Brexit: European Investment Bank (European Union Committee Report)

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of Members’ interest. I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, for her time as chair of the committee. With her energy, knowledge and commitment, she will be an extremely hard act to follow. I regret that we will no longer have the wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Butler, and I hope that someone reports to the Treasury, fastish, the idea that a firework should be put under them, because I cannot think of a greater threat from the noble Lord. If I may say, it would not have happened in his day, because it would not have been needed.

Turning to the European Investment Bank, no-one is going to put, “Leaving the EU means leaving the European Investment Bank” on the side of a bus. It sounds like an issue for pointy heads in Government, in the banks and elsewhere, but in reality it is about jobs, our quality of life and the nature of the country that we aim to be, for ourselves and our children and grandchildren. An interesting thing about the work of this committee is that it has allowed us to go deeper into the work of the EIB. I have been interested in the EIB for a long time, but not to the extent that has been possible within this committee. It is the world’s largest multi-lateral borrower and lender by volume, and it provides finance and expertise for sound and sustainable investment. Walking away from that, as we seem to have done without blinking, seems a dereliction of duty of monumental proportions.

We have heard much about this issue of retained earnings, and about the failure to engage with what is our proper return on the earnings that have been made by the European Investment Bank, and, frankly, the Minister seemed to just shrug, as if this was an aside that was not really bothering anyone. The EU Commission must be laughing all the way to the bank at the inability of Britain to engage on these issues.

We have in this country a real crisis of infrastructure. We see it with transport, but it can be seen in many other walks of life, not least housing. We jeopardise that by walking away from the EIB. We have heard distinguished academics talk this evening about the impact on the universities; that in itself is serious. My own area of interest, the mitigation of climate change, is critical in this area. If we are going to reach net zero, which is our aim, the scale of investment is going to be considerable. There is one very good example of where EIB funds changed part of the renewables industry. If your Lordships look at offshore wind, you will see that the costs have come down dramatically. The initial investment was considerable, but a break-even point comes when the costs start to go down.

Another area where I have an interest is in carbon capture, use and storage—you can tell I am interested in all the glamorous things. Carbon capture is a way of us meeting our targets, but it needs investment and is not the most glamorous investment in the world. The route to the European Investment Bank would help get us to a critical stage where Britain would have the capability to be a world leader; we have walked away from that.

I am also interested to know what work has been done in the Treasury and elsewhere to identify the views of those critical industries on how they will replace that funding. There must be concern about where that kind of funding might come from. Does it mean that future projects in this country will no longer be commercially viable?

A number of noble Lords have talked about the extent to which the expertise and knowledge of the EIB is very important in encouraging crowding-in from other investors. How is that to be replaced? When looking at a risky investment, it is important to have the confidence that others who are conservative investors are prepared to take the risk of investing in that project. It is long-term and really patient finance; giving people that kind of confidence is important.

We have not said much about the European Investment Fund tonight, but the role that it plays in relation to SMEs, particularly in critical and magical sectors such as fintech and bioscience, is important. Where is the replication of investment and of that critical due diligence? Often with such investments, it is not so much the money but the rigour of examining the capabilities of the industry and getting security on your investment for the future, by knowing that it will have the kind of rate of return that you anticipate. I would love to know who is working out how we replicate the expertise and experience. You cannot buy that off the shelf; it has built up over time. Although our involvement in the EIB and the EIF has really been only since we joined the EEC, the bank has been around since 1958. It is a substantial and long-term entity.

I would also be quite interested to know what work is being done not just with industries that may lose investments in the future but on blue-sky thinking about where, for example, a national infrastructure bank will identify that kind of innovative projects for the future. In that area both the EIB and the EIF, because of the eligibility for their funding, had a particular expertise.

I make no bones about it: I am extremely concerned about the impact of no deal on many of our industries, not least some of those vulnerable industries. In April, the Financial Times talked about the British Government going AWOL about what will be the scale and nature of finance for SMEs—innovative SMEs—in the event of no deal. If you balance that with the loss of EIB and EIF funding, quite a critical time is developing in our more innovative sectors and it is highly important that action is taken on that.

I do not want to be too overtly political, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder about the extent of some of the risks that we are taking, particularly by playing games with the concept of a no-deal Brexit. Could it be that the reason the Government have not been prepared to take a more aggressive stand on maintaining our involvement with the European Investment Bank—I appreciate that is almost impossible, given the need for treaty change—is that there are those within government who are frightened to admit how much we have benefited from those years of access to EIB and EIF funding? There is little logic in the situation we find ourselves in now concerning that kind of investment, and I have to confess that I am worried.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not answer that question.

It was very obvious when the Bill was passing through the other House that it was not fit for purpose. That has been dramatically emphasised with the report from the Constitution Committee, ably introduced this morning by my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, and it is the job of this House to take a badly drafted Bill and try to make it into something adequate for the purpose. Yet we are doing it with what is probably the most historic and significant Bill that any of us have ever dealt with.

I suppose it is inevitable that when a Government put a party before country, their life will get very complicated. Prime Minister Cameron did that when he called the referendum; he was putting a tactical issue within the Conservative Party to the nation and assuming it would get us out of a hole. It did not, and we find ourselves now in a very difficult position. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said in a forensically argued speech that the Bill, in the way that it was written, was “naive and … damaging”. I agree. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, cited “arrogance and incompetence”. There is a pattern emerging here. Almost everything that the Government have touched in relation to Brexit and the detail of Brexit has come catastrophically unstuck.

Parliament fought for, and was granted, access to the sectoral analyses that the Government had denied they had. Like many noble Lords, I spent an afternoon going through those sectoral analyses. It left me with a distinct feeling that we, as parliamentarians, were being taken for fools. They were shallow, unilluminating and frequently ill-thought out. They looked for all the world like a diversionary tactic. I have spent a better afternoon in bed with the flu watching replays of “Babe” and “Babe: Pig in the City”. It was a complete and utter waste of time. But should I have been surprised, when the Government have evaded every opportunity to be open and frank about the choices the country faces?

The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, put it succinctly in a powerful speech this morning by saying that under the guise of not hampering the direction of negotiations, the Government refuse to reveal anything. But by their bashfulness, they reveal what many of us have suspected all along: that they do not know the direction of travel or the destination. That is a very dangerous situation to be in.

The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, talked about financial services. We were promised an analysis in financial services. This is critical. There are a million jobs in financial services and we cannot get from anybody an indication of how the regulatory framework and the legal framework are going to work. This is not about the fat cats of the City; it is about the people who live in the next street to me and work in Glasgow, and others who work in Edinburgh, Leeds and Bristol. We need to make that information available to business; not to do so is unacceptable and extremely risky.

We hear a lot about free trade agreements and how they will sort out our difficulties with financial services. Free trade agreements deal with goods. Services are not traditionally covered in free trade agreements. On a couple of occasions they were tried and knocked back. It is not going to be easy to get an FTA relating to financial services, and everybody is pretending that it is not going to matter. Meantime, we have the Prudential Regulation Authority saying to all the big institutions, “You have to have your worst-case scenario ready”, and most of them know that it has to be ready by the end of the first quarter, at the end of March.

The noble Lord, Lord Hill, put it well when he said that there was a need for speed, honesty and certainty. That is true right across the board. I say in relation to Ireland that we have not got the speed, the honesty and the certainty about the nature of borders. Where I come from in the west of Scotland, the history of Ireland was regularly played out until a few years ago, when the Good Friday agreement resolved an awful lot of the issues. We have already talked about Gibraltar and the other territories, but it is critical in relation to the devolution settlement that we stop mucking about on this. Noble Lords have spoken with much greater authority than I ever could—despite having been, at one stage, Secretary of State for Scotland—about the detail of the devolution settlement, which could lead us to a constitutional impasse of quite significant proportions. Quite frankly—let us talk base politics—this is a gift to the separatists, and the longer we muck about on this the greater the gift is.

We are in a ludicrous situation where a Prime Minister cannot even make a speech that sets out the direction of travel. The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, in a very witty speech, talked about how we need to behave ourselves or we will start losing powers here—actually, some of us would say, “Bring it on. We think this place needs to be reformed”. I say to noble Lords in every part of this House: we are one of the most expert Chambers in the world, so let us use that expertise, for the good of our country, to try to make some sense out of this badly flawed piece of legislation. Frankly, if we cannot do that, we always have my noble friend Lord Adonis’s alternative.

Hansard Society: Audit of Political Engagement

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am not entirely sure that I accept that. However, I accept that it was a lower turnout.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

My Lords, I was prompted to respond to the Minister’s remarks on the length of the Scottish referendum campaign. I plead with him to take a serious look at the health and well-being of those who have had to go through those 18 month, and I urge him to think again. Does the Minister agree that the quality of debate among 16 and 17 year-olds during the referendum debate was astonishing? I admit I was wrong; I was one of the people who thought that it was wrong for the franchise to reduce the voting age to 16. I was comprehensively proved wrong. I heard some of the best debates I have ever heard in a lifetime in politics from 16 and 17 year- olds. I urge the Government and the Hansard Society to look at the lessons that have to be learnt from that, but please, not in a long referendum campaign.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Baroness is looking remarkably fit and well. I congratulate her on that after all her effort. The involvement of young people and the very serious approach which young people in Scotland took to the issues in the campaign provide lessons that we all need to think through. It is not possible to introduce voting at 16 in British elections between now and the May election campaign, so it is not an issue we have to consider at the moment, but it is perhaps one that we all need to discuss over the longer term.

EU: Scottish Independence

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what advice they have received on the consequences for the European Union membership of the remainder of the United Kingdom should Scotland secede.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the UK Government have already confirmed that they hold legal advice on this issue. The overwhelming weight of international precedent suggests that, in the event of Scottish independence, the remainder of the UK would continue to exercise the existing UK’s international rights and obligations and that an independent Scotland would constitute a new state. The UK Government judge that this situation will be recognised by the wider international community.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. However, in view of the events over the weekend in Catalonia, it is inconceivable that the European Commission would not be looking at the consequences for member states of the secession of one member state. In Scotland we have had enormous difficulty getting straight answers as to what the consequences will be for the citizens, so we need every citizen of this country to be confident that we have genuine advice and information on what will happen. Will the Government consider the establishment of an expert panel to look at the issues around the separation of Scotland from the rest of the UK to make sure that all British citizens do not suffer as a consequence of the break-up of Britain?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my noble and learned friend and colleague—and perhaps even noble kinsman—the Advocate General for Scotland has a legal forum, which met last Friday, which is considering these issues. In the course of 2013 the UK Government will publish a number of studies on some of the issues engaged. On the question of Catalonia and Spain, it is entirely clear that the Spanish Government are opposed to any idea of secession and would be likely to veto a Scottish application to join the European Union under current circumstances. There have been exchanges between the Spanish Government and the European Commission on this exact issue.

Scotland: Director General for External Affairs

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As a former Secretary of State for Scotland, the noble Lord is treading on slightly sensitive ground by comparing the Scottish Government to an English local authority. There is no statutory basis in the Scotland Act for such surcharges, but I think I hear the shape of an amendment that might be tabled to the current Scotland Bill when it reaches Committee.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the creation of jobs such as this leads to tremendous uncertainty that is added to by the coyness of the First Minister in revealing the date for the proposed referendum on separation? That uncertainty affects Scottish businesses and other businesses that may be seeking to invest. However, it also affects Scottish families who are worried about their pensions, social security payments and jobs. Would this money not be much better spent trying to find jobs for the one in four young Scotsmen who are out of work?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is an extremely good political intervention that I trust will appear in the Scottish press tomorrow. The devolved Administrations work best when they work constructively with the Westminster Government. That is how government should operate. Different Governments need to work constructively together. I know that there are those who know the Scottish First Minister better than I do and think that he is a very provocative populist who likes provoking the Westminster Government. That is clearly part of what is going on.