Economic Growth

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for instigating this important debate. I want to offer some practical solutions, with three different hats on.

The first hat that I wear is as an adviser to the digital centre of government. This week, we announced some big changes in how public services will be delivered in the next wave of what GOV.UK will look like. I mention it because one enormously important plank of this work is the opportunity to change the procurement processes in government—particularly in relation to the digital sector, but this applies across the whole of government. I believe deeply that if the Government were to take a more creative, innovative and urgent view of the procurement process, we could achieve an extremely interesting level of growth, particularly for our own industries that sometimes lose out to bigger US commercial sectors. Can the Minister please reflect on the procurement issues as he sees them? I know that Minister Gould has been working on these issues effectively as well.

My second hat is that of the president of the British Chambers of Commerce. Noble Lords will be aware that the chambers of commerce do quarterly reviews and that at the minute, those are pretty bleak, but in a spirit of collaboration with the Government, I note that the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, has met my colleagues at the British Chambers of Commerce. We have a long list of infrastructure projects that just need urgent decision-making today. They range from Sizewell C, which has not yet been given the official go-ahead—although I hear that that announcement might come very soon—through to the electrification of various railway lines and planning for offshore wind. It is not acceptable that projects that will enormously increase wealth, jobs and opportunities in local communities and economies are sitting for so long in planning decision inboxes. Has the Minister had time to reflect on that British Chambers of Commerce infrastructure list and might he be able to keep kicking the relevant departments? This is such an easy win for the country right now.

I will finish by talking about my final hat, which is perhaps the more unusual of the hats I wear. It is as co-founder of Lucky Voice, my karaoke chain of businesses, which I am sure many noble Lords have indulged in. It is a small and medium-sized business. We have venues around the UK and a couple overseas. It came from my idea that the Japanese have too much fun singing in private rooms by themselves and that we should be able to do it here in the UK. It is a hospitality business and not very big. It is run by a young colleague, who was elevated from where he joined to now running the business. I own it—full disclosure—but it is having a super tough time; no surprises there. I have been reflecting a lot on how I can best help that business. It is definitely not by trying to help at an operational level; that is normally when I cause total mayhem.

The thing that I come back to continually with the CEO is the intensity of the media headlines around our economy right now, which the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, reflected on in some of his comments. I do not want to get into a political debate about the justification for those headlines, but I think all of us would probably accept that we are in a dark place in terms of reporting on what is happening and the plans that are coming up over the next few months. Can the Government reflect on how, in the absence as yet of the industrial strategy, they will fill that void, because it really matters?

Every single day matters right now. I have seen that from the British Chambers of Commerce and our member businesses. I also see it every day at Lucky Voice. Consumer confidence is not there and when we ask our customers whether they have a difference in their finances, very often they do not. They are just scared about what this year might bring and do not want to go out and spend cash. I know that engaging in a media war is probably not top of the Minister’s agenda, but I urge him to think carefully about how we can fill the void, particularly in the absence of the forthcoming industrial strategy. Can I also, as a not very successful entrepreneur, urge on him that urgency really matters? Being seen to be urgent across the different spheres that I have tried to highlight would really make a difference.