Many of us in this House know the benefits of longer lives. We are enjoying them daily. We know that there are great intergenerational benefits from that. So many grandchildren have relationships with their grandparents in ways that were less common 50 years or so ago. That leads to an enormous increase in societal well-being. We know that this process has not stopped. Demographers forecast that 50% of girls born today will live to be aged 100 or more. These are great societal gains and we should celebrate them.
However, they do not come without risks, of which there are a number, but I will focus on just two. The first is income. The noble Lord, Lord Turner, put it graphically and truthfully in his famous report that longer lives mean we have to work longer, save more or both. There are no other options. Contrast that with the Financial Conduct Authority’s significant survey last week of I think about 13,000 non-pensioner adults, of which 31% had no private pension. They were relying on either the state or their spouse. I will leave it to noble Lords to decide which of those is riskier.
Great progress has been made on auto-enrolment, which we should celebrate, but none of us would have thought this was a particularly sensible system, which effectively puts all the responsibility and risk on the individual to save for their own pension, to have foresight and to be able to make sacrifices. It also shunts all the investment and longevity risks. Not many other countries in the world have such a risky platform for later-life income and we should not think for a second that the job of pension reform is done, even though progress has been made, not least by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and many others.
What is to be done about this? I shall say two things quickly. Keeping in the labour market—particularly helping today’s 50 year-olds keep in the labour market—is fundamental. So is increasing the housing supply radically: that does not necessarily mean more owner-occupiers; what we are concerned about is increasing the supply of good-quality housing which enables people in later life not to have the burden of increased housing costs. If today’s 30 and 40 year-olds have to pay high rents in later life, they have to increase their savings yet further, and they will struggle to do so.
The second big issue we need much more debate about is that because there are going to be many more of us, for many reasons, there is going to be a very significant increase in the demand for and the cost of the NHS and social care. We are not just debating about now, we are also debating what is pretty certainly going to happen over 10 years. There are many reasons for NHS cost increases, and I will not go into them, but longer lives is one of them—if you are alive another 10 years you have many more episodes of health treatment. Secondly, many more older people generate more costs. Between 2010 and 2030 there will be 50% more 65 year-olds and 100% more 85 year-olds and they all go into those last years of life at some point, when their cost burden will increase.
The Lancet in April produced an epidemiological report which said that there will be a 25% increase in the number of disabled people in our society in 10 years’ time. That, for planning purposes, is now and we have, therefore, to face up to the increased health and care demand and cost over the next decade. As part of this, we clearly need a proper social care settlement, as was well said by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull. We cannot fudge this, we have to get the right balance between risk and contribution and between public and private expenditure. Wherever that balance is struck, it will certainly require more public expenditure, either to compensate for caps or to face up to the underfunding of people with moderate needs who are currently going without any social care at all: there will be many more of them over the next decade.
When I talk in private to leading economists and ask for a rough view of what they think the increase in NHS and social care costs will be in 10 years’ time, I get a figure of 2%. That is a very small figure, but a 2% increase in GDP, which is what we are talking about, is equivalent to £1,400 more in taxation for the average family. There is no science in that figure of £1,400, but if we can keep it to less than £1,000, we will be incredibly lucky. This is not the end of civilisation. The issue is that today’s and tomorrow’s younger people have a right and expectation in our society for decent health and social care standards, but we have to recognise that we have to pay for that. No Government, I fear, are going to stand up and say that each family will have to pay £1,000 more tax in 10 years’ time, but we need at least to promote a debate on that and recognise that the funding of that has to have some basic principles. If we are to meet those standards, we have to take account of people’s needs, but also of their means to pay—wealth as well as income—because that is the ignored issue, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, said. We have to take account of both, and age as a filter as to whether you need help or not is an increasingly obsolete measure.
I hope that out of this, and out of our work, we will affirm the fundamental importance of good later life for tomorrow’s older people as well as today’s and face up to some of these significant public policy challenges that are implicit in longer lives and more older people.
]]>The starting point is that we are living longer, and this is a cause for enormous celebration and thanks. There are people in this Chamber and in our society who are alive now who would not have been without the changes and successes of medical science. So we should address this as a fantastic opportunity to consider how we benefit from longer lives, rather than seeing it as a disastrous crisis.
Nevertheless, we have to face up to the scale of change and challenge. The ONS tells us that in 10 years’ time there will be 40% more people aged 85-plus. We know what that implies for the NHS in terms of demand and cost. We know that it means many more people with long-term conditions—there are some estimates in Ready for Ageing? if noble Lords want illustrations—and we know from the five-year forward plan that long-term conditions drive 70% of NHS costs. So one way or another there will be a major increase in the proportion of GDP that we spend on health and social care over the next 10 years. Wanless estimated about 11% of GDP; the King’s Fund report by Barker estimated about 12%. Those give us the scale of increases in GDP spending that we are likely to make by one means or another.
What should we do? I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Fowler; it is not the model that is wrong. The model of the NHS is fundamentally equitable and relatively efficient and low-cost compared to others. The question is essentially: how do we fund an NHS and a social care system to address this?
Prevention is critical; it has been talked of, so I will say only two sentences on it. Wanless said in 2002 that unless we address prevention we will hit a crisis; the NHS Five Year Forward View said that we have now hit that crisis because we failed to address prevention properly. At present there is no ambition, plan, leadership or social debate about how we will make the major shifts in personal attitudes and behaviours that will avoid self-inflicted damage and cost to individuals and the public purse later on. Many lives are poorer because of that, so we have to address it, and although it will be slow to make change, it is fundamental to success.
In conclusion, on how we as a society pay for between 11% and 12% of our GDP on health and social care to benefit from longer lives, the question is clearly how we do it in a way that is fair to all people. We need to recognise that many of today’s pensioners are better off than ever. Pensioner poverty has been largely eradicated, and pensioners have a very privileged tax and benefit status—I celebrate that personally. However, in truth the question is: what is the political agreement with the public? Is it essentially, “We will protect you in a privileged tax and benefit position” or “We will commit as a society and as politicians to protect the quality of health and social care that you will need in an equitable way in our society so that you will benefit from your longer lives”?
]]>Some noble Lords will remember that two years ago this House produced a report, Ready for Ageing?, which set out the enormous opportunities of longer lives. It also made very clear that both individuals and the Government had to change to avoid a series of miserable crises—to quote roughly from it. I fear that what we said then has come to pass and we are now in the midst of a miserable crisis on social care, which I fear will only get worse.
Most of this debate will be spent talking about the immediate crisis. I am not going to do that; it has been well covered by other noble Lords. I will suggest instead that it is essential to look forward five or 10 years in public policy and public debate. The number of people aged over 85 will have increased by 17% by the end of this Parliament. In 10 years’ time, it will have increased by 40%. This is a social revolution and it matters because most formal social care is focused on those aged over 85. Another National Audit Office figure shows that 50% of those aged over 85 require some form of social care. We have clear evidence of rapidly rising demand and have experienced some of it over the past few years.
The Commission on the Future of Health and Social Care said:
“The government appears … to have no strategy whatever to tackle the rising and pressing needs for social care”.
I regretfully agree. This matters massively. We are talking about our oldest old in society and how they are treated with decency. We are talking about very fundamental things—help to get out of bed in the morning, help to wash or to bath and help to put on shoes and socks, let alone other forms of care. It is not some abstract debate about public policy.
What is needed by all of us—the Government as well—to address this? There is not time in seven minutes to give more than a very crude agenda, which most noble Lords know already. We clearly know that people wish to sustain their independence for as long as possible; therefore there is a serious question about what needs to be done and what works to sustain an individual’s independence. We all know we have to grow and support informal care. It is the foundation of care in our society and I am glad the Government are making progress on how to support carers more. We also have to use the asset of more older people and community action to address how to support more frail and ill older people. This will deal only with lower levels of need. You cannot expect some of the really heavy lifting to be done by individuals and volunteers.
That takes us to the fundamental question about what sort of supply of care we need to cope with the certain rapidly increasing demand we face. It is obvious that we need more home care because it is fundamental to making the system work well. We will need more residential care—that is a starting point. ResPublica estimates that 15% more residential care will be needed within five years. Even if it is wrong by three percentage points, it is a significant increase. We need, above all, a much bigger and more skilled care workforce to cope with more residential, domiciliary and palliative care.
Yet the consequence of local authorities, which dominate the market, being starved of funding is that we are driving down supply and weakening the ability to build a workforce for the future. There is not much sign anywhere that anybody has a strategy either for workforce and skills growth or for generating the mixed supply of domiciliary and residential care that our public will need as we go forward. That is staggering and horrific.
I shall give your Lordships one piece of evidence that shows why the care market is going south when it should be going north. Professor Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, wrote to me this week. He said that Care England, which represents carers across all sectors, is now recommending to care providers that they should try to withdraw from the publicly funded provision of social care. That is on-the-record advice, and noble Lords already know why it has been given. It is a shocking situation.
I would like to ask why we are where we are. None of what I have said is news to good officials in the Department of Health, and it is not news to a good, thoughtful and well-informed Minister. What I have said is all known but we are not seeing action—for two reasons. One was set out very well by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and it relates to the hidden misery. Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering in invisible places and, unlike the NHS, they do not have political salience. The second reason—I am not being party-political; your Lordships can see where I now speak from—is that the Ministers in the Department of Health are trapped within the Government’s fiscal and political stance. I do not deny the importance of fiscal balance but it is clearly possible to achieve fiscal balance and better care at the same time if you apply your mind to it and if you give bold political leadership. Fiscal balance is necessary but we also have to grow a market and a workforce to cope with social care.
As I get towards the end of my remarks, I ask your Lordships to consider the irony of a political stance—which many of us understand—that involves seeking to protect pensioners in a very privileged way in relation to tax and benefits. That is what has happened in our society and it is the stance of the current Government. Yet, at the same time, the Government are withdrawing funding, which means that now—and the situation will become even more serious over the next five to 10 years—hundreds of thousands of pensioners will be deprived of the support that they will desperately need in order to live in circumstances where there is respect and decency.
Trivialising matters slightly, we should ask whether many of our older people would be prepared to trade some of the highly privileged tax and welfare benefits that they now get so that they and others who are older can benefit from the required levels of support and decency. A strategy will be required, as well as consistent public funding, to ensure that those in the greatest need are properly cared for. That will require a much more grown-up debate than I have seen any sign of yet on how our welfare settlement needs to adjust in order to cope with the many more older people who will have the opportunity to live longer lives. We are obviously not facing up to the changes that we need to make in public policy but it is urgent that we do so.
]]>I should have mentioned one member of staff who I forgot: Owen Williams. He was our press officer and was genuinely superb. He got almost everything right, except for the final day. At about 10 pm on the night before our launch, we know that we had the lead spot
on the “Today” programme the following day. Then the College of Cardinals elected the Pope. Owen had failed to control the College of Cardinals and we were bumped off the top slot. You cannot get the perfect staff, can you?
In conclusion, the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, was good at giving me strong advice—the committee will recollect this. He did not mince his words and at the end of the process I asked him, “What do you think I should do now?”. He said, basically, “Keep going”, and he made me think that that was the right thing to do. I thank him for that because we have kept going, which is sensible even if we are not really a Select Committee anymore. We will keep going and I will wish to discuss some of the excellent ideas that I have heard in this debate to see how we can pick up on them. I thank all who have spoken.
Motion agreed.
]]>First, I offer warm thanks to a talented and challenging committee. You could not get a better committee of Members to work with than we had. They were superb and their commitment and contribution was very great indeed. I also thank our two special advisers, Howard Glenister and Jonathan Portes; it is particularly good to see Professor Glenister with us today. I also thank our excellent staff, Bina Sudra, Tristan Stubbs, Tansy Hutchinson and our quite remarkable clerk, Susannah Street. I thank Philippa Tudor for the quiet support she gave in the background to this process. We had a remarkably pressured timetable, trying to deal with 70 witnesses in about three months, and she was very helpful indeed. Lastly, I thank the House itself for agreeing to the suggestion for this ad hoc Select Committee.
How, then, do all of us need to change to be ready for this ageing society? Clearly, first, as individuals, our prime responsibility is always to try to manage our own lives ourselves rather than to expect others to do it for us. Clearly, people need to understand the probabilities and risks consequent on ageing—that they may need to save more, to work for longer, to at least make provision for their social care and to think about how they care for others. Individuals also need to engage with the choices and behaviours that are likely to make for a healthier and happier longer life. We have control over quite a lot of things—at least, some of us do.
It may well be that many people need trusted, accessible, person-centred information and evidence to make these informed choices and, hopefully, the behaviour shifts that might go with them. Clearly, civil society itself will have to make changes in how it will need to engage with ageing and how it can better work to support the many more older people in our society. It would be naive to think that the state, either central or local government, was able to support all the increased numbers of people in our society. Yet there is enormous potential if civil society itself engages positively in this and the question, of course, is how we stimulate such a growth of civil action.
Clearly, civil society also needs to understand the choices that we all have to make collectively as a nation to address the changes and some of the pressures and choices consequent on them. Finally, we need to use the assets of many more older people as a resource that is able to contribute to meeting the needs of other older people. That is obvious to many of us and axiomatic. Again, we need to think about how we make it happen in practice.
There needs to be much greater engagement with ageing from businesses generally, large and small. Ageing affects our economic growth, our fiscal position and the supply of labour to businesses, which others may speak on later. Business needs to become much more positive about flexible working for older people, otherwise we will have labour supply problems, less economic growth and less fiscal contribution than we otherwise would. In other countries, particularly Germany, business is actively engaged in these debates. I look forward to hearing invitations to discuss these issues from some of our business leadership figures, not least the CBI.
Local government will clearly be at the fulcrum of ageing at local level. In some local authorities, the scale of the changes in their older population is quite remarkably greater even than the dramatic figures I have given already. Clearly, local government’s role has to go way beyond just the management of social care, although that is already an enormously taxing role for it. It has to address the failures of planning and housing supply for older people at a local level, which clearly cause greater problems for many people and clog up family housing that could be released. Local authorities will need to work with, and generate greater engagement from, the voluntary sector and civil society to increase volunteering, to support attempts to reduce loneliness and isolation, and to contribute towards informal social care. We will need a quite remarkable scale of increase in informal social care. Again, it would be naive to think that the state will deal with all those things by itself. There is, therefore, a very large range of roles for local authorities over and above their new public health role. One would expect to see thoughtful local authorities making estimates of the scale of demand that they will face, and starting to have dialogues with their communities about how they will plan for and address those great opportunities and pressures.
The voluntary sector—which I recognise does enormously good work—will itself want to consider, individually and collectively, how it will need to change
to make a greater contribution to meeting the needs of an ageing society. I doubt that doing what it has done in the past, or even doing more of what it has done in the past, would be adequate or sufficient. Therefore, we have already started discussions with some of the key voluntary sector organisations about how they need to assess the scale of future need and how they will raise their game to meet the future needs that will be required of our society.
Public health at national and local level is, I think it is obvious to all of us, a central issue in how we address ageing. I will give one simple illustration. If, over the next 15 years, we were able to shift the behaviours of many people in our society so that they made healthier lifestyle choices about diet, weight, exercise, smoking and drugs—and we all know ourselves how difficult some of those resistances are—the personal, fiscal and economic benefits would be remarkable. I argue, both to government and to civil society: think of what we have done on smoking, but also think of how we make these changes. They start to make coping for an ageing society more bearable in public policy terms, but they also make individuals’ lives that much happier and more fulfilled if they are able to enjoy them in that way.
On the NHS, I think we would all acknowledge that the fact that we are living longer is due in part to the great success of medical science and of the NHS itself, combined with many people making better lifestyle choices. That, therefore, is to be celebrated. Nevertheless, an ageing society is by far the biggest challenge that the NHS has faced since its foundation. I will give three reasons why that is the case. First, there will be an enormous increase in the number of long-term conditions in our society, consequent on many more older people, many more much older, older people, and the propensity that that causes to generate long-term conditions. In the past you died of certain conditions; now you live many years longer with those long-term conditions. That is a wonder, but it has challenges.
Secondly, there will obviously be very great increases in cost for the NHS and for social care, consequent on that increase in long-term conditions and social care needs itself, so we will see remarkable increases in cost hitting the system as well. Thirdly, every bit of evidence we received, and all the expert opinion—including the briefing noble Lords have received from the NHS Confederation—is of one mind that the system needs to go through quite a remarkable change so that it moves to the better management of long-term conditions in the community and away from what is essentially an acute and hospital-centric focus. Everybody broadly agrees with that diagnosis; the challenge is how it is going to be made to happen.
The problem—without wishing to be party-political for a second—is that politicians do not always give the impression that they are facing up to the scale of those three issues: the scale of increased demand, increased cost and how to bring about that system change. We all hope that NHS England, when it produces its strategy in the autumn, will set out a clear vision as to how that should be addressed, both assessing the demand and setting out how it thinks the system should change to do so. However, even if it does that
well, it will not be able to do it without clear, strong, consistent political leadership, preferably supported by all political parties.
How has central government responded to our call for action? First, we all recognise that central government is not responsible for all these challenges. They are issues for all of us. However, many of us consider that central government is responsible for leading the debate and setting out the issues so that we as a society can face them rather than hide from them. It is also remarkable that there was no rebuttal in the Government’s response of the fundamental evidence and analysis that the committee set out in its paper. They did not say that we got it wrong; they were almost totally silent on that. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the diagnosis we presented was reasonably accurate. That has been the view of many experts, as well.
We were disappointed not to see from the Government a vision statement, or a commitment to produce some sort of vision, about what they think we should do for our older society in future, and some sort of outline of how, as a society collectively—central government and civil society—we should go about making that vision a reality. They have also resisted our request to set out an honest debate with the public about the opportunities, challenges and changes. We argued for a White Paper and a Green Paper to set out the issues so that we could all engage with them seriously. They did not respond to that. In part I know why, but it is a great shame, because that is what we all need.
In my final few minutes, I will say a little about what we have done to maximise engagement with the Government on this report. Our committee ceased to exist in March, but we chose to ignore that and to continue having very vigorous discussions among ourselves, and excellent meetings with Ministers and senior civil servants. We tended to go in twos, as is our way, whenever we could. I met five or six Ministers, virtually all the top civil servants relevant to this, and special advisers, and I thank them all. Without exception, the conversations were thoughtful, and with many officials we could discuss both policy and politics—realities—at the same time, because those things are real.
Next we should acknowledge that the Government have done some very good things in a difficult environment. They have made remarkable progress on pensions reform and on putting into practice the fundamentals of Turner. Steve Webb is to be commended on that, in an incredibly difficult fiscal context. That is good progress, but, as we said, it is the start, not the end of the story.
The situation is similar with Norman Lamb and social care. It is not the thing to mention this week, but we should recognise that Dilnot, even if you did not think that it was the perfect answer, was a brave and difficult thing to do, and was not always welcomed by the Treasury. Again, that is to be commended; it gives us a basis to move forward. We will have to get the details right as we work on it.
We have had discussions with Mark Prisk, the Housing Minister, as well as with Norman Lamb. We had excellent discussions in closed seminars about what the report said, and there was a recognition in
the Government’s response that there were significant failures in current policy and practice. The market in specialist housing for older people does not appear to be working, and there is a need to do something about that. Again, I commend the honesty and engagement that we have had there.
I wish I could be as positive everywhere, but, as noble Lords will sense, I am not going to be. What still amazes us as a committee is that we have not seen from the Department of Health any published data of its estimation of the increasing demand consequent on the absolutely certain increase in the number of older people. Perhaps we will get that from NHS England; let us hope so. It is fundamental to the situation. When you know that you will face massive increases in demand, you make some assessment of what that will look like and you then think about what it implies.
Secondly, there is still a doubt over the Government’s narrative that the massive systems changes that we all recognise need to happen will just come about organically in a bottom-up process. Clearly, the leadership of the NHS and the health service generally looks for clear, solid, consistent ministerial support for these changes. That is difficult, but they will not happen without it. Lastly, we need an honest conversation between politicians—hopefully of all parties—and the public about the changes that our NHS will face.
I am coming towards the end. I will now deal with the fiscal implications of this. As noble Lords will know, the dependency ratio is obviously worsening as a consequence of these demographics, and I will not go into detail on that. Many more older people, and older old people, will mean much more spending on pensions, health and social care. It is axiomatic that that will happen. The debate is about how much of that extra expenditure should be paid for by the state out of taxation and how much of it should be paid for by individuals themselves. However, it will have to be paid for one way or the other because our society will demand a level of care and healthcare befitting a civilised society. Therefore, we must face up to a discussion on that.
Apart from what the Nuffield Foundation and the IFS have produced, to date we have not seen much indication of the scale of that future cost. However, the material that has been produced is frightening enough. It signals a gap of at least £35 billion, and probably £54 billion, by 2021-22. The IFS told me that those figures had been reached just by looking at the 4% per annum historical trends; not by assessing the elemental increase in demand consequent on having more older people with long-term conditions, so I think the figures, are, if anything, likely to be an underestimate. We have to discuss as a society the implications of how we fund these increased public service costs. There are no right or simple answers to that, but thoughtful discussion, preferably across the party divide, would be helpful. Ideally, I think that some Turner-style process that commanded cross-party support would be a healthy approach.
We have not seen what we hoped for from the Government in terms of a Green Paper or even a ministerial subgroup to look at these issues. However,
I hope that all is not lost. We are 18 months away from an election. Although I have been putting these questions to the Government, it seems to me they are equally questions for all three political parties. We hope that all three political parties engage seriously with these questions over the next 18 months, and, we hope, do so in a more transparent way so that there is a proper engagement by experts in their thinking about how we as a society address these challenges.
I am pleased to say that one of the consequences of our work is that eight major charities came together into the Ready for Ageing Alliance. They will work with our committee and maintain a constant dialogue with experts and politicians about these issues over the next 18 months. No doubt they will inspect the election manifestos, and the work behind them, of all the major parties.
As noble Lords sense, my committee members and I think that these are important issues. We will not let them go. We look forward to further discussions in the House and with wider and civil society about them. The benefits of getting this right are enormous, but if we are in denial on these issues we will massively underestimate those benefits.
]]>It is unarguable that the NHS and social care will face a massive increase in demand and cost. It is axiomatic, even though not done, that we have to have a major service redesign, as Sir David Nicholson said today. However—and this is different—it would be naive to think that the process of massive service
redesign, given the time and complexity of doing it, will by itself fund the significant gap consequent on the increase in demand. We will, therefore, have to have a debate, not only about service redesign but also about how we fund the NHS going forward.
For my part, I hope we abide by the principles of the fundamental services being free at the point of use. That requires us to have a wider debate about the welfare settlement of our society, given the very considerable increase in demand and costs consequent on our ageing society. That, in short, is what I will say, so your Lordships can nod off if you do not want to hear the rest.
Those who have glimpsed the report will know it, but I will try to encapsulate the situation on ageing now. In the current decade there is going to be a 40% increase in the number of people aged 85-plus: it is not a future change. The numbers who are 85-plus will increase by 100% in the two decades 2010 to 2030. Largely consequent on that, we will see a quite remarkable increase in the number of long-term conditions experienced by those older people.
We were staggered to find that there is no public forecast data on demand of that sort published by the Department of Health or the NHS. We therefore had to ask eminent academic epidemiologists to do forecasts for us, by applying current and forecast incidence rates to the future certainty of the age cohorts that we know. The illustrations showed increases of between 45% and 90% in the five main chronic conditions in the long term. The number of those with multiple conditions will increase from 1.2 million in 2008 to 1.9 million in 2018, and those needing social care and daily assistance will increase by 90% between 2010 and 2030. It is therefore clear that there will be a massive increase in demand and it would be of great help if NHS England, if not the Department of Health, would put out some clear evidence on why demand increases are likely. It will help an honest public debate across society.
I will not go on but it is obvious that because the number of long-term conditions will increase massively—they drive roughly 70% of health and social care costs—there will also be a massive increase in those costs. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patel, that David Nicholson is clear in what he said today but is underestimating the scale of the challenge. Nuffield and others state that £40 billion-plus is more likely to be the sort of funding gap that we will face by 2021-22, if you consider health and social care together.
We should therefore beware of the myths being portrayed, whereby if we do what we have to do—integrate health and social care, increase prevention, shift from an acute focus to a community and primary-focused model, and get more older people out of hospital—that in itself will crack the funding problem. It will not do so because all those changes will take a considerable time, even if there is stronger political leadership on these changes than we have seen from any political party so far. These are big systemic changes that will take 10 years and require investment. The benefits will not always be cashable and there will be double running costs while the changes are being made. Thinking that
they will produce short-term savings is naive, although I do not for a second belittle the importance of going for those big changes.
If one looks at the context of continuing public deficits in 2015-16 and high levels of public sector debt, a difficult challenge is facing whichever Government address these issues. They have to be looked at in the wider context, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord McColl, that the more that we can get at least some attempt at cross-party discussions about the reality of this situation, the better for our society.
]]>The points are as follows. If we adopt the proposal on the Order Paper, we are much more likely to be able to have timely debates on issues that the public think are important and we will be seen to be relevant. That is important; it was one of the fundamental issues that the Goodlad report affirmed. Secondly, unlike in the Commons, these issues are not divisible. That is important for our traditions. The Government do not have to fear what they fear in the Commons-that you have a debate on some contentious issue leading to a headline story that the Lords voted X or Y. That would not happen and it is in keeping with our traditions that it should not. That ought to allow the Government and the coalition parties who are signatories to the letter to relax a little bit on this issue. Thirdly, the proposal makes no change to the existing procedure for QSDs. Those who are beloved of ballots will still be able to go in for ballots for a number of QSDs; that is going to continue. Finally, we all know that the Government can ensure that there is a debate on any issue that they judge to be topical and important whenever they wish to do so. Back-Benchers ought to be able to do the same.
]]>I thank the House and the Liaison Committee on behalf of my committee, which produced its report, Ready for Ageing?. It was a great privilege to have the opportunity to do that. We are delighted that the membership of the committee was so well supported by the staff and that the issue has caught the public's attention. However, I draw attention to a small problem with ad hoc Select Committees which I hope can be discussed at a later date. My committee, which published its report last week, has now ceased to exist. If the aim of the House in undertaking Select Committee work is not simply to publish a piece of paper but to have an impact on public policy and debate, that is a fundamental problem. To illustrate it crisply, how the Government respond and how the political parties think about such an issue is of fundamental importance. Although my committee has ceased to exist, it will continue to meet because we recognise that in the next two months or so we need to meet Sir Jeremy Heywood, Sir Bob Kerslake, a couple of Permanent Secretaries and senior figures from each political party. As I say, the clerks have supported us superbly. I know how to use a telephone but, clearly, if you want your ad hoc committees to have an impact, you have to provide the sort of support I have suggested: that is, an administrator for one day a week for six months to support the follow-through.
]]>I will advance the argument as to why. I start by reflecting on how government works. Many of us know how government works, either from the outside or the inside. Governments, quite rightly, are in power to do things. They have a manifesto-or even a modern version of it in the coalition agreement-and are massively busy and challenged, and are committed to delivering on what they think is either their manifesto or coalition programme and, they hope, getting another innings after the next election. Legislation is a necessary evil. It is a distraction from what Ministers really want to do but is necessary because that is how our constitution works. By and large, they want to get their legislation through the House as quickly, and with as little damage to it, as possible.
Ministers also believe they are right. Civil servants believe they are right, by and large, because they are usually more expert on a subject than most parliamentarians. Ministers believe they are right because they have to, otherwise they would not have the confidence to sustain doing a difficult job. That sense of confidence as a Minister or as an official does not make you sufficiently persuadable to change your mind, particularly when you have got to the position where you have committed your Government to legislation, in either primary or secondary form. It is not obvious that the processes of the House themselves will naturally lead Ministers to change their minds. Why should we expect that they will do so?
We know how we change their minds on primary legislation but let us consider, as my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Butler, has spelled out, what happens on secondary legislation. We cannot amend it, and it is quite right that we cannot amend it, for good technical reasons which I will not go into. We decide, although we are able to reject it, that we will not do so. By our own self-denying ordinances, we can neither amend nor reject an instrument: so why do we assume that that is going to change anything? The only thing that shifts Ministers and shifts policy is either the fear or reality of adverse publicity, or a defeat. That is a statement, for most of us, of the blindingly obvious. We get zero publicity on primary legislation, except when there is a defeat, and we get even less publicity-if you can have a negative-on any publicity about secondary instruments, for pretty obvious reasons. It is hardly the stuff of the Dog and Duck. On that argument, we have a situation where it is not the media that will change Ministers' minds but only defeats. However, we have said that we will never defeat the Government, for reasons that I struggle to understand.
The consequence of this-this is my central argument-is that the legislation that comes in through one door, in all its hundreds of pieces, exits the other door in all those hundreds totally unchanged. So what have we done in this processing factory to affect that legislation? I am open to persuasion that in some way the feel or quality of the aura of the legislation is better but the words are exactly the same. So what are we doing? Where is the evidence we are improving secondary legislation by our processes? I struggle to understand it. If noble Lords accept my argument-from too many years, probably, serving on the merits committee-that the processes are superb but that what the Chamber itself does is fundamentally flawed because it will not do anything about it when it thinks it is wrong, what should we do about it?
I will not waste your Lordships' time on considering the alternative mechanisms. Wakeham made a very sensible recommendation, which was perfectly possible and came from a totally eminent committee. It was a very sane and sensible proposal. I thought that Goodlad, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Butler, made an equally sensible one. These recommendations are significantly less frightening than our convention on primary legislation.
We defeat primary legislation up hill and down dale whenever we do not like the policy. It would be completely improper to defeat a secondary instrument when we did not like the policy because that would be to frustrate the will of Parliament, which had put that policy into practice in the primary legislation. So the only way that this House can legitimately reject a secondary instrument is because it is fundamentally flawed in some way, either in its execution or its policy design, or it does not actually reflect the instrument. In such cases, if the House thinks it is flawed, it ought to have the guts to do something about it and reject it.
Why do we get so excited about that? I do not understand it. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said so clearly, you probably could not bring an SI back next week but you could certainly bring an SI back in a month's time with a better Explanatory Memorandum explaining why you thought the House was wrong and therefore you relaid the same order, or substantially the same order; or you said you had listened to the House and you thought it could be improved, in which case you would lay down a secondary order. The Government would lose a month or two on their processes; they might lose a bit of face-I do not think they would lose much face as not many people are watching-but as a consequence the House would have added something to the process.
Unless we are prepared to do something like that, with the greatest courtesy to my good friends on the committee, we are largely open to the charge of wasting time by debating these things, because debates by themselves change nothing. Unless we are prepared to reject bad secondary legislation, we would be better doing other things with our lives.
]]>Nevertheless, the Leader of the House has given us some pointers. First, a number of us are bound to wish to have a discussion with him. Without doubt, with his usual good grace, he will give us time. Our discussion with him will be about on which elements of the changes that have been strongly supported from all corners of this House we can move forward. As he implies, ultimately, it is not what I think or even he, from his eminence, thinks; it is what this House thinks that it wants to do on some of these issues. We will discuss with him the procedures that are there for us to explore how some of these things can be fairly, without too much manipulation, brought before the House in the ways in which they were expressed in the Goodlad report and, no doubt, informed by good guidance about what is practical. I think that the House would welcome it if we did that in a sensible and measured way. I thank again all who have spoken so strongly and supportively of the need for sensible, progressive change.
Motion agreed.
]]>I will argue how crucial it is now that we look afresh at how we make better use of our talents and the skills of our Members, fundamentally better to fulfil the functions of the House as set out on the Order Paper. I will argue that it is timely to do so. We know now that fundamental change to the composition of the House is off the agenda, at least for the immediate future. You can make your own guess, but I would expect that the present incumbents, if we are fortunate, may well be here in 10 years' time. That therefore increases the necessity of looking at our processes to see whether we can improve them.
Next, it is right to look at this again because there is unfinished business. The Leader helpfully set up a Leader's Group, chaired very ably by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, but many of those recommendations, some of the most important ones, have not yet come before the House for discussion and decision. It is timely for many of them to do so.
Lastly, there are wider issues, and none of us will be able to resist some of the temptation of straying into them. However, the fundamental issue should be about completing the Goodlad business that was started and is not yet at its end.
I turn to what was in the Goodlad report. My apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, for using the abbreviation; he will know what I mean by that. The report looked at the scrutiny of legislation. That matters. We spend most of our time on it; it is our most important function. The volume and complexity of legislation have increased enormously over recent decades. We do not do a bad job, but we do not do a good enough job either. That is not always helped by the fact that Governments of whatever party have a persistent disease of rushing Bills into the House before they are properly ready and prepared.
There are two fundamental recommendations in Goodlad which would have helped to address that. The first was establishing a presumption that there should be pre-legislative scrutiny on all important Bills, particularly those which made major policy shift and/or had not had full consultation via Green Papers or White Papers. The second was a test of legislative preparedness before a Bill had its Second Reading to ensure that some basic process tests had been fulfilled. This may sound tedious and unnecessary, but I ask noble Lords to reflect on the Health and Social Care Bill that came into this House. I hope that the Health and Social Care Act works because, for most of us, the improvement of the NHS is fundamentally important to the cohesion, health and well- being of our society. But it was an object lesson in how not to proceed. I do not make that as a party-political point. The Government of whom I was a Minister was, at times, guilty of similar failings. I argue that a fundamental change like that needed the fullest consultation before the Government had firmly made up their mind. That is why pre-legislative scrutiny matters: because Governments are more flexible before they and their officials have committed themselves in that way. If we had had pre-legislative scrutiny, and if we had had tests of legislative preparedness, I am confident that the Health and Social Care Bill would have had an easier passage, probably a quicker one, and I would have expected that it would have been a better Act at the end of the process.
The Goodlad report also recommended that we should change some of our processes. The primary recommendation was that most Bills should go into Grand Committee. I will not go on in detail about that; we have debated it. However, the Goodlad proposal was not of course the proposal on which the House voted. I hope that at some stage-not in the near future but at some stage-we will come back to the proposal that most Bills should be scrutinised in Grand Committee. The process of scrutiny is evidentially better there than it usually is on the Floor of the House.
On secondary legislation, Goodlad recommended what had been recommended by the Wakeham commission previously: that the convention on secondary legislation that the House does not usually strike down and defeat SIs would be better replaced by a convention that essentially said that the House should use a power to defer and ask the Government to think again. That is absolutely consistent with what we do on primary legislation, and the benefits of doing it on secondary legislation are for the once or twice a year when there are manifestly failings in an SI brought before the House, either because its policy or processes are unclear or its consultation has been poor. The Government would be invited to think again about such an instrument and bring it back in a month's time with amendments or with a better argumentation as to why that SI should stand. We would have better SIs as a consequence because officials and Ministers would be aware of this potential delaying power and would therefore do their homework better. That is not to imply that the quality of SIs is generally poor, because it is not; it has improved.
Those are some of the changes on legislative process that this House has within its power to make relatively simply, at relatively little cost. The public would be better served if we did so.
This House is an important forum for debate and inquiry. We do not get that much attention in the wider world. Sometimes, that is the media's fault; sometimes, it is our own. The question for us, though, is how we make better use of our time and skills to be an effective forum for debate and inquiry. I shall make three simple points.
First, Goodlad argued that the process for choosing Back-Bench debates was somewhat arcane-some of us would say asinine. Essentially, the Government can table a debate on a topic that they think is important, relevant or even urgent at any time they wish to do so. Back-Benchers are not able in this House to do that. The only mechanism by which they can do so is if they win the lottery, which is what, of course, the ballot is, and there is no guarantee that the name that comes out of the hat will meet the test of being important or topical. Alternatively, they can put their name down for a Question for Short Debate. We are now debating issues on Questions for Short Debate that were tabled five months ago. Therefore, it is impossible by that mechanism to use QSDs to raise timely and urgent issues. There is something fundamentally flawed in the way in which we select topics for Back-Bench debates. Goodlad recommended a very simple, very low-cost process for doing so, whereby the Back-Bench Members of this House control that process. I very much hope that we will discuss that before long.
Secondly, recommendations that Goodlad made that have been introduced, and I was delighted to see them, were to establish two ad hoc sub-committees. They were not introduced in exactly the way that Goodlad recommended them, but it could well be that the Leader of the House was right on this occasion, as he often is, to recommend that they be short and sharp rather than standing or long-standing. Two are under way, on SMEs and on public service and demographic change, and they will report by Easter. There will be two new ones next year. Therefore, it is clear that we should focus on that issue and try to ensure that we have two excellent topics for the successor committees. I hope that, in time, we will recognise that this is one of the best possible ways of harnessing the talent in this House and that we have more such ad hoc sub-committees. However, that will depend on whether we can demonstrate that there are good topics that need to be so debated.
Thirdly, we need to find ways of getting on with debates on Select Committee reports. It is not healthy that a committee works very hard to produce a report and that it has then to wait sometimes weeks and months before there is a debate on it.
Transparency was touched on in Goodlad, although perhaps with not quite that language. Transparency is an objective of this Government and I commend them for it. It is healthy for public life and public policy if most of our processes are more transparent and thereby accessible to the public and the wider world. However, public understanding of and involvement in the House of Lords, while they have improved, are still not good enough. Members' own understanding of its processes and decisions is often shaky and weak-I think, after 10 or 12 years here, I begin to understand how it works, but I would not like to sit a GCSE on the subject.
One illustration-I am not just teasing the Front Benches on this-is the way in which the usual channels work. The processes of the usual channels are necessary-I do not think that the usual channels are malign, or at least not usually-but it is clear that many Members do not understand how they work. Goodlad argued that it would be healthy if the Leader looked at how we could make the workings of the usual channels more understandable and thereby accessible to the wider membership of the House. That is necessary and I hope that it happens before long. It would also be helpful to the wider public.
I say with tact that the usual channels are extremely influential in the way in which they manage the business of the House and are extremely influential in the major committees of the House. The consequence can be, no doubt unintentionally, that they have quite an influence on how Back-Bench issues are addressed as well. The House should take ownership of its own Back-Bench business within the time that is allocated to it as a fundamental principle. It does not always feel as if that occurs. I shall illustrate the point by mentioning again the two new ad hoc committees that will be set up next April. How many Members of the House are aware that there will be two new ad hoc committees? How many Members of the House are aware of any process by which they can put forward suggestions? Some Members are, but very many are not. How many members of the public are aware that two new ad hoc sub-committees will be set up next year? There is nothing wicked here, but it would be a cleaner process if the wider world and ourselves were aware that there were two slots for ad hoc sub-committees next year. They would thereby be well sited on the potential for putting in argumentations for them and aware of the criteria that will be used for selection of those and where the decisions will be made. Nothing is wrong with what is happening at present, but that would certainly be a better process.
I shall touch very briefly on wider issues. The elephant in this Chamber, which you can all see, is that this House is too big. It frustrates the ability of new Members and many older Members to participate and it damages our credibility to some extent. It is self-evident that, if we are meant to be a House of expertise doing good scrutiny, we need to refresh and bring in new talent. Those two objectives are in conflict and the way of resolving them is obvious to us all: there has to be some process of retirement. Such a process will not be easy or even possible unless a government of the day are prepared to introduce legislation. However, it is necessary, as otherwise the House will clog up and become discredited, or we will fail to bring in sufficient new talent, which is clearly necessary.
If the scrutiny of legislation is our fundamental task, are the resources available to opposition Front Benches, of whatever party is in power, or to Members sufficient to do that? I have taken part in the scrutiny of legislation, and your Lordships know as well as I do the process. It is almost impossible unless you are lawyer to engage in the amendments and their processes without external support. That can be helpful and it involves the wider world, but it can also lead to risks. I also hope that we will as a House recognise that we have to champion Back-Bench interests, not in the interest of Back-Benchers per se but in the interest of better scrutiny, better debate and a better holding of the Government to account.
In conclusion, I am arguing that the priority is to make the case for a Back-Bench debates committee as soon as possible, and bring that before the Liaison Committee when we have completed making the case; in time, to bring in a process for a legislative standards committee; to review the transparency of our processes with a view to improving them; and, lastly, I urge all Back-Benchers, and even Front-Benchers, to persist in the important task of improving the processes of this House, because we have an obligation to the public we serve to do so.
]]>In this report from the Liaison Committee we consider some of the significant areas for improvement to the working practices of this House which, in many previous debates, have been strongly argued for by many Members from all parts of the House. I can be brief because they come to relatively few fundamental points.
First, most Members of the House believe that if we spent more time on pre-legislative scrutiny of more Bills, we would have better legislation. This recommendation both makes that possible and starts an increase in the resources going to pre-legislative scrutiny, which is to be commended.
Secondly, many of us have argued for years that we should carry out post-legislative scrutiny. We should look, in a sober, thoughtful and informed way, at the effects of the legislation that we pass. The Commons is doing some but we have done nothing. We have not yet brought our considerable expertise and knowledge of many of the aspects on which we legislate to looking at whether the legislation achieves its objectives-and if not, why not-so that we can better inform both that policy area and, more significantly, our own processes of scrutiny of legislation.
Thirdly, the Liaison Committee makes a recommendation for a process to bring in additional ad hoc committees. The Leader of the House will know that I would not have brought it in in exactly that way but, nevertheless, it is to be welcomed in terms of what it would allow the House to do. It would allow the House to identify a topic of significant domestic policy interest which is potentially cross-cutting, and so in no way duplicate the work of the Commons; and it would have a short remit of a year in which to bring forward an influential and reflective report. There are two good examples there and I shall spend 30 seconds speaking on one of them. Most of us know that the significant demographic changes in our society will have a fundamental effect on public services-the demand for them, their cost, and the impact of that-and yet no-one in either House has as yet looked at that issue. It cries out for a short, sharp, well-informed and expert committee of this House, drawing on experts from outside. It is a topic to which the House would bring great value.
One of the more contentious elements of the Goodlad report was the recommendation that this House should be better at reviewing its committees as they exist. In the past the House has sometimes tried to do this and, for obvious reasons, it is painful. There is great resistance to making any change to the existing architecture of committees. Why so? It is because people develop passion, commitment, and expertise. Everything that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, and everything that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, so eloquently said in his argumentation of the value that the EU Committee has brought to this House, is true. However, unfortunately that is not the point. The point is that unless the House can continue to increase its resources to allow new topics to be studied, there will always be a starvation of the issues that are not being debated because the existing agenda dominates the resources, and existing interests in the House are eloquent in its defence. I respect their doing so-I would do the same myself-but that squeezes out anything new to the disadvantage of the House.
If, the House considers that it can have only one net addition, the Liaison Committee would then have the invidious task of deciding that we did not do more pre-legislative scrutiny, that we did not start post-legislative scrutiny, and that we did not have a process whereby we selected a couple of topics of cross-cutting domestic policy to look at each year. That would be regrettable. I regret that the Science and Technology Committee and the EU Committee are to be reduced, but that is necessary in circumstances where we do not have limitless resources. They can both make their case in a year's time as to why they should be increased.
However, the thrust of the report essentially is that we would be a better House if we accept these recommendations. It would involve substantially more of the expertise in the House which currently has no voice in our affairs because some noble Lords do not have a seat on a committee of the House and are longing to have that opportunity. For those reasons, I strongly support the Liaison Committee's recommendations.
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