As Catherine Bennett suggests, the proposed reforms to the House of Lords by Meg Russell of the Institute for Government are sensible and could well be achievable (“Why does Starmer want to add yet more peers instead of abolishing the lot of them?”, Comment).
However, second chambers always serve to constrain the legislative powers of popularly elected first chambers. Arguably, they are intrinsically undemocratic, even when, as in the case of the US Senate and its counterparts in other federations, they are themselves elected; and were and remain an indispensable part of the constitutional systems involved.
Neither is true of our House of Lords, which has become a national embarrassment. We should simply (and speedily) abolish it and introduce proportional representation for elections to the House of Commons.
Richard de Friend
London NW5
Catherine Bennett is right to call for the abolition of the House of Lords as part of an incoming Labour government’s programme of renewal and change. The UK is in desperate need of a new constitutional settlement between its people and government. Since 1979, there has been a relentless reduction in the power and funding of local government to the detriment of good governance.
If we are to have a second chamber, it should be formed of a representative from each of the 383 top-tier local councils. At a stroke, Labour would have brought local government into the centre of British politics. In doing so, it would also give the new chamber a leading role in ensuring politics works across all localities.
Paul Lally
Liverpool
Trust teachers to teach
One factor often overlooked when analysing the reasons for crises in our schools is the importance of trust in maintaining our confidence in the teaching profession and teachers’ belief in themselves as professionals (“Schools struggle to cope as disruptive behaviour soars”, News). It is the erosion of trust in teaching that has led to increasing problems with behaviour.
When there is unnecessary external interference in schools, such as that inflicted by Ofsted, the main effect, far from the pretence to ensure quality, is the erosion of parents’ and pupils’ trust in the very nature of teachers as professionals. We build an established and rigorous training and accreditation system for our professions. It is right that these should be monitored but, for the good of our institutions and those who depend on them, once the accreditation systems are assured we need to be able to trust our professionals to show what they can really do. Peer monitoring should then be sufficient, when tailored with appropriate data and supervised by local advisers who know the complex context in which each school operates.
Frank Newhofer
Oxford
Tragedy of children in care
Michael Marmot and Clare Bambra’s joint evidence to the Covid inquiry focused on the evidence that the average height of five-year-olds in the UK began to go down in the middle of the past decade: a shameful indicator of austerity policies and increasing inequality (“Britain’s shorter children reveal a grim story about austerity, but its scars run far deeper”, Comment). An equally shocking measure of the nation’s health is the number of children in care in England, up by over a quarter since 2010 and at an all-time high of 82,170 in 2022, stoked by the same rising child poverty and collapsing public services.
There are few state interventions more draconian than the power to separate children from their parents; almost none with greater lifelong consequences. According to the Department for Education’s own analysis, losing a child to the care system is over five times more likely to affect the poorest 20% of families than the wealthiest. If we levelled up the chances of any child being separated from their parents to the proportion found in the wealthiest families, there would be around 60,000 fewer children in the severely overstretched system we call “care”. Investing in the resources families need to thrive should be a crucial element of recovery from austerity and Covid.
Professor Paul Bywaters
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
Gareth’s grail
Playwright James Graham is right that what Gareth Southgate is “doing on a personal level, but also national, is Shakespearean” (“Cry God for Harry, England and our Gareth”, Editorial). Graham is referring to Southgate’s attempt to “retrieve the grail” of England winning a first major trophy since 1966. However, Southgate’s most significant stand has been his support of England’s players taking the knee, sometimes in opposition to senior members of the government.
You correctly praise the brilliant first Ashes test. But when an independent commission has devastatingly concluded that English cricket suffers from “widespread and deep-rooted” discrimination at all levels, we need our noble, enlightened sporting heroes, like Southgate, more than ever.
Joe McCarthy
Dublin
Universities’ debt to students
Anna Fazackerley highlights the distressing situation faced by too many of this year’s “graduating” students (“Unluckiest cohort of students rue lockdown, strikes and finally, the marking boycott”, News). Not only have they had to deal with being isolated in their rooms or sent home during the pandemic, but they have also been faced with inflated private rents, sometimes queuing overnight to pay eye-watering sums on student houses that are often rat-infested and covered in mould. Throughout their time at university, academic strikes have meant that tuition, for which these students have paid £9,250 a year, has been sporadic, and marking has been late with minimal feedback. Now they’re being told that they won’t, for the foreseeable future, receive a grade for the degrees for which they have worked so hard. Surely this is the final nail in the coffin of our broken higher education system?
If I buy a rail ticket for a strike day, I get my money back; if the Royal Mail strikes, I don’t fork out for a stamp... and yet if I am a young student receiving nothing like the service I have paid for, I get no compensation whatsoever. Universities should be drawing on all the extra money they are charging international students to pay back the young people they have so badly let down.
Shoonagh Hubble
Alresford, Hampshire
My solution to the care crisis
With regards to your article “Fears rise about cost of giving unpaid care to elderly parents” (News): the situation could be substantially improved through the development of more care villages run on a not-for-profit basis. Government could properly fund housing associations to meet the cost of buying clusters of new houses and redundant country house hotels near market towns using the grounds to build energy-efficient eco–homes earmarked for people with disabilities, older people and family carers.
Board and lodging on the site should be offered free to care staff and to volunteers, including young professionals in training for the caring professions: medicine, nursing, social work, teaching and all the therapies – occupational and physiotherapy; art, music, craft and horticulture therapy – in exchange for a minimum number of hours donated to the care village. This would help with the cost of living and other multiple crises.
This would also ensure family carers had a community of support to help in their task, reduce loneliness and isolation for all concerned, while simultaneously improving the status of care work and helping GPs and others in training to better understand the care needs of vulnerable people and their families.
Family carers would be better placed to return to employment, if appropriate, knowing there was a village community of care support on hand to meet the needs of loved ones. Anecdotal evidence suggests that where care staff were resident on site, virus transmission was reduced and easier to control, which should be held in mind for future pandemic planning.
Simon Burdis
Morpeth, Northumberland
