House of Lords
Preparing for an Ageing Society (Economic Affairs Committee Report)
(1 day, 22 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Liddle
That this House takes note of the Report from the Economic Affairs Committee Preparing for an Ageing Society (2nd Report, HL Paper 236, Session 2024–26).
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)
My Lords, before we start, I want to make a short statement. As set out on Today’s Lists, speeches in all three debates should be limited to three minutes, with the exception of those of the movers, winders and Ministers. I know from experience that if everyone goes over by just a few seconds, those seconds mount up. I am sure I speak on behalf of Members across the House when I say that I would be grateful if Members could stick to the advisory speaking time to ensure that the Ministers have adequate time to respond to the points raised in each of the debates today.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great privilege and pleasure to introduce this report on behalf of the Economic Affairs Select Committee of the House in place of our former chair, my noble friend Lord Wood of Anfield. He has, as the Salvationists would say in the 19th century on the death of one of their senior members, been promoted to glory, which in his case is ministerial office as one of Ed Miliband’s Foreign Office Ministers.
I have known Stewart for more than two decades. He demonstrated a very high level of intellect by his appointment as a fellow of Magdalen at a young age. When I was in No. 10, he was a member of Gordon Brown’s council of economic advisers. Although we did not agree on every aspect of government policy, we were both committed European social democrats and were fascinated by the lessons for Britain of post-war Germany. He has been a great chair of our Select Committee to work under, and we owe him a lot.
No report is ever produced without the contribution of the clerks, the expert advisers, our technical and administrative support, and our witnesses. This whole operation was brilliantly orchestrated by our committee clerk, Matthew Manning, to whom I also pay tribute.
We learned a lot from many excellent witnesses. To pick on one is unfair, but I will take the liberty of breaching that rule by paying tribute to Charles Goodhart, the former Bank of England economist. His brother William was a distinguished Member of this House, whose contribution at the age of 89 lost nothing in its clarity and pungency. He is a great exemplar of why we should not be pessimistic about the possibilities of an ageing society. I also pay tribute to other members of the committee, including those rotated off before this debate.
The UK is a rapidly ageing society. The numbers are striking. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s projections say that the old age dependency ratio—that is, the number of people above the state pension age relative to the number of working people—will rise from approximately 31% now to 38% in 2050 and 47% in 2074. Indeed, in the years of the Conservative Governments from 2010 to 2024, the population aged over 65 rose from something like 16.5% to 19%.
The decline in fertility rates is even more striking. In 1964, a peak fertility rate of 2.93 children per woman was achieved. This has fallen precipitously. In 2023, it had reached a new low of 1.44 in England and Wales and 1.25 in Scotland. The long-term replacement rate is 2.08, so we can see the basis of the demographic crisis.
We heard from our witnesses that the prospects for raising the fertility rate are dim and that policy attempts elsewhere to do this have failed. That was a great disappointment to me, because when I worked for the President of the European Commission two decades ago, we had confidence that the adoption of Nordic-style family-friendly policies—subsidised childcare, gender equality and more equally shared responsibility for bringing up children between men and women—would help sustain an adequate fertility rate. Sadly, that has not proved to be the case.
Immigration is likewise not the panacea that in some quarters it is made out to be. It might help if immigration were circular—that is, immigrants returning home as their countries become more prosperous, which to some extent has happened with eastern European immigration. The problem with the immigration from further afield that Britain has experienced since 2019 is that families are more likely to settle here permanently, adding in the short term to public spending costs but not adding to demographic sustainability in the longer term, as second-generation birth rates tend to adjust to UK norms.
Among our witnesses, people were optimistic that the change in profile of the population is manageable. However, the rate at which it is occurring could pose substantial challenges, though it is worth highlighting that some of that is the result of a great success story. Rising life expectancy is something to be celebrated—for girls born today, life expectancy is 90, while for boys it is 86.7—but there is a worrying gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy has actually fallen in the last couple of years. There is already a huge north-south gap emerging; for instance, the gap in healthy life expectancy between London and the north-east is seven years. These are very worrying trends.
The fiscal picture is also stark. In its Fiscal Risks and Sustainability 2025 report, the Office for Budget Responsibility—for which I have great regard, unlike some other people—says that by the early 2070s, on current policy settings, borrowing will be pushed up to a clearly unsustainable 20% a year, and debt will rise to over 270%, which again is clearly unsustainable.
We are not alone in facing this challenge, but that is no source of comfort. The fact that others will be grappling with the same issues could increase competition between nations over a dwindling workforce, at the same time as our economy will be struggling.
This is about more than just the current elderly. The current young population will become the older generation of the future; indeed, thanks to the increases in life expectancy, they will be older for longer.
Yet demography is not destiny. One key conclusion we reached is that the Government need to focus on the older economically inactive who are below state pension age, and I think these facts are not particularly well known. Discussion of raising the state pension age to deal with this problem is, in our view, misplaced. Those still working at the point of state pension age are entitled to claim it but are in fact highly likely to continue working beyond it. The focus has to be on those who exit the workforce before reaching the state pension age.
This is the scale of the problem: at the age of 50, 80% of the age group are still in work, but at the age of 65 the participation rate has fallen to 25% to 30%. That catastrophic fall in the participation rate is the public policy challenge that we feel needs to be addressed. Simply to raise the state pension age would plunge a significant number of people in that late-60s bracket into poverty, as happened when the pension age was raised from 65.
The Government are beginning to think hard about how to promote workforce participation at the other end of the age spectrum, among young people, with the brilliant Milburn review, which is greatly to be welcomed as an outstanding contribution to public policy. However, we hear nothing, or very little, about the scale of what is required to prepare an ageing workforce for those in their mid-50s to mid-60s. The Government’s response is their mid-life MOT programme and targeted jobcentre support for older job seekers. All that is welcome but it hardly seems an ambitious enough response to this crisis, and that is a crucial conclusion of our report.
There are a number of reasons for people to leave the workforce at older ages, which present policy does little to address. Some are benign. People want to stop working if they have the financial resources to do so. Unfortunately for the Treasury, these are often those who contribute the most in taxes, and the Government need to find ways of incentivising these people to remain in or return to work. However, we also heard about those who want to work but are unable to do so because of caring responsibilities, either to ageing parents or to dependants. We recognise that this is a priority for the Government and we are looking forward to the recommendations of the commission that the noble Baroness, Lady Casey of Blackstock, is working on. But you cannot help noting that a number of these grand reviews have been held in the past, with very little action taken. Let us profoundly hope that the Casey review will be the last before concrete policies are announced and enacted.
There has obviously been some focus in discussion on reforming the triple lock. This has proved an expensive driver of real-terms increases in the state pension, due to the recurring volatility of both inflation and earnings, which have led to real-terms increases. Linking pensions to earnings—that is, to the living standards of the working population—is estimated to save some £15.5 billion. That is a significant sum of money. It would take the defence budget up by over 0.5% of GDP. But in our report, rather than focus on that, we have chosen to focus on the much longer-term issue of raising labour force participation among those over 50. The continued yearly focus on the Budget, and the Government’s fiscal headroom and all that, means that there is a danger that we lose sight of the far more serious long-term issues. I am afraid that nothing in what the Government had to say reassured us in this regard.
The Cameron Government, to their credit, made the ageing population one of the subjects of their foresight studies, but this was lost in the aftermath— I would say “chaos”—of Brexit. The present Government, in response to our recommendation that they publish an overarching strategy statement setting out how they plan to address the challenges of an ageing society in a cohesive way, said that an “integrated approach” was
“preferable to a single standalone strategy”.
I do not know quite what that means. They went on to say that they were taking
“a strategic and cross-cutting approach to issues relating to an ageing society”.
Well, without some clear statement of what the strategy that underpins the purported integrated approach is, I find this answer devoid of significant and substantial content.
The lack of any published strategy on ageing is a worrying indication that the Government would prefer not to face up to these challenges as an immediate question, and that the UK is therefore woefully unprepared for the future. This is a harsh conclusion, but the point of having Select Committees is to point out difficult conclusions that our politics is failing to address. On that basis, and with that reason, I beg to move.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Wood, for his outstanding chairmanship. I have already paid tribute to him at Question Time, and I do so very happily again today, because his job was brilliantly done. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, who has summarised our report very comprehensively; he has not left much for anyone to say, even within three minutes.
For me, the most important paragraph in the report was one referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. It is paragraph two, which refers to the OBR stating, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, emphasised, in its Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report, an annual publication about ageing, that without a change in policy, government spending pressures will push up debt to
“above 270% of GDP by the early 2070s”.
Those are very alarming figures. Of course, many people will say that this will never happen, but it will not happen only if we take steps to prevent it happening.
According to the OBR, age-related public spending will increase total spending by 10% of GDP by 2074. When you add debt interest on top of that, it will raise total government spending from 44.5% of GDP to 60% of GDP by 2073. Taxes are already at an all-time high. What would they be if spending were to reach 60% of GDP? What policies are there that can mitigate the apparent need for deep spending cuts or increases in taxation? The usual answer from a Government, of course, is growth, but alas, growth does not always happen and has not always happened in response to the exhortations of government.
According to the OBR, immigration on any likely acceptable scale will not be sufficient to improve the debt dynamic. According to our witnesses, efforts to increase fertility rates in other countries have largely failed. Raising the pension age, which the Government intend to do, does save money but does not, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, emphasised, increase participation rates or promote longer working lives.
One alternative, which is recommended in our report and accepted by the Government, is to increase labour force participation among those aged between 50 and pension age. Finding a solution to the problem of social care—which is an urgent problem in its own right, not just a financial problem—would help many of those in their mid-50s and 60s to remain at work. But a national care service modelled on the NHS, as suggested by the Prime Minister, could cost no less than up to £19 billion a year in 10 years’ time, so that will not help our fiscal problems.
If we do not increase the proportion of older people at work, output per capita and the overall size of the economy will be lower, with fewer workers and higher pension payments. We have to improve productivity per worker and, at the same time, get more of the old to remain at work. It is not impossible. Over the past 100 years, the old age dependency ratio tripled, but it has not been a factor in holding back growth. In the past, we have adapted.
Our report only scratches the surface of what is a huge subject. The ageing of society is transformational and will reach into every department, but the impact is felt only gradually, almost imperceptibly. We need a longer-term framework to allow well-informed development of policy to prepare for these profound changes. If we do not face reality, reality is going to face us.
Lord Burns (CB)
My Lords, I would also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for outlining the conclusions of the committee’s report so well, and thank the noble Lord, Lord Wood of Anfield, for chairing the committee during this investigation. He has now gone on to greater things and I hope he will have the opportunity to continue to deploy his considerable economic skills in that role as well.
There is nothing new or recent about the phenomenon of an ageing population. This been going on throughout my working life, but it is now a major factor in the conduct of economic policy. In the mid-1960s, when I started work, there were fewer than 7 million people aged 65 or over. Today, that number is approaching 14 million and by 2050 it is forecast to reach almost 19 million. The increase in those over 85 is even more impressive. Over the same period, their number has gone from fewer than 500,000 in the mid-1960s to almost 2 million today. It is now forecast to reach 4 million by 2050. This is something to celebrate; it was one of the things we had to keep reminding ourselves of in the committee. It has been a remarkable measure of the progress that has been going on. But it does have consequences for fiscal policy.
Our concern is that, despite this success, the proportion of people aged between 50 and 65—this was mentioned by the noble Lord, Liddle—either working or looking for work drops off considerably compared with the cohort just before them: the 35 to 50 age group. There has been some noticeable increase in the participation rate of those over 65, but it remains quite modest. It was these figures and the starkness of this that formed the basis for our report. It is clear that, unless working lives are extended, our successors will have to fund many more years of retirement than in the past. The report also emphasises the need to rethink our approach to lifelong financial planning for individuals; this is not just a matter for government but for individuals as well.
As has been noted, the committee concluded that, from a fiscal point of view, the best response would be to encourage and incentivise those in their mid-50s to mid-60s to remain active in the workforce, but this would also require greater recognition of the valuable contribution that experienced people can make to the workplace.
The issue of the growing number of people requiring health support and social care has been mentioned. As others have noted, the unsatisfactory arrangements for adult social care have been recognised for years, but no policy proposal has received the necessary support. Fundamental questions remain about service provision, our lifetime contributions, how we share costs between the state and the individual, and the potential role for insurance. Let us hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, can unlock this puzzle.
Finally, there is the testing question of pensioner incomes. The old system of indexing pensions solely to prices meant that pensioners did not automatically benefit from economic growth. However, the triple lock guarantees that the level of pensions will increase faster than earnings over time, but in an arbitrary and random way. This is a problem that must be fixed.
The Lord Bishop of Coventry
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important issue, and I thank the Economic Affairs Committee for its thorough and timely report. As we consider the prospect of a society where the people of older age vastly outnumber younger people, it is vital that we avoid framing our discussion primarily around the burden of the old to the young. We must continue to emphasise that the value of a person cannot be reduced to their fiscal contribution to the state, although I very much understand the pressures. As the report rightly notes, increased life expectancy is a welcome gift and one of the considerable achievements of modern society. I note that, when I began ordained ministry in 1997, I regularly conducted funerals for people in their 60s and 70s; decades on, they were much more frequently for people in their 80s and 90s.
I wish to emphasise the way in which other cultures can teach us the value of older age from their perspective. For example, on a trip to Kenya in recent years, I was privileged to share in the birthday celebrations of an 80 year-old matriarch of a village, and I was bestowed the honour of a ceremonial feeding of the first taste of her enormous cake. I will never forget her jubilation, which was felt across the entire community present. Her life, in its longevity, intrinsic value and social contribution, was remarkable, and nobody there took that for granted. Sadly, here in the UK, we often speak of and treat older people as an inconvenience to be mitigated, rather than cherishing the wisdom and life experience they bring. As a young priest, I was trained to visit my congregation in their own homes—a practice continued throughout my parochial ministry to this day. What started as a visit for a cuppa ended with accounts of careers and achievements, such as the invention of the contact lens, expeditions to the summit of Everest, and a most memorable and gorgeous afternoon with an original character from “Call the Midwife”.
Clearly, the flourishing of our civil society continues to depend on the time, generosity and commitment of older people, many of whom serve as volunteers, carers, mentors, trustees and community leaders in retirement. Without this, many organisations would struggle to survive and function. It is vital that local communities continue to have the support to provide the network of friendship and stimulation that helps older people remain connected and appropriately valued as they grow older. Examples across the country of excellent dementia cafés and bereavement and other support groups are a lifeline for many. I visited the church-run Memory Lane Café in Henley-in-Arden, where the lunch on Christmas Day is oversubscribed, with 100 people attending, who were very keen to let me know that it is a much-loved annual event.
Finally, as the report explores, an ageing population requires a reframed understanding of retirement. The Church of England depends on an active workforce—as a Bishop, I am hugely grateful for their commitment. As we consider the extension of the working life, it is vital that we maintain the safeguards that protect sustainable patterns of work. That said, the challenges facing public finance, health services and social care are acute and must be addressed. I again thank the Economic Affairs Committee for its work. I urge the Government to ensure that, within this work, the value of older-aged people is not lost. As we prepare for an ageing society, we must not forget that such people are not merely recipients of care; they remain bearers of gifts, contributors to the common good and people of immeasurable worth.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, the report we are discussing was completed before I joined the Economic Affairs Committee. Therefore, I need feel no embarrassment in congratulating the committee on its work. It is prescient, timely and, to put it bluntly, a stark warning to this and future Governments that they will ignore at their peril. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, summarised it very well. The UK is ageing rapidly—a sign of success. Longer life expectancy is a success, but falling birth rates mean that older people will form a larger share of the population. This will cause critical problems. This is on top of the problems of exponential growth of public expenditure and welfare that we already have.
The noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Lamont, pointed to a crucial paragraph. I will not repeat the statistics, but it illustrated just how far we will have to go to meet the challenges by 2074—roughly the next 50 years. If we do not meet those challenges, we will be in a crisis long before that. I believe this is a challenge, laid out in this report, that no responsible Government can refuse to recognise.
There is another warning. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, simply increasing the state pension age will not cut the mustard; it will not provide the means to address the challenge the committee outlined. A greater priority should be helping people in their 50s and 60s remain in or return to employment, but this in turn requires better health and social care, flexible working, reduced age discrimination—something to bear in mind next week when we discuss the report from the Retirement and Participation Committee—and opportunities for lifelong learning and retraining. All these are outlined in this report, and I urge the Government to take them most seriously.
If I have one disappointment, it is that the report did not more forthrightly consider and challenge the triple lock. I believe that is essential. Absent that analysis in the report, we have to rely on the good services of the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, who has been forthright on it. I agree entirely with him. That issue would undoubtedly have to be part of the deliberations of the recommended Cabinet sub-committee and overarching strategy.
Overall, the message is simple: the UK needs to prepare now. It is already later than it should be to start preparations. We need to treat longer lives as an opportunity rather than a burden. In the months and years to come, the Government cannot say that they were not warned.
Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)
My Lords, before we move on to the next speaker, I again insist that we keep to the three minutes, because every second is extending the time of the debate. We need to keep within the three minutes.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, I shall do my best. I also warmly congratulate the committee. Many of the speeches already made have set out the situation, demography and all the rest of it. The United Nations has described population ageing as
“a defining global trend of our time”.
The changes taking place here and across the world will transform our workforce, public services, pensions and families. It is worth remembering that when the Queen came to the Throne in 1952, she used to send a telegram to everybody reaching 100. How many did she send in 1952? Some 300. That is the scale of the change. Sending that many telegrams now would be difficult, to say the least. We have to act now. The greatest improvement to our fiscal outlook will come not from simply increasing the state pension age but, as has rightly been said, from enabling more people in their mid-50s and 60s to remain in work.
Healthy life expectancy in the UK has fallen by more than two years in the past decade. As the ONS figures show, it is at its lowest level since the present series began—a watershed moment.
I will refer to Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working review. We are growing older and living longer but getting sick sooner. This is not just a problem for the NHS; it is a problem for the economy. He identifies a profession that gets far too little recognition and understanding. It is mentioned in the report and the government response. It is the occupational health profession. As the report says:
“In 2024 only 45% of workers had access to OH support … this falls to just 18% among small employers”.
If we want to keep more people working through ill health, or returning afterwards, they are a critical group, helping people manage conditions, make adjustments, return after illness and avoid leaving employment altogether. The Centre for Ageing Better, which I applaud, estimates in its report on the looming retirement crisis that more than 900,000 people between 50 and state pension age are out of work but would like to be working.
I must quickly shoot forward to the triple lock, because the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, as has rightly been said, has been forthright—saying that it is “completely bonkers” and “very unfair” to younger generations—and we heard more from him this week. Sir Leigh Lewis, the distinguished former Perm Sec at the Department for Work and Pensions, wrote this in a letter to the Times recently:
“Of all the policies for which I had some responsibility during my time in government, this was by far the worst. Left unchanged, it will bankrupt our children and grandchildren”.
His conclusion was equally clear: politicians of all parties have a duty to admit that the triple lock policy is “unaffordable” and “has to change”.
The other area in which I look to for courage is social care. The Prime Minister, with his people-pleasing approach, has said warm words about social care, but this is an incredibly costly programme. Healthcare has always been free at the point of use, but social care has always had an assessment of means. It is essential that there is a proper expectation of what the reality of a social care programme will involve. I hope somebody will produce coherence in this programme. I commend the report.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, as a member of the committee which produced this report, I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Wood, putting on record my thanks for his outstanding chairing and my thanks to the committee staff.
I want to emphasise one of the major conclusions, which the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and others have highlighted and which I think was for many of us the major new insight: that we must concentrate on raising the participation levels of people in their mid-50s. This is really important. The UK has done pretty well at raising the state pension age, but just putting it up further is not a panacea, as others have explained. Doing that is very unlikely to increase employment levels among the pre-retirement cohort, where many have already dropped out of the labour market. Conversely, raising participation among these 55 to 65 year-olds would make a major difference to our economy, to the public finances and, in many cases, to people’s physical and mental well-being. As our witnesses confirmed time and again, working is really good for people, and being unemployed and economically inactive really is not.
This country had a good record over the last few decades of providing jobs and keeping formal unemployment down, and there is now concern, rightly, over the impact of government policy, in both taxes and employment legislation, on employers’ willingness to hire and especially to hire the young. PAYE data shows a fall of 86,000 payrolled employees in April to June 2026, while workforce data shows a fall of 97,000 in the year to March 2026.
Although we are very focused on the immediate problems, our participation rates over a longer period do not actually look that wonderful. At a time of lengthening life expectancy, it is true that total employment is up, but that is because of the size of the population. Overall employment rates have been pretty static this century: down a bit for men and up a little bit for women. Meanwhile, unemployment rates are down because of people simply dropping out of the labour market. Again, we know and heard from witnesses that, if you drop out in mid- to later mid-life, you are very unlikely to return. Meanwhile, part-time employment, which is especially attractive to older workers and those with caring responsibilities, has started to fall sharply.
This is a major challenge for the Government, and I think that people have not really been aware of it. We asked them to set out their policies and to look at tax and other incentives but, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, the focus at the moment is very much on the young. The young really matter but, in our ageing society, people in their 50s and 60s matter too.
Baroness Nargund (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Liddle for securing this debate and for his brilliant opening speech. Having written and campaigned on declining birth rates since 2009, I will focus my remarks on the fertility aspect of this challenge.
Last year, we had the lowest birth rate since 1977. My noble friend Lord Liddle has highlighted the statistics of a decline in birth rates and the policies tried elsewhere. I want to focus on an easy win. The Department for Education could implement this tomorrow at minimal cost to enable our young people to understand what affects their future fertility and how to protect their natural fertility. I am talking about an issue close to my heart: introducing fertility education into the school curriculum.
Today, one in seven couples struggles to conceive. I have seen the emotional, physical and financial toll that this takes, as prospective parents fight for years to realise their dreams of holding their baby. In many cases, if these patients had better knowledge about their own reproductive health, the hardship of IVF and infertility could have been avoided. Within the education system, we need to teach both boys and girls in their late teens to understand the impact of their age and the lifestyle choices they make on their future fertility.
In this age of social media, we know that more young men are looking to perfect their image online, but performance-enhancing drugs, including anabolic steroids and non-prescribed testosterone, can severely affect their fertility, not to mention the risks of smoking and excessive alcohol intake. Moreover, young women need to be aware that, if they become underweight, with a restrictive diet and excessive exercise to achieve a certain appearance, their hormonal and bone health could be affected, as could their future fertility. They need to know about their family history of menopause and its impact on their own age of menopause.
We are failing to educate young people about their future fertility. I urge my noble friend the Minister to meet me to discuss how to develop fertility education modules in the PSHE curriculum to teach students how to protect their natural fertility and change their lifestyle. I have tried this. I introduced fertility education modules in some London schools, but I have failed to get that into the curriculum. Now is not the time to sit on our hands and argue that demographic shift is our destiny. It is the time for fertility education and for more babies.
Lord Redwood (Con)
My Lords, I was happy to support previous Conservative Governments in implementing the triple lock, and I support the current Government in honouring their promise. This has been a useful policy in reducing pensioner poverty.
As one of the Members of this House probably keenest to control public spending, I am very conscious of cost, and I have regularly recommended that we should raise the state retirement age, which gives you a substantial reduction and is a fair way of achieving the savings. It is also very much in the spirit of this report, which I welcome; namely, that people in their 60s, unless there is disability or a serious health problem, should be encouraged to work, and they will probably have richer lives as a result. This is now possible because life expectancy is greater than when the lower state retirement pension ages were first set.
More importantly, there are now very few people who do hard manual work. Clearly, they needed a much lower retirement age because they could not continue. Now people have hydraulics, automation and robotics, so it is much more feasible to carry on working for longer. Really, the most power or muscle pressure you now need is the ability for your fingers to press a touchscreen; you are then able to do most of the interesting jobs in our community.
Those who wish to abolish the triple lock or make other changes to pension arrangements would be well advised to remind themselves that the pension is not a welfare benefit but an entitlement based on contributions to the national insurance scheme. Of course, that can all be changed, but it would require complex legislation and a lot of political argument. No Government to this day have been willing to attempt that, I suspect because it would be very unpopular with the public.
The contributory principle is, to me, fundamental. It shows that people have to work and have to pay national insurance. There is an annual sign-off of the fund, with a review. It is a pay-as-you-go fund, not an endowment fund. It embodies a very important contract between generations: the working generation say that they will pay for their parents’ generation on the basis that their children, when they are working, will then pay for them. I do not want to disturb that social contract between generations; I want to keep the contributory principle—you get something for something—and I do not want to take away the triple lock. That would be a great pity.
Lord Turnbull (CB)
My Lords, we have two related debates in successive weeks. Next week we will debate the issue of long-term debt and, this week, we are addressing one of its main drivers: an ageing population. The main elements of this are well known. Older people are putting less into the Exchequer and requiring more assistance from it. There is a sharp decline in the fertility rate. In mid-life, the shape of careers is changing. The old model of education to, say, 16 or 18 and 40-plus years of work followed by a retirement of 15 years has largely broken down. Young people are staying in education longer and taking longer to find settled employment. Taken together, these developments are producing a sharp rise in the dependency ratio, leading to severe pressures on public finances.
The EAC report looked at these developments and possible responses. It took the view that there has been significant change in the pension age, often going further than other countries, but that the scope for further rises is small. One change that should be made now—pace my noble friend Lord Redwood—is the abolition of the triple lock, which is, frankly, idiotic. Instead of a considered decision on how, over time, pensions should rise relative to prices or earnings, we have a chaotic system generating random windfall gains—and they are always gains—according to the movement of earnings and prices in particular years. The OBR has estimated that this could cost an extra 2% of GDP.
The report is rightly sceptical that the Government should try, or would be able, to influence the birth rate. We could permit greater immigration but not only is this politically sensitive; the effect may only be short term as, eventually, immigrants adopt the work and family patterns of the host nation. This leaves two areas where government action can be justified. The one emphasised most strongly in the report is trying to improve the participation rate in the 50 to 65 or 70 age range. Technological change is affecting how long jobs last. Someone may find that the line of work they have been in for 30 years has ceased to exist and they are therefore likely to need help to change jobs and skills to find new work.
Another issue, which gets less prominence in the report, is that many young people are finding it difficult after completing education and training to find fulfilling jobs. This is seen in the rise of the so-called NEETs to more than 1 million. It should be a priority to bring this number down. The policy response has been precisely the opposite of what is needed. Young people need incentives, mentoring and advice to help them into work, while we are in fact consigning them to the dead-end world of disability benefits.
The course we are now on makes for sombre reading—there will be more of that next week—but we are not without responses that could improve matters. I hope we will take them up as a matter of urgency.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the Economic Affairs Committee report. I was of course a member of the committee, as can be seen. Most Members will know that you do not necessarily agree with everything in a report when you sign off on it but, in fact, on rereading it, I am quite surprised by how much I agree with.
I thank my noble friend Lord Liddle for his introduction, but I must pick him up on something. He twice used the word “crisis” in relation to the challenges of an ageing society. The report specifically did not use “crisis” because, unlike financial and geopolitical shocks, demographic shifts are slow-moving and quantifiable decades in advance. The committee’s own projections run to 2074 and the key trends—falling fertility and rising life expectancy—are already fully visible in the data. That is an advantage. Policy can be phased, rather than improvised, and institutions can adjust incrementally, rather than under duress. There is also a precedent: we absorbed the post-war baby boom generation into education, housing, employment and, eventually, pension systems over several decades. Life expectancy rose substantially across the whole of the 20th century and retirement provision was adapted accordingly, however imperfectly.
I will dodge the issue of triple lock except to say that, somewhat to my surprise, I totally agree with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, who gets it exactly right. We need a proper debate on the triple lock.
The specific levers identified in the report—encouraging workforce participation, addressing the social care shortfall, improving productivity, expanding skills training and tackling misplaced assumptions about age and capability—are policy choices, not fixed constraints. What the report identifies as missing is not the capacity to respond but sustained political attention. There is an absence of a published government strategy or forum for addressing ageing as a standing priority. This is a remedial deficiency. Given the lead times available and a demonstrated historical capacity to absorb comparable transitions, the present challenge of an ageing society is not one without a solution, but one of sequencing and will.
Lord Tugendhat (Con)
My Lords, in the time available I will make just two suggestions—I hope to keep within the three minutes by doing so. The first I can dispose of very quickly: it is to add my voice to those of others who have urged getting rid of the triple lock. This innovation was much needed when it was introduced but has long since served its purpose and the Government should replace it without further ado.
My second point concerns the issue, which has been widely discussed, of finding ways of bringing people in their 50s and early 60s back into the workforce. We all know that there are many reasons why people retire: the need to care for elderly relatives; ill health; tiredness; age discrimination—all sorts of things. Not everybody is susceptible to financial incentives. None the less, I ask the Minister whether he will explore ways in which the tax system might be used to bring people back into the workforce and to keep them there. In particular, will he look into whether the rate of income tax and national insurance might be lowered for those who continue in work above a certain age—say, 58 or 60? What it should be, I do not know; that can be decided only after the matter has been thoroughly looked into. If people could be incentivised so that their earnings were significantly increased in the time leading up to the state pension age, it might make a difference. I urge the Minister to look into this possibility and report back to the House in due course.
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for the thoughtful way in which he introduced this important report. I declare my own interests as chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research. This is not the first report of a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House that has identified important and common challenges attending ageing. A report in 2013 by a Select Committee on Public Service and Demographic Change, two committees chaired by my noble friend Lord Patel on the sustainability of the NHS and adult social care in 2017, and a Science and Technology Committee report on the science of ageing in 2021 all reached remarkably similar conclusions.
As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has said, the increase in longevity is to be seen quite rightly as a tremendous success. But the real peril is the fact that healthy lifespan has not increased at the same rate, and that more and more of our population will be living with multiple co-morbidities and ill health for an extended period. That puts unsustainable pressure on the provision of healthcare, and it must now be addressed.
Thirteen years of addressing this issue in your Lordships’ House has been attended by no meaningful government intervention or action; action is now urgently required. There is a good basis to act, because the science of ageing is now far better understood. The biological processes are better understood. We are now able to identify biomarkers associated with chronic inflammation that attend the development of many co-morbidities.
Therefore, in a short time, we should be able to develop strategies to identify early in life those individuals at high risk for the development of multiple co-morbidities later in life, and to intervene in those in a targeted and precise way to reduce the occurrence of those diseases. In time, that will have a substantial impact on reducing the burden in the National Health Service. That burden manifests itself not only in the need to deliver care but in an ever increasing proportion of the population needing to deliver those services rather than being economically active in other parts of the economy.
But all this requires a holistic strategy to be delivered somewhere in government that brings the elements of government together and, most importantly, ensures that elements attending the delivery of healthcare reflect the complexity of managing health in an ageing population and the need to ensure that those challenges are addressed appropriately for individuals, as well as across communities and more broadly in the system. We need substantial government investment to ensure that the move to prevention is properly financed now, rather than being talked about as a future requirement.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, ageing problems begin during childhood and are incubated by poor government policies. A June 2026 paper in Nature Human Behaviour noted that consequences of poverty, inequality and discrimination accelerate biological ageing from a very young age. Adults enduring childhood economic deprivation age at a significantly accelerated biological pace, even if they achieve financial security in later life. Many need support.
Austerity, real wage and benefit cuts, and degradation of the NHS deprive people of nutritious food, good housing, healthcare and possibilities of working until a later age. A regressive tax system prevents the poor saving for old age. The poorest 20% pay a higher proportion of income in direct and indirect taxes than the richest 20%. The income tax personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since 2021. If it had increased in line with inflation, it would now be £16,070. As a result, someone earning just £17,000 this year will be paying £1,000 more in income tax and national insurance.
Some 39% of adults in the UK have savings of less than £1,000. Millions simply cannot save for old age. Premature biological ageing prevents people working until a later age. Some 7.27 million hospital appointments are awaited, fuelling a rise in chronic illness and disabilities. The average healthy life expectancy has declined to 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females. In parts of Blackpool, it is 50.9 years for males and 51.2 years for females. In parts of Scotland, it is 44.8 years for males and 44.2 years for females. It is hard to know how we are going to get people aged around 50 to work.
Calls for educating younger people about the financial cost of retirement will bear little fruit. In a society where 1% have more wealth than 70% of the population combined, pushing pensioners into poverty is not the answer: it will simply lead to a form of economic euthanasia. The ageing problems are nurtured by inequitable distribution of wealth, poor housing and healthcare, and regressive taxation. Government must rise to the challenge.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Economic Affairs Committee for this report. It reminds us that an ageing society is not simply about older people, it is about how we structure our whole lives and how that may need to change in future. I will touch on two points; the first is pensions, where I welcome the work of the Pensions Commission. While we await its final report, there are three issues on which I would welcome the Government’s thoughts.
The first issue is how we build a stronger culture of investment more broadly. For most people, pensions are their main exposure to the stock market, and outside that, too many people still default to cash saving, missing out on longer-term growth. The second is the gender pensions gap. Among 55 to 59 year-olds, the commission finds a 48% gap in private pension wealth. This is not primarily because women contribute less when they are saving into a pension, but because they are more likely to work part time, earn less and take time out for caring. So how are the Government considering pensions alongside women’s labour market participation? The third issue is public service pensions, which are firmly beyond the commission’s remit. The committee heard evidence about pension cliff edges discouraging people from potentially working longer.
More broadly, we need to ask ourselves whether we have the balance right across the whole life course, particularly when people in their 20s, 30s and 40s face pressures to buy a home or pay for childcare, while some pension schemes provide a substantially greater amount of security in retirement. Do the Government have a clear assessment of the affordability of these pension schemes and the incentives they create?
The second area I will touch on is fertility, where I agree with the noble Baroness opposite: we should not treat this as a lost cause. Looking at the evidence to the committee and beyond, I am not advocating for one-off incentives or baby bonuses, for which the evidence is weak, but there is evidence to say that fertility responds to economic confidence. UK fertility rates rose through the 2000s, before falling off after the financial crisis and never recovering. Growth must be part of the answer, but that is beyond a three-minute speech.
However, research by Dad Shift and Movember found that 57% of fathers say that financial insecurity after their first child holds them back from having more. Eligibility for paternity leave and the levels of pay in the UK are almost uniquely low compared with other developed economies. I ask the Minister what the Government’s approach is under this Prime Minister to the review of parental leave, due to conclude by the end of the year.
Even if the Government do not think that it would impact fertility, there is strong evidence to show that better leave for dads increases mothers’ and overall labour market participation. That matters doubly in an ageing society for strengthening workforce participation now and helping to close the gender pay gap in future. These issues are related and I hope the Government will treat them as such.
Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the committee on some first-rate analysis. An ageing population has been long foreseen and long debated. Very occasionally, Governments have taken action. I recall working on the reforms to SERPS introduced by my noble friend Lord Fowler in the 1980s. But for the most part, Governments have preferred to shelve decisions on the many reports they have commissioned. The result is that the cost of ageing is rising inexorably. The OBR estimates that age-related spending will rise from 26% of national income to some 35% in 2075. We can fantasise about financing these pressures through spending cuts elsewhere, but even if we abolished all expenditure on working-age and children’s benefits, that would relieve only half the pressure from age-related spending.
Demographic pressures are already resulting in cuts. To pay for the ever-increasing proportion of spending accounted for by pensions and the NHS, successive Governments have had to cut “unprotected programmes” such as prisons, police and local government. The report describes the failure to solve “the social care crisis” as a scandal. But if those unlucky enough to require paid care are not going to pay for it, somebody else is—and that means the taxpayer. We need to face up to this fact.
I have long argued the case for a health and social care levy. Everybody should pay it, young and old alike, and it should be payable on dividends and rents as well as earnings. For all of six months, thanks to Messrs Johnson and Sunak, I got my wish. Sadly, its abolition was the one tax cut which survived the Kwarteng-Truss Budget of 2022. At some point, it is going to have to be reinstituted, but raising taxes has its limits. The triple lock will have to go. At the very least, the state pension should rise no faster than the post-tax earnings of those in work, and we will have to take another look at the winter fuel payment and universal benefits such as free travel. Support for pensioners needs to be targeted at those who need it most. A rising proportion of the elderly is relatively affluent; more than 1 million pensioners pay the higher rate of income tax.
Conceivably, higher growth may yet come to our rescue—though I rather doubt it. I was encouraged by the new Minister’s remarks on economic strategy on Tuesday. I wish him well in solving these problems, which have proven intractable for too long.
Baroness McGregor-Smith (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I congratulate the Economic Affairs Committee on its excellent report. One passage particularly struck me: paragraph 40, where, in discussing the implications of an ageing society, Richard Hughes of the OBR highlighted the pressures that demographic change will place on the public finances.
Those pressures are real, and they cannot be ignored. Yet I am concerned when older people are viewed principally through the lens of cost and dependency. Too often, the debate focuses on what older people will require rather than what they can continue to contribute. Older people are workers, carers, volunteers, mentors, entrepreneurs and taxpayers. Their contribution to our economy and our communities is immense. We should therefore view an ageing society not simply as a challenge to be managed, but as an opportunity to be embraced. Having spent all my career in UK and global businesses, I have seen at first hand that experienced employees bring great experience, judgments and resilience. Too many people, however, leave the workforce—not because they wish to, but because poor health, caring responsibilities or inflexible employment practices make it difficult for them to remain.
I have three requests to make today to support businesses and business growth. First, on healthier lives, we should shift more resources from treating ill health to preventing it. We need a national focus on healthy life expectancy, with prevention, physical activity, including strength training, and healthier ageing recognised as investments that reduce future pressure on both the NHS and the public finances.
Secondly, on skills, we need to support a genuinely lifelong approach to learning. Apprenticeships, retraining and digital skills should be accessible throughout anyone’s full and longer working life. The apprenticeship levy should be fundamentally reviewed to ensure it is sufficiently flexible for an economy being transformed by AI and longer careers. We should remember that the apprenticeship levy was devised well before we even discussed generative and agentic AI.
Thirdly, on employment, we should make increasing employment among older workers a clear economic priority. Greater flexibility, phased retirement and stronger occupational health provision would enable more people to remain economically active for longer. Let us not forget: 40% of our construction workers will be retiring in the next decade. If we are serious about building homes and infrastructure, we really will need more.
The most sustainable response to an ageing society is to improve healthy life expectancy, strengthen productivity and enable more people to remain active contributors for longer. This will reduce the pressure on our public finances and support business growth. I welcome this report and look forward to the Government’s response.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, a strong theme in this excellent report is the importance of people aged over 50 remaining in the workforce—the other NEETs—and the challenge in the report is clear. Perhaps I can make the Minister one specific Budget representation on this issue. At the moment, people with pension savings can access them without losing any tax reliefs from the age of 55. The Government are already planning to increase that to the age of 57. The report makes a strong case for increasing that age to 60. Will the Minister consider that option?
Secondly, as we make progress on improving participation in the workforce, the issue of the pension age comes up. It is striking that, from April of this year, the pension age started increasing from 66 to 67 with no fuss and no dispute. Beyond that, there is an option of increasing the pension age to 68. The Government commissioned their obligatory review of the pension age from Suzy Morrissey. They have had that report for several months. It is absurd that we in this Chamber are discussing this issue and the Government have still not published that report. Can the Minister give the House an assurance that it will be published urgently, so it can inform debates such as the one we are currently having?
Finally, and very briefly, as this is a report about long-term trends, I was surprised that there was no reference to the most significant long-term technological trends—notably, the developments in robotics. It is striking that, when you look around the world, the countries facing the most significant demographic crises—Japan, Korea, China and Italy—are also the world leaders in robotics. This is part of their strategy. I declare an interest as chairing the Regulatory Innovation Office, the government body that looks at regulatory barriers to new technologies. But you do not need to read dry reports on the issue. I strongly recommend the BBC series “Ann Droid”, which identifies one possible scenario which could be in existence by the dates which this report discusses. I personally do not think we are likely to have one single humanoid robot doing everything, but I can absolutely envisage robots interacting with lonely older people, with indefinite time to give to their attention, and assisting with physical social care. I urge that the Minister also incorporates technological possibilities in any considerations of ageing societies.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, my comments on this excellent report concern a missing ingredient and omission from it: the role played by housing policies in preparation for demographic change. I am not seeking to make the case for private and public investment in more manageable, accessible, right-sizer accommodation that enhances health and well-being, saves NHS and social care budgets and releases family homes for the next generation; that job has been done so well by the Older People’s Housing Taskforce of 2024. I am referring to what we choose to do about housing policy today, which has profound economic implications for both helping pay for our long lives for some and, conversely, adding appreciably to the cost of our long lives for others.
Some 75% of pensioners are home owners. Most pensioners will have paid off their mortgage. Their incomes in older age go much further, because they are not having to spend a large proportion of their income paying the rent. Most have accumulated a tax-free capital gain. Today’s pensioner owner-occupiers hold approximately £3 trillion in housing equity. This accumulation of significant resources has implications for the debate on paying for care costs and the current review by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey.
However, for pensioners in the private rented sector, and particularly for retirees of pre-pension age in the private rented sector, there is serious trouble ahead. Here, rents that start out at one-third or so of earned income will absorb a much higher proportion of post- retirement income. In many cases, the impact of the increasing rent is likely to trigger an eligibility for housing benefit. The IFS estimates that the already massive housing benefit bill, currently around £38 billion per annum, will rise dramatically as a result of the switch from younger people buying to private renting. Home ownership is down from 71% to 65%. The prediction is that the housing benefit bill will rise to over £70 billion in the years ahead, much of the increase necessary to support the PRS pensioners.
It is housing tenure, beneficial for homeowners but highly problematic for private sector tenants, that will make a massive difference to the wealth and living standards of older people and the cost of an ageing population to society at large. I strongly recommend another inquiry by our excellent Economic Affairs Committee to cover this.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, one of the challenges of speaking so late in the debate is that many brilliant points that you thought you might cover have already been made, and the noble Lord, Lord Best, just made one of them. It is one of my biggest concerns about the increasing costs and one reason I kept trying to encourage the Government to abandon their ideology about not being able to buy your own home from housing associations or councils. We are reaching the tipping point, where costs are going to rise significantly as we see less home ownership.
I appointed my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe to do the previous report looking into pension age. We have to reach some kind of consensus on what is an acceptable proportion of pension income compared to earnings to reach a proper settled way that we can take forward.
It was the 2007 Act, brought in by the then Labour Government and enacted by the coalition Government in 2011, that reinstated the link to earnings. We have a variety of views on what the ideal pinch point should be. That is the sort of thing that I hope the Pensions Commission will settle.
Sometimes, the triple lock gets blamed for a lot of things. To some extent, I would prefer some kind of double lock. At the time, the 2.5% probably seemed right to achieve the policy outcome of getting pensions as a proportion of earnings up more quickly. It has achieved that, by and large. As a consequence, however, it has been used about four times—though only twice in an artificially high way—compared to some of the other changes on earnings and inflation.
Indeed, I was the Cabinet Minister at the time, and we took the proactive decision on two occasions: one was when the earnings link legislation would have frozen the state pension. We changed that for a year. We also changed the earnings link, removing it for a year. That, just in one year, saved £4.5 billion, and about £30 billion over the next five years. It shows that some quite modest changes can have significant benefits to the public finance.
The other element of this very interesting report that I thought was useful was thinking about working. The best employers are a lot more flexible. I want to encourage the Government to think again, as they bring forward their regulations and guidance, about what they are doing. We removed the default retirement age. Again, this was designed to make life more flexible for people.
The other key element—I saw it with my late mother—is that Covid had a massive impact on old people, as they just did not get moving. I saw her muscles atrophy. We need a proactive occupational health service, and I would welcome health visitors for pensioners, not just for children.
Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, earlier this week, I was pondering on which aspect of this most impressive report on ageing I might usefully make a small contribution. As a relatively new chair of the SCIE—the Social Care Institute for Excellence—it seemed important to make the links between the new enthusiasm from our new Prime Minister for the reform of social care and this debate. The reform of social care is a much wider issue than just social care, because it deals with young people, disabled people, those with learning and mental health challenges and so on. The interface between health and social care is undoubtedly a facet of this debate.
However, lo and behold, the BBC—bless it—and its radio programme “Radical” gave me an answer, featuring, as it did, Professor Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology at Oxford. She was a witness and contributor to the considerations of this report. Like my noble friend Lord Reid and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry, she challenged the widespread belief that ageing populations are primarily a social and economic burden, arguing instead that longer lives represent one of humanity’s greatest achievements and an opportunity to rethink how society is organised. As the report does, she explains why many of the pressures associated with ageing societies stem from institutions designed for a different era—it is obvious. She argued that our welfare systems, labour markets and expectations around retirement no longer reflect the realities of modern life, where people are often living longer and healthier lives—more so than previous generations.
That is a note of optimism, and that is what we need to inject into the debate. In fact, many of the contributions did exactly that. The Government need to grasp this, run with it and bring forward a much bigger strategy, and this needs to be done in the face of optimism for our society and its future. Look around this House, and look at the age profile that we have here. We are an excellent example and, of course, we are greatly privileged. There is no doubt about that, and I greatly support it. I think about my noble friend Lord Dubs at 93. He is still here, leading great things in this House. We need to see this as an opportunity to build a richer society that takes into account the things in the report to do with the economy, health and social care, and the changes that are necessary. In particular, it is about the culture and how we regard older people and the value we place on them. I look at this report as the start of an optimistic debate, which I hope will lead to greater things.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, people aged over 85 are the fastest-growing population segment, but we are also having far fewer children. This is a problem, as the excellent report highlighted. The committee doubts that financial incentives can reverse falls in fertility. I do not entirely agree. Since the 1950s, successive French Governments developed a strong, pro-family system, with tax advantages and practical benefits aimed at larger families. It worked: France had the highest fertility rate in western Europe. Today, France has not escaped the recent decline, but its fertility remains higher than ours, at 1.56 per woman.
The Government can create an environment in which it is easier for people to have more children. Higher taxes, housing and childcare costs have made it harder to start a family, just when fertility drastically declines with age. The Centre for Social Justice estimates that 3 million women may remain childless. It calls them Britain’s “missing mothers”. Not wanting children is a choice; wanting them, but being unable to afford them, is a problem.
There is another worrying statistic. In 2023, almost one in three conceptions ended in abortion—the highest proportion on record. Yet the Government recently removed women from the criminal law relating to their own abortions at any stage of gestation.
Then there is the other problem, addressed by many noble Lords, of intergenerational fairness. Immigration is not the answer. As Professor Andrew Scott told the committee,
“immigration may buy you time”,
but it does not solve the fundamental problem. Immigrants grow older, too.
Instead of all this, we need a fundamental change in our attitude towards ageing. Retirement should not be seen as the finishing line. We should encourage people to remain active, engaged and useful for longer. As we said before, look at this Chamber. Many Members are well beyond conventional retirement age. That is a perfect example, and we should stop treating older people as a cost and recognise them as an underused resource. This week, 84 year-old actor Peter Marinker, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, is performing Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” alone on the London stage. What better example could there be?
What steps will the Government take to change our attitude towards older people, and will they consider reducing taxes and improving housing and family policies to make it easier for people to have children?
Baroness Prashar (CB)
My Lords, I commend the Economic Affairs Committee for producing this report and thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for his comprehensive introduction.
The committee has offered a sobering assessment of our inadequate preparedness for an ageing society, and I fully endorse the recommendations of the report, particularly the emphasis on supporting those in their mid-50s and 60s to remain in work or return to work, as well as its call to address the crisis of adult social care. It is, however, regrettable that the Government’s response does not grasp the strategic direction recommended in the report, nor the committee’s call to “act now”.
I declare my interest as an ambassador for the Age Irrelevance campaign, which was built on the vision of the late Baroness Greengross, a lifelong campaigner for age inclusion. The campaign’s push for the inclusive language of “era of longevity” as opposed to an “ageing society” captures the need for a holistic approach and the pressing need for younger generations to invest in their own longevity, from both a financial and a health aspect.
If we are to move from the idea that an ageing society is a burden that will deplete resources, we need to look it at as a multistage life. We need to move away from the narrative which creates intergenerational division and resentment to one which is designed to create systems that allow people to contribute to society in different ways and at different stages of their life. To achieve that, we need an integrated approach with a positive narrative that shows determination to benefit from the demographic shift and maximise the opportunities it offers.
If the pension imperative is that people must work longer, this can be achieved only if it is supported by a national housing strategy, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Best, which supports rightsizing near places of work, enabled by progressive models to promote work and healthy, longer lives. Longer working lives can be achieved only if they are underpinned by a focus on healthy living, healthy ageing, prevention, and understanding of healthy living and healthy lifestyles from early stages.
In preparing for longer lives, financial planning should be mandated in the education curriculum, and we need employers to actively support longer careers and changing working patterns. The Government should also place lifelong learning at the heart of education and, of course, continue to ensure digital inclusion and the use of innovative technology to achieve this.
Urgent engagement with the issues raised in the report is very important, and I look forward to an encouraging response from the Minister.
Lord Razzall (LD)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords on the committee in thanking our recently departed chair, the noble Lord, Lord Wood, who was an excellent chair, as we have all agreed. I have only one tiny criticism about his chairmanship and his drafting of this report, and I speak as the one of the tenders of the Asquithian flame on these Benches. If you look at the report closely, it says that in 1909, when the old age pensions were introduced, they were introduced by Lloyd George as Prime Minister. They were not; they were introduced by Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Asquith was Prime Minister, so I want to get that on the record.
Many people may have thought that we chose to do a report on the ageing society because the majority of the members of the committee were over 80 when we decided to do this. I have to say that that was not the case. We chose to do it because, as a number of noble Lords have indicated—certainly the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, did in his wonderful opening speech—this is a serious issue facing our country.
One thing that nobody, apart from the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, touched on is that we are not the only country facing these issues. To take three of them, Italy is the worst—or best, whichever way you look at it—country in Europe for these problems, probably because, as a well-known Roman Catholic country, it has the lowest rate of fertility. Further away, Japan has a massive problem which will result in the reduction of the population of Japan. The best view about what has happened to Japan is that it is because it has had no immigration, as a result of which its population is shrinking. Then, of course, the obvious country with a problem is China, because that is what happens if you have a one-child policy—it comes back to bite you in future years.
Our committee was extremely strong on what we do not believe the solutions are. First, on fertility, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, indicated, we did not believe that doing anything about fertility would be enough to solve the problem. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, had some solutions, and I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, disagreed, but we were not saying that doing something about fertility would not have some impact, we were saying that doing anything about it would not have an impact in the timeframe to solve the problem.
The second thing that we thought would not solve the problem is immigration. As the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Turnbull, indicated, whatever we do about immigration, we do not believe that that would have an opportunity in the timeframe to do anything about it.
Thirdly, we do not think that what appears to be the Government’s approach, which is, “If only we did something about productivity, that would solve the problem”, is correct. Despite endless government attempts to do something about productivity over the last 14 to 16 years, there does not seem to be any evidence that we have done anything about it. So we do not believe that that will solve the problem.
As far as pensions are concerned, we did look at them, and we certainly looked at the question of an increase in the starting pension age. As the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Reid, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, indicated, we again thought that it was too late to have a massive impact by increasing the state pension age. The noble Lords, Lord Redwood and Lord Willetts, probably disagree, but that was our conclusion.
As readers of the report will see, we did not look at the triple lock. This debate probably indicates why we did not do so, because it is clearly a highly controversial topic. On the one hand, we had the noble Lords, Lord Reid, Lord Turnbull, Lord Tugendhat and Lord Macpherson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, all indicating that they thought keeping the triple lock was silly, while on the other hand we had the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, indicating quite the opposite point of view, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, thinks we certainly should not do anything about it without a proper debate. For that reason, we rather wisely kept off in the report the issue of the triple lock.
As noble Lords will realise, we believe that the magic bullet, to the extent that there is one, is to do something about getting people aged between 50 and 65 either to stay in work or back into work. As a number of noble Lords have indicated, there are a number of reasons why they leave work. The noble Lords, Lord Liddle, Lord Lamont and Lord Tugendhat, all indicated that people do not work because they have caring responsibilities. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was the only person to say what I think is very often the case: actually, they have made enough money so that they do not have to work. That has an impact on our society. People such as the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, have also made the obvious point that there are often health concerns. The noble Baroness had some interesting suggestions as to what might be done to help that.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, also drew attention to the fact that it is not only what is happening at the top end but what is happening at the bottom end that is relevant. As the Milburn report indicated, unless we do something to bring young people back into the workplace we will not help to provide the revenue necessary to support the elderly. I, and the committee, agree that requires action.
Finally, as the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Davies of Brixton, both articulated, the government response to our report is at best disappointing and at worst very disappointing. I hope that the Minister can do a bit better in reply.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, this is a valuable and timely report. It continues the tradition of high-quality reports from the Economic Affairs Committee, and I join the tributes to the noble Lord, Lord Wood of Anfield, in his role as chair, to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for his clear and compelling opening speech, and indeed to the clerks who have supported the committee.
This excellent report sets out with clarity the scale of the demographic challenge facing the country. The UK is ageing rapidly, birth rates have fallen to historic lows and the implications for our labour market, our tax base and our public finances are profound. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and my noble friend Lord Lamont were right to emphasise the consequences for fiscal sustainability and to cite the OBR in telling us that, on current forecasts, debt would rise to an unimaginable 270%. My noble friend Lord Willetts emphasised the possibilities of technology and robotics in heading this off, and many noble Lords have rightly focused on the need to increase employment rates among those in their 50s and 60s. That is a theme I will return to later.
We also heard from many about the need for transformation of adult care; I think we all wish the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, great success. There has been a debate about pensions, summarised by the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, and articulated very well by my noble friend Lady Coffey from her experience at DWP. There was a lack of agreement, but the arguments for the triple lock were set out very clearly and well by my noble friend Lord Redwood. I thought my noble friend Lady Bottomley was right to mention the value of occupational health, which is something I agree with from my business experience.
It is possible, in the time available, to cover only a few points. I will try not to repeat what has already been said, but I draw attention to the Government’s response. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, I think it is a respectable one, although sometimes ideology is overinfluential. At the top of page 12, the commitment to
“halving the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest”
is foolish. The Government’s ambition should be to improve healthy life expectancy for everyone, especially the least fortunate. We do not want the gap to be narrowed simply by reducing healthy life expectancy among the rich.
It is clear from the report that the problems of our ageing society would be much reduced if we could get our birth rate back up to the replacement rate. Although all countries have found this difficult, more efforts should be made. It is not a lost cause, as my noble friend Lady Penn explained. My view is that more help with nursery provision could make a big difference. Having a childcare system largely geared to school hours and school terms may be convenient to teachers, but it makes it very difficult for most working parents. They do it better elsewhere, not only in Scandinavia but in the United States and, indeed, in France, as described by my noble friend Lady Meyer. I know that from the experience of family members in those countries. The noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, explained that people also need to be taught more about fertility. Of course, the shift to starting families later can lead to lower replacement rates.
Otherwise, the best way to mitigate the problems outlined in this important report is to conjure up more economic growth. The then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, James Murray, described this in his response letter as the “central mission” of the Government. It is one of the best ways out of the dilemmas described and, indeed, many of the other problems we face. Unfortunately, many of the actions taken by this Government have reduced growth. Examples include the effective ban on new drilling in the North Sea, leaving Norway to grow instead. That and other policies have led to the highest electricity prices in the developed world. These have ruined our car and cement industries and hit data centres which support AI, one of the key new avenues of growth. We have seen a disastrous attack on large and small businesses: a £25 billion hit on NICs, a very high minimum wage, especially for the young, and the Employment Rights Act, the damaging consequences of which become more apparent by the day. I urge the Government not to launch another attack on wealth creators in the Budget on 28 October.
Improving productivity can also contribute. It was rightly on the list from the noble Lord, Lord Razzall. I am more optimistic than he is about the scope for improving productivity if we follow the right policies.
Demography is not only about births and deaths—or, indeed, immigration. We face a worrying trend of entrepreneurs and younger talent emigrating because of high taxation and growing burdens on business. If we want people to work longer, to invest more and to innovate here in Britain, we must stop making it harder for them to do so. I ask the Minister for reassurance: how do the Government intend to reverse the outflow of skilled, ambitious workers, who are essential to sustaining our future tax base and supporting our ageing population?
We also need a national conversation about retirement expectations. Too many assume that the system will simply provide. Yet, given the demographic realities, younger workers will need to save more for longer and will almost certainly retire later.
There are two mitigations in the report that I will highlight in conclusion. The first is to join others in persuading those able to do so to work for longer and allowing them to do that. People live much longer than they did, but a much smaller part of their life is spent in work than when pensions were devised. It is too easy for many of those contributing to the economy to retire early. My father’s farming business failed when he was in his 40s, but he retrained and worked into his 70s. We need more of this, and not only in the House of Lords. To achieve this, we need to call out the culture of age discrimination that I was shocked to discover when preparing my review of the state pension age in 2022. The latest figure from the Centre for Ageing Better suggests that one in three people reports experiencing age discrimination. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry rightly described the amazing contribution that older people make to civil society.
My second issue is better financial education. It is welcome news that the Government will shortly consult on better provision in the national curriculum. On page 6, the response commendably tells us that, through their reforms, the Government will be
“building a generation better equipped to plan for and navigate significant financial decisions, such as those relating to retirement”;
obviously, I would add to that investment, which has been a subject of this debate. The response talks about young people learning
“about tax, scams, bank accounts, savings and pensions”,
to which I would add the power of compound interest when you save. I would also point to the value and importance of financial literacy across the population and in lifelong learning, which is the subject of amendments I have proposed to the financial services Bill.
In conclusion, I warmly thank the committee for all it has done in setting the scene in this vital area. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, all of the committee’s members and all those who have taken part so constructively today. They will, I hope, help the Minister move things forward, and I very much look forward to his response.
The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Lord Pitt-Watson) (Lab)
My Lords, I begin by echoing the welcome of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and others for the report. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Wood of Anfield, on bringing it to the House today. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to what has been a thoughtful and wide-ranging debate. As a new boy, I am struck by how coming to a debate in the House of Lords always opens up new issues around things you thought you had studied. I will aim to address the points that have been made—although I may not be able to namecheck everyone—and the excellent speeches made by noble Lords, such as that from the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, which were very broad in terms of thinking about how to deal with this issue.
I begin where many noble Lords—in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Burns—began: with some optimism. The fact that we, as a society, are living longer is one of the great achievements of the modern age. I have two little twin granddaughters, Grace and Astrid. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, explained to me that they can expect a lifespan of 90 years, which is an absolute triumph of public health, medical science and rising living standards. People having longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives has been an objective of everybody and of every party, I think—one that we want to promote. This Government remain committed to that goal.
However, that brings with it new and mounting pressures on public services and public finances not just here but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, and the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, pointed out, in lots of countries across the developed world. The Government do not shy away from the reality, which is that addressing this challenge is not straightforward. It is not just about addressing the pension age, although that is an important part of what we have to do, or addressing fertility. I was interested in the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Nargund. I had not thought about that issue before, so I would be more than pleased to talk to her about it or arrange for her to talk to somebody in the Government with greater expertise on it than me. The noble Baronesses, Lady Penn and Lady Meyer, also talked about this issue.
As I say, though, this is not just about the pension age or fertility. An ageing society touches on nearly every area of public policy. It would be wrong of me to suggest that there is one lever that can resolve it alone, however important it may be; that was, I think, the key point in the committee’s report. In order for this to work, we need to think also about how we can keep people, particularly older people, in work for longer and how we can deal with caring and social care. There is a circularity here, because the people who are not working are often looking after their parents. We need to think about how we can address discrimination and about life planning from education, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, as well as keeping people in employment.
I wish to talk about some of those points and the Government’s approach. I will not touch on housing, which I know is important and was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Best, or technology, which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts. I would like to talk about how we can look after people in old age. How can we support them to keep working? How can we provide adequate pensions? More broadly, how can we promote prosperity and keep the dependency ratio down by focusing on the denominator?
I shall start with social care, about which many noble Lords—including the noble Lords, Lord Burns, Lord Lamont and Lord Liddle—talked. There is a big gap in welfare provision. People are seeing everything they have worked for be wiped out by the costs of social care, which are increasing hugely. This issue was raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady McGregor-Smith, the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry. We must think about the technical solutions and not forget that old people, like all people, are of immeasurable worth.
Our Prime Minister has set out his personal commitments to making progress on fixing our broken social care system. He has agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, to bring the conclusion of the independent commission forward to 2027 in order to help with that. This will combine the work that was originally set out as two separate phases, so that a single set of recommendations will cover both the immediate improvements, which the system needs now, and the longer-term transformations that are required to meet demographic changes. The same pressures are bearing down on the National Health Service, and a series of actions is taking place there. That is all from me on social care.
What about keeping people working? I must start by addressing ill health. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, introduced fantastic expertise to this debate. Last year, the Government set out a 10-year health plan. They remain committed to supporting people to lead healthier lives. In the 2025 Budget, there was an increase of £29 billion in annual cash resources by 2028-29. The Department of Health and Social Care is bringing £13.4 billion of public health funding into the public health grant, and £800 million is being put into the treatment of mental health. I know that I am quoting inputs rather than outputs, because we do not know what the outputs will be, but I feel that there is a commitment to try to address these issues.
I turn to pensions. We have had a big debate about the triple lock, and I thank the noble Lords, Lord Redwood and Lord Turnbull, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, for their input on that. As noble Lords know, the Government made a manifesto commitment that, until the end of this Parliament, the triple lock will remain. The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, made an interesting suggestion about a cost-benefit analysis, and the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, asked what the retirement age will be. That has been delayed because of the Pensions Commission.
Last summer, it was announced that the Government had launched a Pensions Commission to review the state pension age. The pension age review feeds into the Pensions Commission, which will advise the Government early next year on how the state pension age and wider pensions policy framework should adapt to trends to ensure that pensioners have adequate incomes in future, while ensuring fairness and fiscal sustainability.
The danger is that this feels like just another grand review. The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, raised that. I have a long paragraph on all the things that are happening in pensions right now. Many foundation stones are being put in place: mandating value-for-money reporting; trustees giving people guidance on how to get a pension out of their pension savings; and CDC collective pensions that will give people an income for life rather than cash. Lots of stuff is already going on. There is also, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said, financial education for the young so that they know what is going on as well.
I am running out of time. Noble Lords will be aware of many of the things that the Government are doing on the economy. It is growth in every postcode, which I hope addresses the point raised by my noble friend Lord Sikka. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, is right to hold us to account. This is not procrustean. We are looking after everyone in every postcode.
Let me skip forward, if I may. A lot is going on with young people. We have talked about education. There is the youth guarantee, the growth skills levy and investing in training. More broadly, the Government recognise the importance of ensuring that every young person can make a successful transition to work. That is what Sir Alan Milburn’s review will be doing. Given that this is such a cross-cutting challenge, consideration of how we tackle the ageing population is embedded everywhere—in growth, pensions, health and social care and labour markets. It is also embedded in housing. We are not following one of the recommendations of the committee with a grand plan. My noble friend Lord Davies recognised this. However, the Government recognise that this is a big challenge.
An ageing society is a symptom of success. It is a matter for celebration. It is a result of the determination of a great nation to improve living standards for everyone. We have not solved all the problems—and I have not addressed them all in this speech. However, we have some strong foundations, not least in your Lordships’ report keeping an active debate going and in action by the Government. I trust that Grace and Astrid can not only expect longer lives than their granddad but healthier and more fulfilling ones. Thank you.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, which has thrown up an enormous range of new ideas and thoughts that various committees of the House might take up. I was going to discuss with our clerk how we can summarise all the issues that might be taken up further. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Pitt-Watson on his summing-up. It is very difficult when you are a new Minister to do this, but he did very well, so I thank him.
I feel a little guilty that the report did not directly address the triple lock question. It is obvious that that question must be addressed. My own sympathies are very much with taking the risk of doing it in an appropriate way. We did not do that because we wanted to draw attention to a fundamental problem of this declining participation rate among over-50s. A lot of ideas have come forward on how we could address this question. Therefore, the report and the debate on it have been extremely valuable. I thank everyone most sincerely for the part that they played.
Social Mobility: Local Roots, Lasting Change (Social Mobility Policy Committee Report)
(1 day, 22 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Manningham-Buller
That this House takes note of the Report from the Social Mobility Policy Committee Social Mobility: Local Roots, Lasting Change (HL Paper 201, Session 2024–26).
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
My Lords, there is hardly a more important subject than the future of our young people and their contribution to the wealth of the nation and to their own happiness. I was privileged to lead a one-off committee last year on social mobility. What the committee learned was sobering and shocking, as a result of lots of evidence that we received. Our remit was to look at how education and work could be better integrated.
This is a complex subject—we have just heard in the wind-up of the last debate references to young people—which covers a range of things. Therefore, our first decision was that we would focus on four areas: the importance of place, or where the issues are arising; NEETs, which is a horrible expression meaning those young people not in education, employment or training; the particular problems of those aged between 16 and 18; and data.
I hope that not many of your Lordships will criticise us for the things that we did not cover. Some may have been more important but to have covered them all we would have needed a full standing committee on the subject. Early years, mental health, housing, the benefits system, the care system, the effect of Covid, social media, levers for economic growth, attitudes to work—any one of those could have kept us busy. However, despite what we learned being sobering and shocking, it is encouraging that there is now plenty of public and political focus on these issues.
We heard a number of options for definitions of social mobility. We ended up with working on the basis that where you are born, the circumstances in which you are born and the income of your parents should not determine everything that happens in the rest of your life. As far as possible, it is the responsibility of all Governments to provide circumstances in which our citizens can thrive from an early age. Several witnesses said that social mobility is not about fishing out of the education system bright, young, talented but disadvantaged people, sending them to a Russell Group university and expecting them to be earning £100,000 as a lawyer within five minutes. We were told that by a number of people and the committee agreed.
Since we reported, there has been a lot of broad policy and HMG initiatives on this subject, and I will talk about some of them later, but we found it very compelling that different solutions are required all over the country—in coastal areas, remote rural areas and inner cities. Inner cities are also different; problems in the centre of Bristol may be different from those in Birmingham. Therefore, whatever frameworks or initiatives HMG have, we must recognise that the best solutions come from the people in the areas where the problems are, who know those problems—the transport issues, the local education, what the local jobs are and so on—or who can help create those job opportunities and remove barriers.
In a moment, I will talk about a really encouraging visit that we had to Blackpool, but one of our recommendations, building on what I just said, is that local partnerships must be the answer. I do not wish to pick out particular evidence, but I remember being very struck, as were other members of the committee, by one area—I cannot remember where—where the local fire brigade had noticed the NEETs and taken the initiative to do something. We should not prescribe that it has to be the further education college, if there is one, or the DWP: it has to be a combination of people helping.
Our other recommendations are to do with education. It is striking how many people fail maths and English who are then barred from further progress at GCSE. We went to Blackpool, where the further education college has a drop-in centre by the front door to give extra coaching in this area, but the committee tended to believe that the presentation of maths to students who understand its functionality and value in today’s internet-enabled world needed some fresh thinking.
Also striking was that the loan that someone from a low-income family gets to go to university has not risen for seven years—or had not at the time of our report—thereby barring a number of people. At that stage—and things are beginning to change—the committee also felt that there needed to be greater scope for progress on creative, technical and vocational subjects in education. Career advice seemed pretty patchy. The trailblazers looked like a good proposal; we hoped that the arrangement in which the Minister straddles the DWP and the Department for Education would continue. Data again needs improvement, including the ability to share, so that we know what the problems are.
At the time we did our report, there were also particular problems with care leavers making the transition to work. We heard evidence that, to get enough to pay for rent and the transport to get to work, they would have to give up their accommodation allowance, so there is a Catch-22 there. We thought that the growth and skills levy should be extended and that we needed datasets on parental income.
I mentioned Blackpool earlier. Blackpool comes near the bottom of most indicators of social mobility, employment and a range of other issues. But, partly led by the Social Mobility Commission—I applaud its excellent work in this area and it gave us great help in working out what we were going to do—the people in Blackpool have created a fantastic partnership. It is already beginning to have results, but there is a long way to go. It involves the local authority, the further education college, employers, the DWP, charities and students. Listening to students about their experiences and what those in education are doing to help those in the NEET category was inspirational.
Again, we were encouraged to think in terms of various tiers of people who are not in education, employment and training, which ranges from those who are very nearly ready for employment, if the jobs are available, to those who are so far away that they are without the concept of what jobs are and the social skills that they need to do them—turning up on time and so on. The suggestion was that that group needed particular attention. To quote the Social Mobility Commission, it is
“the truly disadvantaged, who get lost”
in these areas.
We had some super evidence, including from the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, from whom we are going to hear later, who influenced us and is quoted in our report. We had 58 pieces of written evidence and heard 54 witnesses—students, employers, educationalists, university professors, training providers, further education colleges, academics and Government Ministers. I am not going to pick out anything, except to say that a particularly poignant piece of evidence came from an academic studying NEETs. She told us how she went to interview a young man in this category. He was thrilled to see her, as she was the first person who had taken an interest in his future. He thought that she was coming to offer him a job, but she was coming to do academic research.
I thank the members of the committee, starting with the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, whose proposal this was. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, thanking the clerks on the committee whose report was debated previously. Anybody in this House knows what fantastic support we have: Andrea, Bruce and Emily helped us enormously. I also thank the committee itself: everybody turned up, contributed and did the maximum that they could to help produce a report of which we could be proud.
Before I end, I need to inject a slightly grumpy note. I do so reluctantly, given that the Government are doing a lot in this area, but we did a lot of hard work. The Government’s response, rather than two months, took eight. The response was issued a day after the Summer Recess and—to be slightly personally grumpy—the committee was chaired by me, not by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, as the Government’s response said. Having said that, I know that there is a problem with managing business, but I plead again—as other Select Committee chairs have before—that when Members of this House do extensive, careful, thorough work, which takes a lot of time and costs the taxpayer substantial amounts of money, their reports are taken seriously and given adequate time for debate. We should not experience what this committee did.
I already mentioned the flurry of government initiatives in this area. Before we reported, we had Charlie Mayfield’s review Keep Britain Working and the work being done, although it was not complete, by the Curriculum and Assessment Review. Since we reported, we have had the interim report from Alan Milburn, some changes on arrangements for apprenticeships, job placements, youth hubs, the youth jobs grant and a jobs graduate scheme. These clearly have value severally, but—and I have not been able to discuss this with the committee because this all happened after we submitted our report—the concerns I have are whether this is co-ordinated, whether data is being collected on the value of these initiatives and their success, whether there is the right proportion of direction from central government and the freedom for local initiatives, and whether they cover enough of the country. It was clear to us that it was easier to make progress where there are combined authorities than in areas that are not covered. There are quite a lot of gaps in the country that are not covered at this level.
I will probably have more to say in summing up but, at this stage, I beg to move.
Lord Winston (Lab)
My Lords, it is a huge privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for whom I have huge respect. So often I tremble when I see her, but always with respect.
This is an excellent report. The noble Baroness mentioned that it obviously has gaps, which there are bound to be. I want to start with the gap on early years learning, because it is relevant to what happens later in the rest of learning.
I am reminded of something that happened some 50 years ago, experimentally, with neuroscientists who blindfolded a number of newborn kittens. What was interesting was that, depending on how long the blindfold was in place and for how long they were in darkness afterwards, within, say, three weeks of blindfolding, their visual impairment was permanent. Sometimes, they were virtually completely blind. In other experiments that were done, some cats showed that they could not identify geometric spaces, in spite of normal cognitive ability in other animals.
The fact of the matter is that their eyes were completely normal. Their retinas, lenses and muscles were fine, but the visual cortex at the back of the brain was hampered. Indeed, in many cases, there were no proper connections with synapses. Those synapses are the result of experience. Experience is the basis of how we learn completely. These cats did not learn to see. Just as with children who, as they go on, learn by experience all the time, this is something that we have to understand educationally.
What is so important is that this applies to early years learning. It is rather sad to think of SureStart, for example, which started under a Labour Government years ago and was highly effective. It was shown by my colleagues at University College London to be a really effective way not merely of improving learning but also social cohesion, behaviour and a whole range of other things, such as the ability to express oneself and to communicate and connect with other people. That it ended is sad indeed.
This applies in primary schools as well, of course, and I want to devote time to them, although I have so little. We neglect primary schools at the most important stage of all education. I see this when I go around coastal areas, for example, where the issue is not just NEET young people but the number of children on free school meals who are damaged as a result. That is one of the things we try to do at Imperial College, with no interest in trying to recruit students. We simply want to provide a public benefit with our outreach. That is very important.
To conclude, one of the things that the committee recognised was that connections with the universities are very important. It does not have to be local—in fact, at Imperial we go as far as the north of England with some of our outreach activity. This is something we should be expressing, but it is not properly funded, just as, indeed, primary education is not properly funded either.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the committee on an excellent report. I am sure it was the right approach to focus on a specific set of problems, and it is a very well-judged collection that is put to us to debate today. Personally, I have always thought that the biggest single problem we face in social mobility is the prospect for those 16 year-olds who do not get good GCSEs. That is where the most shocking waste and loss of opportunity occurs.
I would like to pick up on three specific points in the report. First, there is the brief discussion of work experience in paragraph 50 and elsewhere. There is an extraordinary phenomenon at the moment: T-levels include a requirement for 45 days of work experience and have significant funding for employers to provide that work experience. That is having the effect of pushing all the work experience options into a relatively small programme and number of beneficiaries. Does the Minister see the case instead, in so far as there is public funding for work experience, for spreading it more widely and more equitably, rather than it being so specifically linked to T-levels?
Secondly, I should refer to higher education. Higher education is the only stage of education where the kids from the poor areas outperform. It is the one stage where they catch up a bit. The report is absolutely right to identify the importance of maintenance loans for them. It is still the case that kids from poorer areas are less likely to go to university. I always enjoy it when the Minister takes the opportunity of these Lords debates to reflect on policy. There is a lot of talk at the moment on restricting and controlling the numbers of people going to university. Does she agree with me that the danger, when you control numbers, is that it is the marginal students from the tough backgrounds who lose out? The evidence is that those cases where it is the marginal students—those who might just have gone or just did not go—are where you can do the best and most rigorous empirical research. That research shows that the students in those circumstances who do go enjoy far better work opportunities and life outcomes.
Finally, and third on my list, it is great that the report has such a meaty chapter on data. We need to link data to have proper social mobility research, of the sort that Raj Chetty has conducted in the US. But we do not just need it for research; it is also necessary for the place agenda, which is another strong theme in the report. At the moment there are many people providing services to young NEETs and others who are not totally confident about what data they can share with other bodies, including other public bodies that are also trying to help these people. Often, there is overcautious legal advice about GDPR obligations, so data is not being shared. There is a role for the Government in signalling clearly to those players that they can share data.
Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)
My Lords, this was a fascinating committee with a very impressive chair and enthusiastic members. We asked witnesses for a definition of social mobility and received a very wide variety of answers. We ended up with, “Ensuring that the situation that you are born into or grow up in does not determine your outcomes in life”. In theory, of course, this could mean down as well as up—duke to dustman, for instance—but we felt it more productive to concentrate on people bettering themselves rather than moving down.
The government response has warm words and sets out plans for tackling the NEETs, who should be a scar on our society. We look forward to Alan Milburn’s final report and welcome the £2.5 billion to support young people, as well as the proposals for work experience and youth jobs grants, but fear that the penalties for employers in taking on young people will act as a deterrent to those opportunities. Will the Government consider relaxing the employee rights for young people trying to get into employment? We moved amendments to the Bill to ensure that apprentices should not have their hopes dashed by acquiring full rights from day one, but it is important that all those trying to find work should give employers the chance to try them out.
Messing about with vocational qualifications is never a clever way to encourage take up. We had well-tried and tested BTECs and City & Guilds qualifications when the last Government introduced T-levels under the misapprehension that changing “vocational” to “technical” would, at a stroke, raise their status. T-levels are beginning to be understood and there is some encouraging take-up, but why introduce V-levels when existing provision covers the same fields? We plead with the Government not to defund existing provision until there is very sound evidence that the new qualifications on the block are valid, valued and working. To stop when T-levels and V-levels are introduced, as in the response to recommendation 9, is no use if they have not been properly evaluated and understood by students, colleges, training providers and parents, who are some of the most difficult people to convince.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said, we were very impressed by the work in Blackpool, particularly at Blackpool and The Fylde College, where young people relish doing real work in building and engineering. Local collaboration is obviously vital for such schemes to work and the partnerships that the college has built up with local businesses, large and small, was a key factor in its success.
As the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, said, however, we must not ignore the huge contribution made by universities to social mobility. We need to ensure that financial and structural barriers do not prevent students from disadvantaged backgrounds accessing and succeeding in higher education.
We welcome the measures that the Government have announced—the Minister set those out for us in our debate yesterday—particularly to review careers guidance, to help care leavers leaving care and being left adrift, to transform the growth and skills levy, and to ensure that unspent funds go back into apprenticeships rather than into the Treasury. We shall watch with interest, in the hope that the intentions get translated into actions to enable disadvantaged people, young and old, to have the opportunity of social mobility and to become productive, happy and fulfilled members of society.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, I too warmly applaud this report. What is so encouraging is that it does not have all the answers. I think it has whetted in a great number of people a curiosity, an appetite to study further, to have more data. That, to me, is a very encouraging start.
Social mobility is a theme that has dominated most of my working life. I worked in Brixton and Peckham. I was chairman of a juvenile court. Many noble Lords know that I was for 17 years chancellor of the University of Hull. I tried to represent the Isle of Wight, another very poor area, but my constituency was South West Surrey, which contained Farnham, Haslemere and Godalming—a totally different picture.
The point about disadvantage, deprivation and opportunity is that these are so contextual. The Education Policy Institute tells us that disadvantaged children are already five months behind their peers by the end of reception. By GCSE, that gap has grown to 19 months. This is something that people in the field know. There are a great number of factors. What I want to ask is: what are the protective factors? When I worked in my child guidance clinic, when a child came from a very difficult, poor home in a disrupted and difficult area there was a sort of reluctant pessimism that they would inevitably become a delinquent or fail at school. What fascinates me is those people who, in spite of all those factors, have made it through because that is a much more positive message and one from which we can learn. In my present career, I often discreetly ask people who evidently had a pretty grim start what it was—was it a grandparent, a priest, a school, the armed services, youth groups, music or sport? I hope that, through data, we can get people’s self-report about the factors that have made a great difference.
Of course, employers have a huge part to play, and I welcome the way in which many of them have been mobilised. The other day Sainsbury’s was offering more work placements, careers guidance and much else besides. A young man who I greatly admire co-chairs the social mobility allies at a professional services firm. He is the son of Albanian refugees who came to the UK during the Kosovo war. He says that it is all too easy to overlook how important mindset and self-belief are. If you do not believe you have the ability to achieve or do not see role models who have managed to achieve impressive results, you feel that that other people who come from a background similar to your own will, whatever the Government say, struggle to engage.
We need employers to recognise the value of socio-economic diversity. We can help individuals build confidence and aspiration, but we also need organisations to be open to talent that may not fit the traditional mould. There is a huge amount of untapped potential that can be unlocked when employers focus on capability and potential rather than pedigree. We talk a lot about opening doors, but for many from working-class backgrounds, there is still a feeling that they need to change how they speak and how they dress to fit in and progress. Social mobility is not just about giving people opportunities, it is about creating environments where people can be themselves and be seen as credible, capable and worthy of progression. It is a good example.
Lord Ravensdale (CB)
My Lords, for me, this journey started all the way back in 2024 when I proposed this topic as a special inquiry, so it is very good at last to see the work brought to a conclusion in this debate. First, I thank our superb chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for her sterling work in keeping us all focused on delivery, steering us through a complex topic and keeping us entertained with her amazing Cold War spy stories. I also thank our clerks, Andrea, Bruce and Emily, for all their efforts, culminating in an excellent report. Finally, we need to single out the Social Mobility Commission for its expert advice and support throughout the process. We must also note that we are standing on the shoulders of previous work done in the House in this area, in particular, the previous committee in 2015, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley.
Something that we have clearly demonstrated throughout this work is the real importance of a regional, local approach, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, to social mobility in making progress in this area, having heard from many of the excellent local partnerships. We have made good progress in this area, both in the government responses to our recommendations and in the work done in your Lordships’ House on the English devolution Act. However, it is an area that the Government need to continue focusing on as they progress their devolution agenda in the coming years. As the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, said, many areas of the country do not have that focus on the way that our devolution agenda is currently being progressed.
On data, I am pleased to see the acceptance of our recommendations on data and I look forward to seeing the outputs of the government review in March 2027 on the development of broader datasets in social mobility; I cannot overstate the importance of this work in helping to better understand the drivers of social mobility. That is really going to help us design better interventions and ultimately help to improve life chances for so many disadvantaged communities across the UK.
I finish with a quote from a noble Lord we all remember fondly, Lord Boyce: “There are no such thing as problems, only solutions in disguise”. I am grateful for the work of the committee and its collaboration with the Government in helping to tease out some of those solutions, which will make a real difference to the life chances of so many in those disadvantaged communities and ultimately continue our journey to a fairer society and opportunity for all, which is something that we can all get behind. I thank again the committee and the Government for all their efforts, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, who reminded the committee of the importance of data. I join him and others in complimenting the noble Baroness on her chairmanship. Her earlier career gave her unparalleled skills in interrogation.
While welcoming much of the Government’s response, I was disappointed with their principal response. That is because the substance of our report is captured in its title, Social Mobility: Local Roots, Lasting Change, and if there is one paragraph in the report that sums it up, it is paragraph 236:
“We have further concluded that those initiatives are best taken forward by local government, working in collaboration with Skills England and … universities, FE Colleges, schools and local employers, and, crucially, the DWP”.
However, in the introduction to the Government’s response this concept of devolution of responsibility and a fresh approach is totally absent. Worse, the Government then reject what I regard as our key recommendation that we should build on the eight youth trailblazers. That was kicked into touch:
“We expect to publish interim findings during the next two years and will develop the value for money assessment once longer term impacts have developed”.
Rest in peace. But the committee’s message was actually received by the new Prime Minister, who made a speech on this issue shortly after he became Prime Minister. The message was this:
“The current local government restructure and the creation of mayoral combined authorities is an opportunity for Government to devolve the power and resources needed for those authorities to lead work, through local partnerships with schools, colleges, universities and employers and Skills England, to promote social mobility and address the acute NEET problem”.
That is exactly what we recommended but it was not reflected in the Government’s response, which was published after Mr Burnham became Prime Minister.
There is another point that I want to make. During the Recess I read Jeremy Hunt’s book Can We Be Rich Again? This is what he said about the DWP budget on unemployment:
“Can national employment programmes ever be as sensitive to local or individual situations as those run locally? The whole system would be far more tailored to individual situations if we devolved responsibility for getting people back into work to elected mayors or unitary authorities. If they were allowed to keep a proportion of any savings made, we would be likely to see a far quicker rise in the number of adults in work than by relying on a centralised national bureaucracy”.
That is exactly in line with our report. Devolving budgets and devolving responsibility locally would indeed bring about lasting change here.
Lord Harlech (Con)
My Lords, as a member of the committee, I also express my gratitude to our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, along with our clerk and her outstanding team. I draw attention to my registered interests as an employer and an active Army Reserve officer. I also pay tribute to the exceptional staff at Blackpool and The Fylde College, and all our witnesses. However, I want to reiterate our chair’s point that the publication of the Government’s response took eight months and was published on the day immediately after the House adjourned. I have formally written to the Government Chief Whip, the Minister, and the chair of the Liaison Committee regarding the timing of this response and performance.
The rate at which people are speaking makes this debate feel like a QSD. In conjunction with the meagre three minutes offered to respond to the committee’s serious hard work of nearly a year, my personal view is that this behaviour from the Government displays more than a degree of contempt for the committee’s work. It is also a shame that not a single Labour Back-Bencher who was part of the committee is here today; they were all very valid members during the committee’s work.
Turning to the substance of our report, employment remains the single most effective vehicle for social mobility—far surpassing any strategy, taskforce or policy framework—but to create the jobs, you need to create the right environment, including housing, transport and digital connectivity. However, cumulative burdens since 2024 have made hiring increasingly costly: higher employer national insurance contributions; above-inflation minimum wage growth, which has narrowed the youth pay differential; and immediate employment rights under the Employment Rights Act. Consequently, sectors like retail and hospitality—traditionally the primary entry point for young workers—are experiencing severe job cuts. The British Chambers of Commerce now projects youth unemployment to reach 17.6% next year. We should not be surprised that taxing employment results in fewer available jobs.
When our committee recommended lowering the levy rate for smaller businesses, we were informed that levy operations fall under Treasury jurisdiction. This policy environment leaves nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training. Among them, 60% have never held a job, compared to 40% in 2005. Government reviewer Alan Milburn calculates the annual economic cost of youth disengagement at £125 billion, exceeding our national education budget. The repercussions extend beyond economics. Milburn’s findings indicate that young men in the NEET category are five times more likely to acquire a criminal record than their peers, while half of those aged 15 to 17 in youth offender institutions possess primary school levels of literacy and numeracy.
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
The noble Lord has exceeded his speaking time.
Lord Harlech (Con)
It is advisory. In the absence of legitimate career paths—
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord is right: the speaking time is advisory. However, given the number of speakers we have in all three of today’s debates, if the Ministers are going to have appropriate time to respond, and if we are going to finish at a reasonable hour on a Friday, it is three minutes.
Lord Harlech (Con)
I will then put forward two direct questions to the Minister. First, will she advocate with the Treasury to expand national insurance exemptions to cover all employees under 25 in the upcoming Budget? Secondly, will she confirm that the final Milburn report will be released promptly and that it will incorporate participation conditionality?
Baroness Prashar (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, and her committee for producing this very thoughtful and focused report. The committee’s focus on education and training opportunities for 16 to 18 year-olds is pertinent, as is its recommendation regarding local leadership, given the regional disparities. While the Government’s response is encouraging, it is, however, disappointing that they are not keen on the expansion of youth guarantee trailblazer pilots or expanding their remit to become pilots on social mobility.
I take this opportunity to highlight the importance of literacy as a determinant for social mobility, and the effectiveness of place-based approaches. The link between social mobility and socioeconomic status and low literacy in the UK is profoundly strong and intergenerational. Despite numerous government strategies, the situation has persisted for 50 years. Research shows that children’s lives, from their earliest moments, are shaped by characteristics of neighbourhoods and local circumstances. Based on this research, the National Literacy Trust—which I co-founded, and of which I now serve as president—has for several years advocated for place-based solutions through 12 hubs in local areas. Through these hubs, it has worked with multiple stakeholders to galvanise the whole community to improve local levels of literacy and help drive social mobility. This approach also ensures sustainability. Based on this experience, I urge the Government to take the committee’s emphasis on place seriously.
To achieve social mobility and inclusion, the importance of literacy skills should not be underestimated. Lack of literacy skills can be traced back to early years, and an early literacy deficit affects future life chances. A focus on literacy skills, particularly during early years, should be given a priority, as these skills are a crucial determinant in enabling acquisition of education and social mobility. This is not a criticism of the fact that committee did not look at this area; I am just highlighting the importance of the link between taking advantage of education at later stages and this ability. I look forward to the response from the noble Baroness.
Baroness Porter of Fulwood (Con)
My Lords, as we consider this issue it is also important to look at how it intersects with the criminal justice system. We know there is a cycle whereby disadvantage can lead to educational disengagement. This can lead to someone ending up outside of education, employment or training. Once there, this puts them at greater risk of getting involved with the criminal justice system. Having then been involved with the criminal justice system, this further reduces their employment prospects.
I had pulled out the same statistics that my noble friend Lord Harlech has already quoted, showing just how substantial the link between youth offending and NEET status is. The DWP report he quoted—I will not repeat his statistics—goes on to say:
“The pipeline from education failure, to offending, to sustained detachment is one of the most documented and most neglected in the country, but very little has changed or improved for this cohort”.
That is damning. We need to do more to ensure that all the different organisations working with these young people are focused on providing a genuine pathway into education, training or employment.
What we address nationally and what we address locally is important. There are obvious tensions, which have been raised, regarding where the balance of power should lie, and, as ever, the optimal answer is not a straightforward one. Too much localisation with multiple layers is confusing; people do not know where to go for help, and it is not clear where responsibility lies. Too much centralisation ignores the reality that local circumstances vary dramatically and that those closest to a specific community are often those most able to help people navigate and find a way through—a point this report makes powerfully.
The youth justice system has had to grapple with this same tension. Its current consultation into the oversight and funding of youth justice services is looking at this specifically. There is a sense of a system that has been too fragmented, with too many layers and not enough clear accountability. Given the proportion of NEETs who were involved with youth justice services, any reform of the system should be looked at in the context of wider structures and needs to be fully integrated with the conversation we are having.
The key principle should be that there must be clear accountability for who is responsible for doing what at each level of the system. As the Government consider the oversight and funding of the youth justice system, they should consider the points raised today and in this report and look at how to deliver a properly integrated system that helps transition people into education, training and employment; and, crucially, they should be clear on who will be responsible for making that pathway work.
Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell (Con)
My Lords, I read the committee’s excellent report over the Summer Recess, when I spent time in Washington DC and visited the recently opened Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. It defines the core pillars of that dream—in other words, the core pillars of social mobility—as education, health, financial empowerment and entrepreneurship. Much of the exhibition turned on the essential role of business in lifting people out of poverty.
When we talk about social mobility, we too often talk about it as something driven by the state—by the Government and the laws we pass in Parliament—when in truth the greatest engine of social mobility is business. Consider the late Dolly Parton, born into poverty in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, who built a global career and a multibillion-dollar fortune in the entertainment industry through sheer guts and talent. But even for those who work in Main Street rather than Hollywood, the first pay packet, the first taste of responsibility and the first colleague who believes in them—all these things—are crucial to setting up a young person for life.
This subject is close to my heart, as president of the Jobs Foundation, as declared in the register. The charity recently published a report on Jobs and Education: Building the Bridge to Opportunity, which identified two sides to the NEETs crisis. On the supply side, too many young people leave school without the attitudes and workplace readiness that employers want. I welcome the committee’s call for reform of the EBacc framework. This aligns with our own finding that a broader curriculum from 14, with genuine parity between academic and vocational routes, would help prevent young people becoming NEET. I was pleased to hear the Prime Minister echo this sentiment earlier this week.
On the demand side, the rising cost and risk of hiring a young person is making employers reluctant to take a chance on someone without experience. The cost of employing a young person has risen by more than £4,000 in two years. When we raise the cost of hiring young people, we should not be surprised when fewer of them are hired. As the chef Tom Kerridge told the authors, rising costs push restaurants away from the very weekend and part-time roles that once gave young people their first taste of work in the hospitality industry. When these first rungs of the jobs market disappear, the ladder of social mobility goes with them. This is why, to achieve NEET zero, both the supply and the demand side of the NEETs crisis need to be addressed.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend and her colleagues on an excellent and timely report, and on her speech. I will make two quick points. The first is to add my voice to the point about local partnerships and how vital they are. You cannot just have a national policy that can be applied; this is a lot of very detailed work locally, which requires the empowerment of local leadership from across the sectors, including, as the noble Lord has just said, business, alongside education, health and others. Noting that my noble friend Lord Mawson is in his place, I say that this is what he describes as a 360-degree society. This is a problem for the whole of society.
I will raise one point that has not yet been raised— I note that the committee could not cover everything—about the first years of secondary school, when children are aged 11 to 13, and what I believe is technically called key stage 3. That is a time when the body and indeed the brain change fundamentally, and it happens at the same time as people move from a primary school where they had one teacher who knew them into a situation where they may have six, seven or whatever the number is, and move from an individual pastoral approach, as it were, to a less clear one.
Research shows that educational attainment declines during that period. It then tends to come back up again, but the people for whom it does not are from disadvantaged backgrounds—increasingly, girls in that group. I do not know what the reasons for that are, but one could speculate that the link with the individual teacher in primary school being replaced or not being replaced may be part of that. It is good to see that an independent and government-supported taskforce, which I believe is called the Key Stage 3 Alliance, is looking at this, and that there is a whole series of other reviews around this. I would be very interested in the Minister’s observation on the importance of this stage in an educational career, and about how this can be tackled.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, I pay tribute to our formidable chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for keeping us all on track. I welcome the Government’s response to the Social Mobility Policy Committee’s report on social mobility and NEETs, and it is encouraging to see progress on earlier identification, better data sharing, the youth guarantee, stronger local partnerships and the development of the “risk of NEET” indicator.
The central point I want to make is that NEETs are not simply an education or employment problem; they are a social mobility problem and an economic and place-based problem. Opportunity has a geography. Where a young person grows up shapes the education they receive, the employers they encounter, the transport available to them and, ultimately, the choices they can make about their future. That is why this response must be seen in the context of the much bigger question of how we create opportunity across the country.
The Social Mobility Commission’s recent work makes clear that social mobility cannot be separated from the economic dynamism of the place in which people live. That is particularly relevant to NEETs. We can identify risk, offer training and even secure an apprenticeship, but, ultimately, young people need good opportunities to move into. Economic growth and social mobility are not competing objectives. A growing local economy creates jobs, demands skills and supports the services and infrastructure that underpin opportunity. The challenge is ensuring that young people with the fewest opportunities benefit from that growth.
I therefore welcome the Government’s recognition that different places face different challenges. We should not assume that the answer looks the same everywhere. The causes of NEETs in a major city are not the same as in a coastal town, a former industrial community or a rural area. The employer base, transport and educational infrastructure and barriers are different. The question is not whether we have a national programme, but whether we have effective local systems that understand their young people and act early.
Better data will help, but identification is not intervention. Knowing that a young person is at risk is useful only if someone takes responsibility for acting and ensuring a sustained outcome. Success cannot be measured simply by someone disappearing from the NEET statistics. The real test is whether they make a lasting transition into education, training or employment. The technical education reforms are important but, again, the test is outcomes. Do these qualifications lead to jobs or further training and are they accessible to disadvantaged young people?
There is bigger point about social mobility. We often talk about individuals moving upwards, but we must also think about the mobility of places. Can towns experiencing decline attract investment, develop new industries and enable young people to build successful careers? If the answer is yes, we do something more powerful than helping a few individuals leave: we change the places themselves. The challenge is not simply to stop young people becoming NEET but to create places in which young people can see a future, with good schools and colleges, effective careers advice, apprenticeships, early support and, crucially, businesses, investment, innovation and economic growth. These things are interconnected.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, and her committee on their thoughtful report. I declare my interest as a social mobility commissioner. The Social Mobility Commission was very pleased to contribute to the inquiry, including our excellent chairman, Alun Francis, who hosting the committee at Blackpool and The Fylde College, where he is chief executive. At the commission, Alun Francis has put localism and place at the forefront of breaking down social mobility barriers, so we strongly support the committee’s calls for place-based approaches.
As to the most serious matter of NEETs, the SMC has been highlighting the growing crisis for some time and contributed to Alan Milburn’s interim report. While it is true—as the Milburn report said—that getting a job is increasingly difficult for all young people, including graduates, it is important not to conflate the Government’s political and economic decisions that are deterring employers from recruiting young people with the social conditions that are driving the huge increase in economically inactive NEETs.
The commission is currently discussing with the Milburn review team its soon to be published qualitative research with young people who are NEET in Blackpool. That research shows how they are not a homogenous group and how, for many, a lack of stability and security in their home life influences their well-being and lack of progress towards education, employment or training.
Addressing the causes of our NEET epidemic must go beyond increasing and spreading economic opportunity. It must involve topics that, too often, politicians and policymakers are reluctant to discuss, the most obvious and important being the family and parenting. This is not just about household incomes or parents’ educational attainment; it is about highlighting the need for both parents to provide stability, uphold social norms and teach their children common standards that are beneath no one, beyond no one and vital to our individual success, cohesive communities and a stronger society.
My noble friend Lord Elliott mentioned the late Dolly Parton. Alongside her talents, one of the most important things she had going for her was a stable, strong family background.
It was as surprising as it was disappointing to read media reports this week signalling the Social Mobility Commission’s demise. Of course, it is for Ministers to decide how to organise resources to address barriers to social mobility, but perhaps the Minister could tell us how and when she intends to communicate their decision. But whatever the commission’s future, promoting the importance of stable families to children’s future success must be a government priority. We exacerbate inequality when we deny evidence and fail to join obvious dots for fear of causing offence. Most importantly, those who suffer most when we do are in the lowest socioeconomic groups.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I welcome this report, particularly its focus on local areas, and also strongly agree with a number of previous speakers that Blackpool college, the Social Mobility Commission and Alun Francis are really inspirational.
There are some important specific recommendations, but I would like to offer a couple of more general—and perhaps somewhat partly downbeat—comments. There is a sizeable academic literature which traces social mobility using very much the same approach as this report, looking at whether someone’s adult occupation and finances are closely related to and predicted by their family of origin. In deciding whether this link is strong or weak, there are two key forces. The first, bluntly, is how well or badly better-off parents are able to protect their children from downward mobility. In a static society, that is critical, because when things are static, if somebody goes up, somebody else is going down.
Fortunately, in a dynamic society—or less fortunately, in a collapsing society—what really matters is the whole structure of the labour market. In the last century and a half in this country, it has been the structure of the labour market and therefore the class structure that have been the really important drivers. They have been wonderful. The greatest UK expert on this is Oxford University’s John Goldthorpe, who has done a magisterial analysis of social mobility and education in this country over the last century and a bit. The contrast is quite dramatic. For example, among men born between 1938 and 1947, two-fifths of them were upwardly mobile compared with their families, and only a 10th downward. But in the last 30 to 40 years, this has plummeted. Upward mobility has become less frequent, and downward mobility has become more frequent. This is very much because of the flattening of the labour market structure.
What I really want to say in this context is that we must not expect of education what it cannot provide. Of course, all these things are important—they are what I have worked on all my life—but what ultimately will transform social mobility is economic growth, and we have to be realistic about that and to think about that in every local area.
I want to say one more thing. I am a little concerned at the tendency—which was visible a bit in this report—to feel that if a 16 year-old is struggling with English and maths, we should just forget it. I know that is hugely oversimplistic, but there is something of that in some of the witnesses’ evidence. The new qualifications coming in for 16 to 18 year-olds, which are pre GCSE, will be important. But the most important vocational skills by miles in a modern economy are maths and English. If you doubt this, you can look at the sterling work done by DfE statisticians, which is also pretty magisterial.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this is one of those debates where the report, as the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, described, seems to address only certain aspects of the issue. But as she also described, if it did not, we would be here all week. We are looking at key aspects, among which we have concentrated on the rise of the NEET.
We have paid attention to NEETs, and this debate is rather an extension of one I was in yesterday. The rise of the NEET is something that we have identified for over a decade at least. They are a group of people who do not become involved in education or work. Something has happened in our society that makes this possible. Covid undoubtably accelerated the process slightly—it may have even established it—but it was already there. There is something about the way that we are structuring our education and society that is encouraging this group to grow. I hope that we can start to address it properly. We will not do that by repeating the policies of the last decade ad nauseam; we will have to change something.
I always go back to special educational needs and dyslexia, and if the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, had a small bet with herself that I would raise it, she has won it. It comes to, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, raised, English and maths. The Latin origin of the word dyslexia—no, it is Greek. Sorry, I did not do classics. The Greek origin of the word translates to a problem with words. It is not; it is a problem with processing, which expresses itself in problems with literacy and reading—more prominently writing than reading, which are two separate skills. Maths is a language, and processing problems can express themselves there.
Many of the solutions we have found are in encouraging and immersing people in the subject. You tend to scan read, so you get a new function. In the modern world, we use technology to produce literature and to communicate. I have not yet met anybody who would object to somebody talking to a computer to get communication going, as opposed to tapping a keyboard. If there is somebody, they probably will be waiting for me at the end of the debate, but I will have very short shrift for them. Please, can we start to establish what is needed with literacy and mathematics? In training and so on, we have found that for all these groups, if you test them on the language or the maths that they are going to use in their career, they do better. Please, can we address that and work it in? The level 1 qualification, which was hinted at by the last Government and now seems to be being implemented, may well be enough for a person to go through the rest of their training. Could we please work that in? Could we make sure that everybody uses a computer all the time?
In the past, I have raised that, in terms of education, the phone in your pocket may be a distraction because of the technology on it. It also can carry assistive technology. It carries voice operation and a calculator. We may have to do other things, but it is there, it fits in your pocket and we all have them with us. I hope that mine has been switched off. We have to start addressing this differently.
When it comes to the process and the system—my noble friend Lady Garden raised this, as she often has before—changing the names of the qualifications may be great, and you may get slightly different qualifications, but let us make sure that they work properly. T-levels had an incredibly bumpy start. Because of the work experience required, there were some courses that nobody finished. V-levels are not as big. Yes, I did find out the figure. It was only one course. The V-level will fit slightly more easily into the existing system, but can we make sure that it works? The BTEC qualification, which has generally been accepted, seems to be the primary target. You are going to get a diverse set of qualifications for a diverse workplace. Even if they have the same name, they will be very different, because they have to be. Can we make sure that we get things that are appropriate and that people have appropriate pathways?
The great engine of social mobility, certainly one that was preached to me, was university. At the moment, universities are getting very bad press. You will get in a big debt with it. There is not much support. The Government are taking steps to make sure that they remain attractive.
However, universities have also become a sacred cow. We all had to get to university, or half of us had to, and we elbowed out levels 4 and 5 HND and NVQ courses. They were devalued by that drive. Newer universities, when they stopped being polytechnics or colleges, tended to push those aside and dump them. Can we encourage universities to take on some of these level 4 and 5 qualifications? Let us bring them all up to the same social status. Many of them were there, and non-graduating courses are an important part of the history of our universities. Can we bring that in to make sure they have the social status and support they need? We need to make sure they are going through.
However, all this is impossible unless you are letting people know what is there, and careers advice is mentioned in the report. It is one of my personal favourites, so I would have liked to see that made a little bigger but hey, you can only do so much. Can we make sure we get this information to the parents or the carers in these groups, because they are the important ones? Some of those we are talking about here may not have people who are engaged in this.
It is about social mobility; if you come from a group which has low attainment in academia, you are less likely to acquire it yourself. You are also less likely to acquire somebody who is pushing you forward to do it. Have the Government given any thought to how you get people to engage with that advice, or give it properly, to make sure that from a fairly early age you know what the options are?
Age 16 is effectively too late in this context. You have to get somebody who is geared up and prepared to take on that effort, that investment of time, energy and money, to get themselves there, particularly if you do not find it easy or you have extra problems. I refer back to my comments on dyslexia; other special educational needs are available, I am told. Can we make sure that we actually have somebody who knows what is going on, and structures to try to reach people? This is not easy. We are talking about parents who may have found that their own educational experience was something best forgotten. If we can start to do that, much of the work of this Government and the previous ones becomes, shall we say, so much easier. That engagement will lead us to some real results. It is a big ask, but I hope the Minister will give us a positive response and tell us how this is at least being started.
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for leading this debate, and I thank all members of the Social Mobility Policy Committee for producing such a thoughtful and important report. Its title, Local Roots, Lasting Change, captures particularly well the central point that I want to focus on today. As the noble Baroness said in her introduction, this subject matter could not be more important.
Noble Lords who have taken part in the debate have raised many key points. I promise your Lordships I will not repeat them, but I will just list them so that we all understand them: the size and the scale of the problem; the relevance to that scale of those who are economically inactive; and the economy. If we know nothing else, it is that only employers create jobs. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, made the very important point that the best way to have an impact on social mobility is to have a robust economy. Long may we get one.
There is also the impact of operating costs on business, the business rate increase, and the VAT and national insurance contribution increase. Vacancies are through the floor, and if there are no vacancies, although we can prepare young people for work, where will they get it? The one thing that has come out loud and clear is the importance of data—as I learned when I was at the DWP under the direction of my noble friend Lady Coffey. When you understand the data and when you can analyse it, you know best where to focus your efforts. I consider data to be absolutely critical.
Turning to place and partnerships, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, alongside others, raised the importance of place. I always say that anything we deliver must be known nationally, designed and delivered locally, and felt personally. I ask the Minister—who may not be able to do this, but I will ask anyway—to be brave about budgets. Spend the money where you get the best outcomes.
When I was running my charity, Tomorrow’s People, we were sponsored by Diageo, which decided to conduct an analysis of our work to see what we were delivering. The outputs were phenomenal and the cost per job was phenomenal. When he was compiling his report, Alan Milburn asked organisations he met, “What is the impact of the work that you do? What do you deliver? What are the outcomes?” He said he was astounded that so many of them could not say. Let us fully endorse the point made by my noble friend Lord Young about trailblazers placing budgets locally rather than centrally. We may then see some lasting impact on the lives of the young people we are trying to help.
One thing that has not been raised today—I am not criticising, as it was not in the report—is the importance of having a mentor. Some of our young people have a mum and a dad and a granddad at home who encourage them. They do not just tell the young person what it was like in their day; they encourage them to do well and give them advice. The young people I have dealt with have no hope. How does it feel to go home after being on a programme and say to a parent or guardian, “I’m going to get a job” and they say, “For goodness’ sake, don’t do that”. What can we do when young people are given this information? It flattens them all the time.
I give credit to a lady I used to employ, who loved the young people she worked with so much. I am not saying that others do not, but she loved them. She would take them to job interviews. I remember this lady standing outside an employer’s premises with a young person and she said, “Take your jacket off and wear mine. You’ll look better”. It was that level. When she got a call in the middle of the night from a young person from the police station because they were in a pickle, what did she do? She got dressed and went to the police station to get them out.
There are some young people who have this level of support, and some who do not. We need services and people to get them on the right road, but we also need them to keep them there. That would be right. The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, made the point about having a primary school teacher—I can still remember mine—who knows their pupils, but the pupils move on. It is critical that a young person works with someone who knows them and stays with them. Getting a young person into work is an output; keeping them there is an outcome. That is where we need to be. I have talked about the cost of employing people, so I will not go on to that.
I want to be robust in my points about the Social Mobility Commission. What an organisation it is and what great things it has added. It is led by Alun Francis, a great giant of social mobility—my noble friend Lady Stowell has already explained his impact. The work in Blackpool is a credit to him and his team, and a blueprint for others to build on and adapt to the place they are in. They have data, and I am convinced of their use. Can I ask, in the nicest terms, what the Minister is thinking about: getting rid of them or taking them out? If that is correct, please can the Minister explain it? [Interruption.] I am delighted to hear that. We do not believe everything we read in the newspaper—I should have learned that lesson by now. Can the Minister tell us whether she is planning to get rid of them, and how will young people benefit from that?
Let me ask the Minister some other questions. Where a mayor or local authority can demonstrate clear leadership, strong partnerships and the capacity to deliver, will the Government transfer real control over skills, employment, careers provision and budgets, or will Whitehall continue to hold the levers while asking local leaders to carry responsibility? How will the Government ensure that areas outside mayoral combined authorities—especially rural and coastal communities, where the barriers are often most severe—are not left behind? What is the plan for those places that do not fit neatly into the Government’s preferred devolution model?
The committee places significant responsibility on the DWP, jobcentres and the proposed jobs and careers service. Will local leaders have meaningful influence over DWP and jobcentre budgets? Will those budgets be capable of being pooled with local skills funding? Will the Government provide multi-year settlements rather than expecting long-term partnerships to be built on short-term pilots? Given that economic inactivity now accounts for the majority of NEETs, what action will the Government take on the growing number of young people who face no work requirements when claiming incapacity benefit—a feature not shared by countries with lower NEET rates? Does the Minister accept the findings of the Resolution Foundation’s report Lost in Transition? If so, what reforms might follow?
Finally, vacancies are falling, costs are rising and employers are becoming more cautious. What is the Government’s plan to increase the demand for young workers? How will they ensure that Saturday jobs and junior roles—the first chance to prove yourself—do not continue to disappear? Unless the Government can answer these questions clearly, devolution risks becoming little more than the administration of centrally designed programmes, and young people will continue to pay the price. We owe them more.
The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, for both her leadership of the committee and securing this debate. I thank the committee for the careful and constructive way in which it considered the issues about which we have talked today and which are reflected so well in the report. There is no excuse for the time taken by the Government to respond; I am sorry for that.
The inquiry goes to the heart of a question that should concern every part of government and this House: how can we ensure that background, geography or early disadvantage do not determine a young person’s future? The committee rightly calls for stronger local partnerships, better data, earlier support for those who are at risk of becoming NEET, clearer routes through education and training, and closer links between skills and employment. The Government share those aims. We may differ on some aspects of delivery, but we are united in wanting every young person, wherever they live, to participate, progress and build a good life. Yet too many still leave education without a secure route into further learning, training or work.
The task that we have started, therefore, is to build a nationally coherent but locally responsive system that works around the learner, supports local growth and expands opportunity in every part of the country. The debate and the report have rightly placed a strong focus on place and devolution. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, has identified, the Prime Minister has set out a very clear approach to the way in which we will rewire the state and go far further than ever before in devolving power and budgets to those places that, with greater understanding and bigger ability, will be able both to bring together agencies in the way described by the noble Baroness and to deliver on local priorities. The Government will set out more detail on how that will work in a White Paper in the autumn.
Every young person should be able to see a clear pathway from education into further learning, skilled employment and adult life. Academic, technical and vocational education will be complementary parts of one high-quality offer. As we recently announced, new technical pathways from age 14 will reflect local needs, giving young people earlier access to technical skills, work experience and employers. Here again, regional mayors, schools, colleges and employers will shape those pathways around local industries and growth sectors—from advanced manufacturing, AI and digital technology to clean energy, life sciences, construction, health and care and the creative industries. Mayors will have the powers, flexibility and accountability to bring education, employment, health and local support closer together. We will work with strategic authorities, providers, employers and local government to implement this approach and to ensure that new freedoms translate into better routes to apprenticeships, higher education, high-level skills and employment.
Some noble Lords who contributed today also contributed yesterday to a lengthy debate on many of these issues. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, that it was a debate initiated by a Labour Peer. However, whether in yesterday’s discussion or today’s, there is a common recognition that we face a serious challenge with the numbers of young people who are neither earning nor learning. Almost 1 million young people are in that position. That is not simply a statistic. It represents individual young lives, their ambitions and the potential for them to be held back. That is why we commissioned Alan Milburn to examine the deep-seated drivers of youth inactivity, unemployment and sickness. His interim report was a clear call to action. We will consider the recommendations from the next phase of his work carefully.
However, we are not waiting. Across the DfE and the DWP, the Get Britain Working White Paper and the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper set out a joined-up approach to participation, skills and employment. An important guiding principle is that prevention is better than cure. Once a young person becomes disconnected, re-engagement is much harder. We are therefore strengthening the role of school in supporting successful post-16 transitions so that every young person leaves with a clear destination and those most at risk receive timely help. We are also piloting a post-16 backstop to connect young people without a confirmed place or plan quickly with appropriate educational training, with the wraparound support needed to stay engaged. While it was not the topic of this report, the noble Lord, Lord Winston, is right about the significance of early years and primary and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, is right that we need to focus on key stage 3 in the early years of secondary, which we are doing.
The report is also right that better data is central to that effort. Too often problems are identified only after a young person has disengaged. Through the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, we are investing in risk of NEET indicator tools, improving data sharing and strengthening attendance monitoring in further education. When young people are outside work or education, we constrain labour supply, limit productivity and store up long-term costs for individuals, the Exchequer and the economy. That is why the Government are investing an additional £2.5 billion over three years into the youth guarantee and the growth and skills levy to support nearly 1 million young people and unlock up to 500,000 jobs, training and learning opportunities and 300,000 work experience places as part of that.
The committee rightly stresses that social mobility is often delivered locally, as I have referenced. Blackpool shows what can happen when leaders have the right data, can convene partners and can act early. The youth guarantee trailblazers are testing innovative local approaches to supporting young people into education, training and employment. However, one of the reasons why we will not necessarily continue those trailblazers in the same format is that, having learned some of the lessons, we are determined that they inform wider policy. We have introduced a national youth guarantee but will ensure that it is delivered in a way that enables local and regional design and use of the links that need to be made between employment support, apprenticeships and education.
We do not believe that one model can be imposed everywhere. It is absolutely right to say that the barriers facing a coastal town, rural community, post-industrial area or major city differ, but the best local practice should shape national reform. Prevention must also be matched by a post-16 system that is clear, high-quality and understood by learners, parents, employers and providers. That is why our reforms will create three clear level 3 routes and, importantly, new level 2 pathways will provide clearer stepping stones for students.
The committee also raised English and maths. Those skills are essential for work, further study and wider life, but repeated resits can become a barrier rather than a bridge. That is why the Curriculum and Assessment Review has emphasised strong foundations in reading, writing and maths, alongside improvements at key stage 3, and we are introducing new 16 to 19 level 1 English and maths qualifications, helping students to consolidate and build the foundation of knowledge that will enable them to progress.
Apprenticeships are an essential route into opportunity. That is why we are prioritising youth starts through the growth and skills levy to reverse the 40% decline in starts by young people over the past decade. We will now fully fund apprenticeships for 16 to 24 year-olds for employers of all sizes. From 1 October, eligible small businesses will also receive a £2,000 payment when they recruit an apprentice aged 16 to 24.
As I said, the youth guarantee will also expand work experience and training placements, work coach support and pathways into employment, apprenticeships, further learning and workplace training. Careers education, information, advice and guidance must sit alongside these reforms, as the report makes clear. Through the Careers & Enterprise Company, a national network of careers hubs reaches the great majority of secondary schools and colleges in England, connecting young people with employers, local labour market opportunities and informed choices about their next steps.
Higher education remains another important route into opportunity. We want everybody with the desire and aptitude to enter it to be empowered to do so, but access gaps remain too wide. Through Uni Connect and the Office for Students’ wider work on access and participation, we are supporting stronger local collaboration to connect people’s ambitions with opportunities and skills needs in their communities, creating clearer pathways from education into good employment.
The access and participation task and finish group is developing proposals for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and underserved areas, with its work continuing through to January 2027. Maintenance loans have now risen by 2.71% for the 2026-27 academic year; we will of course reintroduce maintenance grants to support young people into higher education.
The committee is right that this must be a genuinely cross-government effort. Skills, employment support, welfare, health, local growth and social mobility cannot be treated as separate silos. As Skills Minister across DfE and DWP, I am driving a joined-up approach through the youth guarantee, the Jobs and Careers Service, apprenticeships and skills reform and support for young people on universal credit, as well as the work reforming the curriculum and supporting further and higher education. As a Government, we are working with strategic authorities, local authorities, schools, colleges, employers and the voluntary sector, because improving opportunity requires concerted action at every level.
Our task is to move more young people from inactivity into opportunity, with the confidence to take their next step, the skills to enter work and the chance to fulfil their potential, while supplying the talent our economy needs to grow. I thank noble Lords on the committee for their work, which rightly challenges the Government to go further and faster, and we will take up that challenge.
Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)
I am very grateful for the positive reaction to our report around the House, even if some noble Lords understandably emphasised some slightly different things and where they think the committee has not quite got the emphasis right. I wondered whether, as I am speaking at the end, I would want to challenge anything anybody had said, but actually I think pretty well all the contributions have been helpful, constructive and have supported what we have been trying to say.
This is not surprising. Many noble Lords came into politics or, in my case and others, into public service, to improve the lives of our people. What we were looking at was a tremendous waste: people becoming a drain on the economy rather than contributing to it. I am encouraged today by the number of people across the House who agree that this is of critical importance.
I have to say that I am rather closer to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, than the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, on maths and English, having had substantial problems passing maths myself. This did not prevent me running a charity that, at the time I left, had a budget of £30 billion—despite my lack of numeracy, not because of my fiscal skills. When 40% of young people fail GCSE maths and English, we must have a slightly different approach. That is not to say that these skills are not very important, and we must have high expectations of people rather than dumb down, but we need to think of different ways of doing it.
I welcome what the Government are saying. Those of us on the committee and others will watch and hope and challenge. I will end with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham: please loosen the apron strings. It is not just delivery locally, or money and power; it is also encouraging local freedom on policy, because that is where we felt the change would come.
Lord Addington (LD)
Before the noble Baroness sits down, I must apologise to the House. I forgot to declare my interest as chair of Microlink plc, which deals in assistive technology.
Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains (JCHR Report)
(1 day, 22 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Alton of Liverpool
That this House takes note of the Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains (6th Report, HL Paper 159, Session 2024-26).
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, it is an honour to introduce this report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains. I pay tribute to my hard-working Joint Committee on Human Rights colleagues, two of whom will be speaking in the debate, and to our committee team—its clerks, Rhiannon Hollis and Moriyo Aiyeola, and the specialist Laura Fatah.
I am also grateful to the Library and to the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, who was introduced and made his maiden speech only yesterday, and will give the ministerial response this afternoon. He is a very welcome addition to your Lordships’ House. I also thank his officials and the committee’s witnesses, including the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Border Force, BSI, NCA, Solar Taskforce, the courageous Rahima Mahmut of the World Uyghur Congress and the noble Baroness, Lady May, the principal driver of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
Having visited Tibet and western China, where 12 million overwhelmingly Muslim Uyghur people face state-imposed forced labour and genocide, I make no apology for remaining focused on Xinjiang. President Xi Jinping explicitly framed his labour policies around ethnic minorities, telling his cadres to “guide them to integrate into modern urban life”—a campaign which, researchers note, masks coercive labour transfers.
For exposing this, the Minister’s noble friend and Scottish compatriot, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and I, in an attempt, I suppose, to try to silence us, were sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party regime. In part, this report is a riposte. But Uyghurs are not the only victims. Globally, around 50 million people endure modern slavery, generating some £174 billion annually in illegal profits. The charity Walk Free has identified state-imposed forced labour across 17 countries.
Last year alone, the United Kingdom imported around £20 billion-worth of goods at high risk of exposure to forced labour—shamefully built on the broken backs and broken lives of men, women and children. The committee identified high-risk sectors right across our economy. These include renewable energy components, such as solar panels, which I raised as an all-party amendment to the Great British Energy Act 2025, alongside seafood, coffee, tea, chocolate, PPE, garments and critical minerals, where our committee cited the widespread and shocking use of child labour in Congolese cobalt mines.
Although the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was ground-breaking, our legislative architecture has completely and utterly failed to keep up with the escalating challenges. We found that our reliance on a patchwork of regulations randomly and erratically applied opens the door to tainted goods bearing the fingerprints of slavery. Compliance with transparency rules is dangerously low, as companies can legally report taking zero steps without facing penalties. The noble Baroness, Lady May, wrote to the committee saying that
“there is growing acceptance that mandatory human rights due diligence, aligned with the UN Guiding Principles, is the best approach”.
That requires changes to Section 54 of the Act.
The UK must implement mandatory due diligence and stay in lockstep with our international allies. Failing to do so leaves a yawning regulatory gap that puts the UK at risk of becoming a dumping ground—the top safe haven for forced labour goods that cannot be legally sold elsewhere. Adding to that danger, note that as of 3 August, United States tariff policy has led to 13 countries responding to US pressure to address slave labour products. With so many countries robustly scrutinising products that enter their countries, UK exports will be at higher risk of exclusion because there is no mechanism in place to exclude forced labour imports from entering UK manufacturing supply chains.
For anyone who believes in national resilience and less dependency on slave-based economies, we must tackle both those things. Let me add to the list: this is also about protecting United Kingdom workers. Forced labour artificially deflates the price of goods, creating unfair competition for UK companies. It is not too late to reverse the irresponsible emasculation of our manufacturing base and the wanton destruction of British jobs. Automotive, aerospace and pharmaceutical jobs continue to be at extremely high risk from state-imposed forced labour. I commend a recently published Henry Jackson Society report into the doubling of dependency on China for active pharmaceutical ingredients, many manufactured in Xinjiang. This is a strategic risk.
Reducing dependency can also bring gains. In the US, when solar modules made with polysilicon made by forced labour were banned from import, the US solar market exploded. After a decade of decline and the loss of thousands of jobs, the US solar industry has made a striking comeback, producing solar modules for consumers who prefer products that are not made from forced labour. Segments of the solar industry require a short lead time and could become a growth industry in the United Kingdom too. In this instance, the ethical and moral choice can coincide with self-interest and the national interest.
Under Section 3(2) of the Great British Energy Act 2025, GBE is required to encourage and participate in measures to ensure that
“slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in its business or supply chains”.
The JCHR recommended that GBE reported to our committee on what it had done to cleanse its supply chains, and last month it constructively wrote to us with an update. It says it will use various
“levers to drive meaningful change within a constrained context”.
This is what happens when the chairman of a company, in this case Jürgen Maier, makes a welcome and deeply personal commitment. It is even better when they have the sense to appoint people of the calibre of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, my noble friend Lady Young of Hornsey and Sarah Champion Member of Parliament to the GBE ethical supply chains advisory group, something I greatly welcome.
More generally, the JCHR found that the Government’s Solar Roadmap and the Solar Taskforce fail to address forced labour in solar supply chains. In recommendations 26 to 28, we urge the Government to evaluate the work of these failed initiatives and develop a viable strategy to address the risks of forced labour in the UK’s solar supply chain. I hope that the Minister, fresh as he is to his post, will nevertheless give us an update on that.
In a letter to the committee of 26 August—one of the first he must have written in post—the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, gave a welcome pledge:
“The Government believes that progress towards our clean energy and net zero ambitions must not come at the expense of human rights. The Government is clear that the UK’s ambitions for energy security, bill affordability, and clean power must go hand-in-hand with HMG’s longstanding position towards protecting human rights domestically and in its supply chains”.
However, note that Professor Laura Murphy categorically states:
“It is possible to trace these goods to identify which are at higher risk of forced labour, but currently, the UK has no apparatus to do so”.
To tackle that, I will summarise our main recommendations. The committee calls on the Government to examine targeted import bans to prevent goods linked to forced labour entering the UK market. It calls for mandatory human rights due diligence, a legal requirement forcing companies to actively map out, clean up and audit their supply chains, backed by financial penalties for non-compliance. It calls for civil liability—that is, a legal duty to prevent—and, where a company fails to take adequate steps to prevent exploitation, for clearer access to justice and civil remedies for victims in the UK courts.
We commend to the Minister best practice elsewhere. See the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act 2021 in the United States, which introduced a rebuttable presumption banning goods produced wholly or in part by forced labour in Xinjiang, unless the importer can prove otherwise. Following suit, the EU forced labour regulation will come into force in 2027. That bans the sale, import and export of goods made with forced labour. Once again, if we are not in lockstep and do not do the same, it will further exacerbate the risk of the UK being a dumping ground. This is urgent.
To achieve our recommendations, we call for comprehensive new legislation. Many of us were justifiably disappointed not to see that hope realised in this year’s King’s Speech, but we welcome measures in the Immigration and Asylum Bill implementing JCHR recommendations 3 to 5 to strengthen and expand the transparency and supply chains reporting duty under Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act. It will be a good start, but there is still much more to do, which is why we still argue that a new Bill is urgently needed.
While we await comprehensive legislation, there are, of course, other things that we can do. The committee examined the historic 2024 UK Court of Appeal ruling, in a court case brought by Rahima Mahmut, that the UK’s National Crime Agency had applied the wrong test in deciding whether to investigate the importation of cotton products produced by forced Uyghur labour in Xinjiang. Those powers in the Proceeds of Crime Act have too rarely been used to confiscate goods linked to forced labour. The National Crime Agency and Border Force appeared before our committee, and the NCA wrote to us stating that it does not have a clear mandate to confiscate goods linked to forced labour. After an exchange of correspondence, we have only today had a letter from the NCA, which I will ask the Joint Committee to publish and will of course share with the Minister.
I can say that it adds weight to the committee’s view that the Government need to get a grip on this issue. We are clear, in recommendation 31, that the Government should explore further ways of using the existing proceeds of crime powers to prevent goods linked to forced labour being sold in the UK and should go on to seize assets linked to forced labour. The Government should not use the lame excuse that they cannot direct independent law enforcement bodies. They can give them a legislative mandate—they have done so before. This House amended the Health and Care Act to prohibit the NHS from sourcing products, such as PPE, made with slave labour. However, given the 2024 finding that 21% of NHS suppliers had a “high risk” of exposure to forced labour, I hope the Minister will commit to a review of whether and how the NHS has implemented those legal obligations.
It also became worryingly clear during our inquiry—backed up by some brilliant journalism in the Financial Times—that the UK does not bother to collect or publish data that would enable risks of forced labour in supply chains to be identified. I am referring specifically to shipping manifest data. It provides only less detailed, aggregate data, in contrast to many other states, including, for instance, Kazakhstan and the United States. On 15 July, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, the Minister of State at the Home Office, confirmed:
“Home Office does not routinely assess whether goods entering the UK may have been produced using forced labour”.
If other jurisdictions can assess this, I hope the Minister will commit to thinking again about creating comparable transparency.
The JCHR also recommended the creation of greater corporate responsibilities, including enhanced transparency reporting obligations and mandatory human rights due diligence duties, to be implemented with new regulatory arrangements, including penalties for non-compliance overseen by either the Supply Chain Centre or the Office for Responsible Business Conduct. In his letter to us of 26 August, the Minister said that the Government are considering their response to the responsible business review. Can he say whether he has a preliminary view on whether the ORBC should have a regulatory role and when he imagines that the response will be published?
I conclude by returning to the people who have been subject to forced labour and who provided evidence to the inquiry. They described a lawless existence, where they have been denied food and water. Wounds were left untreated. They sustained permanent injuries, and they were abandoned destitute, without papers. Some survivors reported their exploitation to local authorities, but nothing was done. Even after reaching safety, survivors expressed experience of psychological difficulties, such as PTSD and addiction.
In recommendation 54, the JCHR calls for improved access to justice for survivors. Corporations should be subject to a civil cause of action generated by a failure to prevent forced labour. I say to those who talk about slavery as a problem of the past that, despite the hopes of William Wilberforce and many others, it remains a contemporary challenge. Modern-day slavery is not a problem simply in far-away countries; it affects all parts of the world, despite us too rarely hearing about it.
Sadly, most of the items and products that we use and buy every single day are, to a smaller or larger degree, tainted with modern slavery: the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the computers and phones we use, and the food we eat. But, as a country, we are still a long way from eradicating it. We must try harder. We must do more to focus on victims, Governments, companies and consumers. I am particularly grateful to the Wilberforce Society at Cambridge University, which is working on proposals for me on the empowerment of consumers in challenging modern-day slavery. We can do far more.
In welcoming the Minister to his new role, I hope that he will keep this report on his desk and its recommendations in his in-tray. I welcome him to his post and thank all noble Lords who will speak today. I beg to move.
Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his committee on this important report and on securing this debate. I add my warm welcome to my noble friend the Minister.
I chaired the House of Lords committee that examined the Modern Slavery Act 2015. It recommended the introduction of much more robust due diligence standards, aligned to those emerging from the EU. I was so pleased to see that echoed in this report. Will my noble friend the Minister signal support today for the approach advocated by the Corporate Justice Coalition, which is backed by both business and unions, as set out in the excellent Private Member’s Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Young?
I also have an interest in the debate, as we have heard, as Great British Energy’s board member with lead responsibility for a just transition for workers and to combat modern slavery. Basic human rights are severely threatened by climate change too. So the answer cannot be putting the brakes on decarbonisation. GBE is committed to becoming an anti-slavery leader, helping to cut industry reliance on minerals and products from companies or regions that use forced labour. In the short term, we are finalising a code of conduct on which investments and grants will be conditional. But ultimately I agree that the best way forward is to invest in the development of alternative technologies and to build supply chains and decent jobs here in the UK.
As a country, we must also learn from history. Globally, the last great advance against forced labour came after the Second World War, when many former colonies won independence and set about dismantling colonial systems of indentured labour. In the British Empire alone, an estimated 1 million Indian workers and hundreds of thousands of Chinese labourers had been brutally controlled through drugs, debt bondage and the criminalisation of desertion.
My point is that today the root causes of forced labour are the same: unaccountable state or corporate power; poverty, racism and discrimination; and weak labour rights. Workers organised into free and independent trade unions play a vital role in holding companies and their supply-chain policies to account. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that new UK rules on due diligence will recognise and strengthen that trade union role.
Baroness Sugg (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this debate to the House and I commend the Joint Committee on Human Rights for a report that is both sobering and constructive. Its central conclusion, that goods produced through forced labour are entering UK supply chains, should concern us all. As the report argues, in comparison with our main international trading partners, the UK is falling behind. A country that rightly takes pride in its leadership on modern slavery must ensure that its own market does not become a route for exploitation.
I approach this debate with two principles held together: our responsibility to tackle forced labour and uphold human rights, and the need for a regulatory environment that supports responsible business rather than placing unnecessary burdens on it. The committee is right to highlight that many British companies are already investing significant time and resource into tracing suppliers, improving transparency and mitigating risks. They do so because it is morally right but also because their consumers increasingly expect it. Yet these responsible firms can find themselves undercut by competitors which take a less rigorous approach. That is not fair competition and is one reason why this debate matters.
At the same time, we must recognise the pressures that businesses face. Many sectors are navigating inflation, supply-chain disruption and tight margins. Additional mandatory requirements, particularly if introduced without careful design, could impose substantial new costs. The committee’s proposals on mandatory human rights due diligence and import controls are serious and deserve consideration, but they would mark a shift in the UK’s regulatory landscape. So, before moving in that direction, we need clarity, evidence and a full understanding of the economic implications, as well as ensuring their efficacy in tackling forced labour.
I welcome the Minister to his position and would be grateful if he could address three points. I am happy to take his responses in writing. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, asked, when will the Government publish their responsible business conduct review and the national baseline assessment on the UN guiding principles? Those documents will be essential for informed policy-making. Secondly, how will the cumulative impact of potential new due diligence requirements on small and medium-sized enterprises be assessed? Thirdly, can the Minister confirm that any future proposals, whether on due diligence or import controls, will be developed in close consultation with business, with a clear understanding of sector-specific risks and the need to maintain competitiveness?
The UK should never be a market for goods produced through coercion or abuse, but our response must be effective, targeted, proportionate and workable. The task before us is to protect those being exploited, while supporting responsible business. I hope that today’s debate helps us move closer to achieving both.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, I join others in welcoming the Minister to his seat. I hope that he will not mind my sharing that, before his introduction yesterday, we were chuckling that wandering about this place for the first time felt a bit like wandering around Hogwarts. My hope, if I may say so, is that he will fight as passionately for justice as the heroes of those stories.
I am also not alone in welcoming this report wholeheartedly. I express my gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his colleagues for the extraordinarily good and profound work that has been done here. I am proud to be part of a nation that, 10 years ago, introduced—for the first time anywhere in the world, I believe—ground-breaking legislation. However, we have not gone far enough. This matters, morally, legally, economically and in terms of human rights. I suspect—to think of my day job—that I am preaching to choir in terms of the moral case for this. We have only to glimpse the basics of forced labour to see that this is not good enough. Although that is part of the problem: we do not glimpse it, and we do not have the public outrage that we need.
Others will make the economic case far better than I could. I refer the House to the work of charities such as Unseen, which reckons that around £60 billion a year is added to the British economy by dealing with these issues. Imagine the effect of money being taken out of the criminal economy and put into the mainstream economy. If I may speak up for the Church Commissioners, I am glad that our responsible investment team has been working for a number of years on this.
I would say that I am a bear of little brain, so my reflections are focused on two very clear questions. The first is how, in tackling this injustice, do we make sure that we do not transfer inequity from one group to another? I suspect that to most in this Chamber, it would make very little difference if 10% were added to the cost of a new sweater or other items of clothing, but it would matter hugely to many of the people I am privileged to serve. In researching this, I have been surprised and delighted to find that many of the most cost-effective clothing providers in our society today have some of the strongest policies in this regard. Can the Minister say what the Government are doing in response to these recommendations, but particularly in ensuring that cost is not added to the most impoverished parts of our economy?
My second question, which has really absorbed me, is how do we raise public awareness of this issue, so that people know when there is forced labour in the supply chain when they go to buy a new pair of socks or whatever it happens to be? Where are the Greta Thunbergs or—if you are of a particular generation—the Bob Geldofs who will raise these things and raise public irritation to a point where we must do something about it, not only legislatively but by changing our society?
This question matters morally, legally and economically. It matters to the very soul of our nation. I thank the committee for this report and urge the Government to respond.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, I declare that I am co-chair of the parliamentary group on modern slavery and vice-chair of the Human Trafficking Foundation. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 was transformational in its ambitions, but it was a long time ago and much of what came from it has not really been implemented, or has been positively discouraged. The two recent reports, particularly the excellent one we are debating today, set out sensible recommendations, but they are not yet implemented by the Government. That really is what I will talk about today.
There is no provision in the Act for enforcement and we are now, as has already been said, out of step with many other countries, including Australia, the United States, Norway and France, and with the EU. I remember discussing with United States border control officers, over a web link, how they stopped “hot goods”, as they call them, very effectively. Why are we not looking at how the Americans deal with hot goods?
The EU has a due diligence directive. That is going to affect our big companies, because we deal hugely with the with EU, as we do with the United States. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, are we going to find that our goods are rejected because we cannot be clear that they are safe? We have the Procurement Act 2023; excellent in idea, but not yet effective. We have an Immigration and Asylum Bill that will increase transparency and reporting, but it has no due diligence directives, mandatory provisions, or duty to identify, prevent and address forced labour. Quite simply, we do not have anything effective to deal with the companies, many of which are working extremely hard to do the right thing, which means they are at a financial disadvantage compared with all too many companies that are not doing anything to prevent forced labour.
My view is that the mandatory provisions should apply and that they should have financial implications. We should use SMEs, as well as the very big companies, with a right degree of proportionality. Trade negotiations should include consideration of modern slavery and cleaning the supply chains. There are issues across government departments, so there should be clarity and responsibility. This is urgent. The Government need to get on with it.
Baroness Goudie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this report and securing this debate. I also thank those who worked on the committee, my noble friend Lady O’Grady for the work her committee has done, and others in this House who are working on this issue. I have a long-standing interest in today’s discussion. As an adviser to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, I welcome the opportunity to discuss the Human Rights Committee’s report, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains.
The figures provided by the International Labour Organization are beyond disturbing: every single day, an estimated 27.6 million people are trapped into forced labour conditions—nearly double the populations of London, Manchester and Birmingham combined. Of course, this travesty is not gender neutral. Of the 6.3 million people in forced commercial sexual exploitation, nearly four out of five are women and girls. Children—who are the most vulnerable and deserve care from their communities—make up 3.3 million of those stuck inside forced labour situations, of which over half a million are commercially sexually exploited. No one who has been sexually exploited lives a long life; we ought to realise that. Every single one of these people deserves our efforts to secure them the freedoms they deserve.
The nature of supply chains means that many of these cases are deliberately obscured and hidden beneath layers of supply chain contracts, and ultimately also hidden within British homes and workplaces. Our current framework asks only companies with a turnover of £36 million to report on supply chains. The committee noted that due diligence currently takes a voluntary approach that disregards businesses that take this responsible approach but do not always publish. I support the committee’s call for mandatory human rights due diligence throughout the supply chain and would want to ensure that safe reporting mechanisms for victims are prioritised at every level, including the right to autonomy and protections of the dignity of the people who have experienced this trauma. I also support the call for businesses to have a duty to prevent, meaning that victims have a route to a civil claim if they are wronged. I hope the Government will look again at establishing a survivor advisory council. Those who have lived through this terrible form of exploitation understand the truth of its mechanisms more than any legislator ever could.
Finally, I briefly bring attention to the fact that our principal trading partners are moving forward in this area. The EU will be banning the sale, import and export of goods made with forced labour from December 2027. While that is a while away yet, it is a strong and decisive move, and one that we must bear in mind to avoid goods that are rejected over the channel being simply redirected to be sold at our stores. A year has passed since the committee’s recommended timetable for legislation, and we now have a new Government. Both give us a real opportunity for fresh leadership on this matter. Can my noble friend the Minister say when the Government expect to set out their legislative plans? I congratulate the Minister on being with us today.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My noble friend Lord Alton’s commendable inquiry has shone a light in dark places. Abuses occur beyond first-tier suppliers, affecting women and the environment in particular. It made us think, and his opening speech today will have made us think further.
As the NHS is one of the largest commercial organisations in the country, and the fifth-biggest employer in the world, I want to focus on its supply chain. Antibiotics alone constitute about half of NHS primary care prescriptions, mostly penicillin based. Their manufacture depends on the precursor 6-APA, for which 85% to 90% of global manufacture is in China. In the NATO area, Sandoz in Kundl, Austria, is the only producer of 6-APA for penicillins, which it manufactures.
The surgical equipment supply is similarly worrying. Over one-fifth of equipment, especially disposables, is produced in northern Pakistan, with supplier companies in Europe or the US. Labourers manufacturing surgical instruments are often paid less than $1 per day and have poor job security and woefully inadequate health and safety protection, and many employees are children, some as young as seven.
Some 150 billion pairs of disposable gloves are produced every year, mostly in Malaysia, Thailand and a few other Asian countries, from factories often known already for their serial labour rights concerns. In Malaysia, migrant workers producing surgical gloves have reported unsafe factory conditions, confiscation of passports, illegal withholding of pay, and debt bondage from high recruitment fees paid to agents to secure the job.
In 2016, procurement agencies for the NHS started introducing contractual requirements. But our “strategic vulnerability” was evident in Covid, buying £150 million-worth of equipment from Chinese companies whose factories were using Uyghur and North Korean forced labour with extensive links to human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
The report’s recommendations warrant action. Our short-term approach, with procurement based on price, leaves us complicit with human rights abuses and perilously vulnerable to disruptions in critical health supplies. In Sweden, procurement directors included effective labour clauses into a regional contract with an Indian healthcare uniforms manufacturer. It can be done, it must be done, and I hope the new Minister, who I congratulate, will urgently press for the supply of medical instruments and medicines to be tackled across ministries.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to see the Minister in his place. He has always represented the best of the Scottish Labour tradition, that of building people up rather than trying to tear things down.
I am strongly in favour of what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said about Xinjiang. It is worth looking not only at the horror of what happens there, but the exportability of it. An algorithm monitors you for antisocial behaviour. What is antisocial behaviour? Growing a beard, covering your hair, observing the fast, talking to foreigners, accessing the wrong websites. The algorithm can then sentence you to re-education. I hope it is common to all of us in this House that that is abominable behaviour.
Equally, I hope it is common to everyone on every side that forced labour is an atrocity. It offends all our deepest moral sensibilities. I wish we would spend more time eliminating the remaining pockets of slavery in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Mauritania, and so on, rather than fretting over who owned a share in the Royal African Company in the 18th century.
The problem that arises from this report is that we should not judge policies only by their intentions. We need to look at their consequences, and there are reasons why we have generally, in trade policy, restricted ourselves to the finished product, rather than trying to police the production of any given good or service, whether it is to do with net zero, animal welfare, or whatever it is. It is an incredibly difficult and intrusive thing to try and police, and it is usually very ineffective.
To the extent that there is an impact, it is very often negative. With a trade sanction of any kind—refusing to buy certain products and then having to go through a bureaucracy to see which products they are is, if you like, the loosest form of trade sanction—who does that hurt? It hurts ordinary people in the other country and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester reminded us, in our own country, and it generally drives support to the regime of which you disapprove. It strengthens its control of the economy and makes it easier for it to put its cronies in positions of power. So there is a real danger that we elide from saying, “I disapprove of this practice”, or “I disapprove of this regime”, whether it is Iran, China or wherever else, into saying, “Therefore, let’s have some kind of trade sanction”. Actually, I think we need stronger sanctions: not commercial sanctions but political and legal sanctions aimed at the individuals responsible.
We should not use trade as a kind of dustbin into which we put all our desiderata. It is rather like the last debate, when people were talking this way about the school curriculum: “I want my particular thing in the school curriculum—I want there to be more financial literacy, more climate change”. If you put in everything that everyone wants in the school curriculum, there would be no English, maths or science.
Similarly, if trade deals become about women’s rights and workers’ rights, net zero and indigenous rights and all the rest of it, there will not be room in them for what they really for, which is the removal of obstacles to increase mutual prosperity. I have to say that, historically, the thing that really did for slavery was rising prosperity, which made it obsolete, and if you look at the list of countries where it still persists, they are poor countries. The best thing we can do is to allow them to trade their way to wealth.
Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)
My Lords, like all the rest of us in the Chamber, I thank my noble friend of over 40 years for his incredibly diligent work and for the work of his committee, which, as we have said, has shone a light on this very painful area: an entangled web of cheap and forced labour, modern slavery and migrant and asylum issues, all of which are in a mess.
I do not wish to trivialise the issue in any way, but if your Lordships fancy a cinema trip, the current film “Mutiny”, available in cinemas now and featuring Jason Statham, is all about a conspiracy of international slavery proportions—and in fact, a great British actor exposes the best way to deal with the issue. It is quite violent, I have to say, but never mind; it is there to be seen.
We are having this debate in the week in which we discover that 660 British companies have underpaid their workers—not even minimum wage, barely living wage and having to return £4 million to 27,000 people for trying to get them to do things on the cheap in the UK. This is the kind of disgrace we are focused on.
I noted in particular that the report from the noble Lord’s brilliant committee states that state-imposed forced labour is an issue, and it is. When a state seeks to either criminalise, reduce or push people to the margins, it forces not just forced labour activity but wrong labour activity. This very week a young man, of British origin but of African parentage, was arrested on the streets of London and bunged behind bars again for a minor offence—nothing to do with violence or other people—simply because, as an asylum seeker trying to get the Home Office to do its job and because of its failure to do so, he found the only way to get some income to feed himself was to sell minor category B drugs. Now the taxpayer will shell out £120,000 over the next two years by simply saying that keeping him in prison is better than letting him work. That is a nonsense. That is state-imposed forced labour absence, and I hope the committee will consider in its brilliant future thinking how these minor aspects of our policy and failed government departments trap people rather than liberate and build them up.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
My Lords, as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, so ably led by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, my first remark is that I find it slightly unfortunate that the House is only now considering a report that the committee published in July 2025. But delay has been something of a feature in the long history of dealing with modern slavery and, indeed, slavery in the history of our country. As has been observed, the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, so bravely introduced by my noble friend Lady May, was a ground-breaking international instrument, which reflected in our domestic law our obligations and led the way for many countries to emulate the points that were made. That was a reflection of our nation’s long and very positive history in this area.
As long ago as 1897, Parliament passed a statute called the Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act, which sought to achieve for its own time a measure of the type that is recommended in our report. One can trace a line all the way back to the great glory of the British Empire, which was the abolition of the slave trade, led so wonderfully by William Wilberforce. The recommendations of our report are, in my submission, a logical extension of that long and noble history in our country of seeking to eliminate slavery in all its forms.
I appreciate that the Minister will look at our recommendations and wish to balance them against the desire not to burden business with undue regulation, which is a real and genuine concern, given the state of burdens on businesses, but I urge him to accelerate that consideration. In doing so, I circle back to a point ably made by my noble friend Lady Sugg and the noble Lord, Lord Alton: we are awaiting a response from the Government. In June 2025, the Government announced in the UK’s Trade Strategy that they would:
“Launch a review of our approach to responsible business conduct, focusing on the global supply chains of businesses operating in the UK”.
The JCHR received a letter from the then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, saying that he considered that the launch of the responsible business conduct review was 30 June 2025. One of the noble Lord’s earliest acts as a Minister was writing to us on 26 August. In that letter, he said that the responsible business conduct review
“has now been completed, and the Government is considering its findings”.
I ask the Minister: could he publish the review now, prior to the Government publishing their consideration of its findings? In so doing, I welcome the Minister to his place.
Lord Sentamu (CB)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Alton of Liverpool, chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, together with his 11 fellow members of the committee, is to be congratulated on this insightful and timely report. The action on it has been delayed. Nevertheless, it is a very timely report. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord on securing the debate and, most importantly, on the masterful way in which he introduced it. The issues that the report raises are live issues. They are not something in the past; they are going on and on. Somehow, we have to find a way of stopping them. His Majesty’s Government’s response to the report is centred on the recommendations of the report. In my short contribution to the debate, I will ask questions on the Government’s response to the first and sixth recommendations.
The first recommendation deals with UK domestic law. It recommends a new law that would ensure that the UK’s market is protected from goods tainted by forced labour. It would do this by clearly stating
“that it is unlawful to import or sell goods linked to forced labour”.
I Timothy 5:18 says:
“For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward”—
his wages and his hire Forced labour pays peanuts to its workers, almost treating them as if they were squirrels and less than human. That is what forced labour does to people.
The challenge that His Majesty’s Government now face is that the Joint Committee on Human Rights asked for the new legislation to be introduced within one year of the publication of the report. The Government’s response was that there was a review. Can the Minister, whom I welcome most warmly to the Front Bench, tell your Lordships’ House where we are on this? My concern is that delay will result in the innocent becoming complicit in unlawful importing or selling of goods that are linked to forced labour. We all know that ignorance is not a defence. Furthermore, those who are carrying out forced labour have the time to find devious ways of getting away with it. If we do not do something, we are allowing them to get away with it. In all these areas where the reviews are announced in the report, who is persistently urging and chivvying the reviewers to complete the work? The time to act is now.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, talk about being thrown in at the deep end. My noble friend the Minister was introduced just yesterday and I welcome him to your Lordships’ House and to his post. My noble friend is not a new friend. We first met so long ago that he was probably a teenager at the time. Much water has flown under many bridges since then. Maintaining the aquatic theme, I am sure that he will take to your Lordships’ House as a duck to water and excel here.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the members of his committee on their report, which builds on the report to which my noble friend Lady O’Grady referred. I was a member of that committee two years ago, conducting a post-legislative review of the 2015 Act. One of our recommendations was that the Government should introduce sanctions for companies that fail to comply with supply chain requirements. Unfortunately, the Government’s response in December 2024 was that the status quo should be retained with a voluntary aspect to it. Evidence shows that this is simply not enough. Without it being made compulsory, there will not be any meaningful change.
Section 54 of the 2015 Act requires companies to publicly disclose their efforts to tackle forced labour and human trafficking within their business and supply chains. However, Section 54 only requires companies to report action on forced labour in supply chains, not to take action. That is bizarre. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, taking no action complies with the Act. If the Government are serious about ethical supply chains, as I believe they are, they must make sure that those companies with a poor record on supply chains involving forced labour and human trafficking show what action they are taking. Otherwise, this is in effect siding with those companies. It then distorts competition by denying companies that act responsibly a level playing field. That cannot be right.
In their response to our report, the Government said that they were reviewing how they can strengthen penalties for non-compliance and create a proportionate enforcement regime. That was a year and nine months ago. In June 2025, Minister Bryant said that the Government had launched a review into the UK’s approach to responsible business conduct. That was a year and three months ago. Two months ago, in answer to a Written Question from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, my noble friend Lord Stockwood said:
“The Government is considering the review’s findings and will set out its plans in due course”.
That sequence of events brings to mind the rather acid comment of my noble friend Lord Blunkett when he said of Tony Blair’s first Government, of which he was a senior member, that it had “hit the ground reviewing”. That was one of the criticisms that Keir Starmer’s Government also received—an often overcautious approach characterised by incrementalism. The early signs are that Prime Minister Andy Burnham will be much less risk averse. One way of demonstrating that would be to introduce legislation to make human rights due diligence of supply chains mandatory. It is long overdue and absolutely necessary.
Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests as an honorary associate professor in the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham, which has done so much work in this area, and as a member of the Great British Energy advisory group on ethical supply chains. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, for including me in that structure.
I point out—and I thank noble Lords who have mentioned it—that I have a Private Member’s Bill, the Commercial Organisations and Public Authorities Duty (Human Rights and Environment) Bill, to prevent forced labour and environmental harms in all their operations and throughout their value chains. I am waiting on a date for Second Reading for that. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, and invite him to have a meeting to discuss that, because my belief and that of many others is that it covers 99% of what people have been asking for for some time in legislation in this area. Of course, I also thank the Joint Committee on Human Rights and, particularly, my noble friend Lord Alton for his role in the fight against modern slavery, in which he has been engaged for so long.
I want to have a deeper understanding of the Government’s response to the recommendations, and that is one of the reasons why I would like to have that meeting. I believe that we can clarify and find out whether there is a way of working together to a common end. I do not want to fight the Government on these issues, but I want to be critical of, first, the slowness with which they have approached them and the confusion which has been sown. This is caused by not being clear about what the approach is, where we want to go, how the different parts of the legislation that has been enacted so far fit together, and how that legislation will be incorporated into this area of business responsibility.
I want to say something about the issue of placing a burden, which noble Lords have referred to. I wonder who is really bearing a burden. Who are the people suffering most from this inaction? Businesses should be addressing some of these issues through standard business risk mitigation. It is not about introducing a whole slew of bureaucratic structures to make people feel better about themselves; we want to change the landscape substantially.
I have been working recently with the construction industry, and I raise this because the Government have a very ambitious programme of building not just homes but other parts of infrastructure. Yet again, people tell me that they want to engage with due diligence and to ensure that they are aligned with the EU and other countries, but they do not know what is going on here, so they do not know what they can do. This represents a good opportunity for leadership from the Government to ensure that the kinds of structures and principles we are discussing today can be incorporated into this rebuilding of Britain.
Lord Hussain (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to be able to speak in the gap. I join noble Lords in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, to this House, and we look forward to working with him. Given his new responsibility as a Trade Minister, I will ask a question or two. I do not mind receiving a reply in writing if he cannot answer the questions now. What assessment has his department made of forced labour in UK supply chains in India? India is one of the most important trading partners, with bilateral trade worth over £40 billion. But according to the Global Slavery Index, India has one of the highest absolute numbers of people in modern slavery, and the ILO and UK modern slavery assessments have repeatedly flagged up high-risk sectors, including textiles and garments, brick kilns, agriculture and leather.
My questions are threefold. First, what due diligence does the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade require of UK firms importing from high-risk regions in India? Secondly, under the developing UK-India free trade agreement, what binding labour provisions will ensure that trade does not profit from forced labour? Thirdly, what practical support, not just guidance, are the Government providing to help British SMEs which do not have large compliance teams to audit their supply chains, remediate where abuse is found and source ethically?
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, we started the week by giving a Second Reading to the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, and we end it with a debate on the JCHR report. So ethics have permeated the week, as they should, but there is quite a crossover between specific issues as well.
I was not a member of the committee when it held its inquiry. I was a member in the previous incarnation—of the committee, not me—in 2017, when it published its report on Human Rights and Business. Its summary said:
“When UK companies source or manufacture goods in less developed countries where there are weaker mechanisms for protecting human rights … serious violations can occur. Human rights are just as important abroad … The Modern Slavery Act in 2015 has raised the profile of … modern slavery within UK companies and their supply chains abroad. However, more action is needed … the Government could make a positive start by facilitating the passage of Baroness Young of Hornsey’s Modern Slavery (Transparency in Supply Chains) Bill”.
Well, that was then and this is now. It went on to urge the Government to “consider what extra resources” various organisations may require. As the Minister will realise, that is Lords-speak for, “They are badly underresourced”. We also commented on human rights being a matter for so many government departments, which should be communicating with each other on this. A lot of the 2025 report, therefore, was familiar to me.
In the course of many debates, noble Lords have remarked that, at the time of the 2015 Act, we regarded our country as world leading on modern slavery and that, over the years, we have not kept up with international partners. I recall that, when that legislation was going through, I made the rather naive point that public awareness was valuable. We talked about business following the example of the most ethical and best organised, without properly acknowledging that they cannot be precisely emulated by those with smaller margins. I am not making an excuse for unethical behaviour, but I am taking up a point referred to by other noble Lords. In the context where you can be disadvantaged by doing the right thing—as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said—the noble Baroness, Lady Young, asks a very pertinent question on this.
Promoting a product on, or partly on, the basis of green credentials is easier than of there being no forced labour, although I was glad to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said on this, reporting what evidence has shown. The sector still battles the notion that it does not happen here. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, who so skilfully chaired our post-legislative inquiry, brought that out very strongly. It does happen here; it happens here, and it happens there. I agree with the right reverend Prelate that it is difficult when you do not see it starkly and immediately, and it is difficult when you cannot really envisage it, which is perhaps a difference from the green credentials point, which I think we find a bit easier to get our heads around—or perhaps allow ourselves to think about. We do not want to think about modern slavery.
The predecessor committee visited an office where we were given a presentation on the UN guiding principles, and it felt like completely unfamiliar territory to all of us, I think. Was that because of a failure to promote the UN GPs or because of our own lack of awareness? Maybe it was both.
The Minister, whom I welcome to his position—although I think he must already feel a bit of an old hand after having been thrown into it yesterday—will discover that the middle name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is “indefatigable”. He will also find an impressive level of determination in the current Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, as with her predecessors.
Most noble Lords have had a very restricted speaking time today. Although I could take quite a lot longer, that feels a bit rough on them, so I will discard the notes that I made a couple of weeks ago. I want to pick up on just a couple of the points made by Eleanor Lyons, the IASC, in her annual report of last December. She points out:
“Exploitation not only harms victims but also imposes significant financial costs on the British economy and responsible businesses. Modern slavery costs the UK an estimated £60 billion each year—around 2 per cent of GDP”.
She reminds us of the model legislative drafting,
“drawing on the engagement and expertise shared by stakeholders demonstrating how legislation could be introduced in the UK”.
As she puts it:
“The public expect decisive action: 80% want retailers to be legally required to remove products linked to forced labour, and the same proportion support tougher government rules … only 9% fully trust companies to act without oversight, while most believe profit takes priority over worker protection”.
One might say that many people would not want to be recorded as taking a different view, but these are significant figures—even allowing a reduction for my scepticism.
I was very struck by the foreword to the IASC’s report, which was written by a “survivor consultant” working with, and no doubt supported by, the charity Unseen. I quote:
“Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence … is not simply another regulatory requirement … When the law draws clear lines, exploitation has fewer places to hide. When those lines are backed by accountability, oversight, consequence, and guaranteed pathways to appropriate remedy”—
as I say, there is real crossover with the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, which has extensive support and will soon become law—
“we move from reacting to harm to preventing it, and from inadequate responses to just and restorative ones”.
If we as a country are to feel good about ourselves, forced labour in supply chains badly needs attention. I very much support the report, in which I had no hand.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, let me take this opportunity, first, to welcome the Minister to his place, and, if I may be so bold, to thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this debate and introducing it so comprehensively. I do not think that any Member of this House needs persuading of the gravity of what we are discussing. Forced labour is obviously a grotesque abuse, and Britain, working alongside our international partners, has a genuine and important role to play in confronting it.
This has been a comprehensive debate, and there is much to agree with in what has been discussed in the past hour or so, but I shall confine my remarks to pressing the House to drill into the detail and to look beyond the moral clarity of the diagnosis towards the practical consequences of the remedies on offer. We need to be very careful about how we deal with this subject: a one-size-fits-all approach will probably not achieve the necessary objectives.
As the report notes, much forced labour takes place in middle-income and higher-income countries. As a percentage of the population, it is at its worst in the Arab states. How can that be acceptable? Perhaps the most recent high-profile case was the World Cup-related construction in Qatar. The world seemed to turn a blind eye to that, which I personally find shameful. Surely construction is one of the five sectors where forced labour is most prevalent. The solutions to that are unlikely to be corporate in this country; they have to be diplomatic. That needs to be considered when dealing with this problem.
However, we also need to acknowledge that much of the forced labour we are debating arises in nations where corruption and weak institutions prevail and where, as a consequence, poverty is endemic. In that context, further burdens placed on British businesses, whether through mandatory due diligence and reporting requirements of the kind proposed in the Immigration and Asylum Bill, or through restrictions on trade with particular suppliers or sectors, risks doing real harm to the very people we intend to protect in those areas where there are very fine distinctions between “forced” and “desperate”. We do not wish to disadvantage further those who are already in dreadful circumstances. We must, therefore, be very careful to design systems that allow for nuanced judgment; that is not to argue for inaction, but for careful and detailed consideration.
We must also be aware that small and medium-sized British businesses have faced cost after cost and millions of pounds in cumulative regulatory burdens since this Government took office. I fear that further mandatory reporting requirements will do very little to solve the problem they are aimed at while doing much to add to it. It will add cost, complexity and legal exposure to businesses trying, in good faith, to operate responsibly within an imperfect system. In many situations, supply chains are so complex that it would be practically impossible to ensure absolute due diligence and compliance.
This is not to argue for inaction—not at all—but we need to argue that these businesses, particularly SMEs, will need help to ensure that they are able to comply. I ask the Minister to bear this in mind when responding and to ensure that SMEs are taken particular care of and have the necessary support to minimise compliance costs and maximise the efficiency of their practices and solutions to this problem. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester reminded us, we do not want to end up in a situation where all we are doing is, in effect, transferring inequity from one group of disadvantaged people to another. Again, I say this not to counsel inaction but to counsel humility about the limits of regulation imposed at a distance.
The long-term and only durable solution to this problem is trade. Free and expanding trade with more international partners raises standards of living, drives development and fosters the competition—I stress that—that roots out bad practice. It is prosperity, not prohibition, that can eliminate exploitative labour practices in every economy that has escaped them, our own included—a point made extremely well by my noble friend Lord Hannan.
The noble Lord, Lord Alton, also made an extremely important argument about UK business, unfair competition and national resilience. I will not rehash it but, to that end, the committee’s suggestions about consistency in adding clauses on human and labour rights to international agreements should be given very careful consideration. I welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that recommendation.
The drive to net zero has created a substantial and, I suggest, insufficiently scrutinised reliance on imported solar panels from regions associated with forced labour. As much as 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon—the essential raw material in the overwhelming majority of solar panels—has been produced in the Xinjiang Uyghur region, and the committee noted that the solar road map does not tackle supply chain risks. The United Kingdom imports the great majority of its photovoltaic hardware and China’s percentage share of global manufacturing runs into the high 90s at some stages of production. Similarly, some 70% of the world’s cobalt—a critical component in the batteries that power renewable storage and electric vehicles—is produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country whose record on forced and child labour in artisanal mining is well documented by the Global Slavery Index. So even where we do not import these materials directly, we still sanction their use indirectly, but unmistakeably, every time we subsidise or mandate the deployment of renewable technologies built upon them.
As others in this debate have noted, and particularly in debates on this sector, we must not overlook the fact that the public sector has a significant role to play in terms of its procurement policies, as pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and in the education of the public. That point was made extremely well by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. The public need to be educated about the extent of the problem so that they can make better and informed choices. By definition, a lot of that education will have to come from the public sector.
This is not to say that I am arguing against the Government’s energy policy when we are talking about this aspect of the problem, but a serious conversation is still needed about how forced labour ends up in UK supply chains. I was very pleased to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, said on that because sometimes the best of domestic intentions have disastrous unintended consequences thousands of miles away, out of sight, but, I hope, because of this thoughtful and expansive debate, not out of mind.
The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (Lord Sarwar) (Lab)
I thank noble Lords and I am pleased to respond for the Government. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for securing this important debate and thank him for the characteristically powerful and principled arguments that he made and for the way in which he continues to campaign on this important issue.
I say right at the start that I can tell there is an impatience among noble Lords to see progress on this issue. I reassure them that I am an impatient Minister. I want us to get things done and to get them done quickly and in the interests of people right across this country and of our international obligations, too. That is a firm commitment that I want to make to Members across this Chamber.
I thank the Joint Committee on Human Rights for its thorough report, Forced Labour in UK Supply Chains, and all noble Lords who have contributed to today’s debate. I will digress for just one moment to thank the doorkeepers and all the staff who made me and my family feel very welcome and made yesterday a thoroughly enjoyable and memorable day. I also thank the Whips’ Office for making sure to have me busy, not just yesterday but today and on Monday too.
I will endeavour to address as many of the points raised as possible within my allocated time. If I do not cover any points, I make a firm commitment that not only will I write to all noble Lords but also that my door is always open to any noble Lord who has raised an issue in this Chamber and wants to meet to discuss it.
Let me be absolutely clear: forced labour is an egregious abuse of human rights. I think we are all in agreement on what we want the outcomes to be. What we have to work through is how we get to those outcomes. I have served in a Parliament where we were very good at putting words in pieces of legislation, but what we were not good at was changing the outcomes. I want to make sure that we are changing outcomes for businesses in this country but also for workers right across the globe.
Forced labour strips people of their freedom, dignity and agency. It has no place in the supply chains of British businesses, goods purchased by the British Government or products sold to British consumers. The scale of the challenge is sobering. An estimated 27.6 million people worldwide are subject to forced labour, including more than 3 million children. Forced labour generates an estimated $236 billion in illegal profits annually.
Behind those statistics are human beings—workers coerced by threats, children put in danger, families separated and communities denied the basic right to live and work freely. That is why I welcome the committee’s work and share its concerns.
An estimated 70% of global trade now flows through complex supply chains. That tells us the challenge. Globalisation has delivered enormous gains in productivity, innovation and living standards, but it has made the trading system complex, and the opacity of modern supply networks can also hide exploitation. Some products may pass through thousands of suppliers across multiple jurisdictions before they reach consumers here in the UK. That means we have to think this through very carefully.
Many noble Lords mentioned Xinjiang and the abuses faced by the Uyghur communities. This Government will remain absolutely resolute in opposing human rights abuses worldwide, including in Xinjiang, where substantial evidence indicates the persecution and arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. My Ministers in the other place continue to raise these concerns directly at the very highest level.
The United Kingdom has a proud record of leading efforts to combat forced labour in supply chains. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 made us the first country in the world to require businesses to report on the steps they were taking to address modern slavery. It brought the issue into boardrooms, strengthened transparency and accountability, and prompted other countries to act. However, groundbreaking legislation should not remain unchanged. More than a decade later, we must honestly assess whether the framework is for purpose.
Many noble Lords mentioned Section 54 and how it requires larger businesses operating in the United Kingdom to publish annual statements outlining the steps they are taking to prevent modern slavery across their operations and supply chains. But analysis shows that around only 60% of companies have met those basic requirements.
Transparency is meaningful, but the outcomes should be based on the actions, and that is where we need to see progress. A statement must not become a substitute for effective due diligence, nor reporting be seen as an end in itself. That is why the Government are strengthening the regime through the forthcoming Immigration and Asylum Bill. It will establish clear reporting topics and deadlines, require the publication of statements on the modern slavery statement registry and clarify the rules governing group statements. It will also extend the reporting obligations to public authorities with budgets of £36 million or more and introduce penalties of up to £1 million or 1% of annual turnover—whichever is higher—for organisations that fail to comply. Together, these measures will raise reporting standards, strengthen accountability and help responsible businesses compete on a level playing field.
Alongside these reforms, the Government have completed the responsible business conduct review announced in the trade strategy. The review assessed the effectiveness of the United Kingdom’s approach to responsible business conduct, with a particular focus on the global supply chains of businesses operating here. It considered a range of measures, including mandatory human rights due diligence and forced labour import bans, and it drew on the expertise of businesses, investors, trade unions, academics and civil society organisations. Importantly, it also heard from survivors and representatives of communities on the front line of supply chain abuses, including adults with lived experience of modern slavery.
We have also engaged with international partners that have shifted from voluntary approaches to mandatory due diligence and import restrictions, and we are carefully considering what can be learned from those systems. As noble Lords are aware, the review is complete and the Government are considering its findings. We will set out our approach in due course.
Let me reiterate that I appreciate the committee’s and noble Lords’ impatience for greater clarity. I promise that I will not test their patience, but I think noble Lords will accept that, with the formation of a new Government and new Ministers, we are looking at this with fresh eyes. I have been robustly clear with officials in my own department and beyond that I want systems that work and that change the outcomes. That is a commitment that noble Lords have from me, because any strengthened framework must change behaviour, not merely increase paperwork.
It must be clear, proportionate and enforceable. It must support responsible businesses and ensure that they are not undercut by competitors willing to profit from exploitation. Proportionality is particularly important for small and medium-sized businesses, which lack the resources and commercial leverage of the multinational companies. That does not mean lowering our ambitions; it means establishing clear, risk-based obligations and providing businesses with the practical guidance they need to meet.
The committee’s recommendation for an import ban has been a prominent feature of today’s debate, and the Government understand the full force of that argument. An effective import measure could protect victims, responsible businesses and British consumers alike. However, it does require credible evidence, reliable traceability, clear decision-making and properly resourced enforcement. We must ensure that any measure is legally robust and operationally feasible, and genuinely disrupts forced labour, rather than merely diverting tainted goods through less transparent routes.
The Government are already using a range of other measures. The Procurement Act 2023 enables public bodies to reject bids and terminate contracts with suppliers known to use forced labour. The NHS procurement regulations require public bodies to assess modern slavery risks and take responsible and proportionate measures to address them. I note the point made about greater transparency on the outcomes of those measures, and I am happy to follow up with individual Members on that.
Our trade policy also plays an important role. We pursue anti-forced labour provisions in our free trade agreements, while the developing countries trading scheme allows preferential trading arrangements to be suspended in cases of serious labour rights violations. A question was asked, for example, about the free trade agreement with India. Our agreement with India is one of the first that India has signed that includes a labour chapter. That is the kind of leadership I hope we can show in other free trade agreements.
Another issue that has been raised is clean energy supply chains and the link to forced labour. These points were powerfully made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others. The transition to clean energy must not and cannot be built on exploitation. The Great British Energy Act was therefore amended to ensure that Great British Energy takes credible and proportionate measures to manage forced labour risks. We expect Great British Energy to demonstrate leadership, while the Solar Taskforce has worked to support resilient, sustainable and innovative supply chains that are free from forced labour. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, asked for an update on the solar road map. Since its establishment, we have established the Solar Council, which brings together key officials and Ministers with a clear commitment to deliver transparency on supply chains. I am happy to update the noble Lord on that in more detail.
We must also place victims at the centre of our response because, when exploitation is uncovered, businesses should seek to prevent further harm and secure meaningful remediation, not simply terminate a contract and abandon vulnerable workers to an even more precarious situation. No single measure, whether a reporting requirement, a due diligence report, procurement rules, trade provisions, import restrictions or criminal enforcement, will solve this problem on its own. It needs a coherent, whole-system response backed by better data, greater traceability, effective enforcement and international co-operation. The committee’s report poses a serious challenge to the Government, business and Parliament, and I do not downplay or dismiss that. I again commit to noble Lords to do everything I can to work with them and make significant progress in this area.
There were one or two other issues raised; if I do not cover them in the next 30 seconds or minute, I will happily write to individual Members. We are working with our Home Office colleagues on what more we can do to use the Proceeds of Crime Act, and I would be happy to follow up on that. On my noble friend Lady O’Grady’s question, I am looking forward to meeting the Corporate Justice Coalition very soon to discuss its campaign and what more we can do to deliver on the outcomes that it rightly demands of us. To the noble Lord who asked questions around the reports on the outcomes of the FTA with India and what assessments we have made, I am more than happy to come back on that issue.
In closing, I reiterate that this is a collective challenge to all of us. It is an obligation based on our values as a country and to those less fortunate than us right across the globe. This Government and, I am sure, this Chamber will not step back from that commitment.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sarwar, in giving one of his first ministerial replies, has acquitted himself with some distinction. It is wonderful to hear a Minister describing himself as impatient, and someone who will look at things with fresh eyes. I also agree strongly with what he just said about there being no single outcome. All these different levers have to be applied, and he said that he will look at them carefully. I am very grateful to him.
I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate, from left, right and centre. The right reverend Prelate said that we needed a greater sense of outrage; I think that has communicated itself in the speeches today. My noble friend Lady Finlay said that it is our duty to shine a light into dark places. Everyone has done that today.
It struck me, from listening to the references to William Wilberforce, that 200 years ago it was the Select Committee on which he and others appeared—including the slave-trading sea captain from Liverpool, John Newton, who changed his mind and came to describe what he had seen on those vessels—that led to the changes in the law of which this country and Parliament can be so proud. They changed hearts, they changed minds, they changed culture and they changed the law. They did that as an alliance of people who came together from commerce, the law, religious backgrounds and secular backgrounds. They worked with one another. They had campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, who abandoned his studies at Cambridge University to spend decades trying to bring through the legislation that ultimately made such a difference to the people living in those dark places to which my noble friend referred.
I began by referring to the 50 million people who are victims. That is just a number. Behind every number and every statistic there is a story: a life that is not theirs; a suffering that no one knows about; there is pain, exhaustion and hunger; there are dreams of freedom and dignity. The victims of this blight must remain central to this debate.
In the year since we published our report, we have heard new stories on the use of modern slavery globally in supply chains. I draw attention to reports in the Times and the Independent about North Korean labourers living in conditions “worse than cattle”, and to reports about exploited workers on Chinese fishing boats, children working in deadly conditions in the DRC—as the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, reminded us—and the BBC’s report, seen by the committee, of tomatoes being sold in the UK as Italian tomatoes, but which were actually grown by forced labour in Xinjiang.
You do not have to look very far to see forced labour and modern slavery. What we are going to do about it not about historic reparations; it is about action this day—as Churchill famously demanded of his officials. He was an impatient Minister too, and I hope that that dictum might become one that the Minister will have on his desk as he considers this issue further.
To conclude, it is an honour to have been the first Member of your Lordships’ House to be elected by the members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights as its chair. My tenure now comes to its conclusion. I have chaired around 60 sessions and produced around a dozen reports on everything from transnational repression and the failures to prosecute British nationals responsible for genocidal crimes against minorities in northern Iraq to our report, published only last week, on the human rights of children in social care.
I end by saying that the hard work of our parliamentary Select Committees in crafting challenging reports on public policy is exemplary and a rebuke to those who have only negative things to say about Parliament and parliamentarians. Joint Committees of both Houses are rarities that we need more of. I am glad to see the Government Chief Whip in his place to hear that remark. Today’s debate and our JCHR report on supply chains and modern slavery is a superb example of parliamentary work at its best. I sincerely thank all noble Lords who have participated, both in the committee and in the House today.