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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I welcome the emphasis in the Queen's Speech on children and education. The Government's emphasis on those areas over the past 10 years will make it hard for future Governments of any complexion to reverse the progress that has been made. I want to touch on the issue of parenting, one of those issues that are profoundly difficult for politicians and Governments to talk about and yet intensely important to the quality of an individual's life and the society we live in. Recently I have seen headlines, not just from the Leader of the Opposition but across the board, about how we live in a ““broken society””. We really do not, and the evidence for that is very strong. I understand how, if you read the newspapers every day, particularly about what young people are doing, or indeed watch too many episodes of ““EastEnders””, you might come to the conclusion that the British public generally, not just young people, could be put into two boxes: one marked ““Psychopathic killers”” and the other ““Depressive and addictive personalities””. Actually, society is much better than that. The polling that was reported on the BBC recently, showing that about 70 per cent of people regard their family life as being high quality, is much closer to the truth. It is time that we started paying attention to the successes in this area. As I say, talking about parenting is always difficult for politicians and Governments, but it runs through much of what they are trying to achieve. It interests me that the teenage years—which are a nightmare for teenagers and parents alike, incidentally—are the ones that we find most difficult to deal with. Schemes such as Sure Start, of which I am a great supporter, and the child trust fund are profoundly good at the early years stage, and we are getting much better at helping parents and families to deal more effectively with the early stages of life. When it comes to the teenage years, we all seem to back off a bit because it is so difficult. It does us no harm if, whether as parents or as people who do not have children, we sit down quietly in a corner somewhere and remind ourselves what it was we did as a teenager—not all the good times we had, but the things we did that were both bad and deeply embarrassing. When I have done this exercise, it has often taken me so long that I have had to come back to it at a later stage and say, ““I have a lot more work to do on that””. I suppose I should not go too far down this road because the Bishops might say, ““Yes, we agree with you””, and I will end up doing ““Thought for the Day”” on Radio 4. What is important is not just that the exercise is good for your soul, but that it puts you in touch with your feelings as a teenager and therefore with some of the problems teenagers face today, which are not essentially different from what they used to be. There are some differences—the availability of drugs, and things of that nature—but by and large teenagers' problems are not that dissimilar. It is important to try to understand that. Any Government will have to face the problem of how to help parents address their anxieties and concerns during their children's teenage years. Almost any parent will tell you that it helps in difficult situations to talk to other parents. Often that shared experience will enable you to think of other ways to handle a problem presented to you by a young person. I am not sure how we could do that; I simply say to the education Minister, who has been very thoughtful on areas like this, that we need somehow to make it easier within schools and other educational establishments for parents to meet and discuss these issues. We also need to use the internet more imaginatively. There are websites where you can share your experiences of parenting, but they are limited and often hard to find. Finding ways to enable people to talk about this is more helpful than we might think. Quite a few years back—in 1994, if I remember rightly—it was the United Nations Year of the Family. I was an MP at the time and held some useful committee hearings in the House of Commons, which some noble Lords who were not Members of this House at that time had a hand in, as did the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, who was a member of that committee, although he is not with us today. Many of the lessons that came out of those hearings have been picked up on, although not all of them by any means. What we need to do about parenting is not so much legislate for it—Governments cannot lay down ways of parenting—but rather enable a discussion to take place on the issue rather more effectively than has been the case. One of the problems Britain has as a society is that we are far less likely to intervene when we see young people behaving badly in public. Although I am quite happy to sit down and look at all the bad and embarrassing things I did as a youngster—and therefore I hope I am a bit better at understanding such behaviour—that does not mean I think we should not intervene when we see it happening in the street. We should, and at the end of the day most young people will welcome that. It is not easy, though; anyone who has tried to intervene, as I myself have on a number of occasions, will have noticed that everyone else on the bus buries their head in their newspaper, or finds they are looking on the floor for a coin they might have dropped, or something of that nature. We are quite curious in Britain in that we do not wish to get involved, and yet at the same time we often lay down conditions on risk-taking for young people. We go to the other end of the scale when children are taken out on expeditions and there is an accident, perhaps even a tragic death, and the next thing you know there are headlines asking who is to blame. The blame culture stops kids taking risks—but we have to take risks, even if tragedies happen from time to time. We also have to encourage involvement by adults. We have a strange balance. We are less good at this, unlike quite a few other cultures, particularly in the Mediterranean. This situation is not unique to Britain—it is more a problem of northern Europe—but it is quite pronounced here. We have specific problem areas such as alcohol and drugs, where there is much more work to be done. Black-on-black gun crime has caused a lot of problems in the area I used to represent, Shepherd's Bush. All these problems have a parenting aspect. It does not follow, incidentally, that the parent is to blame; sometimes they will be caught up in a situation and a series of events they feel they have lost control of. Alternatively, they might just have opted out and not be pursuing their role any longer. That is why we need to have a wider debate on parenting, although not in terms of what is ““good”” or ““bad””. I have yet to find, as has anyone who knows anything about this, an acceptable definition of ““good parenting””. The old phrase, quite rightly, used to be ““good enough parenting””. Ultimately any parent will have periods of good parenting and bad and it can be very hard, particularly at the time, to judge which is which. Then there is the broader question of how we deliver our public services. I wrote a paper a couple of years back and had discussions with people who were not then Ministers but are now—James Purnell was one of them—on shifting, not away from the idea of choice, because that is still important, but towards the idea of personalising and customising public services. That applies particularly to areas such as education, health, housing and so on, where the approach needs to be ““How do we help you solve your problem?”” and ““How do we help you deliver the service?””. A number of people already support this idea. I notice the words ““personalising”” and ““customising”” in the Government's lexicon now, and I welcome that. It is not easy, though, and the devil is in the detail. Indeed, it was mentioned earlier today that we ought to give people who are spending money on social care their own financial package to spend as they wish. That is a good idea and I support it, but we should bear in mind that the difficulty lies in the detail: in the first instance where such money is used inappropriately, whether for good reasons or bad, and the state then has to step in and provide it again or else leave the person by the wayside, you can imagine the headlines. Personalising goes on much more in education. If a child at a school—it may not be a child who is failing or of great intellectual ability but one who comes somewhere in between—has particular educational needs, he should be brought forward in certain studies that he could be good at but does not do well in at the moment. There needs to be a way of identifying that and personalising an additional educational package to help that child through. We should not think of this applying just to gifted children or to those with problems; rather, we should think of a range of things that would work well for the child and ask how we could put together a package of educational provision outside as well as inside the school. Such a package should be put together in consultation with the parents and the school so that the child's life chances are improved; in other words, we need to identify the problems and work on them with the parents and the family. I think that we are going down that route and I very much welcome it. However, it is a lot more challenging than people think. We should not think that it is common sense and that we can all do it. All sorts of problems are attached to delivering the detail but I am sure that it is the right road to go down. The idea of customising and personalising public services has to come high up in our thinking on public services in the future, because it is what people now expect. That expectation is not simply of a broad general right to a public service that will remain but of a right to a service that will in some way be better at delivering in relation to specific needs. I hope that we ensure that those thoughts run through our legislation but, above all, perhaps we can start the debate on parenting when we discuss some of the Bills that come out of the Queen's Speech. We need to share this very complex problem with which all people struggle in one way or another. We do not have any answers to it and government certainly cannot solve it but this discussion is important.