I cannot think of a better group of speakers to join me for the next two and half hours to shine some light on this all-important issue. I thank in advance all noble Lords participating in this debate. I also welcome our young guests in the Gallery, the participants in the webinar we held last night, and the responses to the Twitter poll we held this morning in advance of this debate.
I worry that too often the voices of the next generation are left out of the debate altogether. I hope we can instead find ways today to ensure that we can put young people at the very heart of policy-making. One of the basic principles of British society is that each generation helps out the next. The taxes of today’s workers fund the pensions of their parents and the education of their children. It is therefore unsurprising that surveys find that a majority of people think that each generation should have a better life than the one before. But this goal is increasingly under threat. In the economy, housing, health and education, the millennials are not getting the same opportunities as the generation before them. Millennials are the first generation not to earn more than people born 15 years before them when they were the same age. Over 3 million people aged between 20 and 34 still live with their parents. According to the IFS, we will shortly reach a point where there is a crossover between the under-30s who are not even on the first rung of the property ladder, and the over-55s, one in six of whom owns a second property. The inequality is clear.
Nowhere does this become more acute and obvious than in the debate about Brexit. In our Twitter poll this morning—I thank the respondents—34% put this as a priority. We are concerned that the Government’s relentless yet futile attempt to secure a Brexit deal that can pass the Commons has meant that the big issues facing young people are not being properly addressed. At present, the Commons seems to shut up shop earlier and earlier, but these are critical issues that need solving now for a future generation. Brexit must have consumed thousands of years of the time and energy of politicians, civil servants, policymakers and journalists—time that could have been spent dealing with the real challenges of our day, such as the impact of an ageing population, the mental health challenge for young people, and the all-important issue of combating climate change. It could have been spent putting greater focus on the brilliant work started by my colleagues, my noble friend Lady Featherstone and Jo Swinson MP to tackle the issues of body confidence or negative stereotyping—issues raised in a recent poll of school leavers by Central YMCA as all-important to them. Instead we are stuck in this endless loop.
What is so worrying is that young people have lost out most from this. They voted overwhelmingly to remain and feel that their opportunities to live, work and study abroad have been constrained. They must pick up the pieces in a few years’ time, when the pension system becomes unsustainable, sea levels rise uncontrollably and deadly extreme weather across the world—and the resulting movement in populations—becomes the norm. So it is right that we ask ourselves today and continue to challenge ourselves on how we can improve young people’s quality of life and make it more equal.
I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and am very glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, managed to secure it. Two and a half hours is certainly not long enough to talk about what the young people of tomorrow or today should be getting out of society and life—I am sorry about my voice, I have a bit of a throat.
I am interested in the word “equality”. Is it equality before the marketplace? Is it equality in the democratic sense of everybody having a vote? Is it the equality that often does not happen, around people’s ability to have social mobility and to move on? Is it the equality we associate with being highly educated and knowing the difference between certain things? Is it the equality that comes from what I call a cognitive democracy?
What is the difference between a cognitive democracy and the democracy we now operate under? We operate under a representative system that, at the moment, seems unrepresentative because it cannot bring enough people together to share this representation. The Brexit issue is a confounding of what we have come to see as representative democracy. That is a great fear for the future and for our children, because it devalues this House, the other House and the whole process of what we call representative democracy.
Let us move on to participatory democracy. Why should young people be involved in participatory democracy? Why should they get off their rears and do things? Why should they study? Why should they burn the candle at both ends when, at the end of it, there is no opportunity to have a fuller life? We need to look seriously at the problems associated with the fact that many young people will do all that—go to university, go to college, do their apprenticeships, sweat both ends and burn the midnight oil—but at the end they will get some crummy job, because the crummy jobs are the only ones on offer.
I would love to see the equality of opportunity that comes from future generations not being controlled by the claptrap of the division between left and right and the division in society between rich and poor. We spend so much time trying to square the circle of the fact that a handful of people can own half of London while other people move along in a very shadowy sort of existence. These are the kind of things that the next generation are going to sort out, because we have not. We have not been able to develop the methodology or the pedagogy that would enable us to do so.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, especially with the plug for the magazine towards the end of his contribution; no doubt we will all study it very closely. I also commend my noble friend Lady Grender, not only on how she introduced this debate and on securing it, but on engaging so widely in advance of it. I hope that that may become a model for many of our debates in this House—making sure that Parliament is about not only the debate in its Chambers but can stimulate debate outside it, as well as be as open and inclusive in our own proceedings as possible.
My noble friend suggested that I might refer to international perspectives and look at some comparative examples from the Commonwealth. In doing so, I will reflect on a slightly wider perspective. According to the United Nations, the world population in 2050 will be over 9 billion, which will be an increase of a third since 2010. Overall, the world’s population is the youngest it has ever been and will proportionately get younger in the next generation, even while life expectancy increases.
When I was born in 1974, the population was 4 billion. The world has grown rapidly from a global economy of $5.5 trillion then to $76.7 trillion today, with average per capita GDP globally going from $1,400 to $10,300. This per capita average growth is marked but masks major inequalities. Often these are class-born, rural and urban, or driven by conflict and post-conflict situations. There are global similarities in such relative inequalities—the world is now a smaller place—so the issues my noble friend raised have relevance across the globe. The marked economic development is reflected in life expectancy, which has increased from 61 to 72 in my lifetime, with child mortality reducing from 132 deaths per 1,000 births to just 43. Our investment in girls’ health, women’s health, education and opportunities at the start of life has led to major developments, but there are still massive discrepancies.
My Lords, there is no more important issue to society than the well-being of our young people and the creation of an environment in which they have the opportunity to fulfil their potential. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, on drawing this topic to our attention today.
Before young people come of age they remain our responsibility and under our protection, whether we are parents or citizens of the country. They are educated in our schools, treated in our hospitals, breathe the air of our cities, live by our laws, must abide by the results of elections in which they do not vote and have to put up with the decisions our generation make, some of them good and some of them less so. This is a huge responsibility and certainly should not be taken lightly.
It is a responsibility brought home to me every morning as I look at my sometimes quite intimidating Generation Z children sitting across from me at the breakfast table. This is a generation that has still to find its voice. I think of the immense challenges that they and all young people face, but with which I am sure they will have the vision and capability to grapple. One of our jobs is to make sure that they have the opportunity to do just that and to be the best they can be.
However, there is clearly a range of issues—some of which have already been discussed in this Chamber—that we need to address to make this a reality. What kind of things do I mean? A new think tank called Onward, on whose advisory board I sit, published fascinating statistics a few weeks ago and I should like to share a few with the House. According to the OECD, millennials are being squeezed out of middle-income households. According to Civitas, nearly 1 million more young people live with their parents than 20 years ago. Onward’s survey of Generation Y discovered that more than half of those aged under 35 are worried or very worried about their personal finances. One in four people aged between 18 and 24 say that they find social media pressure difficult to manage, and they are rightly worried about climate change.
My Lords, this debate is timely. It comes at a time when our young people are excluded from the political process that will affect their future for generations to come, a point well made by my noble friend Lady Grender. Millions of us voted in the referendum to decide whether we remain in or leave the European Union. However, only those aged over 18 took part; the opportunity was denied to our young people. In Scotland, 16 year-olds can now vote in Holyrood and local elections, so why do we continue this anomaly, which had a substantial impact on the outcome of the referendum? The Lord Speaker’s programme for schools has clearly identified young people’s craving to learn about and participate in our political process. Why are there no immediate plans for the UK Government to lower the voting age for general elections? Surely delivering a beneficial quality of life will be more meaningful if young people have a say in their future.
My other concern is that the age of criminal responsibility in the UK is the lowest in Europe. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, it is 10 years old, which contravenes international juvenile justice standards. In the two previous Parliaments I have promoted Private Members’ Bills to raise the age to 12, and in this Parliament I am awaiting the Third Reading of my Bill. The current limit is arbitrary and not evidence-based. It is also out of step with other age limits for children. Criminalising children adversely affects their prospects. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly criticised this and called on the UK to raise the age to 12. How will the Government improve the quality of life for this group of our young people if they continue to retain the lowest age of criminal responsibility in the UK?
Last week I watched with horror a news item on the BBC about a gambling habit swallowing Kenya’s youth. Online sports betting is worth billions of pounds every year. This habit is fuelled by the faster internet, cheaper phones and the English Football League. One Kenyan Minister called it “a curse on youth”. It must be a worry that children are being sucked into a cycle of betting, debt and poverty. I welcome the campaign led by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans on this matter. We need to do much more to divert young people away from gambling. We must have a clear strategy to ban the effectiveness of gambling adverts. We must be one step ahead on the impact of gambling on children. The use of mobile phones has increased, and so has young people’s participation in unconventional or new forms of gambling or gambling-like behaviour. Are we satisfied with the betting industry’s ability to regulate its clients? It would be helpful if the Minister could explain whether systematic monitoring of the betting industry is taking place and whether the Government have in mind demanding a mandatory tax on that industry to fund treatment for addiction, particularly in young people.
My Lords, it is a depressing fact that there are now 500,000 more children living in poverty in the UK than there were in 2012. With so many young people starting from this position of early disadvantage, ensuring equality of opportunity is more important than ever, and I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for providing a platform to air these issues today.
Being born into poverty has a profound and enduring effect on the opportunities that will be both available and attainable in later life. Privilege may be an accident of birth but the propulsion that it provides, throughout the life course, is not.
Children from disadvantaged families have the odds stacked against them from the outset. By the age of three, they are likely to be 18 months behind the children of more affluent parents. In areas of high deprivation, up to 60% start school without adequate speech, interaction and communication skills. This early disadvantage accumulates: if you are lagging at age five, you are six times more likely at age 11 to be behind in English and 11 times more likely to be behind in Maths.
The terrible truth is that, by the age of five, 40% of the overall gap between disadvantaged 16 year-olds and their better-off classmates has already been set in train, and it continues throughout the educational journey. Only 26% of free school meal students go on to higher education, compared with 43% of their more affluent peers. Just 5% win places in the most prestigious institutions and, for those who do, drop-out rates are a third higher.
Early disadvantage continues to exert its insidious influence on employment prospects, career progress and earnings potential. A degree will certainly make a difference, but students from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to be in work six months after graduation, they will be earning less and, as they are less likely to have gone to a Russell group university, they will not be enjoying the 40% earnings premium of those who have. Even when disadvantaged students go on to gain a prestigious first, they are still likely to earn around £7,000 a year less than more privileged graduates with identical results. The recent State of the Nation report says:
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow that incredibly powerful and inspirational speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. I commend her for it and I hope the Minister replies to all the questions that she has put.
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Grender on securing this extremely important debate. Investing in young people is a vital and all-embracing subject but I shall limit my remarks today to areas that I feel are particularly important: housing and homelessness, building resilience and the opportunities offered through international travel and exchanges. Twenty-five years ago, when I was 24 years old, I bought my first flat in Streatham in London. It was a two-bedroom flat with a small garden. I still remember the excitement of receiving the keys and knowing that I had my own place to call home. I was able to buy that flat without parental help and at a time when I was receiving a very modest Liberal Democrat salary. For most 24 year-olds nowadays, however, the very idea of buying a flat in London, Manchester, or Edinburgh is virtually unimaginable unless you have extremely generous parents or have inherited money. The same applies to rented accommodation. My young professional friends in their 20s and early 30s have to give up a huge proportion of their salaries renting a room in a flatshare, often with very basic facilities and with a long commute to work. In real terms, salaries have not remotely kept up with the increases in house prices or rented accommodation since the 1990s, when I was able to afford to buy my first flat.
All mainstream political parties agree on the urgent need to build more affordable housing but I feel that more radical and creative solutions need to be found if there is to be a solution to the current generational divide in access to housing. I should declare an interest as an ambassador for the homelessness charity Depaul International, which works with some of the most vulnerable young people in the UK and abroad. Last year Depaul UK worked with more than 3,700 people at risk of homelessness and rough sleeping, most of whom were under the age of 26. The number of people aged 16 to 25 sleeping rough in London has doubled since 2010.
3:56 pm
The Earl of Listowel (CB)
My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, for securing this important debate. Listening to what the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a care-experienced adult who is 30 years of age. Just recently, she had visited Italy and had visited a children’s home there, and she said that in Italy it is normal for the staff to have a degree-level qualification. That led me to think of a conversation I had with a man from Finland, who worked in a children’s home there. He said, “In Finland, we just don’t allow somebody across the door unless they have a degree-level qualification. The children are far too vulnerable, and we just feel that they need the best quality care possible”. In this country, our system requires that people have only an NVQ level 3 to work in a children’s home; 80% of staff need to have that qualification.
Yet the children in our children’s homes are much more vulnerable than those in Finnish or Italian children’s homes. In Italy and Finland, about half of the children in care go into residential care, and half go into foster care, compared with only 10% in this country. This is understandable, because of the history of child sexual abuse in our children’s homes. That is not to say that other countries have avoided that, but residential care is a very unpopular option generally. I speak to very well-respected social workers who say they would never place a child in a children’s home if they could possibly avoid it.
To my mind, that is a great pity. Developmentally, it is absolutely right. Adolescents move away from their families. Many young people do very well in boarding schools, if there are high-quality staff and support. Parents can visit for the weekend, or for lunch. Tim Loughton MP went to Denmark to look at its children’s homes and said that they were quite like boarding schools, with parents coming along on Saturdays. They have highly qualified and very well-supported staff.
Nowadays, in this country, the risk is not so much the low level of qualifications of children’s home staff. Because they are highly regulated and monitored, it is unlikely that they will sexually abuse children or commit other kinds of abuse. It is when a girl is aged 14 to 16, it is a Friday or Saturday night and there are people who wish to groom them outside the premises who have maybe succeeded in grooming a friend of the girl and they are calling her out. It is how the staff prevent that young girl joining that group or gang. I remember having breakfast in a children’s home a few years ago. Maybe it was Saturday morning. The staff were congratulating a girl, who was 14 years old, on not going out the previous night because she had been called out by a young woman who they feared was involved in such a gang. Thanks to the excellence of the staff and the support they had offered her, they managed to persuade her to stay in.
4:05 pm
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First, we need young people to be at the centre of the political debate, not just an afterthought. Secondly, we need to find the right mechanisms to hear their voice. Neither the current political process nor the policies it produces have made young people think that they matter to the politicians. Here, then, is a proposal that I and my colleagues on these Benches sent to the Minister in advance of this debate. Just as the Government have an industrial strategy to govern their relationship with businesses, we need an equivalent young people’s strategy to help them work alongside our under-25s to deliver the policies they care about most and that will deliver equality.
The Government could start by ensuring that the Conservatives deliver their own manifesto commitments to young people. In 2017, they promised that apprentices would be provided with discounted bus and train travel and that a new, UCAS-style portal would be set up for vocational and technical courses. Both proposals appear to have been quietly dropped—unless the Minister has any further news on these issues for us today.
We also wrote to the Minister in advance with five key policies that we would like introduced. First, we would give young people aged 16 or 17 a vote and a voice in elections, including any people’s vote on Brexit. I look forward very much to hearing more about the democratic engagement of young people from the noble Lord, Lord Bird.
Secondly, we would end the funding emergency in our schools and colleges, so that policies such as the pupil premium, introduced by the Liberal Democrats, targeted to help those most in need, are the priority. Ninety-one per cent of schools will still have less money per pupil in real terms in 2020 than they did in 2015. This must end.
It was obscene to read in the press at the weekend about the fears of social engineering from independent schools as a result of Oxford and Cambridge shifting a tiny percentage in favour of state schools. The belief that writing a cheque for your child’s education means that your child is entitled to a place at a top university is abhorrent and the opposite of equality. According to the Sutton Trust, the system still shows significant bias in favour those from of independent schools getting into Russell group universities. I look forward to hearing much more on that issue from my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar.
As the Social Mobility Commission recently stated, inequality is now entrenched in Britain from birth to work and the Government need to take urgent action to help close the privilege gap. It goes on to say that,
“the dominance of background factors on future outcomes is further compounded when we look at the interaction with gender, ethnicity and disability”.
I look forward to hearing from my noble friend Lord Dholakia on that.
Last night, we held a webinar in advance of this debate. We heard from Dom from Bournemouth University, who stressed the importance of the arts in education. Colleagues will be aware that we very much believe that the arts and creativity have a critical role in the future of the UK if we are to nurture more of the genius talents—yes, this a gratuitous mention—of the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. If we had a fully funded state school system that included arts in our priorities—in other words, STEAM, not STEM—we could ensure that talent for the future.
Our third ask, which we wrote to the Minister about, is to guarantee that every young person can see a mental health professional within two weeks if they have experienced a breakdown. This is an issue that my noble friend Lady Tyler has campaigned on for many years and spoke eloquently about this morning. I look forward to hearing further thoughts on this from other noble Lords.
The charity YoungMinds warns that the NHS has the resources to provide mental health support to just a third of the young people who need it. Last night on our webinar, we learned about a student who has had to abandon his degree because mental health support was too far away. We learned that students had to de-register from their home GPs to get support in college, which was reducing their overall level of support. About an hour ago, outside Parliament, we met some young people who talked to us about the delivery gap for CAMHS, the plight of students needing access to mental health support and—much, much worse—the plight of those who are not students who need access to mental health support.
My fourth point, which is very close to my heart from my background of working at Shelter, concerns having somewhere decent to live. How can there be equality of opportunity if someone under 25 has nowhere to live? I look forward to hearing from my colleague and annual sleep-out compadre, my noble friend Lady Suttie, on that very subject. As the Intergenerational Fairness and Provision Committee recently found, lack of housing provision underpins unfairness in rent levels for 25 year-olds. It is key for our future generations that we build more homes. My noble friend Lord Shipley’s commitment to building council houses is something I have long admired.
The charity Crisis and others have had great success recently in their help-to-rent schemes, but, as we wrote to the Minister to say, this is something that we would like offered at a national level, so that young renters can afford a deposit on their first home. In our Twitter poll this morning, 33% of respondents said that that was an important priority for them.
Fifthly, Extinction Rebellion and the recent visit of Greta Thunberg are signs of a younger generation who care about others, the planet and a global community. I applaud them for that. We should hear them loud and clear, recognise the outcry of young people against climate change and create a legal target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. Instead of the Government’s current policies of banning the cheapest form of renewable energy—onshore wind—slashing renewable power subsidies and ditching the zero-carbon homes standard and the green deal, we would restore them and achieve some of those targets.
This is our five-part package. It is simple, ambitious, life-changing and would help young people to feel that they are changing the debate, not shouting from the sidelines. However, this will not fix the policy-making process or ensure that young people feel that they are contributing to how policies are devised and implemented.
The Government’s industrial strategy includes a council of key stakeholders that monitors progress and holds Ministers’ feet to the fire. In the same way that we have the UK Youth Parliament and the Youth Select Committee to mirror the work of the UK Parliament, a UK young people’s strategy council would put young people’s voices at the heart of the Executive. It could comprise members of the UK Youth Parliament or representatives from young people’s charities. A similar council has already been set up in Canada by Justin Trudeau, and I look forward to hearing more detail on it from my noble friend Lord Purvis.
To conclude, we ask the Government to consider our young people’s strategy proposal and our five key policies. We offer those flagship policies to ensure that young people feel listened to: giving young people aged 16 and 17 the vote; reversing the real-terms cut to per-pupil school funding since 2015, while providing a commensurate boost to FE funding for young people aged 16 to 19; ensuring that no child or young person has to wait more than two weeks for mental health treatment following an episode of psychosis; creating a nationwide help-to-rent scheme, giving loans to first-time renters so that they can afford to pay the deposit; and creating a statutory target to reduce net CO2 emissions in the UK to zero by 2045. We wrote in advance to the Minister and would like answers on those specific proposals.
None of us should be willing to stand by and let the voices of young people be unheard any longer. It is time for this Government to be held to account by a younger generation. Our proposals would help to deliver that: we owe it to a future generation to deliver.
We fail 33% of our children at school. We can go on about public schools and private schools and all sort of things. We can say that, because there are private schools and public schools and privilege for some, we fail 33% of our children. I do not know if it follows like that. I come from the failed 33%. I failed many years ago—50 or 60 years ago—but even in that failure there was something quite grand. It was called Her Majesty’s custodial system, which took children who had done wrong and gave them a second, third and sometimes fourth chance. It moved them on, out of crime and wrongdoing. If they wanted to climb Mount Everest, as long as they did not rob old ladies in the process they would be encouraged to do that. I was encouraged to become an artist, a printer and all sorts of things by a system that worked: the system of rehabilitation. For those 33% now, we do not have that system. We have a system that is clogged up, full up and has a real problem: people go in bad and come out worse.
I was in the care system between the ages of seven and 10. We were fed, looked after and marshalled. There was no individualism, but at least we came out untainted at the other end. The care system now is open for perverts to abuse. Now, if you have been through the care system, you have more chance of ending up in prison, on the streets or in the kind of job that will never, ever lift you out of poverty but actually keeps you in poverty—earning £6, £7 or £8 an hour means that your children will never get to university or get the opportunities of true equality.
I have been working very much on the idea of dismantling poverty. That is why I came into the House. It was a most grandiloquent thing to do: why would anybody come into a House that believes in and runs a system and say that it does not work? This system does not work. When I look around, I am astonished and appalled at the number of people who really want to help the poor have a little more comfort or opportunity but do not want to actually get them out of poverty. This ideological war is taking up too much of our energy. We should be addressing whether we can bring about equality using the old, ideological arguments that have brought us to a situation in which 69% of the damage done to the planet has taken place in the last 40 years.
I am running out of time, but I need to say this. Today, I am launching a very important magazine about social literacy, which to me is one of the central things; we have to pass social literacy to our children. Unfortunately, I have to skedaddle; please forgive me, but at 5 pm we close the magazine. Noble Lords will all get free copies in compensation.
As my noble friend indicated, the way in which young people communicate now will transform even more in the future. In many respects, the world is a much smaller place, offering greater opportunities but also, as young people perceive it, much greater threats to their privacy and security. For example, the number of air passengers in 1997 was 401 million around the world; in 2016 it was 3.7 billion. That increase raises issues not only of climate change but of the benefits of connectivity. The world is more closely connected as a result of the internet and the contribution of the world wide web. Half a trillion text messages are sent out every day, compared with hardly any until the mid-1990s. This means that a child growing up in the UK from whatever class or background will be able to communicate more freely. That offers greater opportunities but also more threats to security and more difficulties.
Politically too there has been major progress. The number of countries considered democratic when I was born was 34, today it is 87; and the number of young people living in a democratic or largely democratic environment has risen from 1.7 billion to 4.1 billion today. This means that with the social, economic and democratic progress also comes a belief that the individual is a stakeholder. The young people of today are far more empowered because they live in a democratic society. However, that democracy, which has an established and accepted social contract which states that your Government will provide you with greater services and better opportunities than the previous generation, is under stress. Now the expectations of these young people are being outstripped by the ability of the democratically elected Governments to deliver. This is the case in developed and developing countries and in countries where there are older populations, such as in Asia and the West, and where there are younger populations, such as in Africa and the MENA region.
What does this mean? It means that the life chances for children born in Britain today are immeasurably greater than a child such as me, born in 1974 to a mechanic dad who became an ambulance technician for the NHS, and a mother who brought up her sons and worked part-time as a cleaner and then in a shop. That fairly typical working-class family that I am from, if born today, would be born into a radically changed world. The policymakers now looking towards life opportunities until 2050 at least, given the growth of the world’s population, must think differently. The traditional policy choices of a social bargain and investing for social justice have to be challenged.
The question at hand, which my noble friend Lady Grender is tackling, is how these opportunities can be secured for the widest number of young people and how government can respond more and better to the views of young people to make sure that there are equal opportunities. A critical first step, as my noble friend said, would be a universal right of young people to vote at the age of 16. I have believed in this passionately since I joined a political party at 16. I was angry then that old people could vote to shape my future and I did not have a vote to shape my own. That was confirmed in the European referendum and other votes, where the older generation was not necessarily making decisions for the future generation.
A second step would be to formalise the structures of government so that young people are not only listened to but involved. Yes, the UK Youth Parliament, the Scottish Youth Parliament and the Welsh Youth Parliament have been positive developments, and I was the first Member of the Scottish Parliament to do joint advice surgeries with members of the Scottish Youth Parliament in my area. They are to be commended, but we need across the UK youth strategies, as my noble friend Lady Grender said, which inform and involve young people.
We can learn from the excellent initiative of the Liberal Government and Prime Minister of Canada. In 2015 Justin Trudeau appointed himself Minister of Youth at the same time as he became Prime Minister. He started the process of having the country’s first dedicated youth strategy, informed and shaped by the Prime Minister’s Youth Council, which he initiated. The introduction to the resulting strategy states:
“Investing in youth is in Canada’s social and economic interest. As a country, we must respect and value young people’s opinions. Almost all government policies and decisions have an impact on young people’s lives and youth have the right to influence these decisions, both individually and collectively. Multiple perspectives also strengthen decision-making and policy development by encouraging innovation, creativity and change”.
The participation of young people is critical to that. It went on to refer to something to which I am deeply committed, saying:
“Furthermore, involving young people in political processes will help build trust in democratic institutions, in turn protecting Canada’s democracy”.
The use of the word “protecting” is deliberate. We need to have that kind of language in our society today because it is under threat given the distance between policymakers and the young people who will have to live with the consequences of the major decisions being made by Parliament at the moment.
If we are to properly realise a strategy which has a direct impact on the life opportunities ahead, we need to make sure that it is the majority that seeks the opportunity but does not shoulder the burden of the difficulties. A respondent to the consultation in Canada said:
“Every young person should be afforded the opportunity to be the best version of themselves”.
That is surely an ambition that a young person in London, England, or London, Ontario, and in Banff, Scotland, or Banff, Alberta, can share.
We also know that at least 10% of young people in Britain today suffer from mental health issues. That could be as much as 20% if we include those not yet caught up in the system. This is a problem of epidemic proportions and I single it out today in my comments, echoing today’s earlier debate.
If we consider that 50% of mental illness in adults starts under the age of 15 and 75% before the age of 18, the problem of today’s children will soon become the problem for tomorrow’s adults. We are projecting a mental health problem of major proportions towards the future. If we are to try to deliver equality of opportunity and beneficial quality of life, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, suggests, this is a big obstacle. We see it in the worrying level of mental health issues that have arisen in our universities with tragic cases of student suicide on the rise. As the Times columnist Clare Foges wrote recently, on top of the stresses of a life on social media and financial stress,
“there lurk three further assassins to wellbeing: too much unstructured time, too much isolation, too much distance from the comfort of home”.
This can result in tragedy for some and misery for many.
Our universities need a good long think about how they can provide more support and a more engaged environment for students, but the problems often start well before university. I welcome the growing awareness of the problems of children’s mental health in society today, I pay tribute to the many powerful charities, such as YoungMinds and Place2Be, which do so much to help, and I commend the Government on making this a priority and on the many proposals set out in their Green Paper.
However, awareness is only the first step, and we are some way from rolling out a holistic solution. Let us look at the Government’s focus on solving the problem in schools, which I welcome. The proposal to introduce a designated school lead for mental health is not yet fully explained. We must make sure that these leads are well trained and their role is clear. Without properly trained counsellors, there is a danger that we will get better at identifying who needs help without being in a position to offer them the help they need. A recent EU-funded study shows the UK way down the European league table for the numbers of CAMHS psychiatrists and hospital beds. A recent study from the Children’s Commissioner found funding down in real terms in one-third of areas in England. Inconsistencies in funding are undermining efforts to get to grips with the problem.
We continue to face a toxic combination of stringent thresholds, which lead to rejected referrals—nearly one-third—and those who are lucky enough to be referred often being left languishing on waiting lists. By the time they get to see someone, the situation is quite a lot worse.
We owe our young people more. We need to do what we can to give them the best chance of a worthwhile life and playing their part in society, fulfilling their potential and being the teachers and doctors, mums and dads of tomorrow. They are our future, and at the moment we are a long way from where we need to be in supporting them.
In the past I have taken every opportunity to reduce the impact of sentencing on our young people. I refer to my Private Member’s Bill, the Rehabilitation of Offenders (Amendment) Bill. I am glad that the Government have now realised that short custodial sentences have little rehabilitative impact on the lives of young people, but more initiatives need to be taken to reduce the unacceptably high rate of incarceration among our young people. We need to reform the childhood criminal record system so that it is child-specific and reflects the nature of childhood offending. I am impressed by the work of the Standing Committee for Youth Justice. I share its concern that the current system allows widespread, lengthy and unnecessary retention of childhood records and acts as a barrier to rehabilitation by preventing children growing up and moving on from past mistakes. At present, the system is by far the most punitive I have come across. I support the SCYJ’s call for the Government to reform the system so that it provides a better balance between public protection and rehabilitation. Such sentences should be significantly reduced, there must be a presumption against the disclosure of police intelligence relating to children, and there should be an ability to wipe or delete records. Will the Minister look at the Supreme Court judgment and undertake a wide-ranging review for significant reform on this point?
The report by the House of Lords Intergenerational Fairness and Provision Committee spells out unfairness between older and younger generations. The committee observed:
“There is a structural shift taking place, with younger generations not seeing the increase in living standards enjoyed by the previous generations”.
I am afraid this disadvantage is built into the lives of black and ethnic minorities from the time they come to the United Kingdom. Of course we have race relations and human rights legislation on the statute book, but discrimination and disadvantage remain an everyday reality in the lives of many people. Geographically and economically, they occupy the place allocated to them when they arrived here, and organisations and institutions still fail to take into account the cultural diversity of our communities. Of course I welcome the Government’s initiative to audit their workforce, but after nearly 70 years of settlement here, we should have eradicated such disadvantages a long time ago.
We saw the ugly face of racism filtered through the last London mayoral election, followed by crude comments about migrant workers during the EU referendum. Many have argued that it is important to articulate a shared sense of national identity in contemporary conditions of flux and change. If so, how can we reconcile this with diversity, openness and pluralism of belief and practice? With the growing generations of young people in our black and ethnic minority communities, fixed notions of shared identity—even if they could be agreed on—are less necessary than promoting individual identity, pluralism and genuine multiculturalism. We need to take into account post-war migration and the process of globalisation, which cross the geographical boundaries of all nations. Unfortunately, much of the public debate on multiculturalism and “Britishness” has been on shallow grounds.
Multiculturalism is about more than a vague, well-meaning tolerance of difference. The passive position has led to the perception of many separate communities with separate interests which are in conflict. True multiculturalism is proactive and means that equality and diversity are at the core of everything we do, from government to individual responsibility. It means taking a much more proactive stance towards combating racism and discrimination, really tackling inequality in all aspects of society—the social and economic aspects and civic participation—positively valuing the contribution of different cultures and perspectives, and treating them with respect. We should not fail, or generations of minorities growing up in this country will never forgive us.
“Being born privileged in Britain means that you are likely to remain privileged”.
Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, authors of The Class Ceiling, go further, describing privilege as a,
“following wind … an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort”.
It is not that the upwardly mobile cannot progress, as we know that they do, and it is not that they will never reach the top; it is just that they often have the wind against them. Their analysis in The Class Ceiling of Labour Force Survey data confirms that, showing that only 10% of people from working-class backgrounds will climb the steep social ladder to the highest professional, managerial or cultural occupations. It would be easy, and it would certainly be easier on our consciences, to put that down to merit—to justify it on the basis of talent alone—but research shows that this is not the case. Unless we believe that talent is reserved solely for the middle classes and above, we have to admit that something has gone wrong.
Education ought to be the great equaliser, but all the challenges of disadvantage are compounded through our twin-track education system: one track for 94% of UK children and another for the remaining 6%. That part of the system employs one out of every seven teachers in the UK and the spend on students’ education is three times higher—all underpinned by fees that are now, on average, 50% of the median UK household income. Pupils at these schools mix with a peer group of equal privilege—the beginnings of a valuable network that will support them in their future careers—and they benefit from a vast range of extra-curricular activities and facilities, such as theatres, sports fields, drama and art, all of which help cultivate character, confidence and cultural capital.
To those of us who regret falling arts provision in state schools, it is bitter-sweet to see how frequently fee-paying schools sell themselves to parents on the basis of their outstanding arts provision. These schools fully understand the multiple benefits of arts engagement—discipline, resilience, empathy and creative thinking, for example—but they also understand the value of cultural capital in high-level careers: the contribution it makes to that elusive quality of “fit”, not just to getting in but to getting on. All that is borne out by the statistics: 48% of A-level grades in independent schools were A and A*, compared with a national average of 26%. Their pupils win 43% of the offers from Oxford and 37% of the offers from Cambridge. They also continue to dominate the professions: 74% of judges, 51% of journalists and 71% of top military officers are privately educated. Even in those fields that we think would be genuinely meritocratic, we see the same discrepancies. One-third of British Olympic medal winners in 2012 went to fee-paying schools, as did 42% of the 2016 BAFTA winners. Those are a lot of statistics, but it is hard not to conclude that our twin-track education system risks entrenching privilege more than ever before.
This matters for three reasons. First, educational credentials matter more than ever before. Secondly, it risks perpetuating inequality far into the future. If these schools were more diverse, society’s leaders would ultimately be drawn from a broader cross-section of the population, able to bring wider perspectives to the processes of decision-making. Thirdly, if there is an education system that is so successful in developing potential and opening up opportunities, should it not be available to everyone, especially those young people who need it the most?
Despite successive Ministers and Prime Ministers making it a priority, inequality is a wicked problem that is not going away. So what might the Government do? First, invest more in early-years education, which has a direct effect on the adults that children become. We know that children’s centres lead to better outcomes, yet up to 1,000 have closed over recent years. Can the Minister confirm when the promised review will be completed? Will he also consider the Sutton Trust recommendation that early-years teachers be given qualified-teacher status?
Secondly, the Government should lead a national conversation about how to harness the best qualities of independent schools, reimagining how the advantages they confer could be shared more equitably and articulating more clearly the role they should play in advancing social mobility. There are excellent examples of partnership in place, but there is a lack of definitive best practice and thought leadership to shift the status quo. The Social Mobility Commission’s report promises more detailed recommendations. Can the Minister say when those will be available?
Lastly, perhaps one of the reasons progress on social mobility has stalled is the absence of any imperative to monitor and report on socioeconomic diversity in the workforce. In January the Government published guidelines on how employers might do that, but their use is currently entirely voluntary. It is a well-worn truth that we measure what we value and we value what we measure. Given that, does the Minister agree that the time is right to move to the compulsory measurement and publication of social mobility data, particularly in the highest-level professions? Only then will we know whether our efforts to equalise opportunities for young people are having a genuine impact on the opportunities available to them in later life.
Investment in tackling homelessness—for example, through the rough sleepers initiative—is reducing rough sleeping in some areas. However, the Government will not meet their own targets to end rough sleeping unless they do more to prevent homelessness and address problems with the welfare system. There are three particular areas where I believe that government action could make a difference. The first is bringing housing benefit for young people back in line with the cost of renting. In many areas there is no accommodation available that young people on low incomes can afford, even when they are receiving housing benefit. Like other types of housing benefit, the shared accommodation rate has been frozen since 2016. In the 40 local authority areas with the highest number of 18 to 25 year-olds sleeping rough, there are just not enough affordable rooms available. Will the Government consider returning the shared accommodation rate to a more realistic level in line with local rents?
Secondly, the current five-week wait for universal credit payments can result in young people falling into rent arrears and being unable to pay for travel to find work. This can very quickly lead to a vicious cycle of debt and despair and ultimately to sleeping rough. Will the Government now consider plans to give new universal credit claimants access to housing benefit payments to cover the five-week period, similar to those planned for transferring claimants next year?
Thirdly, short-term preventive services can help young people to remain in their family home or find alternative accommodation before they reach a crisis point and end up homeless. Homelessness family mediation services can help young people and their families resolve issues that might otherwise lead to a young person leaving the family home and sleeping rough. Will the Government consider substantially increasing investment in preventive and family mediation measures to prevent young people becoming homeless in the first place?
The second issue I would like to raise is looking at ways to help young people develop their skills and build their resilience. Research undertaken by CFE Research and LSE Enterprise on behalf of the British Council found that 82% of individuals with international experience were confident in their ability to adapt to new and unfamiliar situations. Respondents with international experience were also more likely to describe themselves as resilient.
On a personal level, I know that my three-month exchange as a 20 year-old in Voronezh in the Soviet Union in 1988 had a profound impact on my ability to deal with adversity and cope without the luxuries of living at home. It certainly improved my ability to communicate in the Russian language too. At present, international exchange programmes are mostly available to young people in the higher education sector, but I would like to see ways of making them more widely available, and not just to certain socioeconomic groups. We should investigate the current barriers to these international exchanges. We should also look at ways of encouraging young people from all backgrounds to participate in international programmes and school exchanges, as well as encouraging them to learn foreign languages. That becomes all the more urgent if we leave the European Union.
With the British Council, I have been very privileged to attend a great many events in the UK and abroad that help young people to develop their skills, confidence and resilience. The annual Hammamet Conference is one such positive example. It brings together young people from the UK and five North African countries from a variety of backgrounds to allow them to share ideas and experiences in a very practical way. For many of the British participants, it is their first opportunity to travel abroad and most certainly their first opportunity to visit the African continent.
The conference encourages active listening and listening to what young people really think, rather than what we think they think. I would like to see if there are ways in which such positive events can be scaled up to include a greater number of young people in future. I would be grateful if the Minister commented on this in his concluding remarks.
Investing in young people and allowing each individual to find a way to fulfil their potential is surely the single most important thing any society can do. Young people have so much to give and so much to offer if we are just prepared to listen. As my noble friend Lady Grender spelled out so powerfully in her opening remarks, we need to make sure that we find effective ways to tap into that rich seam of talent, in this country and beyond.
I mention this to highlight the main theme that I would like to discuss in this debate. All young people start as foetuses, then become infants and then children. One really needs to think about their whole development and supporting them from the very beginning if they are to have good opportunities in adolescence and beyond. Something I would single out that we are, regrettably, very bad at in this country is recognising the complexities of children’s and young people’s needs and the importance of childhood and adolescence. We talk about it and there is a growing understanding of its importance, but consider, for instance, early years educators and carers. There is an early years degree. We all recognise that we want more qualified staff in early years settings because of its vital importance for young people’s education and other outcomes, yet it is quite possible to qualify as an early years graduate and to be paid no more than when one was unqualified and yet have more responsibility and look after more children.
Thankfully, the Government introduced the minimum wage, or whatever it is called. That probably raised the level of pay for many early years practitioners, but many of them are on the lowest possible wage that can be paid. This is enormously sophisticated work. I mentioned to a colleague that we should have more graduates in early years settings. She said, “Why do you need a person with a degree in an early years setting?” There is a whole culture of misunderstanding. I visited Denmark and spoke with a social pedagogue—a thoroughly well-educated young woman who worked in the early years and whose father ran an early years setting. She was very middle-class and well-educated. Our settings are very often very low paid and people are poorly educated. It is often seen as the sort of job that young women do when they perhaps do not see many options other than doing these things.
Maybe I can take this opportunity to apologise for and retract something I said to a group of educationists this week that I think was unhelpful. I said that I rather thought it was a good idea to advise young people not to become a teacher in this country. That was an extreme thing to say. Obviously, our children need their teachers, but I feel so frustrated at the way we teach our teachers, youth workers, social workers and residential childcare workers. It denigrates the importance of childhood and the complexity of children’s needs, especially those who have experienced trauma and sexual abuse.
I do not wish to be too negative and there is a lot of good progress being made, but will the Minister keep very much in mind what he can do to make teaching more attractive and to ease the burden on teachers? I have an old friend who is a primary school teacher in an inner city. For years, her family have been trying to persuade her to stop doing the job because they get to see so little of her because of the long hours she works. Speaking to another colleague whose wife is a teacher in an inner-city school in the Midlands, it is quite normal for many of her colleagues to work 50, 60 or 70 hours a week.
How can we expect children and young people to thrive? They need good relationships, most importantly with their parents, but going on to their early years provision and then their primary and secondary school teachers, to help them through often difficult times. If we do not treat our teachers well, if we do not treat the people who care for our children well, then we will not be treating our children well. We have to be kinder and more thoughtful to our teachers. We should not leave them feeling so despairing that they wish to leave the profession.
I know that the Minister is doing some excellent work in this area. Perhaps he may say something about the work that he is doing to ease the caseloads and workloads for teachers. However, we compare poorly to the way that those on the continent invest in the people who care for their children. I hope we can do better.