Trade Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 6th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB) [V]]

My Lords, my interests are as listed in the register. It is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, who is extremely well informed. I speak to Amendment 22 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, and supported by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, and my noble friend Lady Boycott.

I will be brief and reserve most of my comments on the proposed trade and agriculture commission when we debate amendments in the group beginning with Amendment 26. However, I have a straightforward request for clarity, which is linked to this grouping of amendments. How do the Government plan to respond to the report that will be delivered by the existing Trade and Agriculture Commission within the next couple of months, when I assume it will report? We look forward to the conclusion of the crucially important task that the TAC was commissioned to undertake by the Secretary of State. It may well recommend a code of practice, as proposed in the amendment, and will certainly make recommendations that should influence the way we conduct future trade deals.

We must assume that the Trade Bill will have become law before the current TAC reports, so I am concerned that we will not be able to take its recommendations into account. I am interested in what the Minister has to say about how the Government will respond to the TAC’s recommendations retrospectively, having passed the Trade Bill before it delivers the report.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my environmental interests in the register and my interest as chairman of the Royal Veterinary College.

I support Amendment 22 in the name of my noble friend Lord Grantchester and other noble Lords across the House. I absolutely agree that there should be parliamentary scrutiny of a code for ensuring standards and of any variation of standards in these highly important areas. My primary areas of interest and expertise are in the environment and animal welfare.

I am sure that the Government may say that provisions such as those in subsection (5) in Amendment 22 would be cumbersome and could delay important free trade agreements which the Government regard as so important to the UK in forging its future place in the world. However, I hope the Minister can reassure us that lowering or abandoning standards will not occur frequently—in fact, that they will be an exception—so the use of the subsection (5) provisions will not prove burdensome at all.

I hope, indeed, that it might be the reverse: that the Minister might welcome this amendment. I am not sure that the Government truly understand the pressure to reduce standards that will come from other countries in some trade negotiations. Having a bulwark in legislation should be a comfort to the Government, so that they can say, “We’re very sorry. We can’t agree to any lowering of standards unless our Parliament approves that”.

Fossil Fuels: Business

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. We recognise that currently the costs of decarbonisation technologies are very high in many industries and many businesses are unable to pass on the increased costs of decarbonisation to consumers. That is why we are working very closely with industry and addressing this is one of the key aims of our industrial decarbonisation strategy.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a pensioner of the Environment Agency pension fund, which co-chairs the transition pathway initiative. The TPI report shows that no oil and gas company can yet claim to be aligned with the Paris agreement. Does the Minister agree that accelerating the phase out of petrol and diesel cars in the UK will do little to impact the global oil and gas market in which UK-based multinational oil and gas companies operate? Will he tell the House what real leverage there is in the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan on these global companies to drive faster and better delivery by the aim of Paris in their global operations?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

In the transition, the North Sea will remain a strategic asset for the UK providing high-quality jobs. We are working closely with the sector to support its transition. The noble Baroness will get more details in the upcoming energy White Paper and the North Sea transition deal.

Trade and Agriculture Commission and Trade Remedies Authority

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, the Government take their responsibility towards climate change and net zero extremely conscientiously. I can reassure the noble Baroness that we take advice from and consult all those bodies as appropriate when we are considering FTAs.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the Trade Remedies Authority is basically about locking the stable door after the horse has bolted and dumping has occurred. Given the Minister’s statement, it has a generous budget compared with that of the Trade and Agriculture Commission, which is about maintenance of standards and preventing dumping before it happens. Is that a sign of how unimportant the Government believe the Trade and Agriculture Commission to be, as already signalled by its stunted remits and limited period of existence?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, with all due respect, I do not accept the hypothesis advance by the noble Baroness. The Government have been clear that we will not sign a trade deal that will compromise our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards. We are a world leader in these areas and this will not change.

Science Research Funding in Universities (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Royal Veterinary College and, until recently, chancellor of Cranfield University. I was very pleased to be a member of the Science and Technology Committee working on this report and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for his excellent chairmanship. However, this report is almost ancient history; it was published over a year ago, and much has changed since the government response in October.

Research, development and innovation, building on the excellence of science in UK universities, has always been incredibly important, and is even more so now, when we need urgent solutions to serious problems—Covid, climate change, security and, most particularly, rebuilding our economy post Covid. The Government have recognised this in the R&D road map, as the noble Lord mentioned, with its commitment to public investment reaching £22 billion per year by 2024-25. But this would take it only to about 0.8% of GDP; the target of spending 2.4% of GDP by 2027 will need big changes to bring in institutional and business investment in research. I hope that the Minister can tell us how the Government intend to do this. The road map has high ambitions, which are much to be welcomed, but it is really still a series of asking absolutely the right questions without yet filling in the answers. We need to see the colour of the money, particularly in the spending review.

Universities are still experiencing many of the problems that we outlined in our report. University research is cross-subsidised from other sources, with a particular one being overseas students’ fees. It remains to be seen, as we will do very shortly, whether those students will turn up this year—or, indeed, possibly next.

As the noble Lord, Lord Patel, outlined, Brexit puts at risk not only access to European funding sources such as Horizon Europe. The Government have committed to meet any funding shortfalls, but Horizon Europe is as vital for open and free collaborations with the brightest and best across Europe as it is about the money. The Government must land an association agreement with Horizon Europe. The changes that the Government have offered to the visa system for researchers still leave visas as a potential barrier, due to their high cost.

I hope upon hope that there is one silver lining in Covid—that it has killed Augar. I mean the report, not the man; at least, I think I mean the report not the man but, when he gave evidence to the Committee, I felt decidedly homicidal towards him. Funding further education properly is important for our economic future; the last thing that hard-hit universities need right now is for the funding of further education to face a reduction in student fees. Can the Minister assure us that this frankly bonkers idea is now officially dead?

I turn to the dual funding system, which must be preserved, with a reversal of the quality-related funding stagnation of the last 10 years that the noble Lord, Lord Patel, talked about. This is particularly important, not only because of the funding levels but because dual funding gives universities important flexibility in creating research collaborations and developing research infrastructure. That ability should not be eroded.

Lastly, we must find ways of ensuring that the fruits of UK university and other research benefit the UK. All too often, as was shown by a previous report from the Science and Technology Committee, innovations researched and developed in the UK are snapped up and grown up by US investors and leave these shores. This is one of the things that we ought to learn about from the US. Can we not import that, rather than chlorine-washed chicken?

Committee on Climate Change: Progress Report

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I very much agree with the noble Baroness that heat pump technology requires support. In line with our commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions, we consider the role of heat pumps in driving down emissions extremely important. This includes large-scale heat pumps. We have the clean heat grant, designed as part of a wider package of measures to support the decarbonisation of heat. The focus of the scheme is on supporting the supply chains that will be needed to phase out the installation of high-carbon fossil fuels in heating and take it off the gas grid.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

I take forward the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, about zero-carbon housing. Can the Minister assure the House that all of the recovery schemes announced by the Prime Minister yesterday will be subject to a net-zero carbon test and a biodiversity recovery test to ensure that we do not lurch from the Covid crisis immediately to the climate change and biodiversity crisis?

[Lord Callanan]

The noble Baroness makes an important point and, as I said to the noble Lord, Lord Oates, we will be setting out our plans, publishing a heat and building strategy in due course. We will take these important points on board.

Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order 2019

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the Woodland Trust and I welcome the Government’s commitment to net zero carbon as enshrined in this instrument. I will make two very brief points. First, to reach this target, we have to move away from fossil fuels—I commend in that regard the noble Baroness’s speech immediately prior to mine—but we also have to undo some of the damage already done. One way to do that on a large scale is to plant more trees. Trees eat atmospheric carbon for breakfast. The Committee on Climate Change has called for a 9% increase in tree cover in this country. If that is to be done in the next 12 and a half years, which is the deadline calculated by the IPCC for having any hope of keeping temperature rises to below 1.5 degrees, it means 74 million trees a year. The Government’s current target is 11 million trees in the five-year lifetime of this Parliament—although who knows what that is going to be? In reality, in the past six months the Government have not even met their own target. According to figures kindly provided by Defra, government action resulted in the planting of fewer than 500,000 trees in the past six months. That is a long way off the rate required.

I recognise that the Government have now put in place some £60 million of additional funding for tree planting in the interests of combating climate change, but that is still not enough. The amendment is therefore fully justified. We need rapid clarity on how the target will be delivered. Unless planting rates are increased 50-fold, the tree element of the CO₂ reduction plan will simply fail. It can be done and it will have huge additional benefits, for biodiversity as well as a range of human health and resilience effects, reduction in heat, water resource protection, flood risk management and air quality improvement. So it is worth doing, it is effective, but it needs to be done faster. The Government’s commitment is admirable in principle, but it needs urgent practical action in the next 12 years, and not by 2050, if the impact of tree planting is to have results. So I commend the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about just doing it.

I make this comment to critics of the target. We are not doing ourselves a service by being mealy-mouthed about the costs of doing nothing. I understand entirely why the climate change committee has taken a conservative approach and does not want to try to estimate the costs of not hitting the target. But the reality is that we do not need to do that; we simply need to ask the insurance industry globally. It has recognised the impact of floods, of heat, of ecosystem destruction, and the impacts on agriculture. It is already paying out for those effects. Ask the insurance industry if you are in any doubt about whether the investment that we are envisaging is worth while.

[Viscount Ridley]

My Lords, I declare my interests in coal but also in renewable energy—wind and wood in particular. I am genuinely shocked by the casual way in which the other place nodded through this statutory instrument on Monday, committing future generations to vast expenditure to achieve a goal that we have no idea how to reach technologically without ruining the British economy and the British landscape. We are assured without any evidence that this measure will have,

“no significant … impact on business”—

but where is the cost-benefit analysis on which this claim is based? Where is the impact assessment? They do not exist. We are told that the Treasury will run exercises in costing the proposals after we have agreed them, but that is irrational. Who among us in our private life says, “Yes, we’ll sign a contract to buy a house, and only after the ink on the purchase is dry will we try to find out the price of the house”?

We are faced with a measure which is likely to cost at least £1 trillion on top of the £15 billion a year that we are now spending on subsidies to renewable energy. Let us remind ourselves just how big a sum £1 trillion is. If you spent a pound a second, it would take you 30,000 years to get through £1 trillion. You would have had to start before the peak of the last Ice Age, when woolly mammoths and Neanderthals roamed across the tundra where we now sit. Now we are talking about spending £1,000 a second for the next 30 years.

The Committee on Climate Change says that the cost will be even higher. It assumes that UK GDP will have almost doubled, from about £2 trillion to about £3.9 trillion a year by 2050, and that we will have been spending 1% to 2% of GDP every year between now and then. That means that we will have spent between £30 billion and £60 billion a year for 30 years: a total of £900 billion to £1.8 trillion. That number has been described in this debate as “manageable” and “affordable” by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. It has been described as “nickel and dime” by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. But hang on a minute—where does the Committee on Climate Change get the estimate of 1% to 2% of GDP?

Off-site Manufacture for Construction (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I should declare an interest as chancellor of Cranfield University, which is involved in off-site construction, and as chairman of the Woodland Trust, of which you will hear more anon. The construction sector in the UK is a big thing, and will see an investment of £600 billion over the next decade, including £44 billion for housing. The sector has low productivity, and lags behind other major industrial sectors in this country in productivity improvement. It faces some major challenges: the dash for housing and a lack of skills, which will only get worse with Brexit—as, indeed, everything appears to do.

The construction sector is at a crossroads. As a member of the Science and Technology Committee, which worked on this report, I welcome the opportunity of this important debate. I thank my noble friend Lord Patel for his chairmanship, and the noble Lord, Lord Mair, for his impressive expertise, charmingly and modestly offered.

Off-site construction offers a major contribution to thinking about and delivering a revolution in the construction sector. Our report defines what we mean by off-site construction: I am sure all readers of it are now fully conversant with the difference between volumetric and panelised construction. Indeed, off-site construction is not a new phenomenon. Prefabricated buildings of many sorts have been around since the time of the original prefabs, and many self-build and individual-build houses have depended substantially on prefabricated elements.

We now have an opportunity not only for the UK to maintain its position at the forefront of off-site manufacturing globally, in the commercial and high-rise residential sectors, but to gain major benefits in the low-rise residential sector, where the UK currently lags behind. Our report outlined the benefits of off-site construction. A recent National House-Building Council report showed that the construction industry companies currently involved in off-site construction were most motivated by a number of factors: first, improved quality in what they could offer; secondly, efficiency and productivity; and, thirdly, accelerated delivery, with shorter end-to-end construction times and considerably shorter times on-site.

Labour and skill shortages were another driver. There is an aging workforce and the impending risks to the labour market of Brexit—and it appears that the Brexit labour market applies to Prime Ministers at the moment as well. Thirty-five per cent of construction workers in London currently come from outside the UK, with the majority of them being EU workers.

Let me highlight another two benefits that the companies involved did not particularly draw to our attention. The first is the reduction in construction waste. When I was chief executive of the Environment Agency, I was appalled that 30% of construction materials delivered on to conventional sites left as waste without ever being used. That was not a great contribution to productivity or the circular economy. The second benefit concerns health and safety. It is estimated that off-site construction could reduce work-related health and safety impacts by 80%.

The Government’s response to our report was pretty positive. It is encouraging to see how a range of investment and other measures are being put in place to help bring about this construction revolution. That seems to be envisaged in the construction sector deal and I urge the Construction Leadership Council, in leading that deal, to see this as a medium to long-term effort, not a quick fix.

The then co-chair of the Construction Leadership Council, Andrew Wolstenholme, gave evidence and was exceptionally visionary in this respect. He described the fundamental change in culture and approach that needs to be achieved in the sector and outlined a comprehensive road map for doing that. I have rarely been so impressed by the clarity of thought in how to achieve sustained change in a major sector and it bears re-reading by everyone involved in change programmes of any kind. I commend it to the Minister.

There have been previous spurts in the off-site construction market, the last of which stalled with the recession in 2008. Governments are not particularly good at keeping a consistent course over a number of years longer than the electoral cycle—though one can ponder at the moment on how long the electoral cycle is—so the role of the Construction Leadership Council is fundamental in keeping the implementation and change effort going until the job is done. Will the Minister comment on the need for sustained long-term leadership and ongoing support for the Construction Leadership Council?

The Government have some key roles, and I welcome the scale and range of initiatives and investments that they have outlined in their response to our report and subsequently. The Government have a unique opportunity in driving this through the presumption in favour of off-site construction, but they need, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, said, to monitor that presumption, and compliance with it, and not to take no for an answer. Ultimately, I would like the scope of the presumption in favour of off-site construction to be expanded to all government departments and public authorities. Will the Minister comment on that too? The Government also need, through Homes England, to influence the procurement of off-site construction by housing associations and local authorities.

Of great importance are measures to ensure the pipeline of projects so that the security of supply can be assured and confidence promoted in the investment market and among planners. Management of the development of the market is important. The risk of success is that the market might overheat and outrun manufacturing capacity, resulting in disruption in delivery and extension of lead times. This would significantly adversely influence clients, architects, design engineers and contractors just at the time when we need them all to be enthusiastic adopters of off-site construction thinking.

On the labour and skills market challenge, I commend the work on apprenticeships and T-levels. Of particular importance will be the retraining of the existing workforce. The skills required are significantly different from those currently deployed, with scarce digital skills particularly important and, potentially, in the future, in short supply and great demand. I have discussed the construction workforce position with my 80 year-old brickie, who told me firmly that there will always be a requirement for his skills as long as brick-built houses still stand up. He is not thinking of retiring yet. However, the transition is not a simple one and a mix of new and traditional skills will be required for as long as our existing building stock endures.

Let me end with one last opportunity that off-site construction can offer. This was the point at which my interest declaration as chairman of the Woodland Trust becomes material. Part of the construction industry already recognises the value of wood in off-site construction. For example, Legal & General and Swan Housing Association have both invested in factories for off-site construction using cross-laminated timber. CLT can be used for a variety of housing projects, from terraced homes to apartment blocks. Wood as a building material has many virtues, including fine aesthetic qualities and its sustainable nature, but by far the biggest driver needs to be its role as a carbon store in combatting climate change.

In its most recent report, the International Panel on Climate Change has sombrely shown that we have only 12 years, if we are to keep the global average temperature rise to under 1.5 degrees. Society must move away from fossil fuels completely, but must also undo some of the damage already done. One of the ways of doing this on a large scale is to plant more trees. Planting a tree locks in carbon and reduces CO₂ in the atmosphere. If that tree is then felled and processed 40, 60 or 70 years later and embodied in a building for a further 100 years, its carbon reduction impact is extended mightily.

The UK Committee on Climate Change called for a 9% increase in tree cover in this country. The Government gave a manifesto commitment to plant 11 million trees in the lifetime of this Parliament—though who knows what that will be. The climate change committee has clearly laid out that meeting that commitment would require planting 74 million trees a year, not 11 million trees over five years. I look forward to debating this with the Government as part of the forthcoming consultation on the England tree strategy. I commend the virtues of wood to the off-site construction market, both intrinsically as a material and for its undoubted contribution to climate change reduction. I hope our architects, designers, construction companies and housebuilders will “embrace their inner tree”, benefit from using more wood in off-site construction and help drive the planting of more trees. I hope the Minister will support my call.

Life Sciences Industrial Strategy (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I too served on the life sciences and industrial strategy Select Committee, and I commend the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I am not going to talk about buses. I am going to talk about the NHS.

The Government’s ambition to make the UK the most attractive place for national and international investment is highly commendable, particularly in life sciences, where we are already a global leader, though as an aside to the main question for debate, I would recommend to the House as obligatory viewing the appearances last night and this morning of Sir Paul Nurse, Director of the Francis Crick Institute. Sir Paul has, with his great authority, laid out clearly that we are in imminent and real risk of squandering this position of global leadership in life sciences research and innovation as a result of Brexit and particularly the lack of clarity about the negotiations and process.

One of the reasons we should be a global leader in life sciences is that we have the NHS, which provides increasing access to large-scale, long-term databases and a testbed for innovation on a national scale. The UK biobank is an example, with half a million participants across the country and a growing resource for medical research. There are many other future opportunities for capitalising on the NHS in this way. I am going to focus particularly on recommendations 16 to 20 from the report, which are about the role of the NHS.

The Government’s response outlined an additional £500 million in government funding for the life sciences sector as part of the sector deal and that,

“our globally renowned NHS will be a key partner in delivering the deal”.

But when taking evidence from a range of research and NHS bodies, it became clear to the committee—focused by the NHS on the adoption and spread of life sciences—that innovations in support of research and improved patient care were simply not happening either at pace or at scale. The Government have put in place actions to encourage adoption of life sciences innovation by the NHS. They have relicensed the Academic Health Science Networks for a further five years and given them a more explicit focus on the nationwide adoption of proven innovations. AHSNs have committed to nationwide adoption spread goals, but only for seven programmes over the next two years. This seems to me too little, too slowly. Indeed, the view of some witnesses was that the AHSNs were trivial in scale and lacked oomph. Throughout their response the Government list how NHS England, NHS Improvement and the AHSNs figure in some individual programmes for innovation adoption, but the response fails to focus on how the NHS can be developed as a fundamentally innovative organisation and system.

So let me turn to the relevant committee recommendations, what we heard from witnesses and what the Government said in response. Recommendation 16 is particularly germane: it says that the current structure of the NHS stifles innovation and that a focus on cost control and lack of co-ordination between NHS bodies means adoption and the spread of innovations are not given the priority they require.

The Government in response to this issue have set up yet another new group, called the NHS life sciences and innovation group. In common with the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, I was concerned that we were seeing yet another group. It reminded me of the old story of the politician who when he identifies a problem makes a speech, and when he identifies a serious problem makes a series of speeches. We seem here to have a series of committees, the one layered on the other. What is needed is not another committee or a range of small-scale initiatives, but a concerted, integrated approach to changing the whole culture of the NHS away from cost reduction and risk avoidance to one embracing innovation.

I recognise that the Government have outlined their response—again, I quote:

“Working with clinicians, managers, policy makers, industry and charities we are developing plans to expand the pipeline of innovations proven to be effective, and their subsequent adoption at pace and scale”.


I recognise that progress has been made on implementing NHS England’s published 12 actions to support and apply research across the NHS. I recognise that NHS England,

“is exploring additional financial incentives for increasing the adoption of innovation, for example through the development of CQUIN indicators, and linkage to best practice tariffs”.

However, it was clear from across the evidence that we received from NHS England, NHS Improvement and others that the NHS sees new things as cost and not opportunity, and that its objective is not to spend money. NHS Improvement told us that innovation,

“is not the centrepiece of what the NHS is trying to do … securing productivity is”.

We had much discussion about the more abstruse definitions of innovation. There were “additive innovations” and “substitutive innovations”. Additive innovation is where the innovation provides higher levels of care but costs more; substitutive innovations provide higher standards of care and save money. There seems to be a notional commitment from the NHS to adopt the substitutive innovations but not the additive ones, since those would cost more and cannot square with pressurised NHS budgets. Yet we are clear that the additive innovations could be some of the most promising and profitable for UK plc.

Even the substitutive innovations, which improve standards and save money, are not being adopted by the NHS nationwide at pace. I therefore commend wholeheartedly to the House the committee’s recommendation 20, which urges mandation,

“of those innovations that have been shown to improve patient outcomes and provide good value for money”.

A small start on this has been made in the past. Medicines approved by NICE are allegedly mandated to the NHS, but local CCGs do not always approve local adoption. It is interesting that the Accelerated Access Review did not address non-adoption by local clinicians or CCGs. CCGs can decide what to do individually. We appear to have lost the N from NHS, in that decisions are now made in such a delegated way that any central mandation simply does not happen.

Let me illustrate the lack of co-ordinated effort in making one national decision on best practice which could then swiftly be adopted across the whole system. When I was chief executive of Diabetes UK, we developed innovative best practice care pathways which would improve care for people with diabetes and save substantial sums of money. We first offered them to the NHS, but there was no real mechanism for introducing standardised best practice across the system. In desperation, I offered them to the then Chancellor, George Osborne, and told him that I could save him £1 billion from the NHS budget on the basis of them. I am still waiting for a reply. In the end, we as a charity had to hike a dedicated change team around every CCG and trust, persuading them one by one to adopt best practice which would save them money. We did not charge them; we simply took our costs from the money they saved.

I commend an initiative by NHS Improvement which also uses boots on the ground to persuade trusts and CCGs one by one. It is called Getting It Right First Time, a programme which has now expanded to cover more than 90 specialties working with local clinical networks. However, mandation of best practice, validated once at national level and then mandated across this allegedly “National” Health Service, would be so much more immediate. It should not have to be this difficult to get these things to happen.

The USA does not have the national test bed for innovation that the NHS represents, except perhaps on a smaller scale in the veterans administration hospitals. Oversight by the medical insurance companies, by managed healthcare organisations and by commercial and not-for-profit hospital chains shows how innovation and best practice standardisation can be mandated and backed up by local key performance indicators.

Why is mandation of innovation which improves patient outcomes and saves money not supported by the Government as an easy way forward? We can no longer as a nation afford an NHS which is highly variable in terms of innovation and value for money at the whim of local CCGs, trusts and individual clinicians.

I have one last challenge for the Government. As yet, we do not have a strategy for developing and exploiting innovation to meet the real future challenges of the NHS: ageing, multiple complex conditions, resistant infections, antibiotic resistance and general immune system compromise—to name but a few. How do we fill the “somebody needs to” gap? What does government plan in this respect to really anticipate the future in our innovation and research strategy as part of the industrial strategy? It is a vital strategy; we are a global leader and are in danger of losing that position. The Government need to show more bottle over this strategy.

Industrial Strategy

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree entirely with the last sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, about implementation. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will forgive me if I steal something he has already said in your Lordships’ House. He quite rightly pointed out that this is the ninth industrial strategy in his lifetime. In fact he said it was the eighth, but the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, phoned him up and said that he had omitted his strategy of 20 years ago. The lesson from all these nine strategies, not all of which have been successful, is that implementation does not just happen. The Government’s Industrial Strategy that we are now considering lays out important implementation mechanisms: continued chairmanship by the PM of the Economy and Industrial Strategy Cabinet Committee and the creation of an independent industrial strategy council. I take seriously some of the reservations about the industrial strategy council that have been made. However, the overwhelming message is that these mechanisms must be designed to persist over many years to ensure that the strategy is delivered not just over an electoral cycle but over a decade and longer.

I am sure that the Minister will assure us that a wide range of other players will also shoulder the burden of implementation. Sector deals gave a key role to business players but are no substitute for sustained government leadership. Can the Minister also assure the House that sector deals will not overly rely on the established technologies of major incumbent firms but will support disruptive innovation which can create the industries of tomorrow?

I did not intend to talk about the work that the Select Committee on Science and Technology is doing on the examination of the Life Sciences Industrial Strategy and sector deal. However, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, say that he was reassured by the evidence taken in the Select Committee hearings, I will take a contrary view and say that I am unutterably miserable about it. We are in a position where both nationally and internationally the National Health Service is seen as a huge asset to this country for driving innovation and its uptake and for the concomitant benefit to businesses in a global sense in the life sciences. However, in reality, the evidence given by witness after witness has been totally dispiriting, both from the private company and quoted company point of view, and from the point of view of the NHS itself, about the ability to ensure that the NHS uptakes innovation, implements best practice and reaps the benefits of substantial cost savings that many of these innovations would bring. It is dispiriting, and I hope that the Government can bite the bullet.

I know that I am probably at the radical end of the spectrum on the solutions which seem to me to be sensible but I have led health services for 20 years and been the chief executive of Diabetes UK, a major research-based patient group, and it seems that we have now reached the point when 1,000 flowers blooming is no longer the name of the game but mandation of uptake of best practice, which happens regularly in America through the insurance companies, has to happen.

However, I wanted to talk not about the NHS but about infrastructure. I very much welcome the more strategic approach to housing and transport that the Industrial Strategy White Paper talks about, but the reality on the ground is not hugely encouraging at the moment. Rather than recognising the need for the right housing in the right place, the dash for housing is causing real problems at a local level.

First, on housing quality and the quality of place, we are now building the smallest houses in Europe. I used to dread going to stay with my friends in Holland because they lived in a rather small, boxy house. I used to get severe claustrophobia and had to break out after a very short time. However, the reality is that we are now building houses even smaller than those built by the Dutch. Many housing developments lack amenities such as transport infrastructure and there are insufficient green spaces, with all the benefits for health and the environment that these bring.

I was privileged to sit on the ad hoc Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, and I commend its report to your Lordships—it still stands. We are very much at risk of building the slums of the future if we do not take up the recommendations of that report. Also, insufficient affordable housing in a range of tenures is being built, and that will have an inevitable impact on the supply of workers who are vital to the industrial strategy.

There is not enough long-term planning to ensure that housing is for life and can cope with the stages of family growth through empty-nesting to, ultimately, older age. That is an important point in view of the fact that one of the four great challenges of the industrial strategy is ageing—a challenge which I am sure, as previous speakers have said, is of interest to your Lordships’ House.

Regarding transport infrastructure, which is fundamental to the industrial strategy, the White Paper focuses primarily on major strategic rail and road routes and ignores the smaller feeder systems, which are underinvested and congested but which will nevertheless still have the power to gum up the works in terms of industrial strategy development.

So where does the problem lie? There are a number of issues. One is that the dash for housing and the streamlining of the planning system, which we debated during the passage of successive planning Bills in your Lordships’ House, have had some serious repercussions. Planning authorities are now so driven by housing targets and by a fear of the sanctions that the Government can apply if an agreed local plan that both meets and delivers the housing targets is not in place that they are approving plans which are about not the right houses in the right places but the wrong houses in the wrong places. If local authorities fail to deliver a plan or the subsequent housing, developers can have a free run through to put things wherever they like, and government can take away planning powers and make decisions on behalf of local authorities. Local authorities simply do not wish that to happen.

In addition to local authorities making decisions on the run to avoid those sanctions, they are also very much weakened as planning authorities as a result of financial cuts and they are denuded of specialist staff. That, again, was a finding of the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. As a result, in working out the plans, they are hugely dependent on the analyses undertaken by the developers. Similarly, developers have the whip hand where viability assessments are used to challenge agreements made with them about their contribution to infrastructure and their commitment to affordable housing. In many cases, it is very much a David and Goliath situation. The chaps with sharp suits and sharp elbows—the planning consultants to major developers—roll in and put forward detailed cases demonstrating that it is simply no longer possible for developers to deliver on the infrastructure contributions and affordable housing numbers that they originally promised, and quite frankly the local authority has no means of seriously challenging that.

To make matters worse, these viability assessments are not in the public domain, being regarded as commercially confidential, so local people and local interest groups are unable to judge the calculations that underlie the decisions to short-change infrastructure contributions and affordable housing numbers. Therefore, I urge the Minister to consider how viability assessments can be routinely published in the future so that local people can judge whether their local authority is being robust in reflecting their interests. If that does not happen, we will have a backlash from many unhappy local communities across the country which see the reality of what is happening in the dash for housing.

The Industrial Strategy White Paper says:

“We want to support greater collaboration between councils, a more strategic approach to planning housing and infrastructure, more innovation and high quality design in new homes”.


I agree entirely with that sentiment but how will government shift the planning system from the sorry position it has been driven to, which certainly is not delivering the Government’s vital aspirations for housing and transport infrastructure at the heart of the industrial strategy

Deregulation: Public Services and Health and Safety

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare some past interests. I was a former regulator of the environment as the chief executive of the Environment Agency, a former regulator of biodiversity and conservation as the chairman of Natural England and a former regulator of health and social care quality as the founder chairman of the Care Quality Commission.

I thank my noble friend Lady Andrews for this hugely timely debate in the light of the Grenfell tragedy. It is also timely as today marks, fortuitously, the day that the repeal Bill is published. It is now out there on the internet for those noble Lords who want to wade through its 57 pages. This is no doubt a signal for some Brexiteers to come out of the traps and condemn EU regulation, particularly environmental regulation, and call for its watering down as part of this process.

I was pondering how to encapsulate the wildness of some of the calls for a reduction in EU regulation. However, I spotted an article in the Telegraph in the spring in which it called on the Conservative Party to,

“promise a bonfire of EU red tape”.

The examples the article mentioned were pretty interesting. For example, it referred to the working time directive. So we want to go back to doctors falling asleep while treating patients, do we? The article also referred to builders and newts. Apparently, the entire construction industry is on its knees as a result of too many newts. It also referred to forcing householders to use dim energy-saving lightbulbs. So let us fry the planet with climate change instead. And, of course, there was reference to the perennial bent bananas. I find it difficult to take seriously a campaign with these four prime examples. It is a real shame that noble Lords on the Conservative Privy Council Benches who have continuously advocated such a bonfire are not in their place for this important debate.

A considerable proportion of the EU regulation that will need to be transposed is environmental regulation, the purpose of which is to protect not only the environment but also the public. Therefore, I want to focus on the environmental regulation issue. European environmental regulation has delivered for the environment. We now have cleaner beaches and bathing water. Before the European bathing water directive was passed, only 16 beaches in this country had bathing water considered safe for people to swim in. We now have more than 630 safe beaches. European environmental regulation has reduced waste and made more environmentally sound our handling of waste and our reprocessing and reusing of valuable raw materials. It has also made a huge difference to the protection of our wildlife sites. Every year some 15% of our sites of special scientific interest used to be damaged. That is now down to 0.1% a year on average.

The EU has also been very instrumental in introducing regulation to reduce air pollution. The whole issue of acid rain, which was a major problem for European countries, was resolved by European legislation. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, Europe, and the legislation coming from it, will be a key factor in the short term in trying to get more proactive action in this country on tackling urban air pollution and its impacts on human health.

Therefore, the repeal Bill is very important. However, I would like to outline a couple of principles with which I suspect the repeal Bill will struggle. We may well see European legislation and regulation being brought across without too much fiddling—I use that as a technical term—but the principles that underlie much of our environmental progress are at risk of not being transposed successfully: principles such as the polluter pays and the precautionary principle. Therefore, I ask the Minister to tell us how these vital environmental principles can be brought across safely and not be lost in the process.

There is also the issue of compliance and enforcement. I used to be responsible for the quality of water in the Thames. It was impossible to get adequate government investment and to free up Thames Water to allow the super-sewer to stop London being the last capital in the world that uses its river as an open sewer at times of high rainfall. European legislation meant that we were put into infraction and fined eye-watering sums daily, and that is why the Government enabled the creation of the super-sewer, which is now under way. Therefore, although we will lose the infraction process, the fining process and the European Court of Justice, we need to make sure that individuals’ access to environment justice is not lost in the transposition. We will need proper mechanisms to allow that to be replicated effectively in this country. Access to the courts is not enough. We have recently seen a move to reduce the ability of private individuals to call for a judicial review by removing the cap on the costs. Your future livelihood and assets are now threatened if you take a judicial review without that protection.

We do not simply want a process whereby local authorities and companies can be fined for environmental failure; in cases where government has played a major part, we need a mechanism that allows the nation to hold government accountable for failure to deliver environmental outcomes. There are a number of suggestions for that, such as an environmental ombudsman process or an environment court. I have no strong views about which it should be, but it must be an effective process that allows action to be taken where there has been inadequate environmental protection.

Of course, the environmental legislation that we have is not just good for the environment and for all of us who depend on environmental quality; it is also good for business. For example, the global market for low-carbon environmental goods and services is estimated to be €4.2 trillion, and the EU member state market share is currently 21% of that, according to BEIS figures. Environmental impacts are the third most important factor for EU customers after quality and price. According to a report by the Office for National Statistics, environmental goods and services contribute £29 billion to the UK economy in value added, and they account for 373,000 full-time jobs. Therefore, there are big business opportunities here and big opportunities to use environmental regulation to drive innovation.

Some claim that environmental regulation is simply a burden and a barrier to global competitiveness. However, thinking about that rationally, the reality is that, if we fail at global competitiveness, it is because we are not sufficiently innovative and because inevitably we find it difficult to compete on labour-market costs with companies and industries based in countries with less labour-market and other regulation. Therefore, we need to find ways of promoting innovation and make sure that we compete on the basis of added value, not a race to the bottom on standards.

I have been impressed by the way in which various regulators have demonstrated how their approach to regulation supports innovation under the Government’s productivity plan and complements the industrial strategy. Indeed, businesses mostly do not complain about environmental legislation. However, they say that, if they are to have a level playing field, there needs to be clarity on standards, an adequate lead time to allow industry to adapt to those standards and innovative ways of meeting them. The last thing they want is changes of direction, very short notice and flip-flops—which might be a bit of a problem for this Government.

Of course, we all want better regulation, and various noble Lords have spoken about that. It needs to be risk based, proportionate and transparent. The regulators need to work in partnership with the regulated businesses and parties and to help them improve, not stand on the sidelines until they get it wrong and then shout at them. But that implies that we must have resources for the agencies to allow them to take that more risk-based and collaborative approach. Alas, that has not been the history of the environmental regulators over the past few years.

I have been privileged to work with a number of people in the better regulation field, not least the noble Lord, Lord Curry, who I am delighted to see is in his place. He led the Better Regulation Executive and did some excellent work. Indeed, when he said that he was standing down, I rather fancied the job, so I phoned up and inquired about it. It turns out that there is not going to be a chairman of the Better Regulation Executive in the future and that the Government have simply handed that over to the Civil Service as a process.

With the one in, three out rule, and without proper consideration of the full benefits of the costs to business and proposed benefits to the public—not just focusing on the £10 billion of savings but looking at what environmental regulation delivers—we need proper oversight of the whole better regulation process. We need an independent body that combines business and beneficiaries, and keeps a firm eye not just on the costs of regulation but the benefits. Environmental protection is for people’s future, and it is too important to be a victim of the anti-regulation political tendentiousness we see in the better regulation field at the moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I have forgotten where I had got to. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, raised a rather existential question at the beginning of her speech when she asked, “What kind of state do we want to live in?”. Many noble Lords on the other side may be thinking about that at the moment, as noble Lords on our side may also be. I heard the Mayor of London on “Newsnight” last night talking about London and the tale of two cities: the invisible people as well as the visible people. This awful tragedy at Grenfell goes far beyond the narrow issues we have been talking about today. It asks all of us what kind of state we want to live in. However, I take issue with one point the noble Baroness made, when she said that we were ideologically opposed to regulation. As someone who was chairman of the Care Quality Commission for several years and has been quite heavily involved in education for many years, I can tell the noble Baroness that we are not ideologically opposed to regulation; I will address that issue later on in my speech.

I will go further than that and say that regulation is essential to any civilised society. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred back to Lord Shaftesbury. I had hoped that Lord Shaftesbury was a Tory, but I note that as it happens, he was a Whig. However, many former Conservative Prime Ministers throughout the Victorian age were at the forefront of bringing regulation into the factories, to chimneys and the like. So let us be absolutely clear that regulation has a long and proud history and that it is an important and crucial part of improving people’s lives. That does not mean, as a number of noble Lords said, that all regulation is perfect, or that some regulations have gone beyond their sell-by date. All regulation needs to be kept under constant review.

We have heard a number of examples from the environmental field, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Smith, and there has been no question that regulation has achieved hugely beneficial things. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, mentioned beaches and water quality, as well as air quality and the like. There is no question that regulations have had a huge impact to the good in that area. However, the noble Baroness is concerned within the context of Brexit about some of the principles that underlie some of that EU regulation. For example, she mentioned the principle that the polluter pays. There is nothing to stop us incorporating that as a principle in our future environmental legislation here, and in a post-Brexit world we can carry on many of the good things that have come out of Europe, of which there are many. The noble Baroness mentioned pollution in the inner Thames. The Thames tideway project will remove 60 million litres of raw sewage out of the Thames, and we can do that both in or outside Europe.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone]

It is slightly fishy that action on the tideway happened only when Europe threatened to fine us.

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

Europe has brought us many good things.