19
Examination of witnesses
Christopher Brooks, Elaine Smith, Professor Adele Atkinson and Dr David Martin.
Q120 The Chair: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this session of the numeracy for life inquiry and welcome to our witnesses today. Thank you very much for getting here in what are pretty difficult conditions on public transport. To open the batting, could each of you do a 30-second summary of your areas of interest, so that the committee knows where you have your expertise?
Dr David Martin: In retirement, I am a volunteer with the U3A, as its national subject adviser. That is the member-led, member-run, peer-learning organisation that has 400,000 members clustered around 1,000 local independently run U3As. Briefly about my background, after a degree and doctorate in mathematics specialising in computer-based mathematical models of molecules, I engaged in post-doctoral research in theoretical chemistry, getting qualified as a teacher. I taught computer science and mathematics, and became an advanced practitioner and a teacher trainer of adult numeracy subject specialists. I have sat on various maths advisory committees and been chair of the National Association for Numeracy and Mathematics in Colleges and honorary secretary of the Joint Mathematical Council of the UK.
Professor Adele Atkinson: Good morning, everybody, and thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I am a professor of practice in financial literacy and well-being at CHASM, a research centre in the University of Birmingham. CHASM provides robust and research-based evidence for a fairer and more financially inclusive society. I have been an academic for the last four years, hence I am a professor of practice. Prior to that I was at the OECD, where latterly I was head of financial education within the directorate for financial affairs.
Christopher Brooks: Good morning and thanks for the invitation to be here. I am head of policy at Age UK, the charity for older people. We represent the interests of older people, particularly people who are on lower incomes or in difficulties. This is a particularly interesting inquiry, because we do a lot of work with people, particularly around maximising income and trying to make sure people can manage their money effectively. Many people we work with are on a low income and find life really tough.
Elaine Smith: Thank you for the invitation. Good morning. I am Elaine Smith. I am head of employment skills and practice at the Centre for Ageing Better. We are a charitable foundation that focuses on people who are roughly 50 to state pension age. My area of work focuses on employment support and skills and employment, so looking at how existing services, workplaces and workplace systems work for people in their 50s and 60s, and building that evidence base around what benefits people in that age group and maybe what the challenges are.
The Chair: We have a few questions, which I think you have seen, and there will probably be some freeform ones. Could you keep your answers as brief as possible so that we can hear from all of you, particularly on your specialist subjects?
Q121 Baroness Bull: Your comments almost introduced the question I wanted to ask. I am going to phrase it in two ways. It is really to understand in what areas of life good numeracy skills make a difference for older people. The other side of that is how the deficit of numeracy skills, where it exists, disadvantages older people. We are looking at what could be and needs to be done differently to support older people. I have a couple of areas I would love to dig into, but I do not want to steer the witness, as it were, so I will let you open and I will come in.
Christopher Brooks: Numeracy skills are really important for people. Managing money is the obvious area. People find it quite difficult to ascertain their income in the round, so from different sources, and to take the right decisions, particularly if people are budgeting or are on a very low income. Having good numeracy skills is key there.
They are also really closely intertwined with other areas such as literacy and digital skills, so it has quite wide ramifications for people’s lives. It makes it a lot harder to use the internet effectively if you are struggling with your essential skills. As we see in the modern world, everything is digitising. It is becoming more and more important, and so people with a lower level of those essential skills find it increasingly difficult. It is really important and touches upon all areas of people’s lives. Specifically, the money side is the obvious example, but it has really wide ramifications elsewhere as well.
Elaine Smith: It has real practical implications. You are less likely to be employed if you have lower numeracy skills, but you are also more likely to be on out-of-work benefits, so if you have health conditions or disabilities. It has an impact in that sense.
It links to confidence in terms of finding employment. It links to your ability to engage with skills systems, as Chris has already said, so there is a link there with accessing digital services and a lack of confidence around that. It also is a concern in terms of how comfortable you are engaging with employment support services and putting yourself forward for different roles. It impacts on confidence in different positions. It links into that pensions knowledge and advice space as well, so understanding what support exists, how you access it, what that means and the issues around that.
It is numeracy, but it is very closely linked to financial stability and insecurity, as well as general life outcomes. It becomes much wider than maybe what you assume numeracy is in the immediate sense.
Professor Adele Atkinson: There are a lot of challenges that people face. For sure, the pension discussion is always top of people’s minds, and it tends to be focused on security. One thing that CHASM research has done is to actually look at the other side, so the decumulation, the spending and the ways in which people manage their money later in life. There are a few things to flag in terms of that. People are making decisions that they have never made before. They need numeracy, but they also need help and some kind of tailored advice.
Each person’s life is slightly different and so when they come to make that decision it may not be a simple decision of taking one pension and deciding whether to buy an annuity. It may be a decision of taking some self-employed income or some income from some kind of asset that you have, perhaps a property that you are renting that you inherited. Who knows? Life is complicated for many people, so all of those challenges come together.
People try to apply numeracy. If they do not have numeracy, we have also seen that people tend to have workarounds. They may have heuristics. I can give the example of my dad. He has a heuristic that he is going to live three score years and 10. He is way past that, but that was his heuristic and that was how he calculated his pension. People do that quite a lot. They have workarounds, which can be dangerous, so that is a really important point.
There is also claiming benefits, for example. There are the challenges of tax, which change considerably when you move out of PAYE through to retirement. There are complicated housing decisions. There is the risk of fraud. There are all kinds of pricing issues that change as you get older. Insurance becomes more complicated; accessing insurance becomes more complicated. There is the digital access as well, and there is the fear of running out of money. I do not think that that should be underestimated, because people are very scared. Because they make the decision by themselves, they are also responsible for the outcomes. That used not to be the case.
Baroness Bull: You have all spoken about money, and of course that is hugely important. Dr Martin, you may want to also talk about money. I am very interested in the impacts on management of healthcare and continued participation in civic life, when so many stats are thrown at us and there is a risk of so much misinformation. I will pass to Dr Martin but, if anybody has a short comment on any of that, I would love to hear it.
Dr David Martin: We need to recognise that making sense of bills needs certain numeracy skills, as does checking, when we have a reliance on technology, when a mistake is made. In terms of health, there is the complex nature as you get older of actually keeping a record of pills: this to be taken twice a day; this to be taken later on in the day with a meal or without a meal; stand up for half an hour after that meal. It is quite a complex regime, which is helped by having the blister packs, but there is a complex set of time restraints that have to be worked around when it comes, for instance, to medication.
Baroness Bull: Does anybody have anything that they want to come in with on this question of civic participation and the ability to remain engaged with the democratic life of the nation?
Professor Adele Atkinson: We did some work looking at numeracy and financial literacy combined. One thing that came out was the 24-hour clock. Somebody was saying that, as people have become increasingly likely to use the 24-hour clock, they felt excluded, which is possibly an interesting point from your perspective.
Christopher Brooks: In terms of participation in society, it comes out that people with lower essential skills find it harder to get out and about, engage socially and take part in leisure activities. That probably is for various reasons, but possibly partly because it is harder to understand the information of where to go and how to take part. There may be people for whom it is linked to low confidence and low self-esteem more broadly, so it is a bit more difficult for people to take that leap to go outside and do things in their community. That link came out in our research as well.
Elaine Smith: You see lower numeracy levels in certain groups, and maybe those groups are also the ones that are less likely to be engaged with work. If you are on health benefits, you are less likely to be working and using your numeracy skills. That lack of use is something to factor in as well, because that impacts on how willing and able you are to engage in society more generally.
Q122 Baroness Garden of Frognal: You have touched on this already. Perhaps I will come to Professor Atkinson first on this. In what ways do numeracy skills affect people’s decisions as they approach retirement? Where do you see people struggling, if at all? You have already mentioned the 24-hour clock.
Professor Adele Atkinson: If I can go back to decumulation, that is probably one of the big issues. As we move to an environment where people have more choice and freedom as to how they manage their pension, they hear numbers such as 25% tax-free and become slightly attached to that. Instead of going through a decision-making process, or two, three or four decision-making processes—one of them being the timing decision—and instead of thinking, “Do I actually need this money tax-free at this moment?”, this 25% is something they pin to. They think, “That is how much I should take out”.
The other side of that is that they hear “tax-free” and so also have this calculation going on in their mind: “Any money I leave behind is going to be taxed. Any money I take out is not going to be taxed”. That is one clear example that has come out of qualitative research of listening to people and seeing their struggles.
Christopher Brooks: I agree with the pensions decumulation point. That is really difficult for people. For anybody, even if you have good numeracy skills, it is really hard to understand how to use your pension in the most effective way, and that is hugely exacerbated if you do not.
I would add online banking, to follow up on my earlier point about digitisation. It is an additional barrier to people managing their money. It makes it really difficult. People on lower incomes who are budgeting often use cash and prefer to bank offline in any case, so being encouraged/coerced into banking online makes life extremely difficult for a lot of people who could do without that additional barrier. We need to do more. The banks are alive to this, I think, but there is a lot more that could be done to help and support people.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: It is more difficult to access cash these days as well, because a lot of the cash machines and the banks have closed down.
Christopher Brooks: Yes. Managing your money in person is really difficult. A lot of the branches have closed. Our research into banking a couple of years ago found that just over a quarter of over-60s relied on face-to-face banking in order to manage their money.
Elaine Smith: With regards to pensions, if people have been in and out of work throughout their lives you will see that they may have small pension pots, multiple workplace pensions and a lack of understanding about how to manage those and combine them, or even about where they sit, what exists and pulling that together. You also have a lot of people who do not have the very large pension pots, so people who have maybe miscalculated how much they would need or with more life shocks or cost of living increases. There are certain circumstances that you cannot plan for. People have found themselves going from assuming that they would have enough money to last, often retiring, thinking that they had left the workplace for good, to having to find a way to re-engage with that and understand how to manage smaller amounts of money.
There is also the fact that, if you know you do not have enough in a pot, you disengage with it because there is no point trying to understand the ins and outs of it: “I can’t do anything around that”. It is almost burying your head in the sand. It is trying to build that confidence and explain the reality to people and managing that circumstance. When we talk about pensions generally, we talk about private pensions and quite large ones. We have a lot of people who are very much reliant on state pension. The complexities around drawing that down, when they have access to it and how much it will be, are often not really understood, or the information and training around that is only presented to people at a later stage in life, at which point it is potentially too late to do very much about it.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: I worked for Citizens Advice for many years and we were always advised, if we got anybody coming in to ask about pensions, not even to try to answer it. Go straight to the experts. I entirely accept what you say about pensions.
Dr David Martin: I know one person who, because of a challenge of numeracy, was budgeting to see whether it was time for them to be able to retire. They had different figures they had to put into different columns, so things that were four-weekly, things that were monthly and things that were annual. They struggled with that. At the end, they decided they could retire and then had great difficulties in retirement because they could not do the arithmetic to progress to a sensible decision for them.
Q123 Baroness Alexander of Cleveden: Maybe we will start with Elaine on this. I want to continue the theme we have had. You have beautifully articulated the challenges. As a committee, we are trying to think about solutions. My question is around the place of numeracy with employers and the role of employers in solving some of these challenges. We have heard from Citizens Advice. Talk to us a little bit about how you see employers rising to this challenge and how we might ask more of employers in terms of helping older people or people approaching retirement approach these issues.
Elaine Smith: There is very little evidence around employers supporting people with numeracy, unfortunately. That does not mean that it is not happening. It probably does in lots of places.
As people age, they are less likely to be offered skills support or skills training generally and less likely to take it up. There is something around that assumption that, as you age, you have already figured it out and do not need to have the training. The training is very much something that people perceive as aimed at the younger end of the workforce.
We need a system that allows people to access the right kind of support and develop the right skills at different stages. There is quite a large shift around that that needs to happen in order to support people. If employers are to be more responsible for numeracy skills for their workforce, there needs to be that cultural shift to understanding that training needs to happen throughout your working life.
It is also important to remember that people might not stay with the same employer for very long. You may have people moving around as sectors change, as industry changes and as people age. Maybe they are not able to continue working in the same sorts of roles that they always have been. What does that mean for where they get their training from? How do they access support? If you have worked for years in quite a manual role and suddenly you need to switch and use your skills in a different type of working environment, where does that responsibility sit and with which employer, in terms of how you develop those skillsets and use that? It is incredibly complex, but you need a system that responds to that, with employers that acknowledge that training needs to take place throughout people’s working lives, but also support for those who are maybe falling in and out of work or having to change roles as they age.
Baroness Alexander of Cleveden: Do other colleagues have any thoughts on employers and their responsibility for helping people prepare for the financial challenges and numeracy in the second half of life?
Professor Adele Atkinson: Employers are starting to recognise in some areas that financial literacy and financial well-being are important. There is some evidence to suggest that financial problems create problems in the workplace, so solving those problems is beneficial for employers.
We should also keep in mind that, while people are working and they have a social network, they also have informal opportunities to learn, whether that is about numbers or money. They have those informal conversation. We should not underestimate the watercooler conversation, if you like.
We also need to keep in mind that certainly research from the OECD shows that practice is one of the ways in which we keep numeracy alive. We learn a lot of our skills in school but we keep them going by continuing to apply them and learning new skills when we need to. If workplaces simplify too much and take away the opportunity to keep practising, those skills are going to disappear. In a way, part of it is giving people the opportunity to use and apply what they already have, rather than taking away and making everything automatic.
Those are probably the main ones. Another way in which employers are helping is in that practical matter of the fact that people have complicated financial lives. They may not do the maths in a way that suggests they have money to save but employers are starting to look to auto-enrolment not just for pensions but also for savings. Nest Insight is working on this. By giving people an easy way into savings, you can build a savings pot that gives people a little more security. It is a workaround and so it is not building numeracy but it is still supporting financial literacy, reducing the bandwidth problem and helping people to then go on and solve the rest of their problems, I hope.
Elaine Smith: Employers can look at midlife reviews and midlife MOTs. A large part of that is focusing on wealth, understanding of financial skills and how that applies in different circumstances. While that is led by the individual, having an employer that has a system in place for that and encourages or delivers a midlife review as standard can make a real difference in terms of financial knowledge.
Q124 Baroness Hamwee: Can I follow this up? We are talking about the ideal employer, but there must be many employers that are not the ideal. They have specific responsibilities about auto-enrolment. I am not sure whether they have other responsibilities and how much employers are engaged and actually do what the Government tell them to do, but in possibly not a very helpful way.
Professor Adele Atkinson: There are plenty of employers that are not doing anything and plenty of employers that have maybe one or two employees, so even if they did something it would be on a tiny scale, so it should not be relied on. Plus, self-employment is an important part of the picture and those people will not access that. If all the effort goes into the employment part of the story, we miss an awful lot of people. It is part of the story and that is the thing. It has to be a comprehensive solution. You are never going to find one avenue that solves everything.
Baroness Hamwee: Should we be making any specific recommendations around this to government? Our remit as a committee is to make recommendations to government, not directly to the outside world.
Elaine Smith: There is a risk with employers that they are wary of providing advice, particularly if it falls into financial advice rather than just numeracy per se. They do not necessarily have the skills themselves to offer it, so may be quite wary of it. People may also not trust their employer to be the organisation to provide that support, and may want to keep their finances and their understanding of numeracy and skills separate from their employment.
Good employers can do a lot, but you are right that there are a lot of not-so-great employers out there that maybe do not provide support. You need alternatives. You can have that available within employers, as long as they are given the right skills to deliver the services themselves, but there is an alternative for those that do not have that to access.
Christopher Brooks: You picked up on auto-enrolment in your question and that is the big‑picture thing that all employers have in common. There is an opportunity to work with the pension scheme to help get at least information about pensions to their employees. Some pension schemes will do that, but a lot of employers rely on having an HR department and a specific pensions manager in order to facilitate the flow of that information from the scheme to the employees.
There is probably something the Government could do in that space around helping SMEs that lack that professional support in-house to get good information, which could well come directly from the pension scheme. A lot of people trust their employer and their pension scheme when it comes to help with money, so that is a good starting point.
Q125 Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: I wanted to pick up on this, because the Government in fact offer a midlife financial MOT to people. You can self-refer into the Money and Pensions Service and it has an online tool. Jobcentres are supposed to offer it for people who are on universal credit in their 50s and 60s. The fact that it has not been mentioned suggests to me that this does not feature very prominently when you look at the landscape. Is that correct? Have you heard of people using it? Does it get a good reputation?
Elaine Smith: Yes, I mentioned it earlier. It exists in certain spaces. It is something that we talk a lot about with people, because there are a lot of benefits to the midlife review or midlife MOT, whichever you want to call it. The way it is implemented varies. Certain jobcentres will offer it. You need to know that it is available and be accessing a jobcentre in order to access it. Some employers deliver them. There is the government accessible one.
In the way it has been implemented, it is very much down to the individual as to whether they take it up. People can be dismissive of it or may not see its importance. It is a really useful tool but it also requires a lot of self-motivation to use and a certain level of literacy and numeracy skills to understand how to complete these things. A lot of them are online, or maybe you are looking at inputting your own financial details. If you do not have that level of understanding, that might discourage you from using it.
It is certainly something that we would like to see offered and rolled out more. There were pilots delivered by DWP, but they ended sooner than we would have liked. It needs more work around it to make sure that it is accessible.
Q126 The Chair: I am a bit worried about your response. These are matters of personal responsibility. You are saying that the employers have to do more, but you are not very specific about what the employers should do. Ultimately, it is these individuals’ personal financial futures. They have to take some responsibility for this. I worry that you are just saying that employers can sort it out. What, practically, can 6 million employers, particularly smaller businesses, do that would be useful and is not going to be burdensome?
Professor Adele Atkinson: There are two questions in that. There is the role of the workplace and the role of the individual. We have moved to a society where we have put an increasing number of risks on the shoulders of individuals, and more than they can possibly manage.
The Chair: Sorry, I do not quite follow that. The state has never been bigger, so I do not quite understand. I cannot let that go.
Professor Adele Atkinson: We used to have a system where people anticipated working for a long period of time and then taking a retirement sum based on their own contributions. We have increasingly moved to a system where people are expected to save for their own retirement and, if they have worked sufficient number of years, they also get a state pension. If they do not have sufficient income, they have to claim for an additional benefit. We know that only around 65%—I think it is—are currently claiming the benefit they are entitled to, based on the calculations of how many are entitled. We have moved to a system where it is very difficult for people to retire without making those decisions.
On top of that, over the years we have also increased the pressure on younger people to borrow in order to have education. That used to be free. It does not only put pressure on the individual, but also on their family. Those are only some examples, but there are many ways in which people take on an awful lot of responsibility. Because people are trying to juggle work, caring and all the complex life issues that reach them close to retirement, they sometimes simply do not have the bandwidth or the mental capacity to take on the additional roles that are being put on their shoulders.
Q127 Lord Massey of Hampstead: The purpose of this inquiry is more about how we can help people obtain the skills and get access to the tools to help them make their own decisions. What you say is right. It has got more complex and more is being asked of individuals in a sense of decision-making. The question for us is how we can help with the numeracy skills to inform those decisions, because they cannot all be spoon fed, even by employers. I am an employer. There is only so much employers can do. We have to equip people to take those decisions, ultimately, themselves. Would you agree with that?
Elaine Smith: That is a fair point. We ask a lot of employers generally, and employers feel the pressure of that, but we ask a lot of individuals as well. We are still operating with a system that, as you said, relied on people working to a certain point. Then you retired and everything worked in that way. Now we see that people may need to work for longer. They may need to work past retirement age. They may want to work past retirement age, but there are lots of things you cannot plan for, such as cost of living increases, if you have a health shock, if you suddenly have to care for a partner, parent or child, or all those combined at the same time.
You can only plan so much for that. You do not know what you can do in that situation. There needs to be a system where people can access skills support and general support, where they know how to navigate the benefits system. There need to be places that feel welcoming and a system that is designed for people of all ages and at different points in life.
There is a big issue within this space: that people do not see services that are designed for them. People would not necessarily think that they should go to the jobcentre, because they do not think it will help. We need a system where they know that they can access skills support there, it is designed in the right way, it is not just aimed at, say, benefit claimants—it is people who have worked at different points in their life—and that they can access support in other places as well. If skills support exists in trusted spaces, people are more likely to engage with it. There is some system-level change that can happen around that and support people to increase their personal responsibility and knowledge, but also support employers with delivering that.
Q128 Baroness Hamwee: The question that you will have seen has been framed in terms of numeracy and maths skills, but we are actually talking about the application of them. You can answer it as you want. It is to ask about the organisations and networks that are available. I am particularly interested in how people are persuaded that there is something that will be there for them, not to be ashamed about asking and all those sorts of things. It is continuing the last conversation, I think.
Dr David Martin: It is a challenge. Maths and numeracy can be great fun as we look at a dartboard and where we would aim on the dartboard if we were not quite as accurate as we might be, or the fascinating Möbius bands and their use with drive belts, or that sense of the Fibonacci series and sequence where those numbers appear in nature. There is that sense in which people find quite great amusement in tackling problems and puzzles in newspapers. That is why they are there. There are pages after pages of them. People watch programmes such as Hannah Fry’s ones. Martin Lewis’s is a particularly useful one on mathematical numeracy.
For so many, looking back, if they have not been successful in maths at school, it can be quite a horror and a trauma. Picking up on the last question, we want employers to encourage and inform about courses that might be relevant and useful in the local authority, where people go along and are assessed as to where they are at. Are they at the different levels, so entry level 1, entry level 2, entry level 3, level 1 or level 2? How might they progress themselves? There is that hurdle and sense of, “I have had a poor experience in the past and I am not necessarily eager to revisit some of that”. That means that such courses are needed not only to develop people’s cognitive skills and their ability in certain areas in maths and numeracy, but also to deal with the fact that they come with the history of anxiety and fear.
Baroness Hamwee: The courses have to be understood to be available and accessible first.
Dr David Martin: Yes.
Baroness Hamwee: You have mentioned local authorities. I would not be surprised if you said that what is available through local authorities has reduced over the last few years. What are the organisations? What are the networks and how do they promote themselves?
Dr David Martin: We have to look at the older learner and what they require. If we are focusing on the older learner, they want to set the curriculum themselves. They want to learn through activities of personal relevance. They are more likely to be reduced in motor, sensory or cognitive function. They enjoy a collaborative peer learning environment. They want to be able to use their rich variety of past experiences, both work and outside. At times, because of their past, whatever the area, they can be a learner in one respect and a teacher in another.
We have mentioned the actual courses, so the FE courses and the courses that the Workers’ Educational Association might put on. They are there, but it is that engagement. I can share a little bit about the U3A, which is a peer learning one, if that is appropriate. That is a member-led, member-run organisation, with peer learning at its heart. It uses the resources of the retired and their rich life and work experience. They generate, among themselves, interest groups. Some of them are for maths and numeracy. There are about 100 maths and numeracy groups.
Volunteers deliver maths sessions for different interests, which picks up on how we might excite people beyond doing the mechanics of arithmetic for getting things right with that sense of the greater joy of mathematics. Hundreds attend online sessions where people talk about enormous numbers and where to find them more, and the problems with memory store in computers being limited, which means that, when you have situations that reach their biggest number, the whole system collapses.
The U3A is about 70% female, with 86% between 65 and 84, so we are talking about the older adult. What do they get out of it? It is something wider, for some, than just numeracy. It is about keeping their mind active. That is the focus. It is about socialising and meeting with others. It is about learning something new. People continue to enjoy learning something new. For them, it is about being in a safe environment, where other people are in similar situations and can be happy learning together and recognise some of the issues. It is one of those many opportunities that exist that are to do with nudging people forward into more numeracy.
There are other areas that you might think are not predominantly about numeracy or developing such skills. Take time swap. Time swap is about people in a community giving six hours for something that they are expert at, such as knitting. In my case, somebody kindly sewed my trousers. I could then claim some hours from somebody who did some family history investigation for me. The maths input that I put into that was that somebody needed some help to cope at work with the statistics, so I put in a few hours working with them on that.
The 50-plus forums are areas where people are coming out of isolation, meeting others and gathering help from each other, as well as input that is given formally in such sessions. The 50-plus Forum is a gathering in local areas of people who are 50-plus. We have lots of opportunities if we encourage them. There are first aid courses, nutritional courses and cookery courses that exist already in the community where we could encourage people to make sure that there is a numeracy component. There are other areas, of course. There are BBC Bitesize videos or whatever if people are comfortable with things online, as well as the access to whatever support banks and Citizens Advice give.
Elaine Smith: To the point around local authority available provision, there is a lot of provision that is available to all ages, or at least up to state pension age for lots of people. The uptake of that is not necessarily as high for those over 50. A lot of that is due to the fact that skill support is normally marketed as something that is aimed at younger people, or it is delivered in places such as colleges or maybe venues where people are less comfortable accessing support or less familiar with going to.
Although support technically is available, it is not something that is being taken up to the extent that we would like to see it being taken up. There is something to be done around delivery styles, the venues that are used and the way that courses are delivered to support people to do that.
In terms of new platforms that exist, people over 50 can certainly do things online and digital services can work really well. You need that financial literacy at the start of that and access to digital as well. If you are looking at those who have lower skillsets, they will sometimes also need to have a physical space where they can get support to do that. Support is there and programmes exist, but we do not market, direct or design it with over-50s in mind. After that, we do not look at how it works for them. There is very limited evidence around what works for people in their 50s and 60s when they are accessing support.
Q129 Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: Can I push on that a little bit? It is incredibly helpful. We talked about Jobcentre Plus previously. What would be the right routes in for over-50s? If the committee was saying that it is great that these courses are available but everyone agrees we need to do a bit more work to shape them for the older learners, how would you get to the older learners? What would be the touchpoints? What are the routes in?
Elaine Smith: There is something around community outreach, which can work very well for those who are not engaged with services already, so that economically active group. That involves going out into communities and spaces that they are already using, so delivering things in places such as libraries and community centres.
There are also adult hubs that work very well. They can deliver multiple services. We have an organisation that we have worked with recently in Southampton. Southampton Council has an adult hub that has careers advice, skill support and employment support. It is a public accessible space without those eligibility requirements around it, so that people can walk in. It is sometimes just that. It is removing that barrier and putting things in central spaces that people go to so that it is easily accessible.
In terms of what that online support looks like, again it is making sure that it is designed and accessible with older people in mind as well, so that it is not just targeted at younger people. That first impression makes a real difference. If you are thinking around the new jobs and careers service, simple things such as having to create an account or having to access it on a certain platform can put people off. There are some very practical things that might dissuade people who are less confident from taking that forward and accessing support.
Christopher Brooks: One point is that, over the last 20 to 30 years, the skill system has been very focused on employment, for good reason. It has meant that some of the other non-employment‑focused or less employment-focused learning has become a bit of a Cinderella issue sometimes, so it gets forgotten about.
I particularly wanted to flag the work that we did with the Learning and Work Institute a couple of years ago, because it is very relevant to the questions. The recommendations from that are a long list of many ideas about how to improve the design of provision for older learners to engage people more effectively. They include thinking about the digital question and how providers in the FE sector work with community organisations, such as local Age UKs. That is another route into people. How does the system more broadly deal with learning that does not lead to a qualification or is maybe more piecemeal? Older learners may want to learn at a slower pace, for instance, but the system is not always designed well to deliver that kind of learning. It addresses all these points. I will make sure I share a copy with the committee so that you can have a look at it in its full detail.
Professor Adele Atkinson: There are a couple of things that are worth thinking about. People continue to have life events throughout life and sometimes those can trigger them to look for new forms of support. That can be a useful way to work with providers, whether they are people who support people with health concerns or people who support people moving home to a new environment, or whatever that might be.
It is also important to think that, once people move out of the workplace, they quite often become active volunteers, which is another good opportunity to potentially provide some kind of numeracy training as part of the volunteering. We know that there are very large organisations that have charity shops, for example, around the country. That might be a good opportunity.
Also, sports centres are often overlooked. Sports centres often offer special discounts during the day when they are quieter. There are opportunities to reach many people who are perhaps not working full-time any more. You can look at music groups. Music and numeracy are very closely linked, and there are a lot of groups that bring people together to sing and play music that potentially would also be able to say, “Hey, would you like to work on your numeracy?”
Quite often, it is finding those links that make sense in the moment and not forcing it on people, but encouraging. The other one is the school gate. Increasingly, people are looking after their grandchildren. They are meeting at the school and picking up children. They are interacting with schools. Schools already have the message of education and so they are a really useful place to start to think about how you can communicate to other groups.
Q130 Lord Massey of Hampstead: You just raised the subject of digitalisation. It strikes me that technology could be hugely important here. If we look at the over-65s—I know that that is not your area—it must be quite difficult for them to improve their maths and numeracy skills. I imagine that the intellectual challenge and the motivation of that is going to be challenging.
However, access to online is so paramount now, is it not? In London, even if you want to park a car you have to be able to use a mobile phone and understand the questions and the prompts. Online banking has been mentioned. We have not talked about AI. In terms of the pension fund issue—I declare my interest as chairman of a wealth management business that has a lot of pensioners—the AI tools could be extremely helpful over time. We see what they do now, but going into the future there is going to be an enormous amount of quite serious practical help available to people if they can use tech. In some ways, the ability to use tech, especially for the over-65s, is possibly even more important than trying to enhance their numeracy skills. I wondered what the panel thought of that.
Christopher Brooks: You are absolutely right. Using technology is really important. There are extensive efforts to help improve digital inclusion. People of all ages can learn new skills and to use different technologies. Sometimes the motivation will not be there for people for various reasons.
There are always going to be some people who are not going to use new technology. We have to make sure that we cater for them in any service delivery across all of government. It is really important to remember that there are maybe 20% of the population who are not going to use that kind of technology. You are absolutely right to make the point.
Age UK does a lot of work around digital inclusion and trying to help people. Often, it can be what we might consider quite basic. It can be trying to engage people in tech in the first instance. A lot of people have never used technology in their lives and it is an extremely difficult starting point. That is why some of the commercial decisions in the banking sector and elsewhere that have been taken to shut down their route to access money management or extra support have really adverse outcomes for those people. It is really important, but there is a lot that can be done, though.
Lord Massey of Hampstead: I was not suggesting that we should not provide for those people, but if we can get more people to a decent level of tech capability that is the gateway to so much else.
Christopher Brooks: There are wide benefits of being digitally included that can help people in all walks of their life. We really encourage people to get online, as an organisation. We just try to remember that there is a group of people who will not.
There is other really good work across the private sector. The Connection Project is trying to galvanise cross-sectoral businesses. Ten large businesses are sponsoring it, including some of the banks, the BBC, ITV and BT. That is an attempt to get the private sector behind digital inclusion. At the moment, often the approach can be a bit piecemeal. It is often taken one organisation or sector at a time. It has lacked that cross-sectoral drive. Businesses are so important here, and similarly with the Government. I know that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has redoubled its efforts to improve digital inclusion recently and there is a lot of work going on there as well. There is a clear drive towards that. It is just that it will not come soon enough for a lot of people.
Q131 Lord Hannett of Everton: Good morning. We are producing a report that will go to government. You have covered a wide range of responses to the questions. If you had only one recommendation that you think we should take to government, what would it be?
Dr David Martin: I spent a number of years as a voice for FE, because, so often, when we looked at maths and numeracy, or maths in particular, it was the voice of schools, which was very important, but the FE voice was not so well heard. For me, it is to ensure that decision-making includes the voice for the older adult, who is recognised as an asset, with rich skills and life experiences to bring to the table, or, if I might say, the equation.
Professor Adele Atkinson: If I am allowed only one, make sure that all government advice services understand that there is a range of numeracy in this country. Some people will not understand charts and other people may not understand percentages or inflation, for example. Do not replicate the problem within advice that people have when they do not access advice.
Christopher Brooks: I do not think that we have mentioned the Money and Pensions Service so far. That plays a really important role in getting the right information out to the public. The Government should make sure that MaPS is adequately resourced to provide that information that is relevant to different people in different situations and to work with community organisations to make sure that the reach of that is wide enough. I will not say a second one.
Elaine Smith: We need to design skills support with and for people of all ages. It is ensuring that, when we design provision, we are not just focusing on one small group of people or do not just think of skills as something that happens when you are younger. It needs to be accessible and available throughout life for different groups of people and to be flexible in response to that.
Q132 The Chair: Going back to your point, Adele, about agencies understanding the range, are you saying that they do not understand at the moment and are trying to aim at the middle of the problem, and therefore there is a lot left on either side that does not get supported? I did not quite understand what you meant by that. It is an interesting idea.
I am trying to harness what is out there already. There is a huge amount. You have given examples of the Learning and Work Institute and the U3A. There are dozens of these initiatives and I think that they are invisible to people. Could you unpack your suggestion a bit?
Professor Adele Atkinson: There are opportunities for people to learn. When they have the opportunity to learn without the pressure of an immediate decision, going to U3A and having discussions with people who might be able to help them is useful. If they are in a situation where they need to make a decision—perhaps they have taken on power of attorney for someone or are looking at their benefits options—the information that they are provided needs to simplify and clarify. There will already be information out there and it is overwhelming people in some situations.
I honestly have not done an assessment of every single piece of advice that is available, but I know from hearing people that they find advice confusing still. I am using the word “advice” wrongly here. I guess that I am talking about guidance. They are looking for something that is very tailored. They are looking for case studies that look exactly like them, so that they can say, “Oh, this is what’s going to happen to me in 20 years”, not, “Our projection says that you have a 50% probability of living to this age and you will have this much income at that point”. That use of numeracy is not helpful to some people. It is finding a way of simplifying and clarifying for those people.
The Chair: Again, how? People have to say that, because otherwise you are mis-selling a product. This is why I am trying to get it back to a more practical position.
Baroness Bull: Can I clarify? You used the words “government advice services”. You were not talking about Santander. You were talking about when I log on to GOV.UK. Is that specifically what you are talking about?
Professor Adele Atkinson: No, I do not think it is specific, but it is the commonplace that we know that a lot of people try to reach out. You were asking the question about what government could do in terms of numeracy. I was trying primarily to respond to that, but certainly there are other ways in which people get non-regulated advice.
The Chair: Christopher, you referred to the Money and Pensions Service. How do people get signposted into that?
Christopher Brooks: It produces a lot of information for the public about different aspects of finances. You can ring it as well. There is online and a call centre. It is widely signposted to. It is the go-to place for information about money that people can trust.
It is linked to the other point that I nearly made but did not, which is scams, just to raise it briefly. It is so important. It underpins a lot of this because people are very worried about being scammed. Our polling in previous work has shown that three-quarters of the over-60s worry about being scammed at least some of the time, so it is a huge proportion of people. It makes it really hard for people to engage with digital solutions and to trust advice that comes in. MaPS is a more trustworthy source. It is respected as being independent and trustworthy.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Is MaPS Martin Lewis’s? That is not the thing he is involved in?
Christopher Brooks: No.
Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: It is an arm’s-length body of government. It is sponsored by DWP. They are some of the people who deliver midlife MOTs, for example.
The Chair: Is it more than a website? Can you actually speak to somebody?
Christopher Brooks: Yes, you can. There is a lot of information about all different aspects of money on there.
Professor Adele Atkinson: It has regional support as well. It is not all based in London.
Baroness Bull: Does it pass your plain English test?
Professor Adele Atkinson: I would love to do some research on it. I suspect that there are still complications just because our average baseline and the reality are not quite the same.
Q133 Lord Massey of Hampstead: I wanted to mention, as a provider of financial advice, that you have all identified how bespoke people’s needs are. You can imagine that providing, especially regulated, advice that is bespoke is just not affordable. Christopher, you mentioned MaPS. That reinforces the role of government. There is very little trust out there for those who cannot afford the higher-level financial advice, which could cost hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds to get it accurate. Providers have to get it right or they risk very substantial litigation.
There is this advice gap. It exists. There is a good place for government there. In a world where people are worried about scams and there are very low levels of trust, government can be trusted. If you can combine that with certain AI tools, you may be able to get to a place where more people can get the sort of advice that could help them make the informed decisions for which they are ultimately responsible.
Professor Adele Atkinson: When we have the pension dashboards, I hope that that will resolve some of these issues.
Christopher Brooks: Pension Wise is also very well liked and trusted by people who use it. It is just that not enough people are going to use it. It provides guidance before you access your pension, but people are largely ignorant and do not understand the difference between draw-down and an annuity, for example. Pension Wise is good at informing people of those pieces.
Lord Massey of Hampstead: People are so turned off by this. You mentioned employers providing information on pensions. If we put out a paper to explain all the pension arrangements to our employees, I would be surprised if more than 10% read it. Unfortunately, people are just not interested in this.
The Chair: Thank you very much, all of you, for joining us today and the information you have given us. I am particularly interested in solutions. If you want to flesh out any of the ideas that you offered at the end, please send them through to us. I completely agree that employers are a very good point of communication, but I am worried about overburdening them. They could be a very good signpost. There must be dozens, if not hundreds, of initiatives and somehow we need to harness those. Thank you all very much indeed.
