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Social Inclusion

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf. I am not sure whether he saw my notes or I saw his, but he will recognise some of the themes that I shall discuss. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Morgan and thank her for picking this subject for debate. I have had the fascinating pleasure of involvement in a 12-year exercise in social inclusion in a part of my former Birmingham constituency at Castle Vale. I want to use these few minutes almost as a case study about what has happened during those 12 years, especially to the people involved. Here was a run-down sink estate, with 34 tower blocks, where one in four people of working age was jobless and which was in the poorest 10 per cent of areas in England for income, jobs, education, skills and training. One in 10 of those of working age was classed as sick or disabled, twice the England and Wales average. Crime was rampant, including burglary, robbery—the poor robbed the poor; colleagues on this side of the House in particular will recognise that—and car theft. Led by a housing action trust—I pay tribute to the Conservative Party for setting such trusts up—and on the back of about £205 million of public investment and £117 million of private investment, residents at Castle Vale have rebuilt not simply their homes but their hopes and life chances as well. Those jobless of working age are now around five in every 100, less than the all-Birmingham average, against the 26 in 100 in 1993. The HAT has helped to create 1,461 jobs. Many walk to work at two new shopping centres, an enterprise park and new health facilities. Educational attainment has soared. Now one pupil in three achieves five A* to C GCSE passes, against one in 13 in 1994. People on the Vale live an average seven years longer than they did in 1992. And the savage scar of crime has seen offences cut since 2000 by 36 in 100, making the Vale one of the safest places in Birmingham and the West Midlands in which to live. The key to this success is simple, and it is obvious that it was not done early enough. The approach of the housing action trust was holistic, recognising that social, economic, physical and community safety issues are inter-related and cannot be successfully tackled alone. Some on Birmingham City Council wanted the 250 million quid which was on offer from the Government given to the council so they could pepperpot it around the city. On the back of my experience in my constituency, with dollops of a million here and two million there, I know that if you go back two or three years later to where it was spent, you cannot see what happened to it. We now know that it is a waste of public funds simply to refurbish a tower block and leave the occupants out of work with no access to training and their children sitting in inadequate schools that are starved of the cash and resources they need. I do not want to give the impression that the job has been completely done—it has not. It is a continuing process because that is what sustainability is all about. My title is Corbett of Castle Vale as a thank you to the people of that area for what they have individually and collectively achieved over the past 12 years. It would not have been achieved had it been done on a hotch-potch basis. The largest remaining problem for the people of the Vale—there are 10,000 souls living there—is that 90 in every 100 young people still leave school at or before the age of 16. There are significant numbers of young people over 16 who are not in education, not in jobs and not in training. They are under-achieving and denying themselves access to the skills they need to take advantage of the jobs waiting to be done. You have only to look at the skyline of the city of Birmingham to see the hundreds and thousands of jobs on offer in the construction industry, for example. Those young people could get the skills and the training near to where they live so they could get those jobs. This, then, is the challenge being tackled by the Castle Vale Neighbourhood Partnership Board, which I am pleased to chair. This is the successor body to the housing action trust, and links the principal service providers—Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police, Josiah Mason College, the primary care trust and others—with the elected resident representatives. For the first time anywhere in the country, to my knowledge, the providers have set down in detail the services and the level of services they will provide over the next five years. The residents are there to see that that is delivered. The board’s education, training and employment group aims to provide high quality learning and skills opportunities to open the road to personal fulfilment, effective community engagement and to meet the demands of a changing jobs market. Much has already been done, as the jobless figures show, but there are still too many young people unable to take the opportunities available. The opening of an impressive, state of-the-art campus by Josiah Mason College early next year will put the opportunities to learn new skills and top up educational attainment literally at the end of the street for those thousands of young people leaving school at 16 or just under and going nowhere. This inability—unwillingness, perhaps—to travel out of the area to access further education and other training facilities has been a big factor in the low take-up. A few years ago, Castle Vale School was sending out raiding parties to lasso people in so that they could get their money. It now has a waiting list extending right up to leafy Sutton Coldfield. The head teacher, Clive Owen, building on the dramatic success of his predecessor, has started a range of vocational courses which he reports students have taken up with commitment and enthusiasm. Working closely with Josiah Mason College, these offer direct roads into jobs in healthcare, leisure and hospitality as well as the building industry and vehicle maintenance. The school wants to develop a construction facility with a firm of private builders not just for young people but for older people as well, because more than 50 per cent of the adults on that Castle Vale estate have never had a paid job. The key to jobs now, as the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, said, is skills and the need to acquire, update and change them during a working life. The parents of those 16 year-olds without this passport to a better life in a strong community took up the chance to change over the past 12 years and succeeded magnificently. The challenge now for their children, the young people of the Vale, is whether their generation will now do the same. When they understand the chances and see the prospects for more fulfilling lives, I and their parents are confident that they will.