Noble Lords
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)
I am sorry, but some of my noble friends are walking in front of my noble friend while he is trying to introduce his debate. I ask my noble friends to leave the Chamber in such a way that does not cut across in front of my noble friend, because I know that those who are remaining for this debate very much want to hear him introduce this very important Question and hear what he has to say.
Lord Farmer
Thank you. I will begin again. I am delighted that time has been found for such a debate this side of Her Majesty’s most gracious Speech next week. I cannot think of a better way to spend precious time in your Lordships’ House so near the end of this Session than to talk about how the Government can most effectively help the most disadvantaged people in our country.
I thank from the outset every participant in this debate, for whom the striving for better life chances is not just an agenda item but a lifestyle: a cause that gets them out of bed in the morning and wakes them up in the middle of the night.
I am sure that much personal insight will be shared today. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, has a towering reputation not only as a former chief executive of Gingerbread, which campaigns tirelessly for parents raising children on their own, but also played a crucial role in the riots commission. This body came to the very important conclusion that at least half a million families in this country were close to breaking point and has, I am sure, been a prime mover in the expansion of the troubled families programme. We are indebted to her; strong and stable families are the wellspring of good life chances and her work has obviously borne much fruit with the present Government and the previous coalition Government.
I am similarly eager to hear what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro has to say. As chair of the Children’s Society, he represents an organisation that has an impressive track record in championing all children and especially the most vulnerable. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, will I am sure have many insights from the time when she led Relate most ably before she came into this House. She has been a leader of cross-party efforts to ensure that mental health is at the forefront of all our minds. She also chairs CAFCASS, which assists families going through contested complex court cases at that most stressful time of divorce, separation and public law proceedings. Finally, the quality of representation from my own Benches could not be higher than those who have kindly put their names down to speak at such short notice—for which I am deeply grateful.
To set the scene, the championing of life chances by our Prime Minister is the maturation of a process that has unfolded over the 10 years that he has led my party. On his first day as leader he went to London’s Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy, which nurtures and develops the leadership potential of young African and Caribbean men—often living in disadvantaged communities—and enables them to succeed. Moreover, the first policy group he set up to give him the ideas that he would need to transform Britain was the Social Justice Policy Group, led by lain Duncan Smith and charged with looking at the full range of root causes of poverty. The focus desperately needed to be shifted away from the simple redistribution of money and on to tackling the drivers of the problems that poison life chances. As soon as he became Prime Minister, he asked Frank Field MP to lead a review on poverty and life chances. This again signalled his intent not to ignore poverty—this has never been the way of one-nation Conservatism—but to address it root and branch, broadening the focus away from the income targets that had impoverished the poverty debate.
The poverty plus a pound approach can callously leave people behind if, say, alcoholic parents are deemed beyond the concern of government when a financial transfer tips them over an income line but their lives and those of their children remain unchanged. Since 2010 a deep evidence base has been laid by one review after another: for example, on the importance of early intervention and the early years. These led in turn to the establishment of several What Works centres, such as the Early Intervention Foundation, which act as guardians of effective practice to improve poor life chances.
The new life chances strategy will stand on a sure foundation of academic research and tried and tested solutions that work across the whole of people’s lives to eradicate disadvantage. Similarly, the very concept of life chances has not just been plucked from a spin doctor’s playbook. It has an unimpeachable intellectual pedigree reaching back well over a century to one of the founding fathers of sociology, the German Max Weber. His concept of Lebenschancen, or life chances, is a social science theory of the opportunities that each individual has to improve the quality of his or her life. It is a probabilistic concept concerned with how likely it is, given certain risk and protective factors, that a person’s life will turn out a certain way.
I am sure that today we will be articulating not only what these risk and protective factors are—what will likely produce bad and good outcomes for individuals and families—but also how to boost the good and counteract the bad.
Chief among protective factors is the influence of safe, stable and nurturing relationships, which are essential foundations for human flourishing. If tiny babies, children, young people and adults do not have these, it is very hard to tackle the root causes and effects of poverty, such as addictions, serious personal debt, educational failure, mental ill health and worklessness. It is also nigh on impossible for those with disabilities to thrive if they do not have supportive relationships.
As I said in my maiden speech, my own origins were filled with shame, neglect and poverty, caused by my parents’ alcoholism and bankruptcy. My father died very early but bequeathed me a contact in a London Metal Exchange company, which enabled me to start my career there, albeit at the very bottom. This relationship gave me a much-needed starting opportunity as I did not cover myself in glory at school—partly, it must be said, because my family was collapsing around me.
I therefore speak from personal experience when I say that our epidemic levels of family breakdown act against the likelihood of having people to help one through adversity. Efforts to tackle this, particularly in our poorest communities, have to be front and centre of the life chances strategy. Two-thirds of children on our poorest estates are no longer living with both their parents by the time they are 15; half of them are in this position by the time they start primary school. This is not just about money: the stability of poor couples who are married is far higher than those who are not.
For example, we have to support marriage more effectively at the poorer end of the income spectrum, where its collapse has been most extreme yet where aspirations to marry remain high. Marriage is a social justice issue because it is so much harder to overcome cultural and financial barriers to marrying for those who are poor than for those who are comfortably off. Will the Minister take back to the Treasury the proposal that we should sharply increase the marriage tax allowance for those in the poorest parts of the country, where rates of single parenthood can be as high as 75%? Ironically, the money to do this is already in the budget because of the low take-up of the current trifling tax allowance.
Yet family support has to go beyond this. I have been speaking to Ministers across government about the need to have policies to support family stability in every single government department. We have universal healthcare, universal education and policies to encourage full employment, but all these social goods and reforms will be undermined by poor family functioning and the breakdown of relationships.
Universal family support, which would mean that all struggling families have somewhere to go where someone has the answers, such as family hubs, requires cross-government buy-in. The Department for Education has a clear interest but so do the Ministry of Justice, given the need to support prisoners’ families in the community, and the Ministry of Defence, which has thousands of service families who would also benefit—to name just two. This debate will, I am sure, cover many different areas, and it is clear that there will be no lasting success in any of them without several government departments and organisations working well together. Will my noble friend the Minister lay out what is being done to make sure that this is the case?
I reiterate the potential for good that our time together today holds. One of the paramount roles of good government is to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to flourish, whatever their starting point. This debate will, I am sure, brim with ideas and examples of good practice, and I look forward to seeing the trace of our passion expressed today in the life chances strategy shortly to be unveiled.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Altmann) (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer on securing this debate today, and also thank all Members from all sides of the House who contributed to the discussion.
This is a priority issue for the Government. When we talk about life chances, what we mean is a relentless focus—an all-out assault, as the Prime Minister calls it—on tackling the root causes of poverty in Britain today. It is about ensuring that every individual, no matter what their background, is able to realise their potential. Some people are held back by deep-rooted social problems. The life chances strategy will set out our comprehensive plan to tackle disadvantage and extend opportunity, as announced by the Prime Minister in his speech of 11 January. The strategy will describe how we are working across government to break down some of these barriers to opportunity and to transform people’s lives. This will be a cross-government initiative.
We have already introduced the new life chances measures through the Welfare Reform and Work Act, which will focus action on the root causes of child poverty rather than the symptoms. The Act introduces the new duty for the Government to report annually on children in workless households and children’s educational attainment—two of the five measures outlined by my noble friend Lady Stroud. We have chosen these measures because the evidence is clear that these are the factors with the biggest impact on child poverty and children’s life chances.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, and many others have observed, we know that being part of a working household is the best route out of poverty. Children in workless families are around three times as likely to be in poverty as those where at least one parent works. As my noble friends Lord Lupton and Lady Jenkin and others have observed, this is important from the point of view of role models as well as just having more money coming in. Evidence shows that nearly three-quarters of poor workless families where the parents found full employment escaped poverty.
I am proud that this Government have a strong record on improving employment to date. The employment rate remains the highest on record, at 74.1% and with 31.4 million people in work. The number of children living in workless households is at a record low. It has fallen by 450,000 since 2010. That is 450,000 more children who now benefit from the role modelling, the health benefits and the economic security of living in a home where adults are going to work. The Government have introduced major structural changes to the welfare and tax systems to ensure that work always pays for families. This includes universal credit, changes to the personal tax allowance and the national living wage. I hear the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, about universal credit, but it is designed to ensure that work pays. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Freud has already met the Resolution Foundation to go through some of its findings and some of the areas which its analysis may have missed.
Of course we all recognise that education can be central to transforming children’s futures. I recognise the contribution of my noble friend Lord Fink in this area, and the involvement of many Members of this House in the academies programme. It is clear that educational attainment is the biggest single factor in ensuring that poor children do not end up as poor adults. We are determined to deliver educational excellence everywhere so that every child, regardless of their background, reaches their potential. Let me set out briefly what we are doing to achieve this. The Government are raising standards with a rigorous new curriculum, world-class exams and a new accountability system that rewards those schools which help every child to achieve their best. In particular, the Government introduced the pupil premium in the last Parliament, which provides schools with additional money to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils of all abilities. It is up to schools to decide how to spend this funding.
I certainly agree with the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro on food poverty. We have invested £1 billion over two years in universal infant free school meals, for example. Our measures on education will drive real action and will make a big difference to disadvantaged children both now and in the future.
I echo the sentiments expressed by many noble Lords about the importance of the family and improving life chances via that most important element of any society. I certainly agree with, and support, the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro in that regard. We must continue to affirm and reaffirm the importance of families in helping to give their children the best start in life. I am personally passionate about the role that all members of the family, including grandparents—an often overlooked and underplayed element of many families—can play in improving the well-being of children.
We are doing more to support couples and parents during difficult times—and even to anticipate difficulties—with our relationship support programmes. The recently published report from the Early Intervention Foundation found that conflict between parents can have such a devastating impact on children’s mental health and long-term outcomes. That is why it is so important that we help every mother and father be the best that they can be. I agree wholeheartedly with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, about the importance of relationships in that regard. That is why we have already doubled the funding for relationship support and have increased the amount of free childcare to support parents. It is also why we have targeted those families that need the most help. Our troubled families programme has turned around 120,000 families that had complex and deep-rooted problems and we are extending this to 400,000 more families. It is another prime example of collaborative work across government, with DCLG working with my own department and others on this programme. I hope that noble Lords will recognise that the Government are indeed working on a cross-departmental basis on this important new strategy.
Our life chances strategy will include a wider set of non-statutory measures on the root causes of disadvantage, including problem debt and drug and alcohol dependency. These non-statutory measures will work alongside the statutory life chances measures in the Welfare Reform and Work Act and will help us to drive real action on the deep-rooted and complex social problems that so many disadvantaged people face. The Prime Minister announced in his speech in January several new policies to transform the lives of the most disadvantaged.
As my noble friend Lord Holmes, the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro rightly stated, mental health issues must also be tackled. We are making a £290 million investment into mental health by 2020, which will mean, for example, that at least 30,000 more women each year will have access to specialist mental health care during or after pregnancy. We are committed to improving access to better services and promoting early intervention to address children’s and young people’s mental ill health issues before they worsen and we are investing an additional £1.4 billion over the next five years. We have also invested £120 million to introduce waiting time standards for mental health services for the first time.
I could not agree more with my noble friend Lord Farmer on the importance of stable relationships in ensuring better life chances and that it is about far more than just giving people money.
My noble friend Lord Holmes also made an important contribution in his powerful speech. I am pleased that he welcomes the Government’s sports strategy and I echo his commendation of organisations such as YoungMinds and comments on the importance of supporting those with both mental and physical needs. A healthy mind in a healthy body is certainly something that I fully endorse.
We are also making a £1 billion investment in the National Citizen Service, which will be extended to 60% of all 16 and 17 year-olds over the next few years, to show young people the power of public service. We will be using work experience much more creatively to give young people the encouragement they need to get into further education, employment or training when they leave school. We will also be supporting those with drug and alcohol addictions to help them to turn their lives around and fully recover.
I also agree with my noble friend Lord Hodgson about the role of the voluntary sector and the contribution that it can make. I know that other noble Lords also very much support that sector, which has a vital role to play.
As my noble friend Lady Jenkin mentioned, social networks are important, as are role models. She is absolutely correct to set out a number of the challenging issues faced by so many in society.
My noble friend Lord Young mentioned the importance of mentoring and careers advice, which, again, we are focusing on. It is true that there is more to be done on tackling housing and transforming housing estates. It is unarguable that this will have cost implications and I certainly assure my noble friend that we intend to pursue this energetically and with vigour.
Of course, I agree with my noble friend Lady Stroud, who knows so much about this area, about the importance of monitoring the impact of the life chances strategy and developing indicators, as well as a special focus on children in care.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)
It is important that the Minister is able to give the House an assurance that the Prime Minister’s earlier exercise in trying to family-proof new legislation is continued through the rest of this Parliament. Can she give us an assurance that the legislation in the Queen’s Speech will be subject to the family-proofing that the Prime Minister set out some months ago in his speech?
Baroness Altmann
As the noble Lord is well aware, I cannot anticipate what will be in the Queen’s Speech, but I can certainly repeat that the family test is applied to all new policies developed by this Government.
My noble friend Lord Shinkwin made an emotional and passionate intervention on something that I feel very strongly about, and I certainly agree about the importance of considering all the requirements for a successful working life for disabled graduates, as well as the early encouragement of disabled children.
In conclusion, we have already committed to tackling the root causes of poverty. I am sorry that I have not had time to go into more detail about all the points that have been raised in this excellent debate. But I assure noble Lords that our intention is that, by putting people first and reiterating the importance of family in our new life chances strategy, we will, together, be able to transform people’s lives. Our forthcoming explanation of and further information on the life chances strategy will demonstrate how we and others across society will be able to achieve this.