Thames Tideway Project: Contingent Guarantees

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley]

I cannot answer that specific question. I can say that it is Ofwat’s job to oversee exactly what each water company does, particularly Thames Water.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

Pursuant to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord West, is my noble friend aware that on the Thursday of the occupation of the Iranian embassy rather more than 30 years ago, the chairman of Thames Water was rung up by an anonymous caller on that morning and asked whether, if he received instructions to cut off the water to any of his customers, he would accept that order implicitly? The chairman replied, “If it was the Iranian embassy, yes; if it was any other customer of ours, no”. In my view, he demonstrated considerable knowledge of the international scene.

[Lord De Mauley]

I know that we are always grateful to my noble friend for his grasp of history. He was there. On the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord West, it is important enough that I will write to him.

Japan: Dolphins

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord De Mauley]

I pay tribute to my noble friend for all the work she does for animal welfare. I agree with her that the pressure which animal welfare organisations can bring to bear in situations such as these is often more effective, frankly, than that of Governments.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend’s department keep records of the degree of pressure it receives in the context of different animal species or other species from within our own society, in line with what my noble friend Lady Fookes has just asked him, so that it has some idea of what is the scale of the pressure from within our own society?

[Lord De Mauley]

Yes, my Lords, the pressure is maintained, consistent and considerable.

Environment: Leafleting

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the irony towards which he is leading us whereby local authorities will be castigated as being philistine because they intervene on cultural leaflets when recent archaeology demonstrates that the philistines were actually very civilised people?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I am sure that they were, and far be it from me to suggest that any behaviour by a local authority is philistine.

Gangmasters

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

From my knowledge of star chambers, which is rather limited to history books and the like, they are where conflicting views which may need to be resolved are discussed in an informal way. That is exactly how the star chamber has functioned in this way. I am not suggesting for a moment that the European issue could be resolved quite so easily.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, “GLA” has another acronymic provenance. Will my noble friend see if it is possible to avoid duplication of acronyms when they occur for bears of very little brain who find it very difficult to follow?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Unfortunately, the first letters tie up with the Greater London Authority but as far as I am concerned the GLA is the Gangmasters Licensing Authority.

Higher Education: ERASMUS Scheme

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, the noble Lord takes us slightly beyond the Question on the Order Paper. We have on a number of occasions debated the whole question of the reforms that we are bringing in; we will have further debates on them in due course, and I look forward to taking part in those debates. This Question is about ERASMUS, which is a much narrower point than the one that the noble Lord is asking about.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, can my noble friend tell me where the ERASMUS project is physically based, because the European Union Commission, with uncommon felicity, managed to put the EUREKA programme in the Rue Archimède?

[Lord Henley]

Oh dear. I am afraid that I cannot answer my noble friend's question as to where it is physically based. The best answer would probably be that I think that it is based in Brussels, but if it is not I will write to my noble friend to let him know.

Agriculture: Pigs

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

This side!

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, if I may say so to the noble Lord, it was the turn of those on these Benches. I congratulate my noble friend on the usual high standard of his answers. Does his bloodline make him a kinsman of the late Earl of Emsworth?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, that is a very difficult one. I am very familiar with the works of PG Wodehouse. Whether I am related to Lord Emsworth is another matter.

Rural Communities: Prince’s Countryside Fund

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is not a duty but a pleasure to congratulate my noble friend Lady Eaton on her maiden speech. She and I served together on the board of the Conservative Party and have been saying for months—nay, years—that we must have lunch together. Now that her maiden speech is done and dusted to such effect, I particularly look forward to that pleasure. She comes to your Lordships’ House as chairman of the Local Government Association and from north of the Trent. I have always taken the view that Conservative Party policy on local government is best shaped by those who have had actual experience of local government and I look forward to many more contributions in this House from my noble friend on these subjects.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble on having secured this debate so soon after having taken part in the rural debate before the Recess and on having persuaded my noble friend Lord Kimball to speak, so that we have had two Kimbles for the price of one. I also congratulate him on his admirable opening speech.

Sir Francis Burdett, who was for 30 years Member of Parliament for Westminster and a strong radical, eventually retired to Wiltshire, where he became Member of Parliament for North Wiltshire, hunted three days a week and became a high Tory. After 24 years as Sir Francis Burdett’s distant successor for Westminster, I, too, have retired to Wiltshire, although unlike Sir Francis I do not hunt three times a week and our hamlet is denoted as “Lower”.

It used to be said that, if Yorkshire cricket was in good shape, so was English cricket. I declare an interest not only in cricket but in West Yorkshire, which is the global centre of gravity for the worldwide network of Brookes. In the same way, I believe passionately that, if the countryside and the rural economy are not in good shape, the whole country is unlikely to be so. The principal beneficiaries of the Prince’s fund, to which this debate is devoted, include, as has been said, the programme Pub is the Hub in Wales. Although I am half Welsh—I, too, mourn the loss of the late Richard Livsey from our debates on these subjects—I live in Wiltshire rather than in Wales. In the local government parish of Sutton Mandeville, however, we have both a pub and a church as our community buildings. The pub, the “Compasses”, has several times been voted the best in the county, which I regard as a good omen for the Welsh pub project.

The second beneficiary, I note, is the farmer network which operates in Cumbria and the Yorkshire dales and will, over two years, use the fund’s contribution to develop a hill-farmer apprenticeship scheme in Cumbria. Some in your Lordships’ House today will recall the debate devoted to the rural uplands that my noble friend Lord Greaves initiated before the Recess, in which my noble friend Lord Gardiner also spoke. Whoever else does not read the debates of your Lordships’ House, His Royal Highness the Prince clearly does because of the way in which he has devoted this aspect of the fund to the uplands, and all credit to him.

Thirdly, in this 150th anniversary year of the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, whose financial appeal under my noble friend Lord Plumb is such a roaring success, the fund’s reserve for the farm charities is still a very prudent move. If my noble friend Lord Gardiner can do so at the end of the debate, I hope that he might confirm that with the personal contributions that individuals can make to the fund over the post office counter, which is said to be available as a scheme in the autumn, the first week in October counts as part of the autumn. I look forward to making my first contribution to the fund in our local post office over this weekend.

Foxes

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I was wondering when that question would come up. I have a feeling that the repeal of the Hunting Act would not make much difference in relation to urban foxes in Hackney.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, although I appreciate that urban foxes do not live as long as rural foxes, does the Minister know the proportion of urban foxes to the fox population at large?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, some research has been done into fox numbers. It is believed that there are of the order of a quarter of a million foxes in the country and that in the region of 15 per cent are urban foxes, although those are estimates. If we brought in some form of immunocontraception, those numbers could drop further.

Queen's Speech

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I shall come to my noble friend Lady Wilcox in a moment. First, once upon a time, the noble Lord, Lord Birt, and I used to meet across a table to discuss the 1994 White Paper on the BBC, and it is a pleasure to be linked consecutively with him once again.

Most of your Lordships’ House will probably have heard before from others’ lips what I am going to say next, but if only one noble Lord present tonight had never heard it before, he or she would alone make it worth saying again. It relates to the levee given by King George V in the palace in 1931, 80 years ago, when the sovereign asked Mr Jimmy Thomas, a member of his Cabinet, whether the international financial situation was really quite as serious as Mr Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept telling him. Mr Thomas replied, “King, it’s that serious that if I were you I’d put the colonies in the wife’s name”. The message of the last Labour Chief Secretary, Mr Byrne, to his successor in the coalition, suggests that he might have given the same advice. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Conservative gains in this election were the largest since those they achieved in the election of 1931. That is what the deficit does to you. The highest compliment that I can pay to my noble friend Lady Wilcox is that I have every confidence in her ability and that of my and her noble friends in the Treasury to sort it out without my direct help. Of course, we shall all very genuinely miss the noble Lord, Lord Myners, who was and is in all senses my former constituent.

That has taken the first of my minutes. My remaining four will be devoted to four brief points or comments. First, after the deficit, on which debt interest is now taking more per annum than is spent in the Budget on schools’ revenue expenditure, the challenge to the Government is unemployment, especially among the young—hence the references to growth.

It is a conventional commonplace that it is SMEs that now generate jobs. Once upon a time, almost 50 years ago, I joined a firm of 10 foreigners to open their business in this country. Fifty years later, that worldwide business is now the largest of its kind in the world still in private hands, so we must have done something right. But what I remember from that original period is Messrs Kaldor and Balogh, perhaps in the context of the SET, making me spend a weekend every month providing proof to the Inland Revenue that I needed to keep all our money in the business, which, as the man building the business, I knew perfectly well already. So my first plea to my noble friends on the Front Bench is that they reduce the burden of unnecessary tasks on entrepreneurs when they need their energy to justify and finance the creation of new jobs.

My second plea is similar. I was proud to serve on a Treasury team of four Ministers under my noble friend Lord Lawson, all of whom in due course reached the Cabinet, two of them reaching No. 11, one of them reaching No. 10, and who helped my noble friend to carry through the massive simplification in the tax system that he achieved. I do not place on the Labour Government the whole responsibility for dismantling that simplicity—though they must carry some, especially in dismantling changes that they had themselves created—but it is high time that we got that simplicity back, even if some of Labour’s complications will make it harder. Simplicity in taxation makes it likely that people will take investment decisions, and better ones, for business reasons rather than for tax ones.

My third plea supports the coalition’s desire to rebalance the economy. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya, on the abilities still inherent in British engineering, on which the noble Lord, Lord Broers, also spoke. Those firms that have survived have done so because they are world-class, which they owe substantially to their R&D investment in technology. I reiterate to the coalition as a whole the advice of my noble friend Lord Waldegrave of North Hill in yesterday’s Times to the new Chief Secretary, my right honourable friend Mr Alexander. My noble friend was a distinguished Chief Secretary, and the first for over 30 years to have run a large spending department before he became Chief Secretary. A critical part of his advice yesterday was to keep a secret reserve in his hip pocket for subjects, like science, that departmental heads might not champion. I acknowledge that I speak as a former departmental Minister at a time when the Chief Secretary took precisely the opposite view.

Finally, a quiet word: the coalition should not believe everything that it reads in the papers, especially if it causes depression. As the first Viscount Slim said in the war, “No news is ever as good or as bad as it first appears”. A noble Lord earlier in this debate referred to rural broadband. I live in Wiltshire, a county notorious for an atmospheric phenomenon called the Wiltshire banana. I live at the end of a lane two miles from the nearest shop. Two hundred yards from our house lives and works the highly respected automotive engineer who won the £25,000 prize given by the Mayor of London for a contemporary “Routemaster plus” design, but who relies on online engineering to design buses for Brazil and trucks for China. Until a year ago, half way—or 100 yards—between us lived another couple. They ran another successful service business reliant on high-speed broadband but could not afford to buy a first home in Britain so moved to France, partly because they could afford a first home there but also because, on technology, they believed the 18th-century English novelist who said, “They order these things better in France”. It turns out that they do not, and rural France’s broadband is much slower than Wiltshire’s, endangering the whole of that couple’s business and their decision to move. It is a crucial imperative for the coalition that it persuades our compatriots at all levels to believe in themselves. As I sit down, with sympathy, I encourage my noble friend Lord Henley to act on that advice at the end of this notable debate.