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Debate on the Address

My Lords, this has been a long but very interesting and diverse debate. We began with an extremely coherent and full statement from the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, covering the full ground of the Bills mentioned in the gracious Speech. Like the noble Lord, Lord Warner, I welcome the fact that on this occasion we are considering the public services of heath, social care and education in the same debate. I have participated in too many debates on the gracious Speech in which I have been speaking on education alongside environment and agriculture, and it is a great joy to be speaking as part of the public sector debate. I shall not address the specific health Bills that my noble friend Lady Barker addressed in her opening remarks. However, common themes on these public services come through our debates. In all of them, the Government aspire to provide the best quality service for everyone and are faced in all of them by considerable inequalities, both in the provision of service and in the outcome of that provision at present. They are anxious to try to even out those outcomes. Many of those inequalities are linked to social class—which picks up a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, mentioned. In all they are trying to do, the Government are trying to deliver high-quality services, so that everyone can fulfil their potential and not be handicapped by the old Beveridge giant evils of ill-health, poverty and ignorance. Three interesting themes came through from the debate. The first was resources. The right reverend prelates the Bishop of Leicester and the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, mentioned it, as did the noble Baronesses, Lady Howarth and Lady Murphy, who made the point that without resources we cannot deliver on our aspirations. We need money to deliver the programmes; not just money that is guaranteed for two years, but money that helps us to provide these services sustainably, over a period of years. One Bill that falls within the education remit is the one for reclaiming unused bank balances that were to be used for the provision of youth services. It is important to remember that it is not just, as with the National Lottery, a matter of providing capital funding to provide new youth clubs. It is a question of providing the continuing sustainable resources that enable those local authorities that have the duty to provide youth services to continue to provide those services year-in and year-out. It is because we have not been providing those services year-in and year-out that we are confronted by something of a crisis in this area. Resources must be provided over a long period. In our debates today, it has come through particularly in remarks on the Children and Young Persons Bill that we look to local authorities to carry through the reforms in relation to looked-after children. Those responsibilities should be delegated to the local authorities, but they must have the resources to be able to carry through the duties imposed on them. So resources constitute one theme that has come through. A second theme that I think has come through is implementation. The noble Lord, Lord Low, the noble Baronesses, Lady Young, Lady Howarth and Lady Murphy, mentioned this, as did the noble Earl, Lord Howe, in his opening remarks. If we are to carry through these programmes, we need competent people who must be trained—how foolish it is to take money from training budgets at a time when we desperately need to train more people—but above all people who are very well motivated. If people are to feel a sense of involvement with a service in order to implement it, they must feel a sense of ownership of it. It is vital that we motivate staff well. You have only to look at the fiasco of the medical training budget to realise what a very bad influence that was and what bad motivation it provided, so implementation and training competent management are vital. Therefore, the third theme that comes through is that of involvement and ownership. There are two senses in which this is important. One was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, when he talked about personalisation. It is vital that the services that we provide meet the needs of the individual child, the individual patient or the individual looked-after child. We need to personalise the services that are given to those people, which is expensive. I pick up the final point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. We know that most teachers can identify children at ages six and seven who are likely to experience difficulties reading by the age of 11. We also know that if you get in there early and work with them at ages six and seven and give them personalised tuition at that point, whether it be phonics or just reading and reading recovery—it is a combination of everything and different kids respond to different methods—those children will be reading when they go through to secondary school aged 11. If they can read when they go through to secondary school aged 11, it is much more likely that they will not drop out of secondary school. A reading recovery programme costs £2,000 a year per child at age six. How much more valuable it is to put in that £2,000 per child at age six than—as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, mentioned—£40,000 per young person at age 16 or 17. Therefore, you should personalise services, get in there early and make sure that you provide the services that are needed. Here I put in a plea for therapeutic services, which are vital. Many looked-after children have psychological and emotional needs. It is vital that we recognise this and provide for these needs as well as for their straight healthcare or reading needs. As I say, we need to get in there early and personalise services. The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, referred to localisation and making sure that Whitehall does not run everything. Whitehall does not know best for everybody and there are dangers in imposing top-down initiatives rather than pushing decisions down to the local level. Time and again these Benches have stressed the importance of making accountability local and not national. Thinking about top-down initiatives, I confess that I worry about the Education and Skills Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, explained, the Government have been confronted by a pretty intractable problem. For all the money that has been pumped into the education budget, we have not been able to shift the participation of 16 and 17 year-olds as we would have wished. Above all, there is the problem of the 10 per cent who are not in education, employment or training. They oscillate between unemployment and short-term jobs for which they are paid at the minimum wage. They never acquire any qualifications, and they will probably go through life unemployed for most of the time. They are also much more likely to get involved in criminal activity. It has been an extraordinarily intractable problem. The Government have a top-down answer. They say, ““We have tried hard, and we have spent money on the education system for the past 10 years, and they are still not there. We are going to pass a law that says that they have got to be there. If they do not come, we will give them ASBOs and fine them or their parents””. That is top-down. To do the Government justice, they are not going to do that until 2015. Surely the answer is that those young people are not reading, so we have to put resources into making sure that they pass into secondary school. Moreover, for the past 25 years we have had a curriculum in our secondary schools that has turned off 50 per cent of our young people. The Government are introducing a new curriculum—an important curriculum—in the new diplomas, but we do not yet know whether it is going to work. It has not been piloted. They are rolling out five of those diplomas next year. I am worried that the schools are not ready. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, made the point that if they are to deliver the diplomas properly, they must have specialist resources. Many schools do not have those specialist resources, let alone specialist teachers. Yes, they will work in consortia, and they will work with colleges, and many colleges will have those resources. The Increased Flexibility for 14 to 16 year-olds Programme that has already been introduced has shown that 14 year-olds benefit from such vocational initiatives. I admit that I personally have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, has been saying. It surely would be far better if we had dedicated facilities for these young people. The 14 and 15 year-olds, who often have the least motivation to go to school, will be wandering around the town from one school to another to study one subject here and another subject there. That is not the most suitable thing. Let us have dedicated technical institutes or technical high schools—which is very close to what the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington, was asking for—where, instead of being selected, children at age 14 can opt to go. Let us not have, as with the diplomas, two channels of training which cannot mix and match. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, knows, this has been a constant criticism of the way in which the Government have introduced the diplomas. There is no mixing and matching; if you opt for a diploma line you go for a diploma, and if you fail that diploma you will fail everything. You do not get O-level Maths and English if you do a diploma; you perhaps get the equivalent thereof. But what if you pass that bit and fail the rest of it? There are some real difficulties with the diplomas as they are. We want a technical or vocational curriculum to be offered, with specialist subjects. I have a great deal of sympathy with the solution suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing; indeed, he and I have sat and talked about it outside on various occasions. I have doubts about the Education and Skills Bill being too top-down. The other doubt that I have about it, which is picked up by the Apprenticeship Reform Bill, is whether employers will really deliver. For 148 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, said, we have looked to employers to deliver on apprenticeships. Time and time again, they have not done that and they have not delivered on training. Are they going to respond to the skills pledge of the noble Lord, Lord Leitch? We do not have many more firms signed up. Behind the Apprenticeship Reform Bill is the threat, perhaps, of compulsion later—of some form of levy grant system. Maybe we should have that. Yes, we want apprenticeships, but we want them properly and coherently developed. At the moment there is far too much variation from one area to another on how many years people have to study for apprenticeships and what level they have to reach. I also warn noble Lords that far too many of those in modern apprenticeships are reaching only level 2, not the full level 3. Given the time, I will not say anything further about either the Sale of Student Loans Bill—although I have some reservations about it—or the Children and Young Persons Bill. My noble friend Lady Walmsley, who cannot be here today, spoke at some length yesterday. That is on the record, in Hansard. I return to the three themes that I picked up, because they are important. We must have long-term resources to sustain the services we need. We need good people who are well trained to implement those services, who are well motivated and who can act as champions for what we want. Lastly, we want personalisation and localisation. All are vital components of a successful policy.