Debate on the Address

My Lords, I suppose that I should not be surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, spent half his time talking about health—after all, the Department of Health is his ministry—but I intend to take a more general approach and leave most of the health issues to my noble friend Lord Howe. We look forward to not one but six maiden speakers—a quick look at Dod’s shows that their interests comprise almost all of social affairs. We await their remarks with interest. Like them, I think the words ““social affairs”” cover a very broad spectrum: education, work and pensions, health and, in part at least, culture, media and sport. I say in part because at the top end, that last subject is in my book an industry. Take for instance Premier League football or ITV, where vast sums of money are involved. However, at the other end it provides social integration, education and improves mental and physical health. I cannot help but wonder whether the massive increase in childhood obesity, which appears to have taken the Government by surprise, is due to the fact that for decades competitive sport was discouraged in our maintained schools up and down the country. We have had Questions and debates about selling off school playing fields. Still we are told that that does not matter because they are replaced by gyms and indoor sports facilities. There is not much fresh air there. Or are we to be told that fresh air does not matter any more? There is not much fresh air for youngsters either. The BBC told us recently that, on average, children spend 25 hours a week in front of either a television or computer screen. It is political correctness that tells us that outside is a dangerous place. ““Don’t play conkers: they might split and go in your eye””. Of course they will split, that is the object of the game. All is not quite lost. Farley Nursery School in Salisbury, Britain's only outdoor nursery, where children are taught outside for most of the time, is a real breath of fresh air in a system led by damage limitation and fear of risk. It champions the long-forgotten principle that children and young adults in education should be allowed to take responsibility for themselves in all aspects of their lives. It was therefore with great disappointment that I discovered some of the intentions of the forthcoming education Bill, which had its First Reading yesterday. Although there are problems with the current system—for example, the worrying number of 16 to 18 year-olds out of education has risen by 40 per cent since 1997—the Bill promises no real change. Instead, it will merely reshuffle Learning and Skills Council officials from local to regional offices, where bureaucracy will be even further from the reality. We need training funds to follow student and employer choices, rather than bureaucrats second-guessing provision. The approach is not more responsive, as the Minister said, but a wasted opportunity. In preparing for this debate, a first for me—not, I hasten to add, the preparation but the debate on the gracious Speech—I chanced on something that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said in this debate in 2002. He said: "““There are strong links between ill health and the other problems that we face, such as unemployment, poor housing, poor educational achievement [and] the insecurity faced by so many young people. We will always have to work together throughout Whitehall to sort out such problems””.—[Official Report, 19/11/02; col. 357.]" The noble Lord may remember saying that. ““Aye””, as Hamlet said, ““there’s the rub””. The plethora of strategies, targets and curricula with which the Government are fixated have not proven to be the answer. The Government do not have all the answers. That was proven when they asked the noble Lord, Lord Turner, to chair a pensions commission, which resulted in two valuable reports: the first analysing the problem, the second proposing solutions. That will result in not one but two Bills, one of which was forecast in the gracious Speech. Although this year’s Pensions Bill is arguably the most sweeping state pension reform for a generation, it will only do half the job that the noble Lord recommended. Rather than deal with the most urgent problem of increasing people's savings for retirement which, for half the population, are non-existent and for most of the other half, negligible, it will comprise only a revamp of state pensions and the setting-up of yet another quango—except, of course, it will probably be called a commission—to administer a national supplementary pension into which employees will be expected to put 4 per cent of their earnings, the employer 3 per cent and the Treasury 1 per cent. Or will those figures change, and over what period will the scheme be introduced? We will have to wait for a White Paper to see the Government’s intentions. This year’s Bill, however, will steal one of my party’s pledges at the last general election: to raise the level in line with incomes rather than prices. They will not do so, we are told, until 2012 at the earliest. Meanwhile, millions of pensioners should be claiming pension credits. Some are, but a worrying 1.6 million are not. They will also reduce the number of years needed for someone to acquire a full pension from 44 to 30, while still contributing throughout their working life—something of which the party on my right fundamentally disapproves. As the Minister has just said, we will soon consider another work and pensions Bill, the Welfare Reform Bill, which has already started its passage in another place. In order to get 1 million people off invalidity benefit and into work by 2017, the Bill creates a single benefit with numerous sub-divisions and rates of payment for those with possibly temporary problems such as a bad back, for the long-term sick and disabled, and extra for those with children. Although I agree that it could reduce the number coming on to benefit, it does not seem to reduce the number currently on benefit, and it adds yet more complication to a social security system that, since its inception, has built one overlapping benefit on to another. It is time we considered the benefits regime as a whole. That would be a proper reform, like that of my noble friend Lord Fowler in the 1980s. That argument, however, is for another day. In the summer, we were also promised a Bill—to be preceded by a White Paper—to sort out the mess of the Child Support Agency. I confess to a sneaking sympathy with the Government, who have taken steps to chase absentee parents who refuse to support their young. Perhaps the Minister will tell us what progress is being made by the outside agency that now conducts this work. As I understand it, however, the Bill will be about assessing what the absentee parent should be paying and about penalties for not paying. Yet again, the Government have a bad record in this respect. They introduced a new child support scheme in 2003, and, as of last October, had spent more than£530 million on it. Yet this June, the National Audit Office commented that, "““overall the new scheme has performed no better than its predecessor””." Some 250,000 child support cases remain to be processed, and it is hard to imagine that the Child Support Agency will reach its target to reduce the number of uncleared new scheme applications by25 per cent between March 2006 and March 2007. As the Minister said, £3.5 billion of debt is uncollected. I failed to hear him say, however, that the department believes that £2 billion of this is uncollectable. The key issue here is the robustness of the original assessment, and if the Bill fails to crack this, it will be another wasted opportunity. Naturally, much of the CSA’s work is done by computers. There is no doubt that computers are marvellous things that can be programmed to make all sorts of calculations and communications. However, there seems to be a strand of thought in government that, just because something can bedone, it should be done. As the song goes, however, it ain’t necessarily so. Again and again, we see overcomplicated schemes running late, costing vast sums of unscheduled money and, when delivered, failing in their original conception. That brings me on to statistics. No one who heard Her Majesty on Wednesday could have missed the laughter when she said: "““Legislation will be introduced to create an independent board to enhance confidence in Government statistics””.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/11/06; col. 4.]" Statistics are at the very heart of social security. Even if a Minister thinks that it would be a good idea to change something, such as creating a new benefit, they will get nowhere without discovering what is going on now and with how many people, and how many gainers and losers there will be as a result of the proposal. My honourable friends and I have recently been trying to get to the bottom of social exclusion—a very big subject. We recognise that we cannot do so until we know exactly how many adults and children are involved. The Social Exclusion Unit, which this Government set up, lists the main causes and consequences. Statistics exist for all of them, except family breakdown. Yet, recently, in a Written Answer, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, told me: "““It is estimated that each year between 150,000 and 200,000 couples with children separate””." He will remember that, no doubt. He continued: "““This is made up of 100,000 divorces, and between 50,000 and 100,000 cohabiting relationships breaking down””.—[Official Report, 18/10/06; col. WA 191.]" That is not very helpful. Both he and I would need much better figures than those to convince a Treasury colleague to spend money on even a part of the problem. I can only hope that the new board will sort this out and, most importantly, that members of the board, not Ministers, decide what is to be subject to the proposed code of conduct and Ministers do not have a veto on their publication. Is that a pipe dream? Maybe it is, but no more than many of the aspirations underlying the legislation proposed in the gracious Speech.