Spring Statement

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

They are not, and I am sure that the policies are fully in line with all equality laws, because that would have been signed up to before the policies were published. On what we are doing for working people, we saw yesterday that wages are now rising faster than prices, and that in this Parliament living standards will rise at twice the rate they did in the previous Parliament.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

During the Minister’s main response, he mentioned small businesses, SMEs, job creation and deregulation a number of times. Can he give the House the names of any SMEs that support the Employment Rights Bill?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

No, I do not have a full list of all SMEs in front of me, and I am not sure that that is a sensible question to ask me, if I am honest. Everyone is clear that we have a very clear small business strategy. We are helping small businesses to expand and grow, and to trade with the European Union.

Carbon Border Taxes

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

Fertiliser production in the UK is subject to carbon pricing under the UK Emissions Trading Scheme. A UK CBAM will ensure that fertiliser produced overseas faces a comparable carbon price to equivalent goods produced in the UK. Most UK agricultural prices are a function of a range of international factors and the Government do not expect a CBAM on fertiliser to put UK farmers at a competitive disadvantage.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in this subject. Further to the question asked by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, can the Minister say whether the Government have made any assessment at all of the impact that this could have on our balance of payments?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I do not think that that is relevant to this policy. Most of our trade in food is with the EU, and the EU has a similar scheme to ours.

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Tuesday 4th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I welcome the amendment with regard to the salmon and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, on the stand that he has made and the excellent contributions he made at earlier stages on the Bill.

I too welcome the steps that the Minister is taking, but can he explain how the mechanics would work in relation to Scotland, where the Crown Estate is devolved—but also in Wales, where we still have salmon, mercifully, though in small quantities, in rivers such as the Dyfi? In Wales there is always a danger of the salmon suffering, though not as great a danger as there is in relation to fish farms in Scotland. How will the mechanics work with regard to the devolved responsibilities for wildlife and waterways but the non-devolved responsibilities when it comes to the Crown Estate? Perhaps the Minister could clarify that—but otherwise I certainly welcome this as a step in the right direction.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I have a quick question on this. I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said. He pursued this amendment with great vigour, and we have some form of concession from the Government. Is there going to be a reporting back mechanism in place? How do we review it in maybe two or three years?

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, we always supported the amendment on the territorial seabed when it was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, on Report. We did not feel that it was particularly likely to happen but, in a belt-and-braces approach, as the Crown Estate gets more powers to invest in offshore wind and develops, we always felt that it was sensible to have this measure in the Bill. The Minister in this place was clear that the amendment would probably need more time and consideration, particularly with the complexities of the law surrounding these matters. I thank the Minister that giving it more time has resulted in an amendment in the other place. We welcome that amendment and think that it is useful, as it provides security to our undersea assets.

We now have a situation in which the Crown Estate is unable to sell land without ministerial approval, but can the Minister confirm that we do not have a situation in which the Crown Estate could, for instance, do an indefinite lease that would not need ministerial approval? These are important matters. I do not think that is the situation, but I would be pleased if I could clarify that with the Minister.

Turning to Amendments 2 and 2A, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, for raising these issues. We support him wholeheartedly on the need to protect wild salmon. These are important issues to raise. Our issue with the amendment was not what he sought to do—it was the vehicle of using this Bill, which was an inappropriate method for doing it. These are devolved matters, and there is only one salmon farm under the control of the Crown Estate. I wish him luck in continuing to fight for wild salmon.

It is good that the Government have listened and responded, and we welcome the two elements of that response. Adding standards and making sure that they are upheld and reported on is important. It is also important that those standards are written into the framework agreement—so we welcome that, and we think that it is a useful and constructive result of the dialogue that has taken place in this House.

On Amendment 3, I thank the Minister for his explanation. It may be just because I am the new boy here but I was very confused by it, and I am pleased with the explanation. Before I sit down, I also thank him for having listened to the House on the importance of pre-appointment scrutiny. The fact that the Minister has taken that away and it is being enacted is welcomed on these Benches and, I am sure, across the House. I thank the Minister and his Bill team for how they have conducted the business.

EU Law

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for the warm welcome. With regard to REACH, we held a consultation on an alternative transitional registration model for the UK REACH chemicals regime to reduce the cost to industry while ensuring high levels of human health and environmental protection. We will publish a government response in 2025.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, can the Minister explain the difference between retained EU law and assimilated EU law?

[Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)]

Yes, of course I can—

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

With that additional comment and my full support for my noble friend’s amendment, I hope the Government will respond positively to what is a very modest measure.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I also support my noble friend, who recently sponsored an important debate in the Moses Room on this very subject. I inform noble Lords, if they had not spotted it already, that this is a very modest measure. It is not instructing the Scottish Environment Protection Agency or the local planning authority; it is simply instructing the commissioners of the Crown Estate and asking them to be more responsible in terms of outlook to the environment and, in particular, to the obvious evidence that is accumulating about the damage being done to salmon and sea-trout.

I want to reinforce what I hope the Minister is going to say by giving him what I think it is the really important example of the River Lochy on the west coast of Scotland near Fort William. That was once a very important salmon river with a prolific angling catch of well over 1,500. It has gone downhill quite catastrophically: the numbers have decreased; the number of staff employed as ghillies on the river has gone right down; and the impact of tourism on the economy has been very badly affected.

About seven years ago, the two fish farms in Loch Linnhe were both fallowed for a year. The following year, the number of grilse coming into the river went up very sharply and the angling catch went up by a factor of three and a half. That seems to me to be quite compelling and overwhelming evidence of the damage that is being done, which my noble friend described so eloquently. I hope the Minister will accept this amendment because it is a modest amendment and, as I say, it is not actually affecting any government or local government organisation; it is simply affecting the commissioners and giving them this extra duty. I support my noble friend.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I declare interests as a trustee of the Burnham Overy Harbour Trust and president of the Wells-next-the-Sea RNLI station—I say that only because they both go out to sea. I apologise that I was not here at Second Reading on 2 September; I was in the Netherlands on business also relating to the environment. Like my noble friend Lord Trenchard, I agree that the main purpose of the Bill is to allow the Crown Estate to borrow and leverage against its assets and manage them in a way becoming of the 21st century.

I am astounded that the Crown Estate is not required to undertake the same level of environmental impact assessment that we do on the mainland. Amendment 37F is incredibly straightforward. It seeks to install in law a requirement for the Crown Estate to undertake an EIA, just like any other business on the mainland planning to undertake large-scale engineering works.

In preparation for this amendment, I spoke to a number of people in my local community on the coast of North Norfolk: Andy Frary of the Wells & District Inshore Fishermen’s Association; Bob Smith, the Wells-next-the-Sea harbourmaster; Leo Hambro, founder of Tidal Transit; and Professor Jenny Gill of the School of Biological Sciences at UEA—she is not really in my community any more, because she has just moved to Fife.

As the harbourmaster and I discussed, obviously the Crown Estate wants the rent, but this EIA needs to be rather more rigorous. If we insist that the Crown Estate will be required to undertake detailed environmental impact assessments, who will monitor that? Will it be the MMO? Bob Smith’s view is that the MMO is vastly removed from the coalfaces; it gives out the licences but has inexperienced staff and does not really understand local communities.

The fishermen I spoke to, the harbourmaster and I are very much for wind farms out to sea. We have marine protected areas and, ironically, once a wind farm is established, it becomes a sort of natural marine protected area. Rock armour is placed around the base of the wind turbines to protect them from big tides and scarring, et cetera. It then quickly attracts crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—and fish and there is a 50-metre “no fishing” rule for fishermen, who cannot get close to them. It is almost a sanctuary for all these crustacea. As they develop and thrive, they move out and the fishermen can then catch them.

There was also concern that giving licences to different companies for different wind farms was rather disjointed; they should be liaising on where their cables can come together out to sea so that they hit the land in one place. That has happened to an extent in North Norfolk, where they come ashore at Weybourne.

Professor Jenny Gill looks at this from an environmental point of view. The location of these wind farms is the most important thing. We need to avoid putting them where birds are—they are easier to monitor than fish and sea mammals. The concern is bird strike out to sea. Organisations such as the BTO and the RSPB have done a lot of work on flight heights of migratory birds and sea birds in relation to rotor speed and on whether bird strike is a big threat. Bob Smith surveys boats going out from Wells-next-the-Sea; maybe they are lucky and the wind farm they have been surveying is in the right place, but they come back and say, “We saw four birds today”. That damage is not happening.

In seeking this EIA, I am encouraging the Government to involve nature conservation organisations at an early stage so that they can be part of the planning process. Professor Gill mentioned that this is getting quite complicated. Beth Scott, professor in marine ecology at Aberdeen University, has worked on how tides work in open sea and form around tidal nodes and on whether putting static turbines on the ground changes the way tides work and the spatial way in which they move.

The big thing is making the planning process more transparent and getting conservation organisations at the table. They do not want to be adversarial; they are all at the green end of the scale and want to see a lot more of this renewable energy.

I had a very interesting conversation with Leo Hambro, of Tidal Transit. He operates crew transfer boats. I talked to him about the construction phase of these wind farms. He said that there have been improvements of late, in the last few years, including air bubble rings that are placed around the piling system which let out bubbles to reduce the sonic boom—which of course carries a long way underwater—therefore, we hope, mitigating damage to mammals. However, that has happened only recently.

When trenching, that is done either through some sort of underground machine that pulls a plough through the sand or, more often, through a large ship pulling a plough which turns over a trench a metre deep, into which the big cable is placed and then sand is placed back over it. If necessary, a few more rocks are placed on top of it. However, there really ought to be an EIA to decide which route these cables take. I suspect they probably take the shortest and cheapest route, but do they avoid mussel lays? They must avoid sunken ships, but off the coast of north Norfolk, in Cromer, we have a very important chalk reef, and it is important that that is protected.

To go back to crew transfer boats, Leo Hambro has seven of them. In fact, there are 200 around the UK and 700 around the world. Some 80% of them are in the UK and Europe because of the large-scale wind farms we have out to sea. To explain, these boats go out every day and take engineers to maintain and man the wind farms. The average stat for the industry is to use 1,500 litres of red diesel a day. In reality, he said they could use 2,500 to 4,000 litres a day, particularly if they are servicing a wind farm which is 45 miles away. He has to service East Anglia ONE from Lowestoft. These boats are going at 20 knots, so they are burning a lot of diesel.

It is not the case that when they get out there they switch their engines off. They have to spend up to two hours pushing against the turbine to make a safe platform for workers, transferring kit on and off the boat, et cetera. When they are then waiting for another three hours or so for the engineers to do their work, they have to stand off, but they do not drop an anchor and switch off; they have to run their engines to maintain generators and such on-board.

Leo Hambro is operating boats out of Wick, Grimsby, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. An interesting point to which I hope the Minister pays attention is that one of his boats is being converted to run on pure electric. That is being done in Great Yarmouth and should be ready for May 2025, thanks to DfT UK SHORE funding. It also includes offshore and onshore charging infrastructure, which I will come to in a second. The reason I mention these boats is that, for 200 boats using 2,500 litres of red diesel a day on average, five days a week, 50 days a year, that is 125 million litres of diesel.

That takes me to exhausts. AdBlue is added to the exhaust to reduce toxins, including nitrous oxide and sulphur oxide, and diesel particulates. AdBlue is made of synthetic ammonia—

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 14th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I make it clear that this is very much a probing amendment. I am trying to find out the Government’s attitude to how regions benefit from the development of offshore wind power.

We have a number of precedents here. We now have onshore wind development, which I very much welcome and which the Government are effectively permitting. Under the previous rules, it was almost impossible in England for onshore wind developments to take place. But it was made clear in very strong guidance that there had to be community benefit from onshore wind. It is very obvious that this is possible and not very difficult to do. A wind turbine or farm is planted in a particular location terrestrially in England, so it is quite obvious which communities are affected: the parishes around it. There is an onshore wind turbine just down the road from me, and two parishes benefit annually from part of that revenue stream. That works out really well; it is important and valuable, and, to a degree, it makes that generation part of the community’s effort towards the local economy. For those who do not particularly like wind turbines—there are not many of them in my local area—this is, if you like, a compensation and a way in which the local authority is rewarded.

Outside England, up in the most northerly parts of the British Isles, we have Shetland, which has its own wealth funds that came from the oil exploration. A very good deal was done by the local authority back in the 1970s, which I think ran out in 2000; it is not so good at the moment. Its wealth funds are related to a local authority, based on the oil development from around the Shetland waters. Again, it is fairly obvious geographically where those benefits should go. There is that precedent—and that system, with some warts, has worked relatively well.

Clearly, the major development of wind technology in future and at present is on the waves. Some of that is going out, such as the Celtic Sea floating offshore wind development. Those developments will be very large. However, even if they are beyond the horizon, which some of the floating offshore wind developments are, those regional communities are still affected by those developments because, as was pointed out on the last group of amendments, we need grid connections that land somewhere on the UK’s shore.

My proposition is that, given the consistency of policy here, there is an imperative and social justice in rewarding regions that have offshore wind coming into them because of developments away in their marine area. To be equitable both for regional communities and of easing the legitimacy of those offshore wind installations, there needs to be payback to those regional communities.

In this amendment, I have put some very general ways in which that would work. Clearly I have no expectation that the Government will copy and paste that into this Bill in future, even if the Minister thought that it was a brilliant idea—which I am sure he does. What I would like to understand from the Government is whether this is a way forward that they see as possible. How should that happen? Would the Government, the Minister and his officials work with us from these Benches to see how such a system could work? I beg to move.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I want to add a couple of very quick points. The noble Lord moved that amendment with great clarity and put a strong argument. The angle which I am coming from is the county where I live and which contains the constituency that I once represented, North West Norfolk. Norfolk is host to a number of onshore installations related to the offshore wind industry. Indeed, off the Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts a number of arrays generate a huge amount of offshore electricity. However, Norfolk is seeing the construction of a very large substation, another having already been completed. As a result of that substation, there will be the need to connect to the grid. That will entail the need for transmission. At the moment, it is going to be along pylons. There is a big debate about the possibility of putting it underground but, in any event, there will be a major infrastructure project.

The idea of these regional wealth funds makes huge sense. The community is obviously the recipient of renewable energy infrastructure that can have great benefits to local communities in terms of electricity and can also have an impact on the local environment. I am thinking particularly of the substations and pylons. Could there be a way to link what the noble Lord has suggested with the original fund to some amelioration of the impact on those communities? Perhaps the Minister can comment on that.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 33 and in favour of Amendment 27 tabled by my noble friend Lord Teverson.

My noble friend laid out Amendment 27 very well. A good positive communication strategy is missing entirely from this Government’s conversation on the energy transition. It is extremely important not only that we meet our climate targets but that we take the public with us and that they see the benefits of that transition. As I said earlier, in energy terms it is the biggest transition since the Industrial Revolution. It will impact bill payers and people’s lives. If they see the environment as something not related to them and see the consequences of the energy transition only as something that costs them money and inconvenience, it will be difficult to bring them with us on this journey that we need to do together.

The Liberal Democrats have always believed in community and community benefit. It is extremely important that the Government work very hard to bring down cost to bill payers as early as possible in the transition. That is why I was so worried about the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment. On a separate note, I say that it sent entirely the wrong message at the start of this Government and this process of taking people with them. I encourage the Government to reconsider that.

On the subject of community energy and community benefit, my noble friend Lord Teverson raises a really interesting point about offshore wind. This is obviously a probing amendment. We know that there are links with onshore wind, but I would be really interested to hear from the Minister whether there is scope and whether the Government are listening and are aware and prepared to look at these things in the round over time. They are really important. This is about showing that we are in this together, that the energy transition is for everybody, and that the energy transition brings benefits to local communities—particularly those impacted by overhead pylons, substations, offshore cables coming to shore or because they are near to offshore wind facilities. I encourage the Minister to consider all those points. I hope that he will give us a favourable answer and look at them over time.

My Amendment 33 is also, in a similar vein, a probing amendment, so I will not speak for long on it. It seeks to require the Crown Estate commissioners to direct a percentage of the Crown Estate’s profits, to be agreed by the Secretary of State, to a skills training fund. The fund would work to

“provide persons residing or employed on the boundaries of or on the land of the Crown Estate with skills training”.

The commissioners must

“consult with appropriate national and regional organisations and industry to agree the type of training that the fund will provide”.

Budget Statement

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, first, I declare my interest as a paid non-exec director of four companies and two public companies. We have heard some exceptional contributions today, and I endorse all the remarks about and all that praise for my noble friend Lady Moyo on her superb maiden speech. It is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Lea and my old and good friend the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, who talks so much good sense.

As tail-end Charlie in this debate, I understand that I am all that stands between noble Lords and what are going to be three superb wind-ups and a very good dinner. I can see the Whip looking at me, because this debate has gone on quite a while and a lot has been said. I want to start by mentioning something about the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, which was referred to by my noble friend Lord Tugendhat and the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill. If this had not been handled in the way that it was, we would have been staring down the barrel of a full-blown tech crisis that would have completely transformed the start of Budget week. What was required was calm, competent government, and that is exactly what we got. I was impressed by a letter to the Chancellor which was signed by 340 founders and chief executives of tech companies employing nearly 20,000 people. It said:

“Thank you to you and your team for understanding the urgency, for appreciating the risk to the UK tech sector and its importance to the UK economy and for working around the clock to find a timely solution”.


That is praise indeed. Ben Marlow, the chief City correspondent on the Telegraph, is an outstanding journalist. He put it this way:

“To pull off something that complex in the space of a weekend is hugely impressive and a reminder that Britain’s most important national institutions still possess the proficiency to rise to the occasion when needed most”.


So we must pay credit to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the brilliant City Minister Andrew Griffith, the Bank of England and all those civil servants who worked incredibly hard that weekend to find a solution that will not cost the taxpayer one single penny.

The background to the Budget has been discussed at some length. I always listen very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell. He said that we had been through a period of low growth, with GDP expanding by an average of 0.9% per year between 2008 and last year, which was down from a 2.7% average between 1949 and 2007. As he and other noble Lords pointed out, we have seen a period of very weak business investment and poor productivity, and frankly a gradualist decline and what I would call almost a lost decade of growth.

So the exam question is very simple. Will this Budget put in place the building blocks to reverse that? Will it welcome the start of a coherent and credible medium-term growth strategy? At a time when the tax burden will rise to 37.7% of GDP, the highest level since World War II, will the Budget really move the dial? Obviously, there is a huge onus on the Chancellor to maintain stability and above all to go on retaining the confidence of the markets—an agenda that he has worked on tirelessly since his appointment last autumn. So, in addition to his priority for growth, he has rightly made reducing inflation and bringing down debt as a percentage of GDP the other two key priorities.

How does this Budget measure up? There is a lot to like in it. I welcome a number of supply-side reforms that were announced yesterday. I like the childcare package. The 12 investment zones, which the noble Lords, Lord O’Neill and Lord Bilimoria, touched on, will be really important for generating growth and investment for wealth creation. I was very pleased with the announcement on nuclear policy and on carbon capture and storage, which was mentioned in some detail by my noble friend Lord Howell in a typically erudite and impressive speech. I also welcome the announcement of the pension lifetime allowance, which will create incentives for people of my sort of age to go back to work and to stay in work, which must be good for the wider economy.

All that is very positive, and I welcome it enormously. I also welcome the £25 billion business relief package for business investment and, as my noble friend Lady Lea pointed out, the full-expensing arrangements. This will ensure that we have the most generous capital allowance regime in the OECD. Add to this the R&D support package for SMEs, and the extended credit scheme, and that is good news. However, I am still very concerned about the increase in the corporation tax headline rate. I absolutely 100% endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said a moment ago. Would it not have been better if the £25 billion had been used to prevent this increase from 19% to 25%? The headline rate sends a strong signal. It is about the mood music and whether Britain really is the best place in the world to do business.

Another point that I picked up on yesterday was that, as a result of this, the ratio of corporation tax receipts to GDP will rise to the highest level since its inception in 1965. Bearing in mind that Nigel Lawson reduced corporation tax from 65% to 40%, that shows the impact that this will have on business. As Andrew Neil pointed out today in his article, if as an SME or a business of any size you invest £100 today, you can claim back £130 under the super-deductions before paying 90% corporation tax on profits. From April, if you invest £100 you will be able to deduct £100—which is welcome but not as good as it was before—but you then pay 25% on your profits.

I urge the Minister to recognise the concern about this. Even if the Chancellor cannot change his stance on this immediately, I hope very much that he will revisit it at the earliest possible opportunity. I see the Whip looking at me anxiously, very concerned that I will go on too long. So I will just say that, with that one exception, it was an imaginative and well-crafted Budget. It deserves to succeed, and I have no doubt that it will.

Wagner Group: Sanctions Regime

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

As I said, the Government have taken action against the organisation. For example, it is subject to sanctions under the Russian sanctions regime. I have said I will need to write to noble Lords on wider matters. I undertake to do that.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that some of the West’s sanctions are being undermined by a key NATO ally, Turkey, where a number of oligarch’s yachts have been diverted to and a number of trust funds set up for their assets. Are the Government going to tackle this problem with our NATO counterparts?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

One of the key aims of the Government’s sanctions policy is to co-ordinate with our allies to ensure that sanctions are as effective as possible and are not circumvented. We will continue to take action to do so.

Russia: UK Companies

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

If British companies were seeking to circumvent the sanctions that we have put in place, that is something that we would take extremely seriously. The noble Lord is right that the scale and range of sanctions that we have now put in place against Russia need to be matched with increased efforts to ensure that those sanctions are properly enforced.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, is it the case that there are still a number of Russian oligarchs with assets in this country and the Channel Islands who have not yet been fully sanctioned? What other discussions has the Minister been having in the Treasury with the Channel Islands authorities?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

As I have said to the House, the UK has undertaken the largest-scale sanctions programme that we have ever had in our history. We continue to look at new sanctions, and obviously that has to be done within the legal framework that we have set. We amended elements of that framework early on after the invasion to ensure that we could take the widest possible range of action. We continue to look at what we can do, and we continue to speak to our Ukrainian partners about where they would find our efforts most effectively directed.

Stock Markets

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I think the noble Lord forgot to mention a global pandemic and Putin’s war in Ukraine. He also forgot to acknowledge the point that I have made throughout this Question that London continues to be either the highest or second highest-ranking financial centre in the world.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, obviously we cannot be complacent, but can the Minister remind the House that Paris has 795 listed companies on its exchange, whereas London has 2,484 companies. We should look not just at the most valuable companies, such as LVMH, which is quoted in Paris and has a market capital of over €300 billion, but at all those small companies that are raising capital on the London market.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I think my noble friend has reminded the House on my behalf of those figures. I take the opportunity to say that we are not complacent about London’s position, and we are doing a lot of work beyond the Financial Services and Markets Bill to ensure that it remains competitive—the listings review from the noble Lord, Lord Hill, the second capital raising review and the wholesale markets review, among other pieces of work. The FCA has already delivered a number of rule changes based on the listings review to ensure that we remain competitive.