Student Tuition Fees and Maintenance Loans

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

We of course looked at the report, as I am sure the ONS did, and its recommendations were influential. I take the point my noble friend makes about the interest rate at one level, but at another, it is graduated so only those earning more than £45,000 a year will pay the full 3% above RPI. Those earning over £25,000 would pay only RPI. All of these things can be looked at in the post-18 education review, which is under way and due to report next year.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, when is the review is expected to report? Could the Minister also give us the Government’s precise percentage figure for the proportion of loans expected to be repaid? My understanding is that the assumptions regarding that percentage are declining, which is part of the reason why the ONS has made this judgment.

[Lord Bates]

As I said, the Augar review is due to report during 2019. It was set up in February 2018 by the Prime Minister and it will report to the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and, of course, the Secretary of State for Education. Regarding the assumptions, the ONS still has some work to do, as it said in its announcement; it will not come out with the correct figure until September next year. The working assumption on the amount of loans that will not be repaid, as used in the current calculations, is 45%. It is a matter for the OBR and the ONS to review that when they make their recommendations, which we will follow.

Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree entirely with what my noble friend Lord Whitty said about the need for proper parliamentary oversight. I also support the amendments in the names of my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, which I will vote for if they press them.

Almost everyone except the Minister accepts that the Chequers policy on tariffs and customs is now defunct. The Minister knows it to be true; he just cannot say so. The Bill is essentially a trade destruction Bill in that it helps to dismantle our current membership of the European customs union and single market without any policy, let alone a credible strategy, to put in its place. I would say that this is the height of Executive irresponsibility, but coming from a Government who have turned irresponsibility into an art form and created in Brexit a giant political Ponzi pyramid scheme waiting to collapse, it is sadly par for the course.

However, I want to concentrate my remarks on one issue. The position of Northern Ireland was precarious before the Bill and impossible after it because of the Rees-Mogg new clause—Clause 55—which the Government accepted in the Commons at the last minute to stave off certain defeat. It reads as follows:

“It shall be unlawful for Her Majesty’s Government to enter into arrangements under which Northern Ireland forms part of a separate customs territory to Great Britain”.


We all know the clause’s genesis: in the European negotiations leading to the EU and UK’s joint report last December, Mrs May accepted the necessity of a backstop in respect of Northern Ireland whereby if new hard border or customs controls of any kind were necessitated by treaty provisions—or their absence—affecting Great Britain after Brexit, Northern Ireland would remain subject to European law and customs and trade provisions to ensure “full regulatory alignment”. Mrs May struggled hard to avoid a commitment to such alignment and the backstop but she had no choice, for two reasons: the Government’s pledge and treaty obligations to observe the Good Friday agreement, and the reality that the Republic of Ireland would simply have vetoed any EU negotiating provision that did not guarantee that there would be no border infrastructure or mobile border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

As I said, Mrs May struggled hard against those provisions, so much so that when she was in Belfast last month—in a visit orchestrated and supervised by Arlene Foster, the DUP leader who has Mrs May at her beck and call—the Prime Minister disowned the backstop, saying that it should not be a legal mechanism in European law and should be time limited. In other words, it should be a backstop that is not a backstop, like an insurance policy that does not provide any insurance. That analogy is a bit close to the bone because British insurance policies will lose a lot of their insurance cover if we leave the European Union next March without a deal.

In saying this, Mrs May is parroting the critique of the Northern Ireland backstop which, disgracefully, is now par for the course among Brexiters. When I challenged Mr Nigel Farage about this in a debate last week, he said that the concerns about Northern Ireland were,

“entirely got up by Barnier”,

and that, anyway, Ireland was a “tiddly” country. This echoes Mr Boris Johnson who attacks Mrs May every day for letting Ireland become the “tail wagging the dog” of Brexit. Not to be outdone, Mr Rees-Mogg has suggested that the answer to the Irish problem is for the Republic of Ireland to follow us in leaving the European Union. If it does not, we might need searches at or near the border,

“like there were in the Troubles”.

In other words, this is a choice between neo-colonialism and a return to the politics of the 1980s which, I am afraid, sums up Mr Rees-Mogg’s approach to Brexit as a whole. Whatever else Mrs Thatcher did in the 1980s, she did not seek to leave the European Union.

These attempts to undermine the Good Friday agreement and the Irish backstop are utterly reprehensible —indeed, chilling to anyone with any experience of Ireland. The speech by my noble friend Lord Hain was very much to the point. Despite this, the Irish backstop is still the formal negotiating position of both the United Kingdom and the European Union. Thanks to your Lordships, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act enshrines in statute that any withdrawal agreement must conform to the Good Friday agreement.

To return to last December’s EU/UK joint report, your Lordships will recall that it was nearly derailed at the last minute because Arlene Foster and Mr Rees-Mogg worked out that, if there had to be “full regulatory alignment” within Ireland, but Great Britain was leaving the customs union and the single market, then there would have to be a tariff and customs barrier down the Irish Sea. To forestall this—in yet another layer of the Brexit Ponzi pyramid—Mrs May gave a commitment that there would be no hard border down the Irish Sea, nor within Ireland. As your Lordships appreciate only too clearly, after our 150 hours of debate on the then European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, this means that any Brexit which involves Great Britain leaving the customs union and the single market is not possible unless something fundamental gives.

This brings us to Chequers. As the House knows, the Cabinet imploded after Chequers, with the resignations of the Foreign Secretary, the DExEU Secretary and a string of junior Ministers. The Prime Minister was forced to appoint Mr Raab as her Brexit negotiator and thereby disown her own Chequers policy of “a facilitated customs arrangement”. This language was an attempt to disguise a customs union. It was, unsurprisingly, rumbled by Arlene Foster and Mr Rees-Mogg within minutes, which is why the Prime Minister was forced to concede new Clause 55, prohibiting any customs regime for Great Britain which is different from that in Northern Ireland. So we now face a policy which is completely impossible unless Brexit involves no change of any substance in the customs union or the single market in their application to the entire United Kingdom.

There is no point in my pressing the Minister on these fundamental issues of government Brexit strategy because he will simply read out his brief, but can I ask him two specific questions? First, do the Government continue to support a backstop which has legal force and is not time limited? Secondly, does the Minister accept that no deal, in the form in which the Government presented it as an option last week, is incompatible with the Good Friday agreement? It is possible for the Minister to give a one-word answer to both questions. I look forward to hearing whether the Minister—whom I greatly respect—gives me a straight “yes” to both or whether he is forced to dissemble. If he dissembles, people in Ireland will be even more alarmed than they are today.

Rendition of UK Citizens

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to be clear on this. Is the noble Baroness saying that Her Majesty’s Government may or will provide evidence or information to the prosecuting authorities in a case that could lead to the death penalty? If I have understood that correctly, is she not dancing on the head of a pin when she says that we oppose the use of the death penalty in all circumstances, because this is a circumstance in which the death penalty could occur as a result of the direct actions of Her Majesty’s Government?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I absolutely refute the implication that the Government would provide information that would lead directly to someone facing the death penalty. As I have outlined, the guidance is very clear about not seeking assurances, as opposed to sending somebody to face the death penalty in certain circumstances. The Government are quite clear that justice needs to be served.

Public Sector Pay Cap

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to ask the Minister two specific questions, of which I have given him prior notice. Do the Government believe that average salaries of £275,000 for England’s vice- chancellors are justified? What do the Government intend to do to cut vice-chancellors’ pay?

I specifically refer to the University of Bath. Bath is a mid-ranking university among the UK’s 130 higher education institutions. It has barely a fifth of the income of the University of Cambridge. A majority of that income comes from tuition fees, and most of the rest from state research grants, so students and the Government have a predominant interest in the university. This year, the university is paying salaries in excess of £100,000 to 67 staff. Of those 67, 13 are paid over £150,000.

Last year, the vice-chancellor earned £406,000. This year, despite the 1.1% cap on pay for non-managerial staff across the higher education sector, the vice-chancellor’s pay rose by 11%, to £451,000. On top of this, the vice-chancellor, Glynis Breakwell, earns £27,000 from three non-executive directorships, which she apparently has time to undertake alongside being a full-time vice-chancellor. She also has a large house in the historic centre of Bath—a benefit in kind worth £20,000 a year. Put all that together, and Glynis Breakwell is paid almost exactly half a million pounds—more than three times the Prime Minister’s salary.

The University of Bath has a remuneration committee and governing bodies to decide these matters and prevent abuse. The problem is that the governing council is mired in controversy over this precise issue. In February, after an intense debate, the university court voted by the narrow margin of 33 votes to 30 not to censure the remuneration committee. However, that majority of three included the vice-chancellor herself and the very members of the remuneration committee whose conduct was in question. I have been contacted by many members of the university, staff and students. One member of the court has written to me, and has given me permission to quote his words to the House. He says:

“I find the failures of governance and unchecked self-serving senior management to be sources of nauseating embarrassment and inevitable reputational harm to a university otherwise comprised of wonderful, hard-working, and dedicated students and staff”.


If this is not a case for HEFCE and the Government to intervene, I do not know what is.

People often say that top pay is only one brick in the wall and it does not make much difference to the whole edifice what people at the top are paid. However, this is to miss the crucial point that top pay is just the apex of the pay structure, and it determines what happens across senior management within an organisation. The fact that the vice-chancellor is paid £500,000 makes possible the pay of more than £100,000 for the 66 others at Bath University whom I mentioned. Take those 67 salaries together, and the total is £8.7 million. That is £8.7 million out of the university’s budget of £283 million—a sizeable chunk. If that £8.7 million were halved, it would save £4.4 million—the budget of many secondary schools.

A final point is that the highly paid should set an example, particularly at a time of pay restraint. The only example the vice-chancellor of the University of Bath is setting to her staff is one of greed. That is not my idea of a university; I doubt it appeals to your Lordships either. So I hope the Minister will tell us what the Government will do to stop it.

Transport: HS2

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, the benefit/cost ratio for HS2 is strong, and stronger still once the high-speed lines extend north from Birmingham to Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, with high-speed trains proceeding on conventional tracks through to Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The proposed “Y” network—London to Birmingham, then north-west to Manchester and north-east to Leeds—encompasses much of the economic heart of England in one integrated high-speed network of 330 route miles.

I obviously appreciate that some who live on or near the 330 route miles are opposed to HS2. The golden rule of high-speed rail is that everyone wants the stations but no one wants the line. However, the business case is robust and the Government are right to proceed.

There have been claims that the benefit/cost ratio is too optimistic. Actually, for transport infrastructure such as HS2, connecting densely networked population and economic centres, BCRs tend to be too pessimistic because they have difficulty in capturing wider economic benefits. The Jubilee line extension to Canary Wharf and Stratford was approved with a BCR of just 0.95, less than half that of HS2. Traffic forecasts for the M25, when planned in the 1970s, grossly underestimated usage; it was dubbed the “road to nowhere”—famous last words.

In assessing the case for HS2, it is vital to understand that the status quo is not an option. Critics talk as if the choice were £33 billion for HS2 or a few billion for upgrading existing infrastructure. Sadly, this is false. Patching and mending a 200 year-old railway, working at capacity, is hugely expensive and disruptive. There is no need to gaze into the crystal ball. The last upgrade of the west coast main line, completed five years ago, cost £10 billion. It entailed a decade of constant disruption to passengers and freight, and it delivered only a fraction of the capacity and connectivity of HS2.

Capacity is the key issue. To provide just two-thirds of the extra capacity of HS2 from London to Birmingham by further upgrading the west coast and Chiltern lines, would cost more in straight cash terms than building HS2. For starters, with or without HS2, Euston needs to be rebuilt. It was built in the 1960s for barely half of today’s traffic levels and is falling down. Furthermore, extending HS2 to Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds relieves all three main lines from London to the north, all three of which would otherwise have to undergo massive—and massively disruptive—upgrades over the next 25 years.

There is no free lunch here. The choice is this: invest billions in a patch-and-mend of the Victorian railway, or invest a similar sum in 21st century high-speed rail technology, with far greater social and economic benefits, like pretty well every other developed nation in the world. We should invest in the future, not the past.