National Security and Investment Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Lord Alderdice

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, on his arrival in the House. He commented powerfully on the failure of privatisation. They are remarks I welcome and to which I will circle back.

Two Greens are speaking in this Second Reading. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will talk about the national security aspect of the Bill and I will speak on the investment part. My noble friend will focus on the major, long-identified threats of the climate emergency and the nature crisis, with its many linked dangers, including that of pandemics. On those and other issues, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, noted, it is nonsensical that we are debating this Bill while still awaiting the integrated review. I want to focus mainly on the investment part of the title and on another element of national security—poverty, inequality and how the finance curse contributes to them.

There is increasing academic focus on the importance of giving macroprudential regimes a sense of social purpose, including in respect of national security. Excellent work is being conducted at the University of Sheffield, particularly by its Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, known as SPERI. We have an oversized, overactive, extractive financial sector. A SPERI report conservatively put the cost of the finance curse between 1995 and 2015 at £4,500 billion. That has to be seen as a threat to our national security. Money that could be strengthening our society is lost, as is control over a commodity as essential to a modern society as water or air. The finance curse is built on a sector that, as we learned in 2008, is as fragile and dangerous as an oversized dictator’s statue teetering on an inadequate, narrow pillar.

The other security threat lies in the extractive processes. There are huge and widely acknowledged issues of corporate culture and priorities, as well as regulatory loopholes and blind spots which allow financial funds and senior corporate management to loot companies and hollow out balance sheets. As a society and as a Parliament, we have lost control.

This issue arises particularly in the context of this Bill, where we are talking about investment by foreign companies in foreign states. We might hope that some pressure could be put on domestic companies to act in socially responsible ways by directing at least some of their funds to things we need to keep society running. They have, after all, to exist in this country, even if they seldom keep their profits here. The same constraints do not apply to foreign investors. While we know that a huge percentage of profits from even UK investment ends up in offshore tax havens, we can be sure that those profits will not help us where there are foreign owners.

I want to focus briefly on the nature of a curse—be it finance or resource. We look around the world at nations often identified as suffering from resource curse, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Iraq and South Sudan. They have huge problems of national—and internal—security. Oil is sucked out of their rocks. Our society is milked for cash. Meta-analyses of the resource curse show there is nothing inevitable about this. The quality of governance, the rule of law and the functioning of democracy are crucial to prevent it. Which is where we come back to this law—and the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Woodley.

In the UK, through continuing decades of privatisation, we have sold off the family silver. We are now down to the rather small teaspoons. When, in 2016, the people showed that they wanted to “take back control”, that reality was hidden, but the Government no longer have flamboyantly presented fictions about Brussels to hide behind. When they champion “Singapore-upon-Thames”, they will be held responsible for the consequences. Noble Lords working on this Bill, but particularly the Government, might want to focus on that.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Alderdice) (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Lord Alderdice

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 1st February 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Alderdice) (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, has withdrawn so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I offer the full support of the Green group for this group of amendments collectively. We have already heard very powerful and important testimonies from all who have spoken, but particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in introducing them and the noble Lord, Lord Woolley of Woodford, in making some powerful points about how BAME communities and other minority communities are affected. I have three or four points to make in general terms. It must be repeated, as all speakers up to now have stressed the importance of specialist support, that simple provision of accommodation will not meet the needs of victims of domestic abuse.

I make a point particularly about funding. As the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, said, competitive tendering for these services has often been—and he used an appropriate word—toxic. I do not think there is anything on this in this amendment, and it may be a matter of policy more than law, but the Government should consider moving away from the idea of regular competition as an appropriate way of seeing that these services are funded. We should move closer towards a system of having a good, ideally local, service that meets the needs of a community, with an appropriate check to see that that continues. The assumption should be that that funding continues, rather than seeing the huge waste of resources that are put in again and again into bidding to keep contracts. The risk is that you can lose a local service completely, if it loses just one round of contract bidding.

Another point worth making in this context is on the place of refuges in feminist history. From the early 1970s onwards, they were places where we saw the growth and coalescence of a movement. They continue to be a centre for advocacy and campaigning support for the essential services that domestic abuse victims need. If we lose those specialist services, we also lose a lot of that advocacy and campaigning, as well as a depth of knowledge.

I have a final reflection on how we are talking about increasing statutory provision. The Green Party very much believes in localism and decisions made locally, and referred upwards only when absolutely necessary. But we also need a foundation of rights and standards, which is appropriately provided at the national level. Those standards and that statutory provision is not enough; we now that, increasingly, local government is left with barely enough funds to meet its statutory requirements, let alone to provide the extra services and needs that each local community has. When talking about this, it is crucial that we also focus on ensuring that local communities and local government have the funding that they need to meet these statutory requirements—and not just that but to meet the extra, individual local community needs that each local government area has, to ensure that that we truly deliver what the local community asks for.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Alderdice) (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.