Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill has attracted a large number of speakers, partly out of the huge respect in which the House holds the noble Lord, but also because of the importance of the issue his Bill seeks to address.

Let us applaud the Welsh, and the noble Lord for his passionate introduction to the Bill. This is a wide-ranging Bill, it is ambitious and challenging, and I fear that some measures may prove too demanding for a Private Member’s Bill. I have not seen any costings—that may be my mistake—but the proposals seem so overwhelmingly positive that it may be that the funds will be forthcoming.

The Bill advocates a Joint Committee on future generations and a commission to be appointed by the Prime Minister. Here I have problems. We in this House have seen how prime ministerial appointments can distort the membership, so perhaps commission members could be generated by another method. The commission would need to be and seen to be non-political, and if they are prime ministerial appointments, there is a huge danger that they will be overwhelmingly party political. The well-being of our young people can only benefit by co-operation between government and across all the parties and the public bodies. It would be good to think that such dialogue already takes place, but I suspect that it does not.

I also applaud the proposal for a citizens’ panel of at least 50 people, a large and wide-ranging selection of people, which would need an exceptional leader or convener, but which could prove invaluable in bringing expertise from all parts of our community to this subject. The bigger prize would be for the next generations to have better prospects for rewarding employment and fulfilling lives, if we all work together in the way suggested.

The Bill greatly deserves further consideration and scrutiny, and I look forward to Committee and trying to ensure the well-being of future generations by exploring in more detail how these proposals would work in practice. I very much support the intentions behind the Bill and congratulate the noble Lord on all his endeavours, especially all the work he does to improve the lives of the less fortunate and the young. He may not be able to solve all our problems—as he has so modestly admitted—but, my goodness, he does an amazing job in tackling many of them.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, has withdrawn from this debate, so I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.