Income Equality and Sustainability

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

I strongly agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Young, has just said. The last Labour Government introduced one higher band in respect of council tax. The noble Lord’s pro1posal for another higher band and using the resources for social care should be taken forward.

I, too, join the tribute to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York. As a spiritual and a pastoral leader, he has touched the lives of many of us, and his international work has also been seminal. Most of us will never forget the way he took Mugabe to task—particularly Zimbabweans.

On the big issue of youth poverty that he has raised and what we do about it in the coronavirus crisis, I shall follow my noble friend Lord Boateng and make a few concrete suggestions. I shall just rattle through them almost like tweets as we have so little time.

First, as my noble friend said, we should revisit the two-child rule. This relates to families who are on benefits and it goes to the heart of poverty. It is completely unjustifiable, and it targets further poverty on the poor, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.

Secondly, everyone in the education world knows that there is a big crisis at the moment over the provision of free school meals, because the voucher system is not working and the meals are not being provided in schools. We need a quick and targeted fix for this. The best proposal I can come up with about what we should do immediately is to double child benefit—which is to some to extent targeted because it is taxed away for the better off—for the duration of the crisis so that families have the money they need for schools meals rather than complicated school meal vouchers.

Thirdly, we need to give people the right to repeat years in school, because a lot of young people are losing out on education at the moment.

Fourthly, we need to give people the right to do additional years of further education, because a lot of young people are going to be unemployed or will not get the results they need. That should be tied into an urgent review of apprenticeships and the right of people to study in FE if they cannot get apprenticeships because the numbers are falling.

Finally, on university fees, it is clearly unconscionable that students should have to pay fees for substandard courses from this October. The Government should have either a reduced fee or no fee for next year.