National Citizen Service Bill [Lords]

Steve Reed Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 16th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

I suspect that the House will not be subjected to too much of a bunfight this afternoon. Labour is delighted to support the Bill, and its passage through the Lords smoothed over some of the more contentious issues, so it is extremely welcome that the NCS therefore has strong support on both sides of the House. My one small regret is that the Secretary of State referred to a new draft of the royal charter, which was laid before the House only two minutes before this debate began. We have checked with the Vote Office, and it is not yet available in hard copy.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

We just got it. Here it is.

[Mr Reed]

My hon. Friend has just received a hard copy, but I have not had a chance to read it.

[Karen Bradley]

I apologise to the hon. Gentleman. I understand that there has been a problem in the post room, but the document is now available. I apologise if he did not receive it before the debate.

[Mr Reed]

I thank the Secretary of State for that. I look forward to reading it. I am sure she will tell me if any of my points have already been miraculously addressed in the new draft.

Before getting into the detail of the Bill, I will talk briefly about its context. The Secretary of State said that the Prime Minister mentioned the NCS in her speech on the shared society, and we need to make sure that that vision does not end up hollowed out like the previous Prime Minister’s big society. The big society shrank down to little more than an attempt to replace paid professionals with unpaid volunteers, which is a shame because there is an urgent need to reshape politics in this country around people, family, community and shared institutions in a way that strengthens society and gives people more direct power. For all their talk, so far the Government have tended to do the opposite, rather than matching the power of the words they speak in this Chamber.

If we want people to feel they really have a share in society, they need two things: a voice to articulate what they are looking for; and the power to make it heard, be it at work, in their community or about the public services they use. In all that, there is a real big vision about national renewal based on sharing power, reshaping politics and opening up opportunity to everybody. We already see the potential of that in communities that have taken more control through projects such as tenant-led housing organisations, user-directed social care, community land trusts and community energy generation, to name just a few. The NCS can play a significant role in building young people’s capacity to participate; but the Government’s approach, including what we have heard of the “shared society” so far—I accept that that is not much yet—is still too narrow and too centralised to tear down the barriers that frustrate wider and deeper engagement by citizens. I hope that will change. The NCS will achieve great things, but it could achieve even more if the Government really understood the power and potential of communities freely co-operating for the common good, and allowed that principle to influence and shape the direction of Government policy right across the board.

Let me move on to some of the detail in the Bill, most of which, as I said earlier, is not contentious, unless the changes I have not seen have suddenly inserted a raft of things we are not expecting—I doubt that is the case. One of the most powerful aspects of the NCS is how it brings together young people from a range of different backgrounds. The divisions so starkly exposed by the EU referendum, and, I am sorry to say, widened by the Government’s unfair approach to funding cuts since 2010, show just how important it is that we promote better integration right across society.

I had the privilege of meeting some young people in Croydon who were taking part in the NCS, and their passion to make change real was tangible and moving. They had clearly learnt a lot from living, working, eating and facing challenges with other young people from backgrounds that were very different from their own. Let me give an example of why it is so important that we break down barriers. In some parts of urban Britain we see a growing problem with violent gang crime. Mercifully, the problem is still small at national level, but if you live in one of the neighbourhoods most affected, it is disfiguring and destructive in a way that is hard to imagine without having experienced it. In London, I have worked with people living on housing estates where violent, gang-related youth crime is endemic, but right next door there were streets full of better-off people leading completely different lives, with completely different expectations. The two communities live parallel lives that never touch. Young people on one estate that I visited spoke as if the borders of their world ended at the borders of the estate they lived in and the world of opportunity beyond was closed to them.

We have to break these barriers down, and I hope the NCS has a real role to play in that. I would like to hear the views of the Secretary of State or the Minister on strengthening the focus on integration in the Bill. It talks about “cohesion”, but not about the process of integration necessary to achieve it. A change along those lines in clause 1 has the support of a number of delivery organisations. We will revisit this in Committee, but I hope that any change can be achieved through cross-party consensus.

It is fundamentally important that the NCS continues to offer opportunities to young people from different backgrounds, so it is a concern that the proportion of participants from poorer backgrounds, as measured by eligibility for free school meals, has fallen since the NCS was created in 2011. Indeed, the National Audit Office states that

“in many…areas a disproportionate number of young people from certain backgrounds participate”.

It is of course very important that the NCS is an organisation for every young person in the country, whatever their background.

[Tim Loughton]

It is slightly disappointing to hear the hon. Gentleman making quite a lot of negative comments about a scheme that I thought his party had come to support, after several years of trying on behalf of many of us. Does he not acknowledge that the number of young people going on this programme who qualify for free school meals has been put at 17%, which is more than double the proportion in society as a whole? In that respect, this programme is actually doing rather well.

[Mr Reed]

The points I am making are intended to strengthen and improve the NCS; if we do not make them, it may never change, so I hope the hon. Gentleman will join me in the spirit of seeking to offer constructive criticism to improve what the Government are doing.

Applications in general are below the target set by the Government—they were 13% behind in 2016. That must be addressed, and although the delivery organisations are aware of that, we look to the Government to provide the support that they need to reach more young people. In particular, we encourage the Minister to look again at introducing a specific duty on the NCS to promote the programme to young people from socially excluded backgrounds and explore new ways to reach them.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

To proceed in the tone that I thought had been set for the debate, does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the work the Government are doing, through the Bill, to authorise HMRC to work with NCS to reach more people is a key part of ensuring that the NCS reaches a far wider range of eligible young people? Hopefully that will increase participation rates, as well as diversity in the schemes.

[Mr Reed]

That is certainly helpful, but if that is the limit of the hon. Gentleman’s ambition for the NCS, he needs to find a little more of it, in the way that Opposition Members do.

A truly shared society requires everyone to have a voice and the power to assert it. There is no single model for achieving that: how we give people more control depends on the circumstances and context in which we operate. When the state sets up new organisations or services, it often fails to give people on the receiving end a real say, despite the fact that organisations benefit from higher levels of input from their users. If the NCS is to remain relevant to young people and in touch with their lives, it is important that they have a real voice in what it does and how it operates, now and in future. That means giving young people a direct role in NCS governance and decision making.

I was involved in setting up one of the biggest community youth trusts in the country, the Young Lambeth Co-operative, which took control of a number of the council’s youth services. The intention in setting it up was to give young people a real voice by reserving half the positions on the governing board for them, and ensuring that those young people who were appointed properly represented young people from more deprived backgrounds who had the greatest need of the services on offer.

In the absence of a mutualised structure, which is not being proposed for the NCS, it would still be good to see the NCS take a similar approach to that of the Young Lambeth Co-operative and ensure that young people have a key role at every level. That will be critical to making the NCS credible and attractive to as wide a range of young people as possible, particularly those who are categorised as harder to reach. The governance changes in the version of the draft royal charter that I have seen are important. There is to be a new board of patrons, but the NCS would benefit from more young people, and fewer politicians, at the top.

The NCS has the Opposition’s full support. I am raising concerns in the spirit of constructive criticism, with the intention of improving the organisation’s operation. We want to see some changes in the Bill that we believe will strengthen the focus on integration, ensure that the NCS reaches as wide a range of young people as possible, and give young people a bigger voice at every level in the organisation. Such changes would help the NCS to meet its laudable objectives, and we hope that they can be achieved through consensus.

We live in a country with a generous and open spirit, full of talented and ambitious young people who want to make a difference to their own lives, their families, and the community around them. But to do more, they need a bigger voice and the power to make it heard. Civil society organisations such as the NCS have an important role to play in making that happen. Ours is already a sharing society in which people instinctively co-operate; it is government that needs to catch up. The measure will be whether the Government make real progress in opening up and sharing their power with people so that they can make, or at least influence, the changes that affect their own lives.

The Bill may be small, but it has some very big ideas behind it: power, opportunity, community and contribution. Given the chance, young people and the NCS have much to teach us, and the Government, about those great national themes. We wish them every success in doing that in future.

[Several hon. Members rose—]