Queen’s Speech

Lord Howe of Aberavon Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howe of Aberavon (Con)]

My Lords, I follow the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, with a similar approach to the problems we are all trying to face. He started off by saying that there was no agenda. I would add something that is almost more serious, where, for our society and for our economy in particular, there is no forum or framework and where we have a double shambles. I have a particular emphasis on the absence of any coherent, comprehensive system of weights and measures.

British weights and measures are in a universal mess: litres for petrol and fizzy drinks; pints for beer and milk. We use metres and kilometres for athletics and miles per gallon for cars. The metric system is used in schools, yet all too often pounds and ounces are still used in the market. It is impossible to argue that this chaos does not matter. The fact is that it increases costs, confuses shoppers and managers, leads to serious misunderstandings, causes accidents, wastes our children’s education and, quite bluntly, puts us all to shame.

Almost 800 years ago, Britain’s first charter of human rights, Magna Carta, proclaimed that there should be,

“one measure of wine throughout our whole realm … one measure of corn … and one width of cloth”.

Before then, and ever since, every civilised society has recognised the need for one set, and only one set, of standard measures. How did we get into this curious mess? We have been dithering for almost 150 years. As long ago as 1862, a Commons Select Committee unanimously recommended the adoption of the metric system. A century later, in 1965, the decision was finally taken to go metric over the next 10 years. However, it is still shambling along beside the old system. Alas, the Government then, of whom I was a member, foolishly accepted the recommendation to go that way. We are still stuck half way, while the rest of the world sensibly and quickly moved on. Australia, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Jamaica—members of what we used to call the British Commonwealth—have long completed the entire change, and Ireland, our neighbour, completed the process as quickly as those countries did.

Quite frankly, the proposition that I wish to emphasise to the House is that plainly we cannot stay where we are, with two confused, competing systems. It would be madness to go backwards. The only solution is to complete the changeover to metric as swiftly and cleanly as possible. It is long past time for us to summon up the will to get ourselves out of the present wasteful, untidy mess.