Northern Ireland After Brexit (Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee Report)
Lord Redwood Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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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.
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(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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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(1 year, 10 months ago)
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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.
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.
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.
Debate on the Address
Lord Redwood Excerpts(2 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow the Public Accounts Committee Chairman. She will understand that I have a certain affection for her in these debates because of her position.
The hon. Lady made a comment about looking forward 30 years. The whole western world faces a paradox that goes back 30 years. In the 1990s, three massive things happened in the world: first, there was a dramatic reduction in tariffs, which led to a huge increase in global trade; secondly, there was the collapse of the Soviet empire; and finally, there was a dramatic acceleration in the creation and adoption of new technology. All those things raised well over 2 billion people out of oppression by starvation and out of political oppression. They changed the world dramatically for the better, but those dramatic changes have had a number of effects.
Today, we face a series of challenges in the western world, not just in Britain, that are more complex and more difficult to deal with than any I can remember since 1979, whether it is Ukraine and the series of wars that are breaking out, whether it is the migration that results from that, whether it is domestic challenges such as the impact on the wages of the western working class—much of the impetus for Brexit was the result of working-class wages across the west being depressed by competition with the rest of the world—whether it is the impact on public finances, which derives partly from that, or whether it is the impact on public services, which are failing not just in Britain but in many countries, to some extent for the same reasons.
That is why, unlike the hon. Lady, I welcome what I think of as the common sense in the King’s Speech. There are a number of sensible measures, including on crime and justice to promote safety, justice and closure for victims, which is important, and on net zero, where the approach is intelligent and measured, rather than headline driven. That is important—the old net zero strategy would not have survived the public reaction. Like the hon. Lady, I vehemently welcome the policy on smoking. We have done far too little for many decades to focus on public health, rather than patching people up in the last three years of their life, which is what our national health service has been reduced to doing. In education, we are building on some of our successes, including in PISA—the programme for international student assessment—and our international competitiveness. There is much to recommend in the proposals in the King’s Speech, particularly with respect to apprenticeships and vocational education. The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education is brilliant and is making a great difference.
Broadly, the proposals are sensible, but the House would be surprised and disappointed if I did not find something to criticise in the Home Office proposals. I will not surprise the House—I am going to pick up on something that I think is a fundamental mistake. I hope that Ministers will think hard before they introduce the proposal, which has been aired in briefings in the last day or two, to allow the police to search homes without a warrant. This is one of the fundamental foundation stones of a free British society, along with jury trials and the presumption of innocence. The right not to have the state kick your door down and search your house without judicial approval is a massively important British value. If anybody has any doubt about that, I have two words to say to them: “Damian Green”. They should go back and look at what happened with the Metropolitan police’s handling of the case, as it were, of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green). The Leader of the Opposition was then the Director of Public Prosecutions, and he in effect struck down the Metropolitan police’s behaviour. We have to think about that very hard indeed, because the judicial control of the police is vital and must be preserved.
Beyond that, the education measures are good as far as they go—as I have said, particularly on skills—but I would go further, as I will explain in a moment. Indeed, all King’s Speeches are basically just frameworks, not the whole agenda for the coming year, and this one is the same. As a result, the last line of every King’s Speech is always the same:
“other measures will be laid before you.”
I want to talk about what I think those other measures ought to be.
What should those measures be? I think most of them should be in areas where the state is struggling to cope with the worldwide problem I have talked about arising over the last 30 years. By the way, it is not an accident that I say “30 years”; that covers Governments of both persuasions, and neither have managed—in some cases, I might say they have failed—to solve the things I am going to talk about. The one advantage we have when it comes to the problems I am about to lay out in education, health and housing—the three critical areas on which we need to go further—is that for the first two, technology may come to our aid to some extent. I, like the Public Accounts Committee Chairman, welcome the move on AI. I thought it was quite risky to have that conference, but it worked diplomatically. It has not got a solution yet, but that has got us on the first step.
Let me talk about health for a second. All parties have taken the approach for my entire lifetime, which is much the same as the lifetime of the health service, of putting more and more money into the health service. We are now talking about a huge amount of money; it swallows the entire amount of national insurance contributions, and what was supposed to cover health and pensions now simply covers health. We spend more money than the OECD average on health—that in itself is quite extraordinary—but it does not deliver. We can put all sorts of excuses in the way, but this is more about management than it is about money. Before we got to covid, from 2017-18 to 2018-19 we put about £3 billion extra into health in real terms—and what happened? Productivity went down by 0.75%. The next year, we put in £7 billion, and productivity went down by over 2%. That was before covid started.
Those dry numbers sound bad, but they do not quite carry the terror of the actual effect, and I am going to give an example from my own constituency to explain what I mean. I had a constituent whose name was Richard. He had had cancer, and had been operated on and cured, and as a result he had regular six-monthly check-ups thereafter to watch for any outbreak. But through administrative failure, he did not get the check-ups, so was at least six months behind the timetable. We all know that the later we diagnose a cancer, the more difficult it is to solve. The operation he was supposed to have was then delayed as well, and it got to the point where basically there was no chance of recovery for Richard. He came into my life, as it were, as I was his constituency MP and his family wanted him out of hospital for Christmas so that he could die among his friends and family rather than surrounded by strangers. That is what we are talking about thousands and thousands of times over. That is the impact of this failure. I think there are a lot of things we can with respect to the re-management of the health service, but I will talk about one.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Office for National Statistics published figures for the three years from 2020 to 2022, which state that public service productivity in general fell by an unprecedented 7.5%? That means that we needed to put roughly £30 billion extra into public services to achieve the same thing.
Mr Davis
My right hon. Friend is right: it is a systemic problem. It does not just affect Britain or the health service. Indeed, I think that numbers for those years for the health service were about 25%—so huge, huge numbers. I bring this back to the reality of the individual. If we delay diagnosis and treatment, we sentence people to death. It is as harsh as that.
I would like us dramatically to increase the amount of diagnostic capacity we have. If we look at OECD numbers on CT scans, I think we are third from worst. This is why I say it is not a single Government problem—we do not get to be third from worst in one term; it happened over the course of the whole 30 years. On MRI scans, we are the worst in the OECD. How on earth a country such as ours gets to that position is astonishing.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
I have declared my business interests in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I hope the Government are listening to the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) on those important matters for Northern Ireland. It is vital that there are changes to the Windsor framework, so that Northern Ireland is properly a part of our United Kingdom and can accept our commonly agreed laws on everything from taxation through to the arrangements over products and trading.
I welcome very much the emphasis in the King’s Speech on the United Kingdom’s producing more of our own oil and gas in substitution for that which we are currently importing. The logic of substitution is most obvious in the case of gas. We have gas pipelines already installed to bring gas from the fields to the mainland, with capacity in them because gas output has been declining; and, of course, if we deliver it directly through gas pipelines we have none of the extra cost and trouble of transit involved in importing liquefied natural gas, usually from the United States or Qatar. Those who are keenest on the road to net zero should recognise that having our own gas down a pipe greatly reduces the amount of world carbon dioxide because so much more carbon dioxide is generated if it is necessary to liquefy the gas, to transport it for long distances, and then to recreate it as gas when it arrives. All those are very energy-intensive processes which we do not need if we generate more of our own gas from the North sea.
I have good news for Ministers. Let me remind them that although they say they think we need a bit of additional legislation for future licensing rounds, what we really need to do is concentrate on developing the existing fields and the new discoveries that have been well known about, in many cases, for a great many years, and maximising the output of what we already have so that the gas and the oil come more quickly and at lower cost, because we need it now. Most of our constituents still need gas for their domestic heating and will need it for the foreseeable future, most of our industrial plants run on gas as their main source of energy, and most of us have petrol or diesel cars, so we still need the fractions of oil to run our transport. It is important for us to get on with that—and, as the right hon. Member for East Antrim has said, another great bonus for all of us, including the Treasury, is that the sooner we get that oil and gas landed, the sooner we will secure a big increase in tax revenues from which we could benefit, enabling us to get the deficit down and support the public services that we wish to see.
I am very pleased that the King’s Speech began with the mighty topic of the economy. I am sure that the Government and the Prime Minister would agree that what we do over the next year to get inflation down more quickly, to bring about faster growth to create more and better-paid jobs, and to secure the extra investment that we want to see is absolutely vital. Again, I have good news for the Government. I think there are measures that they can take in a future Finance Bill—which, I am sure, will constitute part of our proceedings over the next year—that would help to achieve all those aims. They are not incompatible, and we do not have to wait. Some people seem to think it is necessary to sequence it and to spend a year of misery—with a massive credit squeeze and an austerity Budget—to get inflation down before we can think about doing the other things, but if we cut the right taxes, we can bring forward the reduction in inflation, and that, of course, has a direct knock-on effect on the cost of running public services. One of the reasons we have seen such a big increase in public spending in the last year or so is the massive rise in inflation, because so many things are directly geared to the inflation rate.
So, Government, let us have a year of temporary tax cuts on energy, because British energy is far too expensive. It makes us much less competitive, and it is a burden on household budgets. I would pay for that— because I do not want to increase the overall deficit—by selling all those NatWest shares that we still have. Interest rates have gone up a lot, and banks should be making a lot more money. Let us just sell all the shares and use that for a one-year advantage while the oil and gas prices are still very elevated, and to ease the transition from slow growth to higher growth and to a faster reduction in inflation, which will then help reduce the deficits.
We also need measures to help small business and the self- employed. It is of great concern to me, as it should be to many other Members, that we have 800,000 fewer self-employed people today than were known about, at least, in February 2020. Some of that is due to covid and lockdowns or to natural retirements, but some of it is due to the sharp change in the tax system called IR35, which took place in two tranches, one at the end of the last decade and one at the beginning of this one. It is now very difficult for people to grow businesses, particularly if they want contracts from other businesses. This has put many people off, and we are not seeing the new generation of self-employed people coming through that we have seen in previous generations—and that is mightily important, because they provide much of the flexibility in our economy, and can also provide extra capacity. Such measures would also help to provide worthwhile things for people to do, because some will be currently without a job and will be on benefits generally. So, Government, change the tax system back to the pre-2017 one which allowed a phenomenal growth in the number of self-employed people, and helped the workings of not only products and services markets but the job market itself.
We all have many small businesses in our constituencies and we know how important they are to the services and output of our local community. We know how flexible they are, how hard so many of them work and how prepared they are to go the last mile to win clients and to look after clients and customers. They need a tax break, and the first thing we should do—now that we no longer have to accept the EU rules on VAT registration —is to have a big increase in the threshold level at which businesses register for VAT, because this is now a major constraint. I am sure we all know small businesses that turn down work or close down for a month extra during the year because they do not want to go over the £85,000 turnover, with all the burdens of the compliance, regulation and paperwork that that would cause, as well as having to put 20% on prices and so forth.
Let us allow small businesses to enjoy their flexibility for longer and to get to a bit bigger size—let them have one or two employees—before they have to go through all the hassle of registration and the legal pressures that that generates. I think that would generate more revenue from other types of taxes, and even on the strange Treasury arithmetic it would be quite a cheap item. For example, we could easily pay for it out of modest improvements in productivity, which we will need to ensure if we are to deal with the collapse in public sector productivity identified by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). There must be ways to do something about that, and I believe that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is working on them.
My final point relates to the Bank of England. The Bank is independent in the setting of the base rate and the work of the Monetary Policy Committee, but it is not independent in managing the mighty portfolio of bonds that it currently owns on behalf of the institution and wider taxpayers. The proof of that is the fact that successive Chancellors from Alistair Darling onwards signed a concordat with the Bank of England giving it permission to buy bonds and agreeing to pay any losses, should losses be made, when it came to sell them or when they matured. The Bank of England now wishes to sell £100 billion-worth of bonds over the next few months, now that they have crashed on the markets because of the Bank of England’s changes in interest rate policy and bond policy, meaning that huge bills are being sent to the Treasury. I believe that the bill was £24 billion of losses in the first four months of the current fiscal year, and the theoretical liability is over £170 billion of losses of that kind and of the kind of running losses due to the way in which the Bank holds bonds at the moment.
I would like to advise the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England to look at what the European Central Bank is doing. It too made the colossal mistake of overinflating, over-creating money and buying too many bonds at very expensive prices, just as the Bank of England did, and it too ended up with the predictable excess inflation that we have seen. But the ECB is not panicking out of those bonds; it is holding them until they repay, which will result in fewer losses for it. There will still be losses, because it often paid more for the bonds than their actual repayment value, but it is not incurring big losses by selling them at very depressed prices on the market, now that the central banks have decided to smash the asset values of the bonds that they spent quite a lot of time acquiring just two or three years ago in many cases.
We need to do this because the Treasury should not have to make those huge losses and because money has now lurched from being crazily too expansive and likely to generate inflation to being far too tight and likely to overshoot in slowing the economy too much. So please, Government—listen, watch and on this occasion I say learn from the European Central Bank, which seems to be getting this just a bit more right than we are. Then we might start to make progress in bringing together the perfectly compatible aims of getting some growth, which we will not get if we have too severe a credit squeeze, and getting inflation down, which could be speeded up with the right type of tax cuts.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I certainly welcome this King’s Speech, particularly because at the end of the King’s Speech we saw—I see a former Lord Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), looking at me with a beady eye—the reintroduction of an important tradition: the Lord Chancellor went backwards down the stairs, rather than the modern innovation that we have been infected with in recent years of the Lord Chancellor turning his back on his sovereign. So we have one occasion when the Tories, after 13 years of Government, have at last turned the clock back. Evelyn Waugh complained that in all his life the Tories had never turned the clock back, but we now have one good example.
In the King’s Speech, we also have an opportunity for growth. I endorse every word said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) on growth, the need for growth and the need for us not to treat the withdrawal from quantitative easing in the way the Bank of England is doing it, which is insanity. The men in white coats, who were once called upon by John Major, could be sent in a different direction on this issue.
Two key parts of growth are set out in His Majesty’s Gracious Speech. The first is in the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership and in having legislation for that. Free trade is the real opportunity to make this country and the world richer. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) pointed out that, since 1990, the growth in free trade has had a phenomenal effect in reducing absolute poverty from 36% of the globe’s population to 9.2%—from about 1.9 billion people to seven hundred and something million people. That phenomenal success in prosperity comes from free trade. With the CPTPP, we have the opportunity to push that further, but we should go further still.
We should get rid of tariffs and barriers to trade unilaterally, because opening up our market is beneficial for our consumers. Protectionism is always the provider of the port for vested interests, but free trade is to the advantage of consumers and individuals. So yes, the Government are going in the right direction and the King’s Speech is going in the right direction, but I would encourage His Majesty’s Government to go further, as I would on the issue of using the Brexit opportunities.
We have a chance to become a light-touch regulated economy that can be efficient and competitive. Again, we should be challenging vested interests. Many Members will remember that, when the REACH regulations came in, the chemical industry was up in arms, saying “These are terrible, awful European innovations. We don’t want them, they are costly, they are ghastly.” Then industry said, “Oh, these regulations are marvellous because they keep out any competitors.” We want to change things like the REACH regulations, so that we recognise regulators around the world that provide a similar level of safety, rather than allowing regulations to be used as a means of covert protectionism. That is the challenge for this Government.
Using these advantages is mentioned in the King’s Speech; we need to use them aggressively. I have an interest in financial services, declared in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, but these advantages should be used particularly in financial services, where we should restore our position as one of the most competitive areas in the world. We should be using them in agriculture to take the burden off the backs of our farmers because, when I advocate free trade, it is only fair that the quid pro quo is that we allow those who produce to do so in an easier way—in a way that takes burdens off their backs.
Talking of taking burdens off backs, there is a part of the King’s Speech that is essential, but does not go far enough. A few weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made an excellent speech about lifting some of the net zero burdens and some of that will be coming forward to this House in the coming months, but it is nothing like enough. On the motor cars issue, most of the regulations, as I think my right hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) pointed out, will remain and will still make it harder for people to buy cars; they will make it more expensive. That is a burden on British people. We want to be getting rid of things such as that. We do not want to force people to do things; we want the technology to be there first so that they want to do it. No one had to regulate to make people give up the horse and carriage and move to the motor car—the horseless carriage, as I used to call it—even though His Majesty came to Parliament in a horse and carriage. They did so not because of a regulation or a penalty, but because market forces meant that we favoured the motor car. If an electric motor car is so good, people will buy it; if it is not so good, they will stick to petrol—I am certainly going to stick to petrol for the time being.
John Redwood
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it does not work in its own terms? If somebody gets an electric vehicle today and goes home and plugs it in, they will have to burn more gas in a gas power station, because there will not suddenly be more renewable power to recharge that car.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right but at least, thanks to this King’s Speech, it may be a little bit more British gas that we will be getting out, and that of course should be pushed further. There has been some talk that the proposals have been watered down. Well, they should be watered back up again, so that we get as much out of the North sea as we possibly can. It is in our economic interests and our environmental interests because the emissions are lower when we use domestically produced resources. But, as I say, we have to go further.
We have heard the news about our steel industry. The reason our steel industry is being changed, so that we will have no pure steel manufacturing, is because of Government policy. It is because of the emissions trading scheme. It is because of having the third most expensive electricity costs in the world. It is about putting burdens on industry that make it impossible for it to operate and this utterly bogus view that, if something is made in China, the emissions are Chinese and, if it is made in the UK, they are British emissions, even if the steel is used for exactly the same purpose. This is the ridiculous thing about Drax. The chips put into the Drax machine count as Canadian emissions even though they are burnt in the UK. This is barmy in wonderland stuff. We need to be putting British industry first, and not using silly statistics—legerdemain of carbon emissions—to try to pretend that we are doing something that we are not.
This ties in with the growth agenda. Let us look at what we have already achieved. Since 1990, the UK has reduced emissions by 44.1%, the United States has reduced emissions by 2.6 %, and the People’s Republic of China, our red friends, has increased emissions by 426.5%. We have done our bit. Our economic growth has been lower in that period than it otherwise would have been because we have forced upon ourselves the high cost of energy, which the Americans and the Chinese have not done.
Therefore, we need a growth strategy with cheap energy, but there are problems that we have to deal with. There is a bit about enforcing the rules against the small boats, but we have to go further than that. We are not building enough houses, as the Leader of the Opposition pointed out. We are not building the infrastructure for 606,000 net migrants to come to this country a year, and we are finding, as we see there is trouble on our streets, possibly even on Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, that the integration that we hoped we had in this country is not as deep as we thought it was. That is something that should concern us. I thought that we could be very proud of the integration that we have in this country and the good relations, and we want to keep those, and the way to keep them is to control migration and to have it at levels that allow for integration to take place.
Therefore, I am disappointed that we are still focusing on illegal flows. I am afraid we are caught up in the HMT-OBR understanding of migration that is wrong because it focuses on total GDP, rather than GDP per capita. We are actually making ourselves poorer as a nation by the excess of migration that we are having, and we are risking what I might call the comfort of the nation—the ease with which we all live together—by allowing the arguments of countries away from the United Kingdom to be heard on the streets of the United Kingdom, which is unwelcome. We want a growth strategy, we want cheap energy, we want to control migration, but we do not want to abandon our ancient liberties.
I was not planning to mention this, but I was inspired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden, who is standing at the Bar of the House, when he talked about warrantless entry. If the police always got things right, we might think that was a good idea, but over the last few years we have had any number of problems of police behaviour and police leadership.
I say that cautiously, and I concentrate on leadership because when we go around this Palace, we speak to as fine a body of men and women as we could hope to meet, who keep us safe every day, and whenever I meet constables in North East Somerset, I find exactly the same—fine, brave people who look after us. But their leadership, we must acknowledge, has been pretty poor, and this seems to me not the time to give them a power that goes against one of our most ancient constitutional safeguards.
I know that there is a rule in this House that discourages tedious repetition, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I hope I can assume that the House was not paying sufficient attention in March 1763 to a comment made by our old friend Pitt the Elder, because he said:
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter!—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!”
That is such an important liberty. It does not mean that the police cannot run in after someone if they are caught in the act, but it means that if they are to come through someone’s door, they need evidence and a warrant. It is a foundation of our liberties, and I do not think a King’s Speech, as a prelude to a manifesto, is a place in which to water down our ancient liberties.
Tata Steel: Port Talbot
Lord Redwood Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Ms Ghani
It is unfortunate that the hon. Member decided to politicise such an important sector. It was not me but Gareth Stace for UK Steel, the trade association for the UK steel industry—the voice of the country’s steel manufacturers—who said:
“This is a really important day for our steel sector in the UK, with the Government showing a real commitment to the future of steel making here in the UK. We will get a true transformation of our sector to create steel for the net-zero economy, something which our customers are asking us for. We have the ability to completely transform our sector and boost the net-zero economy in the UK. We can really seize the opportunity to increase production in the UK and increase exports. We all know that a net-zero economy will need more steel, not less.”
The hon. Member is putting on a very poor display over a serious decision that has been in discussion, I am told, for more than a decade. I have spoken to Ministers who have held the portfolio over many years before me, and they tell me that these matters are nothing new.
More importantly, the hon. Member knows that the blast furnaces were at the end of their life. The right decision is to provide certainty, security and continuity, and that is exactly what we are doing. The UK is a world leader in producing steel, but we need to decarbonise, and this is the best way of ensuring and guaranteeing jobs, of which there are 8,000 on the site and 12,000 in the supply chain.
As well as the £500 million, £100 million has been put together for a group to consult and work with the unions, the staff, the Welsh Government and the Secretary of State for Wales to ensure that the transition is as appropriate as it can be and not so challenging for the people who are impacted. The proposal is to go for electric because other energy sources are underdeveloped. If the hon. Member will reflect on what is happening in Europe on hydrogen, for example, he will see that nothing else can work at this scale and within the tight timeframe that we want to work in to ensure that the site continues to be viable not only for manufacturing steel in the UK and supporting all the jobs in the supply chain but to support Wales, too.
The proposal will also transform the Welsh community and the Welsh area. A huge amount of work is taking place with the freeport, and a huge number of businesses and jobs will be coming out of the transformation to green steel. It is unfortunate that the hon. Member cannot recognise that, without this decision, there would have been continued uncertainty, no security for the staff and definitely no security for the UK steel sector.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Have the Government ascertained that there is enough old steel and metal around for the recycling facility? Do their wider plans for steel in the United Kingdom include retaining capacity to produce new steel?
Ms Ghani
My right hon. Friend is always absolutely hot on these topics. There is enough steel, because we export so much of it and we can now use it on the site. Considering the age of the current furnaces, the reality is that electric arc furnaces are, within the timescale, the best way for us to transition. There is of course a supply chain in place that enabled Tata to put the business plan forward, for it to commit a substantial amount of money, and for us to support its plan.
UK Automotive Industry
Lord Redwood Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Ms Ghani
I would love to. More importantly, I was recently at a site where we saw trucks that used hydrogen, ensuring that construction sites achieve their net zero ambitions. Leyland will not be forgotten, due to my hon. Friend’s hard work.
Although we are not reinventing the wheel, we are witnessing the biggest transformation this sector has gone through since the first Ford models came off the production line. New vehicle technologies are emerging and shaping our understanding of mobility daily.
In the transition, the UK’s aim is to lead the future by creating it. Our primary objective is to boost private sector investment across the whole of the UK and create the right conditions for all businesses to innovate, by giving them the confidence to do so. That is why Government have created a comprehensive and long-standing programme of support, which includes the Advanced Propulsion Centre, the automotive transformation fund and the Faraday battery challenge—all tangible interventions that industry can access. We believe that, through those programmes, we can de-risk private investment in R&D, fast-track the commercialisation of new technologies and unlock the industrialisation of our EV supply chains.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Would the Minister like to give us a few thoughts on what she thinks the opportunities are for synthetic fuels, sustainable fuels and hydrogen? How will they fit in around her battery vision?
Ms Ghani
My right hon. Friend’s views on electric vehicles and zero emissions are well documented. As I mentioned, a hydrogen strategy is also in place. I have been to a number of projects where vehicles are using hydrogen to ensure that that technology is exploited and that there is supply and demand in the chain, too. We are looking at sustainable alternative fuels not only in the automotive sector but in the aviation sector, so it is not just in that space. All alternative fuels will be investigated.
The future of the auto sector is electric—although I know that my right hon. Friend would like it to be much wider—automated and connected. The UK is well placed to consolidate its position among global R&D leaders as these technologies begin to commercialise, creating jobs and valuable new services for our businesses and communities. Our flagship Commercialising Connected and Autonomous Mobility programme will bring benefits across the UK. The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicle’s recent £66 million Commercialising CAM programme 2025 aims to create an early commercial market that could be worth £42 billion by 2035. This innovation will save lives, create jobs, enable more efficient movement of people and goods, address chronic driver shortages, and better link under-served communities to vital services. As part of the programme, on 5 September, I was pleased to announce £18.5 million of public grants to 13 projects and 43 organisations across the UK to strengthen our capabilities in the CAM supply chain. I then had first-hand experience of a self-driving vehicle with Wayve, near King’s Cross. These technologies are here. They are no longer something from science fiction. Today, we can take automated bus journeys in Didcot and Edinburgh, with more world-class automated passenger and freight services to follow in the coming months.
In addition, through Government policies, we are enabling future mobility in the UK. We launched the full local electric vehicle infrastructure fund in March 2023. Following a pilot, it provides a further £381 million over the next two financial years to deliver tens of thousands of local charge points across England. Furthermore, to enable long-distance journeys, the rapid charging fund will future-proof electrical capacity at strategic locations to prepare the network for a fully electric car and van fleet—not just cars.
G20 Summit
Lord Redwood Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I refer the hon. Gentleman to my previous answer on Mr Johal. Most recently, the Foreign Office Minister met Mr Johal’s family to discuss the case in detail.
Turning to the hon. Gentleman’s other points, on our investment partnerships, the British investment partnership approach with India, for example, has invested over £2 billion to support 600 different enterprises, employing about half a million people. That is just to give him some sense of the scale of the alternative projects we are involved in.
Lastly, I turn to the hon. Gentleman’s point, which the Leader of the Opposition also raised, about the US Inflation Reduction Act and the approach of other countries. Neither seem to recognise that the approach we have taken is working for the UK, not least with the recent announcement of a £4 billion investment in the UK by Tata, which represents the single largest investment in our auto industry, potentially ever, to build a gigafactory here. That was followed by investment by Stellantis and BMW to secure future electric vehicle manufacturing in the UK. Any which way we look at it, our auto manufacturing sector is receiving record amounts of investment to make the transition to electricity-oriented vehicles. That is because of the tax, regulatory and incentive regime we have put in place, which is delivering real jobs and real opportunity for the British people.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Did the Chinese representatives give any indication of when they might stop their big increases in carbon dioxide and start to reduce them? Does the Prime Minister agree with me that it makes no sense for the UK to rely on Chinese imports of electric vehicles, solar panels and other green products when they are so CO2-intensive in their production, and deny us the jobs and added value?
The Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend makes a good point. He will see in the G20 declaration a commitment by all members recognising the need to peak emissions in the next couple of years. To his broader point, that is why the Government have consulted on measures to address carbon leakage. It is absolutely right that there is a level playing field, and that if we take action here it should not come at the cost of British workers if it ultimately makes no difference to global emissions. That is why we have consulted on proposals on carbon leakage, and I very much welcome his thoughts on that.
Northern Ireland Protocol
Lord Redwood Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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The Prime Minister
This is about ensuring the free flow of goods within our United Kingdom; that is what the green lane is there to do. It was always going to be the case after we left the European Union that sending things to the European Union from the UK would be different. What this agreement is about is prioritising trade within the United Kingdom’s internal market, and the green lane that we have delivered through this framework does exactly that.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Who will decide which EU laws will apply in Northern Ireland, and on what basis will they make that decision?
Tributes to Her Late Majesty the Queen
Lord Redwood Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
We meet together in mourning. Once again, our late Queen has united the nation, but this time, unfortunately, she has united us in grief and our common sense of loss. We here in Parliament suspend our differences, our party and our political views, because something so large has happened—that constant in our national life who has always been our Queen is no more.
All those of us here who are all privileged to have supporting roles in public life have learned a great deal from observing just how well the Queen carried out all her public service over the years. Everyone here has met her at invitation at Buckingham Palace, or at a national event in London, or, perhaps, hosted her in their constituency—some of us had the honour on many occasions to be with her and to see her. What always came across to all of us was just how much she respected every person and every institution that she visited. She showed that respect by impeccable manners and great courtesy—always on time, always properly briefed, always appropriately dressed for the occasion.
But, as so many have said from their personal experiences, there was something so much more than that. She was not just the consummate professional at those public events: there was the warm spirit, the personality, and above all the understanding that everyone else at that event was terrified that something was going to go wrong, that they had not understood the protocol, or that there was some magic way of doing it—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) was explaining—that they had to get right. At those public events, the Queen always relaxed people and showed them that there was no right way, because she was there for the people; she was there for the institution; she was there for the event. That is what we can learn from.
Of course, she was also Our Majesty. She was the embodiment of the sovereignty of people and Parliament; she represented us so well abroad and represented us at home, knowing that as a constitutional monarch, she represented us when we were united. She spoke for those times when we were gloriously happy and celebrating, or she spoke for those times when there was misery and gloom and she had to deal with our grief and point to the better tomorrow. That was why she held that sovereignty so well and for so long—a constitutional monarch who did not exercise the power, but captured the public mood; who managed to deal with fractious and difficult Parliaments and different political leaders, but who was above the politics, which meant that our constitution was safe in her hands. I wish her son, the new King, every success in following that great lead as he has told us he will do, and I can, with others, say today—“God save the King.”
UK Energy Costs
Lord Redwood Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
Instead of taking the Opposition’s approach, we are taking an approach that is pro-growth, pro-business and pro the investment we need for our country’s energy security.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Does the Prime Minister agree that we are too short of energy but have plenty of taxes, and that if we had an over-supply of taxes, as the Labour party wants, we would have less supply of the things we were taxing?
The Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. The reality is that we cannot tax our way to growth. The policy that I am setting out today is all about helping people with their energy costs, as I promised, and making sure that we have the long-term energy supplies that we need for our country.
Mr Rees-Mogg
That is structurally wrong. Taxes need to be certain. If we are to encourage investment—and we need investment in this country—the tax policy has to be set for the long term. We cannot retrospectively pick people’s pocket; we need to tell them what the charge will be beforehand and keep it clear.
John Redwood
Would the Business Secretary like to remind the House that the Republic of Ireland deliberately chose much lower corporation tax rates than the rest of the advanced world and collects a far bigger proportion of its economy in taxes on business than we do?