Taxation: Capital Gains Tax

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, the Government believe that the current structure of CGT balances the need for simplicity alongside fairness by having three effective rates, which provide a lower rate for basic-rate taxpayers and support for entrepreneurs, alongside the main rate. At that, I am going to stop.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as somebody who paid capital gains tax last year, having already made it. I am prepared to volunteer through my noble friend to teach the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, first, how to make a capital gain and, secondly, how he declares it for tax.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

I look forward to that great contribution, my Lords.

Defence: Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the process of consultation and debate with outside bodies is well under way. The noble Lord makes his points about involving those parties, and I myself have been to see some of them. I was at the Royal United Services Institute and at Chatham House discussing precisely those broad issues behind the SDSR, so the process of consultation with outside experts is under way. I wish we had seen more, for example, about Labour’s approach to defence and security, which might have fed into a more public debate before the election.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, as the SDSR of 1998 sought to reduce the Reserve Forces, and the coalition’s recent SDSR moved in the opposite direction, if my noble friend is still serving in a coalition Government in the next Parliament, in which direction does he think it is likely to go?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as the noble Lord has remarked, we are in a much more acute security situation, not only in eastern Europe but in north Africa and across the Middle East, than we were five years ago. One of the questions that whichever Government emerges after the next election will have to consider is what spending priorities are, and how far we need to raise the issue of security within that. I again stress that an SDSR is not just about military spending: there are a wide range of other security threats—some very long term—which that includes.

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.

G8 Summit

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, if only because it enables me to thank him publicly, after a long interval, for once telling me that a description of mine of the siege of Prague which I had incorporated into a debate on the arms trade was the only time he had ever laughed out loud while reading Hansard on a train. But his content today was much more noteworthy.

It is difficult to imagine any subject more germane for debate in this week than that which my noble friend Lord Trimble has selected, nurtured and so cogently introduced. It is a most felicitous overture that it should be an Ulsterman, one who has played so large a part in the Province’s history, who is doing it. The 198th anniversary of Waterloo may not be an ideal day for the G8 beginning its business, but at least it was another Ulsterman, in the person of Lord Castlereagh, who did the successful fixing at the Congress of Vienna a year later, and Derry’s/Londonderry’s year as City of Culture is a happy index to underline the happiness of the Prime Minister’s chosen and highly apposite location, through we must hope that 2013 will be an exception to the general Irish rule of thumb that in July Lough Erne is in County Fermanagh while, for the rest of the year, County Fermanagh is in Lough Erne.

For myself, I think that the Prime Minister is to be warmly congratulated on the priorities and preliminaries over which he has presided. From the letter he wrote to his international colleagues in the first week of the new year to the selection of Professor Paul Collier to advise the Government on the preparations and policies for the G8 summit, from the speech the Prime Minister delivered to the World Economic Forum in Davos on 24 January to his subsequent letter to the leaders of the UK Crown dependencies on 20 May about continuing to work in partnership with the UK on internal tax matters, he does not, at least to me, appear to have put a foot wrong. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has just said, the days prior to the full G8 conference are full of events that play to the conference’s themes.

Moreover, the Prime Minister has sought to keep the agenda simple and taut, with its emphasis on trade, on tax and on transparency. The critical issues contained in the letter of 20 May to which I have just alluded—tax, information exchange and beneficial ownership—were at the heart of the agenda. That does not mean that we should necessarily be too optimistic about securing all we seek. The Minister responding to this debate confessed earlier this week that the Government were not sure about the definition of a lobbyist, and some of the briefing we have received from that quarter for this debate has had a peremptoriness about it which some might think was a little unrealistic.

In Northern Ireland, in what we have called our peace process, we had to learn to be patient, but we never forgot what our long-term goal was, and applied patience and policies to achieve it. There is evidence from the overall plan that this has not been neglected here either. Of course the G8 are important, but so, likewise in these matters, are the G20 and their handling should be all of a piece, even if the diplomacy is complicated.

In its briefing for today, the House of Lords Library drew heavily on Professor Collier’s article in Prospect in March this year. However, the briefing uses only part of it, and I strongly commend the entirety of the article to anyone who has not yet read it. Professor Collier has been an Oxford Professor of Economics since 1993, a fellow of St Antony’s since 1986 and he has been director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies since 1991. The latter shows up in particular in the rigour and comprehensiveness of his analysis of the hazards and complexity of the solutions that these problems will require. Happily it is, of course, to his college’s St Antony that we pray when we have lost something and cannot find it. Not for nothing did the head of taxation at OECD aptly refer to the existing arrangements as “double non-taxation”. In the context of the subsequent transfer to the G20 meeting, it is a notable vindication of the Government’s employment of Professor Collier that he was also invited by the Russian Government, current hosts of the G20, to address the major conference on tackling corruption in government and business that they convened in April.

I want to speak only about international tax as that has constituted a serial thread in this Chamber over the past six months. It is a matter of some relief to me that of the UK Crown dependencies, one of those which has, to the best of my knowledge, never been a tax haven is St Helena, where a forebear of mine was a distinguished and gallant governor between 1787 and 1801 and where his nephew, whom he brought out as his secretary, remained until 1834. Thus, a family connection with the island was created that lasted not only through Napoleon’s stay, but in all for almost half a century. However, those British territories which are tax havens have understood our intertwined role and, in the case of Jersey, have given leadership in these tax considerations which the World Bank has adjudged a model.

The fact that Jersey also became the world’s largest exporter of bananas is an index of the sub-plots of this drama. It is 54 years since I was last in Uganda, where it was borne in on me that there are 250 different species of banana. It is 43 years since I was last in Jamaica, another island where bananas are not unknown. At the Negril end of the island there was then a waste—for the benefit of the Hansard writer, I am spelling that word with an “e” rather than an “i”—that was eloquently described on the map as the Great Morass. These are deep waters, Watson, as Sherlock Holmes used to say.

However, to be encouraging, and not least in the context of the G20, there are signs of light. America has made for transparency in reporting a legal requirement for US-listed resource extraction through the Cardin-Lugar amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act 2010. The European Parliament is considering an equivalent of Cardin-Lugar. At a European Council meeting in Brussels on 22 May this year, beyond the general conclusion on fighting tax evasion, it was agreed that rapid progress was needed, and I quote,

“to improve the EU’s agreements with Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra and San Marino”,

in line with measures equivalent to those in the EU. Canada is following the United States in clarifying and tightening the application of its equivalent to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, even if Canada has also opposed the introduction of mandatory disclosure standards; for instance, in relation to 330 minerals extraction projects in Africa.

Professor Collier has also earned our gratitude by trumping the African defence of questionable deals done—the defence being that it takes two to tango—by enlarging the duo to a threesome, as in, I think I recall from my youth, the dance “the dashing white sergeant” with a cast of a briber, a bribee and a facilitator. The latter word is one that my noble friend Lord Trimble may remember from the vocabulary of the peace process.

Facilitators can live a long way from Africa, including in this city. A recent experimental study conducted by Griffith University in Australia, which sent more than 7,000 e-mails to law firms around the world, requesting that shell companies be set up, contained a sprinkling of references in random e-mails that included incriminating information indicative of corruption, and offers of a premium on normal fees to maintain secrecy. Regrettably, replies to this random selection demonstrated a fall in the number of law firms demanding identity documents, which are internationally required to allow company owners to be traced. Law firms in G8 countries were not immune from this diplomatic—or undiplomatic—omission.

Professor Collier adduced practical and effective responses to these contingencies, but it remains the case that only 1,000 of the 280,000 annual reports of transactions that give grounds for suspicion in the UK are investigated. On the other hand, the fact that the US now recognises that present practices are adversely affecting US tax revenues is a powerful stimulus to remedial action. It is, however, a combined and united push that is required.

In closing, I go back to where I began, with the moral from our peace process in Northern Ireland. The most important imperative is agreement on the goal and unremitting attention to anything that will advance that cause. The Prime Minister, at his level, and Professor Collier at his, have done an outstanding job in setting out an agenda that addresses these matters. If we can match even a fraction of the results of the Congress of Vienna, we shall have done well.

Historical Manuscripts Commission

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 29th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, my speech will be both brief and personal. First, I apologise to my noble friend Lord Cormack and your Lordships’ House for being absent when his speech began, against all the rules of the rubric. I had been giving lunch for one of my sons, whose birthday occurs during the Recess, which starts today. Only one screen is on in the Barry Room, and I had my back to it, so I had no idea that our hour-long debates this afternoon were getting on so ahead of schedule.

I arrived in your Lordships’ House in time to hear my noble friend allude to the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill. The late Lord Bingham and I were contemporaries at Oxford at the same college and we were very close friends, taking coffee together after evening chapel every night for a year, with our third companion, Maurice Keen, later a distinguished medieval historian. Six or seven years later, after we went down, Lord Bingham and I were mutual godparents to our respective eldest children.

Fast forward 35 years, to when I was Secretary of State for National Heritage, I asked the authority of the Permanent Secretary, given the circumstances, to appoint the then Master of the Rolls, also known as Lord Bingham of Cornhill, to be chairman of the Royal Historical Monuments Commission. I gather that the National Archives website uses its titles HMC and RHMC interchangeably. The Permanent Secretary acceded.

Fast forward another decade and, as a 70th birthday present, I gave Tom Bingham, then a senior Law Lord, the bound volume of a Select Committee of Parliament in 1800 on our historic manuscripts. In thanking me, he said that he could not imagine any other nation which had preserved all its key constitutional documents in good shape since the 16th century. It is in the memory of the spirit of Lord Bingham that I congratulate my noble friend Lord Cormack on having secured this debate and opened it so cogently. I hope that the alliances formed this afternoon will flourish along the same lines as described in this debate.

Electoral Registration

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, the initial language of speeches in debates such as this is conventional, even to the extent of seeming Chinese. However, on this occasion, which is also the 180th anniversary year of the Great Reform Act, convention can be thrown to the winds and the noble Lord, Lord Wills, can be thanked for and congratulated in an old-fashioned, John Bull-ish, Hogarthian way on the immense service that he has done to your Lordships’ House in securing this debate and opening it so well, even if sometimes controversially.

To genuflect towards the Great Reform Act, I remark in passing as a former Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster that my predecessor, Charles James Fox, required seven votes to be elected in Midhurst and 13 in Malmesbury, but was confronted by an electorate of 6,000 when he came to Westminster, on a property franchise so liberal that the electorate actually fell after the 1832 legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, will be aware that, although the House of Commons Library note on this subject was intended as briefing for an opposition day debate in the other place on individual electoral registration on 9 November 2011, he will also be aware that that debate did not take place and never has since. So this debate is the subject’s first parliamentary outing since the White Paper of last summer.

My noble friend the Minister who is replying to the debate is himself a living embodiment of the coalition. I am happy to say that voter registration is a subject on which the two coalition parties do not in principle seem to have differences of opinion. I can still recall, in opposition in your Lordships’ House, my agreeable surprise in another such debate when my now noble friend Lord Goodhart, speaking after me, said that he had agreed with almost everything that I had said in preceding him. I also derive satisfaction for having spoken in the Second Reading debate during the passage of the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002 in your Lordships’ House—a debate that precipitated the wholesale rewriting of the Bill at the behest of the late, great Lord Williams of Mostyn between Second Reading and Third Reading and the requirement therefrom for people registering to vote to provide their personal details, including a national insurance number, an event that provides forbear ancestry to this debate. The fall of 10 per cent in the Northern Ireland electorate was a consequence but not, in my view, an inexplicable one. The new electoral register involved a sharp reduction not only in duplications but in those removed to a higher place by death without having been removed from the electoral register as they crossed the bourn.

In Great Britain, after the boundary changes leading up to the 1983 general election, my inner-city seat had the lowest turnout in the country at 58 per cent, a level the country itself reached two elections ago; clearly, where Westminster leads, so goes the nation. I told my agent, the admirable Donald Stewart, who retired last year, that this position in the turnout list must never be repeated. Over my next three, and final, elections, we rose 24 places in the turnout list, overtaking not only other inner-city seats in the great cities of the nation but some Northern Ireland seats as well. Personally, I enjoy election canvassing, but I enjoy it the more when I am confident in the security of the register. I also have profound consequential admiration for inner-city postmen.

I hope that I am not telling tales out of school when I say that some years back the Conservative Party’s research department’s statistical side did some research into the electoral registers of marginal seats. As its motivation was primarily political, it did not go further and compare its data academically with those for other, less marginal, seats. However, the outcome was very similar to that which emerged from the post-2002 Northern Ireland data. One additional element was the significant number of aliens on the register not yet entitled by citizenship to vote. I am not in this regard implying fraud, although of course there may have been some. An alien with imperfect English might well feel that he was obliged by law to fill in the annual household electoral request from the local authority. Nor do I blame electoral registration officers for failing to conduct a full electoral canvass. Funding for electoral registration officers is not ring-fenced, to pick up where the Welfare Reform Bill Report stage left off last night. Moreover, as the House of Commons Library note says, the Electoral Commission,

“initially saw the change as being an essential ‘building block’ for e-enabled elections but individual registration was later seen as an important measure to guard against electoral fraud”.

All this, however, militates in favour of a full 2014 canvass at this stage in the programme’s evolution, rather than relying on an updated 2013 register.

One of the incidental consequences of the international détente of 1989 and the fall of both communism and the Berlin Wall was the exposure of UK electoral experts, often as election observers, to the practices of the eastern European countries, where it transpired that voters very much had to prove who they were, not least in the Balkan imbroglio. My late first wife was a Brazilian citizen who also carried a British passport, but I did not then realise that in Brazil too you had to prove at the time of voting who you were. The majority of countries now require a photographic card or even a specific electoral registration card.

I realise the bias against identity cards in this land and the distaste for indelible ink on our hands, but I wonder whether we are not being offered the opportunity to learn from the experience from others. We had the first industrial revolution and other countries learnt much from it—indeed, improving on it in the process. We were, with the exception of Albania, the last country in Europe to create a modern national lottery and, as the Minister who introduced it, I can testify to how much we learnt from the experience of others to create what is widely regarded as the best lottery in the world. I know that we are the mother of parliaments, but perhaps humility might help us to make the giant leap to an electoral registration card ourselves. We are conscious of the importance that the coalition attaches to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011. The same importance should be attached to a copper-bottomed improvement to the whole electoral procedure.

On a final elegiac note, one of the losses from 18th-century electioneering history is the gradual disappearance today of constituency agents from the ranks of our political parties. As the farm labourer disappears from the land, so does a great deal of knowledge of country lore. For the benefit of the Hansard writer, I spell that word with an “o”. The same is true of agents —and I spell “lore” in that instance with both an “o” and an “a”.

Armed Forces: Housing

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, may I remark to my noble friend that my noble friend Lady Sharples asked a question about the Wellington barracks when we were in opposition? It has clearly therefore appeared on the screen of the Ministry of Defence. If the first Duke of Wellington was alive today, I shudder to think what he would have said if it had disappeared from the screen during his lifetime.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I shudder to think what service accommodation was like when the Duke of Wellington was a general.

Universal Credit

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, many noble Lords will be aware that the MPA starting gate report was passed to the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons and placed in the House of Commons Library. It was not specifically intended to be open for full publication, but one of the Members of the PAC passed it on to the Telegraph, which, I suspect, is part of the origin of this Question.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, will my noble friend remind our noble friend the Minister in charge of the Bill, who is sitting next to him, that at Second Reading he promised four of us, two of whom have already asked questions, that he would give a presentation on the computer arrangements at some time in the reasonably near future?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My noble friend tells me that this will take place in early November and that he will give a date very shortly.