Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Baroness Maddock Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on putting forward this excellent amendment. It would be very good if something like this appeared in the manifestos of however many parties we have in the general election next year.

This comes down to the stewardship of the proceeds of non-renewable resources. That is the point. My part of the world, Cornwall, was one of the richest mining areas in the 19th century. Over a period of about 60 years it had the equivalent of billionaires and some of the greatest exports. It was certainly one of the richest parts of the UK. Where is it now? It is one of the poorest EU regions and receives some of the highest forms of EU aid in the European Union. Not one penny of that income from tin, copper and arsenic was retained, so we have an example of how that generational opportunity was very soon dissipated and lost to today’s generation. Perhaps that is a very simplistic illustration, but it is a very real one. We have one small quasi-sovereign wealth fund in the UK: the Shetland Charitable Trust. There are issues around that, but that local authority has managed to keep some of the proceeds from North Sea oil.

The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made the point extremely well. As he said, the Norwegian fund is so large that for each citizen—some 5 million of them—it would be something like $200,000 within a three-year period.

Having spent the income from North Sea oil, I do not see that within a European context overall we are wildly ahead of some of our neighbours because we had that asset. Clearly it is a challenge to government, and I suspect that the Treasury is not so keen in this area, particularly when we are tackling a £90 billion per annum deficit. It may be that this is a difficult time to persuade the Treasury that we should start banking it rather than paying off the mortgage. However, I think this is an important area. It is intergenerational. We think more about those issues these days. You have to start somewhere with something like this. You start when you start to explore and use a new non-renewable resource, and unconventional gas or oil is one of those. The start may be modest but I hope that as we reduce the deficit in our public expenditure such a sovereign wealth fund can take up the slack and be of benefit to future generations.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, I am happy to support this amendment. It is probably two weeks ago today that I was in Norway on an Inter-Parliamentary Union visit. We were privileged to have a presentation about the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund: how it started, where it was and the fact that during the recession we have all suffered, the sovereign wealth fund did not suffer. It was interesting to see it from that point of view, but we need to be aware of two things that are very different there.