Civil Service Pension Scheme

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, will the Government be asking the contractor for compensation for their costs and inconveniences, as well as the contribution it should be making to those who have lost on their pension?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right. We have already done so, and Capita confirmed in writing in April that it will meet the costs that we have laid out.

Social Media: Use of X by Government Departments

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord has been campaigning on this issue for many years, including before he entered your Lordships’ House. A level of pragmatism needs to be adopted. We need to talk to the electorate and to our citizens where they are, and not necessarily on which platforms we wish they were on. When 19.2 million British citizens use X, it is an important place, which I guess is why the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, is still on X.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Does anyone in government have the job of reading all the incoming messages, following the Government’s submission, and do they ever take any of them seriously?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, on a personal level I tend to look at X as little as possible, which is why I was a little out of the loop yesterday given all the news that was breaking on X. But, having said that, there is a genuine thing here about how we communicate with people. There is a reason why we use these tools. In fact, given the extreme heat that we are currently experiencing, both the Met Office and UKHSA are using X, among other platforms, for engagement. It is making sure that it is about engagement and not just one-way, although on a personal level, when I was an MP, I found Meta platforms much easier to engage with the electorate on.

Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade (Lord Leong) (Lab)]

My Lords, steel is a historic British industry at the heart of our national story. For generations, steelworkers have forged not only steel but Britain’s prosperity. From Scunthorpe to Sheffield, from Port Talbot to Teesside, steel communities have powered our industrial success, strengthened our economy and contributed immeasurably to our national life. For those communities, steel is far more than an industry; it is a source of pride, identity and opportunity. It is a way of life, built over generations through skill, dedication and enterprise.

However, steel is not only about our past; it is fundamental to our future. Steel underpins our infra- structure, manufacturing base, energy networks and transport system. It is essential to the homes, railways and power stations that we build and the defence capabilities on which our national security depends. Steel is therefore not merely another sector of the economy; it is a strategic national asset. Its future is central to our economic resilience, our industrial strength and our ability to deliver the growth and prosperity that this country needs.

The global steel industry faces profound challenges. The volatile geopolitical climate, intensifying international competition and significant global overcapacity have placed enormous pressure on steel producers worldwide. British producers face those challenges while contending with energy costs that remain higher than those of most of their many international competitors. Recent events have highlighted the fragility of global supply chains. The pandemic exposed vulnerabilities that many had assumed did not exist. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded us that economic and national security are inseparable. Increasing geopolitical uncertainty has underscored the importance of maintaining domestic industrial capability.

The lesson is clear: a modern industrial nation cannot afford to lose the capability to produce the materials on which its economy and security depend. Without intervention, the United Kingdom faces the prospect of being the only G7 nation unable to produce virgin steel from raw materials within its borders. That would be more than an industrial failure; it would represent a strategic vulnerability. That is why in March the Government published The UK Steel Strategy, setting out a commitment to revitalise the steel sector, restore domestic production to sustainable levels and secure the industry’s long-term future.

The strategy recognises that the Government have a vital role to play. It means tackling the drivers of high operating costs, including reducing industrial energy costs. It means maintaining a robust trade defence regime to protect British producers from unfair competition. It means working alongside industry to secure the investment that is needed to modernise and decarbonise steel production. It means ensuring that where strategically important steel-making assets are at risk, government has the tools necessary to act decisively in the national interest.

That brings me to the Bill before the House today. This Bill establishes a framework that enables the Government, where necessary and justified by the public interest, to bring steel undertakings into public ownership. This is an enabling measure. It provides the Government with the ability to intervene where strategic domestic steel-making capability is at risk and where such intervention is necessary to safeguard the national interest. As the Prime Minister has already made clear, the Government are strongly minded to use these powers in relation to British Steel, subject, of course, to the public interest test set out in the legislation.

The circumstances surrounding British Steel and the Scunthorpe steelworks are well-known to the House. Scunthorpe is the last remaining primary steel-making capability in the United Kingdom. It directly employs approximately 2,700 highly skilled workers and supports many thousands of additional jobs throughout the wider supply chain. The Government took decisive action last year under the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act 2025 to prevent the premature and disorderly closure of the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe. I would like to place on record my gratitude to noble Lords across the House for their constructive and responsible engagement with that legislation. I pay tribute to the parliamentary staff whose efforts enabled Parliament to respond swiftly to an urgent national challenge.

The measures enacted last year served their immediate purpose. They prevented closure and ensured continued production. However, those powers were always intended to be temporary. Although they have enabled continued operation, they do not provide the flexibility required to undertake the longer-term restructuring, investment and modernisation that the business now requires. As matters stand, the Government believe that public ownership offers the most effective way to secure the company’s future and to enable strategic decisions to be taken in the long-term interests of the business, its workforce and the nation.

However, I emphasise that any decision to nationalise remains subject to the public interest test as set out in the Bill. The Government did not reach this position lightly. We engaged constructively and extensively with Jingye to pursue a commercial solution. Our clear preference was to secure the future of steel-making through agreement rather than through intervention. However, despite extensive negotiations, it has proved impossible to reach an agreement that would represent a responsible and proportionate use of taxpayers’ money. In those circumstances, the Government concluded that legislation was necessary.

Some noble Lords may reasonably ask whether nationalisation is the right answer. The Government’s response is straightforward. Nationalisation is not an ideological aim and it is not the first option either. It is a pragmatic tool available for use when the national interest requires it. The costs of losing our steel-making capability would far outweigh the costs of preserving it. Once blast furnaces are extinguished, once supply chains disperse and once specialist skills are lost, rebuilding those capabilities becomes extraordinarily difficult and expensive. Inaction carries consequences and dependency carries risks. The loss of sovereign industrial capability carries costs that cannot be easily measured in purely financial terms. That is why Governments around the world intervene to protect strategically important industries. Britain should be no different.

We believe that British Steel can succeed. With the right leadership, investment and long-term strategy, the company can be transformed. We have already seen the success of public ownership in the case of Sheffield Forgemasters. Recently, British Steel has secured important new contracts, including supplying rail infrastructure and supporting future energy projects. These are encouraging signs of the opportunities ahead.

Turning to the detail of the Bill, I recognise that it contains significant powers and that noble Lords will wish to scrutinise them closely. That scrutiny is both expected and welcome. The Government have consistently sought to ensure that the powers contained in the Bill are proportionate, necessary and appropriately constrained.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

On a point of information—

[Lord Fox (LD)]

We do not do points of information at Second Reading.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on his appointment. I am also very grateful to the Minister for his honest account of this legislation, where he made it very clear that it is very likely that the strong powers in this legislation will be used sometime soon fully to nationalise the Scunthorpe works. That, I think, makes it even more curious that the Government he represents have given us an impact assessment with no numbers in it at all, no account of what a nationalisation of the Scunthorpe works would look like, what impact it would have on the public budgets, what impact, as my noble friend Lord Hunt said, it would have on the £2.5 billion allocated for steel as a whole, and no account of how it would be a transfer of money we thought had been allocated for capital investment and modernisation in creating something new to the purpose of paying losses on a very old plant whose future is very uncertain. During this debate and over the course of this Bill, I hope we can get some numbers from the Government.

When the emergency legislation went through a year ago, I think both Houses of Parliament understood that the Government were not then in a position to produce numbers, but at that point, in those debates in both Houses, strong voices said, “There must be a business plan; there must be budgets”, and we were told at that stage that these would be forthcoming in relatively short order—but we await them. We still have a menu with no prices. We still have a lack of information about what the business plan of a nationalised Scunthorpe would look like, just as we have travelled for a year with a Scunthorpe that is run by the state and paid for by the state, but not owned by the state, making enormous losses which, according to the press, have been running at £1.3 million a day. We were offered no explanation of how long this might go on, when those green shoots the Minister reports will actually translate into real cash, how much steel this plant needs to sell and at what kind of prices before it can have a positive margin or before it can maybe halve the negative margin which it has been running at for all too long. Indeed, we were told at the point when the state took on these mighty obligations that, under the previous Chinese owners, it had been losing about £700,000 a day, so if the more recent press stories are right, the losses have clearly been considerably worse over the last year.

I understand that the Minister cannot firmly say they are definitely nationalising because they have put in this public interest test and they obviously have not yet applied the test to any project to nationalise which they are currently planning. However, reading how wide the public interest test allows the Government to be in order to satisfy themselves, I do not think it is any actual prevention of the nationalisation of Scunthorpe. I am sure they are quite clever enough to come up with a plan that is well within the details of the public interest test, widely drawn as it is in this piece of legislation, so I do not think that is a reason for not giving us proper figures.

I think it would also be good, over the course of this Bill’s debates, if we could hear a more honest statement to the workforce of Scunthorpe, because the Government say two different things. They tell the press and the rest of us—and we are very relieved to hear it—that they have saved the jobs, but then the Government still seem to be wedded to a net-zero strategy, which says that all blast furnaces of the Scunthorpe type have to close—and they are the only two left—to be replaced by electric arc furnaces. Therefore, if that is still the plan, we need to be told that honestly, and the workforce needs to be told that, because, of course, there will be a very big reduction in the numbers of people working, should they switch from blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces in the case of Scunthorpe, as the Welsh steel industry discovered when the previous Government went on that journey, carried on by this Government, to replace those blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces.

Ministers should have a personal interest in wishing to get beneath the numbers and work out how much it is going to cost, not just because of pressures on public budgets and the need to assess this against alternative ways of spending the money, but also because we read that, when the initial transfer of the liabilities and the running of the plant was made to the state, the senior civil servants apparently said to the Secretary of State and Ministers that they were not able at that point to sign off that this was value for money. They were not able to sign off that it was definitely going to be a policy that was going to work. They were not saying it definitely would not work: I think they were saying they did not have enough time and it would require a lot of very detailed work and consultation.

Ministers used their right to issue a direction to the Civil Service to say, “We think the public interest is such that this is urgent, and so we are going to ignore the absence of sign-off on value for money and on the efficacy of the policy because it is worth a shot and we, Ministers, will take responsibility”. I understand that, but, having taken that responsibility, the Ministers are under more of a personal duty to come to this House and to the other place with proper budgets and proper business plans to show that there will be value for money as they go on this course. Indeed, I think we need a year’s audited statement on what has happened so far with all that money passing to a Chinese-owned business, which the state largely controls but where it does not own the assets.

It would be good as well to be updated on where the Government have got to in negotiating with the Chinese owners. I think it is tragic that we have not had a deal with the Chinese owners. Maybe it is the fault of the Chinese; I understand that there are two sides in any negotiation. However, when I looked from the outside, just using public sources, at what was on offer when the state moved in a year ago, I thought that, as a rough rule of thumb, if the state said to the Chinese owners, “We will take full responsibility for the workforce and their future payments, so we save you all the redundancy payments you would have had to make if you had carried out your closure”, the state would take on the land and buildings in the state that they were in, probably with many environmental obligations and costs of clean-up, and that would have been another relief for the Chinese authorities of the company, because otherwise they could be liable for having to clean up the site after they had closed it.

In return, the Government should have said, “You definitely keep all the debts you have incurred during your unsuccessful period of management, and the value of your share and your land and plant we would put at £1 to complete the transaction”. Some people thought I was being a bit generous there, but I think that was the shape of a deal that one might have been talking about. According to press comment, the Government have been thinking about £100 million of compensation for the liabilities that they are absorbing to also obtain the plant and the land in its current state.

We read in the press that the Chinese say that, no, they want £1 billion for this transfer of the freehold and the shares, which would seem to me to be extremely excessive in the circumstances. I would fully support the Government pushing back very hard on that and, if necessary, defending themselves in court if they cannot get a deal. But it would be in everybody’s interest if a deal could be reached. Getting to that deal would be helped if we had a published statement of the likely business plan for an enterprise now in public control and maybe soon to be in public ownership. That would also help create a mood for the negotiations with the Chinese.

I fear that that business plan, certainly for the last year and probably for the next year or so, would produce an awful lot of red ink. It would be the background to explaining to the Chinese why the idea that they might walk away with £100 million or £1 billion is for the birds. They have presided over a heavily loss-making business and they were unable to find a way to make it work, so they were thinking of incurring massive costs of closure as the alternative to carrying on with a very high rate of losses.

Like all the other speakers in this debate, I think we want a proud steel industry again in Britain, as we were used to having over many decades. I also think there is a case for keeping a virgin steel manufacturing capability, as well as a lot of electric arc recycling steel capability. That would require a study of how much longer one could carry on with these two blast furnaces, which the state will probably own quite soon, and of what would be a sort of deep or long-term maintenance schedule if it is thought that they can carry on, because these are quite ageing plants. That would perhaps be a better option than having to think about how to find an investor who wants to establish new virgin steel-making capability in our country.

What is very clear in the wider debate of the Minister and the Shadow Minister’s opening remarks is that we will not have that opportunity—through inward investment, or domestically financed investment, or City financing through private equity, or new equity issued through the AIM market, or whatever—of steel-making capability in this country as long as our energy prices are sky high.

We heard unfavourable comparisons in a previous good speech with European competitors, but, of course, they are not the main threat. Asia and America have energy prices considerably lower. In the case of the United States of America—a first-world competitor in many fields, with a much stronger economy than the European one—its electricity prices are one-quarter of the prices that industry in Britain has to pay before any subsidy.

The Government are following a bizarre policy towards energy. They put on massive carbon and emissions taxes, and all sorts of other taxes if we dare to produce any of the energy ourselves, or else we have to pay other people’s heavy oil and gas taxes as we import so much. Then they realise that this produces energy prices that mean the loss of jobs and the mass closure of industry. We have seen refineries and bits of the oil industry go, we have seen petrochemicals go, and we have seen a lot of our steel industry and a lot of our ceramics industry go.

So then they say, “Why don’t we offer a little bit back by way of subsidy to discount the very expensive energy prices we’ve got with these very high taxes imposed on the energy?” This is a very bad way of doing it: you get the worst of all possible worlds. You deter investment because the energy prices are too high. You do not give enough back in subsidy to make the businesses competitive, so they still close. You are left with a situation where you are deindustrialising, so your import bill for goods goes through the roof. Your import bill for energy also goes through the roof because of the bad mistakes made in the energy policy. That is why the UK is struggling so much.

So I plead with Ministers, for their own sakes, to do some sums: find some numbers, work out what the business case will look like, interrogate your managers, find out what you need to do to help them to sell more steel. Unless you can sell more Scunthorpe steel, there is no point pumping money in; you will not end up saving the jobs. And please tell your workforce whether you are serious about saving these jobs and really want to carry on with blast furnaces, or whether your net-zero preoccupations mean that their jobs are doomed anyway.

UK Electricity Prices

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, industrial electricity prices are four times the level of the United States of America’s and more than three times the level of China’s. It is no wonder that we face a disaster of deindustrialisation accelerating under this Government with the closure of the oil refineries, ceramics plants and others that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, rightly mentioned.

This is all avoidable damage. It is self-harm on a huge scale that the Government should be ashamed of. We have signed up for dearer electricity—it was not just this Government, but this Government have signed up to it, doubled the signature and worsened the terms, making it so much worse than even the position they inherited. It was always going to be the case that, if you put on more renewables, you would have dearer electricity. It is completely wrong to suggest otherwise, because you need to pay for two systems: you need the wind power as well as 100% back-up, because on some days, particularly cold, difficult days in winter, there is no wind power at all. So you are paying twice with the back-up.

It was always going to be the case that the more renewables you put on the system, the dearer your cheapest form of energy production, which is gas generation, becomes. When you switch from gas being on baseload to gas being interruptible and brought in only occasionally when there is no wind, it works much less efficiently. The efficiency of the power station drops from over 60% to around 40%, so there will be even more carbon dioxide per amount of energy produced. Of course your costs go up dramatically, because your overhead costs for the gas power station are defrayed by a limited number of days instead of being defrayed by operating every day of the year apart from occasional maintenance. It was baked into the system that this would be less efficient and work less well.

Governments, particularly this one, have then compounded the problem by saying that gas must incur very high carbon tax charges. Of course our electricity was going to get dearer, because customers had to pay additional taxes on the gas. Why are there additional taxes on the gas? It is mainly as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, implied: the gas was too competitive and was still cheaper even on some of the interruptible runnings that they were proposing. So you needed a big carbon tax to say to people, “This really is the dearest part of the power system, which is why we are trying to get rid of it”.

So the Government go out and sell to the public this unbelievable idea that we have uniquely dear electricity because we are producing some on gas—gas which is diminishing in volume because, when we have windy days now, there is more wind power available, so the amount on gas has reduced proportionately. They are not coming clean with the public that a series of levies and carbon taxes are the cause of very high energy prices in the United Kingdom.

The Government offered £300 off people’s bills as a lovely election offer. We all thought that that meant our bill would go down by £300, but we now learn that their down payment is £150 off a rise, so the bill still goes up. The sting in the tail, which we were not told about, is that we have to pay the £150, but out of general taxes instead of our electricity bills. For most people who go to work and pay taxes, that is no advantage at all. The Government are kidding themselves and undermining their own popularity, industry and commerce by a policy which is all self-harm.

[Lord Harrington of Watford (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of Make UK, which represents 26,000 manufacturing businesses in the UK. I declare it not just because it is in the register; I am speaking in this debate because the unfair policy for pricing energy is affecting every one of those 26,000. Our members pay 25p per kilowatt hour. French and German companies in exactly the same field pay 12%.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

It is 12p.

[Lord Harrington of Watford (Non-Afl)]

Sorry, I stand corrected: 12p. The noble Lord is right. In China, it is 3p. What does this really mean? Is it just a number? Having been on a presentation with the chief executive officer of Nissan, I can tell the Committee that that company pays more for electricity in Sunderland than in any of its other plants globally. Tinsley Bridge Ltd had to shut its automotive division in Sheffield because of energy prices—110 skilled jobs and £20 million of work went to France. That was because of energy prices. Another company, one of our members in Yorkshire, has seen its bills go up from £1.2 million to £2.4 million, not because of Iran or anything else recently but because of the cost of energy.

Why is this? International oil and gas prices are much the same everywhere. It is the price. This is the Government’s choice. Five different levies make the difference. That is policy; it is a choice that can be made. This is what makes the difference. Domestic prices are regulated, I assume for electoral reasons, but industrial prices are not and there are 150,000 small companies in this country that do manufacturing.

I had the pleasure of working with the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Whitehead, when I was Energy Minister and he was my shadow. He is very smart and understands all these arguments, but I ask him not to respond to this debate by talking about the supercharger. That is an attempt to lower prices, very successfully, for 400 heavy users. I also ask him not to rely on BICS and its subsidies. This was announced after extensive lobbying by Make UK a year ago, when Jonathan Reynolds, then Secretary of State for Business and Trade, phoned up with glee to say that he had won a big argument around the Cabinet table and that there would be this scheme for manufacturing, affecting thousands of businesses and reducing their prices to the levels of those in France and Germany. A year later, what have we had? We have had consultations and arguments about who is included. Ed Miliband’s department tells us that it is the Treasury; the Treasury tells us that it is Ed Miliband’s department. Our members do not care: they get their bills, which are going up and up. Where is this?

I remind the Minister, who is a student of history, that every industrial revolution has been based on cheap power: water, steam, coal and oil. What now? We cannot allow the deindustrialisation of this country because of inept—I do not use the word easily—energy policy which is penalising jobs, employment and, as the Government are always mentioning, growth.

Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

As ever, my noble friend is exceptionally wise, but I understand why Members across your Lordships’ House have questions about what comes next and about the material. There is, as I have said, a significant volume of it to be released. We want to do this well and effectively, so that we do not return time after time with additional materials, by making sure that reviews are done effectively and internally. That is one of the reasons why additional materials were passed to the ISC after we thought all the materials had been. We need to do this in a cross-party way. I am aware that Members of your Lordships’ House have questions. I am sure that, when the next tranche of materials is released, we will be discussing their content in great detail.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Why has there has such a long delay in the publication of basic materials, such as Lord Mandelson’s application and his declaration of interests, which are of great interest to everyone but surely cannot pose any difficulties?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, as I just said, we are looking to publish only two key tranches. The first has already been done; the second will follow shortly. The third and final tranche will be after police investigations. Those are the materials that are being withheld because the Met is using them for its work. Rather than repeatedly coming back to your Lordships’ House, we want to do this effectively in a way that works for this House.

King’s Speech

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, is right to warn us all that our relative prosperity and power is waning.

I have always been happy to fully support this Government’s main aim, as set out in the general election and repeated in all the economic speeches that I have heard them make. They are right that this country can achieve so much more. It can grow much faster. It can unleash enterprise and develop more business. However, I fear that my noble friend Lady Finn set out in her brilliant speech just how, for almost two years now, this Government have done everything wrong if we wish to promote growth. They have clobbered entrepreneurs instead of praising them; they have taxed people instead of rewarding them; they have taken incentives out and made it more difficult to employ young people—they seem to have a grudge against young people. Now we are presented, in this gracious Speech, with what they think is one golden thread that I think will turn out to be leaden and depressing: the idea that an EU reset will somehow promote trade, which in turn will give us that missing growth.

Let me try to help the Government think this through. Quite often, Ministers here and elsewhere tell us that we have suffered a 4% GDP loss as a result of Brexit. But all the graphs and charts of what happened to GDP between 2016 and today, in the leading European countries and here, show that there is absolutely no sign of an extra 4% drop as a result of either our voting to leave or actually leaving. If you ask Government Ministers why they think there has been a 4% drop, they say that the OBR has said it. But the OBR report is a forecast, which says that between 2020 and 2035, the British economy might grow its productivity 0.25% per annum less than if we had not left the EU. It is not forecasting any drop in GDP at all; it is not even forecasting a drop in productivity—it says that it might grow a bit slower, and if you compound out 0.25% for 15 years, you get to roughly the 4% they all wrongly cite. Ministers must be honest with themselves and the public: there was no 4% drop, and their reset will not recover the 4% that they wrongly allege has disappeared.

Let us explore the idea that increasing trade would uniquely provide growth. I fear that Ministers are again mistaken, because our trade with the European Union results in a very large trade deficit, particularly in goods. It sells us a lot more than we sell it, so if we could agree a set of policies with the EU that might increase the exports of each side by, say, 10%, which is quite a sizeable number, the deficit would rise and our GDP would fall, because the EU would export much more to us than we export to it and we would have to close down things in Britain to receive the exports we decided were cheaper or better as a result of the changes. To have the same volume, we would need to grow our exports by 17% to match the 10% growth in the EU’s exports. If you wanted to get more GDP, you would have to grow our exports a lot faster than the European Union because—I repeat to the Government—exports add to our GDP, but imports do not. If we import more German cars and close a UK car factory, our GDP goes down; it does not miraculously go up because our trade figures with the EU have gone up.

That is exactly the Government’s strategy, thanks mainly to their net-zero policies. My noble friend Lord Lilley set it all out very well. They are literally going to ban us making any diesel or petrol cars from 2030, five years earlier than they would stupidly ban them on the continent. Do they not see that that means that we would close our factories first, and definitely lose all the jobs, while Europe was still thinking about making more of these cars that people want to buy? The Government will say, “Well, we’re going to buy battery cars”. Yes, some people will buy battery cars if they cannot buy diesel or petrol cars, but most of them will probably be imported from China, or they might be made in eastern Europe and imported via that route, so the Government will not get more jobs, growth or economic activity from that source.

Here is my friendly proposal. I really want this country to do well; I want this Government to do well. I know that they are not about to fall—Prime Ministers might come and go, but they will presumably carry on governing—so I say to them: please govern well. Instead of having the wrong idea that promoting more imports from Europe and perhaps a few more exports to Europe will miraculously transform the position, I want them to put in place in Britain a series of policies for import substitution.

It is much easier for small companies to sell to people, shops and businesses near them than to go through all the hassle of exporting, however much red tape the Government think they can reduce. That would give our small businesses more chance by creating more opportunity for British production. It should be much cheaper and easier to replace imports than to try to develop exports to markets with different languages and customs which may not like what you are doing or offering. I know this well from my experience running industrial businesses, when we found that by far and away the most difficult markets to export to were France and Germany, although they were geographically much nearer. We always hired staff who loved the countries and spoke the language, but it was still much more difficult to sell there than it was to the English-speaking world, including America, or to Asian countries where English was the common business language.

We need to lift the ban on making our own petrol and diesel cars, because they have always been one of our leading exports to the continent. We need to lift the ban on getting our own oil and gas out, because they too have been leading exports to the continent. We need to get energy prices down, as my noble friend Lord Lilley rightly said. We have in the past exported a lot of petrochemicals and refined oil product, and if we are shutting all our refineries, petrochemical works, ethylene plants and so on, we will not export anything like that volume in the future.

The Government need a dose of reality and common sense and an examination of the data. It is not good enough for Ministers to say, “We will get the British economy to grow as soon as we have signed away our powers to make our own business laws and given some more money to Brussels”. They cannot identify billions of pounds of extra exports we can make at a time when they, through their policies, are ensuring that we export fewer and fewer cars and chemicals and less and less oil, gas and refined product, and are in the process of closing 21 plastics recycling plants.

As my noble friend Lord Hunt set out in another brilliant speech, there is no plan to save steel. Indeed, I heard the Minister say in her opening remarks that it is still the Government’s policy to go over to electric arc furnaces. They need to be honest to the workers in Scunthorpe: the Government are not going to permanently save the Scunthorpe jobs. They still want to sack all those people, but just a bit later, after they have wasted billions of pounds of public money on keeping open a works that is struggling to compete, in the way that my noble friend set out. I ask the Government to please level with the workers in Scunthorpe about the fact that their plan is anti-blast furnace and anti-burning coal in any sense, and to come to a decent settlement with them. The workers should not think that the Government have a solution to steel, because they clearly do not.

Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975 (Amendment) Order 2026

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)]

My Lords, this order is a necessary measure to address the historical misapplication of the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975, which sets ministerial and other officeholders’ pay. The other officeholders are the Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses, the Speakers in both Houses, the Opposition Chief Whips in both Houses and two Opposition Assistant Whips in the House of Commons.

In 1997, a formula was introduced to link pay increases for Ministers and certain officeholders to senior Civil Service pay bands. The formula set out that ministerial salaries should be increased by the average annual change in the midpoint of the senior Civil Service pay bands. During the financial year 2023-24, the Cabinet Office identified that the formula had been misapplied. Since the introduction of the formula in 1997, the salaries of Permanent Secretaries had often been excluded from the calculation, despite the legislation not permitting such an exclusion. This technical misapplication of the law has happened under successive Administrations, over several decades. The formula was originally proposed by the Senior Salaries Review Body, which recommended that Permanent Secretary pay should not be included in the calculation for ministerial pay. The Government believe the policy that has been often applied since 1997, in line with the Senior Salaries Review Body recommendation, is the correct approach and are introducing this Order in Council to ensure the law aligns with long-standing policy.

The order performs two primary functions. First, it resets the statutory salary levels for all Ministers and specified officeholders. Given the misapplication has been applied for several decades, resetting the salaries in law provides legal clarity and a baseline for any future uplifts. These reset figures were calculated based on the average annual change in the midpoint of the senior Civil Service pay bands including the Permanent Secretary pay band for each financial year since the misapplication was identified, in line with the formula set out in the legislation.

Secondly, the order amends the formula to exclude the Permanent Secretary pay band from future calculations. This change simply formalises the policy approach that has been applied in practice, by all Administrations, for over two decades. For the initial year beginning 1 April 2026, the order sets out a transitional measure where the higher of the old or new formula will be applied to ensure that no individual is disadvantaged by the order’s retrospective effect. The impact of this order is minimal; it affects only ministerial office holders and a small number of other office holders in Westminster. Due to incomplete records, it has not been possible to determine the exact financial impact of this misapplication. Analysis shows that no individual has gained or lost a substantial amount.

I want to be clear that for Ministers, this order will result in no change to actual take-home pay. The Prime Minister has maintained the policy of freezing ministerial salaries, and Ministers will continue to waive their statutory entitlement. In fact, ministerial salaries for Members of the House of Commons have not increased since 2008. Ministerial salaries were actually cut in law, via an Order in Council, in 2011. Lords ministerial salaries have not risen since 2008 and were cut in 2011, but in 2019-20, they began to claim their full salary entitlement. They were again frozen in 2020-21 and remain so today. The other officeholders make a personal decision on whether to take the salary they are entitled to in law or to waive part of the salary in line with the ministerial salary freeze. The order therefore does affect the salaries paid to these individuals who choose to take their entitled salaries. The Government have been unable to calculate their annual pay increases while work on this order was ongoing, so we will provide back payments covering annual pay increases owed to current and former officeholders in these roles dating back to 1 April 2023.

The legislation is also linked to the salaries of the Chairman and Deputy Chairmen of Ways and Means in the other place, whose salaries increase through the same formula but are paid by Parliament. They will also receive back payments dating back to 1 April 2023. The total cost of back payments to the Government is just over £15,000. This is for the roles paid by the Government: the Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses, the Speaker in the House of Commons, the Opposition Chief Whips in both Houses and two Opposition Assistant Whips in the House of Commons. The total cost of back payments to Parliament is between £7,000 and £19,000. This is for the roles paid by Parliament: the Chairman and Deputy Chairmen of Ways and Means in the other place and the Lord Speaker.

It is important to note that the majority of the back payments represent money that would have been paid if the misapplication had not been identified. I am grateful to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments for their consideration of this Order in Council and for their respective reports. I shall briefly address the issues they have raised.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee noted that it has taken three years for the Cabinet Office to resolve this issue. Although a small issue, it is a complex and technical one; it is right that the Government took the time to ensure that the misapplication was addressed correctly, and I am sure that noble Lords will support this order which addresses this long-standing misapplication of the law.

The Joint Committee on Statutory Instrument has reported that this Order in Council appears to have retrospective effect without the express authority of the parent legislation. The Cabinet Office considers that the Act provides power for limited retrospection, and that the retrospective effect of this order is justified and fair. This is because backdating of salary increases is normal practice given that, for senior civil servants, salary increases are usually not known until the summer but pay increases take effect from the 1 April. In addition, as I have set out, the impact of this order is minimal, affecting Ministers and a small number of other officeholders.

In summary, the Government are bringing forward this Order in Council to address a historical misapplication of the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975, which sets ministerial and certain officeholders’ pay. This is a necessary measure to address a technical misapplication of the law and will ensure that the law aligns with long-standing policy. I beg to move.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for the technical explanation of a complex matter, but could she also answer a couple of relevant questions? First, what is the progress on having more Lords Ministers in receipt of salaries, after our recent discussions and legislation on extending the number of paid posts? What progress is there on helping Ministers rather more by clearer definitions of their aims and their targets, with suitable mentoring and support and, if necessary, performance reporting, so that we can all see that these well-justified salaries are indeed well justified and are resulting in better government?

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order. As she has set out, it is a sensible and largely technical measure that would bring the law on ministerial and officeholder salaries in line with the current practice of excluding Permanent Secretary salaries from the calculation of annual salary increases. It brings the statutory framework in line with the approach that has in practice been followed by successive Governments since 1997. It does not change the underlying policy; rather, it corrects a discrepancy in the legislation relating to the treatment of Permanent Secretary salaries within the relevant calculation. It also addresses the criticism, as the Minister pointed out, from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that this issue has not been previously addressed despite the discrepancy being noted by the Cabinet Office in the 2023-24 financial year. On that basis, I do not take issue with the intent of the order.

The principal point on which I would welcome further clarity relates to ministerial pensions. The Government have been clear that ministerial salaries will remain frozen in practice and that take-home pay will therefore be unaffected by this order. However, the order alters the maximum salary that they may receive under the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975. It would be helpful, therefore, to understand whether future pension entitlements will be calculated on the basis of that legal maximum salary or on the salary actually received. If it is the former, this measure may have the effect of increasing pension accrual despite the continuation of the pay freeze. I would therefore be grateful if the Minister could set out how pension calculations will operate, and whether any additional cost to the public purse is expected as a result.

More broadly, this measure raises a question regarding the scope of the ministerial pension scheme itself. Unlike with other public service pension schemes, there does not appear to be any provision for forfeiture in cases of serious misconduct. In contrast, we have long accepted in principle across the public sector that pensions may, in defined and exceptional circumstances, be subject to forfeiture where there has been criminal conduct connected to office. Given that disparity, it would be helpful to understand whether the Government have considered bringing forward legislative changes to place ministerial pensions on a more consistent footing with other public service pension schemes in this respect.

I note that similar issues are already being examined elsewhere in relation to standards in public life, and it would seem desirable for the legislative framework here to be equally coherent. In that context, I would be grateful if the Minister would inform the House whether the Government intend to bring forward an amendment to the current Pension Schemes Bill to address this issue, or whether they have concluded that no legislative change is required. If the latter is the case, I ask the Minister to outline the reason for maintaining the present position, given the clear precedent for forfeiture provisions in other public service pension schemes. It would also be helpful to know whether this matter is under active consideration within government, or whether it has been ruled out entirely.

Northern Ireland After Brexit (Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee Report)

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, I intervene in this debate not as a Northern Ireland specialist or representative, which I am clearly not, but as someone who has taken a strong special interest over many years in the economy and economic growth, and in the trading patterns of our great United Kingdom. I am not surprised that much of the debate so far has been about these economic issues. We have heard eloquent testimony to the barriers and difficulties that small businesses in particular but also some big businesses are experiencing as a result of the dreadful settlement of the so-called Northern Ireland problem, embedded first in the protocol and subsequently in the Windsor Framework.

I fully support what my noble friend Lord Lilley said and will explain to the Committee that my noble friend and I, and other Conservative MPs and Peers, held regular meetings over the Brexit years to discuss how our country can get the most out of the freedoms we can enjoy and could develop now that we have left the European Union, and how the £17 billion we are now saving in annual contributions can be best spent to our wider benefit and related issues. We have often, as a result, had joint meetings or exchanges of MPs and Peers with our unionist colleagues here today.

In our meetings, we took on board that Northern Ireland had a particularly bad deal out of the form of Brexit entry that the EU cajoled or persuaded successive British Governments into accepting. There is no doubt that absorbing so much European Union law into Northern Ireland is a constraint on growth, on small businesses and on trade. I urge the Government to think carefully about this, because they wish to align the whole United Kingdom with more of these laws, charges and impositions. Yet it is the case that where it is being tried in Northern Ireland, far from being a golden scenario, as some suggested, it is clearly a negative that is causing trouble.

In a previous speech in the Chamber of the House of Lords, I set out my own research findings for the period 1952 to 2020—from 20 years before we entered the EEC, from the 20 years in the EEC customs union from 1972 to 1992, and from the 28 years in the single market from 1992. The data is overwhelmingly convincing that the closer the alignment—the more European law, costs and taxes we absorbed—the slower we grew. I fully accept that there were other factors affecting our growth rates over those long periods, but you cannot reach a conclusion from the data that there was ever a time when aligning more closely helped and gave us a boost. There was no boost when we joined the customs union. On the contrary, because a lot of our industry was not fully competitive and was being protected by tariffs, when the tariffs came off, the Labour Government, who had to face the problem, saw mass closures and destruction of large parts of our industry because Italian, German and French textile companies, steel mills, engineering works and vehicle makers were so much more efficient than our own. The shock was too much.

There was also no visible extra growth—indeed, quite a lot to the contrary—after 1992, when the EU had completed its so-called single market, which was actually a major power grab and a whole series of laws that were often negative to the conduct of business. Again, there was no sudden improvement or growth in our economy. In many ways, the problems got worse after the single market had been completed. Of course, it was completely misleading to say that the single market was completed in 1992 because, for the following 28 years of our membership, there were ever more laws, ever more rules, ever more charges and ever more taxes, which had a direct impact on British businesses and clearly did no good.

Northern Ireland is right to say that there are two problems with the settlement we have been persuaded or forced into by the European Union. There is the problem of economic growth, prosperity, and business and trade success, but there is also the fundamental democratic accountability problem, which is a direct result of the EU’s chosen solution of putting Northern Ireland under European Union rules.

The report is wonderfully written. When I first came to it, I found it quite heavy going, complicated and difficult, and I then realised that, in a way, that was a wonderful parody of the issues that the report had to deal with. The authors of the report clearly understood it perfectly well and were showing, by the way they described it, what a dreadful mess there was: just how many contradictions and complexities were built into it, all to the advantage of the EU and not to the United Kingdom or Northern Ireland. I pay great tribute to the committee and to the work done.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, pointed out the wonderful organogram, which was meant to be a simplification so that those of us who found it hard going could see a picture. It tells you all you need to know: the thing is quite unworkable, completely incomprehensible and, by any external judgment, completely mad. No sensible country would ever behave like that or have accepted it, yet this is where we have got to by having all these agents and institutions involved in negotiating.

The solution offered by my noble friend Lord Lilley, hammered out as it was with a lot of colleagues—we had the benefit of two expert lawyers in this field, who very kindly worked pro bono for us because they felt, as we did, that things needed to change in a radical direction for the benefit of Northern Ireland—would, of course, resolve the democratic accountability. If, either by agreement or unilaterally, we no longer have to impose European Union laws on Northern Ireland, then the democratic accountability problem vanishes.

However, we are rightly told in the report that an attempt to resolve the problem was the partial solution of saying that, if a law is really so bad that Northern Ireland cannot put up with it, then Northern Ireland should have the right, through the Stormont procedure, to say that it will not apply in Northern Ireland—an override. Although that does not get you around the table to influence and vote on all the other laws that you can put up with—so it is not a full answer to democratic accountability—it is a very good partial answer, because not only would you be able to strike out anything that was really bad but the fact that you had that power would start to influence European Union opinion and attitudes, so that when representations were made on other matters, the European Union would have to bear in mind that you could just decide that it was all too much.

This takes me back down memory lane, which I am normally reluctant about, but on this occasion it is relevant. I remember, as a very young man, that when the 1975 referendum occurred and the British people voted to stay in the European Economic Community, we were assured by the then Labour Government and by the Conservative and Lib Dem opposition parties that our sovereignty would not be taken away or damaged in any way. We were joining a trading arrangement; it was a free trade area, and they called it the common market—they would not even call it the EEC. I made the mistake of reading the treaties and felt that this was an unlikely explanation of what was going on.

When I found myself, some years later, as Single Market Minister, I remembered that we had been told that no sovereignty had been lost, but my job was a visible demonstration that a huge amount of sovereignty had been lost, because I had to spend all my time trying to construct alliances with member states to stop a law being imposed on our country that did not make any sense or could even be positively damaging. I remembered that, over the years, in an attempt to persuade us that we had not been cheated over sovereignty, something had been developed called an emergency brake—language rather similar to the Stormont brake.

Faced with this avalanche of draft laws that I did not want or wanted to change dramatically, and recognising how much work it was to construct an alliance of member states sufficient to dilute or delay in each case, I decided on one—I cannot remember which I chose now—and let it be known that I was going to use the emergency brake. This was just to show Brussels that this was all getting out of hand and that I was prepared to take action to stop its extreme legislative ideas. As soon as I mentioned this within the privacy of government, I could feel the quiver of fear and annoyance that this idea created. The great British governing establishment—the civil servants and quite a few of the Ministers—were so pro the EU having its way on everything that they thought a Minister going maverick, as they saw it, and trying to negotiate from a position of strength was a very bad idea. It was, of course, vetoed before anyone outside government ever knew about it. I conspired with the rest to make sure nobody knew about it, because I did not think it would reflect well on me that I had lost the argument to use the emergency brake, or reflect well on the Government, because they were clearly throwing away a very powerful negotiating tool that could have got us an answer that was a lot better.

I give this as a salutary tale. I know that Northern Ireland bravely got a bit further than I did and once suggested that it was going to use the emergency brake. Once again, the great governing establishment knew better and decided that it was not going to be allowed to. I do not think that the Stormont brake will be used. The European Union does not think it is going to be used, which does not give you any negotiating heft as it tries to put more laws upon you.

My conclusions are this. This is advice to the Government that is heartfelt and well meant, and that would actually help the Government. I fully support the Government’s aims to have a growth strategy for the whole United Kingdom that levels up those parts that need levelling up, and is driven by more trade, industrial activity and small business developments. The Government will not get that in Northern Ireland unless they address this issue. The way to address it is to take up my noble friend’s suggestion: this is a bogus problem; there does not need to be a hard border. In the past, the big trade flows have always been east-west, or GB to Northern Ireland, not north-south, or Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. The big trade flows are being damaged. This has to be lifted and we have to put it to the EU. If the EU is a friendly and sensible neighbour, it will see that it makes sense. If it is not, we should do it unilaterally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

Given the nature of InterTradeIreland, that is a matter for InterTradeIreland and is not something I can comment on from the Dispatch Box.

With regard to the specifics of the report, in short, a lot has been done, but there remains more to do, as this report by the committee highlights. Indeed, the Government’s response to the committee’s report following the independent review shows as much. This leads me to our next steps. We are ensuring that the stakeholder engagement landscape captures a broad spectrum of businesses in a new Northern Ireland business stakeholder group—just to add to the wonderful flowchart that we saw earlier today. We are also looking at how the Government and devolved departments can conduct engagement and capture the views of industry, so that this is joined-up and gets the right outcomes earlier on.

The Northern Ireland Executive participate in all structures under the Windsor Framework, yet we acknowledge that there is more to be done between the Government and the Executive to ensure that public authorities link up and address issues with changes to regulatory proposals earlier in the process. We are therefore implementing new processes to address that and facilitate better engagement at all levels, beyond the Cabinet Office executive office working group.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Can the Minister say whether the United Kingdom will be tabling proposed improvements to the Windsor Framework as part of the reset negotiations?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord, who has been a Member of the other place and only recently of your Lordships’ House, will be aware better than me that I am not in a position to give any detail of ongoing negotiations while they are currently ongoing. The noble Lord will be aware that the impact on Northern Ireland is key to some of the negotiations, which is why we are focusing so much effort on the SPS deal.

We will continue to welcome contributions from the Executive, including at the Joint Committee—the governing body for the Windsor Framework and the withdrawal agreement as a whole. More broadly, looking at the committee’s report, we are taking forward a new phase of the Trader Support Service, which provides vital support to businesses with goods movements. Those issues were covered in the committee’s report and, in December 2025, we set out more information on the consortium to deliver it. We are working to give greater discretion to the Democratic Scrutiny Committee; it will be allowed greater discretion over how it conducts its scrutiny and the timelines for it. We are backing this up in Brussels, increasing resourcing, as requested by the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels, so that it can provide vital perspective to the institutions there as proposals are developed and considered.

I move on to transparency and awareness. Our approach seeks to ensure that the broadest range of voices from across Northern Ireland is heard, including from business and civic society. It also ensures that there is the right space for technical engagement between government departments and their counterparts in Northern Ireland and the EU institutions. It seeks to ensure that devolved departments are equipped with the right information about regulatory proposals to consider their impacts and advise the Assembly further on Northern Ireland’s interests.

Where issues are identified, we have already shown our capacity to take action, whether domestically, where we have announced consultation activity on toy safety and chemicals labelling and ensured that the UK internal market is protected in response to concerns from industry; or bilaterally, such as on dental amalgam or the arrangements to protect the supply of pharmaceuticals. On all these issues, we have listened to stakeholders, whether they are business organisations, civic organisations or the vital work of the Democratic Scrutiny Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Just as we will continue to support the scrutiny of the Windsor Framework arrangements and the rules that apply in the Assembly, and by the Independent Monitoring Panel, so too will we support the work of InterTrade UK on promoting the economic bonds and strengths of all parts of the UK, and the east-west council in developing the ties across it.

I move on to some of the specific questions in the order that they were asked and not necessarily grouped by issue. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, touched on EUR-Lex. Although the EU’s EUR-Lex tool can be used to read and consider detailed legal terms, we recognise the need for businesses to have clear and accessible guidance. The enhanced one-stop shop we are delivering will do that, providing businesses with tailored advice to navigate those issues. We believe that this is the best way that we can support businesses with explaining the rules that apply.

Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address Motion

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, I wondered how my noble friend was going to get a warship into this question—and, as ever, he succeeded. My noble friend is right; from my perspective, Peter Mandelson should donate his severance to any charity that campaigns for, or protects, women who have been targeted and have experienced horrendous violence. That is probably the least we are owed.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

My Lords, is it the Government’s case that Lord Mandelson misled them to get the appointment? Can the Minister give us a couple of examples of what he said to fool the Prime Minister?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord will be able to read any and all correspondence for himself as further tranches are published.

Public Procurement

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Alex Burghart)]

I beg to move,

That the draft Procurement Regulations 2024, which were laid before this House on 25 March, be approved.

This statutory instrument represents a significant legislative step in implementing the Procurement Act 2023, which seizes the opportunity, following Brexit, to develop and implement a new public procurement regime for over £300 billion-worth of public contracts. The new regime helps to deliver the Prime Minister’s promise to grow the economy by creating a simpler and more transparent system that will deliver better value for money, reducing costs for businesses and the public sector.

The regulations bring to life and set out the practical detail necessary for the functioning of many of the Act’s provisions. They address many of the points of practical detail that are more appropriately set out in regulations given their detailed nature and propensity to change and need updating from time to time. Many of the measures set out the detail required to be provided in notices required by the Act, which allow contracting authorities to conduct their public procurement in an open, transparent and informative manner. They include the particular contents of various notices that will be used to communicate opportunities and details about forthcoming, in-train and completed procurements.

[Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Does the Minister think the regulations are duly simplified so that it is feasible for the self-employed and very small businesses to have access to contracts? Is there any provision for breaking down contract sizes so that the self-employed and small businesses have more opportunity?

[Alex Burghart]

My right hon. Friend asks a pertinent question—one that was at the forefront of Ministers’ minds when the legislation was drafted and as it made its way through both Houses. A number of provisions in primary legislation are there specifically to increase the chances that small and medium-sized enterprises, which are more likely to be British, get a bigger share of the £300 billion-worth of public procurement. Those provisions include everything from the online procurement system that we are building—which will increase transparency and allow greater notification of pipelines, helping small and medium-sized enterprises to prepare for those procurements—to reduced red tape, which will take the burden off those SMEs and reduce their barriers to entry. We are hopeful that a lot of local businesses in his constituency and in mine will benefit from this landmark piece of post-Brexit legislation.

The contents I was describing would typically include the contact details for the contracting authority, the contract’s subject matter, key timings for the procurement process, and various other basic information about a particular procurement that interested suppliers would need to know. The provisions also cover the practical measures that authorities must follow when publishing those notices, such as publishing on a central digital platform and handling situations in the event that the platform is unavailable.

Beyond transparency, the instrument includes various other necessary provisions to supplement the Act that will be relevant in certain situations. We provide various lists in the schedules so that procurers are able to identify whether certain obligations apply in a particular case, including a list of light-touch services that qualify for simplified rules, and a list of central Government authorities and works that are subject to different thresholds. The regulations disapply the Procurement Act in relation to healthcare services procurements within the scope of the NHS provider selection regime, which has set out the regulatory framework for healthcare services procurement since its introduction in January this year.

The regulations also set out how devolved Scottish contracting authorities are to be regulated by the Act if they choose to use a commercial tool established under the Act or procure jointly with a buyer regulated by the Act. The provisions of the regulations apply to reserved procurement in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and to transferred procurement in Northern Ireland. The Welsh Government have laid similar secondary legislation that will apply in respect of devolved procurement in Wales, and if the devolved body carrying out that procurement mainly operates in Wales, elsewhere.

The Government have consulted carefully with stakeholders throughout all stages of the reform process, and we published our response to the formal public consultation on these regulations on 22 March. That consultation was a great success, evoking a good response from the various representative sectors, and confirmed that the proposed regulations generally worked as intended. Many stakeholders urged that certain matters be clarified and explained in guidance and training, which is a key part of our implementation programme that is being rolled out across the UK. The Government response demonstrates that we have listened to feedback, and confirms a number of areas in which the consultation led to technical and drafting improvements.

Once the instrument has been made, contracting authorities and suppliers will need time in order to fully adapt their systems and processes before go-live. As such, the Government have provided six months’ advance notice of go-live of the new regime before these regulations come into force, which will happen on 28 October this year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

It is difficult to come up with a good system that has the right balance, because the taxpayer’s interest is very much in favour of economies of scale and availability, while the small business struggles to meet the possible volumes of a successful bid for a contract and to satisfy all the criteria that the large company finds easy to manage. I am grateful for the fact that the Minister and the Government generally have been thinking rather more about how small business and the self-employed can make a bigger contribution and how contracts can be broken down into more manageable sizes, both in primary legislation and now in the detail.

[John Spellar]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right on that, but very often the primes get the contract and subcontract to the SMEs and put on a huge on-cost and profit margin. Those SMEs are therefore never able to grow properly, and they are stifled, because Whitehall prefers to deal with very large conglomerates.

[Sir John Redwood]

There will be that bias. Sometimes it is right, and it is always understandable, but Ministers and, above all, the senior officials implementing this new policy will have to bear that in mind. They will have to try to correct for the ease of going for a large company solution, where all the boxes will be filled impeccably and all the right things will be ticked, although that can lead to a contract disaster, because getting the electronic responses right is not the same as delivering the right good at the right price in all the right ways.

I have another worry. We are in an era of exciting and rapid change. Technology is changing even more quickly than over much of our lifetimes so far, as the Prime Minister was mentioning in his remarks this morning. None of us can be sure what opportunities artificial intelligence will produce in wider digitalisation, but we know that digitalisation will make an increasing contribution to, and have an impact on, service provision. So much of government is about the provision of personal services and administrative services, and so much of that can benefit from the intelligent application of these exciting new technologies, but they need careful handling.

The big problem in public procurement is when the innovators are moving so quickly that the invitation to bid is about things that are out of date; they are what the system has been used to handling and the state feels comfortable with. The state can define the old products and old services perfectly well, because it has experience of them, whereas maybe what is needed in certain cases is the innovative product or service. I remember innovating in industry in the past. Often, we had to be willing to license a competitor of our own breakthrough, to give people comfort that there would be some competitive check on costs and availability. Such things are complicated to model and to build in to big procurement systems, such as the state. It means that the state tends to lag and the private sector makes much more rapid advances, because people take more risk and are prepared to change what they wish to procure when they see something better. In the case of the state things have to go through many committees and many memos, and it is probably easier not to bother or to wait a few years until something has happened.

I do not have any easy answers. I understand that the Government and the Minister have the best of intentions, and they have come up with rules that they think are more flexible, but the proof of this pudding will be in the eating. I just emphasise that we need a system that is flexible enough to understand that sometimes it does not know what it wants, or does not know what is available, or that something that is available might be better than the thing people thought they wanted.

My final observation is that we have lost a lot of the self-employed in recent years for one reason or another, but the issues over tax status are part of the problem, with the toughening of the rules over IR35. I worry that a lot of self-employed people will struggle to get any work from the Government, because it is much easier for those procuring just to say, “It’s too much hassle; we would be to blame if this person were taking liberties with the tax system, and although they say they are compliant and self-employed, we aren’t so sure.” Of course, someone can become genuinely self-employed only if they win enough independent contracts. If a big part of procurement is not allowing them to win state contracts, it is much more difficult for them to become genuinely self-employed.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

The right hon. Member makes a very good point. The self-employed have been telling me about the amount of administration they have to do even to be in the running. Also, they do not tend to find out about contracts. I hope that the regulations will extend their promotion and the length of time, and that the Government try to break down those contracts into smaller chunks, so that small British businesses can genuinely be in with a chance.

[Sir John Redwood]

I entirely agree. That is where the more transparent and simpler system will be very good, and we should give that a good trial. I am concerned about someone who is genuinely self-employed struggling to prove that they are sufficiently self-employed, and whether the state would want to take less risk on that. Again, I would like the Minister to put a stronger case to the Treasury that, perhaps, to have more successful self-employed people working for the state under contract, we need to review how we enforce and police their tax status.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the Scottish National party spokesperson.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar]

It is true that the social weighting applied here is insufficient, but European countries also send a clear subliminal message to competitors, putting up, as it were, a sign saying “Just don’t bother.” When Germany did procure a design for naval vessels from Holland, the prerequisite was that they had to be built in German yards.

[Sir John Redwood]

Is there not also a strong national security argument for procuring all defence items in Britain and creating a more competitive market at home to have honesty on prices?

[John Spellar]

That is exactly right. One of the arguments for buying steel from, mainly, Sweden—and possibly from France—was “We do not produce steel of that quality here”, but if we do not provide the orders for that quality of steel, our plants will gradually stop producing it, and we will also lose the skills. That has been a constant row. The same has applied to trains. When I was a Transport Minister, Alstom came along, having taken over the Washwood Heath factory, and said, “Our problem is that when we go to corporate headquarters, we will be told that if we want to sell trains in France we must produce them in France, and if we want to sell trains in Germany we must produce them in Germany. Britain will buy from anyone; where do you think the investment goes?” That has been a regular theme.

During the period of Labour government—and I fear that it is probably still the same with this Government —we heard Ministers say, “We have to abide by these rules because otherwise we cannot expect other people to do so.” I say, “Join the real world, the world in which people do fight their corner, the world where people battle for their corner!” The real, deep irony is that the failure to protect our industry is also a failure to protect our industrial communities, and to protect not just the livelihoods but the life of those communities. We talk about left-behind towns, which are very much at the heart of this issue, but it has also happened to quite an extent in America. It drives a populist feeling that people decry, but which they have been instrumental in bringing about.

If the argument that we have to follow some theoretical rules, rather than be part of the practical world, was wrong previously, which it certainly was, it is even less sustainable now. What the Ukraine conflict has shown is the need for industrial capacity. When I say “industrial capacity”, I do not just mean a plant; I also mean trained personnel. I do not just mean scientists, high technicians and skilled trades—semi-skilled production workers with the ability to make the machines work and to turn materiel out are also a core part of this.

We have seen that drain and drift away, so when we are faced with an existential crisis and Ukraine is on the frontline for freedom against an aggressive and assertive Russia, it becomes incredibly difficult—regardless of whether we will the money out of the Treasury, which I accept is important—to get production ramped up because of the lack of skills throughout the economy. I accept that some of the equipment in the second world war was less technically advanced, but the allies were quickly able— America was astonishingly quick—to move civil capacity into war production. Although we often focus on the “whizz bang” stuff—the hi-tech stuff—a lot of it is about good machining, which requires those abilities and that capacity.

When I argue for maintaining capacity in the UK, it does not mean that we should not co-operate with other countries, but we should do so on the basis of ensuring that our interests get dealt with as well, which will be mutually beneficial in the long run. If we are able to play our part, we will have that greater industrial capacity, but we cannot be the universal donor. We also have to have a degree of reciprocation and investment coming into the UK.

As I said, I accept that the changes introduced by the regulations are an improvement, but they have still not broken the psychological grip inside the civil service, which is not interested in industry and does not rate it, even in the face of the Ukraine crisis and the world dividing up into trade blocs. I am asking not for Britain to be an outlier, but for Britain to become part of the international community, behave like a normal country and have prosperity spread out much more across the country. I think it is called levelling up—we even have a Department that is supposed to be dealing with that.