Tag: 2013

Liam Byrne – 2013 Speech on Full Employment

Below is the text of the speech made by Liam Byrne to the IPPR North conference on 17th May 2013.

There are few better places than here, to speak about the task of rebuilding Britain as a country of full employment.

Today we meet under 10 miles from Jarrow, where I spent this morning.

The town from where families hungry for work set off on the road to Westminster.

Walking in hunger they still inspire us down the ages.

Today we meet in a city where once again it is the Labour movement, in trade unions, in constituency parties and in local government, that are once more leading the campaign for work.

The story of our fight for jobs is the genesis of our credo.

When Keir Hardie stood up in Parliament as the first Labour MP, he spoke to insist on the principle of work or maintenance.

‘Useful work for the unemployed’ was the call of our first manifesto.

And it is our call today.

Next year we mark a proud anniversary in our long struggle.

We mark seventy years since the famous white paper on employment policy.

The first white paper in which a national government accepted a national responsibility to build a country where everyone had a job.

Its virtue was not simply the determination written through its pages to never return to the Devil’s Decade of the 1930s.

Its achievement was greater than that.

Its achievement was to show us how countries can be rebuilt and can be renewed if and only if we put everyone back to work.

The story of this great declaration bears re-telling. It’s mother and father, so to speak, was the Beveridge Report.

The bold plan for a system of ‘all in’ social insurance.

It was swept off the shelves in 1942 to become the most popular White paper until the Profumo report published in the 1960s.

Sex and social security were never going to be a fair competition.

The Beveridge Report was published to a country that was hungry for a vision of just what it was we were fighting for: the victories in 1942 in North Africa, in Stalingrad, in Guadacanal had delivered us the ‘end of the beginning’.

Beveridge gave us that vision of what we were fighting for.

Atlee looked at the report, and said, for us, Beveridge means socialism.

And that is why the PLP was acutely worried that Churchill would to put off the job of preparing to turn ideas into action.

And so 70 years ago, the Parliamentary Labour Party decided to force the issue.

In the biggest Parliamentary revolt of the war, 97 MPs broke the whip, voted against the government and demanded that planning for the peace begin immediately.

In his speech, Jim Griffiths, later the first Minister for National Insurance, moved the rebel’s amendment and rested his case on the belief that we could never again return to the mass unemployment of the past.

“Our people have memories of what happened at the end of the last war”, he said. “Years in which never less than one million and sometimes two million and at one time three million of our people were allowed to rust on the streets”.

“That”, said Griffiths, “must never be allowed to happen again”.

And so, Churchill relented.

A Reconstruction Committee was formed dominated by Atlee and Bevin.

And after just two years the Committee produced its finest fruits. The 1944 White Paper on employment policy, replete with its famous first paragraph that henceforth:

“The Government accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war”.

It set out the big levers that government would pull:

Trade policy – vital for an exporting nation; interest rates – to keep money at the right price; public investment and tax rates to make good any shortfalls in business investment or consumer demand, and crucially, special help for special areas, where old industries were in their sunset years but where new industries were yet to dawn.

When Bevin launched the white paper in the Commons he was very clear that as technical as the strategy might sound, this was a moral crusade.

Remembering some of the soldiers he had bid farewell as they sailed for the D-Day landings in Normandy, he told the Commons of one man of the 50th Division who had asked him this:

“Ernie, when we have done this job for you, are we going back to the dole?”

Both the Prime Minister and I answered, “No, you are not.”

“Unemployment”, said Bevin, “was and is a social disease, which must be eradicated from our social life”.

And so henceforth “Our monetary system, our commercial agreements, our industrial practices, indeed, the whole of our national economy, will have applied to them the acid test—do they produce employment or unemployment?”

When Labour went to the country in 1945, we argued that if we could achieve full employment then we could afford to rebuild Britain – and we could afford to build the welfare state.

In our manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’, we said a policy of ‘Jobs for all’ could pay for ‘Social Insurance against the rainy day’.

“There is no reason”, we argued, “why Britain should not afford such programmes but she will need full employment and the highest possible industrial efficiency in order to do so”.

The big insight of the Atlee government was this: in a fully employed society we could afford social security. We could afford to rebuild.

It was the same insight as New Labour. We knew back in 1997 that if we got our country back to work, we could afford to renew our public services.

Our insight is the same as Clem Atlee, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown.

If we restore our country to full employment, we can afford to rebuild; to address the biggest challenges of our times. Full employment has always been the foundation for rebuilding Britain.

It was for Atlee’s Labour.

It was for New Labour.

It will be for One Nation Labour.

Today the goal of full employment is important for a very simple reason. The faster we return to full employment, the faster we can pay down our debt, and the faster we can put the something for something back into social security.

The Tories’ problem is that they lost belief in full employment many years ago, and they never rediscovered it. This failure is now costing us not less, but more. And more money spent on unemployment means less for working people and less for care.

It wasn’t always like this.

Two years into Government, the Tory Chancellor, Rab Butler told the 1953 party conference:

“Those who talk about creating pools of unemployment should be thrown into them and made to swim”.

You don’t find Tories like Butler any more.

The old consensus about full employment is gone.

Mrs Thatcher’s death has provoked some debate about whether we are all Thatcherites now.

The Prime Minister himself does not seem sure. We can have less doubt about the Chancellor.

It seems pretty clear to me that he is, in Denis Healey’s words, just as much a sado-monetarist as Geoffrey Howe.

And in practice the Chancellor has shown by his action that he is a firm believer in those old nostrums of the 1930s, and 1980s and early 1990s, that unemployment is a price worth paying.

The Conservatives beat their retreat from the ideals of full employment in stages.

In Preston in 1974, Sir Keith Joseph declared he had been converted to ‘true Conservatism’ by the ideas set out six years before by Milton Friedman.

Friedman had set out the monetarist case in 1968 arguing the long term effect of trying to buy less unemployment with more inflation simply increased both.

Joseph did not argue that full employment per se created inflation but rather: “It is the means adopted by successive governments to achieve a high level of employment which are the cause of inflation. Instead of dealing with the real obstacles to fuller employment which are often very specific, governments try the panacea, the universal healer, excess demand”.

Jim Callaghan acknowledged the point in 1976 that, as Gordon Brown put it:

“Quite simply governments could not deliver growth and employment through a macro-policy designed to exploit a supposed short-term trade off between higher inflation and lower unemployment”.

Now, Joseph freely admitted that his prescription would create unemployment – but he at least acknowledged:

“There is no magic cure for these problems”, and that further, “In economics there is not and cannot be one cure. Economics is a matter of balance”. He argued too for “reform of employment services, re-training, mobility of labour, reform of housing policy”.

But no such balance was to moderate the disastrous policies of Mrs Thatcher’s first term: massive spending cuts, large tax rises and a big hike in interest rates.

In a year corporate profits fell 20 per cent, output fell six per cent, manufacturing fell 15 per cent and unemployment rose from 1.4 million to over two million.

It was a disaster. And it got worse. In the following two years, interest rates were cut, but public spending cuts were deep.

Unemployment grew for another five years. It did not peak until 1984.

Nigel Lawson tried to argue there was a logic to this cruel ‘British experiment’.

Macro-economic policy was targeting inflation, not growth and employment.

Micro-economic policy would target growth and employment, not inflation. It was a switch in the traditional roles played by each policy field since the war.

But it was an experiment badly conceived.

Macro-economic policy – both fiscal and monetary – targeted a bewildering array of moving targets – £M3, M1, M0, shadowing the D-Mark, and then joining the EMS – each in their turn, targets wildly missed.

Micro-economic policy meant simply laissez-faire.

The investment – public and private – deemed so important in the 1944 White Paper simply failed to materialise.

Investment backlogs grew, in industry, in infrastructure, in housing.

Bottle-necks got worse. Productivity flagged.

By the late 1980s, Britain was suffering once again from the old curse of rising unemployment and rising inflation.

Unemployment reached 3 million mark, so high that any notion of full employment felt well beyond reach.

Now, Mrs Thatcher liked to pretend this was all about economic efficiency.

When a young Tony Blair challenged her in October 1984, she claimed not only to have read the White Paper but to have a copy in her hand-bag.

In practice the Tories were not creating new economic dynamos but new economic deserts.

The decline in industrial output between 1979 and 1981 was unprecedented.

The balance of Rab Butler and the post-war Tory party was gone.

The Tory cabinet minister Ian Gow later put it like this:

“Belief in monetarism it emerged, was now a prerequisite not only for controlling inflation but for being a real Conservative….Those who resisted conversion and clung instead to traditional Tory principles were soon regarded as, at best, suspect infidels or, at worst, the enemy within”.

Today the Conservative Party is in the grip of the same dogma, and it’s costing us a fortune.

After the recessions of the 1980s, and then the 1990s, structural social security spending rose and rose after the end of each recession.

In the 1980s, from under two per cent of GDP before the recession, to three per cent thereafter.

In the 1990s, it rose from 3.5 per cent of GDP before the recession to 4.5 per cent thereafter.

The reason is simple. A generation were written off on incapacity benefit and never worked again.

Between 1979 and 1997, the number of people on incapacity benefits more than doubled.

Inactivity rates for men aged between 25 and 55 rose from under 10 per cent in 1975-6 to around 35 per cent in the mid-1990s.

Even today of the 10 per cent of most deprived districts in England, around 40 per cent are either ex-manufacturing or ex-mining areas.

The same challenge now afflicts us once again. The cost of social security system rose £24 billion during the crash.

But since then, it’s not come down. It’s carried on rising. It’s rising by 2 per cent a year.

That is simply unsustainable.

The Tories’ economic policy has failed so badly that the output gap is forecast to continue widening until 2014-15.

The Tories are reacting by taking an axe to the security in social security – and people know it.

They pay more in – and get less out.

It’s what Brendan Barber calls the ‘nothing for something’ problem.

I say we have to break out of this vicious circle.

Seventy years ago, we set out a new path to full employment.

And the lessons of 1944 are just as relevant today as they were for the post-war era.

The White Paper teaches us to be radical reformers, to build exports, supporting public investment, fanning consumer demand – and taking determined action on jobs.

When New Labour came to office in 1997, we set out a new approach.

In place of the pure and purely failing monetarism, came a new approach that:

Recognised that demand management was important but could not on its own deliver high and stable levels of employment; provided a new institutional framework for governing monetary policy including the independent Bank of England to replace the failed policy of target chasing; delivered active supply side policy – targeting productivity, competitiveness and active labour market policy – the new deal, tax credits, the national minimum wage – support for high levels of employment.

Contrary to Lawson’s neat but contrived seperation of macro policy to combat inflation and micro-policy to aid competitiveness, new Labour argued for “macroeconomic and microeconomic policy are both essential – working together – to growth and employment”.

And boy did we deliver.

In the decade before the crash, productivity employment and wages all grew together for the first time since records began.

Wages for workers in Britain rose for over a decade – an average of 3.4 per cent a year between 1997 and 2006.

By 2007 UK average wages were some 59 per cent ahead of where they were in 1997. Only two other OECD countries could match this record – Ireland and Australia.

The UK’s record was almost 20 points higher than the average for the Euro area.

In 2015, we’re going to inherit a very different country – Tories always leave higher unemployment.

So over the next few months, I want to say more about just how we raise the employment rate – raise it with five big steps.

First, tackling the crisis of youth unemployment. Nearly 40 per cent of those out of work today are under the age of 25. As the MP who represents the constituency with the highest youth unemployment in Britain, that is simply not a situation I am prepared to tolerate.

Second, tackling the crisis of long term unemployment, because we are simply not so rich that we can afford nearly one million people out of work for more than a year.

Third, raising the employment rate for women. As a country we will never fire on all cylinders when our employment rate for mothers with toddlers is amongst the lowest in the OECD.

Fourth, showing just how we can make the right to work a reality for disabled people once again.

And fifth, and this is what I want to touch on today – how make sure that in the One Nation economy we want to build, we do not leave any part of our country behind.

In his very first speech as Prime Minister, Tony Blair declared that concentrations of poverty and unemployment represent ‘the greatest challenge for any democratic government’.

This is the same challenge that Iain Duncan Smith saw when he went to Easterhouse.

Back in Easterhouse, Iain Duncan Smith set himself a test. He said:

“A nation that leaves its vulnerable behind, diminishes its own future.”

He found his echo in the Prime Minister, who said in 2007:

“A modern aspiration agenda means helping the have-nots to have something, and if we do not succeed in that mission then I tell you frankly that we will all be poorer”.

Iain Duncan Smith’s time in Easterhouse inspired his reform plans for the Work Programme and Universal Credit.

The challenge is that, however well-meaning, both programmes are failing and failing badly.

Three years into the Parliament, the Work Programme has proved literally worse than doing nothing.

Universal Credit is now so mired in problems its virtues are enjoyed by just 300 people in Tameside.

The challenge for welfare reformers is not whether you have nice ideas. It is whether you can make a difference.

I believe the jury is now in for Iain Duncan Smith.

He has failed the Easterhouse test.

On three-quarters of the estates in Britain where unemployment is highest, there are now more people out of work not less. Long term unemployment has risen in two-thirds of these places.

Iain Duncan Smith has failed the test he set out in Easterhouse because he has failed to understand the challenge that poor places now face in the 21st century.

Let me explain.

Back in the 1980s, old industries were destroyed – and almost nothing was done to offer workers a new future.

The great destruction of British industry – especially manufacturing and mining had huge consequences for jobs in places like the North East.

The aftershocks of that shock therapy are still felt today, two generations later.

Of the ten per cent most deprived districts in England, around 40 per cent are either ex-mining or manufacturing areas.

What happened during the 1980s was no great programme of re-skilling.

Instead a generation was written off, put on incapacity benefit without a thought for those former workers or the damage it would do to the aspirations of their children.

Yet this is what the 1944 White Paper taught us: that when the sun sets on old industries, you need big action to reskill, ‘to fit workers from declining industries for jobs in expanding industries’.

But we were contending with a revolution in globalisation. Big time.

Two years after unemployment peaked in 1984, I was sitting my exams.

That year Deng Xiaoping was Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ for the changes underway in China.

When I got to university in 1989, the Berlin wall came down, and a path opened to a united Europe of 500 million people.

A year later, Manmohan Singh was appointed Finance Minister of India and set about dismantling India’s ‘licence raj’, the vital precursor to its explosive growth a decade later.

By the time I graduated in 1992, President Clinton was in the White House, arm-wrestling through Congress a plan for the North American Free Trade Agreement and eventually a green light for China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation.

A century that began with revolution and world war ended with conscious decisions across ten years on four continents to create a global marketplace linking 6 billion of the world’s 7 billion people. It was a quite a fin de siècle.

Since this century began the commanding heights of the global economy have changed out of all recognition.

As Peter Nolan at Cambridge University has shown: since 2000, some 2,500 -billion mergers, worth in total some .4 trillion, have created a new global super-league.

A handful of firms now monopolise the aircraft industry, the world’s auto business, the world’s mobile telecoms infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, beer, cigarettes, aero-engines, computer chips, industrial gases, soft drink cans.

These giant firms often richer than nations now have the power to move jobs to wherever the skills are greatest or the wages lowest.

That means unskilled workers here in Britain compete with wages far lower elsewhere.

The ILO says low skilled wages in some of Britain’s competitors are 12 times lower here than in Britain.

That means there is simply not a lot of low skill work to go around.

The result? Over half of adults in Britain without skills are out of work. And that figure is going up not down.

Crucially, that means Britain’s poor places are falling behind. Why?

Because some of Britain’s poorest communities are home to five times more unskilled workers than Britain’s richest communities. This was the challenge Labour had to clear up.

During our time in office, Britain’s employment rate hit record highs; from 71 per cent of the population in 1998 up to 73 per cent in 2008.

This increase in the employment rate was coupled with a long-term shift in the number of British workers with skills.

Back in 1994, 22 per cent of the workforce had no qualifications. By 2005 this had fallen to 13 per cent.

Because we believed it was wrong to dismiss the future employment chances of disabled people, we introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

We combined reform with investment in back to work programmes; the employment rate amongst those with disabilities rose by over ten per cent between 1997 and 2008.

Now of course we didn’t finish the job: there remained a gap between the national employment rate (72.4 per cent) and employment in our ten biggest cities (68.4 per cent). But at least we closed the gap.

This government is simply ignoring that lesson.

Even when the jobs are there, we’re not training the unemployed to do them.

In great regions like the North West or Yorkshire and Humber, business says they’ve skill shortages, yet we have unemployment way above the national average.

Yet, we knew this was going to happen.

The challenge of poor places and changing places isn’t new. It’s an old challenge.

It was crystal clear to inter-war politicians.

You know too the big challenges that poor places face.

How in many communities, we still grapple with the legacy of the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation of the 1980s, that often led concentrations of the poorest housing stock, where councils were forced to house the most disadvantaged households – often adults without skills.

In poor places, jam-packed like my own with aspirational people, problems multiply.

A low skills base, poor transport connections to work, brownfield land left unoccupied and limited private investment.

Yet, these places are packed with potential.

Over the last ten years, thinking about how to regenerate inner-city areas – in the UK and the US (especially under the Clinton Administration) – has been re-animated by fresh thinking which has explored the idea that inner-cities might actually have some competitive advantages and are in fact a ‘missed market’.

But to unlock that potential means we have put investment in people, and investment in places in the same place.

Unlocking that potential means coordinating skills, education, crime, worklessness, transport, physcial regeneration, health, housing, environmental sustainability, social regeneration, spatial planning, and economic development.

That’s complicated today.

And in fact if you try to do it from Whitehall, it’s impossible to do. We know – we tried.

In fact we had 36 different organisations, operating on four different levels: national, regional, sub-regional and local trying to coordinate this work.

We made progress. But it was no surprise that it was slow.

This is not a mistake that other countries make – they devolve far more to their regions.

It is in fact, something that people on both sides of the debate now agree with.

Lord Heseltine, the Rab Butler of his day, put it like this:

“We need to mobilise the skills of provincial England. I want to shove power out of Whitehall, into the provinces.”

Once upon time, Iain Duncan Smith agreed with him. Once upon a time he told his party conference:

“In the past, Conservative governments have been guilty of taking power away from local government to Whitehall. That was a mistake. We will reverse this process and restore to local councils the discretion to act according to the interests of the communities they serve.”

But it’s not happening.

The problem is that neither Vince Cable or Iain Duncan Smith believe Lord Hesetline. They are the new road-blocks to reform.

The result is our back to work system is hopelessly centralised. This is what the clear conclusion of Labour councils who are now leading the fight against youth unemployment.

That’s why I’m publishing today analysis of the way other countries work.

In Germany, a more localised approach has contributed to saving billions of Euros in welfare payments by driving up the employment rate. Jobcentres work closely with surrounding schools and have deep roots in the local labour market which allows them to engage with employers far beyond the traditional low skill, low pay sectors.

In Canada, localised delivery of back to work programmes gives local government the flexibility to establish their own priorities and to develop programmes to achieve this. Provinces and territories control how the funding is allocated in order to meet the needs of their particular labour markets, which in turn gives them the opportunity to apply local expertise to skills development, allocating targeted wage subsidies, and creating Job Creation Partnerships, to help provide useful work experience that leads to sustained employment.

Next year we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the white paper on full employment.

I believe we should mark that anniversary not with empty words but with big plans.

Plans to rebuild the path to full employment for new times. Plans which could help us modernise our social security system, to rebuild trust, and crucially put its finances back on an even keel for the future.

Our economy not rebalancing

Despite the huge depreciation of our currency since 2007, our export growth has been anaemic.

Business investment is low.

Corporate tax cuts have now totalled £5.7 billion over the course of this parliament. Yet this great act of corporate welfare has not been repaid.

The cash is simply stacking up in corporate bank accounts. Our new Bank governor Mark Carney will recognise the phenomenon from Canada where he has attacked the curse of ‘dead money’.

The result is persistent, high unemployment. The result is OBR now downgrading the country’s trend rate of growth.

The result is that there is quite simply not enough work to go round.

And the government’s strategy is causing engine damage that may last for years to come.

That’s why we need a new plan. We need a new plan for growth. We need a new plan for jobs. And we need people to vote for it at the next election.

To win that vote we need to show how a new plan for full employment will help us pay down debt faster and with less risk by putting our social security system back on an even keel after the crash.

The people of Britain know we can’t go on like this.

And profound change is needed because life has changed since we created the system back in 1945.

People need different things from social security today.

I want to put the something for something back into the system. I want to put the system back on an even keel after the expense of the crash.

But I believe the lesson of our history is simple:

We can afford to do big things to repair and renew our country, to pay down our debt faster, to bring fairness back to the system if, and only if, we get people back to work.

November 8, 2015
Andy Burnham – 2013 Speech to The King’s Fund

The below speech was made by the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham, on 24th January 2013 to the King’s Fund.

Today I open Labour’s health and care policy review.

For the first time in 20 years, our Party has the chance to rethink its health and care policy from first principles.

Whatever your political views, it’s a big moment.

It presents the chance to change the terms of the health and care debate.

That is what One Nation Labour is setting out to do.

For too long, it has been trapped on narrow ground, in technical debates about regulation, commissioning, competition.

It is struggling to come up with credible answers to the questions that the 21st century is asking with ever greater urgency.

I want to change the debate by opening up new possibilities and posing new questions of my own, starting with people and families and what they want from a 21st century health and care service.

For now, they are just that – questions. This is a Green Paper moment – the start of a conversation not the end.

But what you will hear today is the first articulation of a coherent and genuine alternative to the current Government’s direction.

It is the product both of careful reflection on Labour’s time in government and a response to what has happened since.

Everything I say today is based on two unshakable assumptions.

First, that the health and care we want will need to be delivered in a tighter fiscal climate for the foreseeable future, so we have to think even more fundamentally about getting better results for people and families from what we already have.

Second, our fragile NHS has no capacity for further top-down reorganisation, having been ground down by the current round. I know that any changes must be delivered through the organisations and structures we inherit in 2015.

But that can’t mean planning for no change.

Those questions that the 21st century is bringing demand an answer.

When the modern condition means we are all living with higher levels of stress, change and insecurity, how do we give families the mental health support they will need and remove the stigma?

How will we ensure we are not overwhelmed by the costs of treating diseases linked to lifestyle and diet?

And how can we stop people fearing old age and have true peace of mind throughout a longer life?

Huge questions that require scale and a sense of ambition in our answers.

When a Labour Opposition last undertook this exercise, the world looked very different. But it had to be similarly ambitious.

People were waiting months and years for hospital treatment, even dying on NHS waiting lists.

So Labour set itself the mission of rescuing a beleaguered NHS which was starting to look as if it was on the way out.

A big ambition and, by and large, with help of the professions, we succeeded.

We left office with waiting lists at an all-time low and patient satisfaction at an all-time high; a major turn-around from the NHS we inherited in 1997.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

I can trace the moment that made me think differently, and challenge an approach that was too focused on hospitals.

In early 2007, my sister-in-law was in the Royal Marsden dying from breast cancer.

After visiting one night, she called me over and asked if I could get her home to be with her four children.

I told her I thought I would be able to.

But, after a day of phone calls, I will never forget having to going back to Claire and say it couldn’t be done.

And I was a Minister who knew how the system worked, so what chance have families who are at a low ebb and don’t know where to start?

As a Government, we were talking about choice. But it was a painful discovery for me to find we were unable to deliver to this most fundamental of choices.

Concerns about the way we care for people in the later stages of life, as well as how it is paid for, has built and built over recent years.

Stories of older people neglected or abused in care homes, isolated in their own homes or lost in acute hospitals – disorientated and dehydrated – recurred with ever greater frequency.

I have thought long and hard about why this is happening.

It is in part explained by regulatory failures and we will of course learn the lessons emerging from the Francis Report as part of this policy review.

Changes in nursing and professional practice may also have played a part.

But, in my view, these explanations deal with the symptoms rather than the cause of a problem that goes much deeper.

My penny-drop moment came last year when I was work-shadowing a ward sister at the Royal Derby.

It was not long after the Prime Minister had proposed hourly bed rounds for nurses.

I asked her what she thought of that. Her answer made an impression on me.

It was not that nurses didn’t care any more, she said. On the whole, they did.

It was more that the wards today are simply not staffed to deal with the complexity of what the ageing society is bringing to them.

When she qualified, it was rare to see someone in their 80s on the ward after a major operation.

Now there are ever greater numbers of very frail people in their 80s and 90s, with intensive physical, mental and social care needs.

Hospitals hadn’t changed to reflect this new reality, she said, and nurses were struggling to cope with it.

They were still operating on a 20th century production-line model, with a tendency to see the immediate problem – the broken hip, the stroke – but not the whole-person behind it.

They are geared up to meet physical needs, but not to provide the mental or social care that we will all need in the later stages of life.

So our hospitals, designed for the last century, are in danger of being overwhelmed by the demographic challenges of this century.

And that is the crux of our problem.

To understand its roots, it helps to go back to the 1948 World Health Organisation definition of health:

“a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

A simple vision which stands today.

But, for all its strengths, the NHS was not set up to achieve it. It went two thirds of the way, although mental health was not given proper priority, but the third, social, was left out altogether.

The trouble is that last bit is the preventative part.

Helping people with daily living, staying active and independent, delays the day they need more expensive physical and mental support.

But deep in the DNA of the NHS is the notion that the home, the place where so much happens to affect health, is not its responsibility.

It doesn’t pay for grab rails or walk-in showers, even if it is accepted that they can keep people safer and healthy.

The exclusion of the social side of care from the NHS settlement explains why it has never been able to break out of a ‘treatment service’ mentality and truly embrace prevention. It is a medical model; patient-centred, not person-centred.

But, in reality, it’s even worse than that.

For 65 years, England has tried to meet one person’s needs not through two but three services: physical, through the mainstream NHS; mental, through a detached system on the fringes of the NHS; and social, through a means-tested and charged-for council service, that varies greatly from one area to the next.

One person. Three care services.

For most of the 20th century, we just about managed to make it work for most people.

When people had chronic or terminal illness at a younger age, they could still cope with daily living even towards the end of life. Families lived closer to each other and, with a bit of council support, could cope.

Now, in the century of the ageing society, the gaps between our three services are getting dangerous.

The 21st century is asking questions of our 20th century health and care system that, in its current position, will never be able to answer to the public’s satisfaction.

As we live longer, people’s needs become a complex blur of the physical, mental and social.

It is just not possible to disaggregate them and meet them through our three separate services.

But that’s what we’re still trying to do.

So, wherever people are in this disjointed system, some or all of one person’s needs will be left unmet.

In the acute hospital ward, social and mental needs can be neglected. This explains why older people often go downhill quickly on admission to hospital.

In mental health care settings, people can have their physical health overlooked, in part explaining why those with serious mental health problems die 15 years younger than the rest of the population.

And, in places, such is the low standard of social care provision in both the home and care homes, barely any needs are properly met.

What, realistically, can be achieved from a home care service based around ten-minute slots per person?

On a practical level, families are looking for things from the current system that it just isn’t able to provide.

They desperately want co-ordination of care – a single point of contact for all of mum or dad’s needs – but it’s unlikely to be on offer in a three-service world.

So people continue to face the frustration of telling the same story over again to all of the different council and NHS professionals who come through the door.

Carers get ground down by the battle to get support, spending days on the phone being passed from pillar to post.

So far, I have spoken about the experience of older people and their carers.

But the problems I describe – the lack of a whole-person approach – holds equally true for the start of life and adults with disabilities.

Parents of children with severe disabilities will recognise the pattern – the battle for support, the lack of co-ordination and a single point of contact.

CAMHS support at the right time can make all the difference to a young life but is often not there when it is needed.

Children on the autistic spectrum are frequently missed altogether.

The mantra is that early intervention makes all the difference. But it is rarely a reality in a system that doesn’t have prevention at its heart.

If we leave things as they are, carers of young and old will continue to feel the frustration of dealing with services which don’t provide what they really need, that don’t see the whole-person.

They won’t provide the quality people want.

But nor will they be financially sustainable in this century.

For One Nation Labour, this is crucial. Protecting the institutions that bind us together, like the NHS – the expression of what we can achieve together when everyone plays their part.

Right now, the incentives are working in the wrong direction.

For older people, the gravitational pull is towards hospital and care home.

For the want of spending a few hundred pounds in the home, we seem to be happy to pick up hospital bills for thousands.

We are paying for failure on a grand scale, allowing people to fail at home and drift into expensive hospital beds and from there into expensive care homes.

The trouble is no-one has the incentive to invest in prevention.

Councils face different pressures and priorities than the NHS, with significant cuts in funding and an overriding incentive to keep council tax low.

So care services have been whittled away, in the knowledge that the NHS will always provide a safety net for people who can’t cope. And, of course, this could be said to suit hospitals as they get paid for each person who comes through the door.

In their defence, councils and the NHS may be following the institutional logic of the systems they are in.

But it’s financial madness, as well as being bad for people.

Hospital Chief Executives tell me that, on any given day, around 30 to 40 per cent of beds are occupied by older people who, if better provision was available, would not need to be there.

If we leave things as they are, our DGHs will be like warehouses of older people – lined up on the wards because we failed to do something better for them.

But it gets worse. Once they are there, they go downhill for lack of whole-person support and end up on a fast-track to care homes – costing them and us even more.

We could get much better results for people, and much more for the £104bn we spend on the NHS and the £15bn on social care, but only if we turn this system on its head.

We need incentives in the right place – keeping people at home and out of hospitals.

We must take away the debates between different parts of the public sector, where the NHS won’t invest if councils reap the benefit and vice versa, that are utterly meaningless to the public.

So the question I am today putting at the heart of Labour’s policy review is this: is it time for the full integration of health and social care?

One budget, one service co-ordinating all of one person’s needs: physical, mental and social. Whole-Person Care.

A service that starts with what people want – to stay comfortable at home – and is built around them.

When you start to think of a one-budget, one-service world, all kinds of new possibilities open up.

If the NHS was commissioned to provide Whole-Person Care in all settings – physical, mental, social from home to hospital – a decisive shift can be made towards prevention.

A year-of-care approach to funding, for instance, would finally put the financial incentives where they need to be.

NHS hospitals would be paid more for keeping people comfortable at home rather than admitting them.

That would be true human progress in the century of the ageing society.

Commissioning acute trusts in this way could change the terms of the debate about hospitals at a stroke.

Rather than feeling under constant siege, it could create positive conditions for the District General Hospital to evolve over time into a fundamentally different entity: an integrated care provider from home to hospital.

In Torbay, where the NHS and Council have already gone some way down this path, around 200 beds have been taken out from the local hospital without any great argument as families have other things they truly value.

Unlike other parts of England, they have one point of contact for the co-ordination of health and care needs.

Occupational Therapists visit homes the same day or the day after they are requested; urgent aids and adaptations supplied in minutes not days.

If an older person has to go into hospital, a care worker provides support on the ward and ensures the right package of care is in place to help get them back home as soon as possible.

Imagine what a step forward it would be if we could introduce these three things across England.

For the increasing numbers of people who are filled with dread at the thought of mum or dad going into hospital, social care support on the ward would provide instant reassurance.

It is a clear illustration of what becomes possible in a one-service, one-budget world with prevention at its heart.

If local hospitals are to grow into integrated providers of Whole-Person Care, then it will make sense to continue to separate general care from specialist care, and continue to centralise the latter.

So hospitals will need to change and we shouldn’t fear that.

But, with the change I propose, we can also put that whole debate on a much better footing.

If people accept changes to some parts of the local hospital, it becomes more possible to protect the parts that they truly value – specifically local general acute and emergency provision.

The model I am proposing could create a firmer financial base under acute hospitals trusts where they can sustain a back-stop, local A&E service as part of a more streamlined, re-modelled, efficient local healthcare system.

So A&Es need not close for purely or predominantly financial reasons, although a compelling clinical case for change must always be heard and we would never make the mistake of a blanket moratorium.

I am clear that we will never make the most of our £120 billion health and care budget unless hospitals have positive reasons to grow into the community, and we break down the divide between primary and secondary care.

It could see GPs working differently, as we can see in Torbay, leading teams of others professionals – physios, Occupational Therapists, district nurses – managing the care of the at-risk older population.

Nerves about hospital take-over start to disappear in a one-budget world where the financial incentives work in the opposite direction.

NHS hospitals need the security to embrace change and that change will happen more quickly in an NHS Preferred Provider world rather than an Any Qualified Provider world, where every change is an open tender.

I don’t shy away from saying this.

I believe passionately in the public NHS and what it represents.

I think a majority of the public share this sentiment.

They are uncomfortable with mixing medicine with the money motive. They support what the NHS represents – people before profits – as memorably celebrated by Danny Boyle at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Over time, allowing the advance of a market with no limits will undermine the core, emergency, public provision that people hold dear.

So I challenge those who say that the continued advance of competition and the market into the NHS is the answer to the challenges of this century.

The evidence simply doesn’t support it – financially or on quality grounds.

If we look around the world, market-based health systems cost more per person not less than the NHS. The planned nature of our system, under attack from the current Government’s reforms, is its most precious strength in facing a century when demand will ratchet up.

Rather than allowing the NHS model to be gradually eroded, we should be protecting it and extending it as the most efficient way of meeting this century’s pressures.

The AQP approach will not deliver what people want either.

Families are demanding integration. Markets deliver fragmentation.

The logical conclusion of the open-tender approach is to bring an ever-increasing number of providers on to the pitch, dealing with ever smaller elements of a person’s care, without an overall co-ordinating force.

If we look to the US, the best providers are working on that highly integrated basis, co-ordinating physical, mental and social care from home to hospital.

We have got to take the best of that approach and universalise it here.

But there are dangers of monopolistic or unresponsive providers.

Even if the NHS is co-ordinating all care, it is essential that people are able to choose other providers. And within a managed system there must always be a role for the private and voluntary sectors and the innovation they bring.

But let me say something that the last Labour Government didn’t make clear: choice is not the same thing as competition.

The system I am describing will only work if it is based around what people and families want, giving them full control.

To make that a reality, we want to empower patients to have more control over their care, such as dialysis treatment in the home or the choice to die at home or in a hospice.

We will work towards extending patients’ rights to treatment in the NHS Constitution.

This would mean the system would have to change to provide what people want, rather than vice versa.

The best advert for the people-centred system in Torbay is that more people there die at home than in any other part of England.

When I visited, they explained that they had never set out to do that – a target had not been set – but it had been a natural consequence of a system built around people. A real lesson there for politicians.

So an NHS providing all care – physical, mental and social – would be held to account by powerful patient rights.

But, as part of our consultation, we will be asking whether it follows that local government could take a prominent role working in partnership with CCGs on commissioning with a single budget.

This change would allow a much more ambitious approach to commissioning than we have previously managed.

At the moment, we are commissioning health services. This was the case with PCTs and will remain so with CCGs.

The challenges of the 21st century are such that we need to make a shift to commissioning for good population health, making the link with housing, planning, employment, leisure and education.

This approach to commissioning, particularly in the early years, begins to make a reality of the Marmot vision, where all the determinants of health are in play. Improving PH will not be a fringe pursuit for councils but central to everything that they do.

But it also solves a problem that is becoming increasingly urgent.

Councils are warning that, within a decade, they will be overwhelmed by the costs of care if nothing changes.

They point to a chart – affectionately known as the ‘graph of doom’ – which shows there will be little money for libraries, parks and leisure centres by 2020.

One of the great strengths of the one-budget, Whole-Person approach would be to break this downward spiral.

It would give local government a positive future and local communities a real say.

The challenge becomes not how to patch two conflicting worlds together but how to make the most of a single budget.

To address fears that health money will be siphoned off into other, unrelated areas, reassurance is provided by a much more clearly defined national entitlement, based around a strengthened NICE, able to take a broader view of all local public spending when making its recommendations.

It won’t be the job of people at local level to decide what should be provided. That will be set out in a new entitlement. But it will be their job to decide how it should be provided.

That would provide clarity about the respective roles of national and local government, too often a source of confusion and tension.

But I want to be clear: nothing I have said today requires a top-down structural re-organisation.

In the same way that Andrew Lansley should have refocused PCTs and put doctors in charge, I will simply re-focus the organisations I inherit to deliver this vision of Whole-Person Care.

Health and Well-Being Boards could come to the fore, with CCGs supporting them with technical advice.

While we retain the organisations, we will repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the rules of the market.

It is a confused, sub-optimal piece of legislation not worthy of the NHS and which fails to give the clarity respective bodies need about their role.

This approach creates the conditions for the evolutionary change towards the Whole-Person vision rather than structural upheaval.

At a stroke, those two crucial local institutions – council and hospital – have an alignment of interests and a clear future role to grow into.

But the same is true for social care.

At present, it is trapped in a failing financial model.

The great attraction of the Whole-Person approach, with the NHS taking responsibility for coordination, is that it will be in a position to raise the standards and horizons of social care, lifting it out of today’s cut-price, minimum wage business.

Social care careers would be more valued and young people able to progress as part of an integrated Whole-Person workforce.

Of course, the change we aspire to, particularly in social care, won’t come by simply changing structures. It will need a change of culture including leadership, training, working in teams, better information and seeing patients and families as partners in achieving better health and care.

So Whole-Person Care is the proposal at the heart of Labour’s health and care policy review which is formally launched today.

It will be led by Liz Kendall, and will run alongside Diane Abbott’s separate Public Health Policy Review. Over the next six months, we will be holding events in all parts of England seeking views on two central questions.

First, do you see merit in this vision of Whole-Person Care and support the proposals for the full integration of health and social care?

Second, if you do, how far down this path of integration do you think we should go?

The fact is that, even if we move to a fully integrated model, and shift resources from hospital to home, it won’t be enough to pay for all of one person’s care needs.

We need to be very clear about that.

So this opens up the question of the funding of social care.

It is the case that, with the shift of resources out of hospital, more preventative social care could be provided in the home and, in all likelihood, better standards of social care offered, as we have seen in Torbay.

For instance, we have already proposed that this should include people on the end-of-life register. It would also include provision for those with the highest needs and at risk from going into hospital.

But rather than leave this unspecified, people need to know exactly where they stand. Currently, council care provision is the ultimate lottery.

In a single system, it would be right to set for the first time a clear entitlement to what social care could be provided and on what terms, as part of a national entitlement to health and care.

That would help people understand what is not covered – which is very unclear to people at present.

But the question arises: what is the fairest way of helping people cover the rest?

At present, beyond the £23,000 floor, care charges are unlimited.

These are ‘dementia taxes’: the more vulnerable you are, the more you pay.

As cruel as pre-NHS or US healthcare.

No other part of our welfare state works in this way and, in the century of the ageing society, failure to resolve how we pay for care could undermine the NHS, the contributory principle and incentives to save.

Some people might ask why they should save for retirement, when the chances of it all being washed away increase every year?

In this century, we can’t carry on letting people go into old age with everything – home, savings, pension – on the roulette table.

So there is a political consensus that the status quo is the worst of all possible worlds and it needs to change.

We agree about the need to find a fairer way of paying for social care, but not on what that system should be.

The Government have begun to set out their version of Andrew Dilnot’s proposals.

A cap, not of £35,000 but over the £50,000 Dilnot recommended, and possibly up to £75,000.

This is better than the status quo.

But we all know that setting a cap of up to £150,000 for a couple is not a fair solution.

For Labour, it fails a basic One Nation test.

Offering some protection to the better off, but doing little to help a couple in an average semi in the Midlands or the North.

But it also fails a sustainability test.

By failing to address the shortfall in council budgets, it leaves people exposed to ever-increasing care charges and more likely to pay up to the level of the cap.

This won’t feel like progress to many.

So, as part of Labour’s policy consultation, we will ask for views on other ways of paying for social care.

We will only have a solution when all people, regardless of their savings and the severity of their needs, have the chance to protect what they have worked for.

There are two basic choices – a voluntary or all-in approach – and, at this stage, we are seeking views on which path people think we should take, building on the foundations of a fully merged health and social care system.

Both would represent a significant improvement on the status quo, but both present significant difficulties in terms of implementation.

Andrew Dilnot’s proposed cap and means-test would help everyone protect their savings.

It would mean people only pay as much as they need to, but, in the worst case scenario, could stand to lose a significant chunk of their savings.

If people support this option, we would be interested in hearing views on how it could be funded.

One of the problems with the voluntary approach is it assumes the continuation of two care worlds – one charged for, the other one free-at-the-point-of-use – with all its complexity.

So it is right to ask whether we can move to an all-in system, extend the NHS principle to all care.

This would mean asking people to pay differently for social care to create a level playing field on how all care is provided.

But it would only work on the all-in principle and that is its major downside: all people would be required to contribute, rather than just those needing care.

People’s exposure to care costs in an all-in system would be significantly lower. But, as with any insurance system, people might pay and never end up using the service.

As with the voluntary option we would be interested in hearing people views on the pros and cons of the all-in principle and options for how this could be done.

It is an open question whether a broad consensus can be found on funding social care on either a voluntary or all-in principle.

But Labour is clear that this must not stand in the way of progress now to get much more for people from what we currently spend on health and care.

To Beveridge’s five giants of the 20th century, the 21st is rapidly adding a sixth: fear of old age.

If we do nothing, that fear will only grow as we hear more and more stories of older people failed by a system that is simply not geared up to meet their needs.

A One Nation approach to health and care means giving all people freedom from this fear, all families peace of mind.

Whole-Person Care is a vision for a truly integrated service not just battling disease and infirmity but able to aspire to give all people a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being.

A people-centred service which starts with people’s lives, their hopes and dreams, and builds out from there, strengthening and extending the NHS in the 21st century not whittling it away.

A service which affords everyone’s parents the dignity and respect we would want for our own.

There will be many questions which arise from what I have said today.

I don’t yet have all the answers.

But that’s why Labour is opening this discussion now.

It’s an open invitation to anyone who has anxieties about what is happening to the NHS right now to help us build a genuine alternative – integrated, collaborative, accountable.

I don’t want to do the usual politician thing of pulling a policy out of the hat at the time of the next manifesto that takes people by surprise.

Instead, I want to involve as many people as I can in shaping an alternative they can believe in.

The task is urgent because the NHS is on the same fast-track to fragmentation that social care has been down.

The further it carries on down this path, the harder it will be to glue it back together.

Unlike the last Election, the next one needs to give people a proper choice of what kind of health and care system they want in the 21st century.

That’s why I started by saying it’s time to change the terms of the debate and put more ambition into our ideas.

Labour is rediscovering its roots and its ability to think in the boldest terms about a society that cares for everyone and leaves no-one behind.

People need One Nation Labour to be as brave in this Century as Bevan was in the last.

That’s the challenge and we will rise to it.

November 8, 2015
Chris Bryant – 2013 Speech to the IPPR

Below is the text of the speech made by Chris Bryant, the Shadow Home Office Minister, to the IPPR at the Local Government Association on 12th August 2013.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

I am very grateful to both the LGA and the IPPR for hosting today’s event.

Local government has been at the forefront of many of the issues I shall be talking about today and Sarah Mulley at the IPPR has done a vital job in informing the debate on the centre left of British politics.

So, thank you.

I want to talk about what I believe is a distinctive view that we in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party take of one of the key issues in British politics.

I hope to do three things: first, look at the value and the challenges that immigration has brought and continues to bring to the UK; second, lay out where I think the Government is getting hold of the wrong end of the stick; and third, suggest some areas that Labour believes need to be addressed in making migration work for everyone, especially in relation to the labour market, the EU, sham marriages and the push factors in international migration.

GROUND RULES

But before I do that; the last three weeks have shown yet again that immigration can be an emotive topic, so I want to start with some basic ground rules.

First, whilst I don’t think anybody is seriously in doubt that immigrants have made an enormous contribution to this country, people, including migrants themselves, quite rightly expect to have their legitimate concerns about immigration taken seriously.

I realise that for some time people thought that Labour believed anyone who ever expressed a concern about immigration was racist.

So let me be absolutely clear. Yes, racists have sometimes polluted this debate and we should always be alive to the dangers of prejudice, but Labour have concerns about immigration, about the pace of migration, about the undercutting of workers’ terms and conditions, about the effect on the UK labour market.

We have concerns about how we can help migrants to this country integrate better.

And we have profound concerns about the Government’s policies on immigration.

That is why both Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper have made important speeches on immigration in this last year.

True, Labour made mistakes on immigration.

When we came to power in 1997 we had to tackle the complete chaos in the Asylum system, when just fifty members of staff were dealing with 71,000 asylum applications every year.

Labour created the position of Immigration Minister to bring real focus to these issues right across government.

But although we were right to introduce the points based system in 2008, we should have done that far earlier.

And when the new A8 countries joined the EU we were so focused on economic growth that when Germany, France and Italy all put in transitional controls on new EU workers, we went it alone.

The result? A far higher number of people came to work here.

Let me say what Labour will not do.

We will never engage in a Dutch auction on immigration with other parties, nor an arms race of rhetoric, nor a tasteless attempt to out-tough anyone else, nor attempt to ape the language of the far right, nor make promises that we simply cannot meet.

Because Labour, like the rest of Britain, values the contribution migrants have made to the UK. Just look at our history.

The very idea of inviting commoners to parliament came not from an Englishman 650 years ago, but from Simon de Montfort, who was French.

Britain’s list of Nobel Prize winners owes much to those who came to these shores as foreigners, Dennis Gabor, inventor of the holograph, born in Hungary, Maurice Wilkins of DNA fame, born in New Zealand, and Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, also from New Zealand.

Or our literature laureates.

Kipling might be the quintessence of Edwardian Britishness, but he was born in India, George Bernard Shaw was Irish, Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria, Doris Lessing was born in Iran and brought up in Rhodesia, V S Naipaul was born in Trinidad, T S Eliot came to study here as an American and stayed and even Winston Churchill had an American mother.

The French Huguenots who built the London silk market from scratch in the eighteenth century, the likes of Mary Seacole who nursed our troops in the Crimean War, the Afro-Caribbeans who came in the First World War to work in the munitions factories of the North West, or as part of the Windrush Generation to fill gaps in the post-war Labour market, the Poles or the Indians who fought with us in the forties, the Italians who came to work in our mines in the nineteenth century, the Indians who work today in our burgeoning IT and gaming industries, the eastern Europeans who have picked our crops or kept our hotels running, have all played a part in building modern Britain.

And any country that tries to turn its back on the get up and go energy and the cultural vitality that migrants can bring to an economy, is likely to lose its place in the world.

There would be a particular irony if Britain, who sought to build the world’s railways, who exported its ideas, its bureaucracy and its people in the millions in the nineteenth and twentieth century, were to become a nation closed to international business just as the rest of the world is becoming more mobile in the twenty first century.

That is not to say that the effects of migration are always positive.

Nobody can doubt that being a foreigner in another land can be tough. When I was a curate in the 1980s our Churchwarden was Ellie Hector. She told me that when she first arrived from St Vincent people in church would refuse to sit next to her, which is why the story of Ruth meant so much to her. She could recite her words to Naomi off by heart ‘whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.’ Literature and history are full of stories of aliens suffering in a foreign land and you only have to think of the miseries inflicted through human trafficking, with men and women caught in fifty shades of modern-day slavery, to see that of course migration is a matter of concern to people of the left and now more than ever. International travel, multinational business, worldwide trading, these are facts of modern life and set to grow. With them will com e new challenges if we are to tackle cross border crime, ensure community cohesion and build an immigration system that maintains a strong outward facing economy and guarantees fairness for all.

Human trafficking alone is very much a live concern.

So what does Labour think? We start from some basic principles: It is the duty of government to protect our borders; It is right to protect the British taxpayer and public services; Britain must retain its strong reputation for international business; just as we welcomed those fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany so we have a moral duty to harbour those under genuine threat of persecution and torture. And above all, any immigration policy must have fairness at its heart, fairness to those already settled here and those who arrive as migrants, fairness so that nobody is exploited, nobody is trafficked, nobody is squeezed out, nobody can jump the queue and those who work hard are fairly rewarded.

THE GOVERNMENT’S FAILINGS ON IMMIGRATION

Let me deal with the Government’s record, not because we want to oppose for the sake of opposition – indeed we have supported several government measures to tackle low skilled immigration and remove foreign criminals – but because the last few weeks of vanman style gimmicks have both left a nasty taste in the mouth and have suggested that the government have got the wrong end of the stick.

More interested in finding voters lost to UKIP than in removing illegal immigrants, they have resorted to gimmicks that have not impressed anyone.

So in the same month as Britain was rightly complaining to Spain about border delays with Gibraltar, we learnt that France had complained officially to the UK about 4 km queues to get into Britain thanks to British staff shortages. Just a month after Theresa May told the Commons that the ratio of police Stop and Searches compared to arrests was far too high, the Home Office refused to state how many hundreds of people had been stopped by immigration officers compared to arrests in what looked to many like a racial profiling exercise. And whilst poorly worded and tasteless ad vans were touring London begging illegal immigrants to hand themselves in, we learnt that the Home Office has not been finger-printing migrants stopped at Calais or Coquelles for three years and has not followed up 90% of its intelligence leads on illegal immigration.

In short, the government’s immigration policy adds up to cheap and nasty gimmicks rather than serious proposals or practical measures to tackle illegal entry.

Yet the government would have you believe that they are getting on top of immigration. You will have heard the government boast in recent weeks that it has cut net migration by a third since 2010. Leaving aside the fact that the figures the government relies on have been dismissed by the Conservative led public accounts committee as not fit for purpose, we need to look more closely at this supposed success. Actually the government has persuaded more British nationals to leave the country, dissuaded more British nationals from returning and cut the number of international students coming to study here, especially from India and China. Even the Prime Minister is beginning to think that is an own goal, which is why he has had to beg Indians to keep coming here to study. The worldwide foreign study market is worth approximately .5 trillion – and is growing. International students pay their own way, they inject cash into the local economy. They add to the experience of college or university and they are more likely to do business with Britain later. Yet if the Conservatives have their way they will further cut student numbers by 56,000 by 2015.

It is not their only failure. Who can forget Theresa May’s summer of madness, which first of all saw the checks at British ports cut back dramatically, and then reintroduced in a panic, without the necessary resources to cope. The end result was border queues stretching all the way back to the planes.

That kind of administrative chaos is becoming the May hallmark, though. The Home Office had promised to clear its huge backlog of cases by Christmas 2012. That deadline passed 8 months ago, but the backlog is actually increasing and best estimates reckon that it will take 37 years to clear. What is more, both tier 2 and tier 4 visas now take over 50% longer to process in country than they did in 2010, and the number receiving an initial response within the Home Office target of 4 weeks has fallen by 49%. Businesses expecting a quick turnaround on a simple visa are effectively being turned away.

Procurement is yet another case of May-style chaos. Labour started the eborders scheme in 2007 and planned to have it covering all journeys by the end of next year, as an essential part of counting people in and out. The Coalition agreement said it would be in place by the end of the parliament. Yet no contract has been signed, the government is still in court with Raytheon and there is no prospect now of even agreeing a date for it to be in place.

The same goes for the Cyclamen contract. This is what guarantees protection from nuclear fissile material at our ports. The kit is in place. The portals have been built, but when I visited Southampton and hull docks, they were still not in use, apparently because the government still hadn’t signed the contract

I fear that we will see an endless run of gimmicks through to 2015. Gimmicks like the Home Office briefing that there would be a £3,000 bond payable for anyone intending to visit from one of five countries, which was immediately dismissed by the PM’s spokesman.

But such tactics do nothing for community cohesion, for national security or for the reputation of British politics. That’s why I believe there is a better way of conducting this debate over the next 20 months, one that deals with voters’ concerns, not fabricated ones.

ONE NATION LABOUR’S PLANS

Since I took on this job I have listened to voters in a wide range of constituencies and from a wide range of backgrounds. Pensioners in Lancashire who described themselves as white British. Asian women in the East End. Floating voters in Pudsey. Councillors from all parties in Boston in Lincolnshire. I have heard understandable concerns about the availability of local jobs and the effects on wages, terms and conditions. And I’ve heard some great urban myths. That every migrant is given a car when they arrive here.

Often people have raised questions of integration. As one who spent five years of his childhood living in Spain, and quickly learnt Spanish so as to be able to talk to the other children in the street, I heartily agree that a good standard of English should be a prerequisite for studying or living here. Of course that’s not always easy. Look at how poorly British migrants living overseas integrate. But we can and should expect migrants here to learn English, which is why it must make more sense for local authorities to spend money on English courses rather than translation services.

The biggest complaint I have heard, though, from migrants and settled communities alike, is about the negative effects migration can have on the UK labour market.

And I agree.

Even good British companies have been affected by the impact of low skilled migrant workers.

Take Tesco. A good employer and an important source of jobs in Britain. They take on young people, operate apprenticeships and training schemes and often recruit unemployed or disabled staff through job centres.

Yet when a distribution centre was moved to a new location existing staff said they would have lost out by transferring and the result was a higher proportion of staff from A8 countries taking up the jobs.

Tesco are clear they have tried to recruit locally. And I hope they can provide more reassurance for their existing staff. But the fact that staff are raising concern shows how sensitive the issue has become.

Some companies have found themselves far more heavily affected.

Next PLC recruited extra temporary staff for their South Elmsall warehouse for the summer sale – last year and this year.

South Elmsall is in a region with 9% unemployment and 23.8% youth unemployment.

Yet several hundred people were recruited directly from Poland. The recruitment agency Next used, Flame, has its web-site, www.flamejobs.pl, entirely in Polish.

Now of course short term contracts and work are sometimes necessary in order to satisfy seasonal spikes in demand.

But when agencies bring such a large number of workers of a specific nationality at a time when there are one million young unemployed in Britain it is right to ask why that is happening.

It’s not illegal for Agencies to target foreign workers. But is it fair for them to be so exclusive? Is it fair on migrant workers who can find themselves tied into agency accommodation deals? And is it good practice for the long term health of the economy when so many local young people need experience and training?

Next also say they have tried to recruit locally. But I want to see more companies providing assurances and demonstrating what they are doing to train and recruit local staff – particularly the young unemployed – even for temporary posts, rather than using agencies that only bring workers in from abroad.

And I want to see the Government to take action – working with companies – to make sure they can recruit more local young people, qualified to to the job.

Some sectors of the economy have been far more heavily affected than this.

Hospitality, care and construction all have consistently high levels of recruitment from abroad. And far too low levels of training for local young people.

Now, many employers say they prefer to take on foreign workers. They have lots of get up and go, they say. They are reliable. They turn up and they work hard.

But I’ve heard examples from across the country where employers appear to have made a deliberate decision not to provide training to local young people but to cut pay and conditions and to recruit from abroad instead, or to use tied accommodation and undercut the minimum wage.

It may be the case, as some have argued, that many young people discount hospitality or care industries as beneath them, but in many other countries a job in a hotel is not a dead end or a gap year stopgap but the start of a rewarding career. Tourism is one of our largest industries and yet I have heard horror tales of hotel management deliberately cutting hours of young British workers and adding hours to migrant workers who do not complain about deductions from earnings that almost certainly take people below the minimum wage. This is all the more pernicious at a time of high youth unemployment, yet there was not a single prosecution for breaching the National Minimum Wage in the first two years of this government.

So yes, we need British employers to do their bit – working to train and support local young people, avoiding agencies that only recruit from abroad, and shunning dodgy practices with accommodation or to get round the minimum wage. Every business I have ever spoken to that has made that kind of investment has found it has paid dividends in terms of a lower turnover of staff, greater staff loyalty and enhanced brand loyalty in the community.

But we also need Government to act.

They should be ensuring school leavers are equipped with the skills they need for work, including the 50% who don’t choose to go to university; that employers are given more control over the funding for training and skills; and by ensuring that young people who have been unemployed for longer than a year are guaranteed a job – so that no young person is allowed to fall completely out of touch with the world of work.

They should also be working with the care, hospitality and construction sectors to deliver more employer training and apprenticeships.

And Government needs to improve enforcement too.

We need to make it easier to bring prosecutions; Labour will double the fines for minimum wage breaches and for illegal employment of illegal migrants; And because local authorities are far better at knowing what is going on locally, we will give them the power to enforce the minimum wage.

Unscrupulous employers should not be allowed to recruit workers in large numbers in low wage countries in the EU, bring them to the UK, charge the costs of their travel and their substandard accommodation against their wages and still not even meet the national minimum wage.

That is unfair. It exploits migrant workers and it makes it impossible for settled workers with mortgages and a family to support at British prices to compete.

But we also need a government that sees as one of its central aims the eradication of poverty wages and is determined to work with industries like tourism and hospitality to build an even stronger, better motivated, better skilled local workforce. I fear that the two parties that opposed the very introduction of the National Minimum Wage will never be able to tackle this.

And we will introduce mandatory registration of commercial landlords, so that nobody is forced to live in substandard accommodation and no employer/landlord can circumvent the minimum wage. I have seen two bedroom flats turned into pits for nine men with a 24 hour rota for the beds. I have seen fast food outlets with a shack for employees to live in, beds in sheds. And it’s wrong. It’s exploiting migrants and undercutting local workers all for a quick buck.

THE EU AND FREE MOVEMENT OF WORKERS

It is not just British national law that needs to change. I am a passionate supporter of the UK’s membership of the EU, and it is a fact that the British use their rights to travel and work elsewhere in the EU more than any other nationality, but as Yvette Cooper pointed out in her speech earlier this year, we need to argue for longer term reform of how the free movement of workers operates. That means that the EU itself should consider migration in the round and rather than always axiomatically try to encourage greater mobility, analyse some of the complex problems. It also means, as Yvette said, that ‘we should be working within Europe to get the sensible reforms we need to make migration fair for all’.

I won’t reiterate the points Yvette has already made about family benefits or about the habitual residence test, nor will I deal today with the wider aspects of free movement, but I do want to point to three very specific concerns that Labour have.

First, I have a concern that the ID cards issued in some countries that are used to travel into the UK are far from secure. Italian cards are issued not by the state but by the local authority and are often not fit for purpose. The immigration officers at Heathrow tell me Greek ones are particularly easy to fake. We should work with EU colleagues to improve the standards of all such ID cards used for crossing borders.

Secondly there is the problem of vehicles driving in the UK without tax or insurance. The government estimates that there were 15,000 foreign vehicles on UK roads illegally. Of these, only four were caught and not one was prosecuted. These vehicles not only represent a threat to public safety and lead to UK drivers losing out in an accident with an uninsured vehicle, but also mean a loss of £3 million in revenue. The government must do more to enforce the existing law.

Thirdly, there is a significant loophole in the law around marriage. Any UK national who wants to sponsor a foreign national spouse into the UK has to prove that they will not have recourse to public funds. The government set the income hurdle for proving that last year at £18,600. Many thousands of couples and families have been effectively separated by his new rule and the government is at loggerheads with the courts over the threshold figure. However, if another EEA national, for instance a Spaniard or an Italian, marries a non EEA national, there is no requirement for them to meet the £18,600 threshold. They can get married either at home or in the UK and they can both live here without any further need to prove their income.

All three of these issues need concerted EU action and our government should be seeking reform in these areas.

SHAM MARRIAGES

But there is another problem. Because registrars have told me that they are concerned about the growing incidences of sham marriages, which has partly arisen because when you close down one route it is likely that people will use another. But also because the way marriage law interacts with immigration is simply not fit for purpose. Understandably, registrars do not see themselves as immigration officers. They see their job as facilitating marriage.

When Labour was in government we tightened up the rules, so anyone wishing to marry in this country who is subject to immigration control has to use one of the 76 qualified register offices. They give 15 days notice of their intention to marry and the notice is published on the register office board. If the registrar has concerns, they send a Section 24 notice to the Home Office, although several senior registrars have said to me that there is a reluctance to invoke this power.

Bizarrely, those notices of intention to marry cannot be passed to the Home Office, whose officers literally have to inspect all the register office notice boards. Yet any investigation has to be complete within the 15 days.

What is more if one man gives notice to marry several different women in different register offices, the register service IT system will not flag this up as a duplicate.

So, I am proposing several changes. First, the Home Office should have real-time online notification of all notices of marriage where one or other person is under an immigration control. Second the notice period should be extended to either 20 or 25 days. Third, if the Home Office detects any anomalies the period can be extended to 60 or 90 days, during which the Home Office can do full and proper investigations. If the marriage does prove to be sham the person under the immigration control would be removed.

PUSH FACTORS

This brings me to one final point. Politicians on the right regularly refer to pull factors that supposedly affect migration, but there is much less talk in the UK of the push factors that lead people to leave their homes, including war, violence, famine, disease and natural disasters. We need to redress that. After all, it is only natural that people want to stay at home, in their home country and it is in everyone’s interests for us to help them do that.

Look at one specific aspect – environmental refugees. Some of the most populous cities in the world including Mumbai, Calcutta, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City and Guangzhou are heavily exposed to coastal flooding. In 2010 extreme weather displaced millions in Malaysia, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines and the United Nations estimates that in 2008 20 million people were displaced by climate change, compared to 4.6 million by virtue of internal conflict or violence. So, if we get climate change wrong there is a very real danger we shall see levels of mass migration as yet unparalleled. Take the Carteret islands off Bougainville, which is part of Papua New Guinea and therefore the Commonwealth. The islands are disappearing under the rising ocean. An evacuation of the islanders started in 2011. They are the first permanent environmental refugees. They may be few in number, 2,500 or so, but repeat that for every low-lying city round the world and you can imagine that the UN estimates of 200 million such refugees, more than the total number of worldwide migrants today, may be about right.

That is yet another reason why tackling climate change and maintaining the commitment to International Development is so key to Labour.

CLOSING

Immigration is rarely a standalone policy. It affects and is affected by the economy, by cultural expectations, by climate change and by welfare policies. Nor is it a monolith. The number of British nationals leaving or returning to the UK are a part of the equation. And I would argue that the international student market is one in which we should be hoping to grow our share not slash it.

The government may well resort to a string of cheap and nasty gimmicks to give the impression of activity over the next two years, but Labour will put forward serious proposals to tackle illegal entry, to end exploitation, to encourage integration, to strengthen the economy and to protect the taxpayer.

November 8, 2015
Jeremy Browne – 2013 Speech on Female Genital Mutilation

Below is the text of the speech made by Jeremy Browne on 6th February 2013 on the subject of female genital mutilation.

In my lifetime, the role of women and girls in British society has been transformed. There has been an emancipation revolution.

Many of these changes have been legal. It seems remarkable today to reflect that, until 1975, women were not allowed to buy a house without financial guarantees being provided by a man, typically their father or husband.

Other changes have been cultural. It is extraordinary, for example, that until 1972 a female diplomat in the foreign office was required to resign if she got married.

As each of these barriers to female attainment has been removed, women have capitalised on the opportunities that equality has afforded them. In virtually every walk of life now it is wholly unremarkable to see women in positions of high responsibility.

Indeed, in many informal respects, women have moved beyond parity and are succeeding in greater numbers than men. In a complete reversal from a generation ago, for example, girls now outperform boys at school.

This is the emancipation revolution. After thousands of years of female disadvantage, this virtuous upheaval in our society has happened in just a few decades.

It is exhilarating for all true liberals who believe, as I do, that every person should have the freedom to be who they are, and the opportunity to be everything they could be.

That is the liberal society

But it is not, if we are honest and blunt, the reality for every woman and girl in Britain. The emancipation revolution should apply universally. It should benefit everyone. But it does not.

There are thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of women and girls in Britain who do not enjoy the benefits of living in our liberal society.

That is not because of some accident or oversight. It is much worse than that. It is because of a deliberate rejection of the emancipation revolution and the equal opportunities now afforded to women and girls.

I am standing before you this evening to say, unequivocally, that this situation is wrong.

It is unacceptable for the individual women and girls whose freedom and opportunities are stifled. And it is wrong for our society. There cannot be a pick-and-mix approach to living in a benign liberal country. The benefits must be universal, without exceptions or exemptions.

I do not believe that cultural relativism provides an excuse to opt-out of our shared liberal social settlement. Everyone should enjoy the freedom to make their own choices, without the fear of social coercion.

Let me spell out some examples of what I mean. Forced marriage has no place in our benign liberal society. The victims are overwhelmingly young women and girls. Like everyone else they should be free to marry who they wish. Or not to marry at all. That is their decision. And that is why we will be criminalising forced marriage.

We should also make clear our collective repulsion about so called ‘honour crimes’. The victims are also nearly always vulnerable young women and girls. What possible honour can there be in murder, rape or kidnap? None, and it has no place in our society.

And that takes me to the subject that brings us together this evening: female genital mutilation.

Female genital mutilation is abhorrent

Sewing up a young girls’ vagina or cutting a five year-old’s clitoris is just plain barbaric.

Looked at in these simple, stark terms, I would hope and believe that when front-line professionals came across such a brutal process – particularly when such violence is practiced against children – they would do everything in their power to first and foremost protect the victim and then help bring the perpetrator to justice.

And yet……

According to a study based on census data, there are around 20,000 girls in Britain who are at risk of female genital mutilation. One hospital in North London alone has recorded 450 cases of female genital mutilation in the last three years. But despite female genital mutilation being illegal for 25 years, there has still not been a single prosecution.

Something does not add up

I can only conclude that there is nervousness amongst some professionals to confront the practice of female genital mutilation head on. That it is viewed as an exotic or unusual custom practiced by a culture they should not intrude upon. That there is a cultural relativism that leads them to excuse what is being done to other people’s daughters when they would never allow it to be done to their own.

That those professionals are somehow not seeing female genital mutilation for what it really is. Because what it is, categorically and unequivocally, is child abuse.

It can never be excused or ignored and it should be treated in the same way as any other form of child abuse.

I want to urge anyone who has real concerns that a girl may be at risk of female genital mutilation to report it – just as they would report their concerns about a child at risk of any other form of child abuse. To do so is not cultural persecution; it is not racial or religious intolerance; it is about promoting child protection.

That is my message to frontline professionals – in hospitals, in schools, in social services departments – report your concerns to the police. All the safeguarding guidelines and legal frameworks that exist to tackle child abuse apply to tackling female genital mutilation. The law is on your side.

If we overcome misplaced cultural sensitivities; if guidelines are followed and if the law is enforced then we will finally see a prosecution of this heinous crime. A prosecution will send a vital and strong message to perpetrators that we will not tolerate this abuse, and if the law is ignored then there will be legal consequences.

But enforcing the law is only one way of protecting the health and well being of future generations. Fundamentally we also need to change values and beliefs. We need to ceaselessly work to encourage everyone to appreciate and embrace the basic principle that women and girls have an equal stake in our society to men and boys.

There is no opt-out clause when it comes to equality for women and girls in a liberal society. Customs and traditions can no longer be used as an excuse or a shield for people who are shunning the values that the rest of our society have embraced.

The emancipation revolution is universal, and women and girls, regardless of their background or culture, are entitled to exactly the same protections, freedoms and privileges as their fathers and brothers.

November 8, 2015
James Brokenshire – 2013 Speech to ISPA Conference

Below is the text of the speech made by James Brokenshire to the Internet Service Providers’ Association on 27th November 2013.

Thank you very much for having me here today. I welcome the opportunity to speak to you. The internet continues to be a powerful force in shaping the future UK and global economy, enabling remarkable innovation, collaboration and growth. Internet Service Providers are key players in that. You play a central role in ensuring the cyber security of the UK, so that the UK continues to be an attractive and safe place to do business, and the public are protected from those who use the internet for harmful and criminal purposes. And that will continue to be the case, as we look ahead to the future of the internet and ISPs.

Today, I would like to focus on:

The threat we face from cyber crime

How the government plans to tackle this threat, including through the National Cyber Security Programme, changes in the law enforcement and legal landscape and the new Serious and Organised Crime Strategy

How government and industry can work in partnership to tackle the threat from cyber crime and reduce the vulnerabilities of businesses and individuals online.

I’ll start with the threat.

The National Security Strategy published in 2010 identifies the risk of hostile attacks on UK cyberspace by other states and large scale cyber crime as a ‘Tier One’ priority for UK national security. The risk of a significant increase in the level of organised crime affecting the UK is a ‘Tier Two’ priority.

There are two criminal activities here:

Cyber-dependent crime, which can only be committed using computers or other information communication technology. Examples include the creation and spread of malware for financial gain, hacking to steal personal or industry data, and denial of service attacks to cause reputational damage; and

Cyber-enabled crime, which can be conducted online or offline, but online can take place at unprecedented scale and speed. For example, cyber-enabled card-not-present fraud cost banks an estimated £140.2 million in 2012. In the same year, cyber-enabled banking fraud was estimated to have cost £39.6million.

More research is needed on the overall cost of cyber crime to the UK. So I am establishing a working group of academic experts and research partners to improve these estimates.

But recent law enforcement operations show the challenges we face. The ambition and complexity of these criminal activities was shown in the arrest, in September, of 11 men on suspicion of conspiracy to steal from Santander Bank.

And the scale can be seen in a recent operation, jointly conducted by the National Cyber Crime Unit, FBI, and other partners, which led to the arrest of 11 people for crimes that are estimated to have resulted in losses of over $200 million.

A third example shows how plausible these attacks can be. In November, six people were convicted of conspiracy to defraud after an investigation launched by the Metropolitan Police and concluded by the NCCU. The criminals posted fake job adverts on websites like Gumtree. Respondents were asked to complete an online application form, but the hyperlink downloaded computer malware which recorded the victims’ keystrokes, capturing their financial and personal data. Mobile phone and online chat records showed the group had made more than £300,000 from the fraud.

So How is Government Leading the Strategic Response to this Threat?

The National Cyber Security Strategy, launched in 2011, sets out the government’s approach to increasing the cyber security of the UK. The strategy is supported by the National Cyber Security Programme, through which the government has committed £860 million over five years (from 2011 to 2016) to protect and promote the UK in a digital world.

The Cabinet Office co-ordinates this work. The funding is distributed among government departments and agencies involved in order to help the UK to:

– Tackle cyber crime and be one of the most secure places in the world to do business in cyberspace;

– Be more resilient to cyber attacks and better able to protect our interests in cyberspace; and

– Help shape an open, stable and vibrant cyberspace which the UK public can use safely and that supports open societies.

This activity is complemented by other developments. In October the government launched a strategy to reduce the level of serious and organised crime, including cyber crime. It sets out how we will take action at every opportunity to prevent people getting involved in serious and organised crime; to strengthen our protection against it; to prepare how we respond; and, most importantly, to pursue the criminals, prosecuting them and disrupting their activities.

Prosecuting Cyber Criminals

I would briefly like to focus on law enforcement agencies’ efforts to disrupt and prosecute cyber criminals, and our work to help protect the private sector and the public.

The effort to relentlessly disrupt serious and organised crime and reduce the threat posed to the UK is being led by the National Crime Agency. The NCA’s Intelligence Hub has a single strategic intelligence picture of serious and organised crime threats to the UK, including from cyber crime. This picture of the threat is enabling the law enforcement community better to identify and respond to threats and vulnerabilities.

The NCA has four commands covering: Organised Crime, Border Policing, Economic Crime, and Child Exploitation and Online Protection. The National Cyber Crime Unit supports all four commands as the centre of excellence for tackling cyber crime.

Our work to improve law enforcement’s capability to tackle cyber crime goes beyond the creation of the NCCU. Half of the NCA’s 4,000 officers will be trained in digital investigation skills. We are also providing extra funding through the National Cyber Security Programme so that each Regional Organised Crime Unit will have a dedicated cyber crime unit. And the NCCU will help drive up cyber skills in local forces. Through its partnership with the College of Policing, we aim to train 5,000 police officers and staff by 2015.

I am delighted with the work already undertaken by the NCCU. For example, a young person in London was recently arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into one of the largest cyber attacks ever seen. The NCCU used sophisticated technical skills to preserve evidence and coordinated this arrest with international law enforcement partners as part of a wider investigation.

Tackling Cyber Crime Together

Of course we know that the UK cannot tackle cyber crime on its own. Cyber criminals threaten the UK from locations across the globe. International collaboration is a vital part of the NCA’s approach to cutting crime, including cyber crime. The NCCU is already working closely with a range of international partners, including the European Cyber Crime Centre in Europol.

The FBI recently described their relationship with the NCCU as “the best illustration” of the paradigm shift they have been undergoing in their engagement with law enforcement, industry, and international partners.

The UK has rightly been recognised as a leading player on cyber issues following the London Conference on Cyberspace in November 2011, and I was encouraged by the constructive discussions at the Seoul Conference on Cyberspace last month. In our international engagement, in the EU, and in multilateral fora we have continued to promote the UK’s vision of an open, vibrant and secure cyberspace.

The government has ratified the Budapest Convention, the main international agreement on tackling cyber crime. Our ratification of the Convention signals our willingness to support other countries to tackle this international crime. All countries should put in place appropriate legislation to tackle these crimes, and the Budapest Convention is the best model for this.

We now need to focus less on international treaties and focus our collective efforts on how to improve the practical response to the threat from cyber crime, such as how the UK supports the development of capability in other countries through the Cyber Capacity Building Fund, which was announced by the Foreign Secretary at the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace in October 2012.

Of course, we also need to ensure that the UK has the right legal frameworks in place to effectively investigate and prosecute criminals online. The government is committed to ensuring that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the powers they need to investigate cyber crimes. We are considering how these capabilities can be delivered, and will put forward proposals as soon as possible.

In addition, we will amend the Computer Misuse Act next year to implement the EU Directive on Attacks Against Information Systems.

The Role of ISPs

I have set out the cyber threat and our strategic, law enforcement and legal response. The final element I would like to talk about today is the role of industry, and particularly ISPs, in helping to improve the UK’s cyber security.

It is vital that we have effective intelligence-sharing relationships so that law enforcement agencies have the full intelligence picture and so that firms can protect their systems. It is important that you continue to report fraud and cyber crimes to Action Fraud, and share intelligence on the threats within industry.

This intelligence-sharing is supported by the Cyber Information Sharing Partnership (CISP) which launched this year. This is a secure environment through which industry can share real-time information on cyber security threats and mitigations. The security services, law enforcement agencies, and government can also share information through the CISP. Over 200 organisations are already participating.

We are also establishing a national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) to improve co-ordination of cyber incidents. The CERT will act as a focus point for international sharing of technical information on cyber security. The UK CERT will allow us to bring together strands of our cyber response and simplify our engagement with international partners.

This intelligence-sharing is underpinned by strong relationships. The NCA is building direct relationships with industry. It supports both proactive investigations and a fast-time response to the most serious incidents. It receives intelligence and reports from the private sector. And it produces threat assessments and targeted alerts on emerging threats to help firms reduce their risks and vulnerabilities.

Creation of Cyber Crime Reduction Partnership

I also want my own direct relationships with you. To do this, I have created the Cyber Crime Reduction Partnership with David Willets (the Minister for Universities and Science). This gives me a opportunity to hear the views of ISPA and the other sectors and academics who attend. Mark [Mark Gracey, Chair of ISPA] and Andy Archibald, Interim Head of the NCCU, jointly lead a work stream to improve cooperation between industry and law enforcement agencies. I look forward to our future work in this area.

But this is about more than the government and industry. The public is often the end user of your products and services. Their cyber security vulnerabilities can all too easily become your cyber security vulnerabilities. So we need to improve the public’s awareness of how to stay safe online.

We will shortly be running a large campaign to improve the online safety behaviours of consumers and SMEs. I thank the ISPs who have already pledged their support for the campaign, alongside a growing list of supporters from other sectors including anti-virus software companies, telecommunications firms, and high street banks. I encourage you all to consider how you can also support the campaign.

Tackling Online Child Sexual Exploitation

Another area where you can continue to help protect the public is to support work to tackle online child sexual exploitation. I know that many of you here support the work of the Internet Watch Foundation, and have helped protect children and the wider public by taking action to block indecent images based on the IWF list. As you will be aware, the Prime Minister has called for more action to tackle the availability and sharing of images, and in particular that search engines should take responsibility for ensuring that it is difficult to access illegal images through their services. The search engines have now made changes to their search functions to support this, and National Crime Agency testing of these new measures shows that they have been effective in making it harder to access child abuse images, videos or pathways.

We have also asked search engine providers to work with law enforcement agencies to develop effective deterrence messages for users who try to access child abuse images.

We have been working with industry and CEOP to develop these solutions, and I thank the firms for their support. The objective is to make it more difficult for users to access indecent images of children, whether they do so deliberately or inadvertently.

These changes will help deter the relatively unsophisticated offender, and make it harder for them to access illegal images. To tackle the more sophisticated offender, for example those who use tools such as The Onion Router (TOR), we need to engage with industry and use your skills.

On 9 December the UK Policing Minister and the US Assistant Attorney General will co-chair the first meeting of the taskforce combat online child sexual exploitation crimes. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command of the NCA, the FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations will all be members.

The taskforce will work hand-in-hand with an Industry Solutions Group, which will design technological solutions to these crimes. Joanna Shields, UK Ambassador for Digital Industries, will lead the engagement with this group, building upon the collaborative work already in place. Membership of the Industry Solutions Group will include technical experts from ISPs and representatives from other important online sectors such as search engines; social networks; and data storage, encryption, and antivirus software providers.

I encourage you all to consider how you can support the work of the Taskforce and its Industry Solutions Group.

Messages to Remember

So what messages do I hope you will hold onto as you head into the interesting panel discussions which follow?

We are committed to working closely with industry to reduce the cyber threats we face. We will bring all our law enforcement capabilities to bear in the relentless pursuit of cyber criminals. And we will provide support and information to help you protect yourselves against the cyber threat.

In return, I ask you to share information with law enforcement agencies and with each other so that we can reduce our vulnerabilities. And I ask you to work with us to reduce the public’s vulnerabilities to cyber crime and help protect children from online sexual exploitation.

Today’s conference asks what lies ahead for the internet industry, and I know you will have some very interesting discussions on that. As you consider the exciting future of the internet, I hope you will reflect on the need to build in cyber security from the outset.

September 19, 2015
John Bercow – 2013 Speech in New Zealand

Below is the text of the speech made by the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, in New Zealand on 8th August 2013.

Thank you so much for the warmth of that introduction. It is an enormous pleasure and privilege to be here today at this exceptional institution in front of this distinguished audience and in this wonderful country. It is an incredible honour for me to speak in this place and I already know that it will be one of the highlights of my tenure. The United Kingdom might be described, not least within itself, as having created the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ but if that is the case then New Zealand has long been among the smartest of her many daughters. That is evident not only in your noble history of entrenching democracy ever since Westminster offered you the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852, most obviously through becoming the first nation in the world to permit universal suffrage of all adults regardless of gender a shade more than four decades later, but in another perhaps slightly more esoteric regard for how you organise yourselves that has enormous appeal to me personally.

This is the reverence which your arrangements offer to the holder of the office of Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives. I note with enthusiasm that the Speaker here ranks third constitutionally behind only the Governor General and the Prime Minister, that it is technically the owner of the entire parliamentary estate and has sweeping authority over it and is so esteemed in Wellington that the last incumbent, Sir Lockwood Smith, who I have met a number of times, moved on to become your High Commissioner in London. I must admit I look upon this situation with envy. It seems to me to be entirely appropriate but alas one that I am unlikely to be able to duplicate. It is a little early, I hope, for me to be contemplating my life after leaving the Speaker’s Chair but it seems improbable that I will be sent to Wellington in a sort of exchange outcome with Sir Lockwood, which is rather unfortunate. This is despite the fact that there must be some ministers in my country who would find the prospect of my being relocated the better part of 12,000 miles away rather enticing.

The topic which I have been asked to speak to today is “Parliaments of the Future”. As with anything involving long-term predictions this is a perilous exercise. It has the severe disadvantage that at best my thoughts today, for reasons I will outline in a moment, are likely to prove incomplete. At worst, they are destined to be thoroughly mistaken. The one recompense is that by the time it is obvious how far short of the truth I have fallen, all of us, including me, are likely to have forgotten what I said anyway, or taking matters to an even more extreme sense, we will have all moved on to the ultimate Upper Chamber in the sky (in that regard I trust that New Zealand does not want to be unicameral). The reason that a subject of this sort is so challenging is that the only way a human being can hope to approach it is by extrapolating from some recent developments and assuming that they will be even more significant, indeed seminal, in the future. Despite this being a Malthusian maxim (and we can see in a planet of around seven billion souls now where that logic took him), it is irresistible. We cannot know what utterly novel invention or idea will occur which disrupts everything beforehand, so we work with the most obvious example of significant change or reform in our current lives.

At the turn of the 20th century, thinkers in Victorian England, nicely illustrated through the work of HG Wells, were fascinated by the possibilities which electricity seemed to be signalling. With the demonstration of the electronic escalator in Harrods store in 1898 and the moving walkway or travelator at various exhibitions in Europe and America at about the same time, serious people were convinced that pavements and indeed walking were about to be rendered redundant. The early motor car, which was being patented in primitive form at the same time, did not loom largely in their imaginations, let alone the aeroplane which would come along very shortly afterwards.

In a similar spirit, I was an impressionable child during the age of the Apollo moon missions. Like most young people then if I had to be asked to write about what the future would look like, I would have assumed that if involved space stations on other planets within my lifetime on earth and that, especially with Concorde in the mix as well, flight times from Britain to New Zealand would be cut to a handful of hours. In fact, the last moon landing occurred in 1973 and the time taken to travel from London to Wellington has not improved much in the past four decades. Yet at about the same time as these seemingly obvious future advances stalled, others, notably the creation of the microchip and the linkage of a set of computers together into an early version of the Internet were occurring but were invisible to all but a tiny collection of specialists at this stage. In a very strong sense, however, the microchip and the Internet have advanced human communications dramatically more than a shiny space station and a four hour flight time between our two countries would have done.

All of this is not, I should stress, an alibi for ducking the question of Parliaments of the Future. It is more of an apology that I am not technologically accomplished enough to be able to anticipate what will prove to be the equivalent of the missed motor car or the ignored Internet in the years to come. I do have some views on the future for legislatures in democracies which I would like to share with you, but they come with the health warning that they too unavoidably involve extrapolation from the past and present to frame a vision of the future. All that I can aspire to in ambition is that what I am about to set out will turn out merely to be incomplete rather than an outright mistaken analysis.

The propositions which will frame my argument today are three-fold.

First, that history suggests that the single more important factor in triggering change within Parliaments is an often delayed response to change without Parliaments. In other words, the changing nature of who the electorate are, what are their expectations, and by what means do their exercise their views, inevitably induces change among the representing as well as the represented, and hence parliaments as political places although this might take time to manifest itself completely.

Second, democratic innovations do not seem to take place randomly. Certain sorts of states seem to continuously be the source of what is initially seen by many as experimentation (even eccentricity) but which come to be viewed later, often rather swiftly in fact, as the new and welcome orthodoxy.

Third, that despite the certainty of change, the central challenges facing a Parliament in a democracy have been reasonably constant and are likely to remain broadly consistent. The fundamental issue is the extent to which change can be co-opted to make meeting those challenges a little easier rather than them serving to weaken the legislature against the executive, political parties or the media. So let me start with my first assumption. Societies lead Parliaments as well as follow them. The expansion of an electorate by extending voting rights to those previously denied them, the evolving composition of an electorate become of demographic movement, particularly immigration and the capacity of existing electors to articulate themselves fully in every respect of their lives because of a more tolerant approach from the majority around them, will all affect the way that a Parliament thinks as well as how it looks, although not with the speed that many reformers would want to see. The incorporation of women into the active electorate in Britain was bound to alter the composition and the character of the Westminster Parliament, although it should not have taken so long to do so. The fact that Britain is more ethnically, racially and religiously diverse has taken its time to filter its way through to the nature of our Parliament, indeed that process is still not complete, but it is there. Homosexuality was never a formal barrier to the franchise in the United Kingdom but an enforced silence about what people felt they could say about the nature of their love ensured a similar silence at the Palace of Westminster as well. More space for articulation in society at large has prompted more capacity for political expression of sexual politics within Parliament. The formal means by which voting is conducted, while to a degree secondary, is not inconsequential. Universal suffrage conducted via the sorts of public meetings which took place in Britain before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 would have been a very different sort of democracy to the one that we enjoy.

So, extrapolating from the past and present to the future, what is it reasonable to assume? I think we should operate on the presumption that the diversity of the electorate will become yet more embedded and that our arrangements need to adjust even further to reflect this. I think that it will become even harder for political parties which were created in an age of much greater conformity and which have found it difficult to adapt to a more diverse democracy to reflect the electorate, so we should expect more new political parties to emerge, looser political parties to be seen and more individuals elected entirely independently of the traditional political party structure altogether. This too will create a challenge for Parliaments designed on an implicit model which may become dated. Parliaments of the future will thus, in my opinion, need to be more fluid and less formal in feature.

Secondly, where should we look for countries which will prove to be the pioneers of change? As I alluded to earlier on the question of truly universal adult suffrage, New Zealand was the incubator and not the Westminster Parliament which established representative institutions here. It was not Britain but Australia which pioneered what we now think of as the typical ballot. I think we can see a pattern in this. As I will attempt to illustrate, not only in Australasia but Europe and North America, it is persistently relatively new, comparatively small (in terms of population, not area) and frequently geographically quite distinct nations which take the initiative and who should be looked to if we are seeking to identify future trends which may then be adopted as the new norm in many other places. Let me take Europe as an example. The first nation to introduce what we would today recognise as a Parliament was Iceland via the Althing. The first place to render slavery illegal was the Republic of Venice more than 1,000 years ago. Switzerland has had universal male suffrage at the federal level since 1848 (and earlier still for certain cantons) and it pioneered the use of the referendum in the European continent (although I should note its record on votes for women was truly appalling as it was not until an unbelievably late 1971 that all adult females in that country were enfranchised). Sweden, by contrast, was the market leader as far as women electors are concerned. Turnout in elections in Belgium has long exceeded that which occurred in Britain.

Much the same can be seen in the United States. The first state to abolish slavery was tiny Rhode Island in 1774 even before the US came into existence. The territory and then state of Wyoming was the first to permit universal female suffrage. The popular referendum or initiative was adopted by South Dakota in 1898. It was then championed by the state of Colorado. The then very sparsely populated state of Florida was the first, in 1901, to introduce the direct primary at all levels. Much more recently, Oregon has been associated with the notion of elections conducted entirely by post.

The past and present would hence lead me to look to a relatively new country or more exactly a relatively new democracy, small in population probably and geographically distinct as a source for a change in the manner in which an electorate expresses itself that will ultimately change parliaments. Is it possible to identify such a place and such a proposition? I believe that we can. It is Estonia. Estonia has a long and proud if slightly isolated national political history. It has only been a modern democracy since the collapse of the old Soviet Union but has made enormous strides since then and is today an extremely comfortable member of the European Union. The notion that it was a dark dictatorship by external imposition less than quarter of a century ago now seems to be surreal. The most striking aspect of democracy in Estonia, for this discussion at least, is the means by which it conducts its elections. After an experiment with local elections, Estonia became the first nation in the world to permit online voting for its 2007 national parliamentary elections. On that occasion, only 3.4 per cent of all participants took up the option. In 2011, by contrast, almost one quarter (24.3 per cent) of all votes were cast via the Internet or chip-secure mobile telephones. Observers expect that at least half of the votes which will be recorded in the next parliamentary elections – due in 2015 – will be delivered by this new rather than the traditional method. Whereas most European countries have a problem with participation in elections, particularly amongst younger adult citizens, Estonia is in a much stronger position. Technology is changing the electorate as well as elections. This has, perhaps not surprisingly, had an immediate impact on the Estonian Parliament as an institution which is widely regarded as the most technologically-savvy in the world. The level of e-dialogue between representatives and the represented is staggering. Although as I have consistently contended throughout this speech there are real risks in predicting the future from the present, if you are to undertake that wager then it is to Estonia that you should head in 2015 rather than to Britain which will be holding parliamentary elections at about the same time in one sense and quite a long way behind the times in another. The new New Zealand in this sentiment is an institution called the Riigikogu in Tallinn where the presiding officer or Speaker is Ms Eine Ergma, possibly the only Speaker in the world to have once been a Professor of Astronomy. My principal prediction about the legislatures which we will see emerge and evolve in the next twenty years is that they will be shaped by electorates and elections which have followed Estonia’s example. The advantage enjoyed there is because the Estonian Parliament is a relatively new institution it has not found it too difficult to adjust to the knock-on effects of new technology in and on the electorate. The challenge for Britain (and, dare I say it, New Zealand) will be culturally substantial by comparison.

Yet that is the challenge for Parliaments of the Future as I see it. Let me return to the three enduring functions of a Parliament that I noted earlier, namely representation, scrutiny and legislation. What would be the impact of the sort of e-democracy which Estonia is the best example existing today?

The area on which I want to focus is representation. This is because I think that what happens here will eventually have a transmission effect on scrutiny and legislation too and indeed render what we have historically thought of as three separate aspects of parliamentary life much more closely interconnected, a shift towards something close to a Venn diagram over the next few decades. How this happens, nonetheless, is likely to depend on how notions of representation change over time.

If Estonia is any illustration then what we already think of as a virtually revolutionary shift in the size of correspondence from the postbag to the inbox is only in its infancy. We are destined for a lot more of it. The representing will surely find themselves in an almost continuous dialogue with the represented. The traditional notion of there being but one concept of a constituency, based on geography, will become increasingly hard to sustain. It will remain the principal notion of a constituency for some aspects of personal representation but I cannot believe that it will be the only acceptable form of constituency. Issue or cause constituencies will matter just as much as territorial constituencies. An MP will be seen, even more and far more than is the case now, as being as much the member for those with a concern about certain sorts of illness or conflicts in foreign countries as they are for the immediate patch of land which provides them with voters at a general election.

This has huge implications for Members of Parliament. It also has massive ramifications for the resources which we will need to devote if our democracy is to service the electorate in a manner which they think reaches the sort of standard that they would accept in private or commercial e-transactions. Can we be as good as Amazon or Google? If not, we may go the way of Bebo or a MySpace. Being more responsive than MPs might have been thirty, twenty, ten or even five years ago will not be impressive enough. When Estonia first starting innovating with e-democracy at the local level neither Facebook nor Twitter not any kind of tablet computer existed. What then might have been called, if the phrase had been struck, a smartphone would today seem pretty stupid. Is any of this change remotely compatibility with the current, austerity-induced, cry to “cut the cost of politics”. I doubt it. Yet if we do not keep up with the pace of change we will be steamrolled by it.

The increased intensity and speed that an e-democracy demands will travel beyond just one form of representation. It will and should have an impact on what and how we choose to debate. The single biggest change at Westminster with which I have been linked is the revival of the Urgent Question. The UQ is a device which allows any MP to petition me at the start of a parliamentary day to compel a minister to come to the chamber and answer an enquiry on an issue which has suddenly emerged. In the year before I became Speaker only two UQs were accepted and the instrument was dying. In my time in the Chair I have allowed numerous Urgent Questions and Parliament is much the more topical and hence more relevant for it. In the Parliaments of the Future, time allocated for the UQ or similar will, in my view, be automatic. The issue will be not whether but what new should be discussed. The historic concept of departmental questions held at fixed, often lengthy intervals will be antiquated. The notion is already meaningless in Estonia today. We will have to be far, far more flexible about what is debated and when across our whole timetable. And the dictum that the Government of the day should have control over virtually the whole of that business will seem astonishingly arrogant. New Zealand, I observe, is ahead of the curve on that score. Others including us must follow you. An e-democracy will demand enhanced democracy within a Parliament and well as between it and the outside world. Deference is not a quality which will have much purchase in the democracy to come.

To a degree, of course, all of this is speculation. It is not, I hope, speculation without some evidence. I have argued previously that the age of representative democracy is not dead and continuous direct democracy via daily polling will not put parliaments out of action and that continues to be my view. Parliaments will, though, be compelled to change and I think we can see through the example that already exists in Estonia, the direction of travel that our democracy is likely to take. We also know from history that societies, as I remarked, lead Parliaments as much as they are led by it. This time, crucially, it will not be possible for decades to pass before legislatures start to look and sound and think like the electorates which they represent. It will be a much faster process in the future. All of which, in conclusion, leaves me as an optimist about the place of parliaments in democracies. We can become the means by which a rightly more demanding public secures what it is entitled to expect from those who rule in their name. “Never make predictions”, the old adage always runs, and “especially about the future”. At best these thoughts will be incomplete but I hope they are not that mistaken. The Mother Parliament has learnt more from a certain Daughter Parliament than it often cares to concede openly. I have come here today to acknowledge this. I have also chosen to suggest that both Mother and Daughter have much to learn from someone even younger. Thank you all so much for letting me look into the crystal ball. The immediate future now belongs to your questions.

September 7, 2015
Danny Alexander – 2013 Speech at the Scottish Productive Ageing summit

Below is the text of the speech made by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, to the Scottish Productive Ageing Summit held on 3rd October 2013.

Thanks Richard.

I was especially keen to come and speak at your conference today…

Because the subject you’re discussing – productive ageing – is a huge issue for this government.

And I also think – unless we take the right decisions in this area now – it will become one of the biggest challenges facing our country in the future.

Why important?

So why do I place such emphasis on this?

Since I joined the Treasury one of our biggest goals has been to secure our country’s long term economic future.

That’s why we’re reducing the deficit, to make sure that our grandchildren won’t have to pay off this generation’s debts.

And that’s why we’re investing in our infrastructure, so that the next generation have the best possible transport and digital networks to support future economic growth.

But if we really want to secure the long term economic stability of the UK, one of our key challenges will be to keep control of the dependency ratio.

Which in plain English – as most of you will know – is the number of dependent people not of working age, relative to the number of working-age.

To do that, we have to ensure that our older people can be as productive as possible.

Because – over the longer term – any significant increase in that dependency ratio would place a greater tax burden on everyone of working age…

And result in a smaller working population, paying for an expanding support system.

Just to illustrate the scale of the challenge facing here…

The OBR’s projections suggest that public expenditure on older people is set to rise by nearly 4 ½ per cent of GDP between 2016 and 2060.

That’s an increase of £66bn in today’s terms.

And the figures here in Scotland are even more profound.

Scotland

The Scottish government’s own research shows that this nation could see a 50% increase in number of people over the age of sixty through the next twenty years.

But despite that research, that same Scottish government concocted a statistical mirage recently to suggest that – somehow – the pension costs of an independent Scotland would be lower than the rest of the UK.

They did this by fiddling the figures and pretending that teenagers are now pensioners.

According to independent forecasts, by the year 2060, each pensioner in Scotland will be supported by just 1.9 people of working age, compared to 2.2 in the rest of the UK.

This is the key dependency ratio when it comes to assessing the cost of pensions.

But in their paper, the Scottish government used a dependency ratio that included those under 16, as well as pensioners.

So – because the rest of the UK has a higher number of children – they decreed that Scotland would have a lower cost of pensions.

And based on those rather suspect figures, they released a paper that suggested they may not increase the state pension age if the ‘yes’ campaign won the referendum.

Not only is that maths highly questionable.

But a two year delay in increasing the state pension age could cost an independent Scotland £1.4bn.

And by 2030, it could mean 30 000 fewer people in employment…

And a reduction in GDP of over £1bn a year.

It also strikes me that the implication that when people hit 65 they want to put their feet up is misleading.

That isn’t what I see either here in Scotland, nor south of the border.

Argument

That’s why this conference, and the work that so many people here are doing, is so important.

We need to turn that argument – and that perception – around.

And – at the risk of going a bit JFK – we need to look not at what our older generations take from society…

But what they contribute to society.

There is – as you will well know – a whole host of evidence out there about the advantages older 65s offer in the workplace:

McDonalds report a 20% higher performance in their outlets where workers over 60 are employed…

B&Q report that absenteeism is 39 per cent lower among their older workers…

and Hertfordshire County Council found that 65 year olds were their most engaged workforce group.

So this age group can offer a huge amount for individual businesses.

In fact, if we look at things on a larger scale.

Studies show that if everyone worked just one year longer, we could see real GDP increase by around 1 per cent.

That’s the equivalent of £14bn for the UK economy every year.

And that’s something it would be foolish for any Treasury Minister to overlook.

Of course, it’s worth saying at this juncture that this isn’t about trying to force retirees back to work.

Where people have worked hard, and saved wisely, and want to relax into retirement they should have every right to do so.

And the changes that my colleague Steve Webb – the Minister for Pensions – has overseen on auto enrolment will make it much easier for people to start saving for and planning for their retirement.

But where our older generations want to remain in the workplace…

And want to continue to support their families, and contribute to our economy…

Then we need to make that not only possible, but also much easier.

The government has taken a number of steps towards doing just that.

What is the government doing?

First, we’re bringing forward the increase in the state pension age.

Back in 1981, a man retiring at 65 typically had about 14 years of retirement; today it is around 21 years.

A woman retiring at 60 in 1981 would have had about 22 years of retirement – today it is around 29 years.

Now I for one am, and I’m sure everyone in this room is, delighted that people are living longer!

But we have to take account of that increased life expectancy in the State Pension Age…

Which will now rise to 66 by the year 2020 – six years earlier than previously planned.

And – should the current legislation go through – it will rise again, to 67 by the year 2028.

I hope everyone here will agree that this is a sensible step in recognising an ageing population, and encouraging people to remain in the workplace.

The second strand is our work – led by the Department for Work and Pensions – to increase the participation of our older generations in the labour market.

As part of this, DWP have launched an Age Positive Initiative to give guidance and case studies to employers and businesses…

They’ve launched a sector initiative to drive forward changes in the employment and retention of older workers…

And they’re also working with expert organisations through the Age Action Alliance Healthy Workplaces Group, to help employers more effectively manage the health of an ageing workforce.

The third – and I think the most important – change that the government is making…

Is removing some of the ageist provisions that already existed in UK law.

This Tuesday marked the two year anniversary of our phasing out of the default retirement age.

Meaning that most people can now work for as long as they want to, and that they can’t be discriminated against for taking that decision.

In that same year – 2011 – we also removed the effective requirement to annuitise by 75.

Which has ensured that individuals now have increased flexibility over their retirement age, and increased choice over purchasing a retirement income product.

Those actions…

– on increasing the state pension age…

– on helping employers to recruit and retain older workers…

– and on removing ageism from the system…

Add up – I hope – to a sensible set of policies that not only recognise the need to reduce our dependency ratio, but also recognise the economic contribution that our older citizens can make.

Civic Society

So far I have focused entirely on the economic contribution.

But I think it’s also vital that we also recognise the massive – and often unsung – contribution that our older generations offer in civic society.

Here in Scotland for example, 31% of adults volunteer , many of whom are older citizens.

Very often this is on a local scale…

I know that most of the charity shops in Inverness couldn’t run without a core team of retired workers.

But older people also play a key role – often an unpaid role – on charity boards, or as school governors, or in local politics.

And it’s important that we acknowledge what a huge asset these people are to our country, and the skills and enthusiasm and knowledge they bring to these roles.

Changing Perceptions

But as I said earlier, I think if there’s one big battle we’ve got to fight here, it’s a battle of perceptions.

It’s true that – very often – society places an awful lot of emphasis on the young.

And sometimes this is a good thing…

We need to keep producing the business leaders and the civic leaders of the future.

But we should also shine more of a light on the crucial role our older generations can play.

We’re in a country which is ruled by an 87 year old.

There’s a member of staff in my office still mourning the fact that a 71 year old is no longer in charge of Man United!

There are two goals that have driven everything the government has done.

And they are…

Building a stronger economy; and

Building a fairer society.

I firmly believe, that if we can make the best possible use of our ageing population…

If we can ensure that they remain in the work place, rather than being ousted by nervous employers and outdated legislation…

If we can celebrate what they contribute, rather than what they consume…

And if we can base our decisions on the pension age around long term economic stability, rather than short term politics…

Then those older generations can play a key role in building that stronger economy…

And in making our society fairer too.

Thank you for listening.

February 23, 2015