Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Jackson. I was delighted to move the amendment in Committee in his absence and to attract so much cross-party support. We also had the support of the police, of the esteemed former Met Commissioner, the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, who I am glad to see in his place, and, as we have heard, from Dame Chi Onwurah, a very distinguished Labour MP.

As it is so late, I rise to say only that I agree entirely with my noble friend. The sight of distressed people in the Apple store, some from abroad, having to buy new phones and trying to get back into their accounts, affected me profoundly. It made me determined to change the incentive structure, both for criminals and indeed for retailers, which actually benefit from emergency sales of mobile phones. Given the degree of concern expressed across the Committee, at a much more civilised time, and the changes that my noble friend Lord Jackson has made to the amendment to try to meet any concerns, I very much look forward to a positive response from the Minister and to getting after this ghastly criminal operation.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 368 in support of my noble friend Lord Jackson, because losing your phone is not just inconvenient. When your device is stolen, a crime has been committed, and operators have a responsibility to take a much more leading role in disincentivising the opportunities to steal, to make it a lot easier to reunite people with a phone that might have been lost and to discourage the black market in stolen goods.

It is a late hour, but I hope to tell a little uplifting story about my experiences today, because today I found a phone on the Tube as I got off at Westminster. It turns out that the gentleman sitting next to me, who had got off at Victoria on the way from Fulham, had left it behind. I am an honest chap. I had a look: it was a pink case with two phone numbers inside. I called them and there was no answer, but I texted them and, by and by, there was a response. To cut a long story short, the phone was reunited with the owner—perhaps, as I have the phone number now, I might send them the YouTube clip and possibly the Hansard as well. The phone was deposited at Westminster Tube with TfL staff, who were really good. They were actually really interested and keen to help this poor, unfortunate chap.

But what if someone had not been quite so honest? What if that phone number was not tucked inside the pink case? How would it have been secured and returned? I did not expect to talk to this group, but my experience today shows how important this amendment is. The man in the street should not rely just on the kindness of strangers. The phone companies should not make it harder to reunite; we should prevent the perverse incentives.

But there is another point. The phone is no longer just a phone. It is not just a device to doomscroll on late at night. It is not just a device to play “Candy Crush”. The phone is now a token—part of our security infrastructure and part of the devices that secure our economy. I do not believe that this has been fully understood. I got locked out of my parliamentary account the other day, and because I had left my phone behind, I could not do my work, neither my commercial work nor the work associated with this House. I do not think that the penny has quite dropped with the operators to recognise that they are now part of the security infrastructure of our economy. It is not just the inconvenience of losing a phone and queuing up, as my noble friend says, in the Apple store to replace it; this is part of the technological infrastructure of our nation. Technology has moved on, and the phone companies must do so too.

National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Tuesday 24th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Before the Minister moves on, would he consider making an affirmative regulation on the very first occasion? The discussions that we have had this evening show that there is quite a bit of complexity here, and that has compliance costs for employers and employees. It seems odd to take the precedent of the social security Act on something new and difficult. I wonder whether that would be worth considering. Perhaps the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee did not have the benefit of the experts here who have explained some of the problems. I am sure the Minister cannot say anything today, but could he at least have a look at whether the first such regulations could be by affirmative resolution, which is a practice that I have encountered with lots of other Bills that we probably worked on together?

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

If I may interject, especially with such a load of—

Pension Schemes Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, one of the astonishing things about the Bill is that it not only stops choice but puts under statute a connivance between the regulators and that old boys’ club of large operators that run investment money in London.

The effect of this connivance is to weaken returns, increase costs, damage competition among funds and weaken the UK economy. It does that because—although you would not know from the Bill—the City of London is, by any measure, one of the world’s top three financial centres. That did not happen by itself. Three hundred years of innovation, progress, capital and scale, starting in Lloyd’s Coffee House in the 1700s, and continuing with the Rothschilds and the big bang 40 or 50 years ago, made the United Kingdom and the City of London a financial powerhouse. It created a tax gusher. That happened because people were able to use their intellect and talents to innovate to turn small acorns into large oak trees in so far as financial management is concerned.

All that is at risk. That is why I welcome the amendments from my noble friend Lady Noakes, which would re-establish the principle that you have to allow the creative destruction in a market economy to advance returns and service and add competition, all of which this Government would sweep aside. It is that sort of macroeconomic approach.

Of course, it also fetters people’s ability to make their own decisions in an adult way. I accept that after someone’s house, their pension may be their second largest asset. But that is not the same in every case, and there are people with sophisticated needs and requirements who ought to have that choice. That choice should not be foisted upon them, because it gives you those weaker returns, increased costs and damaged competition.

I am entirely in favour of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Noakes and, once again, I call on the Government to have a fresh look at this, not least because the Prime Minister has identified fintech and all those sorts of innovative sectors—those start-ups in Shoreditch—as one of the large opportunities where this country can show competitive advantage. That would be snuffed out if these provisions in the Bill were implemented through regulation or other methods.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is fair to say that I am not keen on Chapter 4 of the Bill, which appears to allow the state to trample on and prevent the establishment of smaller funds, and, if necessary, requires their assets to be moved, presumably to another fund. “Squashing new entrants” was the telling phrase used by my noble friend Lady Noakes. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to provide some reassurance.

I support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Noakes and have added my name to most of them. It is essential to permit the regulations to be pro- competitive rather than over-exclusionary, and for the review required by Clause 43—the timing of which we are yet to hear about—to consider the competitive landscape for pension scheme provision.

It is also important that the regulations made encourage innovation, as Amendment 170 would. The substantial £25 billion minimum provided for in the Government’s reforms seems set to deter such innovation—innovation that is characteristic of smaller, growing operators. We have heard that, at length, on several days, but we have not yet received an adequate answer. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, has already raised some good points about other risks that may arise from the proposed arrangements.

My noble friend Lady Noakes rightly suggested that the Pensions Regulator should be made to consider the competitiveness of new entries. I share her praise for the fintech sandbox, although I would say that that was a long time ago—indeed, when I was a Treasury Minister about 10 years ago. I am, however, less sure about the FCA’s overall success. I have therefore added my name to my noble friend Lord Younger’s stand-part notice, which questions the need for Clause 45. The Government’s Explanatory Notes are far from helpful and the implications of this clause are unclear. Why does it extend the FCA’s supervisory jurisdiction to default arrangements under Chapter 4? What, if any, new delegated powers are being given to it?

I have encountered a lot of problems with the FCA over the years. The truth is that I have not found it business or fund-friendly. It presents itself as the champion of the consumer, but adds cost, delay, bureaucracy and uncertainty in a way that often raises prices and returns to the very consumer that it was set up to protect. I am therefore of the view that its role should be minor and constrained. What is the background and rationale for this clause? We need to know more if we are going to support it.

Pension Schemes Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Monday 26th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 91 and 95 in the name of my noble friend Lady Noakes, to which I have added my name. I apologise for not being able to contribute to the Committee’s discussions on Thursday because of competing business on the Floor of the House. I have read Hansard and I should record that I share the reservations expressed about mandation, a subject on which I have received many well-argued requests and emails. I commend the arguments that have been well put by my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie on the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles. I particularly dislike powers delayed into the future. If the Government decide that they need to legislate later, they can bring in another Bill that the House can scrutinise in the light of contemporary evidence.

I turn to the amendments in this group, so well argued by my noble friend Lady Noakes. I am uneasy, as others are, about the overemphasis on creating size and scale in the Bill: £25 billion is a big fund and, as my noble friend Lady Altmann said, it does not seem to be well evidenced. It is a Labour trend that needs to be treated with some scepticism. We see it in local government reorganisation, in rail nationalisation and now in the proposals for the police. I know from my business experience, which noble Lords know I always come from, that mergers of any kind always have substantial costs and that you need smaller, pushy innovators to keep sectors competitive. This might be contentious, but Aldi was good for Tesco because it kept us on our toes—and even better for the consumer, the equivalent of the saver in this case. The point is that reorganisations of any kind always have costs and only sometimes have benefits.

We have seen the growth in recent years of money purchase funds that are almost entirely digital, and they have brought beneficial competition to the market. We risk eliminating the next generation of innovation, real value creation and indeed British unicorn funds, generated by competition, if we leave the Bill as it is.

We must not allow good performers to be snuffed out by the movement to bigger schemes. That is why we are asking the Minister to look at excluding master trusts and group pension plans that deliver good investment performance from the scale and size requirements. Performance is, after all, what matters to those saving for a pension. Size, scale and growth are not everything, popular though they tend to be with the fund managers who benefit. Returns matter more, but the Bill at present rather underplays them in favour of scale. My noble friend Lady Noakes’s amendments are just what is needed, and I look forward to hearing how the Minister is going to solve the problem that she has identified.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 99 in particular but I generally associate myself with all the amendments in this group, including Amendments 95 and 98 in the names of my noble friends.

As we have heard, there is no conclusive evidence that bigger is best when it comes to investment management. Of course there are some large funds that do rather well, but, as I explained on a previous day in Committee, within the Local Government Pension Scheme it is the smallest fund in the Orkneys that has outranked the performance of all the 88 other schemes in the LGPS, and there is something to be said for that. It has never changed its investment manager, and there is a lesson there.

In my experience, the best returns are to be made in investing in companies where you either buy the product or know the management—not so that you can tap them for inside information, of course, but because it hardly ever pays to invest in bad people. I also like to buy when prices fall because, let us face it, buying high and selling cheap is never a good investment strategy. But there is no evidence at all that scale in and of itself is good. There is plenty of evidence that it is worse. As they say, the larger they are the harder they fall, and small ones are more juicy.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Thursday 11th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend Lord Banner in this amendment about proportionality. My experience of this come from my membership of the CIL review, to which I was appointed by the Minister about 10 years ago to imagine a new approach to developer contributions. I do not have the report in front of me—it was a long time ago—but there was one statistic as part of my evidence-gathering process that remains with me today. Ninety percent of all planning applications are for 10 dwellings or less, but the 10% that are for 11 or more are well over half of the total number of houses that are planned to be built in this country. There is an asymmetry; the larger applications are significantly larger than the smaller ones, yet we treat everything the same.

If we are to encourage local builders who spend much time with the local vernacular, local contractors and local supply chains, we must have a more flexible and proportionate system. Proportionality exists in so many walks of life. Just to reflect for a moment on some of the Bills that we have been looking at in the last few months, there is proportionality for small businesses in employment legislation. The Minister and I debated in the Moses Room the other day the definition of a smaller authority, with a different audit test that would happen to those smaller authorities with a turnover of £15 million or less. In the brewing industry, the smaller brewers have an adventitious duty regime. Proportionality should not be alien; in fact, it should be something to be encouraged.

As part of the CIL review work, we looked at how we might help smaller builders and postulated that developments of less than 10 dwellings, as a threshold, would be exempted from Section 106; they would pay the CIL—the community infrastructure levy—instead. I thought that that would be a really proportionate way of doing it. People would make a meaningful contribution to the local infrastructure, but without getting tied up in knots on some of the smaller minutiae. That is an approach we could follow.

In local authorities, when someone applies for planning permission, there is a validation exercise. Unless you have submitted your ecology assessment, CIL form and everything else, the clock does not even start ticking. I would not want whole areas of legislation to be cast aside, and I am sure my noble friend agrees. I do not believe he is suggesting for one moment that there would be no ecology report; it is just that an ecology report for a set of five bungalows in a village on the outskirts of the development boundary should not be subject to the same test as a much more significant development.

That is important because it is significantly more expensive to deliver smaller schemes. There are certain fixed costs of applying for a planning application that have to be amortised—jam-spread, if you will—over a small number of developments. There is a diseconomy of scale. I did some fag-paper arithmetic and found that it is about £40,000 more per dwelling house when you take in some of the extra burdens of a smaller-scale development over a larger one. That is why we do not have affordable housing, a subject that detained us in our debate on the Bill on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

We need to drag out the simple truth that smaller schemes are more expensive and that affects viability, which is a significant challenge to getting Britain building. If only we could have this proportionate effect and make a virtue of it, we would give a bit more choice to the market, and with speedy delivery. It would increase the liquidity of the local supply chains in local economies, which would make us all richer and play a significant part in getting Britain building and the economy growing.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, as I have said on several occasions, we need to cut down on the bureaucracy of planning and the excessive application of policy on habitats. Even the Prime Minister has criticised the HS2 £100 million bat tunnel.

In my experience, we have an over-precautionary approach in planning, so I am attracted by the principle of proportionality, especially as it is promoted by a well-known planning KC, who has already contributed very positively to this Committee. My only question, either to him or to the Minister, is whether there is a risk of rising legal costs rather than the reverse, which I think is the intention behind the provision. Indeed, could this unintentionally hurt smaller builders?