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1.4 pm
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham): I had anticipated that I would follow the hon. Member for South Antrim (Mr. Forsythe), speaking on Northern Ireland.
The Bills set out in the Queen's Speech are important, but the most important objective is to establish a framework to ensure that social advance matches economic advance. In the next 25 years, we expect to achieve roughly what we have achieved in the past 30 years: a doubling of the material standard of living. There is not much point in that, however, if it is not accompanied by an uplifting--in modern terms, a remoralisation--of what is going on around us.
When I first became a Member of Parliament, my constituency included parts of the Ferrier estate, where deeply caring people such as myself, with the help of better qualified professionals, created a town for 5,000 people in which for five years there was no pub, no post office, no chapel, no police officer and nowhere within a mile and a half where people could work. That was a mistake, and I hope that we have learnt from it.
There are estates of perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 people, mainly in the inner cities or outside large towns, where, if one asks children what there is to do after school--assuming that they are in school each day--they say, "Nothing." They are not always being accurate, but every child and parent should be able to talk about worthwhile activities.
Many hon. Members, if they did not have to work for a living, could fill their time twice over with worthwhile activities--voluntary service to others, academic and educational interests, entertainment and sporting interests--that they enjoy. That should be possible for all people--the young, the middle-aged and those in retirement. Yet the shortage of actual or perceived opportunities for young people is one of the reasons why they engage in so much worthless activity or inactivity.
I must add a comment in parentheses, addressed to those in the media who believe that people who speak about such issues should accept all that is thrown at them about their families or extended families, should lead perfect lives, or should deny any connection with wives, children, parents, mothers-in-law or anyone else. If problems are to be properly discussed in Parliament, even if all the answers are not provided, Members should not be expected to have skins sufficiently thick to endure insults to themselves and others close to them.
I shall give a minor example. When an in-law of mine went into hospital, two newspapers sent pairs of journalists to find out whether she was receiving special, advanced treatment. They discovered that she was not. Then, after a serious procedure, she woke up at 1 am to hear that a different newspaper had reported that she had had to wait too long for her treatment. Frankly, that demonstrates why newspaper editors rightly have a code that states that people should not achieve fame or notoriety simply because of their connection with someone involved in public service.
I return to the major issues. What is the avoidable disadvantage, distress and handicap that we are trying to relieve? Part of it may be due to feelings of alienation or anomie; part of it may be the need to help people achieve relationships that are more lasting; but most of it is to try to apply to others what we have experienced ourselves. What we have experienced and enjoyed, others should be able to choose to share. What we or our constituents have experienced or hated, others should have a better chance of avoiding, or choosing to avoid if they want to.
It is a matter not of laying down laws of social behaviour, but of trying to spread information and knowledge. The hon. Member for Croydon, North-West (Mr. Wicks) was director of the family policies study centre, which made available such information to people of all ages and to those moving through the stages of life.
If I were to make one criticism of our approach to social and economic policies since the last war, it would be that we have forgotten to bring the individual and family life cycle, and the family and household perspective, into our social and economic planning. For that matter, we do not normally gather our statistics in a way that enables us to monitor how cohorts are developing and changing. The European Union could usefully provide framework funding so that a new cohort study could start every seven years and each cohort could be re-examined every seven years. Researchers who wanted detailed information would not then have to argue with Government Departments and research funders to start from scratch, because they could tie in to the framework system and it would be far easier to research such issues.
I will share with the House an illustrative example of how such an approach can work, although we did not use one of the famous cohort studies. When I became a junior Minister in the Department of Transport, someone asked me what I would do to improve road safety. I asked how we would notice that there had been an improvement in road safety and the answer was that we would see a cut in the casualty figures. So I suggested that we start by trying to cut casualties. We then looked at the dominant reasons for casualties--crashes. Of the factors associated with injury crashes, 90 to 95 per cent. involve the road user's mistake, 30 per cent. involve some obvious defect in the road environment and 8 per cent. involve a vehicle defect, as conventionally defined. The most common factor was young men who had taken alcohol above the legal limit and then driven.
We then found a clue as to how to approach the problem, which was not to change the law. The clue came from research on a campaign that I inherited on drink driving in December 1986. The research in early 1987 showed that a high proportion of the target audience had received most of the message from television advertising. Fine, but there had not been any television advertising.
What had people been seeing? They had seen news and current affairs coverage of the launch of the poster campaign.
If we need to change people's understanding of a serious subject, which is the first step towards changing their behaviour, why do we rely so much on paid-for advertising on only half the television channels? If the subject is important, it should be discussed and argued in mainstream life. If we can do that for a possible one in 50,000 chance of thrombosis caused by a brand of contraceptive pill, we should be able to do it for behaviour that in those days killed 1,200 people a year.
So we started trying to get young people to discuss the issues. At that point, it became obvious that instead of a 44-year-old Minister, as I then was, talking on Radio 4, we needed a 58-year-old disc jockey talking about the issue on Radio 1.
Once the issues were talked about in the media with which people were familiar and were not preached about, we started seeing a change in understanding. That led to an estimated cut in the number of occasions each week on which young men drove a car when they were above the legal limit, from 2 million times a week--which is low compared with France, Germany or the United States, although still a large number--to 600,000 within two years. Two thirds of an illegal, socially acceptable, body-breaking habit evaporated with no change in the law, sentencing or enforcement.
Let us suppose that we start being concerned about issues such as school attendance. The figures are improving now, but about five or six years ago, a third of young people aged between 14 and 16 and who attended inner-city schools were not in school. Whatever happened to the teacher-pupil ratio in those schools would not have helped those young people.
The approach can be used to tackle other issues, some involving behaviour that is against the law and others involving behaviour that is undesirable.
I have estimated that the number of times each week that young people, normally young males, commit a serious criminal offence for the first time, is 2,000. A third of men have already collected a serious criminal conviction by the age of 30, and the mathematics easily cascade down to at least 2,000 people committing a serious criminal offence for the first time every week. That problem is never discussed in the media relevant to those young people. No one person can be expected to stand up against a culture in which certain behaviour is acceptable or predictable, and we have to try to make it a more general issue.
The number of people each week who for the first time take up smoking is 5,000. That is 250,000 a year. But when we see a young person smoking, our only response is, "You are too young to smoke." Perhaps the more general response is to take up the argument about banning the remaining tobacco promotion. We do not say that taking up smoking is a relatively normal thing for a child to do, but not for adults. Smoking may be an adult thing to do, but it is not adult to start smoking, because that is irrational.
We see young people smoking who are in their teens or older. We see some of those people standing outside their offices having a quiet fag. Instead of looking them in the eye and saying, "What a blithering idiot you are, spending more each day on tobacco than most people
spend on the national lottery in a week," perhaps we should develop an idea that I have had, having seen people wearing red ribbons. One feels sorry for them, because they or a friend of theirs have been affected by HIV or AIDS.
Perhaps we should develop a new and accepted reaction, by looking away from the smoker and rubbing our hand down our cheek as if rubbing away a tear. That would be a way of saying, "I am deeply sympathetic. I am so sorry." Most people, especially when they are young, can take criticism; what they cannot take is sympathy. I suspect that if smokers found themselves getting sympathy two or three times a day, their numbers would fall away quite quickly.
Each week 6,000 people contribute to a conception that ends in an abortion. The House has been good in saying, "Let us fill Trafalgar square one Sunday with a quarter of a million saying that the unborn child has a right to life, but with a quarter of a million people saying the next Sunday that a woman has the right to choose." But we still have about 150,000 home-grown abortions a year. It takes two to tango, so 300,000 people are involved.
Most of the response tends to come from hon. Members, often Tory, including perhaps a 44-year-old. First, we say, "Don't do it." That is as if celibacy is something that we can inherit from our parents. We then say, "If you do it, think about family planning or birth control." I suspect that average active people leaving, perhaps, a new Labour drinks party, a Tory one or a Liberal Democrat one for that matter, except that the Liberal Democrats seem to have gone to a party already, do not say, "Let's plan a family. Let us control births." They will say, "Let's be closer than sharing a toothbrush." If they are to be bold enough to do that, let them pick their embarrassment beforehand. Do they want to talk about the embarrassment of conception afterwards or the embarrassment of discussing conception control beforehand?
I suspect that if we were rather more open about those issues, we would find the number of people becoming involved in conceptions that end in abortions falling from 6,000 a week to about 3,000 and then to about 1,000 within months.
One of the reasons why such matters are not discussed is that we do not have statistics in reasonably real time. We know each month the unemployment figures and the retail prices index to one place in a thousand, and we tend to discuss them. If we had available to us social statistics on age participation in crime, or if we found a way of producing surveys of the number of 15 or 16-year-olds taking up smoking, and we talked about them, we would begin to see changes in the figures. We would begin to discover what sort of interventions made a difference.
On drink driving, I was given much encouragement, to put it gently, from programmes such as "Panorama" saying that the only answer is mass random breath testing. Esther Rantzen on "That's Life" advocated mass random breath testing. The British Medical Association and police officers took the same line. They were all saying that a technique that appeared to have worked in New South Wales was the answer for us. But if we reduced drink-drive deaths from 1,800 a year in 1979 to 1,200 in
1986 and to 550 now without random breath testing, we must have been doing something more effective than the practice and experience in Australia.
I happen to believe from experience that Parliament can do three things. First, it can pass laws, which are quite good at turning offences into criminal offences. That does not necessarily stop them happening. Secondly, it can be quite good at giving people rights. Thirdly, it is quite good at giving people a dispute resolution system through the courts or in another way. Unfortunately, it is not particularly good at changing people's behaviour.
I am quite a big believer in spending money on the right things. For example, let us spend money if that is the answer to poverty. However, we would do better sometimes in providing help to get more people to move from income support to becoming taxpayers when they choose to do so. Rather than saying, "Squeeze those on benefit," or, "Tax those who are in work," it would be better to move people from one to the other.
I shall interrupt myself. We have not had a serious debate in the House about--we do not have a word for it--something that might be a called a wedge or a social cost to income ratio. If I were to employ an extra person at £200 a week, he or she would probably take home about £150 or £160. The cost of employing that person would not be £200 a week, which is officially the salary. It would probably be about £270 plus some other overheads. So the ratio of the £160 to the £270 is an uplift of quite a heavy proportion. People work for what they end up with in their pocket. The cost to the employer is what he has to pay out. We do not yet have a word to describe that ratio. That is one of the reasons why people cannot easily move from being out of work, and probably on income support, to being taxpayers.
Tax and spending can make a difference, but they are not the reasons for the biggest differences in social behaviour. Anyone who believes that restoring the child tax allowance or lifting the married person's tax allowance is the way to keep families together has not been paying attention to the basic improvements in some of those issues over the past 20 years. The child tax allowance gave extra help to higher taxpayers, no help to non-taxpayers and roughly the same to people in work. People should realise that going on to the child cash allowance is a better idea.
I argue strongly that the level of the child cash allowance should be set by the Chancellor and not, in theory, by the Secretary of State for Social Security. It is the equivalent of a tax allowance. It has the same purpose as a tax allowance. It should be set by the Chancellor.
Secondly, I would make the cost of the child cash allowance come from the income from tax revenues rather than treat it as part of public spending. We do not treat tax expenditures of personal allowances as social spending, so we should not do so for the child cash allowance.
For those who argue that the married man's tax allowance should go up, let us remember that half those who receive that allowance have a spouse who is working and half do not have dependent children, so it is the least targeted way of helping people when they have children.
The third thing that the Government could do is to go for exhortation: make a speech about a subject. If it was a really serious speech, the Minister could make a series of them around the country. At least we would get on with running the Department while he was away.
Those who make proposals for changes in the law--changes in tax and spending--and for the continuation of exhortation, should have an understanding of the situation. We should always try to make available to others the background on why we consider a change to be necessary or important. Once that understanding is shared--as in the drink-driving example and the other examples that I mentioned--we can begin to achieve social advances that will match the economic advances. I am not particularly interested in people having more and foreign holidays, more cars and more discretionary money to spend, if they find that, outside their front door or at different stages of their lives, life is unnecessarily miserable.
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