Crown Estate (Wales) Bill [HL]
Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Lord Harper
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, I will speak briefly. I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Moynihan said about the complexity of the economic opportunities here. I was involved in some of those negotiations when I was the Secretary of State for Transport. They are complex and overlap on both English and Welsh interests. If you were to split them, that would make it harder to land those economic opportunities.
I want to touch briefly on what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, said about the 20 mph speed limits in Wales, in order to present a balanced picture. I will not dwell on them, because they are not the subject of this Bill, but I think that she should also have mentioned that the original proposals by the Welsh Government carried a cost to the Welsh economy of £4.5 billion; that is in the Welsh Government’s own impact assessment. You have to balance that against the lives saved and decide whether that balance is correct and whether that cost of £4.5 billion, if used in a different way, would achieve a better outcome. I just want to put that on the record to balance out the argument. The noble Baroness is pulling a face at me, but the impact assessment of the Welsh Government costed that policy at £4.5 billion; that is their figure, if she wants to take it up with them.
The final point I want to make picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, about where the revenues go. It is worth pointing out, I think, that, through the Barnett formula, the Welsh people are net beneficiaries of the UK Exchequer. It is not clear from the Bill, as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, what impact transferring revenues of the Crown Estate has on the Barnett formula—that is, whether it will be netted off and leave the same amount of money going to the Welsh Government, or whether it will be an increase—but the point is that more than all of the revenue that flows from the Welsh public into the Exchequer goes back because they are net beneficiaries. So there is no unfairness here to the people of Wales. I think that taxpayers in the rest of the United Kingdom would look unfavourably on more revenues being transferred to the Welsh Government and increasing that net benefit at a time when the public finances are, as my noble friend Lord Harlech said, so stretched. The picture is a little more complex than some noble Lords have said. For those reasons, I strongly support—
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
For clarification, would the noble Lord like to make it clear that the figure of £4 billion he gave was over three decades?
Lord Harper (Con)
Yes, I am very happy to make that point, but it is still a significant sum of money. If you do what is normally done in these circumstances, which is to look at the cost versus the benefit, I would argue that that is not a good return. Of course, that is one reason—alongside the enormous unpopularity of that policy—why the Welsh Government responded to the political pressure from both my party and the public by changing the policy significantly. They themselves are not, I think, persuaded by those arguments.
I was going to finish by saying that, for the reasons I set out, I strongly support the amendments tabled by my noble friends Lord Harlech and Lord Moynihan. I very much hope that, in due course, the House will get a chance to support them.