Covid-19 Inquiry

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing to the House this Statement on the government response to the Covid-19 inquiry module 1 report. I thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, for her leadership and the work of her team. I pay tribute to those who lost their lives and to the families who continue to grieve. Their loss is not just a memory but a standing rebuke to complacency—a warning against the easy comfort of forgetting. If this inquiry is to mean anything, it must ensure that the failures of the past are never repeated.

The Government’s response recognises those failures, but recognition is not the same as resolution. The inquiry lays bare what went wrong. Lives were lost not because those in government or on the front line lacked effort or intention but because the system they relied on was too slow, too complex and too poorly maintained. The structures for emergency response were fatally flawed, with too many competing voices and unclear lines of authority. When the crisis hit, leaders lacked the information they needed to make informed decisions quickly. Vital data was unavailable, inconsistent or siloed. Worst of all, preparedness had been allowed to slip down the priority list. Without a recent crisis to focus the mind, plans had gathered dust. When they were finally needed, they were out of date or prepared for another type of pandemic.

We broadly welcome the steps that the Government have taken, especially to ensure that the Cabinet Office has a clearer and stronger role in crisis and resilience co-ordination. I appreciate that the Government have clearly signalled their intention to build on the work started by the last Government. The Resilience Directorate should provide clearer leadership. The resilience academy will help build expertise. A full-scale pandemic exercise is a necessary step in testing our ability to respond. These are real improvements, and we support them.

However, there is still much more to do. Preparedness must not be something that the Government remember only when disaster strikes. A culture of resilience should be embedded across the system, with clear accountability for ensuring that it does not fade from view. The Government’s response does not go far enough in simplifying the system. Complexity was a core failing in our pandemic response, yet we are in danger of replacing one tangle of bureaucracy with another. Data sharing remains a critical weakness, and without an efficient way to collect, share and use real-time information, we will make the same mistakes again.

That is why recommendation 10 is the wrong answer. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, calls for simplification, yet her recommendation to establish yet another arm’s-length body would add another layer of complexity. A new statutory body, given responsibility for strategic advice, assessment, local consultation and national capability planning, is simply too broad in scope. A body that is simultaneously an adviser, a regulator, a strategy setter and a watchdog will be a body that lacks focus. Instead of bringing clarity, it will muddy decision-making. Instead of streamlining the system, it will entangle it further. Instead of ensuring resilience, it will create yet another institution competing for influence within an already crowded space.

If independent oversight is needed, let it be exactly that—an assessment function that checks government preparedness against a clear framework set by Ministers, not a permanent fixture with an ever-growing remit. Otherwise, we risk creating a body that spends its time lobbying Ministers for its own recommendations, regardless of whether they are useful or practical. When disaster strikes, there must be no doubt about who is responsible, who is making the decisions and who is accountable to the public.

There are, of course, deeper questions that must be answered. How will we measure progress? Unless we have clear benchmarks, improvement is just an illusion. Without real accountability and framework clarity, the reviews, consultations and task forces risk being temporary solutions. Working out what to do is the easy part. The hard part is ensuring rigorous implementation backed up by data. Is there data to support the whole-system emergency strategy? In recommendation 7, the report asked for three-month publications to report back the findings of the nationwide investigations. Can the Minister speak to that?

Why is this inquiry taking so long? Lessons that could save lives should already be implemented. The Government speak of a duty of candour, but honesty is already required in the Civil Service Code. Yet as numerous inquiries such as Horizon, infected blood and Grenfell have demonstrated, it has not delivered transparency in the past, so how will this now be ensured? Above all, how do we ensure that this inquiry does not become just another exercise in bureaucratic introspection? We have seen too many reports whose conclusions are welcomed, debated, nodded at solemnly and quietly ignored. This cannot be one of them. The Government have not yet responded to last year’s House of Lords Statutory Inquiries Committee report on reforming the process by which public inquiries are conducted, and the committee has said it is unacceptable that so many recommendations have not been implemented. I call on the Government to consider last year’s report. Can the Minister provide an update on the timely implementation of the recommendations? So far, only one recommendation has been implemented.

Resilience is not built through process. It is not achieved by handing responsibly to another statutory body. It is built through strong leadership, clear accountability and a system that is ready to act when the moment demands. The Government’s response is a step in the right direction, but we must go further and move faster because the next crisis will not wait. When it comes, the true test will not be whether we have created another agency, or published another report, but whether we are finally and fully prepared to respond.

Civil Servants: Compulsory Office Attendance

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for securing this important debate on whether civil servants should be obliged to work from their offices or their own homes. It has been prompted by not only the recent strike action in the UK’s Land Registry but the broader shift in working practices in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is an issue that speaks to the heart of productivity and the future of public service delivery.

Amid the upheavals of the pandemic, our GDP remained surprisingly robust, in part thanks to the last Government’s furlough scheme. The resilience of the economy showed that remote work, for some parts of the workforce, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, observed, not only was feasible but could be effective. However, my noble friend Lord Frost is absolutely correct that, while the private sector continues to improve its output, public sector productivity continues to lag well behind. This disparity has contributed to the growing backlog in public services that in turn hinders wider economic growth. We face significant budget deficits, a high level of national indebtedness and backlogs in courts and hospitals and elsewhere. We simply cannot afford to ignore the need for drastically increased productivity within the public sector, particularly in our Civil Service.

Can the Minister provide statistics on the number of civil servants who, first, have contracts that expressly allow them to work from home, and what proportion of them exclusively so; secondly, have informal arrangements with their management that permit them to work from home but with no revised contracts; and, thirdly, have no formal arrangements but none the less continue to work remotely? Do the Government have plans to allow civil servants to make other revisions to their terms and conditions by stealth, or is the intention simply to let remote work arrangements proliferate unchecked? If so, what safeguards are in place to ensure that these changes do not undermine the effective delivery of public services? Who within the Government holds the authority to stop civil servants working from home? Does the Prime Minister or the Cabinet Secretary, or is such discretion left to individual departments with no overarching leadership on this issue?

There are also practical implications, such as how much unused government office space exists within Whitehall and beyond. Can the Minister provide us with statistics on these costs? As my noble friend Lord Farmer said, taxpayers deserve to know whether their money is being spent effectively, and users of public services—the public—deserve better services.

Senior civil servants should generally be required to return to the office full-time by default. Not only does this demonstrate that office working is important but it sends a strong message to junior colleagues. As my noble friends Lord Farmer and Lord Maude of Horsham observed, there is immense value in learning through observation, mentoring and collaboration with peers. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, argued, remote work has the advantage of flexibility, but it is no substitute for working alongside colleagues in an office environment.

A failure to grapple with an issue so fundamental raises serious concerns about the Government’s ability to tackle the more challenging issues of Civil Service reform. In lieu of ambitions to streamline the state to 2016 levels, we instead have the Cabinet Office’s voluntary redundancy scheme, which falls short of what is required. Recent inflation-busting pay rises for civil servants have not been linked to any measurable improvements in productivity.

The most successful organisations in the private sector have made office working most of the time compulsory. Working from home cannot be treated as a right. As my noble friend Lord Maude so rightly observed, business need must always be paramount. The Government must act decisively and embrace the necessary reforms to ensure that public services deliver what the public expect and need.

Renewable Energy: Costs

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, specifically my chairmanship of Project Tempo, a non-profit organisation which researches public attitudes towards the energy and climate transition. I thank my noble friend Lord Frost for this important and timely debate.

My right honourable friend the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition is right that we need to tell the truth. Over the last few years, successive Governments have set more and more ambitious emissions reduction targets, without a plan for how to meet them. We urgently need an honest debate about the different pathways to decarbonising our economy. The road is paved with trade-offs, and we must choose which ones to make.

I want to make two observations. The first is that British voters overwhelmingly support the ambition of getting to net zero. Project Tempo’s research shows that the public care about protecting the environment and want us, as a country, to do the right thing. However, it also shows that public support for green policies declines dramatically when individuals are asked to pay for them through higher energy bills, prices or taxes.

The second observation is that British energy prices are going in the wrong direction, and have been since well before the war in Ukraine. Data from the energy department shows that between 2010 and 2023, domestic electricity bills almost doubled in real terms, and data recently published in the Financial Times showed that the UK’s industrial electricity costs were among the highest in the world, more than four times those of the United States or China, and significantly higher than those of all other G7 economies. This is a profound challenge.

Our globally uncompetitive energy costs not only damage our productivity and economic growth, they risk undermining public support for the transition. If people come to associate green policies with higher bills, it will become much harder to maintain the public support that we need to reduce emissions and tackle climate change. That is why I was worried to read last week that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that Labour’s plans for clean power by 2030 will see green levies rise by an average of £120 per household by the end of the decade. The recent report from the National Energy System Operator also suggested that energy system costs could rise as a result of Labour’s plans.

We ought to pursue the mix of technologies that will reduce energy bills, protect national security and drive growth in our economy. Unfortunately, the Government’s policy will do exactly the opposite. Their ideological rush towards accelerated targets will send prices higher and exclude the development of other forms of clean energy such as nuclear, which would help us hedge the costs involved in decarbonising the grid. Can I press upon the Minister the importance of new nuclear and ask him to set out briefly the position on the Wylfa plant in Ynys Môn?

We must tell the truth about the challenges we face, not pretend that inconvenient facts do not exist. The reality is that many of the Energy Secretary’s current plans entail borrowing enormous amounts of money and spending it on subsidising technologies which are not otherwise viable on the open market, or on importing more products from China. Before the election, the then Opposition promised that their plans would cut consumer energy bills by £300. That claim—which they continue to stand by—is bogus. My fear is that false promises such as that, and their general rush to accelerate the transition, risk undermining the very environmental action which so many of us wish to see. I look forward to hearing how the Minister will address these legitimate concerns.