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Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for her report, which I have just picked up for my Christmas reading. It has been rather influential within the system. I do not know if my noble friend is aware of the cross-Whitehall ministerial group chaired by the new Minister for Technology, Saqib Bhatti MP. It will certainly look at how the digitally excluded can be helped in hubs in different ways. The library network already exists. I have always thought that this is very useful in communities. I have collaborated with bank expertise on fraud—which is my area of responsibility. I am grateful for the work of her committee. I will certainly take her point away.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, was the noble Baroness briefed on a question which I asked on the last occasion when this topic came up? I asked if the Government were looking at developments with Paradot. The Minister who was answering did not know anything about it. Paradot is an online buddy. I have a therapist friend who believes he will be out of business in five years’ time because of the way in which this is developing. If this kind of change takes place, it will have a massive impact on what will happen in the public service.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a good point. The honest truth is that I was not aware of his intervention. Perhaps I can go away and get back to him on another occasion. This sounds a very interesting point and issue.

Cross-government Cost-cutting

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 21st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House for allowing me to nip in quickly. I just want to express a few words of thanks. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for introducing the debate and, as usual, for being provocative on what is needed much more from the Government these days and which seems to be absent—some attention to common sense. So many of our policies seem to go awry and we do not seem able to do the simple things. I also take this opportunity of welcoming my noble friend Lord Watson to the House, and thank him for his very important maiden speech, and in particular his apology. To apologise like that takes some doing, and it is right for us to say that we are sorry ourselves, to accept it and welcome him. I very much look forward to his contributions and the work that he will do in the House.

On the subject itself, I will be very brief. I am surprised that the contribution from the Green Bench did not mention this, but rather than looking all the time for growth, growth, growth, given what is happening to the planet we should now be looking for life. Less of something is better for us and good for the planet, good for the universe and good for individuals. Why do we need to grow, grow, grow? Why do we not start to look to consume less food and drink every day, as a number of noble Lords have suggested? We would all be better at the end of the day if we did that. Why do we not look to travel less, rather than to travel more and use planes, as we have done in the past? We could use less, and stay in our communities and with our colleagues. There is a whole range of areas where we could do this, such as fuel. Why do the Government have to have a debate on whether to advise people to economise on the use of fuel? Common sense should prevail. As I promised I would speak only briefly, I will leave it at that. It is a different approach, and it is time for a different approach on the economy.

Out-of-work Benefits

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

Let me start by saying that the intention behind our efforts is not to issue punitive measures. Let us clear this up right now: as I have always said, sanctions are imposed only if there is no good reason for people not to take up an opportunity offered to them and they can do it. Some 98.9% of sanctions are down to the fact that people fail to turn up for interview, and the minute that they ring up to book the next appointment, the sanction is reviewed. At the DWP we do not go to work in the morning saying, “How many people can I sanction today?” That is just not the line. The noble Baroness raised a point about childcare, and it is number one on my list. I have just come back from the G7 where I spoke to my colleagues in Australia and Canada who have made enormous strides in improving childcare. The noble Baroness can take it from me that I am on the case.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, the number of people available for work is reducing primarily because of the increase in ill health in this country, as the Minister conceded. What discussions is her department is having with the Prime Minister, the Treasury and the Department of Health about how we start taking measures that will improve health in this country and move us away from being one of the unhealthiest countries in Europe?

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I am not aware of any discussions with the Prime Minister, who probably has enough on her plate at the moment. We are well aware that the longer people have health problems—the longer they exist—the more difficult it is. We are working hand in glove with the Department of Health and with psychologists and psychotherapists to help people who have depression and anxiety. I have found that the best way to stop people losing their job because of mental health issues is to make sure that we work with the doctors so that when they give them their antidepressant prescription, they send them to us quickly and we can get them back to work sooner rather than later.

House of Lords: Appointments Process

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the House for the opportunity to intervene in the gap, and I apologise for not putting my name down. I have two points.

First, we have great power, and we are not exercising all the power that we have. If the Government choose to ignore the recommendations made by the Appointments Commission, all of us of like mind should come together and take it into our hands to have a petition against what the Government are doing. If that fails to move them, we should petition the Queen that she should not issue Writs to people who are appointed against the wishes of the Appointments Commission. I would value the Minister’s comments on that before we move to such a position.

Secondly, I take a different line from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, on the House and how we come to be here. I have been here nearly 25 years. I was a union official and was appointed in the first instance as a union official. Mrs Thatcher changed the rules and I then became an elected official. I had to stand in front of my membership, and I was better for being accountable in that way. The great weakness of this House is that it is not accountable. While-ever it continues like that, particularly in modern society where people are able to communicate in a quite different way, we will come under more and more criticism. We need to look afresh. We need Cross-Benchers; we need people appointed too, but we need an element of accountability, which presently is missing. I appeal to the House, now that we are coming back together again, to take the powers that we have and take control of our future for the work we should be doing for the constitution of the country.

Standards in Public Life

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, like others, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Blunkett for introducing this debate in such a magnificent way, based on his long experience in politics. It was a great blessing for us. I am grateful, too, to the Library for the briefing note that it provided, which reminded me to spend a little time looking at the seven principles.

In that context, it is interesting that the new Lord Speaker recently sent out a little reminder to us all about how we conduct ourselves and the courtesies that we show each other when we come into the Chamber. I think that that has been quite well received. It might be worthwhile if the seven principles were circulated among all of us, particularly for newcomers, who are coming into politics perhaps for the first time.

I was particularly taken by what my noble friend Lord Blunkett said in his introduction about the responsibility that we hold, given the privileges we hold, our ability to exercise power and how we do so. I would like to focus primarily on a narrow area, one that my noble friend Lord Griffiths picked up on: the way we conduct ourselves.

If we look at the seven principles, we see that I as an individual and we as the Lords are somewhat weak when it comes to accountability. Who are we accountable to? What is our principal job? I would say that scrutinising legislation is our principal role: legislation comes to us from the Commons, or we introduce it ourselves, and because it goes through the Commons, ultimately we are accountable to it, because it decides, yea or nay, whether our amendments will be taken. But there are many areas beyond that in which, when I look for accountability, there is a great big gaping hole. I am not really sure, in the context of this debate, whether I am asking questions of the Minister or of the House on how we conduct our business, because there is a Nolan principle up there, when we come to it.

I share a room with my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Young, who raised the issue of finance. We are not accountable to the Commons on finance. I do not know who we are accountable to on that. Is it the Government directly? We seem to run our own show in what we believe is the best way possible and acceptable. But as to a clear line of accountability, there is no stream there to be identified, and that is a weakness of this House that we should address.

Linked to that of course is the growth of the House. There are now 830-odd of us—it is far too big and we do not need that. We need change, and we have endeavoured to make that change ourselves. I put it to the Minister that the Government have a responsibility to say what they will do about the ever-growing size of this House, the way in which they conduct themselves in making appointments, and how we contain it and reduce the cost. We, in turn, still have further work to do in that area; we ran away from having an age of retirement, and I can see the arguments against that. But our basic function here is to vote. If people do not come here and stay to vote, they are not fulfilling the public duty that they have been given. If they are not fulfilling the full role given to them, as for a policeman, a nurse or others, they should not be Members of this House; they should exercise the principles and voluntarily leave. We should go back to our work in looking at the House and review whether we could do more to reduce our numbers.

We then come to the issue of accountability to the public. Deep down, we do not want any real change, because it threatens our positions. Whenever this has come up, we have found ways and means, as has the Commons, of avoiding elections to this Chamber. I do not want to get involved in that today, but we still have a gaping hole in our accountability to the public. I hope that we can open up and start to have a conversation in that area. I might suggest that a start would be to do some MORI-type work among the public at large on how they perceive us in the light of where we stand in 2021, particularly after Brexit. In 2016, we were well out of touch with the mood of the public, notwithstanding all our intelligence and expertise. We have to be close to the people and we need to find ways in which we can get closer to them than we are, for the betterment of ourselves, for the betterment of the public and for the betterment of public standards.

Emergency Covid Contracts

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I said in my previous answer that I am not equipped, at this notice, to answer specific questions on specific meetings in another department about which allegations are being made. What I will say to the noble Baroness, and to everyone, is that an extraordinary effort was made, and was required of government by the country—and by opposition parties, as a matter of fact—to procure material that was needed to address the Covid crisis. While criticism is made of the alleged fast-track process of urgent procurement procedures, the absolute priority was to save lives, and those procedures were in line with procurement policy. There was extreme urgency, and indeed the Government’s case that emergency procurement regulations could be used because of the extreme urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic was upheld by a judge in the High Court in a recent case.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I hope that the Government will seek to establish why there have been these administrative errors and give a full report to both Houses. I recognise that the Government had to act urgently in the circumstances in which they found themselves, but I see no reason why they needed to break existing rules. The previous Secretary of State used a personal mobile in a way that was in contravention of all the guidance given to him. There is no reason why he should not have used the official mobile. Can the Minister tell me whether the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, has been having private conversations on his mobile? Has this been investigated? If not, why not? The public need to know what is going on. If there is nothing to be worried about, let us bring it out into the open and the Government will be cleared—there will be a smell continuing if they will not investigate these issues.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the matter of the letting of contracts has been reviewed by many people and many reviews. The Boardman first review covered communications contracts, and 28 of its recommendations are complete, as of today. The Boardman second review covered areas of PPE, ventilators, vaccines, et cetera. Work is under way to implement those recommendations. The NAO found no irregularities or potential conflicts of interest involving Ministers in its report up to 31 July. I think the background is a little less perfervid than is described. As far as email is concerned, of course Ministers should have a care. All Ministers are aware of the guidance around email use. Government guidance is that official devices, email accounts and communication applications should be used for communicating classified information, but Ministers have other lives—parliamentary lives and so on—and other forms of communication may be used in conducting government business. As for my noble friend Lord Bethell, he spoke on this matter in the House on Tuesday, so I refer the noble Lord to his comments; obviously, he is best equipped to answer those kinds of charges.

Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for presenting the Bill. He is a great, doughty fighter, and I very much support what is in the Bill.

I have listened carefully to the arguments advanced about what we can and cannot expect and how we can and cannot plan for the unexpected. We need to be very honest about politics, and we are not honest enough in politics. While I subscribe to much in this Bill, the reality is that when the Minister stands up, I expect he will use all the lovely words of comfort but will reject the Bill. The Government will reject this Bill at every stage. If it manages to get through the Lords, time will not be found for it in the Commons. That is my expectation, and that is very much the life that we encounter.

Right at the beginning, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, talked about difficulties in meeting the unexpected. We can recognise that in certain areas there are expectations that will not change, yet we ignore those expectations and often work against them. I am thinking here of the very important part of the Bill, to which I subscribe, on the environment. We are now going through Covid, an experience we have never had before. In the past five years since 2016, with Brexit, we have seen massive changes and government struggling day by day to cope with what is thrown at it—Covid being the ultimate. It was totally unexpected.

If we look at what we have been doing to the planet, is it unexpected that the planet itself, nature and the spirit behind nature will hit back against the human population to try to defend themselves? We have grown from 1.8 billion 100 years ago to 7.4 billion now, and we are projected to go to 10 billion. This is quite unsustainable. COP 26 is coming, but we are not talking about population. Faiths and science will not address the fundamental problem we have of too many people trying to inhabit this planet and damaging it. We will find that the planet in turn will care for itself, as it has always done, and come back at us. For the sake of our children, the one issue we must spend time focusing on, looking to the future and trying to work together, is what needs to be done about the environment and especially world population growth, where changes are needed. The faiths need to address that. If they want to protect God’s planet, they have to do the things that God needs on the planet.

Budget Statement

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, climate change is the biggest threat to people’s security, so I welcome the Budget’s modest initiatives on this and wish them well. However, like the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I think that much more is needed. I wish only that the Government would address the major driver behind climate change insecurity, which is of course the continuing world population growth. It is the elephant in the room—I know that it is sensitive, but it cannot continue to be dodged, as it is likely to be at the coming COP 26, where it is not seriously on the agenda.

There are rumours that His Holiness the Pope will visit the Glasgow summit and speak. If that is the case, I hope, and suggest to the Government, that discreet approaches should be made to His Holiness and that he should be encouraged to see how the circle can be squared between some of the policies of the Church and what needs to be done to save the Lord’s planet.

Secondly, I turn to the Budget and will say something about health and care. Can we have some new thinking on this, especially the costs that arise from issues such as obesity? This was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McColl. It is such a major contributor to the deaths that we had and the costs that, annually and in future, the NHS has to meet—due not just to things such as diabetes but also to other health problems.

Why have the Government failed to extend the sugar tax, which has proven so effective? Why are the Government still freezing taxes on alcohol, when that is a silent contributor to obesity? We need an approach from the Treasury that starts to take health costs into account in all its approaches; it needs to give more incentives and disincentives to those who damage people’s health.

Budget Statement

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the debate and for what he had to say about growth, about which I will say a few words. To use his phrase, he felt that the Budget had seen beyond the immediate problems that face us.

I think the Government are doing their best in difficult circumstances, and I wish to support them as best I can. There are areas either that they have overlooked or where they have made mistakes, but they seem to be moving quickly enough to speedily resolve some of those difficulties. For example, on rentals it immediately hit people that we needed some movement there, and it will be very interesting to see what they come up with.

It is important that politicians try to come together if they can. This is probably the most difficult time that any of us have experienced where the nation has been faced with such grave challenges. I know people who are virtually having meltdowns through fear and having panic attacks about what is happening. It is therefore important that we as the leadership should endeavour to speak sensibly and calmly and reassure people, rather than frightening them by constantly engaging in attack.

No one knows all the answers; the Government do not have them, nor, I suspect, do my friends in the Green Party, although I must say I agree with an overwhelming amount of what they are saying. It is important that we take our time over this issue and have a look to see just where we are. This House is particularly able to do that. We had three quite important debates last week that made us look to the future: a debate on the green economy, a debate on well-being and the debate of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, about relationships with the younger generation, on which I think we should be spending more and more of our time. So we had that run last week and now we have this debate today.

It is important that we look at some of the fundamentals behind this issue. Why do we have it now? Are the Chinese to blame, or is this something that is happening around the earth for which we all, in different ways, have some responsibility? We are already talking about getting back to our pursuit of ever more non-stop growth as quickly as we can, but we really are at a point where we have to start questioning the nature of the growth that we have. Perhaps we need some growth but in a different direction entirely from that which we have produced in the past. I hear from friends in business that the factories in China are now back and waiting for orders, waiting to start producing the trash and rubbish, much of it, which we have been calling on them to produce at low prices and which we then discard so quickly, harming the planet in the process.

We all have to accept a degree of responsibility for where we are. What faces us at the moment is part of a piece of what we have witnessed over the last two to three years, with the famines, fires, flooding and the list gets ever longer about the pestilences that come our way. We need to start realising that we are relatively powerless. In spite of the size of our brains and intellects, we are powerless when we come up against the real power in the world—the power of nature and of the Almighty behind that. This is not the kind of thing that people talk about easily these days—it embarrasses people—but that is the reality we face at the moment. It is a very different set of circumstances to anything we have seen for a very long time. There is an opportunity for positive change within this. The important thing is that we have to work together to get that change.

I was disappointed that the Budget did not look far enough down the line. I pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky: this will have to be paid for in future. It is wrong that it is again the young who will have to pick up the tab rather than the older in society, who in many ways are responsible for some of the problems we currently face. I hope we can look to start now with some changes. Why did we not reimpose the regulator, the duty RPI link, on fuel? We have seen that the price of fuel has collapsed with the fight between the Saudis and Russians; it has dropped down from £1.35 to £1.26 or £1.27. It is the perfect opportunity to reintroduce the escalator, which we need. The Conservatives know that prices count and that people’s behaviour is changed and governed by pricing, so I ask the Government to look again at the decision they took last week to fail to move on it.

I will not mention what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester said about duty on alcohol; people have heard me go on about this before. We have so many ill people, and here we are reducing the price of alcohol so that they will become ill. This is the kind of living we are talking about—living longer, yes, but living unwell. We must seek to effect changes there. Underneath all that is the sugar tax, which was not even mentioned. We have major problems in our society with obesity and its costs. We should look at the sugar tax and see whether it should be extended and widened beyond what it is already operated on.

There are things we can do to make sure that in the long term we are preparing for a different, better society than the one we have. I hope the Minister will take some of those points away and maybe respond in his reply.

Ministers: Training

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what training and guidance is provided to their Ministers on (1) bullying and harassment, (2) diversity and inclusion and (3) staff management; and how many current Ministers have completed any such training.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, the Ministerial Code provides advice and guidance to Ministers on the standards of conduct that they are expected to uphold and the way in which they should discharge their duties. Obviously, Ministers are also traditionally able to seek further advice and guidance within the departments. The Government do not hold central records of training undertaken by Ministers.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

I welcome the noble Lord to his first performance on the Front Bench and congratulate him on his appointment.

I hope that, on reflection, the noble Lord may go back to the department and see whether it can be a little more precise in trying to follow this through. In Parliament, we now have a programme for training on abuse, harassment and so on. We should seek to apply that similarly at the highest levels where people have privilege and power, which is at ministerial level. I hope the noble Lord might reflect on whether something more formal could be established.

Secondly, given that we now have the freedom and have taken our power, we have an opportunity to have laws in this land better than those in Europe. As we have an employment Bill in prospect, will the noble Lord reflect on whether we could take the principles behind the Question on this Order Paper and see whether they could be applied to employment opportunities in general for people who have problems with abuse of power in general employment, so that we end up with a law that is better in this respect than that in Europe?