Budget Statement

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I recall many years ago, when I had my first public appointment in the Greater London Council, having a meeting early on with officers. We had an expenditure proposal on the table, and I said to the finance officer, “Can we afford it?” I will always remember his reply. He said: “Mr Balfe, there has never been a shortage of money in County Hall. There has frequently been a shortage of willpower when it comes to applying it to useful propositions.”

In the last year or so, we have seen that there is not only a magic money tree but a whole forest of them. I doubt that we will ever again hear the cry that we need a new Marshall plan, because when push came to shove the Chancellor found far more money than Jeremy Corbyn ever dreamed of spending on the economy. So I begin by pointing out that, if we need money, it can be found; the question is whether we should do the finding.

One of our difficulties at the moment is that we are told we are reinventing conservatism. I put it to your Lordships that reinventing conservatism has nothing to do with spending money. Stanley Baldwin reinvented conservatism in the late 1920s. He devised the assisted areas Act, which opened up roads and motorways to the north-east, the area that the right reverend Prelate came from. Baldwin discovered that not only did this enable people to travel to Newcastle but it enabled the people of Newcastle to leave it, which they did in great numbers. I suggest that levelling up is not going to be achieved by spending money. It may be achieved by investing money in education, health and other areas, but not by just throwing a dollop of money at a problem.

The Conservative Party is clearly in the process of reinventing itself. I would like to think that maybe the Labour Party would look at itself and do a bit of reinventing, because it seems to believe in something different every week. I read the pledges on which Mr Keir Starmer was elected, and I was enough of a junkie to read his speech to the Labour Party conference —or, rather, the booklet that was released. They bear very little resemblance to each other; it seems that the policies change almost with the weather. I hope the Labour Party will put its thinking cap on and try to decide what it wishes to achieve and then how it wishes to achieve it. Although I doubt we will ever be great political friends, I must say that some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, often come close to defining a policy area that is well worth a closer look. I shall leave it at that.

The position has been made about education and health. I have often argued in this House that health is safe with the Conservatives. Health expenditure is safe for the very clear reason that we need to keep these people alive. It is very well known that the older people get, the more likely they are to vote Conservative, so obviously the Conservative Party is going to be in favour of a strong, well-functioning health service.

However, I ask the Minister to get his colleagues to look at the way in which it is organised. The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, was right: there is a huge need to sort out the dysfunctions of the NHS, and there are many. Its overweight bureaucracy now cannot even manage to see a patient. In our area, if you want to see the doctor, you have to be triaged and they decide whether you are going to be seen. Of course, as we know, many conditions have been missed.

The point on education is, of course, exactly the opposite. Young people do not vote and expenditure on education has been allowed to wither more than is sensible for an advanced country. I hope that the Government will look at spending on education.

My final point is that the Chancellor has said that expenditure must have its limits and clearly it must. Many people in my local association are concerned at the way in which government expenditure is going. They do not feel that it is the job of a Conservative Government to keep on pushing up expenditure; they feel it is the job of a Conservative Government to produce value for money. I hope that, when the Minister gets back to his department to reflect on this debate, he bears that in mind and looks for value for money from the expenditure that we are undertaking.