King’s Speech

Baroness Freeman of Steventon Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, as the final Back-Bench speaker in this debate, I want to speak about something that seems to be missing from His Majesty’s gracious Speech: a sense of the bigger picture and why it feels to so many as though the country “just isn’t working”.

Our public services and the services from companies that we rely on are just not delivering what we expect and need. We want water companies to take away the dirty water, treat it and deliver it back to us as clean drinking water. We are happy to pay a fair rate for that to be done as efficiently as possible. We do not want to be paying money directly into the large profits of a few individuals while our dirty water is being dumped into our streams and seas.

Likewise, we want to be able to use digital services to do things quickly and effectively, without worrying about whether all the information we put in is being used or sold by the company providing the service, without our consent. We do not want companies to use our children’s social and psychological vulnerabilities to hook them in to doing and sharing more and more online, so that they can be profiled and marketed to.

Unfortunately, the proposals in the gracious Speech to address issues such as these and many others, if they exist at all, seem to be sticking plasters of regulation or legislation, with nothing about tackling the root causes of why people feel that things are not working. We all know that it is very hard and very expensive to get a company or institution to do something that goes against its incentives or fiduciary duties. The Government appear to be making the profit or growth duties stronger and stronger with their proposed agenda. Instead of adding a new priority of growth to regulators or any public service in order to try to increase tax income that can then be spent on the expensive business of trying to remediate the problems, we need companies and public services to be focused on delivering what people want in the first place: the job they were founded to do.

People care about the environment, child online safety, data security and about every job actually being done well. We need the Government to design the basic incentives and the duties of institutions and companies to deliver these outcomes in the first place; to help ensure that all sectors of the economy contribute to the common good; to create incentive structures that allow companies and organisations to develop naturally in the right direction, with minimal need for regulation. Obviously, we can shape what public companies are aiming to achieve through their statutory duties. We can also help shape what private companies do, through changing their fiduciary duties. We need to be able to assign value to what people value, so that we can help companies maximise what people want them to maximise: for example, looking at longer-term outcomes, and mainstreaming natural capital accounting alongside financial accounts.

Even on a utilitarian basis, the services we currently get for free from ecosystems need to be valued before we destroy them and have to invent an expensive way to replace them. Peatlands have a certain value if considered as bags of horticultural compost or drainable agricultural land, but they have a greater value when considered on a bigger scale. Financially, it could be natural flood prevention, saving costs somewhere else. In terms of climate stability, our peatlands could be carbon sinks, but ONS figures show that we are still degrading them and they are releasing carbon dioxide instead of capturing it. The Government have still not announced a Bill to deal with this.

The same is true of how we treat digital tech companies. These companies provide a service to people that to start with is efficient and easy to use. But then companies start to try to maximise their short-term financial return to investors, almost regardless of the impact on all their users and on the environment. Again, it takes government to stand up for and measure what people care about—the service they receive and the protections for them, their children and the environments they care about—and then enshrine these measures into the incentives of the companies wherever possible, and, where it is not, to regulate on behalf of the people it represents.

Prevention is better than cure. Let us get the incentives right so that corporate behaviour follows. Then we might see the jobs we want done finally done well, because the profit motive will no longer be the sole driver.