3 December 2004
The citizen should share responsibility with the state to tackle the nation’s problems, the Prime Minister said in a speech today.
Speaking in Scotland, Mr Blair said there is a massive agenda to take forward.
"In each case the purpose is clear: opportunity and security in a world of change. In each case, achieving it requires fundamental reform. In each case, the nature of the reform is to put power in the hands of people; and to change the way Government and the state relate to the individual citizen."
Read the Prime Minister’s speech in full below:
(Check against delivery)
I am delighted to be at Napier University this morning, at this fantastic new campus and lecture theatre. I pay tribute to your Principal, Joan Stringer, and the remarkable development of the university over the last 20 years, including your path-breaking plans for a joint venture in China, a testament to the success of Britain’s universities in exploiting the globalisation of higher education.
It is a tribute, too, to the dynamism of the Scottish economy. Under Jack McConnell, Scotland is flourishing, and a good deal of the credit belongs to Jack and his Ministers.
When I’m asked what is our governing purpose, I say it’s clear. It is to provide greater opportunity and security for people in a constantly changing world. And not for a few at the top but for all. It combines the traditional progressive belief in social justice with the willingness to make the changes and reforms essential to create that social justice in the modern world.
Yesterday’s Pre-Budget Report reinforced economic stability and opportunity. Last week’s Queen’s Speech reinforced security. The Five Year strategies we are publishing month by month take forward reform of the public services and the welfare state so that the unprecedented investment produces the upgraded, personalised services needed in the 21st century.
Taken together all of this gives us a rich agenda for future policy in any possible third term. In every area of work, there is a detailed plan for the future, much clearer than those in 1997 or 2001. All of it also fits together around common themes of opportunity, security and stability for all.
But what really marks each of these announcements out, is that at their core they recognise that in this future policy agenda there must be a different relationship between citizen and state in today’s world. This has crucial significance for the development of policy for the years ahead.
It is often said that people feel disengaged from politics today; uninterested even. I don’t believe that is true. There is no shortage of interest and in some cases passionate concern about the issues of the day. People aren’t disengaged. They feel disempowered.
They no longer want or expect Government to "solve" all their problems. They want the means in their hands to lead their own lives, make their own choices, develop their own potential.
In the business world, there is no longer mass production. There has to be a direct connection with the individual needs of the individual customer.
In the world of work employees want more flexible working to marry home and work life; they have a greater need of skills in careers that will often span many different jobs; and they know that they, and not Government alone, will have to save for the future.
In public services, patients and parents are looking for the same responsiveness for their particular needs as they experience a matter of course in the other parts of their lives.
Even in the vexed area of law and order in our communities, in providing security for our citizens where, if anything, there are more traditional expectations of Government, people realise increasingly that they as well as the state must shoulder responsibility.
For some on the right in politics, this means Government should retreat from the scene: leave it up to individuals or the market. And in some cases, it may mean that: as with old nationalised industries.
But in most cases that is not what people want or need. Globalisation, new patterns of migration, new technology: all of it brings insecurity in its wake. People don’t want a minimalist state, but nor do they want the old centralised state. Instead, they want the state to empower them, to give them the means to make the most of their own lives.
This shift in the role of Government towards empowerment of the individual has profound implications. Properly understood and developed, it has the capability of staking out a new middle ground, a consensus around which progressive politics, thoroughly modernised, can prosper. That is really what The Queen’s speech, the Pre-Budget Report, and the five-year strategies are designed to do. However, we have fully to follow their logic and realise the scale of changes they require.
When Gordon Brown and I came into Parliament together in the 1980s we were very conscious of our Party’s history, but also of the state of Britain as we saw it. Yes, industrial changes had been made to help business be more efficient. But there was mass unemployment. We watched the recessions of the 1980s and the early 1990s from the powerless Opposition benches. We watched and we learned.
We learned that if Britain was to prosper in the future it must be on the foundation of economic stability. We learned that for businesses and employment to grow, for families to plan ahead and realize their ambitions, economic stability was vital. And we learned that stability would not come easily. It would have to be based on tough decisions, on rejecting short term fixes and easy answers, and that we would have to say no as well as yes.
Above all we knew that without a disciplined economic framework, in which Government gave up the power to set interest rates, the boom and bust of the past was destined to repeat itself.
And so, stability became the cornerstone of this Government.
We made the Bank of England independent, ensuring that monetary policy would be set for the long term.
The Government restricted spending in the first two years. There was heavy pressure from all sides to increase it. There were many deserving causes, all of whom said their own cause would not make that much difference. But, collectively, they would have driven us off course and we said that the long-term future of the country had to come first.
Yesterday’s pre-Budget report reaffirmed the foundations of economic stability and prosperity laid since 1997. Bank of England independence, the new tax and investment frameworks, the New Deals and minimum wage now approaching £5 an hour - all these, together, have delivered the 2m more jobs since 1997, the lowest unemployment for nearly 30 years, the lowest inflation for 40 years, and Britain now the fourth largest economy in the world. More people are working in Britain than ever before and we are making work pay for those on middle incomes as well as low incomes.
I would emphasise one aspect of the PBR. For Britain, as for all G7 countries, economic times have been tougher, but the public finances are in good shape and there is no reason to be deflected from the successful course the Chancellor has set to meet our fiscal rules. Over the present economic cycle the current budget is in surplus, and the Treasury’s growth forecasts - which have proved consistently more accurate than others over the last seven years - are entirely in line with our existing policies to meet our fiscal rules.
In 1997, Government debt amounted to 44% of national income; today, debt is down to 34% of national income, saving £4bn a year on interest payments alone, and our unprecedented investment in health and education is fully funded. We took tough decisions to get the public finances on a stable footing, and will not put this at risk.
But stability is only a foundation. Alongside it goes aspiration, and the creation of what in my party conference speech I called a ‘genuine opportunity society’ enabling each individual to develop their talents to the full. Here is the crux. It is people developing their talents: an education system, welfare state, an NHS that helps them but that also puts power as well as responsibility in their hands.
The five year strategies for education, under-fives, enterprise and welfare reform - the first three published, the last to be published soon - all focus on aspiration and opportunity; as does the Pre-Budget Report in its emphasis on childcare and training in particular. Some of our forward plans relate to the UK, others - covering devolved areas - to England alone; but Jack and his team have similar priorities and are framing their own reform plans in these areas.
A transformation of aspiration, opportunity and social mobility have motivated me personally since my earliest days as an MP for the north-east, seeing at first hand, in a declining old industrial region in the 1980s, the need for new skills, new investment and a new competitive edge - based on higher value jobs, enabling individuals and communities to thrive in the face of what we now call ‘globalisation’.
It was clear to me then, and it is still true today in so many communities, that what is holding so many young people back is not lack of ability, but lack of aspiration - and a view of education which is negative not positive, because the aspiration is not there to start with. Our schools are improving year by year; tens of thousands of teachers make it their life’s work not just to teach, but to raise the whole level of aspiration among the families and the communities where they work. But there remains an immense challenge to transform the culture of aspirations; to establish the excellent schools - not only in terms of facilities, but also in terms of leadership and engagement with their communities and local employers - which transform aspirations, not least among parents who simply do not realise the importance to their children of achievement and qualifications.
Our thinking on these issues has moved decisively forward from the old debate about ‘equality of opportunity’. ‘Equality of opportunity’ is simply not enough when large numbers are not motivated to take the opportunities formally on offer, and social mobility, on some measures, was actually declining in the 1980s and ’90s. We need a fundamentally more radical approach to raise aspirations. Every young person not only can succeed at school, but should succeed at school - and go on to further education or skill training in a job beyond. It is a social failure if this does not happen, and we should be blunt in saying so. An expansion of opportunity has to be matched by a transformation of aspirations, by higher educational standards, and by a sustained increase in both the quality and quantity of education on offer.
So our plans for education are not just for extra investment in teachers and school buildings, essential though these are. But also for fundamentally better schools with higher standards of education to suit the needs of each child. And a radically expanded conception of education:
- a nation-wide system of nursery education where none previously existed;
- Sure Start and equivalent programmes to give disadvantaged parents the best possible help with under-fives, on the evidence that social class differences in progress are pronounced in children from as young as 22 months;
- a sustained investment in further and higher education so that we abolish the old notion of an education leaving age of 16;
- and new training and education opportunities for adults in the workforce and those unemployed - many of them failed by the education system in years past - who desperately need new skills and ladders of opportunity to get on.
We rightly take pride in our economic advance by comparison with other European and developed countries. But while since 1997 the British economy has grown twice as fast as Germany’s and three times as fast as Japan’s, China has been growing three times faster than us, with India and Brazil two other economic giants rapidly in the making.
Look at the economic rise of China alone, with its population of 1.3 billion. Now the world’s seventh largest economy, with exports soon set to exceed Japan’s and an economy which in a short period will be larger than both Germany and Japan’s. Across the UK, universities are thriving with income from overseas students, Chinese students among the most numerous - the great majority of them going back to highly skilled jobs and helping establish literally dozens of new Chinese universities, built from scratch. This is a source of new competition. But it is also a prime opportunity - not only for our outstanding higher education sector, but for many other highly successful British industrial and service sectors, from telecommunications and pharmaceuticals to finance and law. As Digby Jones has rightly remarked: ‘globalisation was made for Britain’.
This raises the fundamental importance, too, of R&D, investment in science, higher level graduate and post-graduate skills, and the research excellence in our top universities on which our competitive edge depends. In many of these areas Scotland is leading the way: in England there is still some controversy about our 50% target for participation in higher education. You have already exceeded the 50% level.
Our five year strategy for the Department of Trade and Industry, published last month, emphasised science, skills, R&D, and employment flexibility as the critical priorities for Government and business, working together. In these areas we need to engage more deeply and systematically with the business community - as for example in 30,000 modern apprenticeships here in Scotland, and the Employer Training Pilots in England, offering training to all employees on a co-funded basis with employers right up to intermediate level, which will now be available to all employers as announced in the PBR. This is the new agenda: not old style regulation, red tape and ‘picking winners’ from Whitehall.
Again, welfare reform is equally part of a genuine opportunity society - a driver of aspiration and social mobility, as opposed to the old concern solely for income redistribution. Surveys show that up to a million of those on Incapacity benefit would work if they had the support and opportunity to get appropriate jobs. It may be, as the German employment minister Wolfgang Clement said recently when visiting a new JobcentrePlus office, that our job placement policy ‘is the best in the whole of Europe’, but it could be better still.
If we are to spend more on skills and childcare, more on new frontiers of opportunity like the Child Trust Fund, set to benefit up to two million families from next April, we need to ensure that those that can work are able to do so.
None of this will come about on the basis of a welfare system that keeps people on benefits unnecessarily; through Government trying to micromanage services; or the taxpayer having to bear all of the cost of new services like all-day childcare.
And as for taxpayer funded services, they want public services that are no longer monolithic in their provision but diverse; no longer dictate to their users but give them power and choice over the service; no longer hidebound by rigid demarcations but with staff that work flexibly and have the real chance for professional development.
These principles are central to our reform of the National Health Service. The NHS is as much about individual opportunity, and economic stability, as it is about individual well-being. Nothing is more important to the individual than health care and protection from the fear of illness; and nothing more essential to a dynamic economy than a high quality, sustainable public health system, removing from people the fear of a bill for ill health, and relieving employers of the necessity to pay insurance premiums to provide decent healthcare packages for their staff. Health insurance is one of the heaviest burdens on employers in countries without effective tax-financed health systems. It is one they do not face here.
This is why we have made such a priority of investment and reform of the NHS. The UK health budget has almost doubled since 1997, from £42bn in 1997 to £81bn today. The new investment has secured tens of thousands of extra doctors and nurses across the UK, and an unprecedented programme of building new hospitals and facilities after decades of under-investment. It is also driving vital reform, including engagement with independent suppliers able to add capacity to the NHS, and new entrenched rights for patients, backed up by choice of hospital and booked appointments, so that every patient gets the treatment they need with much shorter waiting times. Jack McConnell is pioneering reforms in Scotland, to meet the same objectives.
Our goal is simple: to change the National Health Service into a personalised health service for each individual, commanding public confidence not just for its ideals, but for the excellence of the service it provides - and can be relied on to provide in advance. As we succeed, the NHS will be entrenched as part of the new middle ground for the next generation.
Likewise with pension provision. Pensions have been a priority for investment and reform since 1997, and will continue to be so. We are helping the poorest pensioners of today. But we also need to get the right system in place for the pensioners of tomorrow, the right balance between state and individual contribution, the necessary flexibility for allow individuals to move jobs, take up new careers, but still feel they can save for their retirement, and to be able to retire when they decide to. We will bring forward the final detailed proposals based on the Turner Commission in due course.
However, all these areas of policy have the same point at their core: a changed relationship between citizen and the state.
That brings me to the question of security. We were accused in the Queen’s Speech of trying to create a climate of fear by focusing on issues of terrorism and crime. The reality is the opposite. The fear is there. The purpose of the proposals is to remove it. But it is pointless to pretend that in today’s world there is not this new threat of global terrorism of a completely different order from the past. And in our local communities, ask people their number one priority, and they will tell you: anti-social behaviour, crime linked to drug addiction, and above all a sense that too often people "get away with it" while decent hardworking families are playing by the rules.
Ten days ago the Queen’s Speech set out further reforms to meet public concern, to go alongside the legislative programme already set out in Scotland. Tougher powers for councils and neighbourhoods to tackle abandoned cars, litter, graffiti and noise nuisance, problems which plague the lives of many decent law-abiding citizens. Identity cards to protect each individual’s identity, freedom of movement and, where appropriate, access to public services - and at the same time to identify illegality better than now. A new Serious Organised Crime Agency. A systematic approach to drug crime and abuse. These reforms, alongside 13,500 extra police across Britain - 1,000 of them in Scotland - will make the public safer, and strengthen the new social contract of rights and responsibilities. A Britain free of old prejudices about how people live their lives; but requiring responsibility from all, and resolute in protecting the public from crime and the threat of terrorism.
But notice one thing about all these changes: they depend on the citizen sharing responsibility with the state. Government can’t do it for the people. We have to do it together.
This is therefore a massive agenda to take forward. In each case the purpose is clear: opportunity and security in a world of change. In each case, achieving it requires fundamental reform. In each case, the nature of the reform is to put power in the hands of people; and to change the way Government and the state relate to the individual citizen.
Properly done, this programme has the chance to create a new consensus based on progressive values, a new middle ground. Some of it will break through historical left/right divides of policy solutions. I have never worried about this. It is where the public are in any event, always more interested in outcomes than theory.
The possibilities of this shift in politics are huge, both sides of the border; but, as ever, it comes at a price: the courage to take the hard decisions that the future and a changing world is forcing upon us and seeing them through. We intend to do so.
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