Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Hain Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 14th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I will move Amendment 1 and speak to Amendment 23, both of which are in my name. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, for adding her name to the amendment, and of course to my noble friend Lady Smith of Llanfaes, who no doubt will wish to address Amendment 21 in her name, which I support. I also support Amendment 26 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, which we will come to later.

At Second Reading, I outlined the case for the Crown Estate in Wales to be devolved as it is in Scotland. That is the subject of a Private Member’s Bill that I have awaiting a Second Reading debate. Although many of these amendments overlap with that fundamental approach, there are other amendments not going quite as far as full devolution proposals which, none the less, could help meet Welsh grievances regarding how it is widely seen that the Crown Estate, as currently administered, does not address Welsh needs or concerns, and, indeed, sucks valuable resources out of Wales.

This issue has boiled up further since Second Reading, with a number of local authorities in Wales that are really strapped for cash, as indeed local authorities are in England, protesting at the bill demands which the Crown Estate makes of them. Let us take as an example the position of my own local authority, Gwynedd Council. This year it is being asked to pay a staggering bill of £160,000 to the Crown Estate to permit access to and full use of its own land and facilities within its own territory. The council has to pay the Crown Estate an annual rent for access to the beach in Bangor, Barmouth and Llanaber and a staggering £144,000 a year in rent relating to the marina in Pwllheli. Access to beaches touches a raw nerve in Wales; when private citizens have tried to close a footpath access, they have triggered massive protest and have had to back down. Yet the Crown is allowed to tell us that we have to pay for use of our own land and our own coast in our own country and can charge for the use of that privilege with impunity.

Gwynedd Council now faces cutting back on other services to pay the Crown Estate. A motion was moved by councillor Dewi Llewelyn in full council meeting on 3 October, and the council resolved to refuse to pay this charge. The motion also called for the control of Crown Estate land and profits in Wales to be devolved to the Welsh Government. We await developments, but other councils in Wales are also now considering similar steps. No one can say that there has not been adequate warning that the Crown Estate issue in Wales is flaring up in the direction of taking the form of a Boston Tea Party.

Conservative Governments over the past 10 years have known that this issue has been festering, but while they accepted the need to make adjustments in Scotland, which led to the devolving of the Crown Estate through the Scotland Act 2016, the situation in Wales was left to fester. This situation has been strenuously criticised by the Labour Government in the Senedd. I will not repeat the lengthy quotation which I presented to the House at Second Reading, when I drew attention to the words of the then Labour Climate Change Minister, Julie James, who, in a nutshell, said that the Crown Estate in Wales should be devolved, as in Scotland, and that the current situation is “outrageous”. Both the former First Minister, Mark Drakeford, and our erstwhile colleague, the current First Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, have also called for the Crown Estate to be devolved in Wales.

In moving the first amendment, we are offering the Committee, and indeed the new Labour Government, an opportunity to take a small step towards redressing the balance. This does not provide for the full devolution of the Crown Estate in Wales, but it gives the Welsh Government a veto grip over the Crown Estate by way of the words which appear in the amendment:

“The functions of the Crown Estate in Wales may not be exercised without the consent of the Welsh Government”.


The mechanisms for granting that consent—indeed, for pinpointing the issues that would need to be addressed to secure that consent—can be open to negotiation between the Welsh Government and the Crown Estate. What this does is to establish beyond doubt that our Government in Wales will have the final word on such matters.

I will briefly mention Amendment 23, standing in my name and supported by the noble Baronesses, Lady Smith of Llanfaes and Lady Humphreys, and by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. It also provides a mechanism, short of devolving the full Crown Estate to Wales, to require the Crown Estate to pass to the Welsh Government all the net profit that it has generated from Wales; and thereby to enable the Welsh Government to pass an appropriate part of such funds to the local authorities that I mentioned to ensure that they are not out of pocket from the bills that they have to pay to the Crown Estate.

The Labour Government at Westminster should be delighted to facilitate developments provided by the amendment, which I have highlighted. If they are not, they will need to make a very persuasive case because, if these modest proposals are not acceptable, the only answer might be for the devolution—lock, stock and barrel—of the Crown Estate in Wales to Wales, as has been the case in Scotland. I welcome support for these proposals from all quarters of the Committee and I await the Minister’s response with fascination. I beg to move.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 21 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. I do so as a former Labour Secretary of State for Wales who was responsible for the 2006 devolution Act. Before that, as a Welsh Minister, I, alongside the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and others, was closely involved in winning the 1997 referendum, which brought in the 1998 devolution Act to establish the Welsh Assembly, now Senedd. I have also lived in Wales for 34 years now.

Welsh Labour’s programme for government in the Senedd includes a commitment to pursue the devolution of powers needed to help reach net zero, including management of the Crown Estate in Wales. The Crown Estate is devolved in Scotland; surely there is no reason why the same powers should not be devolved to Wales, especially by a new Westminster Labour Government committed to partnership rather than confrontation with the devolved Administrations. That was the essence of the Prime Minister’s message to the special summit of the nations and regions last Friday, and in visiting Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in July within days of moving into Downing Street.

The Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales recommended that the Crown Estate be devolved, and Welsh Labour is committed to working with UK Labour in government to implement the recommendations from that commission.

Taking control of the management of Crown Estate assets in Wales would allow the Welsh Government greater autonomy over the speed and direction of the development of Welsh-sited Crown Estate property. The Welsh Government would have the opportunity to better align the management of Crown assets in Wales with the needs of Welsh citizens. The management of Crown assets also generates significant revenue to the UK Exchequer. Devolution of the Crown Estate would better align revenues from Wales with the income available for the Welsh Government to deliver on their priorities for Welsh citizens.

Marine planning is a holistic, statutory process for managing the UK’s seas including the seabed. Aligning Welsh marine planning with seabed leasing rounds for new developments, such as renewable energy, would help to ensure joined-up and plan-led decision-making.

Currently, there are stand-alone leasing rounds for certain types of activity, such as offshore wind or marine aggregates extraction. These leasing rounds, which occur from time to time, take account of relevant government policy, but devolution of the Crown Estate to Scotland has allowed a reshaping of the process, whereby the marine planning process sets the overall policy direction with leasing rounds only progressed after it has set national strategic policy. This ensures that marine management is better joined up and delivered. Taking control of the management of the seabed would allow Welsh Government Ministers both to better implement their policy decisions and priorities for the marine area and to ensure that all relevant interests can be reflected in a way that is simply not as possible with a top-heavy, centralised and London-centric agenda.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope that these explanations have been helpful and that I have provided some clarity on these points. I hope that the noble Lords, Lord Wigley and Lord Hain, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Smith and Lady Humphreys, will not press their amendments as a result.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, I want to ask him specifically about what he said in relation to Welsh Government Ministers. I pressed him hard to talk to Welsh Government Ministers and consult on this matter. Nobody expects this to be done overnight or, indeed, relatively soon, given everything else and what he has said, but that seems to me the crucial thing which would release me from an obligation at least to press this on Report.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am very happy to reiterate what I said: I will, of course, discuss these issues with the First Minister and the Secretary of State for Wales to ensure that Wales sees the full benefits of the Crown Estate and other forms of investment.

Budget Responsibility Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, two years ago the Tory faithful showed that they had no firmer grip on reality than Liz Truss by choosing a Prime Minister who engineered her own downfall and now blames absolutely everybody else. The infamous Truss mini-Budget provoked a crisis of confidence in Britain’s public finances by sidestepping the Office for Budget Responsibility, and this Bill will ensure that cannot happen again. The financial turmoil around the Truss mini-Budget, with its reckless £46 billion package of unfunded tax cuts and cavalier attitude to government borrowing, added to the economic chaos that seven successive Tory Chancellors caused over 14 years in office since 2010, dumping an appalling legacy in Labour’s lap.

First, they left office with real household incomes lower than when they came into government and working people with the highest tax burden for 70 years. The main reason was appallingly slow economic growth, due in large part to investment being significantly lower than in other G7 economies. Had the UK economy grown as fast as the OECD average over the past 13 years, UK GDP would have been more than £140 billion bigger, providing some £50 billion of extra tax revenue for public services and lower borrowing.

Secondly, the Tories gave up their seals of office on the 76th anniversary of the NHS’s launch with more than 7.6 million patients waiting for hospital treatment in England.

Thirdly, national debt, which stood at 65% of GDP in 2010 even after the financial crisis, is now touching 100%. The Tories have also bequeathed to Labour a huge £22 billion budgetary black hole about which Tory Ministers deliberately kept quiet and with which the Chancellor is now having to wrestle. She is right to stress that 14 years of damage cannot be reversed in one Budget. The OBR estimates that the decade of fiscal austerity imposed by George Osborne and Philip Hammond added up to nearly 9% of GDP—82% by cuts to public spending and 18% cent by tax increases—equivalent in today’s terms to some £200 billion of public spending cuts.

Do not forget that things could have been even worse. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, admitted in his memoirs that, had he stayed in office after 2016, he would have pursued even more public spending cuts. George Osborne’s last Budget in March 2016 revealed plans for another £60 billion of public spending cuts, which would have brought total Tory cuts to £260 billion. Fortunately, Liz Truss lost office before she could attempt similar economic and social vandalism—but then, in this summer’s election, Rishi Sunak’s dishonest promise of national insurance cuts of £13 billion and defence spending rises of £7 billion per year would have doubled the black hole that the Chancellor discovered.

When critics claim that the Chancellor has embarked on George Osborne-type austerity, she is absolutely right to insist that giving public sector workers their first real-terms pay increase in 10 years is certainly not that. Osborne’s first Budget announced a two-year public sector pay freeze. Jeremy Hunt now claims:

“Labour have inherited a growing and resilient economy”.


He says that because UK GDP grew in the first half of this year, yet GDP shrank in the second half of last year as the economy sank into recession. We may have stopped going backwards but we are not yet any further forward than we were an economically destructive and financially irresponsible Conservative year ago. The Bank of England now expects growth to slow, not speed up, in the third and fourth quarters of this year—another sign of Tory failure and nothing like the rapid turnaround that we experienced under the last Labour Chancellor in 2009 as the economy recovered from the terrible global financial crisis.

This Bill is designed to block any repeat of such Tory antics and to establish a future under Labour of economic growth and stability. It will not be easy, but thank goodness we have grown-ups running the country again.

Public Spending: Inheritance

Lord Hain Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Earl for his question. He is absolutely right that the origins of many of the shocks that the British economy experienced were global; however, the UK suffered worse and for longer than many comparative countries. Inflation stayed higher for longer in this country than I think in any other comparative country. The reason for that is the decisions taken by the previous Government, and there were three in particular: austerity, which choked off investment; a badly handled Brexit deal; and the Liz Truss Budget, which crashed the economy and sent mortgage rates spiralling.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend the Minister on his appointment, and his performance this afternoon has shown what authority he has in that post. Does he agree that capable Minister though the noble Baroness was, and respected in this House, she cannot possibly believe the guff that she has just read out, sent to her from down the Corridor, no doubt? The truth is, as the letter from the chair of the OBR confirms, they were not told the full information. There was a monumental mess left by the previous Government, who were not straight with the electorate during the election campaign, promising massive tax cuts and huge increases in defence spending which they could not possibly finance.

However, can the Minister confirm that the payments given to doctors and others in the public sector are merited? They are vital public sector workers who have been treated miserably by the previous Government, and justice is at last being done.