Northern Ireland: Economy
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(13 years ago)
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It is now nearly two decades since I gave up ministerial responsibilities in Northern Ireland, so I shall leave the corporation tax issue to others, including, retrospectively, my noble friend, who for understandable reasons maintain closer familiarity with the Province. That does not exculpate me for not having pursued it more vigorously when I did have ministerial responsibility. Perhaps since I came to Hillsborough direct from four years in the Treasury I had too much respect for its then rationale when, of course, the present level of devolution within the total realm was still a thing of the future.
I shall, however, briefly relate one telling and not irrelevant moment in the 1997-2001 Parliament, when I chaired the Select Committee on Northern Ireland affairs. We were engaged in a report on cross-border petrol smuggling between the Republic and Northern Ireland and were examining the then Treasury Minister responsible to Parliament for Customs and Excise. I asked the Minister to remind the committee of the Republic’s responsibilities under the Kyoto Protocol for carbon emissions. The Minister asked to be allowed to consult the accompanying Customs official and responded audibly, within the hearing of the committee, to the latter’s advice, with the words, “That can’t be true”, until appreciation sank in that the Republic enjoyed privileged treatment under the protocol as a non-industrial economy, whereas Northern Ireland’s treatment was as part of the United Kingdom. I do not blame the Minister’s Private Secretary for deleting the expostulated remark from the official record but it was an incidental insight into the precise extent of the Treasury’s understanding of the Province’s difficulties.
In my confidence that others will fully air the corporation tax dilemma, let me turn to personal experience of my own 50 years ago this autumn and look at the debate’s gravamen from the private sector’s end of the telescope. I realise that the debate is about Her Majesty’s Government’s encouragement but one of the ways in which the economy will be rebalanced is through entrepreneurial activity. Fifty years ago, I was the first head-hunter in the United Kingdom. I was the seventh consultant member of a small firm which had been established five years earlier in Chicago. I undertook to join it for a year to set up a new office in London, although I told the eponymous founder of the firm, who died in January of this year, that I had no idea whether there would be a responsive British Market; I had no idea whether I would be any good at it; and I had no idea whether I would enjoy it. In the event, we planted an acorn, we have harvested a forest—of course including subsequent competitors, some of which were started by our own people— and that firm is now the largest firm of its kind in the world to be still in private hands, which, in that industry, is exactly where it should be. It was on that firm’s business that I first visited Northern Ireland in 1963.
Why is that relevant to Northern Ireland today? I go back again to my time there as a Minister when anything that created private sector activity was of course a plus. I used to keep my eyes open for gaps in the economy where the Province was consuming products or services, however small, that it was not itself making. Where I needed to buy services, which I could have bought in England but which were available in the Province—my mind goes back to a fair amount of bookbinding; certainly, to a commemorative sampler; and, more grandly, to a fibreglass dingy for the Hillsborough Castle lake, which had then an island and a boathouse but no boat, that was baptised as the “Tom King” after my predecessor—I bought them out of my own pocket as a tiny contribution to the local economy. When there was no local product that I could buy, I made quiet inquiries as to why not.
We all know the skills base of the local economy. Today there is not time to tell the moral tale in the public sector of the Passport Office crisis at the beginning of the 1990s and the Province’s dramatic resolution of it—unlike Dr Watson’s remark about Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the world is ready for that story but we have no time. But it was a particularly vivid index of the Province’s superlatives.
I hope that out of this debate, whether through Her Majesty’s Government or the devolved Executive or even from an enterprising charity, will come an analysis of all the things that today the Province consumes but does not make or internally provide. I hope too that at least one person of 27, as I was 50 years ago, has the excitement of creating a business that creates a new industry or service—of course, there is nothing about being 27 that is mandatory—and that there will emerge from the analysis a whole raft of opportunities. Anything that Her Majesty’s Government do in the mean time to favour the entrepreneurial spirit will be a bonus and to be welcomed the more in the Province.
Finally, as to the public sector, I remind your Lordships’ House of Lenin’s doctor, the Armenian Armand Hammer, to whom Lenin offered a monopoly of a single product in the new Utopia. Dr Hammer, who could recognise a bureaucracy when he saw one, chose pencils, and from that acorn grew Occidental Petroleum.
Localism Bill
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I need to declare my interest which I have not previously declared—there has been no need to do so until this part of the Bill—as a landowner and a practising chartered surveyor as well as my interest in local councils.
I need to bring a technical aspect to bear here. However, before I do so, I should like to comment on something said by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, in her introductory remarks. The provisions of the Bill go well beyond what might be described as the recovery of assets that were in, but have passed out of, community use. As regards some of the things about which the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is concerned, a much wider aspect seems to be appearing.
In my professional life I have prepared lots of lists of property assets. I worked for nearly seven years in the public sector and during that time dealt with a lot of things for local authorities, health trusts and government departments, so I know something about preparing lists. I suggest that the proposed list is very far from being a free bet. The process would involve drawing up, managing, publishing, and possibly providing free of charge, a list of indeterminate size and complexity. Why is that the case? It is because regulation cannot foretell what propositions will come forward as a result of the Bill’s provisions.
The obligation is subject to what the Secretary of State may decide following consultation. It is perhaps a pity that the Government have not yet published their response to the results of the consultation on their paper entitled, Proposals to Introduce a Community Right to Buy—Assets of Community Value. In due deference to the noble Baroness on the opposition Benches, the right to buy was not a term that she coined, it was in the consultation document, as I perceive it. I look forward to that response informing the Report stage of the Bill. I hope that I will receive a reassurance from the Minister that it will be forthcoming before that stage so that we all have time to consider it.
I go back to the list. There will be rules about content, additions, deletions and modifications. The list will have to delve into issues of ownership, some of them quite detailed and probably some that are commercially sensitive and may even be confidential. The list will have to be maintained alongside another “not in” list of failed nominations. All I would say at this juncture is that even on a conservative basis this will be a resource-hungry exercise for local authorities.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Hodgson, this is my maiden speech on the Bill. I intend it to be generic rather than go into detail and I hope, therefore, to be brief. I regret the hour at which we are holding this debate, although my noble friend the Minister showed admirable initiative in opening it with the statement that she did. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, did not have the opportunity to paint the larger landscape before we started getting into the detail.
I am speaking in particular to Amendment 136ZD, in the names of my noble friends Lord Gardiner of Kimble and Lord Cathcart, to which the former spoke a little while ago. I express my admiration for their exercise in clarification. The instincts that underlie generosity to one’s community are the big society writ early. I was a London inner-city Member of Parliament for nearly a quarter of a century, and London is nothing if it is not a collection of villages where the instincts of the big society apply. I have in a recent debate identified in my own constituency Pimlico and Soho as model inner-city communities, if in different modes. I have, however, had an address in Wiltshire for half my life and these characteristics of the big society or, as Burke might put it, the small platoon society, are perhaps evidenced even more vividly in the countryside because of the way everyone knows everyone else and where the roots of families are at least as deep as those of parallel families in the cities, if not more so.
I pay warm tribute to those who give of their substance in rural areas and demonstrate their recognition of local need and to the imaginativeness of their responses. My one plea to my noble friend the Minister is that that generosity of spirit should not be unduly curtailed by the letter of the law, which can turn the landscape into briars and brambles which deter rather than welcome sensible development. I, in turn, have welcomed the amendment as being an insurance policy to support one’s desire to be helpful to the community rather than to ring one’s assets around with defences against hazard.
I end with the amendment of my noble friend Lord Hodgson and support his Amendment 136, though by placing it in line 19 of page 61, it means it offers late rather than early assistance in illuminating the first four lines of that page. It is the opposite of the example once set by a Polish Bishop who was visiting a parish in his diocese, an episode that could be helpful to many a parliamentarian. When greeted by the curate, the Bishop said, “When I visit parishes in my diocese, I am accustomed to be greeted by the sound of bells, and that has not happened today”. The curate said, “My lord, there are three reasons. The first is there are no bells”. “Pray go no further,” said the Bishop. Although my noble friend Lord Hodgson has placed his amendment quite far down on page 61, I still think it is an extremely valuable contribution to the Bill.
Baroness Byford
My Lords, I have waited very patiently because my name is not added to any of those amendments, but I support the amendments tabled by my noble friends. I will pick up on what the Minister said to us earlier. In some ways it was a shame that my noble friend Lord Cameron was not allowed to express his broader concerns on the whole of this section. My noble friend quite rightly said that the Government have it in mind to introduce a right of appeal, so clearly they recognise that the Bill, as currently laid down, is far from satisfactory, and that we will get a compensation scheme later. My question to the Minister is: how soon will we have sight of what a compensation scheme might be, or when will we know what right of appeal will be formally moved hopefully between now and Report?
I have a farm in Suffolk that is listed in my interests here, but in this particular context I have no interests that are particularly relevant to this. However, I was formerly one of the patrons of ViRSA, which the noble Lady, Baroness Thornton will recognise. We dealt for many years with post offices being squeezed and unable to make a living in support of their long-term well-being—we are talking here of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. In his amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Cotter, clarified quite well the difficulties that we face with this Bill. Are we talking about the loss of a facility that is established within one’s own community, or are we in fact looking at a facility, such as a post office, that is also someone’s dwelling place? Those are two very different issues, and my noble friend, when she comes to wind up, might perhaps enlarge upon that because it is crucial that we know exactly where we stand. For example, in some areas that I know, post offices that have been under threat have managed to relocate into shops, churches, or wherever. Provided that we keep them, it is very good that they have been enabled to remain and be a vibrant part of that particular community. To me, therefore, there is a great difference between a particular service that is offered and the buildings in which it is set. This has been touched on, but I would like the Minister to address that particularly.
My noble friends also expressed concern about land, and to a certain extent about personal privacy, and about investigations that could be made under the proposals in this section of the Bill that would also worry me. We know only too well of investigations of things that are held on computer disks and things that get moved around. Some of this might not be well held in the public domain, to be honest. This is the balance that we have to get right in the Bill. I support the Bill. As I said earlier on, I am a great believer in localism in its truest sense and from the lowest level. Noble Lords who have not heard me say before will hear me say now that, at the parish level, whether in cities or in country areas, localism is most important.
To pick up on a point made earlier, within local councils, authorities or parishes, there will be different interpretations of how they want to proceed. Again, I would be glad if the Minister could reflect on that in her response.
Lastly, I am concerned—not from my point of view, because we have no interest in it—that that could well have an effect on the land value or the land market of people's private, individual holdings. I hope that the Government will reflect on that.
As I said at the beginning, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Hanham for her statement on inheritance and gifts between families and trusts and considering the question of the holding for a limited time if those assets are bid for. I cannot see any reason why you would bid if you are not going to buy. There is no logic.
Sinn Fein: Parliamentary Oath of Allegiance
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Shutt of Greetland
The noble Lord is right. I repeat: the Government have no plans to change the text of the oath. It may be interesting for noble Lords to know that in Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Members take the oath, just as it is taken in this place, by either swearing or making an affirmation.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
I shall give up. The clock is now showing 15 minutes.