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Social Inclusion

My Lords, even in a list of 11 Back-Benchers, I feel like the 12th man in cricket who has no special skills but can fetch tea or drinks at any time. Rather like my friend the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, I bring no special knowledge, skills or experience to this question, but I would like to reflect on what has been said in this excellent debate opened so ably by my noble friend Lady Morgan. As an economist, I have to say that exclusion is primarily caused by inadequate income. There are other reasons and I am sure that some people with adequate income feel excluded for other reasons, but income payments are primary. In the way that we have built the welfare state we have made far too many complications, deductions and tapers and so forth by which people receive income. I know that any time I rise up to speak I spend more money on behalf of the Government which the Government do not have, but I still want to say that it is high time that we simplified the welfare state. People’s entitlement to income should be unconditional and due only to citizenship. We now have an opportunity to begin that process with pensions. Unless we make pensions non-contributory and a citizenship entitlement, women will always suffer relative to men. It does not matter what we do about it, that is a fact. We also know that in payments such as income support or jobseeker’s allowance, two get less than twice what a single person gets. There is always a tax on cohabitation. Those are two major injustices. Although they are defended on the grounds that it costs less for two to live together than one, they happen to be inequitable rules. We should be thinking seriously about whether we can put that right so that whenever payments are made men and women get the same—and the same conditions. Secondly, at least for those who are at the end of work—retirement may be a peculiar condition in the future—aged 60 onwards, I would like payments to be made that are unconditional and equal for men and women. The second class of people who are excluded, which was pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, are carers. As I have said before, very often when carers get pensions, they lose the carers allowance, which is hitting people very badly. Again, here is a category of people who are invisible to the public purse who, because they save a lot of money, do not enter the Treasury’s calculations. The Treasury cares immensely about money that it has to pay out. If somebody saves the Treasury money, that does not enter into its accounts. Somebody said this morning that the Treasury deals with pounds and pence—more pity for the Treasury. It ought to deal with economics because this is not just about pounds and pence. This is a major scandal because, by all accounts, the amount of money saved by carers to the public purse is immense. We should be able to find a way of giving money to carers because, by not giving it, we are actually costing money somewhere else in the system. If we can somehow simplify our welfare payments in such a way that they become citizenship entitlements rather than payments for people because they are in a particular pigeonhole—and there are far too many pigeonholes as it is—it would simplify matters immensely. I now move on to a matter that was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya—multiculturalism. When the first generation of immigrants came—there is no second-generation of immigrants because there is only one generation of immigrants at any point in time—it was a good thing to do what we did. At various local authority levels, we put lots of money into schools, housing and other activities in order to provide incoming people, first, with protection within their community so that they would feel at home. At the same time they would be connected to a civic life in this country via access to public goods such as housing, education and so forth. That was very good. However, it created a tension. If you give people succour and comfort by letting them build their own community, they often do not have the incentive to integrate out of that community. The housing allocation rules in our welfare state are such that they discourage mobility. They discourage people from moving away from where they are. By accident, many Muslim families landed up in Yorkshire or Lancashire and happened to be caught in a declining industry. They were then caught there for not just one but many more generations because they did not want to move because they would lose their housing allocation. Therefore, they get stuck in an area of low economic activity and get into a downward spiral. These are not things that I have just thought of myself. We have known them for ages, but the passing of disadvantages through generations is partly a result of saying that you get certain goods only if you show me your Muslim, Hindu or Caribbean identity. Again, we need to move to a situation where people are allocated goods because of their citizenship status—because they need housing or education not because they happen to be black. My time is running out, but I would like to say one more thing. My noble friend Lady Howells of St Davids pointed out in a powerful speech the continuing injustice that exists. We now need to look at the problem of exclusion and deprivation among ethnic minorities by making comparisons within the ethnic minorities. There have been some signs of success and some of deprivation. There was an item in the newspaper recently that stated that Caribbeans are doing much better than many other sections of ethnic minorities—whether that is true or not I do not know. If it is true, we should also examine why immigrants of Indian origin—either from East Africa or India—have done better than immigrants of Pakistani origin. It is not a matter of prejudice. It is a matter of finding out why it happens. If we can find that out, I suspect that it is a matter of class rather than colour. It is also a matter of education and ability to be enterprising. Perhaps we may be able to do studies so that the experience of one section of the population can help another get out of the trap of being excluded.