A recent survey by the CBI showed that overall there was a saving of roughly 11% by going through the process of outsourcing activities, engaging competitive markets and awarding the contract to the contractor best able to meet the objectives.
I entirely agree with what the noble Lord said about SMEs. I think there is a contract with HMRC which, when it came to an end, we broke down into component parts. As I said in response to the noble Lord, an additional measure that we have taken is that, when a main contractor is slow in paying the subcontractors, that main contractor will be deleted from the opportunity to bid for future contracts. That is a good example of the steps that we are taking.
Subcontractors will have greater access to buying authorities to report payment performances, and suppliers will have to advertise subcontracting opportunities on the Contracts Finder website. Without repeating what I said a moment ago, we have a target of driving up from 25% to 33% the percentage of government spend with SMEs on these major contracts.
Civil Service Impartiality
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
So far as Ministers are concerned—I answer for Ministers, not for Back-Bench Members of Parliament—the Minister concerned made a fulsome apology in another place on 2 February. He said:
“I accept that I should have corrected or dismissed the premise of my hon. Friend’s question. I have apologised to Mr Charles Grant, who is an honest and trustworthy man. As I have put on record many times, I have the highest regard for our hard-working civil servants. I am grateful for this opportunity to correct the record and I apologise to the House”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/2/18; col. 1095.]
The noble Lord generously referred to my experience as a Minister. I think I have done 20 years on and off—probably more than anyone else in this House—but with many discontinuities, and I have never had occasion to question the impartiality or objectivity of civil servants. They have spoken truth unto power. They have quite often said things that I did not want to hear, but I would never accuse them of some of the things that have recently been levied against them. I think we should be proud of our Civil Service, and I reject the smears that have been made against it.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Minister will recognise that this is not just a British issue. The current attack by the President and his Administration on the FBI in the United States raises rather similar issues. Can the Minister assure us publicly that, when we say that civil servants are expected to be impartial, they are not expected to be impartial between evidence and supposition, and that when Ministers prefer faith or fantasy to evidence, civil servants have the right to point out that good governance depends on paying attention to the evidence, wherever one can find it?
Lord Young of Cookham
The noble Lord is absolutely right. I quoted a moment ago the Civil Service Code, which includes objectivity. Objectivity is defined as,
“basing your advice and decisions on rigorous analysis of the evidence”.
It is these standards for which our Civil Service is renowned.
Brexit: Devolved Administrations
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
We want to reach consensus with the devolved Administrations on which powers go straight through and which are retained under what is called a common framework. If one looks at the communiqué that was issued at the end of the last meeting, one can see that real progress was made. I think the devolved Administrations concede that some powers will have to be subject to what is called a common framework, for the reasons that I outlined. Greater clarity on this will be obtained once we hit Clause 11 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill in the other place. There are a number of amendments along the lines of those referred to by the noble Lord on resolving that issue but, at the moment, we believe that the Joint Ministerial Committee is the right place to try to seek agreement quickly. It may be possible to release some of the powers immediately we leave the European Union, if good progress can be made.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, do the Government recognise that the interests of the English regions, which are different from those of London and the south-east, risk being pushed to one side in dialogue between the devolved Administrations and the central Government in London? The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, has already touched on this. The population of Yorkshire is slightly larger than that of Scotland; the economy is as large. As a region it will be affected quite severely by the loss of EIB funding and a whole range of other things. What mechanism do the Government envisage to bring the interests of England outside the south-east into this dialogue?
Intergenerational Fairness in Government Policy
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, and the speech we have just heard is a very good example of the high quality and of different experiences being brought to bear in this House. It was very good to hear the noble Lord, Lord Willetts—The Pinch was the starting point for many of my thoughts on this subject, probably some years ago now. I too was surprised by the absence of Labour speakers. I am told that Labour is a party that cares a great deal about equality, and this is one of the underlying issues to do with equality and inequality in this country. I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, sat and listened at least to the opening speeches in view of his article in last week’s Daily Mail, in which he said that,
“the very idea of intergenerational inequality is bunk”;
indeed,
“it is one of the silliest political concepts ever conceived, and yet it has been taken up with manic enthusiasm by ... the Resolution Foundation”.
I worry about the Daily Mail, which has four pages today attacking universities and intellectuals. It is a newspaper which attacks immigrants all the time, attacked judges the other month, attacked a major international organisation, the OECD, last week and now attacks intellectuals this week. I wonder who it will go on to attack next and begin to wonder when the Conservative Government will have the courage to stand up to this hysterically reactionary newspaper and defend the concept of open debate and free speech.
The Social Mobility Commission talks about three overlapping problems of inequality in the United Kingdom: that between rich and poor, that between London and the poorest regions, and that between the old and the young. I was struck last week, on seeing a graph in the Economist on OECD figures for the gaps between the richest and the poorest regions in major countries, by how Britain stands out for the gap between London and the south-east and places such as Yorkshire and Lancashire. That is something we should also worry about, and it is why Members of this House such as me begin to go on more and more about the problems of the north and the imbalance in public spending between London and the south-east and the north.
Returning to the question of intergenerational inequality, I am glad that a number of noble Lords emphasised the extent to which growing longevity alters the nature of the equation. This House is, after all, a perfect example of that. When pensions were introduced in 1911, the average life expectancy was 57, and the pensionable age was 60. A welfare state of that sort was therefore easily affordable. When the National Health Service was introduced after the Second World War, life expectancy was a little higher—although not by too much—and there was not much you could do about people with a range of conditions for which many of us in this House have already been treated by the NHS. The situation has been changing and, as we have a higher and higher number of people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and over the age of 100, the question of intergenerational inequality is a major one. My son is now a systems biologist working on various micro-organisms which cause serious diseases, and the speed at which work in that area is developing has huge implications for longevity and medical practice and for what can be done for the elderly in the last two or three years of their lives.
We need a sober, cross-party debate. All parties in government have struggled with this in the last 20 or 30 years. I suggest there might be a very strong case for a Lords sessional committee, for example, which would discuss this question in the broadest terms, because that is one of the ways this House can throw light on difficult issues that each party finds it hard to grasp. We need to ask how we promote longer-term perspectives in government and how we deal with issues where we have to address what we are leaving to our children and grandchildren.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer talks a great deal about the need to get our public debt down so that we do not leave the debt to our children, but he does not talk enough about what sort of investments we should make so that our children will have a better life, better infrastructure, better industries and so on to inherit. I find the selling off of capital assets in the public sector to fund current spending, to hold taxes down, amazing—it was one of the things in the coalition that I most disapproved of and tried to argue against—but it has, after all, been going on for the last 30 or 40 years. There is an underlying question here about whether taxes are too low in this country for the challenges we face, for old and young, in the next 15 to 20 years. There are the questions of taxing housing assets, which we do much less than most comparable countries; of the extension of the national insurance age, which the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, mentioned; and of the costs of social care, which the Conservatives themselves raised before the election and then backed out of during it. The cost of paying for the NHS, including end-of-life care, is huge. I think it is correct to say that half of what is spent on each person by the health service is spent in the last two years of any person’s life.
The Social Mobility Commission in particular stresses the importance of early years and education up to the age of 18. My perspective on this comes from having done most of my politics in northern towns and cities. I look at younger people there without much aspiration or much help, in relatively poor schools where the savage cuts in local authority spending have meant children’s social services are no longer provided, most schools do not have nurses, obesity is a problem because of the quality of the food they eat, and they do not understand how to move from school into work and have very little idea of what sort of skills they need for the sort of work they will face. Local further education colleges have had their budgets cut, so the transition to work and training for that half or more of our 18 year-olds who do not go to university is poorly provided for. I find deep cynicism in West Yorkshire about the new apprenticeship scheme and whether it really will focus on providing skills for young people or be used to provide transitional skills for those already in work.
These people—the left-behind as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said—are also British citizens and we will leave to our children a much more deeply divided and much less peaceful society unless we address some of their problems. This is an intergenerational issue but also a deeply important social issue. We need better apprenticeships and more effort put into local economic and industrial regeneration. The point that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, made about banks that do not spend enough time thinking about investing in local regeneration is strongly felt there. Housing—both housing to buy and a revival of social housing—is crucial, and the prospect that the impact of technological change will make their situation worse, with insecure, unskilled work and zero-hours contracts, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said, is also a serious problem. We have to debate this issue.
One of the reasons I have been converted to the idea that we should introduce votes at 16 is that, as the proportion of our voting population who are retired rises, so it would help to redress the balance if we also increased the number of young people.
The welfare state was introduced before the First World War partly because, as government began to recruit the working classes into the Armed Forces for national security purposes, it discovered that many in the working class were underfed, unfit and uneducated, and that they therefore needed to spend state money on people we would treat as our citizens. The welfare state now benefits increasingly the middle-class retired, who live 15 years longer than the working-class retired, who benefit a great deal from the National Health Service; and the poor—
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I apologise. This is not a sustainable basis for a peaceful and united national community. It is an issue we must address.
Civil Society and the Democratic Process
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
I agree with the noble Baroness that we need to have another look at the exemptions that Northern Ireland has from certain parts of electoral law, in particular on declaring sources of expenditure. We have a new First Secretary of State, and I am sure he will be interested in taking this matter forward in discussions through the usual channels.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the time may now have come to make sure that transparency of income for campaigning charities is extended? It is striking that there are a number of charities, some Muslim, that the Charity Commission has been concerned about, but right-wing bodies such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Global Warming Policy Foundation do not declare their large donors. It would be useful, appropriate and an extension of democratic transparency if those rules were changed to ensure that donations were necessarily declared in their annual reports.
Lord Young of Cookham
I am grateful to the noble Lord, who piloted the relevant legislation through this House in 2014. I mentioned a moment ago the House of Lords Select Committee on Charities report, Stronger Charities for a Stronger Society. Chapter 3 is on improving governance and accountability. The Government will look at the recommendations in that chapter, to which the noble Lord referred. In due course, we will respond to the Select Committee report. There has been a slight discontinuity because of the general election.