Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)
My Lords, this is the final day of the debate on the humble Address, and the advisory speaking time is seven minutes. That will allow the House to rise at a respectable time, and I hope that noble Lords making their contributions will be mindful of that.
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord O'Neill of Gatley) (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I begin by thanking your Lordships for the warm and generous welcome I have received from everyone in this House. It is a privilege to serve as a member of Her Majesty’s Government, and it is a particular honour to make my maiden speech opening this debate following Her Majesty’s gracious Speech. I have been told that the conventions of a maiden speech require the speaker to be both brief and uncontroversial. Let me warn noble Lords—though some already know me—that only about 50% of that comes naturally to me.
My only regret today is that my parents are no longer around to see me here. They were true working-class Tories, which may surprise some people. They would have been not only proud but, frankly, slightly astonished that their continuous attempts to get me to focus on the Daily Telegraph at the breakfast table during my younger years, and not on the latest Manchester United programme, eventually bore some fruit. Indeed, one of my cousins told me just yesterday that even many years later my dad was still, in my absence, apparently pondering whether I would ever get a proper job. That showed me that they appeared to know that an individual and society’s collective productivity is what drives wealth and sustains success. This Government have put productivity as a priority for the next five years.
I was brought up in south Manchester, where I attended the local primary and junior school. When I reflect back—which, of course, I have especially done in the past few days—it is still clear to me that many of those school friends were at least as naturally gifted as I may have been, but for a variety of reasons, so many of them did not achieve their potential. I was lucky enough to go on to university and then achieve a career in the City, ending up as chief economist of Goldman Sachs. My time there overlapped with the rapid growth in the so-called large emerging economies, especially Brazil, Russia, India and China, which nearly 14 years ago now I was lucky enough to describe as “the BRICs”.
During those 18 years I started to understand the factors that drive economic growth. Economic theory tells us there are two things that make a country’s GDP grow—the size of its labour force, and its productivity—and I believe that this basic theory is right. The labour force is primarily driven by a country’s population, which is of course limited by physical factors. Importantly in that regard, the UK seems reasonably well blessed for the next couple of decades compared with many of our developed country—and in particular G7—friends. Productivity is trickier, but we can try to influence that with good policy, and I believe that if we are bolder and truly ambitious, we can do something about it.
I am therefore very excited to have joined the Government at this time to help drive the changes that this country needs to try to increase our productivity, whether that is having the right infrastructure, giving our children the best education, giving our workforce the skills they need for the 21st century, getting more women into the workforce, having a more effective policy on housing supply, providing better long-term incentives to invest, or providing even more effective and—importantly, perhaps—less strangling regulation.
During my time in the City, I also saw that successful interconnected urban areas—often, areas beyond the capital city—are vital to economic growth. The UK was, and frankly still is, underperforming in this regard. So, when I left Goldman, among the things that came on to my plate, I was very attracted to an offer to chair an independent commission on the growth of our cities outside of London. I pay tribute in this regard to my noble friend Lord Heseltine, whose work in this area has of course been groundbreaking. His was one of the very first voices to say that government policy on the industrial cities of the north should not be one of managed decline. He was a true pioneer in trying to help them to enable themselves to redevelop.
That can-do, positive, growth-oriented approach has been at the heart of what I ended up somewhat inelegantly calling “ManSheffLeedsPool”, which, of course, has now become better known as the northern powerhouse, not least because it includes other important northern cities such as Hull and the cities of the north-east—strong, interconnected cities across the north of England. I have been lucky enough to be asked to help deliver this, and to use my experience in the emerging world—especially, although not only, China—to help improve the UK’s economic performance.
Importantly, I will also continue to lead the review into antimicrobial resistance that I have been leading for the past nine months, for which we will make our final recommendations in about 12 months’ time. I hope that noble Lords will continue to feed into the extremely productive work that the review is carrying out, which in itself will help to improve the productivity of not only the UK but the whole world.
I believe that this country could be on the edge of something exciting and special. It is an honour and privilege to be asked to serve in Her Majesty’s Government, and I look forward to contributing to the work of this House.
Turning to the legislative agenda, last week in this Chamber we heard Her Majesty’s gracious Speech, setting out this Government’s legislative programme, which will build on the foundations laid in the previous Parliament to get Britain back towards prosperity. Our legislation is designed for everybody in the country, meeting their needs and helping them to fulfil their ambitions at each stage of their lives. Important things were achieved in the previous Parliament. The deficit has come down, and the economy has improved. The record on jobs, in particular, has been strong. There are 2 million new jobs and, importantly, in the past 12 months we have had the strongest employment increase among the G7 countries. Today, we have the highest employment record in the UK’s modern history.
However, the work is far from finished. The fiscal deficit is still too high, and the same is true of our external current account deficit. Our trade remains overly reliant on slow-growing emerging European markets. We need to do more with my friends in the emerging world. There are big infrastructure decisions that we have yet to make. Our businesses are still hampered by excessive regulation, and of course, there is so much to do to improve the competitiveness of our cities outside of London. The cities commission that I chaired showed that if the largest metro areas outside of London—not just northern powerhouse, but others too—could grow at the same strong rate as London, the UK’s national growth trend could be boosted by 0.2%. This may seem immediately significant only to the economics geeks among your Lordships but, to put it in perspective, it will translate into an extra £79 billion to the British economy by 2030.
Our productivity challenge is well known. I do not need to labour too long on the statistics, but our output per hour is 17% below the G7 average; 27% below that of France; similarly, 28% below that of Germany; and, even higher, 31% below that of the US. In my judgment, there are some valid questions about the accuracy of our productivity statistics but that should not be an excuse. We can and should do a lot better. If we could get our productivity rates up, we could enter a virtuous circle to the benefit of all.
Against that background, today I shall briefly address the measures in the Government’s legislative programme dealing with business, economic affairs and transport.
When businesses do well, so does the country, so we want to help businesses every step of the way. Our enterprise Bill will remove another £10 billion of red tape from businesses. Our target for cutting red tape will cover the activities of more regulators so that they contribute to our deregulation target too. We will make it easier for small businesses to solve late-payment disputes with other businesses. We will also create a faster, simpler, more efficient business rates appeals system, to be in place for the next business rates revaluation in 2017.
Moving on to the tax lock, we also want to let people keep more of the money they earn to spend or invest as they see fit. We will keep the manifesto commitment not to increase the rates of national insurance contributions, income tax or VAT. The commitments for income tax and VAT will be delivered through a finance Bill and, for NICs, we will introduce a national insurance contributions Bill, preventing any increase in the class 1 rate above the current rates.
We believe it is important to keep improving the transparency, accountability and governance of the Bank of England. To keep us ahead of the game, a Bank of England Bill will address the recommendations of the Warsh review, complete the transition to eight meetings of the Monetary Policy Committee a year and formalise changes to the Bank’s top team. Further changes are under discussion between the Treasury and the Bank, and we will announce them shortly.
This Government believe that strikes, many of which disrupt essential public services, should be the result only of a clear mandate. The trade unions Bill will therefore introduce a 50% threshold of those eligible to vote for ballot turnout. In the health, education, fire and transport sectors, it will also introduce a voting threshold of 40% in support of strike action in order for that vote to be legitimate. Other measures will tackle the intimidation of non-striking workers, reform the rules on ballot mandates and make changes to the role of the certification officer.
Noble Lords will recall that in 2013 the Prime Minister delivered a deal in Brussels which saw the EU budget cut in real terms for the first time while protecting our rebate. The mechanism by which individual member states finance this budget is known as the Own Resources Decision. The new ORD was agreed unanimously by member states in 2014. This fully reflects the financing aspects of the Prime Minister’s historic deal, including protecting our rebate. In common with previous practice, legislation is required for the UK to approve this, and we will introduce this in the form of the European Union (Finance) Bill.
I turn now to an important topic for the country and a Bill which, if executed correctly, could be highly advantageous; namely, the HS2 Bill. As is known from a number of my past public comments, I believe that other significant transport projects are vital for the success of the northern powerhouse. However, let me point out that, just in the past few days, a significant number of the leading local policymakers of all the northern cities that will be linked by HS2 have repeated their highly favourable stance to this project.
HS2 will connect eight of Britain’s top 10 cities. It will more than double capacity on some of our busiest routes and support up to 100,000 new jobs, 25,000 of which will be in construction alone. The cross-party support shown to HS2, both here and in the other place, is notable. I would like to pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others in this regard. This Bill will provide the Government with the legal powers to acquire the land needed for phase 1 of HS2, to build it and to operate it. As a hybrid Bill, it will also enable both Houses to hear petitions based on specific issues relating to HS2, although not about the general principle. I look forward to working with my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon on this important issue.
The Department for Transport is also taking forward the buses Bill to enable combined authorities with directly elected mayors to franchise their own buses. It is right that local areas that have ambitious plans to grow and develop should be given franchising powers as they consider necessary to deliver an integrated transport system.
In conclusion, this Government’s legislative programme has three primary objectives: first, to help working people at every stage of their lives; secondly, to put the public finances on a stable, sustainable footing by running a surplus; and thirdly, to deliver a step-change in the nation’s productivity. A dynamic, growing economy, underpinned by sound finances and solid investment, is by far the best way to give the people of this country a better standard of living. The measures set out by Her Majesty last week will help us achieve exactly that.