Ministers: Legal Costs

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I have explained the circumstances about why the taxpayer gets involved in legal expenses. I note the noble Lord’s point.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

I was there when the Secretary of State gave her statement to the Science and Technology Committee this morning and was remarkably unconvinced, particularly by the Permanent Secretary’s assertion that all the aspects of this case had been discussed with legal and technical advisers before the relevant tweet was made. I simply ask the Minister: does she think that was valid advice? Is this the way the Government think a senior Cabinet Minister should communicate with the body for which she has responsibility?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My understanding is that the legal expenditure was approved by the department’s accounting officer. That was made clear. I believe that the Permanent Secretary was there with the Secretary of State. I refer noble Lords to her statement, to all that she has done, and to the fact that she apologised to move this matter on.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of the Labour Climate and Environment Forum and of the Royal Veterinary College.

This law is indeed pernicious, as has been aptly shown by the noble Lords, Lord Wallace and Lord Hain. It is a Bill aimed specifically at the BDS movement. The main targets are ostensibly official boycotts and official divestment, but the memorandum document acknowledges that it would be difficult to define the precise limits of boycotts or divestments so, to prevent that, the Bill is cast in broader terms of “procurement and investment decisions”. That, from my point of view, was mistake No. 1. The result is that the Bill would have serious impacts on a wide range of organisations. I honestly cannot believe that the Government intend such collateral damage to happen.

The Bill would constrain this wide range of public bodies from taking procurement and investment decisions that incentivise ethical business, environmental responsibility and climate change action. Public procurement and the Local Government Pension Scheme’s investments are important levers for change—in environmental improvement, climate change and social welfare. It is vital that we continue to drive ESG considerations through investment and purchasing decisions.

The Bill creates a really unhelpful confusion over what is and is not acceptable when factoring in risk on environmental, social and governance issues as legitimate investment risks that need to be taken into account. The Bill could be interpreted as preventing action on taking these legitimate risks into account, which would be directly at odds with the fiduciary duty of pension scheme trustees. It is almost impossible to take account of human, environmental and governance issues in particular circumstances of contracts or investments without also taking account of abuses in a territorial element. For example, if a decision was made, either by a pension scheme or public procurer, that they would not have anything to do with palm oil grown in an unsustainable fashion, that could be seen as being against the palm oil countries because it is their policies that are allowing unsustainable production to take place.

The most heinous part of the Bill in practical terms is Clause 5, in that it opens up a wide range of collateral damage through judicial review. It is particularly dubious. Clause 5(5) and (6) are incredibly widely drawn. They allow any interested person with

“sufficient interest in the subject-matter of the proposed application”

to apply for a judicial review. That is amazingly wide. It allows anybody, from anywhere in the world—indeed, anyone walking along the street—to raise judicial review concerns. To me, that is the richest thing in this clause because over the last few years the Government have tried consistently to narrow the criteria for being able to bring judicial review on environmental grounds. I ask the Minister: on what basis have the Government decided that other interested parties, in a very wide definition, should be able to initiate judicial reviews against local authorities and the Local Government Pension Scheme? How will they prevent the downside of simply anyone with a grudge having a go?

The question of financially material risks is the subject of a lot of guidance. The Law Commission is clear that investors must consider financially material risks in all their investment decisions. The Bill makes no provision for investors to take account of the financial risk or impact of the asset they may or may not be buying or investing in. This is something that investors and members of pension schemes are quite rightly increasing as a focus in their considerations. The Financial Markets Law Committee recently took the view that such considerations were compatible with investors’ fiduciary duty. Will the Minister undertake to include the risk of fiduciary material risks and the impact of investment risks in paragraph 4 of the Schedule?

A key way in which pension schemes, investment managers and the Local Government Pension Scheme generally manage climate risk to scheme members is through engagement with the companies in which they invest and by voting at their AGMs. Clause 2 designates investment decisions as including “management”. Is “management” that engagement activity—that activism at AGMs? Does this leave the Local Government Pension Scheme open to challenge on such engagement? Can the Government clarify the meaning of “management”? If they cannot clarify it sufficiently, will they remove it?

Does the Bill cover the pension scheme Nest, which covers automatic enrolment, and the Pension Protection Fund? Will these same considerations apply to trustees of these two funds? In particular, Nest offers ethical and Sharia funds for members who wish their pension funds to reflect their moral and religious views. Will that become impossible in the future?

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, talked about universities being included in the Bill, despite their not being public bodies. The fact that the Bill is a disproportionate solution to the problem has caused this, in that it has severe consequences for the higher education sector. I will not repeat the points the noble Lord made and will say simply that they have to be addressed if our university sector is not going to be further constrained. Are the universities some of the bodies that are caught by mistake by the Bill, and will the Government exempt universities from its provisions?

The Minister kind of said that the issues from the devolved Governments were inconsequential because foreign policy is a UK-wide government responsibility and not devolved. But we cannot overlook that the Welsh Government are committed to using procurement as a lever for driving economic, social and environmental benefits. We cannot overlook that the Scottish Government have developed a strategy on public procurement that places a strong emphasis on climate change. Since the Government have not sought legislative agreement with the devolved Governments, how do they intend to deal with these devolved procurement policies?

This is not an unintended consequences Bill—which, being kind, I originally thought it was—but a pernicious Bill, and I hope that the Minister is sincere about considerable amendment being possible.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests, as listed in the register, as a chair, vice-president or commissioner of a range of environmental and conservation NGOs.

I declare today Groundhog Day for two reasons. First, I am following the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for the second day in a row. I am pleased to do so; and it proves that the Whips’ Office has a sense of humour since I revealed yesterday that I have disagreed with the noble Baroness consistently for the past 44 years.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

I think it is actually 34 years.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

I take the noble Baroness’s challenge: I will do the maths shortly and pass her a note, although I did look up her CV yesterday to check the date. It was 1988; the rest of your Lordships can now do the maths.

The second Groundhog Day phenomenon is that, yesterday, I and many other noble Lords pressed the Government on the lack of climate change, environment and biodiversity objectives in the UK Infrastructure Bank Bill. We asked why the Government were missing an opportunity to ensure the delivery of their target to halt species decline by 2030 through the mechanisms of that investment vehicle.

Today, we have a similar—even bigger—real opportunity in the Procurement Bill. Many of the opportunities on the environment and climate change were outlined by my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock. The Minister told us that public procurement is big: it was worth £357 billion in the past year, makes up a third of all public expenditure, represents 13% of GDP and is estimated to account for 15% of climate-changing emissions. Public procurement on this scale has the capacity to be a huge influencer for good in terms of the climate change and environmental performance of the whole of the public supply chain. This influence could go even further because public procurement shapes the performance not only of the suppliers of goods and services that are publicly procured but of the wider markets to which the same suppliers also sell. Basically, my message is that it can influence a big slug of the economy.

The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity decline are allegedly two of the Government’s highest priorities. We boasted about this on the world stage at COP 26 in Glasgow only a few months ago. Yet when the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord True, signed off the Bill’s formal statement under the Environment Act 2021, he never spoke a truer word—if I can pun—when he said that this Bill cannot be construed as environmental legislation. He was absolutely right because it cannot, although it may talk about “maximising public benefit” as a key objective. The Green Paper on which the Government consulted referred to public benefit as including

“the delivery of strategic national priorities”,

including those relating to the environment, yet we have no formal definition of “public benefit” in the Bill. Your Lordships’ House is being asked to pass the Bill when some key elements of public benefit, climate change and performance in support of targets in the Government’s 25-year environment plan are relegated to the National Procurement Policy Statement and a set of policy notes.

The current version of the National Procurement Policy Statement is pretty flabby. It says:

“All contracting authorities should consider the following national priority outcomes”,


which include climate change, the environment and biodiversity. The phrase “should consider” is a bit weak, is it not? It is not “must deliver” or “must adhere to”; it is just “should consider”. That is not good enough. We are at a “Thelma & Louise” moment; for those noble Lords who are not cinema buffs, let me explain. We in the world are currently living it up beyond our means and driving madly towards a cliff edge. We need action to meet the Government’s urgent environment and climate change targets as an objective of public procurement in the Bill and we need it to be a requirement, not simply a consideration.

Can I also ask the Minister whether we can have sight of whatever upgrade to the national procurement policy statement the Government are planning to issue? It is so important to this Bill—otherwise, we are considering a bit of a pig in a poke. Will the Minister also consider whether the process of changing the NPPS could be improved? Currently, it is subject to a procedure equivalent to the negative procedure. Does the Minister think that this is sufficient parliamentary scrutiny of such an important document?

I turn to two further elements of the Bill. The Government are touting the exclusions section as progressive and praiseworthy. That has some merit. The Bill says that the conviction of an offence involving

“significant harm to the environment”

constitutes discretionary guidance for excluding suppliers from procurement—but only “discretionary”. The exclusion provisions must be much tougher than that, to give a clear signal that only operators who consistently meet high environmental standards will be considered.

Secondly, though the transparency requirements are very welcome, they depend on secondary legislation and do not currently impose requirements for suppliers to report publicly on environmental commitments, either in the NPPS or in individual contracts. The Government’s record on tracking performance is not great. The National Audit Office has repeatedly raised concerns about the lack of data and monitoring of compliance with the current government buying standards. It is interesting to see that the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Defence simply stopped collecting the data because it was so embarrassing to have to report. The Environmental Audit Committee at the other end concluded that it appears impossible to know whether departments have improved their sustainable procurement performance. So should the Minister not consider including reporting environmental commitments in the transparency framework that the Government are proposing to establish, and saying so in the Bill?

Somebody once told me that football would be a terrible game if you did not keep the score. I actually think that football is a terrible game—but let us at least keep a proper, transparent score on how public procurement is delivering these important public benefits.

Along with many other noble Lords, I look forward to returning to these issues at subsequent stages of the Bill, to make sure that this terrific opportunity to use procurement as a powerful lever for improving the performance of the Government’s climate change and environmental targets is not lost. We are drinking in the last chance saloon, and if we do not use all the levers at our disposal, we will not meet the climate change and biodiversity decline challenges—and I am amazed that the Government have not recognised how much of an own goal this would be.

Space Industry

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, I welcome the maiden speakers, including the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, has stolen my thunder a bit because he has focused very much on OneWeb, which is one element of government investment in the space industry. They co-invested half a billion pounds in OneWeb, which was a failed satellite communications company that had gone bankrupt and had to be raised from the dead. Although it is based in London, OneWeb’s satellite manufacture is in Florida, and there is little evidence of benefit so far to UK taxpayers or jobs. The company’s plan was to provide global broadband coverage from space in the hope that it could provide an alternative secure satellite navigation system now that the UK has been thrown out of Galileo.

It is proving difficult to get information on the Government’s intentions on OneWeb—the UK Space Agency declines to comment. Can the Minister confirm whether OneWeb is to be the UK Galileo alternative, as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, outlined? If not, what has the investment of half a billion pounds secured for the UK?

European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, I will vote to pass this appalling Bill only because the alternative of no deal is even worse. Let me expand on one of the many inadequacies of the trade and co-operation agreement in the Bill: the provisions for environmental protection and climate change. One of the great achievements of the EU for the UK, apart from helping to secure peace in Europe, was the major improvement in environmental protection that were secured for citizens right across the UK and Europe as we worked together with European partners in the collaborative way that the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, described so well. The quality of our air and water, our biodiversity and climate change impacts all span national boundaries. We can choose to leave the European Union, but we cannot choose to leave the European bioregion.

The Prime Minister’s letter of 24 December asserted that the agreement

“delivers on our commitment to maintaining … environmental and climate standards”.

Surprise, surprise, the PM got that one wrong as well. The agreement certainly contains reciprocal commitments to high-level principles on environmental and climate change and on energy but alas, neither the agreement nor the Bill delivers adequate provisions for enforcing these commitments. Regression from European environmental standards will trigger any dispute mechanism only in situations where there is demonstrable impact on trade or an investment between the parties. We all know that previous trade agreements have shown how difficult that is to prove. Even if regression from standards sufficient to jeopardise trade was provable, an independent panel of experts would then be appointed to report on the alleged regressions. However, at his briefing yesterday, the Minister already confirmed that the findings of such expert panels would not be binding and the environmental principles in the agreement are “not an obligation”. I am sure that the Minister will say that the agreement requires each party to ensure competent domestic enforcement authorities and effective administrative and judicial procedures to ensure environmental standards. However, the debates on the new office for environmental protection in the other place raise major doubts about its powers, resources and independence.

Yet again, the Prime Minister has given expansive assurances about what the agreement and this Bill deliver for environmental protection and climate change, but they have been revealed to be baseless in a very few days. Can the Minister tell us how the fine assurances on high-level environmental principles and non-regression will be assured? Will he let the Prime Minister know, or is this just another collective EU achievement that we will have needlessly thrown away?

Income Equality and Sustainability

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Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, our record in the UK on income inequality and poverty is not very good. We have a higher level of income inequality than most European countries; 30% of children still live in relative poverty; and one in nine of the workforce has little or no job security. Covid-19 is making this worse, as many noble Lords have outlined.

However, this is not just about income inequality. Another inequality has been thrown into stark relief by Covid: the lack of the basic human right of access to green open space. The public have fully recognised that their physical and mental health depend hugely on being able to access green open spaces, the countryside and nature, yet 2 million homes do not have a garden. The most affluent areas in this country have five times more public green space per person than the most deprived areas.

A key part of the post-war settlement was a visionary programme to guarantee access to open space and nature in the form of our much-loved national parks system. I urge the Government to now follow that lead to ensure a fair and inclusive recovery that also delivers green equity—a nature recovery network both urban and rural to ensure that all our citizens have a right of access to green open space in the future.

Covid-19: Self-employed

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the policy for the proprietor of a business to take a dividend is a personal one. It is done largely to mitigate employers’ national insurance, so I do not believe that it is right for the Government to look at that as a form of income. A dividend is defined as the surplus of a business after all its expenses have been paid, profits retained and taxes paid. While we will keep an open mind, I do not think this is something we will be dealing with urgently.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

The answer the Minister has just given is tremendously inadequate for many very small businesses that were advised by reputable accountants that this was the most tax-efficient way of taking, in many cases, very small levels of income from tiny businesses. I really must press the Minister. These people are not eligible for the self-employment income support scheme, find themselves now without any income, have commitments and are often operating on such tiny margins that taking out a loan is really out of the question in the medium term. Can the Minister tell us how many of these left-behind small businesses there are and what the Government will do urgently to address this and help them out, and when? It is simply not satisfactory to say, “They made that choice in the past, and now they must reap the detriment as a result.” This is very unfair.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I will not repeat the arguments I made in an earlier response. We will of course keep it under review. Some 11 measures have been made available for a variety of self-employed people and businesses. I will not list them all now, but there is a pretty strong safety net. If there is evidence that some are falling through that net, we will of course keep an open mind.

Housing: Planning Laws

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

Is the noble Lord aware that even though we all agree that additional housing is required, particularly affordable housing, half of all threats of damage or destruction to our precious and diminishing ancient woodlands are caused by housing development? In the light of the Government’s commitment in the housing White Paper to improving protection for ancient woodland, what practical steps is the Minister’s department taking to ensure that these much-needed houses will not be built at the expense of irreplaceable ancient woodlands and to make sure that the garden village initiative is not just a front for enclosing ancient woodlands in small zoos of concrete from which they cannot escape?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. She will know that in the housing White Paper we consulted on the irreplaceable habitats to which she has just referred. We will clarify the strong protection for ancient woodland and aged or veteran trees, which has been set out in the National Planning Policy Framework.

Housing: Availability and Affordability

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 12th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, we have already heard how too many people and families are struggling with unaffordable housing and homelessness. More than 1 million families remain on the housing waiting list as we speak. There is a clear need to build more affordable homes in the medium term but that is not as easy as it sounds. In England last year, only 163,000 new homes were completed and only 32,000 of them were classed as affordable. That was the lowest number for 24 years. In many cases, those houses were priced at levels we would not regard as affordable for many families.

I support my noble friend Lord Smith in the points he made about the restoration of the local authority’s role as a builder and provider of housing of all sorts and in all tenures—particularly focusing on affordable homes. I want to draw attention to three issues I think need to be sorted in the short term, making reference to the findings of last year’s ad hoc Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, where all three of those points were highlighted.

First is that wonderful and quaint proposition on planning with which we struggle: a viability test. It is absolutely clear that, in a planning sense, local authority targets to achieve affordable housing are not being met. I believe one of the significant reasons for that is the frequent undermining effect that developers produce by using viability assessments to argue down the numbers of affordable homes they will build, subsequent to the original planning permissions being granted and the original number of affordable homes agreed. It is a David and Goliath contest: developers have sharp-suited lawyers with sharp elbows, but planning authorities are depleted, not only in the number of planners but the skills they have. They are no match, quite frankly, for developers.

I welcome the Government’s consideration of helping planning authorities by allowing them to charge increased fees, but that is moving far too slowly and we need a rapid progression of the commitment to allow councils to increase planning fees by 20%. We also need a commitment to allow every council the flexibility to increase planning fees by up to 40% while a fair and transparent scheme of local fee setting is tested. We simply cannot continue at our current pace, otherwise we will continue to see these unequal struggles on viability between planning authorities and developers.

I was pleased to be part of the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment. Almost every witness we saw raised the current operation of the viability test as an issue, so we need to do something about it. I urge the Government, first, to introduce complete transparency in viability assessments. Currently, they are not public documents. Developers say that they are commercially confidential. That may be the case in the initial stages where land assembly is still taking place, but the reality is that once that has happened there is nothing commercially confidential about them. Yet they are still not in the public domain. The viability process needs to take place in the open so that local communities have at least half a chance of understanding the reasons behind reductions in affordable housing and challenging the calculations that result in developers reneging on their undertakings to provide affordable homes as part of their planning permission.

Secondly, the viability test should become an exception rather than the rule. It is almost the rule now that a developer will go back and argue under the viability test that they can no longer provide the public goods that were agreed. I recognise that the Government are pondering a minimum affordable homes requirement of 10% in all planning applications above a certain size, but that does not say anything about the post hoc reneging and renegotiating which the viability test currently allows.

Building more homes will impact on land take on green fields, green belt and the environment. Local authorities feel deeply under the cosh to meet housing targets. The Government have introduced severe penalties for local authorities which do not provide adequate plans for housing targets or deliver them. That takes away their decision-making rights, it allows developers a free rein on development anywhere and it removes access to special funds. For obvious reasons, local authorities are now considering easy greenfield sites, often with poor infrastructure, poor transport and poor employment access, rather than more difficult, piecemeal, previously developed land and urban infill where there is better access to services. If I had a pound for every “garden village” that makes me want to throw up in my handbag, I would be a very rich woman, because they are neither gardens nor villages; they are lightly disguised new settlements inappropriately plonked in the middle of the English countryside providing individuals with no access to infrastructure, schools and transport. We have to do something about that.

We must not see affordable housing as a dash for the bottom. People need affordable houses, not cheap and nasty houses. We are currently providing the smallest houses in Europe. We need a minimum standard for housing. There is huge dissatisfaction with quality. The Select Committee indicated that there had been a sharp decline in the number of developments that undertook design review. Support and encouragement for design review has been diluted and left to local authorities, which cannot afford it. Affordable housing must not mean a dash to build cheap, mean, little houses in poorly designed neighbourhoods with insufficient access to employment, affordable transport, schools and health facilities. They will rapidly become our future slums. We need to learn from the past.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chancellor of Cranfield University, a truly global university in science and technology, with almost two-thirds of its students coming from outside of the UK. In looking at the Government’s Green Paper on industrial strategy, it is clear that what we want to try to forge for a post-Brexit UK is a vibrant industrial sector that is truly multinational in its businesses. That depends on being truly global in our approach to research and in recruiting the best and brightest students from across the world.

I know that we are in a particularly overheated moment in terms of immigration, and the Government are quite understandably nervous as a kitten in that respect. However, the reality is that we cannot regard international students as people who are coming here as supplicants to us. We are going as supplicants to them, because they have many choices. What international students want is to go somewhere where they will be able to study as an undergraduate, and then potentially as a postgraduate, at the cutting edge of whatever their discipline is, where they feel that their families are welcome to come and stay with them because they might be here for many years, and where they have the opportunity of moving seamlessly into employment with a company or organisation that they might have had contact with during their university years. That is what they want, and that is what we are preventing from happening if we are not careful.

The signal has gone out that Britain is not open for business for international students, whether or not that is true. The time has come, after all of these reports from other committees saying that we should change this very important signal, for the Government to ponder on that. The reality is that we are not going to see any diminution in the heat and steam around immigration in the next few years: we are going to see it getting worse and worse as we exit from Europe. The time has now come to make sure that the by-product of that heat and steam is not that we failed to deliver for our high standards of education, our high standards of research or our place in the global business community.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 150 I declare an interest as having, for many years in the past, led a large research group at Oxford University that was heavily dependent on international students, not just from the European Union but from all over the world, from Argentina to the far eastern corner of what was then the Soviet Union.

I want in particular to refer back to one of the many Select Committee reports. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to the fact that this whole question of overseas students has been examined in recent years by many Select Committees. One such committee was the Science and Technology Select Committee when I was the chair; in 2014 we produced a report on STEM students—science, technology, engineering and mathematics students—in relation to international students and immigration rules. In the summary of our report, we concluded:

“Above all, we are concerned that Government policy is contradictory. The Government are simultaneously committed to reducing net migration and attracting increasing numbers of international students”.


Echoing what my noble friend Lord Bilimoria said, certainly in 2014, the Government had a target of increasing international students by 15% to 20% over the next five years. We went on to say, as other noble Lords have said during this debate:

“This contradiction could be resolved if the Government removed students from the net migration figures”.


Will the Minister, in his reply, tell us whether he recognises this target that the Government certainly had two or three years ago? Does it still exist and, if so, does he recognise that government policy is currently contradictory?