Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in Cumbria, where I live and chair the local enterprise partnership, it looks as if the local economy will not return to its pre-Covid levels until 2024 at the earliest. Business has been under the cosh and widespread commercial and personal hardship has ensued, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham, among others, told us.

Business and commerce now need stability—a period when they can get on with their own business, confident that policy will not be oscillating like a pendulum on cocaine. Business has had its period of commercial destruction; now give it some time for commercial creativity and security for its working capital. The post-Brexit world must be allowed to settle down. There is no short-term or even longer-term prospect of going back. Apart from anything else, the EU cannot want that kind of relationship with us.

One of the most damaging aspects of Brexit was and still is the reintroduction of costly and bureaucratic friction into trade with our most important neighbouring market, with its consequential real disruption of supply chains. Increasingly, I am convinced that, in the real world, the trade deals we are negotiating are not a substitute for trade with our neighbours, which is different because of the mainland’s physical propinquity to us. Rather, I sense that President Modi and Gulf potentates are looking at and eyeing up this country rather in the way that Robert Clive did when looking at the Carnatic in the second half of the 18th century.

Equally, the Government’s apparent avowed intent to systematically dismantle that piece of our statute book derived from EU law looks gratuitously damaging. Most of this legislation has been given political legitimacy by the support of the then UK Government at its birth and much has been gold-plated on its transposition into UK law. Reasoned change for good purpose is good, but gratuitous, iconoclastic meddling is bad.

The planning system is clearly, on occasions, byzantine, overcomplicated, bureaucratic and poorly administered, but it is also necessary and that needs to be recognised, as do its real shortcomings. Innovation zones could have a beneficial impact, so long as they do not displace what is happening anyway, are in the right place and on the right scale, take legitimate, site-specific concerns into account and are not mere political pork barrels. I would be grateful if the Minister would tell me what the position on business rates in these innovation zones is.

There has also been a lot of comment about the environment and what one might describe as associated aspects of policy from what the Government are proposing. In areas such as Cumbria, the environment, agriculture and natural capital are important economic assets, not bolt-on luxuries, as some people appear to suppose. Can the Government confirm that they recognise them for what they are and will treat them as important, wealth-creating activities and drivers of growth, not fripperies?

Carbon is now being described as the new gold or the new oil. It must be valued at its real worth and its value redeployed in those places where it is fixed, in the way in which coal wealth was used in the north in the 19th century to promote that part of England’s economy. The same is true for clean energy.

Nobody is suggesting that any of these things is easy, but competent economic governance is rather like being a doctor: if the patient lives and thrives, the reputation grows; if not, it is the opposite. Doing this right might be boring, but if so, boring is good.