Queen’s Speech

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, after five days of the debate on the Queen’s Speech, we have finally reached subjects which are of hourly and daily concern to millions of our fellow people—together with housing, which was briefly debated on an earlier day. These issues, from childcare to old age, concern millions of us. I do not feel that the Queen’s Speech addressed them adequately.

There is wide acknowledgement that there is a chronic crisis in the National Health Service. There is general recognition that we are suffering from a long-term affordable housing crisis, and there are serious problems of resources and teacher supply in schools. I therefore share the disappointment of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and others that in a Queen’s Speech for a two-year Session none of the legislative proposals and virtually none of the speech itself addressed fundamentally any of those interrelated social crises. The Minister was driven in his introductory speech to referring to general commitments and to relatively marginal Bills on patient safety and on money advice for pensioners. Although important in themselves, they did not address any of these fundamental issues.

It is not as if the issues were not acknowledged during the general election; indeed, many of the problems with the Conservative Party’s campaign concerned pensions and social care. It has retreated from its commitments in those areas but nothing has replaced them, and there is certainly nothing in this Queen’s Speech.

It is an indictment of this Government that they do not appear to be addressing those issues, but it is also a wider indictment of this House and the political system as a whole. Here we are on a Thursday afternoon at the end of the debate on the Queen’s Speech talking about these issues when the rest of the country has a rather different system of priorities.

The recent election and the Brexit campaign both revealed the stark divisions that exist in our country. We are not one nation, however much we may claim we are. At both ends of life, there are problems.

This Government and their programme put before the House do not address these issues. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, referred to his committee’s report on social mobility. Coincidentally, a report was issued this week by the independent Commission on Social Mobility. Its conclusions are that 20 years of successive government commitments and some interventions to improve social mobility have failed and that, despite some programmes having limited success, the overall position is that we are going backwards. There is a spatial and regional divide, an income and wealth divide, an educational divide—as the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, emphasised—and particularly a generational divide.

I shall focus briefly on the generational divide. It was evident in the general election, in the Brexit vote and in the Scottish referendum. The independent commission’s report recognised that those reaching majority in this decade are the first generation post war and probably for 100 years who will be less well-off than their parents at the same stage of their lives, with no prospect of that getting better. It is therefore not surprising that there is a generational divide. Sometimes, we do not acknowledge it. Looking around the House today, we have to recognise that our own position is not that of the country. Most of us here, being of the age that we are, probably received a free university education. Most of us could afford a mortgage in our 20s—not all of us, but most of us. Most of us had jobs or professions that yielded a steady income with reasonable prospect of job security and a fixed retirement age for which we could plan. None of that is guaranteed or even likely for the coming generation, or in many respects for people under 50.

The current generation of pensioners are envied by the young because they have decent private pensions in many cases and at least inflation-proofed state pensions. However, some of that envy is misplaced, because there is also a sting at the tail of our lives. We may enjoy our pensions and in our 60s and 70s our Saga cruises, but if we become ill and infirm the provision of social care, whether in residential homes or in our own homes, is totally inadequate. Conditions are often deplorable, with homes relying on staff who are poorly paid and under pressure to minimise any real empathetic care for those whom they are supposed to be looking after.

At both ends of life, there is a widespread feeling of betrayal, some of which came out during the general election campaign. That we are not concentrating on that cannot be blamed on our preoccupation with Brexit, nor can it all be blamed on austerity, although the end of austerity, which some Ministers have begun to proclaim, raises the possibility of some of these issues being addressed. As my noble friend Lady Sherlock said, we need to remove the ideology of those who see austerity not as a short-term necessity but as an end in itself. We do not need a further retrenchment of the state; we need the opposite: for the state to take on its responsibilities in its spending and in effective regulations and enforcement of them. If recent events show us anything, they show us that.

The yawning gap between the Government’s ambition in the Queen’s Speech and the growing divisions in our society are underlined in the report of the independent Commission on Social Mobility. It states:

“Our country has reached an inflection point. If we go on as we have been, the divisions that have opened up in British society are likely to widen not narrow … The old agenda has not delivered enough social progress. New approaches are needed if Britain is to become a fairer and more equal country. It is time for a change”.


I hope that Ministers are listening and that the legislative programme in this parliamentary Session will eventually reflect the need to address those problems.