Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend Lady Gohir on her excellent maiden speech and the noble Baroness the Minister on her new appointment, and wishing the right reverend Prelate well on his retirement from this House in what can only be described by our standards as early middle age.

I wish to pick up two points in this debate: one about poverty and the other about mortgages. In relation to poverty, as the distinguished and respected Conservative the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, said on Radio 4’s “Today” programme this morning, one of the consequences of the Chancellor’s Statement will be to send 450,000 people into poverty, including many children. Apparently, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor call that levelling up. Really? Of course, they may well abandon that policy, but it will demonstrate the muddle-headedness of their thinking.

I turn to mortgages and echo something that was said earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. To quote last week’s Financial Times Lex column:

“Homeowners are watching UK mortgage rates head skywards, as their hearts descend to their boots. Some fixed-rate mortgagees will lose their homes when refinancings land them with month-to-month payments they can’t afford.”


Most of the 9.5 million households in this country with mortgages have fixed-rate loans. They face average increases of £500 per month. That seems to me to be no prescription for levelling up either. Indeed, I would suggest that it is dangerous and foolish to undermine the morale and ethics of those employed in national and local government, public health, education and the arts—all parts of our society that we commend.

If your Lordships feel tired after the long debate today, I recommend that when going to bed they read a few pages of the gardening writer Mirabel Osler’s excellent book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos. Mirabel Osler believed that strong growth depends on not destroying the best plants on the plot but adding flowers and seeds around them. What we are seeing here is a not so gentle, accidental plea for chaos, which will undermine many of the assumptions that our fellow citizens are entitled to make.

We in this House do not have constituents but we do have children and grandchildren—many of us have family members of the sort of age most hard hit by the policies announced by this Government. I do not think that we should tolerate that without fighting, still for growth of course, but growth that supports all our citizens.