Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I was never a good enough cricketer to have played all-day cricket before I was 20 but, thereafter, I played it for another 40 years, and I can still recall vividly how being the first batsman to face the bowling after the lunch interval was always a tribulation. On this occasion, I am conscious that it was the close of the innings of the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, that occasioned the interval, but it remains very much a privilege to share membership of your Lordships’ House with him. On any matter, I should, in cricketing terms, always give him the benefit of the doubt. In the mean time, the lunch interval has been surprisingly long, but I assume that there is a possibility, as sometimes happens in English cricket, that snow has affected the wicket.

The precise subject of the Bill is a new wicket for me to play on. I do not think that it is mandatory for me to declare an interest but, once upon a time, I was a Treasury Minister for nearly four years. Among the seven Treasury colleagues with whom I shared the ministerial responsibilities in those years, I was the only one who had never worked in the City, although I was, for 24 years, its MP. My noble friend Lord Lawson of Blaby was generous in involving us all in the gestation of Budgets but, in practical terms, my direct responsibilities might have been described as Treasury housekeeping, with all three main subjects being housekeeping oriented, and I had up to a dozen minor ones, including—perhaps unexpectedly—the Central Office of Information. It is quite possible that no one else in your Lordships’ House knows the origin of the ministerial concept of “the line to take”, except the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield—and he knows only because I told him. However, it was the Treasury that thought of the policy first.

The only relevance to today’s business that I can detect from those years is that the EU budget Council, on which I sat for all my Treasury days, had methods of computation every bit as complicated as those in the Bill. It is a nice complement to the Bill, and to my noble friends in charge of it, to have had today’s Statement, which has enabled us to get our eye in. However, my remarks will be brief.

The great excitement on the Bill relates to whether the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, can be seduced during its passage through your Lordships’ House into sharing with us how the official Opposition propose to handle the problem that the Bill addresses, for which they were in no small degree responsible for creating. I lived through the 1969 to 1971 recession running a business in New York City, of which my chief memory is the “news in brief” item in the Wall Street Journal to the effect that the best index of the recession’s severity was that the Mafia had had to lay off two judges in New Jersey. However, I acknowledge that running anything during a recession is not in itself amusing.

I do not know how many others in the Chamber of your Lordships’ House today have had the stamina to watch the video which is currently available on one’s PC within the Palace through the kindness of MoneyWeek. It raises all sorts of financial nightmares that lie ahead of us. I stayed with it till it reached its conclusion only because I wanted to see how it would end and I was unsurprised when it concluded with a hard sell to buy MoneyWeek and its attendant publications. To conjure up a quasi-Richter scale of nightmare, it had to be painfully repetitious but from Lloyd George’s 1909 legislation onwards, no Administration avoided some of MoneyWeek’s blame.

A more elegant prospectus was advanced by the article in the Times below the day’s cartoon on 17 January this year by its accomplished columnist Camilla Cavendish. Those who have approached Horse Guards on Whitehall from the Embankment will know that, pausing at the traffic lights when red at the Whitehall junction, enables one to read the Cavendish family motto on the back of a statue to the Duke of Devonshire, who served in Gladstone’s Cabinet: “Cavendo tutus”, a play on words meaning secure by being cautious. It promises well. I shall quote a single opening sentence and three paragraphs from her article, which was on current welfare expenditure. They will be marginally edited for clarity. The opening sentence reads:

“As the debate about welfare rolls on, … it is … revealing that far more working people get their income topped up by benefits than most of us ever imagined”.

The first paragraph I want to quote states:

“There is no official figure for exactly how many [working people] are on benefits. But what is clear is that their numbers increased dramatically under the previous Government: from 700,000 when Labour took office in 1997 to 4.7 million on the equivalent entitlements in 2010, rising to between 6 and 7 million people, once housing benefit and council tax benefit are included … in a period that was, for much of it, one of unprecedented prosperity”.

The second paragraph I wish to quote states:

“In the good times, it was possible to fudge the decision about which aim—rewarding work or rewarding children—should take priority. Now the decision is unavoidable. The coalition has broadly decided to prioritise work through the Universal Credit system, which aims to make paid work more worthwhile. But it is also sensitive to the risk that the rising cost of living is entrenching poverty. Until it imposed the 1 per cent cap last week”—

that was the week of 7 January—

“the coalition had continued its predecessor’s policy of uprating benefits in line with inflation”.

The third and final paragraph I want to quote—the last paragraph of her article—states:

“Poverty campaigners know that the public is unsympathetic to adults who don't want to work, so they have shifted the argument to defending welfare benefits for the low-paid. But the explosion in numbers in the past 15 years makes it difficult to defend the status quo”.

That concludes my quotations from that article.

When the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, whom I am delighted to see in her place, chose and opened a debate on housing in the autumn of 2010, I said that I thought that subject, and those that we are debating today, were potentially the key endeavours of this Government. I reiterated that at the time of the Pensions Bill and the Welfare Reform Bill. I am without expertise in these matters but I regard them as so important that I sought to learn by attendance at the majority of Grand Committee proceedings on the Welfare Reform Bill where matters were, in my view, most admirably conducted throughout, although without, in cricketing parlance, my much troubling the scorer myself. However, I shall do the same on this Bill—this time, I gather, in this Chamber.

The great Claud Cockburn in his engaging memoirs said that the world was divided between those who preferred surprises and those who liked things to turn out as they expected. By illustration, he said that, if he were ever caught in an Alpine snowstorm, the mere sight of a St Bernard would restore his morale, even if the cask around its neck was empty of cognac.

I shall go into Committee with an open mind and recognition that the Bill can perhaps be technically improved but in the hope that we shall learn more than a little of the Official Opposition’s intentions, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, implied would be more thoughtful than political. She must forgive me if I have misremembered her precise adjectives, but I have tried. If, however, the noble Baroness thinks that her speech was other than political, I think she may deceive herself. Certainly one would need to know more of the thoughtful detail to appreciate what its economic consequences would be. It is almost 60 years since I was a soldier but, if, unlike Grand Committee on the Welfare Reform Bill, we are to listen to unremitted hostility, it will seem, at least for me, in military terms as simply being smoke. These matters are too important for that.

Finally I shall speculate in Committee on what the late Lord Russell—Conrad to most of us—would have made of all this. In your Lordships’ House both he and the late Lord Newton—Tony to many of us—were kind enough to remind me that I had given them respectively their first maiden speeches on the order paper in the Oxford Union. Indeed in the interests of balance, I shall speculate on what Tony Newton would have made of it all too. In the mean time, that is not a bad double barrel. I hope your Lordships’ House will forgive me hereafter, although I shall obviously observe the rubric, if I am briefly absent at the 90th birthday party of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharples.