That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty as follows:
“Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament”.
My Lords, the Queen’s Speech will deliver EU exit alongside an ambitious programme of domestic reform that delivers real change to the people of this country. It is my pleasure to update noble Lords on the Government’s plans for the next Session for the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education.
I turn first to the Department of Health and Social Care. In September, the Government announced the health infrastructure plan, the biggest and boldest hospital building programme in a generation. Six new hospital schemes will start immediately, and another 21 schemes have been given the green light to develop their plans. It was also announced in the Queen’s Speech that new laws will be taken forward to help implement the NHS long-term plan in England. The Government have already committed to a multi-year funding settlement that will see a £33.9 billion per annum increase in the NHS budget by 2023-24.
In September the NHS published a set of recommendations for legislation changes that would enable our health service to go faster and further in realising the ambitions set out in the long-term plan: to improve integration, reduce bureaucracy and promote collaboration. We are considering the recommendations made by the NHS thoroughly and we will bring forward detailed proposals shortly. In due course we will publish draft legislation that will accelerate the long-term plan for the NHS, transforming patient care and future-proofing our NHS.
Legislation will also be taken forward to establish the health service safety investigations body. This will be the world’s first such body, with powers to investigate incidents that occur during the provision of NHS services that have or may have implications for the safety of patients. Drawing on the approaches used in other safety-critical sectors, investigations by this new body will be independent and professionally led. This will transform the way that patient safety incidents in the NHS are investigated.
A medicines and medical devices Bill will capitalise on opportunities to ensure that our NHS and patients can have faster access to innovative medicines while supporting the growth of our domestic sector. The Bill will give powers to remove unnecessary bureaucracy for the lowest-risk clinical trials, encouraging the rapid introduction of new medicines, and it will ensure patient safety by implementing a scheme to combat counterfeit medicines entering supply chains and a registration scheme for online sellers. This will ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of the global life sciences industry after Brexit, giving patients faster access to innovative medicines and supporting the growth of our domestic sector.
We will also bring forward substantive proposals to fix the crisis in adult social care, giving people the dignity and security they deserve. Putting social care on a sustainable footing is one of the biggest long-term challenges facing society. The Government have given local authorities access to up to £3.9 billion more in dedicated funding for adult social care this year and made available a further £410 million for adults’ and children’s services. In the recent spending round, the Government announced that councils will be provided with access to an additional £1 billion next year for adults’ and children’s social care. The Government will consult on a 2% precept that will enable councils to access a further £500 million for adult social care. This funding will support local authorities to meet rising demand and will continue to stabilise the social care system.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that introduction. She need not worry about repeating herself; I do that all too often—and I write my own speeches, so she has my sympathy. I am really looking forward to hearing speeches from around the House, but it is a disappointment that we will not get to hear the valedictory by the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton. I simply want to say for the record how much we on this side, especially my colleagues in the health team, have valued her contribution to the House, nursing education and the NHS more broadly. She will be greatly missed.
It feels slightly strange and unreal to be here discussing the details of Bills when out there, the Government only have eyes for Brexit. Indeed, the Prime Minister is champing at the bit to dissolve the Parliament which Her Majesty opened only last week with this gracious Speech. However, here we are, so we must do our job. The Minister has ably set out the Government’s vision for the future of Britain. As she said, the Prime Minister claims it is an ambitious programme which has at its heart a new vision for Britain and that the Government want to make the UK the greatest place to live, work and do business. This cannot be the greatest country to live in unless it is a great place for all our people to live in. We are interdependent, and the true flourishing of any of us depends on the flourishing of all of us, so my test of this speech and this programme is whether it can deliver on that vision.
The welfare state embodies a vision of Britain as a country where we take care of each other. We all pay into it and for it, because we all need it at some point. Some will need it more, but we do not know who that is going to be or whether it might be us. It supports those raising the next generation. It helps all of us at key life stages or in times of need—in pregnancy, sickness, unemployment or bereavement. It gives extra help to those who need it most: those with long-term illnesses or disabilities, or who care for others. It helps make work pay, and it supports us all in retirement. However, our system is increasingly losing its way. The past decade has seen massive cuts to benefits, damaging reforms, especially of disability benefits, and the awfulness that is universal credit. It has seen the demonisation of claimants and an explosion in benefit sanctions, often for the most minor infractions, which have combined to drive people into poverty and to take away their dignity. More and more people are struggling to make ends meet, dependent on food banks or even sending their kids to school hungry.
My Lords, I want to confine my remarks to the area of education, of which the Queen’s Speech says basically, “Motherhood and apple pie”. Could anyone have cause to disagree with the statement that all young people will,
“have access to an excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work”?
Perhaps the Minister will shed some light on the actual Bills that the Government will bring forward to make that happen. I hope that it will not be a further narrowing of the curriculum—we have seen how that stifles creative talent—and that it is not the further expansion of unaccountable free schools, when many parts of the country are urgently in need of building new schools to provide for much needed school places. Can we hope that the important Augar report on 16 to 18 year-olds will be translated into a Bill? After all, it was very close to the heart of the former Prime Minister. Can we also hope that the Government will bring forward changes to the EBacc?
By narrowing the curriculum, we have seen creative subjects decline in the state system year on year while flourishing in the independent and private schools sector. This year, we have seen GCSE entries decrease even further in design and technology, drama, media/TV studies and music at a time when the creative industries have become hugely important to our economy. Employers are consistently clear that the biggest drivers of success for young people are attitudes and attributes such as resilience, enthusiasm, and creativity. As the Edge Foundation says, young people need,
“a truly broad and balanced curriculum, linked directly to the real world and focused explicitly on developing the wide range of skills required to succeed in the twenty-first century”.
It has always fascinated me how Governments of the day and so-called spin doctors manipulate certain situations to persuade the media to follow a particular news agenda. Do your Lordships remember when Michael Gove, the then Secretary of State for Education, told us repeatedly how badly as a country we were performing in the international league tables in maths, English and science? They are called the PISA tables—the Programme for International Student Assessment. Mr Gove used the PISA tables constantly to show how badly we were performing against our overseas competitors. Finland and Singapore were heralded as shining examples. Our failure in the PISA tables became the raison d’être for Mr Gove’s cataclysmic changes in education policy. So what about looking at the PISA tables, 10 years on, to see how we are performing? Singapore still heads the tables in maths, science and reading, and Finland is still among the top European countries. In fact, 14 European countries outperform us in maths and 13 in reading. Over that 10-year period, the UK saw schools drop in all those subjects. Need I say more? I do not think we will hear much from the Government about the PISA tables any more.
My Lords, I propose to speak about social care for disabled and older people, which of course impacts on their health and well-being. This area has been deeply neglected in recent years. We are, sadly, looking at a series of failures in this sector: failure to invest in older and disabled people’s participation in, and contributions to, families and communities; failure to make decisions about how to secure long-term funding; and failure to create a positive narrative around the fact that we are living longer—I know I do. The result is poor-quality and inadequate support services which we would not want for ourselves or those we love.
Users of care and support services are deeply fed up with successive Governments’ “all talk and no action” approach to social care reform, and the general reference to social care in the Queen’s Speech adds little to restore public trust. It is not acceptable in a modern society, and as one of the largest economies in the world, to limit social care to life-and-limb services. This is about all of us: our families and ourselves, not mythical “others”.
While we need the Government finally to act on ensuring sufficient investment in social care, which is so important to the health and well-being of our society, we must equally look beyond government to bring about the transformative change necessary to reshape care and support. Many people and groups are trying to take action to make things a great deal better. Their common aim—our common aim—is summed up by Social Care Future, a network of people receiving, providing and commissioning social care. As it says:
“We all want to live in the place we call home with the people and things that we love, in communities where we look out for one another, doing the things that matter to us. That’s the #socialcarefuture we seek”,
My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, in these debates. I shall to try to draw on her remarks as I make mine. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register of Members’ interests.
I welcome the proposals in the Queen’s Speech. It is refreshing to be devoting a day to these crucial areas of domestic policy. Of course, Brexit hangs over this debate. Be one a remainer or a Brexiteer—thinking back to the debates that we had in this very Chamber on Saturday—one lesson from the referendum is that millions of people in this country feel left behind and do not feel that they have participated in the economic growth of the past decades. Regardless of whether one thinks a sensible response to that is to vote for Brexit, there is a message for all of us in the importance of the domestic policy issues that we are focusing on today.
I want to begin briefly on education. The Minister referred to technical education and T-levels, one of the notorious weaknesses of our education system. I very much hope that T-levels are a success. There are, however, some significant doubts about how well they will do. They appear to depend on unrealistic expectations of employer participation and contribution. There are already stories around that if T-levels do not secure the level of support we hope, one reaction from Ministers will be to try to close down the alternatives such as BTECs. It would be marvellous if we had an assurance from the Front Bench that existing provision—which is popular and which young people go for—will not be an unexpected victim of any problems that may face T-levels.
It is also important that people have the opportunity to participate in university education—again, I welcome what the Minister said on that. Going to university is a widespread aspiration. There is a narrative around at the moment that too many people go, but at every stage of the growth of participation in higher education, from 5% to 50%, we have had this narrative. If too many people go, it is a social problem concentrated in some rather unusual parts of the country. It is an acute problem in Winchester and Guildford, but, fortunately, in Hull and Bolton they are successfully resisting the dangers of going to university. The Government have committed to spread access to university with some bold ambitions for increasing participation from disadvantaged groups. This raises an interesting challenge. Are these extra students to go at the expense of the middle-class students from advantaged areas who are already going? If so, what steps are Ministers taking to reduce this excess rate of applications from some of our most affluent areas and most prestigious schools? Or does it mean in reality that more people in total will be going to university in future? Will the Minister confirm that one estimate is that simply achieving the Government’s own objectives for more participation from disadvantaged backgrounds, together with demographic change, would mean 300,000 more students by 2030?
My Lords, I regret the cursory reference in the gracious Speech to the social care needs of the old in this country. The Minister’s statement this afternoon has been confined to sums of money, some of which have already been announced. It was money that she spoke of; there was no substantial commitment to make changes to the system at a time when so much needs to be done. I will make two points which apply to the core issues of the care of the seriously old.
First, when I served as the Voice of Older People between 2008 and 2010, I received many letters asking for help with a problem concerning residential retirement homes and villages: many elderly people had come to rely on the expertise, availability and friendship of the wardens appointed to their care. These wardens were being phased out in favour of electronic alarms, buttons and telephone responses. Years later I sat on this House’s committee looking into AI and its potential. It became clear that artificial intelligence and robotic systems would increasingly offer an efficient and economical way of caring for the isolated old. I wish to issue a warning: old people want and need human contact; it helps them fight depression and loneliness in a way that machines cannot. I ask that future provision, while making strategic use of mechanics, has written safeguards about sustaining human contact with the old and isolated.
My second point is on a larger scale and concerns the business model that underpins the provision of residential care homes across the country: this needs a major rethink. I can only hope that the repeated delay of the long-promised Green Paper is because someone somewhere has woken up to the fact that the system is broken. The well-being and sense of security of frail, old people is at the mercy of the private equity-style business model, with the risk of companies carrying heavy debt burdens and paying extremely high interest rates.
It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. As a former council leader, I am very familiar with some of the issues she raised here today, but I shall confine my remarks to the worsening conditions of the least well off in our country. They deserve consideration, although sadly they are not a priority of the Government in the gracious Speech. There is ample evidence that conditions are getting worse for the poorest, whether in the form of research and reports, or in the daily experiences of children, families and individuals. Reports from the UN rapporteur, the Joseph Rowntree Trust, the Children’s Commissioner, the Child Poverty Action Group and a host of others provide shaming testimony in a country that once led the world in the social welfare of its citizens.
The gracious Speech makes reference to unlocking the full potential of children, yet we hear that teachers are buying food, clothing and equipment out of their own pockets for children who are too ashamed to come to school because their families cannot afford clothes and basic needs. The number of children attending food banks in the last year has doubled. Some 4.1 million children are in poverty, and 70% of them are from families where at least one parent works. Single parents, of whom 90% are women, are twice as likely to be in poverty as married couples. Half the children in one-parent families are in poverty. Furthermore, as far as housing is concerned, there has been a surge in homelessness, which was up by 320,000 in November 2017. Rough sleeping has shot up by 15% in a year; this is because of the paring back of housing benefit and the freezing of local housing allowance.
Nearly 50% of those in poverty—6.9 million—are from families where someone has a disability. On this I support the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and some of the examples she gave us. The crisis in PIP assessments whereby 75% of appeals are upheld requires attention. Even if the Government were concerned only with finance it would be sensible to look at a better way of doing this; in terms of the suffering it inflicts on people who already have to face financial penalties in various forms, it is just unforgivable. Families with disabilities are projected to lose £11,000 a year by 2021-22, more than a third of their income.
My Lords, many noble Lords will know that I have a background in health, and I continue to be a great supporter of the National Health Service, so they will not be surprised when I address my comments to health and social care. In doing so, I recognise the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, to nursing and to this House.
I thank the Government for their work to support and strengthen the National Health Service, its workforce and its resources. However, increased investment and reform does not guarantee getting to the root of the problem. Our health and social care issue is what you might call a “village problem”. Our flourishing, mentally, physically and emotionally, occurs best in community. More than that, as Sir Michael Marmot’s research from the Institute of Health Equity indicated, our economic, social and emotional circumstances all play a part in our health and well-being.
As a Christian, I believe that every human being is created in the image of God. We are not made in isolation. We belong together in creation, which should be cherished and not simply used and consumed. This is the starting point for the Church of England’s engagement in society, nation and the world. We are most human when we know ourselves to be dependent on each other. It is therefore no surprise that when communities mobilise and environments are improved, it benefits everyone and reduces the strain on our National Health Service. Here lies, in part, the power of social prescribing. Churches have an integral part to play. The Church is a builder of and a presence in communities, and is well placed to support people as they journey through life, and in fact towards death.
Within the diocese of London, the work of the Posh Club run by St Paul’s in West Hackney is just one example. A weekly cabaret-style party for the over-60s, it combats isolation and loneliness in the community. It provides a unique way to experience connection, laughter and physical activity. Father Niall Weir, rector of St Paul’s, says:
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Never mind our failure in the international tables, figures released by the Department for Education reveal that, this summer, 35.6% of pupils did not get grade 4 or above in GCSE English and maths, while half—57%—failed to get a grade 5, which is considered a strong pass. That 35.6% of pupils did not achieve a grade 4 might not mean anything to noble Lords, but it means that 190,000 young people were judged to have fallen short after 12 years of teaching. At the other end of the education system, the Department for Education also revealed figures that show that over a quarter—28.2%—of children are already falling behind in their education by the age of five.
Time is always tight in these debates, and I want to quickly mention two other issues that are close to my heart. Children in care and children who have struggled with schools and schooling are often placed in what is called alternative provision. These are the most vulnerable people in our society, and they need all the support and protection that we can possibly give them. Yet a large number of these pupils are put in unregistered schools which, because they are unregistered, are not subject to inspection and scrutiny. In many of them, the most unacceptable educational practices take place, including for example a lack of proper child protection procedures. Why are we allowing this to happen? Why, for example, are local authorities placing as many as 2,600 pupils in these unregistered schools and paying for them to go there? Why is the Department for Education unable to say how many unregistered providers there are? And why do the Government not listen when their own chief inspector of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, warns that inspectors and the Department for Education do not currently have the powers to shut down unregistered schools, even when they are breaking the law? Does the Minister agree that we should give them those powers?
Another area that I have been concerned about for a few years is essay mills and contract cheating. This is when students pay for their essay or dissertation to be written by someone else. It is a flourishing, multi-million-pound industry that preys on the vulnerability of students. The problem is growing year by year and affecting the academic integrity of our higher education system. When I put down an amendment during the passage of the Higher Education and Research Bill, I was assured by the then Minister, Jo Johnson, that the Government would try to deal with this problem by working with universities and the National Union of Students, and that if they failed, they would consider bringing in legislation. They have failed. The problem is getting bigger and bigger every year, with some 50,000 students using essay mills and contract cheating. More than 40 university vice-chancellors have written to the Education Secretary asking for essay mills to be banned. Will the Minister now give an assurance that these actions will be taken?
We all want all our children and young people to have the best possible education, and none should be left behind. When bringing forward legislation, I hope the Government will consider the important points that all your Lordships make in this debate.
not life-and-limb services.
Government financial investment to achieve this is critical, but it has to be done differently. Currently, it is targeted at propping up creaking services that most of us fear having to use. As noble Lords know, my area of greatest knowledge is disabled people, who account for 50% of social care expenditure, yet they say this does not give them what they want or need to live and participate effectively in the community. This group is completely unable to accumulate wealth to pay for their own care, yet Governments continue to raid their meagre benefits and entitlements, which they need to survive, for this purpose. This is wholly unfair, counterproductive and highly questionable financially.
Only person-centred support to live as others do, funded through central taxation, will break the cycle of fear and inaction. There is great public support for this. I and others are proposing new ways to invest in support for people of all ages. We must move away from institutional practices by shifting power to people and communities. We must recognise the case for realistic investment in a fundamental right to independent living, as argued for by the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance, a growing movement of disabled people’s organisations.
This year, the Independent Living Strategy Group, which I am privileged to chair, will embark on an independent inquiry into current support for disabled people, with recommendations for progressive change. This will underpin a Private Member’s Bill which I hope to table in the near future. I intend to call it the “access to living Bill”, because, after all, that is what everybody wants and deserves. They just want a life: they do not want a service and they do not want to live by handout to survive. They want a life and they want to participate. I will look for support for the Bill from the Government and from across the House, because I believe that this is the new future that we want for older and disabled people.
I want briefly to touch on welfare and employment. The Government have a fantastic record of increasing employment. There is of course a striking contrast between the generosity of benefits and welfare for pensioners, protected by their triple lock, and the freeze in the value of working-age benefits. The working-age population does not have an advocate as eloquent as the next speaker in this debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. Will the Government look at the way that benefits for working-age people work, in particular universal credit? When universal credit was designed, the preoccupation was with workless households, and it was designed to incentivise the first person in the household to go into work. The good news is that the number of workless households has fallen, but the problem is poverty and low incomes in families where someone is working. Here, universal credit has exactly the wrong effect: it penalises the second earner and people who increase their hours. A reform of the work allowance would help tackle that problem.
Finally, I very much welcome the pensions Bill. A particular proposal in it—the regime for collective DC pensions—is an excellent compromise between the generous, old-fashioned final salary schemes, where all the risk was borne by the employer and the pension scheme, and the pure defined contribution scheme, where individuals find themselves taking all the risk, with no sharing across fellow workers or other generations. I support this excellent initiative. The evidence from the design work that has been done on the Post Office CDC scheme—the most ambitious proposal—is that it is important for these schemes to be generationally fair. The danger is that the rights of existing pensioners are protected and the adjustment is all borne by younger workers. The regulatory regime set out in this legislation needs to tackle that problem.
Overall, I welcome the Government’s proposals in this Queen’s Speech. I have not had time to reflect on the social care proposals, apart perhaps from taking another lesson from the Brexit debate: just get on with it.
The care home market, as noble Lords will know, is currently dominated by four major care providers: HC-One, Four Seasons, Care UK and Barchester. Between them, they operate some 900 of the country’s 11,000 care homes. Some 95% of the country’s care beds are provided by the independent sector, catering for self-funders and the local authority-supported. Recent austerity cuts to local council funding and the introduction of the living wage have added to pressure on all these companies. Between 2015 and 2019 the big four declared losses totalling £900 million. In their 2017 published accounts their total debt was £2.2 million—I am quoting figures from their own statements as reported by Opus Restructuring. Noble Lords will remember that Southern Cross collapsed in 2011. Currently all four companies are up for sale. A deal for the sale of Barchester collapsed in July this year and Four Seasons put two of its top companies into administration in April this year. Now I am not a banker, and for all I know this is a really healthy state of affairs in the City, but it is not a safe, reliable model for the ongoing care of our older people.
Let us consider it from their point of view. The need for a care home often hits a family very suddenly: the death of a married partner may leave the children looking to provide for the survivor as soon as possible; a frail old person living alone may sustain a sudden injury or a sudden deterioration in health. They need to find somewhere quickly and to meet the complex financial arrangements that have to be made. There is now evidence that companies prefer to set up care homes in the country’s most affluent areas, where there will be more self-funders in their potential market. The market will thus fail to supply the needs of the poorer old, and sudden changes in company finances can leave old residents suddenly bereft and bewildered. Family decisions made quickly in the shadow of bereavement or illness can be the wrong choices, but making complaints or seeking redress is not easy when you are dependent on the staff of the care home. I hope the Minister will address the issue of embedding consumer law in the regulatory regimes of care homes.
Growing old is not an option we can exercise: the alternative is worse. No sector in our society is crying out for reform more than our care of the elderly—and, incidentally, their dedicated and underpaid care workers. Will the Government address these concerns with the greatest urgency, and can they give us a timescale?
Indications also show that the worst off and most vulnerable will suffer more under Brexit. I understand from talking to those involved that very little assessment of this has been done, yet already the depreciation of the pound, rising prices and inflation are making things very difficult for those on fixed income. Unless the full uprating of benefits and low incomes takes place, there will be a crisis and the poorest and most vulnerable will not be protected. Indebtedness has already reached pre-2008 levels, yet little appears to have been done in terms of emergency support.
The gracious Speech states:
“My government will bring forward measures to protect individuals, families and their homes”.
The Government really need to look at the evidence of how they are protecting families and their homes. The two-child limit and the four-year benefits freeze both directly affect children. If what people are saying about the effect of Brexit is right, emergency payments would be indispensable, but they are going to be lost. In the past they have prevented families falling into destitution; they need to be reinstated. The sanctions imposed by the Government are a source of destitution and debt and are particularly damaging to people with disabilities or health conditions such as heart disease.
Payments to young people of £250 per month are not enough to live on for those who do not have supportive homes. Split payments need to be made so that abused women are not kept under the control of their abuser. As the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has already mentioned, the disincentives to work, the effect of sanctions and flexible working need to be thoroughly investigated and action needs to be taken.
There is ample evidence of the worsening lives of the poor and vulnerable. Our priorities must be to build an effective social safety net nationally and locally, to address the issues that lead to low pay and insecure employment and to ensure that measures are in place for the least well-off, the least protected and the most vulnerable so that they do not slip through the holes of an insufficient safety net and drift into destitution and poverty.
“If there was a Posh Club in every town in the UK, I’m certain the numbers of elderly on GP waiting lists would go down hugely”.
In other words, this kind of community partnership can potentially be used to ease some of the unsustainable pressure on our National Health Service. I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what steps are being taken to ensure the deployment and distribution of social prescribing link workers, as outlined in the NHS Long Term Plan, to ensure that there is a level playing field right across all parts of this country.
What of the social care system? Some 1.3 million children—10% of all children—in England have needed a social worker in the past six years, and their prospects are not always good. For example, just 17% of them get GCSEs in maths and English. The social and economic cost of failing to help children is immense. In addition, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, the elderly are being burdened with the huge cost of their care homes, while parents struggle to pay for essential care services for their disabled children.
A great deal of thinking has been undertaken about how we might best improve adult social care funding. The Church of England has been consistent in its advocacy of integrating health and social care to ensure the most efficient and effective use of people and resources; we need to see effective integration taking place on the ground in all the communities of this country. The King’s Fund has pointed out that the NHS long-term plan is fundamentally flawed precisely because it isolates the NHS from both social care and public health. Once again, this is not merely a social care problem but a village problem.
While we are waiting for the Green Paper on reform of social care to be released, we still have the Dilnot report, published almost a decade ago. It had cross-party consensus and tackled the very issues that we still face today. It understood the value of community and the importance of shared responsibility. What plans do the Government have to revisit the Dilnot report and its recommendations?
Although I welcome the Government’s commitment to reforming the Mental Health Act, and despite the commitment made five years ago to closing the gap and the crisis care concordat, there continue to be alarming disparities in minority ethnic mental health provision. I welcome the change in legislation, but it needs to be supported by policies and practices that increase cultural competence among professionals and are developed in partnership with minority ethnic communities.
In conclusion, I remind noble Lords that health and social care depend on the wider collaboration of the community as well as internal change. To tackle the deep-seated inequalities that we face in this sector, we need to work together in partnership. Although I welcome the Government’s commitment to do more, I hope that the Minister will bear in mind the role of communities in delivering positive health outcomes and say something about how that can be done.
We will continue to work to modernise and reform the Mental Health Act to ensure that people get the support they need and have a much greater say in their care. In 2017 we commissioned the independent review of the Mental Health Act to look at rising rates of detention, the disproportionate number of people from black and minority-ethnic groups detained under the Act and processes that are out of step with a modern mental health care system. The findings made it clear that we need to modernise the Mental Health Act to ensure that patients’ views are respected and that patients are not detained any more than is absolutely necessary. By the end of this year we will publish a White Paper setting out our response. This will pave the way for reform of the Mental Health Act and will tackle issues addressed by the review. We will ensure that people subject to the Act receive better care and have a much greater say in that care. Patient choice and autonomy will be improved—for example, by enabling patients to set out their preferences around care and treatment in advance. The process of detention, care and treatment while detained will be reformed, including by providing patients with the ability to challenge detention.
The Government also announced new legislation from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. This includes new legislation that will help accelerate the delivery of fast, reliable and secure broadband networks to millions of homes. We will roll out gigabit-capable broadband across the UK to achieve nationwide coverage as soon as possible, so that people can reap the huge benefits of the fastest, most secure and most resilient internet connections. Faster speeds will boost productivity, drive innovation in our public services and give people the fast connectivity they need to reap the benefits of the digital revolution.
The legislation will create a cheaper, faster, light-touch tribunal process for telecoms companies to obtain interim code rights or access rights for a period of up to 18 months. This will mean that they can install broadband connections where the landlord has failed to respond to repeated requests for access. Amendments to the Building Act 1984 will require all new-build developments to have the infrastructure to support gigabit-capable connections. There will be a requirement for developers to work with broadband companies to install gigabit-capable connections in virtually all new-build developments, up to a cost cap. As well as this, the Government have recently pledged £5 billion to support the rollout of gigabit-capable broadband in the hardest-to-reach 20% of the country.
The Government also announced that Ministers will continue to develop proposals to improve internet safety. Britain is leading the world in developing a comprehensive regulatory regime to keep people safe online, protect children and other vulnerable users and ensure that there are no safe spaces for terrorists online. The Online Harms White Paper published in April set out the Government’s plan for world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online.
The proposals as set out in the White Paper include a new duty of care on companies towards their users, with an independent regulator to oversee this framework. We want to keep people safe online but to do so in a proportionate way, ensuring that freedom of expression is upheld and promoted online and that businesses do not face undue burdens. We are seeking to do this by ensuring that companies have the right processes and systems in place to fulfil their obligations, rather than penalising them for individual instances of unacceptable content. A public consultation on this has closed and we are analysing the responses and considering the issues raised. We are working closely with a variety of stakeholders, including technology companies and civil society groups, to understand their views.
Turning to the Department for Education, we will ensure that all young people have access to excellent education, unlocking their full potential and preparing them for the world of work. We are giving schools a multibillion-pound boost, investing a total of £14 billion over three years, so that the annual core schools budget is £7.1 billion higher by 2022-23. The IFS has said that this investment will restore schools funding to previous levels in real terms per pupil, also by 2022-23. We will level up minimum per pupil funding for primary schools to £4,000 and for secondary schools to £5,000, while making sure per pupil funding for all schools can rise at least with inflation.
We are also spending around £3.5 billion on early education entitlements this year alone, and next year we are planning to spend more than £3.6 billion. Our focus in this area is on delivering positive results. A record proportion of children are starting year one with a good level of development. More than 1.4 million children are taking advantage of funded early education in 2019. Over 850,000 disadvantaged two year-olds have benefited from a 15 hours early education place since the programme began.
We also have a world-class university sector. We are home to nearly half of the top 10 universities in the world. Since 2012, total income for universities in England has increased by around £6 billion and we have frozen the maximum tuition fees rate and increased the threshold for repayments, now worth up to £425 a year for graduates.
Looking ahead, T-levels will represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform technical education in this country, put it on a par with the best in the world and offer young people a real choice of high-quality training that is equal in esteem to traditional academic routes. We are on track for the first teaching of three T-levels in 2020; a further seven will be rolled out in 2021, and all 25 courses by 2023.
Finally, I would like to talk about the work the Government are doing on employment and pensions, in particular the Pensions Schemes Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to support pension saving in the 21st century and to help people plan for the future. It provides a framework for the establishment, operation and regulation of collective money purchase schemes, commonly known as collective defined contribution pensions. These schemes will provide more options for employers and offer members a target benefit level. The Bill will protect people’s savings for later life by strengthening the powers of the Pensions Regulator to tackle irresponsible management of private pension schemes. This will include introducing new criminal offences, with the most serious carrying a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment and a civil penalty of up to £1 million. It will also create a legislative framework for the introduction of pensions dashboards. With record numbers of people saving for retirement, it is more important than ever that they can easily access information about their pensions. Pensions dashboards will mean that for the first time, people will be able to view online in one place all their pension information.
As the Prime Minister said last week, this is a programme that will set our country on a new upwards trajectory. At its heart is a new vision for Britain, a vision of a country happy and confident about its future, a vision of the country that we all love. The mission of this Government is nothing less than to make our country the greatest place on earth, the greatest place to live, work and do business, and this Queen’s Speech will set us firmly on that course.
What, then, does the Queen’s Speech have to say about that situation? As we heard, there is one DWP Bill, the Pension Schemes Bill. We are in broad agreement with the stated aims of the Bill and we will crawl over the detail. My noble friends Lord McKenzie of Luton and Lady Drake will speak more about pensions later, but that is it: there is nothing on social security and the word “poverty” is mentioned nowhere, even though 14 million of our citizens—4 million of them children—are living in poverty. In-work poverty is on the rise and most poor children now live in working households.
What did Ministers think was going to happen when they set out to cut £37 billion from our social security system? The benefit freeze alone will have taken £4.4 billion from our poorest families by the time it ends next year. I was horrified recently to hear the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions refuse to rule out extending the freeze still further. To do that would be to deliberately and knowingly drive more people into poverty and deeper poverty, so I hope the Minister can reassure us that that will not happen. I trust that she will not say that that is a matter for the Budget, because while Ministers have been quite happy to trail tax cuts—there is always money for tax cuts—it is strange that there is never as much money when it comes to benefits for the poorest.
Labour has committed to a £3 billion programme to reverse the worst of the cuts, including the disgraceful two-child limit, and to begin to unpick the disasters of universal credit. A Labour Government would seek to change the culture and create a system dedicated to dignity, universalism and ending poverty. That is our vision of a country where everyone can flourish. Will the Minister tell us what the Government’s vision is?
Our welfare state pools risk across our population and across lifetimes. It is the companion service to the NHS, which also works on the basis that we pool our risk because any of us can get sick. It is because of that underlying vision that the NHS is more than just a public service: it embodies how we as a nation see ourselves as an interdependent community. I am sorry to say, however, that our NHS is struggling and there was not much comfort in the Queen’s Speech. Most of the funding announcements had previously been announced and most of the proposals—for example, for a long-term plan, reforming the Mental Health Act and addressing social care—are very much in the future. Right now, across the NHS, services are missing financial and performance targets. People are waiting ever longer for treatment and a shortage of staff threatens the quality of patient care. Where is the urgent concrete action to deal with these problems?
Meanwhile, social care is in crisis: adult social care is badly failing those who rely on it, with high levels of unmet need and providers struggling to deliver the quality of care that vulnerable people need and have a right to expect. However, the funding announcement on social care had previously been announced and £500 million has to be raised by councils themselves, even though those in the industry had made it clear that that was, in their words, a “short-term sticking plaster”. Without more funding or a detailed plan as to how we get there, older and disabled people will continue to be left without the care they need, and carers will increasingly buckle under the strain.
Labour has set out its vision for a national care service, but we do not know what the Government’s vision is. The Prime Minister promised us that he had a plan to fix the crisis once and for all, but I see no plan, just endless consultation. One has to assume that the ever-delayed Green Paper has perhaps finally bitten the dust. If so, we are left with no proposals and no legislative timetable for a social care Bill in this Parliament. I hope the Minister can contradict me because, if not, that simply is not good enough.
Mental Health was too often addressed in similarly broad terms. It is now almost a year since the independent review of the Mental Health Act was published, but we still do not have a White Paper. Ministers announced a mental health Bill in December 2018 but we still do not have one. There are urgent problems: mental health beds are closing; the mental health estate is crumbling; the CQC has recently reported chronic staff shortages and deteriorating services; children and young people are waiting more than a year for mental health services and many have been turned away because they were not yet bad enough. Can the Minister tell us when will we see some action? My noble friend Lady Wheeler will say more about social care in her contribution.
I am afraid that that pattern of revisiting old promises with slightly vague offers of new ones permeates the Queen’s Speech. In education, again, we are short on commitments to new legislation or policy. Even previous ministerial commitments that need legislation have not made their way into the Queen’s Speech. For example, Ministers said they would introduce a schools’ level-funding formula “as soon as possible” but where is it?
Only a few weeks ago the Secretary of State said that he would,
“put the school uniform guidance on a statutory footing”,
and will do so when a suitable opportunity arises. School uniform costs are rocketing and something is needed, but where is the legislation? Where is the guidance? Furthermore, despite specifically consulting on primary legislation to regulate home education, there is no sign of it in the Queen’s Speech. Can the Minister tell us why and when it will be brought forward? My noble friend Lord Watson of Invergowrie will talk more about education across the spread in his contribution.
The DCMS is the final area covered today but the key announcements on broadband rollout and online harms were covered in part by my noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara on Thursday and my colleagues will pick that up later, so I will not dwell further on it here. However, I want to note the widespread disappointment that Ministers did not use the Queen’s Speech to commit to reverse the cuts to BBC funding for the over-75s licence fee. That should never have been dumped on the BBC in the first place and I urge the Government to review it. Labour will; will the Minister please do likewise?
We have looked at this programme through the lens of some of our most important public services and the welfare state as a safety net for all of us. Does that vision stand up to scrutiny? I do not think that it does. It is not enough just to declare that you want to make Britain great again. If we want a country where all our people can flourish and where they can fulfil their potential and contribute to the flourishing of the nation, government must will the means as well as the end.
We do not need another decade of cutting taxes for the better-off while slashing benefits for the poorest, of letting our most important public services lurch from crisis to crisis and of abandoning vulnerable people to the care of friends and family. We need a new era characterised by mutual care and by a determination to tackle inequality, protect the vulnerable and give every child the best possible start in life, wherever they live and however unwisely they chose their parents. That is the vision that I want to see and I urge the Government to follow that instead.