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Social Inclusion

My Lords, I echo what has been said: this has, indeed, been an excellent debate. I am grateful that my noble friend Lady Morgan of Drefelin has been able to give us the opportunity to range widely and wisely over different elements of an academic and practical understanding of social exclusion. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, ended with a magnificent quotation, which will stay in my mind. It is typical of the modesty of this House that two of our most distinguished academics said that they had little to contribute in the way of experience or skills. Such a comment is always a contradiction, and everyone who has spoken in this debate has brought unique and splendid expertise from many different angles. I am particularly glad that the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, was able to contribute. Like some of us over the years, he has wrestled with definitions of social inclusion and social exclusion. He brings a European dimension, and we must not forget that it was a European definition that led debate in this country. By identifying changes in terminology and the implications of those changes, the noble Lord has managed to reduce three pages of my notes to one. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said, we have identified many different and separate aspects of this subject, and yet they all have a relationship. If I cannot reply to noble Lords in detail, I shall certainly write to them. I want to set out how, in principle, we as a government have tried to tackle social exclusion in different ways and how we have tried to respond to changing situations and to change our definition of social exclusion. With that definition, we have had an opportunity to reflect on the impact of poverty and inequalities while meeting the challenge of exclusion. I believe that that was precisely the point that the noble Lord, Lord Dahrendorf, was getting at. Definitions move on as times change and, at its minimum, social exclusion is a literal term. It does, indeed, mean being excluded from participation in what constitutes a decent society, and so it is to do with citizenship. It sounds banal if you describe it as ““lacking the necessities”” but, of course, a decent home and a decent job are necessities. In the 1970s, the Child Poverty Action Group defined such exclusion in more material terms, including people who did not have a fridge, for example. We have moved away from that as our notions of affluence and the reality of affluence have changed, but we are still facing the constant challenge of people being shut out from the wider community. That means not being able to take part in the democratic process, not being able to volunteer and not being able to celebrate festivals or friendships or, indeed, one’s family. We have had an extremely interesting debate about multiculturalism, which, I felt, was the beginning of a larger debate that the House would like to have. We have talked about the nature of multiculturalism and how it is changing and being accommodated in our society. But I think that we shall have to leave that subject for another day. The point that I am making here is that there is more to tackling social exclusion than reducing poverty or tackling inequality; it requires us to find new ways of supporting families and communities. It is about defining the serious, interlinked and deep disadvantages that create complex and chaotic lives in communities, which are themselves complex and, to an extent, have been abandoned as prosperity, employment and social inclusion have receded. Indeed, it is much more difficult to define inclusion than exclusion, and I think that we will come back to that in the context of the multicultural debate. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, pointed out, this is as an historic as well as a complex problem. To me, it means not finding a response to people who are marginalised and invisible in our society. It also means dismantling the drivers of exclusion, which my noble friend Lady Morgan identified and addressed in her splendid introduction, whether they are poor education, poor skills, poor health, homelessness, worklessness, low income or fear of crime. I say to my noble friends Lord Bhattacharyya and Lord Desai and the noble Lord, Lord Chan, that the best way to address those is not through specific and boxed-off initiatives, but through making our services and our policies as excellent, as culturally sensitive and as relevant as they possibly can be. Those five drivers are not so far from the five giants that were identified by Beveridge. Much of the debate has been about what the Government have achieved. I have been extremely cheered by listening to noble Lords on all sides of the House identify where we have made the most progress. I do not want to reiterate the statistics but we are now offering one of the best situations on employment and unemployment across the G7 group. In Europe, we have a very positive and very high record: 75 per cent of work-aged people are in work and many fewer children live in relative, absolute and persistent poverty. Underlying those statistics is a set of principles that we need to retain because they are the focus of so much of what we have tried to do on the very persistent elements of social exclusion: the poverty of aspiration, the poverty of skills and confidence that leads to worklessness and the poverty that goes with age. They are not so far from those areas, identified by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, of where we have failed. I thought her condemnation was a little sweeping, so perhaps I can reassure her about certain things.