Public Services: Economic and Climatic Challenges

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on having secured and opened this debate with such a bravura performance. He is such a skilful and persuasive leader of opinion in your Lordships’ House. One of my most vivid parliamentary memories in a dozen years in this Chamber was his retort to a member of the Opposition who essayed a criticism of the Government’s flood plain policy, so the rationale of this debate is no surprise.

I shall pick up two things he said at the end of his speech. First, I would like to advise him in the context of the Treasury that I have been in gumboots down in the cellars of the Treasury where there is, in fact, a great deal of water. Some of it may have been moved since I was a Treasury Minister, but I do not think it is likely that it has all gone. Secondly, I have not read the piece which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, quoted about water cannon, but out of Northern Ireland experience, I can say that water cannon is a remarkably inflexible weapon. You have to have a particular domain if you wish to use it. I say that simply to inform the debate.

The noble Lord has given some of us, if not all of us, help in joining him in this debate by the wording of the Motion. My Oxford dictionaries are in Wiltshire, but my Chambers dictionary, which is here, defines the word “resilience” as,

“recoil: elasticity, physical or mental … [L. resilire, to leap back—salire, to leap.].

For the benefit of the Hansard writer I mention that that is the Latin infinitive for “to leap” and not Salieri as in Mozart.

My noble friend Lord Ridley will make a much better informed and more distinguished speech than I shall, just as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has done, and it is only the elasticity of the Motion that enables me to speak at all. My remarks will be microeconomic rather than macroeconomic, but after 24 years representing an inner London seat, I now no longer live here, but in the east-west Nadder valley in Wiltshire, which contains along its length road, rail and river, the rail being sensibly elevated so that the river causes most of its inconveniences to the roads. I am not proposing to dilate on climate change, although of course I recognise its relevance in this context on both sides of the argument, and I admire and applaud the surefootedness of those who have strong views on both sides of the divide.

In thanking the House of Lords Library for the admirable development of its policy of furnishing speakers in general debates with Library briefing, I will remark in passing that I daily read the Times backwards at breakfast, starting with cricket, then using as a stepping-stone to death, both obituaries and classified, the fascinating daily articles entitled “Weather” which the Times now has before proceeding to the stock market, leaving everything else to read at leisure after 10 o’clock at night. Our Library produced an excellent briefing for today, although I hope it is not going to make a habit of one feature in today’s briefing wherein the Select Committee’s examination of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mr Paterson, suddenly jumped without warning from page 7, in the final line of which badgers occurred twice, to page 11, on which deer appear in the second and third lines. Establishing the connection in this instance is relatively easy in terms of what has been recorded in the intervening four pages, and it may have the makings of an ingenious pencil-and-paper game late at night, but it later moves from page 12 to page 19, and some scintilla of forewarning might be helpful.

The value of the briefing, as of this debate, is the concentration on the long term, to which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, paid tribute. When in the 1970s, I was running a multinational firm in the private sector, I used to take a day off once a year to attend an annual seminar conducted by a futurological polymath from the Hudson Institute outside New York, whose erudition can be briefly indexed by his reply to a question about why the Japanese had settled occidentally more in Brazil than in any other country. He said: “I have always understood that it was because the Japanese found Portuguese easier to learn than any other European language”. At a time when manufacturing was beginning its long decline here, he reassured us that we were well prepared for post-industrial society by the extent of our superiority in education—especially higher education—government and health. I have spent the past 40 years admiring his percipience, but also wondering if we were making the most of our development in these particular salients.

I have also always regretted that constituency pressures in the Commons encourage MPs to enter the ranks of last-ditch defenders and protesters whenever small primary schools or elderly hospitals were past their sell-by dates while still dearly loved by constituents nearby. In this particular era, when communities are threatened by economic or climactic pressures, I can join the regrets of some that the big society has been less than wholly successful in catching on, but that is not a reason for the instincts of the big society not to be pursued by those who favour them. Indeed, on what is, appositely, the “ill wind” principle, flooding brings out the best in all of us in terms of mutual aid. I live in a hamlet, the population of which does not run to three figures, and which is sandwiched within the five miles that separate two National Health Service surgeries, one in a village of more than 600, and the other of more than 2,000. We use the former, which has a high elderly component but, simultaneously, perhaps because of its community vigour, a very low incidence of dementia. If good is best done by stealth, some of us pay our savings from freedom from prescription charges back into the practice’s coffers to be used for the good of local collective health. In the same way, rural parishes have the advantage of centuries-old charities into which, again, some can discreetly feed benefits which they do not need, the determination of need deriving, sensibly, from local personal knowledge.

An area, however, where I hope that we can improve, is actual performance knowledge among national charities. To take the current humanitarian tsunami, one can use the default option for sending one’s mite to the Disasters Emergency Committee for onward transmission to its underlying members. However, we do not, to my knowledge, have an equivalent of Which? in the charitable arena. It would mesh in its productivity component with Nesta’s estimate in the IPPR element in the Library briefing that if productivity growth from 1995 to 2007 were or had been the same in the UK public sector as in the private sector, the UK Government would be spending £63 billion less every year; although, of course, I acknowledge that the comparison is not like with like.

If I break my Trappist vow on climate change and allow that possible acute climate change in the Mediterranean may produce population transfer into Nordic countries, including ourselves, then attention to advanced Nordic practice elsewhere may well be worth early study. Before the wall came down in the 1989 detente, the population and the physical space in West Germany was exactly the same as ours. The reunion of Germany has taken it away from that equivalence and moved it in the direction of France. These are potential equations for us to address in the same category of long-term thinking as this debate.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, also referred to the performance of local government. In what is presumably, not yet, but close to, the valedictory analysis of the Audit Commission of municipal data, I was encouraged by its favourable judgment on the clear majority of councils’ resilience, even if there were a handful of parameters which variably put the weaker councils in a minority from 10% to 30% in terms of their being able to cope with the unexpected. Their evidence was the more helpful, in that it effected comparisons between different categories of council. Since I noted that unitary councils were only buoyant and afloat by 53% to 47%, the latter being the highest figure where anxiety was registered, I must hope, as a Wiltshire resident, that we come in the former grouping. That said, the fact that nine out of 10 councils are regarded as well placed to deliver their budgets in 2013-14 gives us some short-term leeway.

As for the private sector, the Charities Aid Foundation reported last year that only one in 34 employees in Britain gave to charity through payroll giving in the prior year, although that is essentially a function of the fact that fewer than 8,500 of the UK’s 4.8 million employers offer their staff the opportunity to do so. However, 31% of employees said that they would be likely to give if the chance were afforded them, which would increase charitable giving by £175 million. Nearly two-thirds of employees believed that more employees would actively support charities at work if they were allowed to nominate a charity to support that year.

To end on a particularly resilient note, I understood orally this morning from the Charities Aid Foundation that, in global research, all things considered, a British subject was more likely to make a charitable donation, which I translate as being more likely to make a pledge, than an inhabitant of almost any other country. I am not going to turn this into a television quiz show, but some in your Lordships’ House may be surprised by the fact that our only superior is Burma.