Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Gordon of Strathblane and Lord Newby

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, briefly, I support this amendment. I declare my interest as a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Islamic Finance. I want simply to ask the Minister to reflect on what his colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, said in Committee as to why the Government could not give a timescale for this. She said:

“This careful, sensitive and important work cannot be rushed towards a deadline that is simply chosen and written into legislation. Our timeframes must be grounded in the realities of the work necessary to deliver a workable system”.—[Official Report, 25/1/17; col. 171.]


What are these realities which mean that not only is there inordinate delay but we do not even know how long the delay is likely to be? As we have heard, this is a relatively modest proposal. There is a lot of expertise which would enable it to take place. Can the Minister assure us that the real reason for the delay is not simply that there is such a shortage of staff in the relevant departments and so many other priorities, not least with Brexit, that the Government are not prepared to put Civil Service resources into getting this scheme off the ground?

If you were in a Muslim community it would be very easy to believe that the Government were not taking their commitments seriously in this respect because there is so little action to show. If the Minister is not prepared today to give a firm date for when the Government expect the scheme to be introduced, will he at least give his support to my noble friend Lord Sharkey’s amendment, which would bring some degree of limited certainty into the process?

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, I too will speak very briefly in favour of the amendment. It seems that there is no ideological objection to the proposal from the Government. What has happened is that it has lost priority. That loss of priority may be for perfectly innocent reasons but surely everyone recognises that it is capable of being misinterpreted adversely from the point of view of good relations in the United Kingdom. I simply urge the Government to restore it to the priority it had when it was first announced.

Northern Ireland: Illegal Petrol and Diesel

Debate between Lord Gordon of Strathblane and Lord Newby

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the setting of the duty rates for diesel and petrol are obviously done at a UK level. Although this is a problem, it is only one of the many considerations that have to be taken into account. There has been a differential in diesel pricing between the Republic and Northern Ireland for a very long time. Some people are obviously going across the border but, as I said earlier, as a proportion of the total consumption of diesel in Northern Ireland it is relatively modest.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

Will the Minister consider publishing all the available data on quite legitimate cross-border traffic? It might further illuminate the debate on Scottish independence, where many people feel that you can have differential rates north and south of a land border without any apparent change in consumer behaviour.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, there is a lot of data published about the duty rates. Noble Lords can see those. What is extremely difficult to do is to demonstrate with any great degree of precision exactly how much of a product crosses a border without a customs post. That is obviously a challenge between the Republic and Northern Ireland, as well as more generally within the EU.