Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s excellent amendment, as we reach the end of Committee. Before I get into the substance of that, I will offer some praise. Noble Lords know that, last week, I took issue with the Government Front Bench about the potential lack of response to letters from individual noble Lords who had raised specific points during Committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, who is no longer in her place, took some issue with that, resiled from my analysis and said that it was not the case. However, over the last few days, I have received a plethora of epistles from the Government in my email. As Private Eye may have said in the past, are those two occasions by any chance related? That was my praise; I thank the Government for coming forward with those letters and we will hold them to account when we reach Report. I am grateful for small mercies, nevertheless. I commend to the Government the excellent report of the Social Mobility Commission, State of the Nation Report 2024: Local to National, Mapping Opportunities for All. I probably say this at every juncture, but my noble friend’s amendment is helpful, because there is a cross-party consensus that we should all be working to help young people in particular into work, innovative employment, and skills and training. As we all know, and as has been found by apolitical third parties such as the charity the Sutton Trust, which focuses on improving social mobility, there are disparities across the country. There are sectoral and geographic disparities, and disparities in people’s backgrounds, race, ethnicity, age et cetera. As far as is practicable, we should be designing legislation that tackles issues around improving life chances, training and skills, and innovation. More fundamentally, we need to be designing legislation that tackles endemic, entrenched inequalities, and that is what this amendment is about. My noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom is absolutely right that this is about opportunity cost. Many employers, given the chance, will try to help young people by giving them a chance to improve their life chances and skills, and by paying for their exams and training, et cetera—via apprenticeships, for instance. But the legislative regime will be such that they are encouraged not to employ that person, because they may have a disability, may be late to the employment market or may not be socialised—they may not understand the protocols of going to work each day, of being on time and of being dressed smartly, which are very basic things that we take for granted. That risk aversity, employers not wanting to employ those people, will have a negative effect as the corollary of this Bill. Ministers have a chance at least to engage with this amendment and, when we come to Report, I hope to accept it; it would make a real difference to the lives of people who find it tough to enter and stay in the employment market. I encourage Ministers to look at the report to which I referred, and at the work that has been done to support the Bill and its laudable objectives. My noble friend offers this amendment in good faith in order genuinely to improve the Bill. On that basis, I hope that the Minister will look on it favourably and incorporate its ideas into the finished Bill.