King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Frost Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Labour Party on its election victory, which I am afraid was well deserved. I welcome Ministers to the Front Bench, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Vallance; we former officials must stick together.

I listened carefully to the noble Lord’s presentation of government policy as set out in the gracious Speech. I heard that the mission was growth, but I heard little that was likely to deliver it. The planning proposals are obviously the main exception to that, and I wish the Government every success with them. I hope they use the reforms to build useful assets such as houses, roads and power stations, not white elephants like wind farms and solar arrays.

What I heard elsewhere was a plan to continue transforming Britain into a big-government, low-growth, low-energy, corporatist state—an alphabet soup of new bodies, plans and more Government-know-best policies. Just one example is the nice-sounding but, I am afraid, damaging reregulation of the employment market that the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, and others have spoken about: more mandatory pay-gap reporting, the rollback of trade union laws, the boost to the minimum wage, the end to zero-hours contracts, and so on. The Government claim in their briefing to us that the aim of all this is to ensure that

“industrial relations are based around good faith, negotiation and bargaining”.

We have seen what that means from the Chancellor’s remarks over the weekend: it means paying up for fear of the unions. I am afraid that if the Government are paying Danegeld already, two weeks into their term—that is, during the honeymoon—then they are going to have a tormented time in the next few years. Does the Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, who will wind up—have any assessment of the economic impact of these labour market measures? Can he explain why more regulation will boost productivity and growth?

Beyond that, we have a panoply of new corporate bodies: the Industrial Strategy Council, Skills England, and the new OBR, with its stronger legal status and even stronger powers to put its dead hand on to any attempt to create economic dynamism. We have more devolution, more incentives to local leaders to demand more money from the centre and more talking shops, such as the council of the nations and regions, with their local growth plans.

Above all, we have the so-called national wealth fund. I do not know whether the Government have noticed but we do not have quite as much wealth as we used to, thanks to the disastrous lockdown policy that others have referred to, and our debt is as high as our GDP nowadays. Yes, we have a plan: to borrow even more money and spend it on dubious projects that no one else will fund. We can all play that game: I can remortgage my own house, spend the money on a holiday and claim I have created my own sovereign wealth fund. It may make you feel good, but you would be crazy to think you had created any actual value as a result. So it will prove with this fund.

The product safety Bill deserves a lot more scrutiny than it has had so far, and I hope will get it. The government briefing tells us:

“This Bill will preserve the UK’s status as a global leader in product regulation”.


That sounds good, but read further down and you discover that it is designed to give the Government the power to follow EU regulations and keep Great Britain aligned with Northern Ireland and the EU as regards product regulation, which I have to say sounds a bit less like a global leader.

In passing, the briefing refers to a seemingly new body called “the Regulator”, with a capital R, whose nature and capacity is to be future-proofed by the Bill and which will

“provide national leadership on product safety”.

Could the Minister explain what that body is, how it differs from existing regulators and, more broadly, why he thinks that following the rules of the EU without any say in them is likely to help the economy of this country?

All these measures take us further from the only thing that actually creates growth—that is, free people making their own judgments and risking their own money in free markets. I am afraid that in due course the Government will discover this. Until we get back to that direction and until we start rolling back the corporatist collective state, we will continue to have a huge productivity and growth problem, and we will continue to disappoint the expectations of our people.