International Women’s Day

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, in a debate like this when one is part of a distinct minority, it is about saying to our sisters of the day, “A small phalanx of brothers are here with you now”. All I can say is that I hope we add to the contributions, listen and carry your messages back to our colleagues.

I am going to make a speech that I do not think will be mirrored in any other part of this debate because I am going to talk about the role of sport, in particular one sport where, let us face it, the stereotypes, although they are changing, are predominantly male: rugby union. I will talk about how it, used in certain aspects in the world, has become—probably slightly unwittingly—an engine for empowering the female of the species.

I mention the Atlas Foundation, started by one Jason Leonard, who held a big, traditional rugby dinner. He said, “Let’s help children abroad improve their educational standards. Let’s do it wherever we can get a volunteer through a rugby-based charity. Throw a rugby ball in, get children running around and get them organised. Feed them and encourage them into education”. What we have discovered is that, if the hands grabbing the ball are female, we get better bang for our buck. Everything is better. We get higher education completion, but one thing that I do not think we expected to discover is that the attitude of the men round the women, when they find the women taking part in the projects, improves as well.

It helps when you get men and women taking part in activity together and being seen, at least in the initial phase, as completely equal. The gender reality is that you have to break up the groups after puberty but, before puberty, children running around can generally do it together. Rugby is a good sport for this because you have a strong authority figure in the middle. We do not have rules; we have laws. We have to have people imposing those laws, which means that we have good, strong authority figures. It also means that it is difficult to do on a casual basis, so there are swings and roundabouts there, but this is a sport that has done it. It is basically a case of getting people together, feeding them to keep them coming, giving them health checks—in the case of girls, it is often about giving them female sanitary products and helping them through period poverty as well—and encouraging them into education. You get good results. It will come as no surprise to this House to know that, if you get girls into school, they get good results. They generally outperform boys because they generally prefer school to boys and have a better relationship with it.

The main thing that struck me in the projects from Memphis, Tennessee, to Kerala rugby in west Bengal was the attitude coming back that the boys in the group were supporting the girls. Even given the huge distance between those two projects, the fact is that they are supporting the girls; for example, pregnancy rates are lower. The boys are making sure that the girls are supported. In Kerala, the boys are making sure that the girls are not molested or sexually assaulted on the way to school. They are taking this on; the girls are standing up for themselves and the boys are coming in and backing them up. That attitude of “Bring it together. We’re all together” is something that I hope we can foster.

If a sport can do it, other activities can do it. Of course, rugby is a macho sport so it is easy, but anywhere you do this, you are going to improve things. Also, attitudes are changing. In one of our projects in South Africa, we have seen a reduction of 39% in reported rapes. Sexual violence is, I am afraid, a part of life down there. If we can bring these groups together so that they find they are a group that comes together, they will get that support. The male of the species is, for once, behaving sensibly: “Make sure your women are more economically viable because, let’s face it, your life’s going to be easier as well”. It is about making sure that you go down there and that the girls, who will become women, are going out there and finishing their education. They will have children later. In Kerala, there has been a reduction of 85% in the rate of child marriage. Just think about that. People are finishing school and going on.

Out of all the projects I must mention, Kerala has a remarkable record of producing female rugby internationals. Our project in Memphis is the same, where 80% of the staff are female, I think, as are 65% of the participants. This is being taken up in this country. The Atlas Foundation has a wonderful online fundraising package, which I encourage all noble Lords to buy into—if I do not say that I will be killed at the next board meeting. Our star project is TackleLondon, which again is predominantly female in its participation.

If rugby can do this, and if sport has the ability to improve women’s image and attention, and can encourage schooling, we can use it to back up all the other things that have been said today. We can also bring in the male of the species to help. There must be lessons that can be learned and applied to back up all the other good work that has been talked about.

Young People: Alternatives to University

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those odd debates where I suspect that a great deal of agreement is going to break out on the problems that arise and the solutions to them. We shall then take a deep breath and fight savagely over small differences in implementation. However, that seems to be the nature of what we do.

The noble Lord, Lord Monks, spoke about a huge array of subjects. I asked the Library what was available in further education and found that there were eight levels with a variety of qualifications. I noticed that the letter “Q” was used very often in further education courses. It probably meant something different on each occasion it was used. Finding your way through this will always be immensely difficult. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, pointed out, higher education is easier to understand as a concept but we are in agreement that we must get slightly more coherent about what we are doing.

Whatever else they have done, apprenticeships have given this sector a publicity boost and a way forward. I do not think that most noble Lords present have had to suffer hearing me go on about my next point, but we managed to make a massive mistake when we brought them in as we effectively excluded anybody with dyslexia or a reading problem from taking them. We had decided in our great wisdom that employers needed employees who had studied English. In the university sector you could get assistive technology that allowed you to get through your course if you had a problem with English. It appeared that employers wanted competence in reading English and could not function without it. This issue turned out to be basically about people refusing to move their ground, not understanding the technology and not responding to change. I do not think that we should have to introduce a Bill into Parliament to make such changes. We should be slightly more flexible and open. The Children and Families Act has resulted in greater emphasis being given to those with special educational needs. However, many problems still remain in this regard because traditionally they have not been seen as something that the higher education sector and other education provision deal with. Although they have a legal duty to do so, they are not very good at it. For instance, they are not required to publish, the way schools are, what they will do so that parents and students can look at it and know what support they will get.

I am dyslexic myself and the British Dyslexia Association, of which I am a vice-president, started out getting a little trickle but is now getting quite a stream of people presenting to their helpline with problems in further education. The Government provide voice-from-text technology that helps read stuff back to you but only 30% of colleges have taken it up. It is an appalling situation that so few colleges are taking up something which is given to them free and allows students to access and get through their courses.

JISC TechDis—he says, staring down and wishing he did not need glasses—is a body which has been looking at technology but is about to be wound up. Technology is a great way forward. I am a convert to it myself and use voice recognition all the time. Technology has a huge advantage: it is cheaper than having support tutors all the time; you can take it away with you and it allows you to be independent afterwards. Why are we not embracing and using it in this field? We are not just teaching people how to use their educational skills—acquiring reading, mathematics and writing—we are giving them skills in how to cope in life. If you have one of these disabilities it is with you for life. You will always learn more slowly and have more problems. If a person can find a way round it and embrace it they can function in the modern world. We can help with this but we do not seem to be embracing it.

I hope the Minister will tell us what will actually happen and what pressure we will place on colleges to make sure they do their best and match the achievements of the schools and higher education, which mainly came through the DSA. Let us see if we have as happy a situation after the reforms and changes to the DSA. I trust we will be talking about that in the future. I hope they can do something here because there are two good examples. At the moment, colleges are just becoming aware that we have this problem. If you have the problem at school you have it there too. I hope they can tell us that they are admitting this, getting involved and taking it on. If they do not, they are guaranteed that a large section of this target area—the group we are trying to skill up—is always going to underachieve and, in a large part, fail. We can avoid a lot of that now by taking on practice which is well established in the rest of the education field. Joined-up government should mean something and not just be a slogan that is brought out to fill the last 30 seconds of any set speech.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, when I put my name down to speak in this debate, it was inspired not so much by what we were discussing today but by the subjects discussed yesterday. Primarily, I am going to talk about the apprenticeship system and the developments in it. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, may wish that she had taken a few more moments over her break, because I have discussed this subject with her far too often; neither of us particularly wanted to, but we felt we had to. We are missing the noble Lord, Lord Young, who talked about apprenticeships.

On this subject, the cock-up school of history is proved right in Whitehall. The training programme for business has not paid attention to what is going on in the education sector. We have a new approach on SEN. Perhaps the Minister could give us an assurance that in future when there is a training scheme we will not make the series of mistakes that we made over the introduction of the apprenticeship scheme. We designed it so that the biggest disability group in the country, dyslexics, or at least those at the severe end—I think that my interests are pretty well known in this House—were excluded from taking the qualification, because it asked for a written English test. You could not use the normal ways around to cope with that test that were available in all other parts of the education sector. I do not think that it was malicious. People said that we must raise standards and have good written skills, so we should have this very tough qualification. When the previous Government brought it in and the problem was pointed out to them, they said, “Yes, we will change it”. But we then had something rather inconvenient called the general election. There are lots of sporting analogies you can make about dropping the ball and bad passes; all I know is that we are now scrambling back to recover from the damage. The last 18 months of my life, which have impinged on the noble Baroness and many other Ministers, have been spent trying to correct this, because we have a series of regulations that make it incredibly difficult to change.

Are we going to ensure that we look more across the board? If you have been in this House as long as I have, you can make a series of set speeches on almost any occasion. For example, you can speak about the Chinese walls that exist between departments, which means that they do not talk to each other. There is a massive example of that happening in the area which I am discussing. Indeed, there are Chinese walls within departments, which means that people in different segments of the same department do not talk to each other. If you are dyslexic, you can take a degree with assistive technology. I declare another interest in that I am chairman of a company which provides such technology. You cannot use that technology when undertaking an apprenticeship or for a course that trains you to develop a skill, usually a manual skill, which involves you not being based in an office with a computer. However, you can use it to take a degree in English, which might help you to find such work. A drunken logic is crawling through my remarks.

I hope that the Government will act quickly to correct the mistakes that have been made in this area. The noble Baroness and I are wonderful friends but I do not wish to keep discussing this subject with her. Therefore, I hope that it will be addressed more effectively than has been the case. I thank the noble Baroness as progress seems to have been made in this area. However, I will not celebrate as I thought that I had dealt with this matter on three previous occasions. Perhaps it is a case of fourth time lucky. The previous Government acted in good faith in this regard but we should remember that their attempts to rectify the situation went wrong. The current Government should remember that and try to adopt a culture of cross-departmental oversight. We must not allow the mistakes to which I have referred to recur. If departments look more carefully at what other departments are doing, we will save ourselves a great deal of time.

If you want to help those disabled people for whom it is most difficult to obtain employment, particularly high-value employment—people with dyslexia may comprise the biggest single group of people in these circumstances but they are not the only ones by a long way—and who are most commonly either unemployed or underemployed, you must make training more accessible. Unless you have the culture in place that I have described, you will not achieve this. Please will the Government reconsider this issue and ensure that the mistakes which have been made do not recur and that training is accessible at all times? If that is not done, irrespective of anything else that you might do, you will end up taking two steps forward, one back and then usually one sideways. Life is too short; let us not make the same mistakes again.

Sunday Trading (London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2012 Lords Chamber

Shop workers, mainly women, are vulnerable, low-paid workers. A high proportion of them are part-time workers. They are people who need as much protection as they can possibly get. I take the view that opting in would have been better than opting out. But you have heard the spokesman for the Opposition saying that the Labour Party accepts this Bill so we will support it as being the best that can be secured. About 11 per cent of the working population in Britain today is employed in retailing. As I have said, they are mainly women workers and they need the greatest degree of protection. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, hit the nail on the head when he stated that these people should be asked to opt in and not to opt out. It looks as if we are going to have an opting-out exercise, so there we are. But I support the view that we should protect shop workers as much as we can.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I want to make a brief intervention. I listened to most of the Second Reading debate. My noble friend Lord Newby spoke on behalf of this bit of the coalition and we felt that one speech between us was probably enough on that occasion. What we have here is a temporary situation that is on very sensitive ground. We all agree there. I do not know if the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, is getting an award for this, but he gave the most detailed explanation of an amendment that I have heard over many years in this House.

[A noble Lord]

Too long.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington]

It might have been long but it was appropriate—the right thing done at the wrong time. What I would like him briefly to clarify again is what the Government will do to make sure that everybody is aware of this change. I do not think that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, will be necessary if we get greater assurance that the Government intend to place a duty on employers to make sure that their workers know what is coming.

There are other issues to do with Sunday trading. If we had the Olympics every six or seven cycles, I am sure that we would have rather more of a point to make. The fact of the matter is, we do not. Most people in this Chamber will not see the Olympics in this country again in their lifetime—virtually all of us, I suspect. It is a special event and a special occasion. If the Minister can give us some assurance that, in the context of these new rights for this special occasion, a real effort will be made to make sure that nobody finds themselves in the situation of thinking, “I did not think I had to do that but I am doing it,” then I think that many of the objections here will be removed.

[Lord Sassoon]

This is a very direct and important point. I gave confirmation on Second Reading but let me do it again. Not only do I have my noble friend Lady Wilcox from the department here but I am sure that the walls have ears and the department will hear the message loud and clear. It has committed to putting out clear guidance, if and when the Bill gets Royal Assent, so that both employers and employees understand exactly the position under the Bill. That guidance will go beyond narrow legalistic explanations to try and be helpful about what should be done and how and about the timescales. I will make sure that my honourable friend the business Minister, who will be taking this Bill through another place if it passes your Lordships’ House, gets these messages loud and clear. I know that he is going to continue to discuss these issues with business and employee groups. I hope that that helps my noble friend.

[Lord Addington]

That is exactly what I wanted to hear.

[Lord Myners]

My Lords, it is good to see the Minister back on the Front Bench. We missed him yesterday when we discussed the progress of convergence under Maastricht. He would no doubt have been as surprised as we were on this side of the House that in an important economic debate there was not a single speaker from the coalition government Benches in support of the Government’s economic policy.

I declare an interest as a former retailer, not as distinguished in my achievements as the noble Lord, Lord Alliance, who I see in his place, but as a previous chairman of Marks & Spencer.

I join my noble friend Lord Davies in making it clear that we on this side of the House support the fundamental intention of the Bill. We will take issue in Committee not with its intent but rather with its phrasing. That said, it is lamentable and shambolic that the Bill should be before the House now, so that the three-month notice period which the law allows for those who work in retailing in other circumstances will not apply. It is a shambles, although I do not think that that is the Minister’s fault.

The economic case that has been made for this proposal is equally shambolic and flimsy. I am sorry that I was not here for the Minister’s speech on Second Reading but I have read it in Hansard. It was a very good speech and he explained the situation very carefully. I was disappointed not to be here for what may well have been the Minister’s parliamentary high point in terms of his contributions to the House. He made an extraordinarily good speech on the issue of Sunday trading. However, the economic case—which is presumably one of the reasons why the Treasury is taking responsibility for the Bill—is extremely flimsy. On every key quantifiable metric we are told, “Not applicable”. Net present value: “Not applicable”. Impact on economy: “Not applicable”. To every question we receive the reply that it is not applicable. Indeed, no acknowledgement is given at all in the narrative to substantial data and evidence suggesting that the total number of visitors to the United Kingdom might be lower as a result of the Olympics. Those who come specifically to participate in, celebrate and observe this wonderful event—which we are clearly going to do a great job in hosting—will be offset by those who say, “It is not probably a good time to go to the United Kingdom”.

It does not seem that the Government have done a great deal of research among retailers. It has been difficult to find leading retailers that are enthusiastic about the intention of the Bill. Indeed, Mr Justin King, the chief executive of Sainsbury’s, who is Mr Boris Johnson’s representative on LOCOG, has said that he does not support this proposal. I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine a family, having observed Usain Bolt in the 100 metres, deciding that now is a good time to go and do the weekly shop at Tesco. I do not think that the economic case that has been made is particularly good.