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Tag: 2002

  • David Willetts – 2002 “Our Commitment to the People” Speech

    David Willetts – 2002 “Our Commitment to the People” Speech

    The speech made by David Willetts on 29 May 2002.

    Two weeks ago, I spent the night on the streets of London listening to people who have slipped through the social safety net or who are being failed by public services. I heard at first hand the problems faced by the homeless from a group of people sleeping rough outside Westminster Cathedral.

    Engaging people, listening to their problems and learning how we might help them in the future lies at the heart of the Conservative Party’s One Nation Hearings. My Shadow Cabinet colleagues and I are visiting places and meeting people that politicians have too often forgotten about.

    Sometimes we have to overcome cynicism from the people we meet. They start by thinking we are just there for a good photo-opportunity. We can prove them wrong as we develop policies that tackle Britain’s social problems.

    But I also encounter cynicism from another quarter, from some Conservatives themselves.

    Some think the One Nation Hearings and helping the vulnerable are just a phase we have to go through until we can get back to issues such as the Euro and taxation.

    Others believe our emphasis on improving public services and reconnecting with people is some how selling out on everything we stood for in the 1980s.

    Well I don’t see it at that way. Helping the vulnerable is not a re-launch of the Party, nor is it a repudiation of our beliefs, it is a rediscovery of a Conservative tradition dating back some 200 years.

    It was Edmund Burke who first talked about having ‘a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve’. Helping people and making lives better has always been as important to Conservatives as defending traditions and institutions. One of the reasons why we won those heroic landslide victories throughout the 1980s was that people could see that above all we were going to make Britain a better place by transforming its economic performance. And one of the reasons why we lost so badly in 1997 and again in 2001 was that we failed to convey a compelling sense that we were going to tackle the new problems facing contemporary Britain.

    We left our country in 1997 in far better shape than we found it in 1979. We had to turn round one of Europe’s sickest economies and make it one of Europe’s most dynamic and successful ones. We achieved that, and we can feel proud of that achievement.

    But we have paid a price for that very success. It has left many reasonable, normal, middle-of-the-road, apolitical British men and women with a quite dreadful sense of what Conservatives are like. They think we are obsessed with economics. They think we are like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. There is and always has been more to Conservatism than economics. That means above all showing we understand that there is such a thing as society.

    One way of tackling that perception of what Conservatives are like is to argue that it was unfair all along and does not do justice to our record in government. Labour would love us to adopt that approach. There is nothing they would like more than for us to be endlessly re-fighting the 1997 General Election. Because we did, after all lose it by a landslide.

    Nor will it do just to show that the Labour Government is turning out to be as bad as many people thought we were by the end. This is a Government that is mediocre in most things apart from winning elections. But just trying to show how bad it is won’t do on its own. Our central task is to show that we will make a better government than Labour when the next election comes in 2005 or 2006. And that means showing that we as a Party want to tackle the concerns that are at the top of the electorate’s agenda. This means talking and behaving in a way that makes sense to Britain in 2002. That is why helping the vulnerable is so important.

    Over the past few weeks, I have seen three different snapshots of Britain at three One Nation Hearings. One of the most striking things I saw was the extent to which helping vulnerable people must not be a passive, one-way, exercise. It has to be about helping people to achieve greater control over their own lives, as much as providing them with money and services.

    In Birmingham, for example, I saw the success of projects that help drug abusers to combat their addiction and to gain gradual control back over their own lives. Many charities are much more effective that the public sector in this area because they treat people as individuals. We need to learn from the strengths of such initiatives and make it possible for them to do more.

    In Kent, I saw how the local council is working hard to help the most vulnerable people escape from dependency on welfare. Through an innovative agreement with the Treasury, some of the savings can be passed back and the result could be improved local services. The result is less reliance on welfare, more independence for vulnerable people and better local services.

    In London, I learnt more about the causes of homelessness. One of the people that I met had been given a one-bedroom flat, but he had returned to the streets because he felt less isolated there. It is no good offering people one-bedroom flats if they have such a strong identity as a group that this does not help them escape homelessness.

    We’ve called these our One Nation Hearings because they rest on the Conservative belief that we have obligations to our fellow citizens in all corners of our country.

    Helping the vulnerable isn’t just a campaign, it’s what elected Conservatives do day in and day out. A fact acknowledged even by this Government which is about to give two London Tory Councils the only perfect scores in the country for the way the are dealing with social services.

    Our approach to helping people is a serious commitment. It has to be reflected in the way we Conservatives conduct our politics.

    We must talk to the electorate in a way that does not reinforce their worst fears about what Conservatives are like. When we were in government we did many things which were right but unpopular. It was easy to draw the extremely dangerous – and fallacious – conclusion that unless something was unpopular it couldn’t possibly be right. There is no special virtue in a modern democracy in being disliked. It is not a badge of honour somehow confirming that what you are saying must be true if uncomfortable.

    We need to talk more about ends and less about means. We all became policy wonks, lovingly analysing the details of our policies but failing to communicate what they were for. We would endlessly debate the internal market in the NHS for example, whilst failing to communicate that we did actually want patients to have better health care and that was the point of the whole exercise. That’s why we don’t need to rush into a host of detailed policies. No matter how good a policy we came up with it would be pointless unless first of all people had registered that the purpose of the whole exercise was to make their lives better. If they don’t think that, then, no matter how good the policy it won’t get a fair hearing.

    We are also recognising that economic change means social change as well. You can’t have one without the other. A dynamic, enterprising and mobile economy is incompatible with a society stuck in aspic. Our economic changes unleashed a whole set of social changes too. Some of them were good and some of them weren’t. Let me give you some examples.

    If there is one single group that benefited more from the transformation of Britain after 1979 it was women aged 20-40. Their opportunities in life have been transformed as education and employment opportunities were opened up to them on a far greater scale than ever before. That would not have happened in an old-style corporatist Britain dominated by heavy industry and even heavier unions. We should have been proud of that but for some reason the message never got through.

    Let me given you a second example – London. London has been transformed in the last 15 years. It is quite simply, once more, one of the world’s great cities. It is dynamic, enterprising and cosmopolitan and diverse. Without the Big Bang in the City or the transformation of docklands or even the cut in the top rate of income tax London would not have been such a magnet for people from around the world. But the Conservative Party fell to being the third Party in London because Londoners did not associate us with this at all and one of the most encouraging features of the local elections last month was that at last we saw the beginnings of a Conservative recovery in London.

    But just as our economic changes brought these social benefits they also had their downside. There were people left behind by the modern mobile economy. That’s why instead of trying to pretend there isn’t any poverty we are investigating more thoroughly than for many years how best we can help the poorest members of our society.

    There are also people who found the sheer creative destruction of the marketplace all too threatening and wanted order, community and security. At the heart of the Conservative tradition is a recognition that we need both the economic dynamism of the marketplace and also wider values that give life roots and shape and meaning. I am proud to be a Conservative because over the past two centuries Conservatives have more successfully reconciled these two principles than any other western political party.

    Our commitment to helping the vulnerable is a renewal of Conservatism, offering a vision of a stronger and better society. But the old caricatures live on in people’s minds and that’s why they will always be on the look-out for recidivism. It would be so convenient for the critics if they could claim that we were just the same old Tories. That’s why Iain Duncan Smith has been right to emphasise that the help the vulnerable campaign is central to the direction in which he wants to take the Party.

  • Damian Green – 2002 Speech to the Connect Think Tank

    Damian Green – 2002 Speech to the Connect Think Tank

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, to the Connect Think Tank on 1 June 2002.

    One of the symptoms of over-centralisation is the over-increasing complication and sheer number of tests that schoolchildren now go through. Let me make my attitude to this clear. Regular testing, in a simple and clear way, is essential.

    Publishing the results of the main national tests is also essential, to allow parents and others to know how schools are performing.

    But what is not essential, indeed what is actively harmful, is turning school years into a never-ending grind of exams. This is where we have now ended up, especially for 16-18 year-olds. The system after GCSEs has now reached saturation point.

    AS levels are one of those reforms that seemed like a good idea at the time. They have proved to be a failing attempt to widen the curriculum which has done more harm than good. They were meant to widen the experience of young people, but instead they have encouraged them to give up sport, music, drama, and other useful and enjoyable activities to make sure they succeed on the exam treadmill.

    Look at the figures. In 2000, 1,149 candidates complained about AS levels out of a total of 76, 427—a rate of 1.5%. In 2002 19,496 students complained out of 771, 893—a rate of 2.5%. One teacher from Suffolk who wrote to the Conservative Party Education Website summed it up perfectly: “The new AS exams are one set of exams too many.”

    Other correspondents to our website include two students: one, from Surrey, wrote

    ‘I have found that AS levels promote only anxiety concerning the burden of work and the inevitable exclusion of activities such as culture and sport. The system punishes the student who engages in either.’

    Another, from London, said: ‘I believe that pupils do sit too many exams which us preventing schools from giving children the rounded education they deserve. Summer sports such as cricket have virtually disappeared for the 15-18 year group in both state and independent schools due to the constant demands of the modular examination system.”

    There have been reports of individuals buckling under the stress. One girl fled from the exam hall in tears as she sat her fifth paper of the day. She had already faced her first four papers with only a ten-minute gap in between each. Another correspondent to our website said that at her college, in the first year of the introduction of AS levels, there were more cases of stress reported than ever before.

    In response to Parliamentary Questions from me Ministers have said that the number of external tests an average pupil will now take in a school career is over 45. Research by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has shown that a typical student of higher ability could face 95 exams through a school career.

    On the issue of AS levels I rather agree with John Dunford of the Secondary Heads Association, who said earlier this year: “If the Government is to introduce new reforms in secondary school qualifications it must address the problem of over-assessment and reduce the number of external exams.” My solution to this is to recognise that AS levels in their current form are the fifth wheel on the coach, and to get rid of them.

    After last year’s fiasco with exams, the Government promised a review. This year, they have promised another review. This is wholly inadequate. Our teenagers are being asked to do too many exams too often. Let’s act now to relieve the burden.

    There are a number of alternatives to the AS level system. We should be looking at the baccalaureate system as one option. Another is a General Studies Paper, which could encompass subjects not covered by the student’s main ‘A’ level subjects. A third is simply to encourage schools to teach non-examined subjects—exams are a measuring rod, not the purpose of education.’

  • Eric Pickles – 2002 Speech to the Chartered Institute of Housing

    Eric Pickles – 2002 Speech to the Chartered Institute of Housing

    The speech made by Eric Pickles to the Chartered Institute of Housing on 12 June 2002.

    Ten years ago this month, I made my maiden speech to the House of Commons as the newly elected MP for the constituency of Brentwood & Ongar.

    My contribution was made during a housing debate sponsored by the then Conservative Government. The debate was entitled Tenants’ Rights.

    What you have to understand is that a maiden speech is an intensely personal thing to an MP. It sets out what motivates the Member of Parliament, it lays down what he or she wants to achieve, puts markers down to the Party Whips office about areas of interest.

    What you have to understand about the Whips office of all parties is that it is run with the cold efficiency of the armed forces during a period of national conscription. So that professional cooks will find themselves assigned to transport, and painters and decorators to the kitchen.

    So you will understand my emotion in making my second public speech on housing in ten years, and my first speech as the new Shadow Secretary of State for Local Government and the Regions.

    Much as I have enjoyed the past few months chasing Stephen Byers, I am pleased now to be given the opportunity to focus on serious issues such as housing, which concern real people every day.

    Looking back over what I said ten years ago in the House of Commons, I recognise that much of it is just as relevant here today.

    If you will forgive a politician the ultimate vanity of quoting himself, in 1992 I said: ‘Any reasonable housing policy must be based on quality, diversity and choice’. The same is true today.

    But now I am acutely aware – perhaps more than in many other areas – the boundaries and the language of the debate have moved on.

    The old arguments about public versus private provision have largely been won. Today, there is some unity about providing good quality, affordable housing and reversing the migration from our inner cities, and about building stronger communities

    So I hope today, to outline to you my approach to housing policy and to try and explain what we will be considering in our policy review process, which is currently underway.

    In my speech in the House of Commons, I explained how public housing was largely responsible for forming my political views.

    As I looked around me on the council estate in West Riding in Yorkshire where my parents ran a small corner shop, I began to despair at some of the conditions in which my friends and neighbours lived. I realised that the fundamental problem was that they deserved a better landlord than they had.

    Many of them lived in properties owned and managed by the local authority. As a former councillor, I know that even when they are trying their hardest, they do not necessarily make good landlords.

    There never was a golden age of public housing. The fact is that most people wanted to own their own homes. This is what the Conservative Governments of the 80s and 90s recognised – and I’m pleased to say that so successful was the policy, that even most Labour politicians accept today.

    Conservatives believe in home-ownership. The importance of property ownership is marked out throughout the history of political thought. You may even say that it is at the heart of Conservatism.

    We are rightly proud of policies such as right-to-buy which empowered a new range of people.

    We are pleased to have introduced the notion of stock transfer.

    We were right to break down the barriers between the public and the private sectors.

    The principles that drove those policies will drive our future policies also. They are the principles I was elected on in 1992, and I hold true to them today.

    But I also recognise the new challenges and priorities we now face. Too often in the past, we have allowed ourselves to be portrayed as only caring about property and money.

    Conservatives may have been the party of property, but we recognised the obligations to the community that property brought with it.

    The priorities now must be to encourage more people to live in our cities to stop them from becoming lifeless ghettos and to look into ways of providing more affordable housing, particularly to young people.

    And we need too, to give greater focus to the war on homelessness.

    I was David Willetts’ deputy at social security for a couple of years; I have talked to him about his experience of seeing for himself the plight of people living on the streets. Something neglected by politicians for far too long.

    Remember what the Prime Minister promised? He said his Government would: ‘do everything in our power to end the scandal of homelessness’. But as we know, homelessness in England has soared since 1997.

    Worse still, the number of children who are living on the streets is rising. What chance does the child without a home have?

    And the number of people living in bed and breakfast accommodation has risen dramatically under this Government – up by as much as 200 per cent in London.

    I don’t pretend that things were perfect under Conservative Governments. We all need to give much greater thought to how we help these people out of their dire situation to give them a greater chance in life.

    It is not as if we have to look far to see the problem.

    David told me of visiting people sleeping in doorways and people seeking warmth in homeless shelters; he came across one group huddled by the side of Westminster Cathedral – less than a mile from the House of Commons and directly opposite the offices of the Government’s Rough Sleeper Unit.

    From where they lie they can see a sign that should mean something to them, but as often is the way: politicians try to help but it is remote and useless.

    Part of the problem is that we always look at the short-term. We just want to get people off the streets. We don’t think enough about them as individuals and families – we only think about them as statistics.

    And it’s not a problem that can be solved simply by throwing more money at it.

    We need to be more innovative in how we address the problem.

    I am sure you understand better than me why some homeless people reject the offer of a one-bedroom flat. On the streets sometimes the only family you have are those who sleep next to you.

    It may seem hard for us to comprehend, but some people would rather stay where they are instead of being sent off on their own to a flat somewhere.

    There is a social dimension to homelessness, and we cannot ignore it. We must address the street culture that exists, and consider making greater use of things like communal housing, so that groups of homeless people can be housed together.

    Successive governments have failed to grasp this nettle, but we are now in a position to do so because we are listening, learning and taking our time to get our policies right.

    But I also spoke earlier about the need to reverse the migration from our inner cities that is leading to increasing degrees of deprivation in urban areas.

    People are the lifeblood of cities, and encouraging people to live in urban areas is both a social necessity and also common sense.

    It is a social necessity because if we are to build communities in inner city areas we need to provide stability.

    It is common sense because if we are to improve the way we run our public services we need to build communities.

    The teacher, doctor or policeman who lives in the community they serve is naturally better able to deal with the needs of the area. When local residents witness the evening flight of influential people it reduces the sense of community. It signals that success lies elsewhere, and stigmatises those that remain.

    All areas need constancy, commitment and stability. Building communities will be the priority of the next Conservative Government.

    So housing policies, which force people to leave inner city areas, are simply wrong.

    The decrease in the amount of social housing constructed under this Government is a problem of Labour’s own making.

    So there are fewer houses to live in.

    But the houses that do exist are also less affordable.

    The decision to cut the right-to-buy discounts has resulted in many young people being unable to take their first step on the housing ladder.

    Labour has also made home ownership less affordable by increasing taxes on homeowners.

    And of course the huge increases in council tax we have seen under this Government – an additional £212 for a Band D property over four years – are hitting households on lower incomes the most. Particularly those just above entitlement to some form of income support in its general sense

    In my own constituency, I have seen the problems this last issue causes. An example of the law of unintended consequences

    In one area where people are living in social housing they have seen the value of their property rise. What would be a band A or B in West Yorkshire is much higher in the South East. The increased valuation with the higher Council Tax is the margin between being able to afford to live locally or not.

    The result of these policies is that the average deposit needed for a first time buyer in the UK has risen by £6,700 to £13,300 – and the average age of a first time buyer is now 34.

    So the Conservative Party’s policy review is considering how to address these problems. The answers are not easy, but by taking our time and talking to the people who matter – people such as your good selves – we aim to bring forward policies which answer these difficult questions, and which help to build strong communities

    And Conservatives know that good quality, affordable housing is inextricably linked to good public services.

    This is where the title of this session – ‘Is the Government delivering better public services’ – comes in.

    The evidence is clear. There is a clear linkage between the home environment and the reliance on public services.

    But of course there are more basic issues to consider.

    We simply can’t talk about improving the health service if we are not simultaneously considering what to do about housing. If we acknowledge that one of the major problems in the NHS today is the issue of so-called bed-blocking we have to realise that it is also linked to the need to provide good quality, warm and comfortable housing for elderly people.

    And if I may be so bold as to agree with a former Labour Health Minister, ‘anyone with a shred of common sense knows that housing affects people’s health’.

    Housing policy cannot exist in isolation. It is inter-connected with our policies on improving public services. And nowhere more so than when we think about who works in the public services.

    The Government has announced many new targets on teacher, nurse and police recruitment. They hope that throwing more money at the public services will help them to be achieved. But these people all need somewhere to live.

    Labour’s ‘Starter Homes Initiative’, while perhaps laudable in its intention, seems to be having little effect – no matter how many times the department re-announces it. Restricting it to ‘key’ workers hasn’t helped. Who decides what is and isn’t a ‘key’ worker? It seems that if you exist on some whimsical government target then you are ‘key’, but if not, you are on your own.
    And of course, subsidised loans do nothing to tackle the lack of available affordable housing.

    These are the issues I have to consider, and events such as this will help me in my task. But I hope also to be able to discuss them at greater length over the coming years on a more individual basis. No doubt, there will be things I have not mentioned today, but I hope you appreciate that for me and for my Party, the important thing is to develop our policies properly rather than quickly. Don’t be under any doubt that this is a serious undertaking.

    I am quite conscious that housing policy is complex and challenging. I know that you are calling on the Government to provide more money to housing in the forthcoming spending review. I watch with interest as to whether, to quote David Butler ‘John Prescott will add his voice to the increased case for increase housing investment’.

    But more than that, we need to think radically about the social aspects of housing policy – not just the economic aspects.

    I said at the start that the housing debate has moved on since my maiden speech in 1992. Certainly it has. Today we are not arguing about public or private provision. But this unfortunately does not mean that we have answered all the important questions.

    We are faced with new challenges. My Party’s focus is changing. We recognise those challenges and we plan to offer solutions to them.

    But our principles have not changed. In the debate ten years ago, the Minister wound up the exchanges by emphasising the Conservative watchwords: quality, diversity, choice, freedom, opportunity and empowerment.

    Now as we are engaged in our policy review, they continue to be at the forefront of our minds.

    I am grateful to have the opportunity to put them into practice, and I hope in the years ahead to return to you and outline precisely how Conservatives will apply them to today’s problems to make stronger communities.

  • Michael Ancram – 2002 Britain and Europe: A Conservative Renaissance? Speech

    Michael Ancram – 2002 Britain and Europe: A Conservative Renaissance? Speech

    The speech made by Michael Ancram on 12 June 2002.

    I am honoured by your invitation to address you. Over many years your Organisation has carried a great reputation for original thinking and for informed debate. We all honour the name and memory of Konrad Adenauer, whose vision and determination rescued Germany from the ruins of war and created a new, wider confidence in Europe as a whole. We are all in debt to him.

    I want to speak today about what I see to be a new confidence and dynamism in the politics of the Centre Right in Europe. I want to talk about what is happening in the British Conservative Party as it climbs back from two massive defeats and how that fits the changing political landscape of the United Kingdom. And I want to look at the British Conservative perspective view the European Union and the changes that are taking place there too.

    I ask whether there is a conservative renaissance in Britain and Europe. The signs are encouraging. Leaving aside the right wing victories in America and Australia, within Europe the picture is bright. Centre right governments in Spain, Austria and Italy; in Denmark and Norway; most recently in the Netherlands and France; looking good in the Czech Republic; and with respect and pleasure we watch the unfolding campaign here in Germany with Herr Stoiber looking set fair. Conventionally I should not comment on your elections, but I wish you every success. We are with you all the way.

    We meet in changing – not to say tumultuous – times, in both world and domestic politics. 11 September served as a tragically stark reminder of the seismic shift in the international scene triggered the end of the Cold War. Gone finally are the old foreign policy certainties of the counter-balancing cold war blocs, the security reassurance of known and measured opponents. Instead we face a time of fluidity, of change, of uncertainty.

    The cold war equilibrium of the symmetrical threat anchored by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) has given way to the asymmetry of the international terrorist threat. The Sumo-like embrace of known enemies has given way to the fear of the invisible enemy and the unknown threat. We face the possibility of potential nuclear conflict in the Indian sub-continent and of the use of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. We live with the constant knowledge that the international terrorist with total disregard for human life – including their own – could strike anywhere at any time and with catastrophic results.

    We are having to learn new rules, new methods and new objectives in pursuit of successful diplomacy; or more accurately perhaps we are having to rediscover those successfully deployed by our ancestors in the 19th Century when the world was last in so fluid a state.

    What is certain is that the world has changed and that we must change with it. Obstinate certainty must be replaced by more sensitive flexibility, the arrogant exercise of power by a more subtle agility, and the coalition of security by a coalition of national interests. There is a new tide in the affairs of men sweeping across Europe and we must ride it.

    Part of that tide undoubtedly is the renaissance of the Centre.

    People are realising that in this changing world the rigid dogma of the left ill serves their interests. They realise that the command economy and the corporate state can no longer deliver –if they ever could – and that it is people as individuals and within their communities who know best.

    The British Conservative Party under Iain Duncan Smith is changing to reflect this changing world. We as a party are seeking to show that we spring from the real world; the world as it is, not the world as we would necessarily like it to be. We seek to cut through spin and to face realities. And one of the starkest realities is that while our country prospers from its increasing wealth and burgeoning technology, it is still a country in which we witness daily the growing phenomenon of those who are being left behind.

    These are the new vulnerable, those who cannot get their children a decent education, or cannot get medical treatment when they need it, or who live in fear of crime and anti-social behaviour. These are our people. We are a party that genuinely cares about helping the vulnerable in our society. Nor is this position opportunist. Over 150 years ago the towering Conservative figure of Benjamin Disraeli wrote that it was the sole duty of power to ‘secure the social welfare of the people’. From this has always sprung our One Nation tradition, which is being given new life today.

    We are a party that seeks to give everyone the opportunity to succeed.

    A Party that recognises it is local people who know what is best for their locality not some centralised Government bureaucracy.

    A Party that trusts people.

    Tony Blair’s New Labour claimed to understand this when they came to power in 1997. They said that they would bring hope and that they would offer people a brighter future. They promised the earth.

    And they have failed to deliver. Failing public services as a result of over-regulation and constant interference, and failing trust as a result of continuous let down.

    This is par for the course with left-wing Governments across the western world. They re-brand themselves but at the end of the day they are still the over-centralising, bossy, all-controlling governments that they have always been.

    Why? Because in the end they don’t trust people – they don’t trust ordinary people to know what is best for their own localities, for their own communities. They always know best.

    We start from the other end. Conservatism trusts the people. This goes to the heart of modern conservatism: trusting individuals, standing up for individual freedoms. Helping those in our society who are vulnerable. Working with the world as we find it, addressing practicalities to make that world better and address the problems faced by millions of our citizens and those worldwide.

    We trust people to do their jobs. We trust them to know what’s best for their family. We trust them with their own money. We trust them to run their own lives.

    When people are trusted, they build communities. We support those local communities. Conservatives believe in the individual, and we believe in those individuals coming together to form communities. Communities that can respond to local needs and help the vulnerable in those communities far better than any impersonal and distant Government could.

    We trust teachers to teach. And in trusting the professionals we can better hope to deliver. Yet in the UK today we cannot find enough people who want to come into or stay in teaching, because the government does not trust them to do their jobs without constant interference. In the last year 4440 pages of regulations have gone to teachers, 17 pages for each working day of the year, all requiring some input from already hard-pressed teachers.

    Education is the source of hope for people. It is the means by which they can better their lives and change their futures, yet our education system consistently fails the most disadvantaged. Truancy is a serious problem. Up by 11% since 1997. The gap between the best and the worst schools is growing. 500% increase in the number of assaults on teachers by parents and pupils, mostly in the worst schools. Is it surprising that 39% more teachers are leaving the profession before retirement than in 1997. And now for the first time for many years we are seeing teachers on strike or threatening to do so.

    We have much to learn from countries like Germany on how to tackle these issues, and on how to improve our education system; and we are prepared to learn.

    And why should the law-abiding majority in our society suffer increasingly at the hands of a minority of vicious and violent and often surprisingly young criminals?

    The British Government has also taken away the local policeman’s discretion and freedom to tackle crime. Instead they have resorted to centralisation, less face to face human contact, more bureaucracy and less understanding of neighbourhoods.

    Neighbourhood policing is the way forward; personal interaction and local knowledge. A system where the police officer knows the people he or she is looking after – and the criminals in the area – and where they know him. Under conservative mayor Rudi Giuliani such an approach produced tremendous results in New York. We believe it could do the same for us. n contrast in London last year street crime roes by 38%. You are now more likely to be mugged in London than in Harlem, New York!

    But there is more to cracking crime than simply locking people up. We will as my colleague Oliver Letwin said offer people a way off the conveyor belt of crime. We will provide exit routes, not just by tackling crime and its causes but by exploring also the causes of good behaviour and law-abiding behaviour.

    At the core of this is the emerging concept of the neighbourly society. A society which is based around a respect for people. To build up and preserve the local relationships and networks of identity and self-worth that make people feel included, that make them an important and valued part of the community.

    In health care it is the same. Our local family doctors are part of the fabric of the local community. They know their neighbourhoods and the needs of those communities ands neighbourhoods far better than any central government department based miles away can ever hope to. We will trust doctors to know what is best for their patients.

    The British Government concentrates too much on its own political health rather than the health of patients around the country, on spin doctors rather than real doctors. And in the midst of it all they have, in our view, lost sight of what really matters – making sick people better.

    We have looked at health care provision in Europe. The best systems are those based on doctors and patients having choice. Having the flexibility and choice that enables them to react to their own needs and those of the locality. Once again we have looked at Germany. Your 5 year survival rate for leukaemia is 39% against ours of under 28%. For prostate cancer your survival rate is 68% against 44% in the UK. There is indeed a lot for us to learn.

    These are the main political challenges facing us in the United Kingdom today, and these are the ways in which we as a party are seeking politically to address them.

    We do so in a changed atmosphere. One which is based on a new sense of national self-confidence, of pride in our country and in our monarchy. This is politically our natural environment. Up to ten days ago this view was mocked by our own left-wing media. It was rubbished by one of your own well known publications. All now have red faces.

    The British people gave their answer. Last week they came out in their millions in London and across the UK as a whole to demonstrate their affection for the Queen, their support for the monarchy and their total pride in their country and what it stands for.

    At home, in the face of massive challenges the tide is finally turning slowly but steadily in our favour.

    As at home, so too abroad we face massive challenges. 11 September has vividly and tragically brought home to us many of the challenges that began with the end of the Cold War. As I said earlier, flexibility is the key to meeting these challenges in what is an increasingly changing international scene.

    After 11 September Tony Blair showed the value of flexibility. He was realistic about what was required to meet the threat, helping to build an international coalition which allowed nations to contribute at the level at which they felt happiest. The bureaucracy of a common position where all must conform to the lowest common denominator was avoided. Europe was able to react at different levels of enthusiasm and participation. The attempts of the most ardent European integrationist to seek a common foreign policy which would have meant sailing at the speed of the slowest ship in the convoy were resisted. And rightly so. It would have been totally unrealistic to have done otherwise.

    We as Conservatives believe in realism, not making promises you can’t keep, and in understanding our history – not denying it. These criteria will be the hallmark of a successful foreign policy in the coming decades. That is why we believe in the development of a Europe that works with America rather than in rivalry to it. America is in fact the greatest superpower the world has ever known; militarily, economically and educationally. It can and will work in partnership with Europe, but not with an antagonistic Europe. We must develop a Europe which is flexible and agile and which politically complements rather than politically competes.

    We need to work to create an EU that is modern, de-centralised, that trusts its members and is not constantly trying to aggregate more of their powers to itself. An EU that is outward looking.

    The Conservative Party is not interested in withdrawal from the EU – to do so would be a dangerous abdication of genuine influence. Nor should we follow the supranational approach beloved of so many in the EU, an approach that submerges everything in a vast supranational concept.

    Our long-held belief that Europe must change to bring it closer to the people that actually live within it is now matched by a realisation in Europe itself that all is not well with “le projet”. Recent referendums and other electoral tests have demonstrated the growing alienation of the peoples of Europe from its institutions. If Europe is to carry true democratic legitimacy and accountability it must find a way of reconnecting with its peoples again. And Europe has realised this need for itself.

    The Convention on the Future of Europe represents this realisation, a realisation first of all of the need for consultation. But that consultation must not be narrow either in scope or agenda. This convention must address all the fundamental problem facing the EU today and in particular the glaring democratic deficit. What we want, and what the Convention should concentrate on achieving, is a Europe of democracies – not a Europe of over-bearing bureaucrats.

    The only certainty in Europe today is that Europe is uncertain, more uncertain about itself than it has been since its inception.

    Against a backdrop of the threat of economic problems, a European demographic time-bomb, a technological gap between the EU and the US, a need for greater deregulation we can see the structural flaws of the European Union.

    That is why we call for a fundamental review of the way the EU is currently working. Such a review is necessary before genuine constructive reform. The twin nettles of review and reform must be grasped if the EU is to meet successfully the challenges of the 21st century.

    The EU stands at an historic crossroads. Recent political events in France stand as a warning of the potential outcome of that sense of detachment from a remote political elite felt by millions of people across Europe. In response to this sense of detachment various prescriptions have been offered.

    Some people suggest the supra-national solution. Some the withdrawal solution. Both are wrong. I have already mentioned the drawbacks of withdrawal. As for the supra-national approach one has but to look at the CFSP for an example of the pitfalls of moving too fast and too far. It is a policy initiative wracked by lack of clarity, weasel words, muddle and impracticality. It is a policy which in practice would require every member state to sign up to the lowest common denominator. The aspiration of a more effective foreign policy is a noble one, but the CFSP route is a misguided one, as indeed is any attempt to coerce what is naturally incoercible.

    An attempt to do so would make foreign policy far less effective. We saw the response to 11 September. Various countries had different views on the most appropriate response, and therefore a common line, a common policy, was impossible. I respect the right to disagree. Indeed I think it is vitally important that nations retain this basic right as national interests differ. But it serves to demonstrate the impracticality of a common policy.

    In the press over recent weeks we have seen the chaos that characterises European security policy. Commissioners Patten and Kinnock have been open in their criticism of the role being played by Javier Solana. Giscard D’Estaing has called for a common European diplomatic service. Romano Prodi wants to push ahead with a single European foreign policy. Jack Straw wants to redefine sovereignty to fit this model. Yet at the same time he and the Prime Minister are calling for a Europe of Nations.

    So who is right? Who do we believe? Who speaks for Britain and Europe on these important matters. So unclear is the message, so confused the language, so indistinct the objective, no wonder ordinary people feel cut off from their European masters. No wonder they are suspicious and distant.

    By contrast we offer a clear approach – a view of Europe that is constructive, positive and forward looking. Europe needs to change to bring it back in touch with the peoples and parliaments of the nations of Europe. They are the original and abiding source of its legitimacy. Reform should aim to put them back at the heart of the European Union again.

    We want to be constructive participants in that process of achieving reform, and our preferred way forward is clear.

    A partnership of sovereign nations, bound by the single market and the rules of free trade, but otherwise working at different levels of participation and involvement, tailoring common ventures and aspirations to the national interest and the national modus operandi. A Europe for all seasons, and all national traits and imperatives, which recognises and maximises national strengths in a constructive way.

    Defence co-operation on an flexible basis, working together as and when required, with each country contributing through NATO at the level with which it is most comfortable.

    The deeds and words of the EU leadership at this time all point, not so much to a desire to make the EU work for the citizens of its member states, but to their desire to submerge – or as some might somewhat disingenuously suggest ‘pool’ – British sovereignty and that of other European countries in an ever more centralised Europe. Whatever the word, and even ‘pooling’ by definition means diluting, their agenda remains quite clearly the creation of a supranational Europe. What Romano Prodi rather infelicitously described as “an advanced supranational democracy which must be strengthened”, but which in the language of ordinary people in concept, in structure and in power is a superstate by any other name.

    We believe profoundly that this is the wrong direction for Europe, and we reject it. It threatens not only the end of popular sovereignty, but also a further divorce of the political process from its legitimacy – through their national parliaments the people themselves. It either presages the unacceptable tyranny of the majority imposing common policies on a reluctant minority of member countries, or the equally unacceptable tyranny of the lowest common denominator.

    The coercion of conformity and harmonisation would stifle the diversity that is the very essence of Europe, and in doing so could give birth to the tensions which would be meat and drink to nationalist movements across Europe.

    These tensions will become even more apparent after enlargement. EU enlargement is a project that has always enjoyed the total support of the Conservative Party. But we must also recognise the need to plan properly for it.

    The tensions that this creates are beginning to show in the failure to face up to the shortcomings of the Common Agricultural Policy, and in the increasingly sharp exchanges between the accession countries and Brussels as the realisation dawns that the EU has taken insufficient account of their needs with regard to structural funds and agricultural subsidies. This is a salutary warning of the internal divisions we risk if we do not move swiftly to reform.

    We want to see genuine and constructive reform. We do not see it in Romano Prodi’s ‘advanced supranational democracy’. A supranational European state would undermine the goodwill and genuine co-operation required in Europe. It would also be harking back. It would be building a bloc when the era of blocs is ended.

    It would also be naively ambitious. To attempt to be a superpower bloc, rivalling America, is foolish. America is a sovereign superpower with vast resources. Europe is not. We need America far more than America needs us. We must stick to the partnership of Europe and America. We must reject the anti-American rhetoric of some leading Europeans who want to make it Europe or America. There are too many politicians in Europe today, and not only in the Commission, who seems to think there is something macho in being critical of America, in portraying its foreign policy as ‘simplistic’ against the perceived ‘sophistication’ of Europe’s. While quiet and well-based criticism can be an act of true friendship, this smug unpleasant anti-American undertone emanating from the upper echelons of Europe can only damage the interests of Europe. Nor would the description of European foreign policy as ‘sophisticated’ be readily recognised in the Middle East or in the Indian sub-continent at this point in time. Europe would be better engaged in examining critically itself rather than in being so ready to insult its friends.

    That is why the current debate on the future structure and shape of Europe is so vital.

    We need to use the current debate to look at what is working and what is not. That which is working and is consistent with the Europe of the future should be preserved and strengthened. That which is not working, or is out of date or is no longer consistent with the evolving nature of Europe should be reformed or discarded. Anything less than this rigorous approach will be a sham.

    The Treaties, the ‘acquis’, the directives, should all be open to re-examination to assess their effectiveness and continuing relevance – and open to change if necessary. A genuine review and reform process cannot object to revisiting those elements which appear either not to be working or not working as well as they should. There can be no sacred cows, no no-go areas, no sealed vaults

    By adapting to change and revisiting the treaties, the regulations and if necessary the ‘acquis’ and in making a constructive assessment of their continuing relevance and value to people as opposed to institutions, we can hope to move once again towards a ‘bottom-up’ Europe. A Europe that starts with the needs and aspirations of the people of Europe, not the ambitions of its bureaucrats, and which can once again make itself relevant to people’s lives.

    We are open to genuine reform. Not doctrinal reform to a set agenda, but reform to build a more workable Europe to meet enlargement. Not destructive reform, but constructive reform which works for the peoples of Europe. Not theoretical reform, but reform which reconnects people with what Europe means for them, and which will make a useful contribution to improving their lives.

    I have tried to give you a view about what is happening in my Party, in my country and our perception of current developments within the European Union. In a strangely inevitable way I have been led back in each case to the same fundamental democratic truth – the central importance of the people. But that is in the nature of democracy. It is what it means.

    It is a regrettably an endemic weakness of politicians to believe that they always know better than the people. Some of our political leaders tell me that it is not a politician’s job to listen but to lead. In fact it is possible to do both, but each action must be commensurate with the other. The 20th Century was essentially an era in which politicians worked to grand designs and built grand structures, where they sought to impose vaulting philosophies and ideologies, and expected people simply to follow, coercing them when they did not.

    However harsh the ideology, however draconian the philosophy, it was invariably pursued in the name of the people, often seeking spurious and unjustified legitimacy from that claim. Towards the end of the 20th Century we saw the worst of these totalitarian dictatorships overthrown by the very force from which they had sought to claim their legitimacy. It was the people who laid low the Berlin Wall. It was the people who brought to its knees and ultimately broke up the mighty Soviet Union. It was the people who liberated themselves and in doing so Eastern Europe. It was the people who reopened the gates of freedom and individual liberty.

    And it was in the name of the peoples of Europe and the determination to protect them from the ravages of any future European war that what is now the European union was begun. This was a dream which was civilised, democratic and well meaning, and many of my generation welcomed it with open arms. But it too has succumbed to the aggrandising ambitions of political journeymen. In so doing it has begun seriously to lose touch with the peoples who are through their parliaments the font of its legitimacy. These same people are making clear their frustration, and not always in the most comfortable democratic of ways.

    On a smaller scale the popular reaction to an increasingly remote and out of touch government in my country is the same. The residual corporate state, the surviving elements of the leviathan largely dismantled by the Thatcher years, still creates resentment through its continuing arrogant tendency to believe that come what may it knows best. Once again it is the people who are demonstrating the growing disenchantment and sense of alienation – in our case by not voting..

    And it is my Party too where the leadership had tended to become remote from its grass-roots, and where through radical democratic reform the link between the leadership and party members has now been revived.

    The message in each area is same. Heed the people. Trust the people. Work with and for the people.

    Democracy is a tender plant. Across Europe it is constantly under threat. Our goal is its entrenchment in the face of massive change. The Centre Right has never been better placed to help bring about that entrenchment. That is our common cause. I believe that together in a flexible Europe we can and will succeed.

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech to the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech to the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations

    The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 13 June 2002.

    I am very grateful to Stephen Bubb and the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations for the invitation to today’s conference.

    Members of ACEVO greatly strengthen our society, particularly at the local level, by enabling groups of people with a common vision to come together to work for a common cause.

    And because you tackle the causes as well as the consequences of social problems you reach vulnerable people who have often been failed by conventional approaches.

    Gathered in this room are a variety of organisations that serve diverse communities of people all over Britain.

    Leonard Cheshire supports and enables 19,000 people with disabilities in Britain.

    The hospice movement provides 3,215 beds for very sick and terminally-ill people.

    Victim Support offers help to over one million people whose lives have been struck by crime.

    Prison Fellowship equips and supports 2,000 volunteer visitors throughout Britain’s 136 prisons.

    This week is National Carers’ Week. This morning I visited the Princess Royal Trust Carers’ Centre in Hammersmith and Fulham, which provides support for those who care for relatives and friends when they can no longer look after themselves.

    Every 5th household in this country includes at least one carer. There are some seven million adults carers in Britain today. I watched my mother care for my dying father and I know the selfless dedication born out of love and obligation that is the cornerstone of so many families in this country.

    Informal care is the most effective and least expensive form of care there is. However it places an extraordinary amount of strain on those who give it. The voluntary support carers receive often makes the difference between a heavy burden and an intolerable one. I pay tribute to the work that they do and the support that you give them.

    Of course, there is also a need for paid professional help, especially where vulnerable people have no friends or relations to look after them. Here the state can step in with support for people who can’t afford this help themselves. But that doesn’t mean the state has to organise and provide the care itself, or that it does a very good job when it tries to.

    Last month a report from the Social Services Inspectorate made clear that many local authorities were failing to provide adequate levels of care to vulnerable people. I was struck by the testimony of one charity worker in the West Midlands:

    ‘Elderly people with mobility problems cannot get even the most basic help. If they want a grab rail for their toilet or bath, they go to social services for an assessment – which takes months… When we complain, the politicians blame it on the officers and vice versa.’

    This is illustrated by the case of a 71-year-old man who has not been able to have a bath or a shower since suffering a stroke in July 1997. He desperately needs a downstairs shower, but the council has said that it may be another three years before one is installed. As he said:

    ‘It is about my dignity. They don’t understand how traumatic it is to have a stroke, to not be able to go out for a walk. They don’t know how it feels not to be able to bathe. I feel absolutely terrible and I really feel as if I have been let down.’

    Some will say that the problem is resources. But it is not about resources alone. There is a huge variation in performance between different councils. As the inspector’s report said:

    ‘People are fitted to services, rather than services to people.’

    I believe that charities and the voluntary sector have so much to teach us about fitting services to people. Of course, many others have come to the same conclusion, which is why the voluntary sector has been called upon to play a bigger role in the public services. But charities must not be used to prop up crumbling state structures. And neither should vulnerable people have to wait and hope for the failing state to find the right partners from the voluntary sector.

    Rather, the true duty of the state is to help vulnerable people achieve dignity and this is best done by ensuring that they get help from those that understand their needs best. And very often that will be a charity or a community group or some other non-state body. It is vital that we establish a direct relationship between what people want and the support the voluntary sector gets from the public purse.

    People will benefit from more responsive public services, but the voluntary sector will also benefit. They will be held accountable by the people they help instead of by Whitehall. This is public funding with a human face that ensures freedom from political interference and a closer connection with the communities they serve.

    That is why an evolving partnership with the voluntary sector will be a high priority for the Conservative party.

    It will be vital for effective public service reform. It also lies at the core of the commitment which I set out at the Conservatives’ Harrogate conference to address the needs of vulnerable people within society.

    Of course you are used to be courted by politicians. We are meeting at a time when the boundaries between the public, private and voluntary sectors are becoming blurred beyond recognition.

    At first glance, this presents charities with unprecedented opportunities. It offers you the chance to expand your work, to gain access to policymaking and to secure new sources of income.

    But on deeper examination these opportunities present their own problems. If charities increasingly rely on government for their influence, their authority and their funding, at what point do they cease to act as agents for change and constancy, and start to become just another agency of the state?

    To improve the quality and the responsiveness of our public services we have to be more flexible about those organisations we use to deliver them. That is one very obvious lesson I have learned from travelling around Europe and America studying those countries who run better systems of healthcare and education than we do.

    But we must never lose sight of the fact that if we want to help the most vulnerable people in our society, then we also have to strengthen society around them and that means supporting institutions and groups whose reach extends beyond the state.

    I applaud the new spirit of professionalism in the charitable sector that you embody, but that should never lead to the professionalisation of voluntary impulses.

    To do so risks eroding the independence of charities and undermining the virtues of self-help, mutual obligation and social engagement. People must not believe that their obligations to neighbours in need begin and end with the payment of taxes.

    People give time and money to volunteering for any number of reasons. They may want others to think well of them, or to contribute to the well-being of those less fortunate than themselves. These sentiments make us who we are.

    That is why the expression of compassion through spontaneous co-operation is as old as society itself.

    It has survived the 20th century struggles between socialism and capitalism and the battle between the public and private sectors for the control over the economy.

    Now it must flourish in the 21st century as we seek to wrestle with the limitations of state power in tackling some of our most intractable social problems.

    This, I think, is where the Government and the Opposition part company. Both main parties talk about civil society, the need to replenish social capital and an enhanced role for the voluntary sector.

    But for my part we do so from a belief that the voluntary sector should not just be another branch office of central government.

    For us the sector is part of new political settlement. One which stresses the local over the central, diversity over uniformity, and innovation over control.

    Labour came into power offering the voluntary sector a new partnership. They were promised unprecedented access to Whitehall, a voice in decision-making and access to a panoply of government grants.

    But in return they were often required to submit themselves to target-setting, auditing and performance indicators that have become the defining feature of the way this Government runs the public sector.

    Too many voluntary groups fear becoming institutionalised. They devote more and more of their time to applying for grants and writing reports and less and less time to finding new ways of helping people.

    This Government’s bear-hug is as expensive as it is suffocating. The bureaucracy and the compliance costs risk excluding the smallest charities who are the most local and often the most innovative in meeting the needs of their communities.

    As Conservatives, we see things differently. Certainly Government has a duty to account for the way it spends its money and there are certain minimum standards which all organisations must adhere to.

    But the potential of the voluntary sector lies in what it alone can achieve.

    Voluntary groups can operate on a human scale, they are often run by members of the same communities they serve, they can demand more of the people they are trying to help.

    The lives they touch and change are not to be measured by statistics or read in annual reports, instead they are measured by the strength of our communities and they are written in faces of the people and the families they help.

    These are the things that give the voluntary sector its power. It is why charities reach the parts of our society that government has never reached in the half century since the universal welfare state was founded.

    If we are to tap into that power, we are going to have trust people; trust charities and the voluntary sector to do their job, not emasculate them with a series of contracts and regulations in the name of partnership.

    This is not a rallying cry for the voluntary sector to provide public services on the cheap: responsibility must be matched by resources and by results.

    All told, the voluntary sector receives a public income of more than £5 billion a year from central and local government, from the European Union and from the lottery.

    But currently this money comes at the price of the strings that politicians attach to it.

    You only have to look at the problems of residential care homes. Many face closure because of excessive regulation, disrupting the lives of vulnerable people.

    The rules governing the European Social Fund are drawn so tightly that voluntary groups are unable to offer assistance to those who fall just outside its rigidly-defined geographical boundaries.

    Muslim groups face discrimination if they bid for money as religious rather than cultural organisations. Christian and other faith-based groups sometimes face discrimination simply because of their faith.

    We have to find ways of involving the sector in transforming our public services without compromising its independence and integrity.

    That is going to mean fundamentally rethinking the way public money reaches the voluntary sector.

    Earlier this week, while I was in Washington DC I visited the Unique Learning Center. It looks after 40 children from broken homes whose parents are addicted to drugs or in prison. It coaches them through school, dealing with teachers and providing a place they can go to after school to do homework or play sport.

    The Center offers children a haven from disruptive neighbourhoods. It teaches children of the link between work and achievement and steers them away from the culture of instant gratification and criminality.

    Currently they receive no money from the central government for fear of interference. But the Bush Administration is backing the CARE Act. This would allow faith-based organisations to bid for Federal funds on a level playing field with non-religious organisations. It would also create a special fund that community-based organisations could bid for.

    We need to learn from the American experience. Michael Howard and I are examining carefully how we can reform our tax laws in a way that will help the voluntary sector.

    As things stand today, funding passes through the hands of too many people who have done nothing to produce it and who lack the expertise to spend it wisely.

    Voluntary groups aspire to serve real people and their real needs.

    But the current funding system gets in the way. It encourages mission creep; suffocates innovation; and it produces uniformity.

    Centralised and politicised funding systems produce grey uniformity.

    Government rarely tolerates alternative opinions. Charities with the temerity to challenge prevailing orthodoxies about drugs or marriage can suffer discrimination. The result is a one-dimensional approach to social problems which can never meet the diverse needs and beliefs of communities throughout Britain.

    The public has a right to demand that the money raised in its name goes to ensuring better access to higher quality services. The Government has duty to tell them where their money is going. But ultimately all governments are judged by results. Elaborate audit trails are no substitute for achievement.

    And as we know from every other walk of life, from every other country whose standards of public services exceed our own, these achievements are greatest when those closest to the communities they serve are given the power to get on with their jobs.

    To do this, we have to address a number of questions.

    How can we reform funding so that charities can stay loyal to their fundamental missions?

    How do we ensure that higher-risk, but more innovative projects, get funds?

    How do we make sure that small neighbourhood-based charities get support alongside larger, nationally based ones?

    The answers will come from a mix of innovative approaches. The NCVO’s interest in local charitable endowments is worthy of consideration.

    Some of the ideas we will look at would extend existing practice, some would depart from it.

    I would be grateful for your views in this search for a more democratic, more diverse and more devolved voluntary sector.

    We will have a robust and constructive debate with the Government as it develops its own responses to some of the issues I have discussed today.

    If good decisions come out of the voluntary sector reviews being carried out by the Treasury and the Performance and Innovation Unit, we will support them.

    But when the Government damages the voluntary sector, as it did by cutting your investment income through the ACT changes or imposing National Insurance increases on a sector which needs to employ more people on tight budgets, we will not hesitate to say they are wrong.

    Nor are we concerned to help only the voluntary sector. Families, community networks and places of worship must also play their part.

    If our society is serious about tackling some of its most deeply-rooted problems, then we must start by taking society seriously.”

    It is often those institutions that lie beyond the reach of the state who have the firmest grasp of what needs to be done. They bring a human touch to the healing of social ills that has eluded both material prosperity and the universal welfare state.

    Government has a role in supporting the voluntary sector and it should carry out that role actively, but it should not try to run your sector for you. It must give you the room to breathe and the space to work.

    That is the balance the Conservative Party will seek to strike in the years ahead.

  • Oliver Letwin – 2002 Speech to the Centre for Policy Studies

    Oliver Letwin – 2002 Speech to the Centre for Policy Studies

    The speech made by Oliver Letwin to the Centre for Policy Studies on 19 June 2002.

    1. The neighbourly society versus the destructive society

    Earlier this year in a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies I observed that growing up in Britain sweeps up many children on a conveyor belt of crime without offering any exit routes. This is a conveyor belt that starts with individuals growing up in disruptive homes. They become an inconvenience and a problem in school. They start a life of petty crime and move on to serious crime. They begin their prison sentence, come out and repeat the offence. They are given a longer prison sentence and they become hardened criminals. Institutionalisation is then the only option left.

    This was described recently by the Metropolitan Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, when he said: “The next generation of children could be growing up in an environment where crime is seen as unexceptional in some areas of large cities – just a part of everyday life……….the bullied become bullies, the beaten become aggressors, and cruelty becomes the norm. Victims become robbers and so the cycle of crime escalates.”

    This scenario is allowed to develop because of the absence of the neighbourly society. Children grow up in neighbourhoods where the stability and support provided by networks of friendships, families, schools, neighbourly associations and other sources of identity and self worth is non- existent.

    The dissolution of these networks of support indicates that the role of the police, as custodians of the neighbourhood – as guarantors of authority and order – is ever more important. Their retreat from the neighbourhood frontline, about which I spoke in March, means that yet another layer is stripped away from the neighbourly society as troubled youngsters have no barriers to the conveyer belt to crime.

    In the face of crime and social disorder, a community can only retreat, ceding more ground to the criminal and exposing young people to values wholly opposed to those of the neighbourly society.

    The paradox is that, where the neighbourly society has disappeared, young people still desperately crave the things that sustain it – security, stability and freedom from fear.

    Their response to the absence of the institutions that sustain the neighbourly society is to establish their own institutions that maintain the destructive society. Their answer to an absence of family, neighbourhood and community networks is to create their own network of support – The Criminal Gang.

    For, what does The Criminal Gang provide but a substitute family? What does The Criminal Gang offer, but a route away from malnourishment and impoverishment? What does The Criminal Gang ensure, but a feeling of power and security? What does The Criminal Gang bring, but a sense of purpose and excitement? What does The Criminal Gang guarantee, but a right to belong?

    In short, The Criminal Gang fulfils that most basic human desire of association and belonging. But, just as with the children in the ‘Lord of the Flies’, the substitution of ‘Gang rules’ for moral rules leads to chaos and destruction. The Criminal Gang sweeps up the weaker members of the neighbourhood, intimidates those outside the gang and embarks on an orgy of vandalism, pillaging and virtually unrestrained violence.

    Of course not all gangs are bad – and some will be worse than others. Some gangs will constitute just a few children stealing from sweetshops. But, at their worst, gangs led by hardened thugs, with no consciousness of right or wrong, have a power to destroy any semblance left of community.

    Their efforts can lead to abuse, rape or murder. The tragic cases of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor bear witness to the destructive power of The Gang and illuminate gang terror in its purest form.

    The extent to which young offenders and gangs are nurturing the destructive society cannot and should not be underestimated.

    Young offenders are now responsible for about a third of all criminal convictions. But the recent Youth Justice Board survey showed that the number of criminal offences committed by young people is probably far higher than the conviction rates suggest. In that survey, 26 per cent of school pupils claim to have participated in some form of crime in the last year – and this alarming statistic is borne out by other surveys.

    Nor does the crisis of youth crime consist just of youths committing crimes. It consists also of young criminals growing up into adult criminals. Until we can find ways of reducing the level of youth crime, we will not succeed in reducing the supply of hardened adult criminals.

    2. Prevention in the place of cure?

    There is little doubt that we could make – and that we must make – much greater and more effective efforts to tackle youth crime by means of crime prevention. As one group of criminologists recently put it to me, we need to raise the hurdles rather than merely attending to the hurdlers.

    One great hurdle that can and should be erected against the young criminal is police presence. If we can get the police visibly back onto the streets, with effective neighbourhood policing, well supported by community watchfulness, and move towards the 2 minute response times, that have worked so well in New York, with the locality controlled by the police rather than by the gangs, then the hurdles that have to be jumped by young people contemplating a crime will be raised substantially.

    A second great hurdle is “designed-in” crime prevention. The evidence from a number of studies, that particular residences or businesses are repeatedly and disproportionately the victims of burglary, suggests that the proper employment of anti-theft designs and anti-crime technology could make these attractive locations less attractive and thereby raise the hurdle-rate for youth crime. The statistics, here, are echoed in the kind of comments I frequently hear from those – often shopkeepers – who have been victims of repeated crime: ‘the youths who hang around were put off once we put in anti theft devices and put up the CCTV’. No doubt also, the design of items such as mobile phones can contribute significantly to making them more difficult to use when stolen – as we hope the new moves to block GSM handsets and the new “designed-in” blocking of GSM phones will do.

    But I do not believe that we can afford to put all our faith in hurdles.

    We must also attend to the young hurdlers. I persist in believing that our society must be capable of addressing – and in a high proportion of cases, altering – the character of young criminals and potential young criminals.

    Some people believe that it is left-wing nonsense to suppose that the behaviour of young criminals or potential young criminals can be addressed or their character altered.

    But I am too acutely conscious of the subtle fabric of affection, reputation and emulation that tenuously and imperfectly sustains the moral characters of those of us who are generally non-violent and generally law-abiding, to believe that there is so vast a gulf as some people imagine between “them” and “us”.

    I take young criminals to be ‘us’, but gone wrong. I cannot see that there is much hope for society, or much hope for humanity, if we give up on the task of preventing them from going wrong. Crime prevention: yes – more of it; but also the prevention – as far as we are able – of criminality itself.

    3. The Youth Justice System does not work

    At present, the youth justice system does very little to sustain my optimism. Indeed it does much to sustain the deepest pessimism.

    The youth justice system in Britain today serves one purpose. It protects the public against some of the most persistent and serious Young Offenders for the periods during which those young criminals are locked up. Such protection of the public is, of course, enormously important.

    But alas, the protection of the public only occurs while the young people in question are in prison – and, all too frequently, a brief spell in a youth offender institution is followed almost immediately by re-offending.

    The re-offending rates in Young Offenders Institutions are roughly 75%. This means that, within two years of emerging from such an institution, 75% of the leavers will have been reconvicted of a crime. When one allows for the very low clear-up rates of crime which are under 10% at present, the presumption must be that an astonishingly high proportion – perhaps close to 100% – of the young people concerned – actually go on committing crimes after being in a YOI.

    So the youth justice system isn’t working as rehabilitation.

    But if a quarter of the pupils in our schools committed a crime last year – as the surveys suggest – then the youth justice system isn’t working as a deterrent either.

    I submit to you that a youth justice system which offers some short-term protection to the public but neither deters nor rehabilitates is, to a very considerable extent, a failure.

    4. The system of local authority ‘care’ does not work

    But the youth justice system is not the only thing which is failing.

    The system of local authority care is also a flop.

    Our care system is at the very least, failing to undo the moral damage already done to many of the children who find their way into it.

    Although many many children in care are very often horribly damaged, it is a tribute to those working in the care homes that many do emerge against the odds and live fulfilled lives. But, alas it is often not so. An appalling number of children in care become young people in prison.

    Figures from the National Prison Survey suggest that 38% of prisoners under the age of 21 have been in local authority care.

    Recently, I was presented with a published book of poems, written by Young Offenders.

    One poem entitled “This Angry Boy” particularly struck me.

    Let me read it to you:

    “At the age of ten he was classed as a problem child and that he needed special attention and so they packed him off to an approved Boarding School

    He was there for three years getting into fights here and there this angry boy.

    There was a lot of frustration but no one looked into the reason why he was angry and or frustrated.

    So he got kicked out of the Boarding school for assaulting another boy and was charged with GBH at the age of thirteen.

    That was the first of many offences. Then for the next year he was sent from Children’s home to Children’s home to Children’s home never having a place to settle for more than a month.

    Then at the age of fourteen he got into crimes ranging from car theft to armed robbery and he also had a reputation to defend in his area which also caused problems without him getting into fights. He had a criminal record as long as his arm. But why did he do these crimes and where was he going to go?”

    What better critique could there be of our youth justice system in operation?

    Or of the failure of our system of care?

    5. We fail from the age of four

    There is, however, a yet deeper failure. We are failing to tackle this problem at its roots.

    Some months ago, I was sent a book entitled Ghosts from the Nursery .

    Ghosts from the Nursery opens with the true story in the US of a 16-year-old boy, Jeffery, who was charged with the murder of an 84-year-old man in 1993 and sentenced to death. The authors observe that:

    “Jeffrey’s story is one told hundreds of times daily in courtrooms across the nation. It is a story told by events, psychiatric reports, interviews with victims, witnesses, friends, and family….. But the beginning of stories like Jeffrey’s goes untold. One chapter is nearly always missing–the first chapter, encompassing gestation, birth, and infancy. And because it goes unseen and unacknowledged, it repeats itself over and over at a rate now growing in geometric proportions”

    Sad and shocking though this story is, it is not so surprising when we learn that Jeffrey himself was the product of a chaotic and abused home background. His mother was a drug and alcohol addict. As a very young child, he was beaten, abused and neglected.

    The authors go on to examine the effect on children of abuse, neglect, and lack of warmth from their mother and father, their inability to relate to the world around them and their likelihood of some becoming tomorrow’s offenders.

    Academic research on both sides of the Atlantic is growing to support the evidence that the seeds of future offending are sown in infancy.

    Although the UK crime statistics do not provide much evidence of the background of offenders, the results of some long-term studies are beginning to be evaluated.

    In the UK, for example, Dr. Stephen Scott , of the Department of Child Psychiatry at King’s College London, has shown that by the age of 5, 15% of children display early signs of behavioural problems and are rejected by their parents. Nearly half of these will go on to have substantial criminal records. Looking back, of those who become serious repeat offenders, over 90% showed severe anti-social behaviour in childhood.

    In the last 40 years, the breakdown of family structures in the UK is both striking and worrying. A quarter of all children in the UK are being brought up with one parent absent – usually the father – easily outnumbering other EU countries. We also have by far the highest rate of teenage mothers in Europe. Whilst many lone parents do a heroic job against the odds, the evidence suggests that young people are less likely to be tempted onto the conveyer belt to crime if the family unit is at full strength.

    The evidence also shows that the single most important ingredient in a young child’s life is the quality of his or her parenting. Harsh, physically abusive, neglectful and chaotic parenting, devoid of love, makes for anti-social, disruptive, dysfunctional children. The building blocks of a normal childhood are missing. The ladder is kicked from under the children’s feet before they learn to walk.

    On a visit to a Parenting Centre in Hereford recently, I was told of a baby, born to a heroin addict, who was ante-natally addicted. What sort of start in life is that? When a child is traumatised by what he sees and hears in the home, how can he develop normal relationships outside? When there are no boundaries in his life, how can be expected to respect the rights of others?

    But what, apart from taking children into care, are we doing to prevent the first steps onto the conveyer belt to crime? When a child first arrives at school, clearly displaying the “early signs of behavioural problems”, what coherent strategies do we have for addressing these problems?

    The answer at present, is next to none. If the child is physically at risk, action – alas, often involving removal to local authority care – will be taken. But if the problem is moral and spiritual, if the child is ‘merely’ an outsider, even to the point where the teachers notice and worry, there is no sustained, coherent, readily available arrangement for effective intervention. We just wait until the problem becomes a crisis of criminality – and then leave it to the care system and the criminal justice system to fail to address the crisis.

    6. The way forward: two ambitions

    It is not enough for a politician – even for a politician in Opposition – to preach about our current failures. Constructive politics consists not only in identifying the current problems but also in putting forward solutions.

    Accordingly, since my speech on the neighbourly society, we have been working, not only to locate the areas of failure but also to identify the broad lines of possible solutions. We are not yet sufficiently advanced in that work to offer detailed policy prescriptions. But I want to sketch today, two major ambitions which – if fulfilled through effective detailed policy, and if set alongside a reassertion of effective neighbourhood policing and other effective crime prevention and criminal justice reforms – could, I believe, make a significant contribution to the reduction of youth crime, and hence to the reduction of crime in general.

    The first of these ambitions is the establishment of effective programmes to lead the ‘problem child’ away from the conveyer belt to crime, from the age of 4 or 5 onwards.

    The second of my ambitions is the establishment of a new approach to persistent youth offenders – so that those whom the programmes within the first ambition have failed to rescue are nevertheless effectively deterred and rehabilitated at a later stage.

    7. Effective programmes to lead children away from the conveyer belt

    The first of these ambitions – the establishment of effective programmes to lead children away from the conveyer belt to crime – is not new.

    In 1852, a Metropolitan Police Magistrate wrote: “the characters of children brought up in London are so precociously developed that I should find it difficult to mention an age at which they should not be treated as criminals”.

    The Nineteenth Century response to ever rising juvenile delinquency – as portrayed by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist was to set about trying to nurture neighbourly institutions that would both help parents to bring up the children and, to the extent that the parental role was not fulfilled by the parents themselves, to provide a partial replacement.

    Great philanthropists like Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Carpenter and Thomas Barnardo saw it as their duty to take action.

    Aware of the shortfall in educational institutions for the poor, Mary Carpenter established a number of schools, including a reformatory school in Bristol in 1854. In her schools, teachers were responsible for becoming acquainted with the child’s home and family surroundings.

    Mary Carpenter believed that support for children should “‘be left in the hands of volunteers, who were the ‘the best means of supplying to the child the parental relation”.

    The same desire to remove youngsters from the conveyer belt to crime motivated the Boys’ Brigade and the Scouts as well as the Sunday School movement which, by 1880, had some 6 million Sunday scholars.

    Nor should we be so insular as to suppose that the problem of youth criminality – or the need for an effort to reduce it by intervening very early and very persistently – are restricted to the UK.

    The Head Start programme in the US is an example of community based, charitable organisations that have developed innovative programmes to meet local needs, often using volunteers.

    The idea behind Head Start is to tackle rising juvenile crime, child abuse, neglect and poor education results by intervening with children under 5, pregnant mothers and their families. Since 1965, Head Start has served over 15.3 million children and their families and it plays a major role in focusing attention on the importance of early childhood development. It draws together the major components affecting a child’s development under one roof as part of a fully integrated service: education, health, parental involvement and social services.

    Head Start is not a perfect model. It is noticeable that President Bush – in a series of early childhood initiatives – has asked for reform. He is intent on basing the allocation of federal subsidies upon the evaluation of results.

    But the Head Start principle is the right one – it uses both the state and the voluntary sector to try and prevent children in their early years from embarking on the conveyer belt to crime.

    We are beginning to see a movement in this direction here, with primary schools playing a leading role in providing breakfast clubs, after school clubs, holiday clubs and counselling courses for parents. Schools are in touch with families in other ways through the educational welfare officers, health visitors and social workers – and the Sure Start project is in its early stages. These schools are only picking up the pieces – they have an enormous task.

    But many different agencies are involved, they are not fully co-ordinated, they are danger of becoming too bureaucratic and large numbers of children can, and do, fall through the net.

    Above all, we have not yet found in the UK – perhaps because we have become so centralised and so bureaucratic in our attitudes and practices – a suitable means of doing what Head Start does: namely, to mobilise and co-ordinate the resources of the voluntary sector.

    I agree with Rob Allen, the Director of Research at NACRO when he says:

    “There is a need for community based supervision to utilise as wide a range of resources as possible in the task of promoting responsibility…schools, youth clubs, churches, voluntary organisations and employers need to accept a greater measure of responsibility for the life of the community as a whole and for offering opportunities to reintegrate young people excluded from it…”

    But, in the UK today, we do not do it. The state all too often either ignores the problem or takes the child into ‘care’ – and all too infrequently sees itself as the facilitator of voluntary, neighbourhood-based efforts to provide or reinforce the stability and moral education that homes have been unable, or partially unable to provide.

    If we knew how to use the vast powers and riches of the state to release these voluntary, neighbourhood energies without bureaucratising them in the process, we should have the beginnings of an answer to the crisis of the conveyer belt. We know this because we know that despite the present lack of state facilitation there are – around and about – remarkable examples of voluntary neighbourhood activity.

    One of the most remarkable is a charity in Camberwell, Kids Company.

    Kids Company holds out a hand to children who are drowning under a system, that has failed them at every turn.

    Many of the children at Kids Company have witnessed all manner of criminal behaviour which in some cases defies the imagination. The case of one particular child provides an illuminating example. This child’s mother and partner are both drug addicts who in their preoccupation to feed their habit forget her most basic needs and sink to depressing levels of depravity. There is no food in the house, no sheets on the bed; the furniture has long since been smashed up. She has witnessed many frightening scenes due to the fact that drug dealers frequent her home.

    Nine out of ten of the children have no father; many rarely see food in the place they call home. Many will have suffered abuse and been exposed to a life of crime since early childhood. Over the years, usually by about the age of 11, they will have learnt to absent themselves emotionally from feelings.

    These children are already in a prison of their own making and it requires intensive work to bring them to return to feelings. Because they do not have a full capacity for sympathy or remorse and have little regard for their own future, they are not much concerned about the welfare of others, and not much worried by the prospect of compromising their freedom. Deterrence does not work for them because they do not feel they have anything to lose.

    Kids Company provides three hot cooked meals a day, incentive points which can be exchanged for clothes, education, psychiatric counselling, help with housing, drugs and benefits. It is in the business of picking up the pieces of discarded lives and attempting to put them back together.

    Kids Company is a local solution to a local problem meeting a specific need. It has established itself spontaneously and its essence is its autonomy which would be lost if we ever tried to make it fit a bureaucratic straitjacket.

    We need to invoke the spirit of the great Victorian social reformers, but we need to translate the working of that spirit into a modern idiom, the idiom of the Head Start programme and the idiom of the Kids Company. We need through concerted and coordinated action to find the means of harnessing the resources of the public sector and of the voluntary sector, to intervene early, to provide support and reinforcement for parents and their children, so that the ‘outsider child’, does not become the ‘problem child’, the ‘impossible child’ and the ‘young offender’.

    8. A new approach to dealing with young offenders

    We have, however, to accept that – however much we improve upon our current, lamentable approach to ‘problem children’ – there will still be failures. There will still be some, I hope, ultimately very few, who slip through the net and become serious and persistent young offenders.

    At present, our principal response to such offenders is to incarcerate them in Young Offenders Institutions. I have spoken today about the statistics which indicate that the system of YOIs in the UK is failing lamentably, both as a deterrent and as a system of rehabilitation.

    Some other places do better.

    You will recall that, for the UK’s Youth Offending Institutes, the latest figures show that 75% of young offenders reoffend within two years of release – and those figures are only for those juveniles who are caught.

    75%. Now let me contrast that figure for a moment with a Young Offenders Reformatory in Ankara, Turkey – a country not normally associated with a Hampstead liberals or a liberal penal policy!

    At this Reformatory, just 3% of those released had been reconvicted of an offence within four years. Yet the inmates of this Reformatory were convicted for severe crimes.

    The Governor of the Reformatory states:

    “This place is more like a school than a prison because we believe this project will be one that will help the children who have committed crimes return to the community as normal citizens”.

    This Reformatory succeeds because it is embedded in the local community. It is the very opposite of a child jail. The young people leave the prison campus every day to work in local businesses or study in local schools. The Reformatory is partly staffed by local volunteers. Although there is tremendous opportunity to escape, very few children do.

    Why?

    Partly because the conditions of the Reformatory are pleasant and provide replacements for all the things that were notably absent throughout the young person’s upbringing: positive support, education and sustenance.

    However, there is one important threat that hangs over these juvenile offenders: they know that they will be sent to a harsh closed prison – most likely to the end of their sentence – if they run away. They know what this closed prison is like due to the fact that they were detained there before trial proceedings.

    Let me give you another example in Texas – also not an area associated with lenient punishment.

    Over 70% of Juvenile offenders who pass through the Harlingen Camp in Texas do not reoffend (roughly the inverse of the UK figure). Although the Camp is highly disciplined, the offenders are given specialised mentoring and education programmes.

    They are constantly re-modifying their programs to create the highest success rate. For example, most juvenile institutions have at least 200 beds, whereas this camp only has 32. This allows for greater personal contact, or as Mr. Coan, the Prison Captain said, “A smaller unit leads to greater individual counselling and better end results”.

    The camp is not completely “military”. It emphasizes the fact that it is an educational institution, where the children can learn moral and physical courage.

    6 months is the minimum time of stay for the average child; the longest stay was 13 months. Children can be kept longer than 6 months if there are problems finding proper placement for them upon departure (if for example the family is not involved or willing to help).

    The children and counsellors meet with the family every two months to check on progress and try to streamline the network of support from the camp to the individual homes. 26 children have applied for the High School equivalency exam; 20 have passed, thus earning their High School Diploma from the camp. The camp also works to help the young people go to college with a 2-year program they are connected with once the kids leave the camp.

    These examples of Ankara and Texas have a lot to teach us – because the contrast with our own arrangements is so great. This is of not, of course, to deny that there are examples of good practice within some UK institutions.

    Thorn Cross YOI in Warrington has proved that if they can hold on to a young offender for long enough they can make a difference to the life of that young person.

    Thorn Cross operates a High Intensive Training programme known as HIT which recent research shows has a positive impact on re-offending rates.

    Cognitive-behavioural programmes, education, skills training relevant to the person and the location, preparation for a useful life, strict routine, detox programmes, mentoring, career planning and through-care on the outside have helped to reduce re-offending.

    A few weeks ago I visited the Orchard Lodge Secure Training Centre in South London. The staff are dedicated and do everything they can to help the children who are placed there. In many cases they do an excellent job and I witnessed some youngsters taking science GSCEs.

    But there are crucial differences even between these good UK examples and the really successful cases in Ankara and Turkey.

    What both the Boot Camp and the Ankara Reformatory have in common is what happens to juveniles when they leave.

    They offer a really serious rehabilitation and settlement service. The staff frequently calls on and check on the children and their families. They help them with their educational qualifications and the young people are invited back into the institutions on a day-by-day basis for further support.

    What a contrast to Britain. I have lost count of how many projects looking after young people, how many Secure Training Centres, and how many Young Offenders Institutions do not have the ability to offer a decent aftercare service.

    Although Thorn Cross – unusually – does make efforts (heroic under the circumstances) to support the boys after resettlement, they struggle in a policy environment that does not recognise what a pivotal time the weeks and months after a young person is released can be.

    They are often unable to find out what happens to former residents, and they have strictly limited capability for any kind of rehabilitation support. In the case of most Youth Offending Institutions and Secure Accommodation Centres, there is no serious after-care at all.

    Unfortunately once young people leave Orchard Lodge, for example, there is nothing. The youngsters go back into their neighbourhoods whence they came. With no positive networks of support, before long, many are tempted back into the gangs and rejoin the destructive society.

    The staff of Orchard Lodge are as frustrated by the system as I am. They told me that they pushed for as many children as possible to go to College, as that would be the one network of support that might keep them off the conveyer belt to crime.

    Recently a member of my team met a young man who had been in and out of Juvenile Units and YOI’s since the age of fifteen. Each time he was convicted he was given a short-term sentence from two to five months.

    He behaved well in prison, he welcomed the opportunity to clean up and come down from whichever drugs he had been taking at the time he was convicted. The problem was he was never anywhere for long enough for any good to be done.

    When his sentence was up he was back on the outside, back to the estate he had come from, exposed to the pressures and the gangs and the vulnerable lifestyle that had contributed to his past pattern of offending.

    Whilst he was in prison he had a routine, three cooked meals a day, his life took on an order and although to you and I that order would be abhorrent, to him, someone who had since a child had lived a life in chaos, it was comforting.

    Health care was on tap, he successfully went through detox, and the prison service, which possibly provides the most comprehensive drugs support programme in the UK, successfully built him up with nutrition and exercise.

    However the education he received was minimal, he was given no skills training for a life on the outside, he had received little in the way of mentoring or counselling and nothing which happened on the inside prepared him for a life on the outside. In fact everything on the inside was the opposite of what it would be on the outside. His meals were cooked, his clothes washed, others took the majority of decisions, he didn’t really need to think about anything.

    Someone who came into prison unable to completely think about the consequences of his actions or his future had all decision-making responsibility removed for the time he was inside.

    The irony was that he wanted a better life for himself. In his words he wanted ” a nice house and a job that paid good money”. He had aspirations, which to someone from his background presented a huge leap.

    By the end of his sentence, he was ready to take a step towards a better life, He was off drugs, had pulled himself together. But, just when he was best placed to make the transition from a life of social exclusion and persistent offending, the system throws him out into the community and virtually abandons him.

    The result being that within weeks he relapsed and was back through the revolving doors for another useless short-term spell at the expense of the taxpayer. This is the human reality behind the dismal statistics: the principal reason why the Youth Justice System fails is that it offers only sporadic episodes of improvement (after a long series of cautions and the like), without any coherent, consistent long-term rehabilitative approach.

    How can we improve upon this dismal performance and begin to achieve the kind of results that are being achieved in Ankara and Texas?

    The first imperative is to recognise that short, sporadic sentences with nothing in between will do very little, if anything, to rehabilitate persistent and serious offenders. There is at least some evidence to suggest that a long sentence, coupled with the reforms I am proposing, would lead to a better chance of successful rehabilitation and potentially reduce the total amount of time that young offenders spend inside.

    The second imperative is to recognise that a ‘sentence’ for such a young offender need not be, and in most cases almost certainly should not be, uniform or composed solely of straightforward incarceration: what is needed is for the serious and persistent young offender to be placed in the custodianship of some agency that can use a combination of support and discipline, sticks and carrots, gradually to wean that young person off crime and into a different style of life.

    In the case of Ankara and Texas, the custodial institutions themselves play these roles. For reasons which have to do with the history of our own institutions, I doubt whether that is a model which could generally be applied here. I believe that we need to build, instead on the Youth Offending Teams – whose origins lie in the work done by Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary.

    The Youth Offending Teams have many natural advantages as prospective custodians of persistent offenders under longer term rehabilitative ‘sentences’. They are locally based. They are devoted to dealing with specific problems of individual, persistent offenders rather than a wide range of other issues. They contain representatives of many of the organisations that need to be involved, from the police to the social services. And they have already showed signs of imagination – with, for example restorative justice programmes and ISSP supervision and mentoring programmes.

    But the Youth Offending teams are a foundation, rather than the whole answer.

    If we are to build effectively on that foundation and begin to emulate the low re-offending rates achieved in Ankara and Texas, we will need to look again not only at sentencing and the powers of custodianship (i.e. the use of sticks and carrots) for long term youth rehabilitative sentences, but also at the structures of the Youth Offending Institutions and secure accommodation, the availability of longer term education and training, psychological help, access to safe housing and much else besides.

    9. Fulfilling the ambitions: tough but constructive

    These then, are our ambitions – a truly effective programme, mobilising the public and voluntary agencies to lead ‘problem children’ away from the conveyer belt to crime, alongside a new approach to serious persistent youth offenders involving longer term rehabilitative sentences with a ‘seamless’ support service focused on the reform of character.

    To make a reality of these ambitions, we will need much further policy work. That work is now in train.

    That work will need to develop all parts of the five point plan for fighting crime in Britain that I authorised at the beginning of the year.

    It will need to deliver not only effective action to combat youth crime, by early years intervention and longer term rehabilitative sentences for persistent offenders, but also effective means of putting police back on the streets and turning them into the custodians of our neighbourhoods. It will need to identify effective means of rehabilitating our creaking criminal justice system – so that trials are conducted efficiently and effectively.

    And – as importantly as any of this – it will need to provide real methods of conducting an effective campaign against drug dependency in this country – without which no fight on crime stands any material chance of succeeding.

    Beyond and behind all of this we shall require a much broader programme of decentralisation, to create a remoralised and sustainable welfare society in which neighbours and parents alike take responsibility, in which family structures are supportive rather than torn apart, in which local communities and individuals feel they have power over their own destiny.

    We do not have to choose between soft action and hard action.

    That is a stale argument.

    We can instead, take action that is tough but constructive, action that is based on a real acknowledgement of the crisis and a real belief in individual moral responsibility, but action that derives at the same time from optimism about the capacity of our society to reform moral character and to lead young people away from crime, to the huge benefit of us all, if only we go about it in the right way.

  • Tim Yeo – 2002 Speech to the Social Market Foundation Conference

    Tim Yeo – 2002 Speech to the Social Market Foundation Conference

    The speech made by Tim Yeo to the Social Market Foundation Conference on 19 June 2002.

    1. INTRODUCTION

    I am grateful to David Lipsey and the Social Market Foundation for this opportunity to set out my thoughts about the future of broadcasting and public service broadcasting (PSB) in particular.

    Television and radio touch all our lives. Their influence on social, cultural, commercial and political activity is far reaching. Every man, woman and child is a consumer of television and radio.

    Decisions on how they are regulated, on controls over ownership, on digital switchover, on the BBC Charter, and many other matters don’t just concern every family in the land. They affect how Britain exploits the huge economic opportunity which broadcasting represents.

    I’m on the early stages of a journey of exploration which started last September when I took on the DCMS portfolio within the Shadow Cabinet. Today what I want to do is float ideas, share thoughts, not set out Conservative Party policy. I will do that at a later date, after I’ve attended a few more events like this one.

    I start from the position of being on the side of the consumer. I want more progress to higher quality, better value, more control for viewers and listeners. Delivering these aims will open up greater opportunities for broadcasters.

    In charting a course for broadcasting’s future we mustn’t be prisoners of the past. Harnessing new technology for the benefit of consumers as well as suppliers involves new ideas and concepts.

    Trusting consumers doesn’t always come easily to powerful people in either politics or broadcasting. Viewers and listeners weaned on an out of date model of passive consumption of television and radio deserve to be treated better.

    Now is the time to move towards a market in broadcasting where viewers pay for what they choose to watch and not for much else; time to reduce the distorting effects of the BBC licence fee; and to set the BBC itself free to grow in competition with other suppliers.

    Let me, at the outset, salute the industry’s considerable achievements. The BBC has a distinguished history. It set high standards which were rightly and widely admired. ITV opened up new horizons, Channel Four provided an innovative model of a publicly owned television channel and Sky TV enormously enhanced viewer choice. The newcomer, Channel Five, has its own angle on news and arts coverage. As it happens all these success stories have been facilitated by applying Conservative philosophy to a rapidly changing industry.

    2. BACKGROUND

    Broadcasting is and will remain one of the most important industries in the twenty-first century. Fortunately it’s an industry where Britain enjoys advantages – a large pool of entrepreneurial and creative talent, a fine record of public service and other broadcasting, the English language and a country in which people from all over the world like to live and work. British influence on the development of the media industry should be considerable.

    Now viewers and listeners enjoy wider choice decisions about ownership of media companies should be left to the competition authorities. The market will protect consumer interests provided there is competition between suppliers. If unfair, monopolistic or anti-competitive practices creep in the authorities have backstop powers to intervene.

    On matters of taste and decency regulators should concentrate on the prevention of harm rather than offence. This may sometimes involve taking a stronger line than now, for example, over material which may encourage aggressive or violent behaviour.

    The present structure of broadcasting in Britain is a historical accident. Radio, and television, developed as state-owned monopolies funded by the licence fee, a television tax which is highly regressive. Gradually this monopoly evolved into a comfortable duopoly and eventually into today’s multi-channel environment.

    But payment methods haven’t expanded to match the range of channels. Broadcasting companies and programme makers exercise great power over consumers. There’s been an assumption that schedulers know best, that the consumer is a passive creature, content to flop down in front of the screen and accept a diet someone else has chosen.

    Today some viewers are starting to consume television when it suits them, choosing from a bigger menu and exercising more control, maybe accessing one item in a news bulletin and pursuing it in more depth. In future more people will do this and it’s time to throw overboard outdated assumptions about how television should be paid for.

    3. THE FUTURE

    The future is digital. The Government must drive the switchover from analogue to digital more effectively than they have done so far. Without real leadership their target date for switchover won’t be achieved. As a Sky subscriber and a former customer of ITV Digital I know how unreliable the reception of the terrestrial service was, a failing for which Ministers cannot entirely escape responsibility.

    The extra quality, choice and potential for interactivity on digital justifies moving ahead quickly, regardless of any residual value in the analogue spectrum. Britain’s leadership of the digital television revolution must not be thrown away.

    Switchover requires a thriving terrestrial platform, alongside satellite and cable. Without that the exclusion of many homes from cable by geography would mean that satellite exercised a monopoly over much of Britain.

    Ideally all three platforms will offer viewers free to air and pay TV channels, even if in the short term the survival of digital terrestrial television involves a limited period of only free to air. However viewers shouldn’t be encouraged to buy equipment which denies them the chance to upgrade to pay channels at a later date.

    An all digital Britain will widen the range of payment options, for the benefit of both viewers and suppliers. It’ll end licence fee evasion, saving £140 million a year, more than 5 per cent of the BBC’s total income.

    Radio is a very important part of PSB and I’ll speak in more detail about it on another occasion. For today let me just say that Britain enjoys high quality radio. Wider choice and higher standards will be possible as digital radio becomes the norm.

    As far as possible the future of broadcasting should be determined by consumers not politicians. The market is the best guarantor of efficient delivery.

    If the market is to work properly changes are needed. The distorting effect of the television tax must be reduced. Consumers must increasingly pay for what they watch, not for what suppliers choose to sell them.

    4. PAYING FOR BROADCASTING

    No other industry prices its products in the way broadcasting does. All viewers pay the television tax even if they never watch the channels it pays for. Severing the financial relationship between consumers of a product and its suppliers is seldom helpful.

    Buyers of books aren’t forced to pay an entry fee to get into a bookshop before they know what books are on sale. Lovers of music don’t pay a lump sum covering the cost of dozens of compact discs even though they know they will only want to listen to a handful. Theatre tickets aren’t sold in a block which gives entry to certain plays selected by someone else before the theatregoer has been told which they are.

    The structure of the publishing, music and theatre industries isn’t the same as television but there are enough similarities to question why television is sold this way.

    The answer lies in history. To get broadcasting going the television tax (originally a radio tax) was introduced. It may have been right in the early days that this tax funded all broadcasting. Today the situation has changed.

    The television tax affects the behaviour not just of the BBC but other broadcasters too. It limits the power of consumers to determine what they are offered. It’s a crude and undiscriminating way to charge for television. It wouldn’t survive if consumers were used to paying for what they want and nothing else.

    The television tax provides a smokescreen behind which other broadcasters price their products in a similar way. Sky has revolutionised viewer choice, winning a large market share on the back of a bold and well judged strategic gamble. It’s been able to bundle its product, like that of the cable companies, in a way which does not suit all consumers, partly because the market has been conditioned by the television tax.

    Let’s take this a stage further. If the consumer, having paid the television tax, equivalent to the price of entry into the bookshop, is a sports lover, he or she is then asked by pay television suppliers for a further entry fee to get inside the section containing sports books. There is no opportunity to state a preference for, say, tennis and rugby over golf and cricket.

    Pay television subscribers, unlike television taxpayers, do at least buy their product voluntarily. For many people a single comprehensive subscription may be convenient. But now digital makes pay per view (PPV) easy, subscription to a pre-packaged bundle of channels shouldn’t be the only option.

    PPV should be widely available so consumers can access programmes individually. Subscribers to one sports channel, for example, should be allowed to buy individual sports programmes on other channels on PPV in the same way subscribers to The Economist who receive a discount by buying a year’s issues at a time can buy a single issue of the Spectator at the full cover price when they want to.

    The present system restricts choice and insults the viewer’s intelligence. It could be replaced by one which gives viewers and listeners the power that cinema and theatregoers, that readers of books, magazines and newspapers take for granted. PPV isn’t a burdensome addition to charges already levied but an alternative which enhances viewer choice and control out of all recognition with past practice.

    It’s time for boldness and imagination. Why shouldn’t quality programmes be made in a freer market? The free market in book publishing doesn’t mean only trashy books get published. Trashy books do get published but quality books emerge as well.

    At present the sole recipient of the television tax is constantly accused of dumbing down. It’s hardly surprising the BBC is tempted to compete for audience but it cannot be said too often that ratings are a lousy guide to whether the BBC is carrying out its PSB role.

    The success of Hello Magazine hasn’t put The Economist out of business. Suppose, however, both were published by one tax funded organisation and supplied free to all readers. It is a sure bet The Economist would be the one threatened with the chop when a commercially orientated chief executive took charge.

    Promoting a television market where consumers are king requires a fresh approach to the television tax and a rethink of the role of PSB.

    5. PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

    PSB is a public good on which public money can properly be spent. There’s a debate to be had whether that money should come from a hypothecated television tax or from general taxation, which is how the excellent BBC World Service is funded. However, the constant struggle of the World Service for proper funding isn’t an encouraging precedent for the general taxation option.

    A twenty first century model of PSB may still involve, at its core, an organisation whose main purpose is the delivery of certain specified obligations. But other channels apart from the BBC have an important PSB role and I applaud how they discharge their responsibilities. The public interest in the new century will only be properly served if there continues to be the widest possible choice for consumers, catering for all manner of individual tastes. However this morning I want to focus on the BBC.

    Many attempts have been made to define PSB and it’s often easier to say what it is not rather than what it is. I certainly don’t regard all the BBC’s output as constituting PSB. Plainly many viewers and even some BBC management don’t think so. Gavyn Davies didn’t claim it was in his 1999 Report on Future Funding.

    An important function of PSB is to remedy market failure. Taxpayer’s money can justifiably be used to fund broadcasting to ensure the supply of programmes which serve a public interest but which would not get made if the free market alone determined supply.

    Annex B of the Government’s own document – rather grandly entitled “The Policy” – refers to the General Public service broadcasting Remit whose first provision is “disseminating information, education and entertainment”.

    Back in the days of the BBC monopoly –as it happens anxieties over concentration of ownership weren’t so widely aired then, those concerns have grown louder as ownership has become more, not less diverse – back in those far off days, entertainment deserved inclusion within this definition of PSB.

    Today, however, the duty of a public service broadcaster to entertain is dramatically less now so much entertainment is available on other free to air channels. Market failure no longer applies.

    Information and education have stronger claims for inclusion within PSB, as does news and current affairs. Although Sky News has emerged as a valuable additional news provider alongside BBC and ITN, the regional news coverage of both BBC and ITV fulfils an important PSB function and might not be supplied by the market.

    The same is true of serious current affairs programmes. On The Record may not reach those elusive younger viewers who increasingly don’t vote but does contribute to political discussion. Regular viewing of Channel Four News and Newsnight not only allows time for dinner but also keeps viewers in touch with what’s happening at home and abroad. Neither would necessarily survive without a PSB obligation.

    In assessing where market failure applies there is a distinction between what the market supplies free to air and what it supplies on pay TV. This is more difficult territory. If croquet is covered on a pay channel does a free to air channel need to do so? Is croquet PSB? If it isn’t what difference is there between croquet and cricket, or golf, or rugby, or tennis? Or even, dare I say it, football?

    It’s doubtful if much sport can still be defined as PSB. And one model for the BBC I’ll float in a minute would allow viewers to enjoy the same sports coverage as now without paying more.

    Harder to judge is the extent to which drama, music and the visual and performing arts are PSB. Maintaining a significant British production capacity in these areas is desirable and reliance on the market may not achieve this goal. How these important elements are defined within a PSB remit requires further consideration.

    There is also the question of how the PSB package should be delivered. Should it be divided up into a series of individual components and bids invited from broadcasters able to deliver them? Or should PSB be bundled as a single package and put out to tender?

    This might appeal to free market theorists but it wouldn’t recognise reality. The BBC, despite faults which its detractors are quick to highlight, would deservedly have a head start in bidding to perform the PSB roles. A tender process would be cumbersome and expensive.

    The aim must be to deliver PSB as efficiently as possible. A new approach to BBC funding, overhauling the television tax, can encourage this.

    6. THE FUTURE OF THE TELEVISION TAX

    Much discussion over BBC Charter renewal will concern funding.

    I want the BBC enjoy the potential for a greater increase in its income than the television tax could ever provide. It is, after all, an internationally recognised brand, capable of considerable growth.

    Unlocking this potential depends on reforming the television tax. I hope the Secretary of State’s mind isn’t as closed as her recent FT interview suggested when she was quoted as saying that a significant change to the funding of the BBC lies “somewhere between the improbable and the impossible”.

    The BBC receives approximately £2.1 billion direct from television tax payers and another £390 million paid by the Treasury on behalf of households exempt from the tax, giving a total income of around £2.5 billion.

    Various options exist after the present Charter expires. At one extreme the BBC could be funded from advertising. But advertising revenue, as recent events have shown, is not infinitely expandable. This option would be unpopular with existing advertising funded channels and would not promote consumer choice. I do not support it.

    An alternative would be for the BBC to rely entirely on subscription or PPV. This would reduce its audience and unless those viewers who remained paid a higher subscription than the present television tax, money for programmes would be reduced.

    At the other extreme the television tax could continue, maybe growing in real terms as it has done recently. This alternative enjoys some support but is hard to justify unless everything the BBC does constitutes public service broadcasting.

    Changes to the present funding arrangements are therefore likely and I want to explore another option – shall I call it the Middle Way – because unlike the Secretary of State I want the BBC released from the shackles of the television tax.

    There’s nothing magical about an income figure of £2.5 billion. Could a high quality PSB function be provided for £2 billion? Or £1.5 billion? Perhaps PSB only needs one national television channel, not two?

    Now is the time to examine just how much television taxpayers should have to pay for the BBC’s PSB functions. I suspect that most television taxpayers believe it’s significantly less than £2.5 billion.

    Once a figure is decided the BBC would sign a public service agreement committing them to providing the core public service programmes. Its finances would be subject both to external audit and scrutiny by Parliament through the Public Accounts Committee and the Select Committee.

    But as I said a moment ago, I want the BBC to have more income, not less, so in addition to receiving this slimmed down television tax, it would be given new freedom to offer consumers additional television and radio channels on subscription or PPV.

    Under the Middle Way there’d be no ceiling on the BBC’s income. Its substantial reputation and assets could be exploited at home and overseas, creating new opportunities for programme makers and management. The BBC could grow without artificial constraints, develop new markets and improve services to consumers.

    A whole range of specialist new television channels and radio stations could emerge. All viewers would have more to spend as a result of the lower television tax. The market for pay television is growing. Would consumers not gain from competition, for example, between a subscription funded BBC Sport channel and other sports channels?

    No doubt it will be claimed that EU rules make it hard for the BBC to operate a dual structure of this sort. As Commissioner Reding pointed out recently to the Joint Scrutiny Committee examining the draft Communications Bill, total transparency is needed if a state controlled taxpayer funded body starts to compete in the market place. I hope that regulatory structures will not impede the evolution of the BBC.

    How far the BBC would grow under this model would depend on how successful it was at making programmes which consumers were willing to pay for. If its output is as good as its champions say, it has much to gain from greater exposure to the market. Timing the introduction of this new model would depend in part on the progress towards digital switchover and the start of the new Charter period is probably too soon for such radical changes. In any case they could be introduced gradually. But the time to debate whether they are desirable is now.

    7. CONCLUSION

    In considering the future of broadcasting generally and the renewal of the BBC Charter in particular our aims should be:

    1) to enhance viewer choice and control

    2) to help the BBC exploit its unique assets and reputation at the same time as preserving a properly funded PSB role

    3) to ensure that other broadcasters are free to develop as they wish

    4) to encourage a diversity of payment methods so that viewers increasingly watch what they pay for

    5) to help Britain maintain a leading role in broadcasting.

    Tessa Jowell’s rejection of changes to BBC funding must not be the last word on this important issue. Viewers and listeners deserve better. The ideas floated above are just that – ideas.

    I hope they will stimulate debate, enhance consumer power, widen the influence of the BBC and ensure that British broadcasters are leaders in this century as they were in the last.

  • Liam Fox – 2002 Speech to the 2nd Conservative Mental Health Summit

    Liam Fox – 2002 Speech to the 2nd Conservative Mental Health Summit

    The speech made by Liam Fox, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Health, on 25 June 2002.

    In the children’s story “The Emperor’s new clothes” it required the simple yet definite and courageous view of one individual to challenge the conventional wisdom and open the eyes of the population to their mass denial of reality. In dealing with the issue of mental illness we need a similar reality check asking whether recently adopted trends and measures are effective and relevant or merely rhetoric and fashion.

    The way in which a society treats those least able to play a full role is a measure of how civilised that society is. Sadly, I believe that we accept a level of care for those with mental illness that we simply would not accept for those with other types of illness. If you walk from Westminster up the Strand or into the heart of London and see people, many of whom will suffer from a mental illness, sleeping in the doorways of some of our wealthiest institutions then there is a policy failure that a humane society should not tolerate.

    THE UNSPOKEN EPIDEMIC

    It will come as a surprise to most people that one in four of us will suffer from sort of mental health problem at some point in our lives. One in four. I doubt there is a single person out there who has not experienced the impact of mental ill-health on someone in their life – be it relative, friend or colleague.

    Mental illness is society’s unspoken epidemic, one of its last taboos and so rarely discussed. People regard mental illness as a weakness. They stigmatise those individuals who suffer from it. Why else was Mrs. Rochester locked in her attic? Why else did it take Lorraine Wicks so long to accept her son Joe had schizophrenia in Eastenders, and for him to seek help? If we are to diffuse the stigma surrounding mental health, we must dispel the ignorance of people.

    The spectrum of mental ill-health is incredibly broad. It encompasses the Mum with post-natal depression, the Dad struck by depression after a period of prolonged unemployment and the son or daughter with a behavioural disorder who is underperforming academically and is disruptive in the classroom.

    It is also about the college friend who commits suicide (seemingly for no reason), the soldier returning from an overseas conflict but unable to adjust to the realities of daily life, and the elderly parent slowly being ravaged by the dehumanising erosion of the human spirit known as Alzheimers.

    While the safety of the public must always be at the top of our priorities we need to move the debate away from an obsession with the mercifully few incidents when someone with a mental illness harms someone else and remind ourselves that it is in the interests of that very public safety that we ensure adequate and appropriate treatment for all those who need it.

    THE CURRENT SITUATION

    Sadly, too many politicians seem to pay more attention to the potential dangers psychiatric patients pose, and issues surrounding their compulsory treatment than to the far more important issue of appropriate treatment of all patients. We need to shift the debate away from those rare incidents of violence which end up stigmatising anyone with a mental health problem.

    The situation is currently bleak with widespread staff shortages, acute and day-bed shortages, wide gaps in community provision, and a lack of effective step-down care for those returning to the community.

    It is a situation made worse by the knowledge that while funds are earmarked in the health budget they all too often fail to reach those in need. Cutting the mental health allocation is an easy way of balancing the budget. The mentally ill are least likely to complain, make a fuss or write to the newspaper columns.

    The evidence that the Government does not consider mental health a priority is stark. Buckinghamshire Mental Health NHS Trust has seen £1 million originally earmarked for mental health diverted into other areas. Half of all GP practices in Cumbria offer counselling to patients in need, and there are plans to axe the £78,000 service. The Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership Trust faces service reductions amounting to £500,000, and the Acupuncture Clinic at the Department of Psychiatry at North Manchester General Hospital is threatened with closure. It costs £60,000 a year to run. It’s quite clear that far from being a priority, mental healthcare is an afterthought for this Government.

    Our inner cities bear more than their fair share of the burden. Those who are homeless, or who have alcohol or drug addictions, frequently also have mental health problems. They end up in our inner cities – where they become invisible amidst the hustle and bustle of city life to those who might otherwise help them.

    But mental ill-health is not just an issue that afflicts inner cities. The crisis in our countryside has also led to an increase in mental health problems – such as the well documented tragedy of farming suicides which has touched my own constituency in North Somerset.

    A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

    Throughout history, mankind has sought to put distance between itself and those deemed mentally ill. In the era of witchcraft, the treatment of the mentally ill consisted of the casting out of devils and theatrical exorcisms. Once civilisation had moved beyond that phase of superstitious fear, the commonly held view, for many centuries, was that insanity was untreatable. Any approach to dealing with the mentally ill had to focus on containment and custody. The mentally ill were hidden from human view in asylums and institutions, with varying standards of care. Locked away out of sight – and literally out of mind – those sent to asylums sometimes lay chained to their beds all day long. The corridors echoed to the screams of the undiagnosed and untreated deranged.

    For many the reason they were there in the first place was often forgotten. Having an illegitimate child was sufficient to have you labelled a ‘congenital imbecile’ or ‘morally defective’. You were condemned to an asylum for the rest of your natural life. Even in the 1960s, there were examples at an asylum in the Scottish Highlands of asylum ‘inmates’ having all their teeth removed to simplify oral hygiene, and false teeth being washed communally in a big bucket.

    For the countless thousands in these appalling institutions, those who were not ill to start with frequently ended up depressed, if not deranged, by the conditions they were forced to live in.

    THE CONSERVATIVE RECORD

    The Conservative Party has always been at the forefront of mental health reforms. It was Lord Shaftesbury who began to turn mental health from an instance of private misfortune to a matter of public concern. He highlighted the atrocious conditions in many of the London asylums, and changes began, albeit very slowly, to occur.

    The reliance on asylums and other custodial institutions was such that by 1954 the population of psychiatric hospital beds peaked at 152,000 – more than twice the current prison population.

    But it was Enoch Powell who took the first decisive step away from this model of care. In his own words, the 1959 Mental Health Act lit a ‘funeral pyre’ beneath the decaying network of asylums.

    He was at his most eloquent on this subject in 1961, in what has become known as his Water Tower speech. He talked of asylums which stood ‘isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside’ His goal, broadly speaking, was to move treatment of the mentally ill away from remote asylums and into local hospitals ‘in the community’.

    With the development of new drugs, the possibility of treating patients actually in the community slowly became a reality. Starting with the findings of a committee into mental health chaired by Cecil Parkinson at the request Norman Fowler when the Conservatives were in opposition in the 1970s, policy development culminated in the 1983 Mental Health Act and Kenneth Clarke’s 1990 NHS and Community Care Act.

    CARE IN THE COMMUNITY

    Most people accept that it was right in principle to bring an end to the old asylums and have patients treated close to or within the community. Certainly the concept of care in the community had support right across the political spectrum.

    But, as Virginia Bottomley wrote in a letter to The Times in 1998: ‘In an institution, an individual can be monitored 24 hours a day. In the community, reporting and fail-safe mechanisms are necessary if tragedies are to be avoided. ….. The pendulum has swung too far.”

    That a warning in those terms should have been delivered by such a staunch supporter of the concept of care in the community ought to have set alarm bells ringing in government. But nothing was done.

    Now the suicide rate is rising again. The increasing breakdown of the family unit, homelessness, abuse, and the absence of any sense of community in inner city areas are all contributing to increasing prevalence of mental health problems amongst all ages, and particularly the young.

    This is not to ignore the fact that care in the community has provided many thousands with an opportunity to experience a quality of life far better than what they would have experienced inside restrictive institutions.

    Nor can criticism be laid at the door of medical, nursing and voluntary staff who have made a Herculean effort in the face of the greatest difficulties.

    I would reject completely the criticism of some that care in the community was nothing more than an unfortunate or catastrophic meeting of a desire for financial savings and a naïve passion for the rights of the individual.

    But the pendulum has swung too far- and too fast. Many now feel that care in the community was implemented too quickly, with inappropriate patient selection and in too many places, there was too little investment in training, finance and related areas.

    There has been, at times, too little care, scant support, and a form of community which has exposed the vulnerable- both patients and the public- to danger.

    Individuals were sometimes placed in a complex urban environment that they just couldn’t cope with. They lacked understanding of their condition, and their institutionalised background made them unable to deal with the complexities of modern living. And when they needed help, their cries went unanswered.

    We need a new balance to be struck which ensures the most appropriate treatment and environment for patients. A balance where those that need treatment in a hospital setting receive it and only those able to cope in the community are placed there.

    And we must accept as part of this balance that care in the community has been discredited in the public mind by a series of crimes committed by the mentally-ill who had fallen between the gaps or come off their medication.

    The litany of cases represent some of the most horrifying and frightening crimes of the past few decades – Christopher Clunis stabbing Jonathan Zito on the platform of Finsbury Park, Horritt Campbell attacking nursery nurse Lisa Potts, Michael Stone murdering Lin and Megan Russell on a Kentish country lane, the attack on the late George Harrison in his own home, the Liberal Democrat councillor Andrew Pennington attacked by a man with a sword at a Cheltenham advice surgery.

    A case from my own constituency: Sarah Beynon from North Weston, just outside Portishead, was sent to Broadmoor in August 1995 after killing her father while on leave from a clinic. An enquiry found that staff at the Southmead Hospital did not ensure she took her medication. Risks were taken unnecessarily, and she was not safely contained physically. There was a lack of communication between social workers at the Fromeside Clinic regional secure unit. At Fromeside, she was the only female in a ward of fifteen patients. The monitoring of her condition was often left to nursing staff without specific training.

    But these tragic cases are not just in the past. A 37 year old paranoid schizophrenic woman was ordered last April to be indefinitely detained after an indiscriminate outbreak of violence in which seven people were attacked in Leeds city centre. Formerly an in-patient treatment, she had been asking her doctors to change her medication at the time of the attack. No-one was around to pick up the signs that something was going wrong.

    As Michael Howlett of the Zito Trust told the Yorkshire Evening Post (11 April 2002): ‘People don’t just attack people in the street out of the blue. There’s always a build-up over weeks or months. These incidents are usually as a result of services breaking down and the danger signs not being spotted’.

    However, it is a misapprehension that because it is preferable not to institutionalise people that the community is invariably the place to locate all mental health patients.

    Let me just quote from the Sainsbury Centre’s briefing on in-patient acute care published the other week: ‘We have yet to develop realistic plans to deliver acute inpatient care which is therapeutic and supports recovery. Unless we develop and implement such plans, nationally and locally, we will see an increasing cycle of decline in acute mental health care with increasing user dissatisfaction, incidents and inquiries and the loss of high quality staff – all despite the best efforts of many committed staff. The situation is little short of a crisis and has to be addressed now. In some instances the quality of care is so poor as to amount to a basic denial of human rights.’

    A DANGER TO WHOM?

    Events involving just a few stigmatise the many – and lead others to overlook the danger some mentally ill people pose to themselves.

    The case of Ben Silcock is a good example. Mentally disturbed, it was he who was severely mauled after climbing into the lion enclosure at London zoo.

    Incidences of suicide, particularly in prisons, far outnumber the cases where the mentally ill patient harms someone else. Sadly, around 1,000 schizophrenics commit suicide each year. This contrasts with the 40 murders each year committed by people who have been in contact with mental health services, and who are not necessarily schizophrenics.

    It will always be the duty of government to protect the public from harm, if necessary by detention or compulsory treatment. But politicians must take care to adopt a balanced approach which does not stigmatise and thereby worsen the plight of those who pose no risk to anyone, except possibly themselves.

    WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ABROAD?

    Gordon Brown says we have nothing to learn from abroad when it comes to health. That is equally ignorant and arrogant, especially in the area of mental health.

    I was enormously impressed in Denmark during a visit to a psychiatric hospital at the profoundly calm atmosphere and the sense of patients being treated with dignity and respect.

    And some of you may have heard of the Hotel Magnus Stenbock in Helsingborg, Sweden. It is a good example of what might be termed a ‘halfway house’ for those moving between an institutionalised setting and the community. It has 21 single rooms. It offers a balance between private and social space. The hotel is not just about its structure and about the offering of crisis accommodation, but it is also about developing a sense of community, a sense of acceptance and offering a place of safety. It is run by the RSMH, an organisation of mental healthcare users, which runs a million-pound organisation that sustains and nurtures self-help models of care throughout Sweden.

    Perhaps the most striking comment I saw about the hotel was that of a shopkeeper who runs a store nearby the hotel. One might have thought the local population would have objected to the hotel being near them, but on the contrary, he said ‘The proximity of the hotel has not had any adverse effects on business, sometimes the general public are a little wary of users, but they see the staff in the shop are not afraid and are treating the hotel residents the same as all the other customers. It makes them more comfortable. We believe everyone has the right to be treated as a human being and at some point in everyone’s life we all encounter problems, some more severe than others’.

    This is symptomatic of the approach of Sweden and other countries. They regard mental illness as no different from any other illness. They are prepared to innovate. Variety is what matters. We need to offer services which reflect the diverse needs of those with mental health problems, rather than offering a limited range of services which the individual has to fit their mental health problem round. And the RSMH shows how the state does not need to be the only provider.

    MENTAL ILLNESS IN THE YOUNG

    It is amongst the young and old that there is the greatest propensity for others to dismiss the symptoms of mental health. The rate of mental health problems amongst children and the young is alarmingly high – twelve per cent suffer from anxiety disorders and ten per cent have disruptive disorders.

    The signs of mental ill-health are too often dismissed as growing pains yet mental health problems in the young can quickly lead to juvenile crime, alcohol or drug misuse, self-harm and so on.

    These problems affect children in care in particular. For example an Audit Commission report stated that two thirds of young people looked after by Oxfordshire County Council had a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, compared with only 15% living at home.

    It is also surely a cause for concern that a third of young men between sixteen and eighteen sentenced by a court are diagnosed with a primary mental disorder.

    Mental health problems not only make children unhappy but also retard their emotional development and social skills, and blight their education and life chances. The social problems that can consume young people such as school truancy, teenage pregnancies, bullying and school drop-out rates are as much part of the mental health agenda as the developmental and behavioural disorders more frequently cited.

    We have a duty to these children to ensure they receive the appropriate assistance rather than being condemned to a youth spent at the margins of an unwelcoming education system and a fearful civil society.

    The causes of mental health problems amongst the young are diffuse. Genetic influences can make children more likely to suffer from serious mental health problems, but very often it is societal influences that can influence the development of anxiety and conduct disorders. The increasing breakdown of the family unit, homelessness, abuse, and the absence of any sense of community in inner city areas can all contribute.

    Such problems can manifest themselves in behaviour which is often classified as wilful ill-discipline. Preventative work which involves educating schools and helping them to understand the wider implications of bad behaviour is a sensible step, as is involving the families. One difficulty, though, is that any suggestion of mental health problems is immediately seen as attaching a stigma to the child, and this impacts on the extent to which families are prepared to co-operate. They fear their child will be bullied (perhaps exacerbating the problem) and that the school’s attitude to a child who is potentially disruptive may also change. They wrongly feel that they protect their child by avoiding the issue.

    THE ELDERLY- TOO OFTEN FORGOTTEN

    Mental ill-health in the young is the wellspring of what I have described earlier as the ‘unspoken epidemic’. That epidemic is just as widespread amongst the elderly, and just as easily dismissed and ignored as with young people.

    A quarter of those over 85 develop dementia – perhaps the form of mental illness most associated with the elderly. However, between ten and sixteen per cent of those over 65 develop clinical depression. This sort of mental illness is too often ignored, as younger relatives assume the individual is just ‘slowing down’ and ‘getting on’.

    Older people deserve access to mental health services as much as anyone else. It is not enough just to assume that because elderly people have access to care homes, home helps, meals-on-wheels and the like anyway, an extra dimension of care on account of a mental illness they may have, is unacceptable. People are individuals, and they must be treated as such.

    PRISON-THE HIDDEN SCANDAL

    Enoch Powell may have lit a ‘funeral pyre’ beneath mental asylums when his 1959 Mental Health Act began the process of shutting them. But today, some seventy per cent of the prison population has a mental health or drug problem. Where once we hid our mentally ill in asylums, we now, unwittingly, locate many in our prisons.

    The incidence of mental disorders amongst the prison population far exceeds that in the population as a whole.

    It is a troubling thought that anyone who is mentally ill and has a brush with the law could find themselves subject to inadequate treatment in Dickensian surrounding at the beginning of the 21st century.

    Facilities often amount to little more than sick-bays with limited primary care cover. The assessment of a prisoner on his arrival at prison typically takes five to seven minutes. A retired GP or a locum who may have no specialist knowledge of mental health often conducts it. The level of training of staff does not always match the complexity of the conditions prisoners present with.

    Prisoners are thus less likely to have their mental health needs recognised, less likely to receive psychiatric help or treatment, and are at an increased risk of suicide. The number of suicides in 1999 – 91 – is almost double the figure of 51 from 1990.

    As a report from John Reed, the medical inspector of the inspectorate of prisons, states: ‘A period in prison should present an opportunity to detect, diagnose and treat mental illness in a population hard to engage with NHS services. This could bring benefits not only to patients but to the wider community by ensuring continuity of care and reducing the risk of reoffending on release’ (BMJ, 15 April 2000). That this opportunity is not grasped is an indictment of the current system.

    And John Reed has also said: ‘Many [prisoners] are quietly mad behind their cell door and are not getting any treatment. Care for mentally disordered offenders in prison is a disgrace’ (Nursing Times, 25 May 2000).

    The Prison Service must, therefore, as a matter of urgency, consider how to address the mental health needs of the people in their charge. Research is required, in particular, to determine how the prison environment impacts upon mental health. This may include issues such as overcrowding, confinement in cells, and the range of activities available to prisoners.

    A second problem is that prisoners with mental health problems remain within the prison service, and are not diverted to the NHS, as the Reed Report amongst others, recommended. It is inappropriate for prisoners with severe mental illness to be in prison. Sir David Ramsbotham has said ‘In my view mentally ill prisoners requiring 24-hour nursing care should be in the NHS, not prison’ (Nursing Times, 25 May 2000).

    But for diversion to work, an alternative must exist. More beds would be needed in special and medium-security hospitals. In addition, upon completion of sentence, there are insufficient beds in ordinary psychiatric units to discharge prisoners into. This lack of beds clogs the whole system up.

    Of course increasing capacity in the NHS whether for acute hospital beds or secure hospital places will require resources that will have to be contained within the envelope of health spending. Additional research is required to make an accurate assessment of exactly what is required and we shall now undertake this. But it is a question of values and priorities.

    Whether patients are within the criminal justice system or not, it is in everybody’s interest to make sure that their mental illness is properly treated, and in the right setting, before they are released from custody with a treatable condition.

    The Conservatives have already stated that we will spend what is required to provide better healthcare, but that imposes a duty to make the best use of the resources we already have before deciding what more might be needed.

    An NHS which, by its own estimate, wastes some £9 billion a year needs to ask some awkward questions about its use of resources.

    In addition, Derek Wanless dealt with the costs of mental illness and the potential savings of a better system in his recent report.

    He pointed out that MIND estimate the total costs of mental illness at £37 billion a year. Of this, £11.8 billion is lost employment. In 1995 over 91 million working days were lost as a result of mental illness.

    Home Office estimates put the overall cost of crime at £58 billion per year with a significant proportion being carried out by people with a mental illness.

    When asked about the cost benefits of better mental health care, Wanless said “It is difficult to estimate the exact value of potential savings, but it does not seem unreasonable to assume that there might be a 5 per cent reduction in the costs of mental illness and a 2 per cent reduction in the costs of crime…..giving a net saving across government as a whole of some £3.1 billion a year.” (Securing our Future Health: Taking a long term view, Interim report, Derek Wanless, April 2002, pp.115 and 116)

    A NEW AGENDA

    Health policies cannot hope to eradicate the problems of an entire society. That Utopian vision was crushed very soon after 1948. What health policies can do is seek to support those who do suffer in what can be, at times, an atomised and alienating society.

    That is why the Conservative Party is making mental health a central part of its health policy agenda. It is an issue that must become a matter of public concern, and not just a private misfortune. A self-enlightened society is one that realises, as they have done in Sweden and Denmark, that it is to the benefit of everyone that mental illness is treated – and if possible prevented – adequately.

    And perhaps we need to bring back another concept – ‘sanctuary’. We started off with Bedlam, then we had madhouses, Lord Shaftesbury gave us asylums, and then we looked to the community. Now we have to speak of what all these differing environments ought to provide – a sense of sanctuary.

    I recently visited a counselling service in Aylesbury where the described their office as “a place to feel safe.”

    And last week I had the very great privilege of visiting the Hillside Clubhouse in Holloway. The Clubhouse network was something I had not heard of before. I was struck from the moment I walked in the door that the people who used the clubhouse – and who had mental health problems – looked on the Clubhouse as somewhere they could go to feel safe. It offered them companionship, constructive activity and the chance to go and get a paid job in the community. It supported them without compelling them. Everyone found their own level, and progressed at their own pace.

    It was not somewhere they were forced to go, but equally it was somewhere that would keep in touch if they stopped coming along. In short, it offered genuine care in a real community. It was a sanctuary in an ever more complex and difficult society.

    With New Labour’s obsession with celebrity, glamour and the good life, many feel that the vulnerable in our society now have no champions left. Concern about the social welfare of those in society who have no-one to speak up for them is an essential part of any programme for a truly national party such as ours. There can be few more vulnerable groups than those with mental illness.

    We are not taking this stance because it is fashionable.

    We are not doing it because we have identified some interest group or section of the population who we can make politically beholden to us as a consequence.

    We are not doing it because we see some short-term gain to be had by pretending to interest ourselves in ‘soft’ social issues for a few months.

    We are doing it because we believe it is the right thing to do.

    That is what politics ought to be about.

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech on the Mentally Ill

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech on the Mentally Ill

    The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, at the Savoy in London on 25 June 2002.

    Much has happened since I spoke to you nearly a year ago at last year’s annual lunch.

    The Two Cities have been at the forefront of the national outpouring of affection and respect for the Queen during her Golden Jubilee celebrations.

    In May’s Elections Westminster City Council once again showed how successful Conservatives can be when we deliver high quality, good value local services. Simon Milton and his team have certainly played their part in our local government revival in London.

    And in the House of Commons your new MP, Mark Field, has marked himself out as a leading member of that new generation of Conservative MPs that I will make it my business to lead into Government.

    Twelve months that would have sounded fanciful. We had just suffered our second devastating defeat in four years.

    Yet today, our Party is more disciplined and more united than it has been for a decade.

    And Labour, seemingly impregnable back then, have been caught in their own web of intrigue and spin which has seen them lose the trust of the British people.

    This is all a very long away from the new dawn in British politics that Tony Blair promised on taking office in 1997 or from the promises he made at the last Election.

    How has a Prime Minister who said he would follow the People’s Priorities come to view those he claims to represent with such contempt?

    Integrity and politics

    The relationship between government and the governed is the cornerstone of democratic politics. It is usually vigorous and sometimes harsh, but when it reaches the point where the Government considers the people it leads as its enemy the very idea of democracy becomes debased.

    Whether it is smearing Rose Addis as racist or investigating Pam Warren and the survivors of the Paddington Rail crash for their political affiliations, one thing is clear. This Government believes that anyone who is prepared to speak out and contradict its message that things are in fact getting better, must have a political motive for doing so.

    Just last month, a newly-appointed Labour minister – the former Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit summed up Labour’s governing philosophy. He said ‘Third Way triangulation is much better suited to insurgency than incumbency’.

    This is a polite way of saying that defining yourself by the people and things you are against instead of what you are for may win elections but isn’t much use when it comes to running the country.

    It is because Labour have failed to learn that lesson after more than five years in power, that they go after the likes of Rose Addis and Pam Warren with the venom that they do.

    Tony Blair said he would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, but overall crime has started to rise again and violent crime and street crime are rocketing.

    The best David Blunkett can claim of nearly sixty headline-grabbing initiatives on law and order over the past year is that they are not Jack Straw’s.

    Tony Blair said ‘education, education, education’ would be their priority, but one in ten students in some inner city areas leave school without a single GCSE and indiscipline has become the standard in too many classrooms.

    And the best Estelle Morris can say is that the days of the one-size-fits-all comprehensive are over after David Blunkett abolished Grant Maintained schools.

    Tony Blair said Britain had ‘24 hours to save the NHS’, but five years later a quarter of a million people are having to pay for operations out of their own pockets because they cannot afford to wait any longer.

    And the best Alan Milburn can say about health is that there is now room for partnership with the private sector after boasting that the NHS would remain a state monopoly little more than a year ago.

    And where is the Chancellor in all this? He said National Insurance was ‘a tax on ordinary families’ and dismissed claims during the Election that he would increase it as ‘smears’. Ten months later he increased National Insurance by £8 billion while the state of our public services have declined still further.

    And the best Gordon Brown can do is to adopt a sphinx-like silence. But New Labour is his project too.

    Political discontent and cynicism have been accelerated by five years of a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who neither mean what they say nor say what they mean.

    Five years of seeking to be all things to all people.

    Five years when Labour’s only tangible achievement is to be neither the Party they once were nor the Government they replaced.

    They have poisoned the well for all politicians.

    So we cannot sit back and wait for the public disillusionment with Labour to grow. We have to show that the Conservative Party is changing, that we can deliver action not words.

    We do not have to stop being Conservative to win the next Election, but we do have to start showing how our principles will deliver solutions to the problems people face.

    Some people say it is not the job of the Conservative Party to talk about the vulnerable. I say it is part of our very purpose. It is what brought me into politics. That is why I will never be apologetic about putting the vulnerable at the centre of our strategy.

    Today Liam Fox is talking about giving mental illness a much higher priority within the Health Service. One in four people in this country suffer from mental illness of one form or another. It is our nation’s hidden epidemic and yet it is one our society’s last remaining taboos.

    There is nothing fashionable about championing the mentally ill, but they are the victims of an old consensus that has let them down.

    Too many people with mental illness now languish in prison and the Government plans to detain indefinitely people with personality disorders who have done no harm to others. The mentally ill have a right to be heard and we will give them a voice.

    Because it is vulnerable people – the elderly, the sick and the disadvantaged – who suffer most when public policy and public services fail.

    We have allowed issues like these to be colonised by Labour for far too long. The paucity of their methods and the poverty of their results can no longer go unchallenged.

    But it isn’t good enough for us just to talk the talk, we are going to have to walk the walk. People have to trust our motives, but they have to believe we will deliver.

    It is going to fall to us to tackle the problems of crime, failing schools, family breakdown and poor healthcare. Now, as in the past, we will work to give people back control over of their own lives, to direct power away from government to the places and the people who can use it more effectively. That is why I have set up a Unit to head the most wide-ranging review of our policies and our priorities for a generation.

    Better schools and hospitals, more responsive local government, means giving teachers, doctors, nurses and councillors the power to do their jobs and making them accountable for what they do.

    That is what happens in every other walk of life, it is also what happens in every other country whose standards of public services exceed our own.

    If we do these things people will see the difference. It is about putting people before systems, results before theory, and substance before spin. That is the right way to do things, but it is not Labour’s way.

    Taxation

    Instead of opening their minds to new ideas all they have done is open our wallets.

    The higher taxes announced in the Budget are intended to give us European levels of health spending.

    But European spending won’t give us European standards without reform. I was struck by recent figures which showed that the productivity improvements in the NHS before 1997 have been reversed over the last five years.

    And Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have shut the door on any serious debate reforming the NHS. Instead, they are simply going to give us higher taxes. That is an expensive recipe for disaster.

    In all, taxes will increase by around £8 billion pounds next year, and over half that sum will come from business, the very people who generate the country’s wealth in the first place.

    But this is not the first time Gordon Brown has raised taxes.

    Pensioners were his first target. In 1997, the Chancellor’s withdrawal of the ACT Dividend Tax Credit landed pension funds and pensioners with a £5 billion a year stealth tax from which they are still reeling.

    In 1998, the utility companies had to pay the second half of the £5.2bn windfall tax.

    In 1999, the very smallest businesses, personal service companies, first became aware that their vital contribution to the economy was to be attacked with the IR35 tax.

    In 2000, hauliers, taxi drivers and every single business reliant on road transport felt the anger of ordinary motorists at the highest taxes on petrol in Europe, culminating in the fuel crisis.

    In 2001, right in the middle of a painful manufacturing recession, Labour introduced the Climate Change Levy, a tax on energy which hit manufacturing the hardest.

    Finally, in Budget 2002, Gordon Brown announced half a billion pounds of higher National Insurance Contributions for the self-employed and £4bn more for all other businesses, not to mention £3.5bn extra that will now have to be paid by employees.

    Regulation and competitiveness

    But it’s not just the higher taxes that Labour have levied on business every single year.

    There’s the red tape, the Government’s favourite mechanism for getting business and the public services to do what it wants.

    Just this morning we hear that GPs are wasting two and half million appointments every year filling in repeat prescriptions and filling out sick notes to satisfy the thirst for bureaucracy.

    Businesses will recognise the pattern, as they cope with regulation upon regulation, from new payroll burdens that have turned businesses into unpaid benefits offices, to administrative juggernauts like the Working Time Directive.

    In monetary terms, the Institute of Directors calculates that these burdens have cost business a further £6bn every year, but no-one could ever really know the true cost of time which comes from having to fill in forms instead of creating wealth.

    And yet, despite all these taxes and all this red tape, Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour says, “we’re all Thatcherites now”.

    Well I’m a tolerant man and I believe in broad church politics, but I draw the line at heresy.

    Mr Mandelson says we all have to accept that globalisation “punishes hard any country that tries to run its economy by ignoring the realities of the market or prudent public finances”.

    Quite. So why is Labour ignoring one of the most fundamental realities of the free market: that to be competitive, to win orders and create wealth, you have to keep burdens on business to a minimum.

    We have become the fourth richest country in the world because Conservative Governments spent eighteen years freeing labour and capital markets, deregulating key sectors of industry, and slashing red tape and taxes.

    Every new regulation and every increase in business taxation introduced by Labour since then has undermined our long-term ability to compete in the global marketplace.

    Monetary stability and the Euro

    Another feature of the economic legacy that Conservatives passed to this Government was that we won the war against inflation. By 1997, inflation had already been running near to the 2.5% target for four years.

    The independence of the Bank of England has helped to reinforce this anti-inflationary environment and credit should be given to Gordon Brown for that measure at least.

    The real question now is this: do we want to give up those arrangements in favour of interest rates set by the European Central Bank?

    Joining the euro would mean no longer setting interest rates on the basis of what is best for Britain but submitting to a single rate that would benefit the whole of the Eurozone – an impossible task.

    The Prime Minister continues to drop hints about a referendum on the single currency next year.

    At a time when everyone is concerned about the state of their schools and hospitals, when we feel threatened by the rise in violent crime, he should focus on these issues and stop playing games over the Euro.

    Lately there are signs that the Prime Minister is getting cold feet, not because of the five economic tests but because of the only test that really matters to him, the opinion of the public.

    He grasps that a referendum on the single currency would also be a referendum on the breakdown of public trust in his Government.

    He is caught between the rock of the Pound’s popularity and the hard place of his own desire to scrap the Pound. His lack of conviction about everything else is getting in the way of the only conviction he truly holds. Such are the wages of spin.

    If the Prime Minister wants Britain to adopt the Euro, he should have the courage to say so, name a date and let the people of this country decide. If a referendum comes the Conservative Party with me at its head will campaign vigorously to keep the Pound.

    We will join with trade unions and businesses, and supporters of all parties and none who believe that replacing the Pound means away giving control over British interest rates, taxes, and public spending. It ultimately means British people giving away control over our politicians too.

    So not only will we campaign vigorously for a ‘no’ vote. We will not be alone. The Pound is more popular than any political party, because it doesn’t belong to any one political party. And we will fight to keep it that way.

    When Tony Blair entered Downing Street five years ago he had more going for him than any other incoming Prime Minister.

    A landslide election victory.

    The foundations of economic stability and success laid by his Conservative predecessors.

    The goodwill of the overwhelming majority of the British people.

    Never has a Government had so much, but achieved so little.

    With no fixed idea of who they are, they have chosen to define themselves by how they look. And the truth is after five years of lies and spin they are beginning to look pretty shoddy.

    They are no more capable of effective leadership to tackle the issues that undermine our society today than they were of grasping the economic reforms that were necessary in the 1980s.

    Whether it is raising standards in our schools and returning civility to our classrooms; restoring the rule of law to our streets; or dealing with the insecurities of infirmity and old age, it falls the Conservative Party to lead the way once more.

    That means fresh thinking and new ideas on education and health, on crime and policing, on finding new ways for people to share in economic growth.

    It means taking every opportunity to show ourselves as we really are: decent, tolerant and generous people who want the country we live in to be a better place for everyone.

    Above all it means showing that the difference between the Third Way and the right way is the difference between promises and delivery.

    We all know this in our hearts. Our job is to earn the right to prove it.

  • David Willetts – 2002 Speech on the Pickering Review

    David Willetts – 2002 Speech on the Pickering Review

    The speech made by David Willetts, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in the House of Commons on 4 July 2002.

    I declare my interests that appear in the Register of Members’ Interests and thank the Secretary of State for an advance copy of this very important report.

    Let me make it clear that we welcome the report, just as we welcomed Alan Pickering’s review when it was established. I join the Secretary of State in expressing our respect for the expertise and wisdom that Alan Pickering brought to the exercise. He has produced a valuable report.
    Conservative Members respond to the Secretary of State’s comments by saying that we understand that the regulatory regime for pensions must be stable to ensure long-term planning, and we will contribute constructively to the debate about the best ways of cutting the burden of regulations on pension funds. That is an obligation on all hon. Members on both sides of the House.

    The starting point of the debate has to be a frank recognition of the scale of the problem that faces funded pensions. For years, Ministers have been shockingly complacent, saying that everything was all right when it clearly was not, and citing statistics that they have since admitted were seriously misleading. The Secretary of State should accept the stark warning in Alan Pickering’s report that

    “without change, the current trajectory suggests less private pension provision in the future.”

    That warning lies at the heart of his report.

    We shall obviously want to study the proposals in the Pickering report very carefully, but I can tell the Secretary of State that we welcome the themes that are expounded in it. For example, we support the call for a proportionate regulatory environment, and we welcome Alan Pickering’s vivid expression that a pension is a pension is a pension. There are too many different forms of pension, and it is right to try to simplify them. It is also true that too much pension provision has become a form of archaeology, with pension providers delving deep into the past to identify the date on which a pension was first set up in order to understand the tax and regulatory regime around it. That needs to be tackled

    Can I press the Secretary of State for more information about the timetable to which he is working? The recommendations will be pointless unless the Government act quickly. As Alan Pickering said in his report

    “Time is not on our side.”

    Yet the Secretary of State offered us a second Green Paper on pensions. I have here the Government’s previous pensions Green Paper, which was published nearly four years ago. That contained the Prime Minister’s promise that his Government would increase the proportion of pensioners’ incomes that comes from private savings from 40 to 60 per cent. Since then, the Government have made no progress whatsoever towards achieving that objective. Instead, they introduced stakeholder pensions that were supposed to go to the 5 million people in their target group, although they reached only about 100,000, and scheme after scheme has closed. Why should the second Green Paper make any progress, given the comprehensive failure of the first?

    If we do not get legislation until 2004, as has been suggested, the changes will not be implemented until 2005 at the earliest. Yet, if pension scheme closures carry on at their current rate, there will not be any pension schemes open to new members by the time that the Government finally get round to implementing the proposals in Alan Pickering’s report. Will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to inform the House of the likely timetable of any legislation to implement proposals for reform?

    May I also press the Secretary of State for more information about the burden of regulation, which is still increasing? Since the Pickering review was established in September 2001, we have had 251 pages of new regulations. We are still waiting for the final results of the Myners review. It is good to see a Treasury Minister on the Front Bench because the Treasury, in its commitment to implementing Myners, has been threatening pension schemes with yet more regulation. There is a useful warning in Mr. Pickering’s report: he hopes that the people taking forward Myners—he might be thinking of the Financial Secretary—will

    “keep in mind our arguments for simplification.”

    Can we have an assurance from the Secretary of State, as the minimum to show his good will on this exercise, that more regulation will not be imposed on pension schemes while we wait for his supposedly deregulatory legislation? Without such an assurance, it will be difficult to take the Government’s commitment to deregulation seriously.

    The terms of reference for Alan Pickering’s report were very narrow and excluded some of the main factors that have been driving the crisis in funded pension provision. Why was Alan Pickering unable to comment on the structure of state pensions, including the state second pension, which left-wing think tanks such as the IPPR are now saying should be abolished before it has even begun?

    What about the burden of ever more means-testing of pensioners? Why could not Pickering comment on the spread of means-testing, which will soon result in more than 50 per cent. of all pensioners finding themselves on a means test? If so many pensioners are to face means tests, which will mean that they are not fully rewarded for their saving, does the Secretary of State recognise the serious danger that the main beneficiaries of the review could be the richer half of the population? They will not be trapped by the means test that he is imposing on the less affluent 50 per cent. of pensioners.

    What about the financial burdens that the Government have placed on pension funds which are their direct responsibility? What about the £5 billion a year tax on pension funds, and the £1.5 billion a year cost of the insufficient value for the contracted-out rebate? Does the Secretary of State recognise that that adds up to £6.5 billion a year being taken from our pension funds? That is the real reason why our pension funds are closing, and nothing that he said today showed any willingness to recognise the scale of that problem and what needs to be done to tackle it.