Consumer Rights Bill

Debate between Damian Hinds and Fiona O'Donnell

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I will always follow the hon. Member for Walthamstow, so I shall pay great attention to what she has tweeted after the debate.

I have a lot of sympathy with any measures proposed to help support the growth of the credit union sector. A lot of things in the IPPR report are welcome and positive, such as the idea of having credit unions in post offices, Church of England facilities and so on, but with respect to all concerned I would say that those are hardly first-time-out occurrences of the proposals. A back-stop reclaim facility, through the benefit system, could also have some benefits.

However, the idea—this is the main point—that some huge one-off capitalisation of credit unions would help to facilitate their growth, is not right. Under the previous Government, we had the growth fund, and I am not here to diss that. It was a well-intentioned initiative and will have done a lot of good. Such things are also eroded over time, however, and by definition if one has a big one-off capitalisation one ends up having to address a slightly more costly part of the market, which contributes to that erosion. What we need to do to help support and facilitate the growth of credit unions is what this Government are doing. We are trying to get them on to a sustainable footing with modernised systems, working collaboratively together to get the marketing and branding right so that the sector does not need a subsidy for ever but reaches a scale at which it can address more and more consumers, meaning that fewer and fewer consumers need or want to access the types of lenders we have been discussing today.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

Despite appearances, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and I are not taking part in a mother and daughter catalogue photo shoot later. We should perhaps co-ordinate in future on what to wear when we are both taking part in the same debate.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). He said that his Government are taking an interest in issues around payday lending. They are certainly taking something, although I am not sure whether it is just an interest. When he criticises Labour, saying that for 13 years we did nothing, he fails to recognise that there has been an incredible growth, certainly in my constituency, in the number of people having to resort to payday lenders. They are having to increase the amount they are borrowing from those lenders as well as their general debt levels. There is a cost of living crisis and poverty is the root cause, and the Government should have acted more quickly. The hon. Gentleman is on the record as having said that self-regulation works, but even he has had to admit that self-regulation of payday lending has not worked and that it is time for action.

Figures reported by StepChange last December showed that among its clients, people seeking debt advice in East Lothian, my constituency, are now saddled with average payday loan debts of £1,864, £466 above the Scottish average.

Early Childhood Development

Debate between Damian Hinds and Fiona O'Donnell

Thursday 30th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) and her cross-party colleagues in the important work that they are doing in highlighting the issues we are discussing. The manifesto is accessible, understandable and persuasive. Speaking as a relatively new dad, so much of it is also very intuitive. It makes one think, “Yeah, of course; that is pretty straightforward and obvious,” although we need to see a lot more of it happening.

I want to take a slightly different angle and talk a little about social mobility and the effect of the first days and years of life on children’s eventual chances. When considering child development, it is always helpful to have in mind a sort of pyramid—in fact, there is such a pyramid in the manifesto. It creates a hierarchy of need. The sharp end of the pyramid is the very sharp end of the scale—the acute cases where, frankly, social mobility is not the top priority. The top priority is child protection, basic safety and health; social mobility is a worry for another day. At the base of the pyramid is the massive part—the world at large; most people. In the middle is the section of children I want to talk about today: those born into poverty and disadvantage who are not quite in the acute bracket.

We know that social mobility in this country is low by international standards—we are usually bracketed with Italy and the United States—and it has not been improving. On average, those of us here in our forties—including, as of a couple of days ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine)—have been less mobile in our lives than those of us here in their fifties. That is a poor state for any advanced democracy to find itself in. Why is that the case? When I was on the Education Committee, we used to find that everyone blamed the stage before. If we spoke to universities, they said that they were not getting the kids coming through from sixth forms; the sixth forms blamed the teachers doing the GCSEs; the secondary schools blamed the primary schools; the primary schools blamed the nurseries; and the nurseries said, “We are just not getting the kids through the door anymore.”

There is an element of truth in what they all said. The more one studies social mobility and children’s life chances, the more one realises that it increasingly does come down to the very earliest age. The all-party group on social mobility published a report called “Seven key truths about social mobility”. Truth No. 1 was that the point of greatest leverage for children’s life chances is what happens between the ages of zero and three—that is what we said, although it could equally be what happens between the ages of zero and two. The problem is that, of course, this is the public sector—we are trying to influence the Government and so on—and most of what happens between the ages of zero and two or three does not happen in a state-controlled or influenced setting; it happens at home. That makes things much more difficult.

Why is this a social mobility issue? How children are brought up is not particularly, or does not have to be, dependent on parents’ income, but there is quite a strong correlation. Figures from “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK”, a report made by the previous Government at the end of their term, show that on school readiness, for example, children from the poorest fifth of households reach about a third of the way up the percentile scale at age 3, versus more than 60% of children born into the wealthiest third. There is a bunch of statistics like that.

It is frightening that even toddlers’ cognitive ability test scores vary more dramatically according to their parents’ income than according to innate differences in ability. In the millennium cohort study, which tracks children through time, that gap does not narrow between the ages of three and five; in fact, it seems to widen as children go through school. Why? I am careful not to infer any direct causality. All sorts of factors may be involved, but there are significant differences in some things that people associate with home learning environments, and so on, according to socio-economic groups. In the lowest socio-economic group—the poorest fifth of households—only about 40% of children are read to every day at age 3, as opposed to more than 80% in the top 20%. Again, those figures are from “An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK”. Those things can be tracked with a series of measures, including bed time, and so on.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

The hon. Gentleman may not be aware of work undertaken by the chief medical officer of Scotland, Harry Burns, on brain development in children from families with generations of economic deprivation. It showed that their brains were developing differently: the fight-or-flight part of the brain was overdeveloped. That shows that there is a real link between children’s life opportunities and deprivation.

[Damian Hinds]

Clearly, there is a link—a range of studies suggest different ways in which that link manifests itself—and I do not think that any commentator argues about its existence, but there is nothing inevitable about that; it ought to be possible to equalise children’s life chances. Of course, there are examples of both brilliant and awful parenting in every income bracket. Children’s development is no respecter of the home they happen to have been born into. As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) says,

“it is primarily parents who shape their children’s outcomes—a healthy pregnancy, good mental health, the way that they parent and whether the home environment is educational”.

As he and many others say, what parents do is much more important than who they are.

Home life is difficult territory for the state. I suggest that we need to think harder about how to communicate what is known about successful, positive ways to parent—a quite substantial body of evidence—in a way that does not come across as, and in fact is not, telling people how to bring up their children.

Geography, as well as income group, reveals other interesting differences in early child development. There is a particular difference in London. When people are told this, they assume that child development is worse in London than elsewhere, because of all the issues in a big city like this. However, that is not so. There was another report last week about the different school results of children growing up in London, versus those growing up elsewhere. That is often attributed to the London Challenge, which started in 2003. There are a number of reasons to believe that the London Challenge was not the sole or primary cause of those improvements. One reason to disbelieve that is that the difference in attainment scores for disadvantaged children is apparent way before they get to secondary school; in fact, it is apparent even in pre-school assessments: on average, disadvantaged children in London seem to do about 20% better on the “good level of development” scale than disadvantaged children in the rest of the country. A bunch of things are different about London children and families.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

I have a similar instinct. I want to be careful not to imply a causality that we do not know to exist, but one factor in some ethnic communities is that there is greater multi-generational support and more extended families. Intuitively, it makes sense that such support can be an advantage.

Where does all that leave early child development from the perspective of social mobility? First, the Government have to address, head-on, the thorny question of how to help parents to parent, while keeping in mind the pyramid of need, with acute cases at the top, children born into poverty and disadvantage in the next layer down and everyone else below that. I suggest that that should start pre-natally, which is a big part of the manifesto “The 1,001 Critical Days”. Speaking as a recent dad, it is amazing how little we were told or read about what was going to happen after birth, because we were so fixated on pain and the other things that people worry about at the moment of maternity. Sure Start and Sure Start outreach can play an important part in that. I echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester said on the variety of views on what Sure Start is. On the Select Committee, I always used to ask people to define Sure Start, and even when talking to professionals in the field, I would get different responses.

There is also a question about the role of television and new media in supporting mums and families to bring up children. Bookstart is fantastic, but it could be more targeted. I was surprised when we received free books through our door. If people in the income bracket of all of us in this Chamber are failing to buy books, or to get them out of the library, to read to our children, it is not a problem that will be solved by being given two or three books when the child is born. Like my hon. Friend, I pay massive tribute to the work done by Home-Start UK and others on direct one-to-one support.

[Fiona O'Donnell]

Will the hon. Gentleman also pay tribute to Mumsnet? Mumsnet is a safe, non-judgmental and anonymous place where mothers can chat and seek advice and information.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. Mumsnet is the sort of thing to which I was alluding when I talked about new media. When we talk about Mumsnet, we are obliged to say that Netmums is also available. There is a range of sources of non-judgmental peer-to-peer support, which is vital.

Secondly, the importance of evaluation also comes out of the manifesto “The 1,001 Critical Days”. Intuitively, we all know that there are lots of things that we can do in the earliest years of life that will make a massive difference to a child’s development and later opportunities, but it is difficult to persuade other people of what those things are. Evaluation therefore trades at a huge premium. I pay tribute to the work of the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) on early intervention, which I hope will change our mindset as a polity on how we intervene.

Thirdly, I am not suggesting for a moment that I think I have the answers, but we should not be afraid of talking more about the wider social context and what some of the impacts might be. While respecting people’s life choices and celebrating the diversity of society—families now come in all shapes and sizes—we should not, for the sake of children, be agnostic about what those choices are. We should also see what we can learn from the differences between communities in different parts of the country.