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Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, rising to make my own maiden speech at the start of this debate enables me to extend real empathy, and not just mere sympathy, to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, whose maiden speech we look forward to later. I begin by thanking Members from all parts of the House for the incredibly friendly welcome that I have received during the past week. Perhaps I may make special mention of my noble friend Lord Filkin, who served before me at the Department for Education and Skills and who I know earned the deep respect of your Lordships and of the department. It is a great privilege for me to be Member of your Lordships’ House. I am very conscious of the duty I owe the House and I will do my best to fulfil it. It is my misfortune to have arrived in the House with rather too much publicity. My wife, I am glad to say, took particular exception to the jibe that I am ““more Andrew than Adonis”” or as the Daily Mail put it touchingly:"““rarely has a surname been more inappropriate””." I submit myself to your Lordships’ judgment on that point, except to say that, in my case, Adonis has nothing to do with beauty; simply that I hail from Cyprus. My father arrived in Britain 45 years ago from a Cyprus which was then, as now alas, deeply troubled. He arrived with little. Listening to the moving speeches earlier in the debate by my noble friend Lord Dubs and the noble Lord, Lord Alliance, about their experience as immigrants, I can only echo their sentiments about this great country which gave us refuge. My family and so many other Cypriots who settled here owe everything to the British values of tolerance, opportunity and responsibility. I personally owe more than I can ever repay to my education and to some brilliant teachers and youth workers. It is this which gave me a personal commitment to the cause of education and to overcoming the terrible waste of talent and potential which I saw so graphically on the Camden Town council estate where I grew up. I hope I can contribute something to the cause of education in your Lordships’ House alongside so many others on all sides of the House who are committed in the same way. The sustained improvement of education, health and the other public services is essential to the gracious Speech. So, too, is the reform of welfare, to meet the contemporary needs of pensioners, the unemployed, the disabled and all others who are dependent on the   state. The Government’s objective is to create a genuine opportunity society—a society of social mobility where the great majority, not just a minority as in the past, develop their talents to the full through education and life-long learning; where the National Health Service offers the best healthcare to all, free at the point of use; where personalised education and health services, meeting individual needs fully, are the prerogative of every citizen, regardless of background or income; and where the welfare state is an agency both for support and for responsibility, giving citizens the help that they and their families need to forge an independent livelihood wherever possible. This has been the mission of the Labour Government since 1997; it was in the manifesto on which we were re-elected; and the theme of opportunity runs through the gracious Speech. I shall take the main areas of debate in turn. On welfare reform, there will be an incapacity benefit Bill to extend greater support for training and work-search to the 2.5 million claimants of incapacity benefit. In the previous Parliament, the pathways to work pilot schemes, extending personal advisers to IB claimants, increased the numbers getting back to work by between 20 and 100 per cent. The Bill that we will bring forward will reinforce the principle of rights and responsibilities, helping the many IB claimants who are able to work to do so while improving long-term assistance for those who are unable to work. We propose also to reform housing benefit to empower tenants to take greater responsibility for their own housing choices. Building on the positive results of existing local pilot schemes, we will introduce legislation to permit a flat rate of housing benefit to be paid directly to tenants in privately rented accommodation, rather than to landlords. On pensions, the Government fully recognise their obligations. Since 1997, additional state support for pensioners has helped nearly 2 million people out of acute poverty, and pensioner households are, on average, £1,500 a year better off in real terms. But the challenge of an ageing society remains immense. There is the critical savings issue. It is estimated that 3 million people are under-saving for their retirement, and that a further 5 to 10 million ought to consider saving more. There are also the long-term pressures. During the current Parliament, the number of people over state pension age will overtake the number of children. Thirty years ago, there were almost four people in work for every retired person. Now there are fewer than three and a half people. In 30 years, if we do nothing, there will be only two and a half people. The Government wish to build a consensus for reform on pensions across the parties. After the report of Adair Turner’s commission in the autumn, we will come forward with proposals. Further radical improvement of the great public services of health and education is at the heart of our third-term programme. The gracious Speech set out reforms to raise standards, extend opportunity, reduce bureaucracy and create more personalised services with greater choice. On health, on which my noble friend Lord Warner will have more to say later, a health improvement Bill will make the vast majority of enclosed public spaces and workplaces smoke free. It will strengthen measures to reduce healthcare-associated infections with a statutory code of practice. It will halve the number of Department of Health arm’s-length bodies; modernise the regulation of community pharmacy and ophthalmic services; and, in response to the Shipman inquiry, ensure the safer management of controlled drugs. There will be an NHS redress Bill to deal more speedily and effectively with low-monetary-value clinical negligence cases. The existing clinical negligence regime too often forces patients down an adversarial legal route that is fraught with delay, anguish and unnecessary legal expense, which we wish to overcome. We will also take forward the Mental Health Bill which was published as a draft Bill in the previous Session and given valuable scrutiny by the Joint Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. The objective of the Bill is to strengthen patients’ rights, break the automatic link between compulsory treatment and detention, and improve the legal framework for those who suffer mental disorders. The Government are considering the committee’s recommendations carefully and we will publish the Bill in the summer. Childcare and education featured prominently in our election manifesto. Children get only one chance at school. It is our duty to give them the best-possible chance and to counter much better than in the past the effects of social disadvantage. School standards have risen considerably in recent years, but there is much further to go before we can be satisfied, and many parents need more support. In the early years, all children need the social and communication skills that are necessary to be ready to learn. In primary schools, a child who cannot read cannot learn, and we intend to focus significantly more attention and support on the 20 per cent of children who still go through primary school without learning to read properly, with all the problems that that causes them and society at large in secondary school and beyond. At secondary level, and in further and higher education, all our young people ought to be able to choose courses which motivate them, including apprenticeships and vocational courses which have too often been unavailable in the past. Further education is as important to the future of this country as higher education, and our third-term programme will reflect this. In terms of legislation there will be a Children, (Contact) and Adoption Bill, which will start in this House. This will strengthen support for parents and children in maintaining contact after the breakdown of relationships and give the courts more flexible powers to facilitate contact and to uphold enforcement orders. There will be new regulation of inter-country adoption and there will be a Bill to protect children and vulnerable adults, implementing key recommendations made by Sir Michael Bichard after the Soham murders. On childcare and early years education, we intend to increase parental leave and pay entitlements for mothers and fathers, progressively to extend rights to nursery education and childcare, including family support and healthcare in the most deprived communities, building on the pioneering work of Sure Start. We will provide investment for 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres nationwide by 2010. Existing primary schools and the private and voluntary sectors will have a key role to play in this new under-fives provision as, indeed, is already happening up and down the country. In respect of schools, a Bill will give local authorities and Ofsted greater capacity to tackle school failure so that we do our utmost to limit the blight caused to children by seriously underperforming schools. The Bill will enable and encourage greater collaboration between schools and colleges to increase the range and quality of vocational and apprenticeship choices available to teenagers beyond the age of 14. It will make it easier for good quality providers of education, including successful state schools, to replace failing schools and to establish new state schools in response to parental demand on the   basis of fair all-ability admissions and fair funding. This will also provide opportunities for the Churches and   other faith communities, who already make an outstanding contribution to our state education system. We also wish to reduce significantly the number and burden of inspectorates and will consult on proposals for a single, lighter touch inspectorate covering the whole of education, children’s services and skills. We are considering how best to take forward the School Transport Bill, which fell at the Dissolution, especially to support greater choice and opportunity for pupils beyond the age of 14. I have set out the Government’s legislative plans but legal changes alone will only get us so far in improving the public services. Underpinning all we do is sustained investment in people and in facilities, in the doctors, nurses and teachers without whom there would be no NHS or schools, in the modern buildings and facilities they need to do a first-class job and in the extra capacity essential to extending both choice and quality. The Government are investing very considerably extra above inflation year on year in both health and education. Our principle is simple, that extra investment should promote both equity and excellence and the reforms needed to achieve both. In the NHS new contracts with better pay are ensuring more flexible working for consultants, GPs and nurses. Vital to reducing hospital waiting times are the new diagnostic and treatment centres focused on particular elective procedures such as cataracts and hip replacements, including facilities run by the new independent providers but with no charges for patients. The new NHS Direct service and walk-in centres are similarly making primary care more accessible and we intend to take all these reforms forward in this parliament. In education, a six fold increase in capital investment since 1997 is making possible the Building Schools for the Future programme, rebuilding or totally refurbishing every secondary school in the country and half of all primary schools over the next 15 years, together with the new academies and Sure Start centres, focused in particular on deprived areas. There will not just be modern classrooms but IT systems, sports, music and arts facilities, childcare, specialist teaching centres, including for children with disabilities, open to their whole communities. While facilities are important, the Government have never wavered in their belief that to extend educational excellence to all we need to invest first and foremost in our teachers, elevating teaching to its rightful place as the foremost profession in the country. This investment in teaching, too, has driven reform. Larger school budgets have enabled schools to more than double the number of teaching assistants in the past seven years, but it is the new school workforce agreement, ending outdated demarcations, that is transforming their practical usefulness to teachers and pupils alike, including the vital role that assistants now play in literacy and numeracy support in primary schools. Similarly, to be successful, every secondary school needs excellent subject specialists in all the main curriculum subjects. Higher salaries are playing an important part in making teaching more attractive to good graduates, but it is reform to teacher recruitment and training which has, for example, encouraged the surge of excellent new mature graduates entering the profession, especially in the shortage areas of maths and science, by enabling them to train directly in schools with a salary instead of by the conventional PGCE route. We do not minimise the challenges that remain. School behaviour is a particular concern and we will continue to give the strongest possible support to head teachers and teachers in tackling bad behaviour. But I believe that we can take great heart as a country from the steady improvement taking place year by year in the teaching profession and the results it is achieving, exemplified by the inspirational annual national teaching awards pioneered by my noble friend Lord Puttnam and supported by all parties in this House, celebrating the success of our teachers in every community. This is a strong platform on which to build in the years ahead. Let me conclude, if I may, with a longer view. Two   months ago the House mourned the death of Lord Callaghan. It is approaching 30 years since, as Prime Minister, Lord Callaghan made his farsighted speech at Ruskin College on the need for higher educational standards to transform the prospects of children from working-class backgrounds. The Ruskin speech launched a national debate on education reform and how to make a reality of equality of opportunity in our society. It is a debate that continues to this day. At the start of his speech, Lord Callaghan set out two great maxims of R H Tawney that,"““the endowments of our children are the most precious of the natural resources of the community””," and,"““what a wise parent would wish for their children, so the state must wish for all its children””." What every wise parent today, regardless of background, wishes for their children is an excellent education developing their talents to the fullest extent. It is what the nation now needs for all its children. It is the vision which animates the gracious Speech and I commend it to the House.