King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I begin like other Members of your Lordships’ House by congratulating the new Minister on his elegant maiden speech and welcoming the new Front Bench. I declare my interests as chair of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, which has just divested itself of its formal responsibilities to the local authorities and is now running itself down, and as a member of the Borderlands Economic Forum.

I would like to raise two points about aspects of the King’s Speech. First, regarding ownership of the railways, I am a subscriber to Alexander Pope’s proposition—not that he knew anything about railways—that:

“For forms of government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best”.


I am also conscious of what I was told by the late Lord Kingsland, when electioneering with him: one of the golden rules of electioneering is that nobody ever lost votes knocking British Rail. My experience, like that of many noble Lords, is that we have all spent too much time going to the north of Britain on the railways. The test of whether it works will be whether we spend more or less time on the railways. It is a case of less is more. The House authorities ought to take an interest in this as, if it works, I suspect they will receive substantially less in rebates.

Secondly, I am not a fan of the Brexit settlement. On the evidence that I have seen in the north of England, it seems that it has damaged a lot of small and medium-sized businesses through the loss of markets; it is not only tariff barriers but non-tariff restrictions. I wish the Government well in trying to sort some of these things out, but I do not think it will be easy.

The functions of local enterprise partnerships have been transferred under the direction of local authorities. The key approach behind the LEPs, which is also the key approach of the new Government to economic development, is partnership. Sometimes it goes well and at other times less well, but it is important that, in looking at these things, we recognise that there is a clash between two cultures—that of local government and that of business—which are just as distinct as CP Snow’s two cultures of humanities and science. Look at the trailblazers—the big metropolitan areas where this has taken place—and you find that they have been working on this for many years, and have had at their disposal large resources from both the public and the private sectors. This contrasts importantly with what I might call “out of London”, which has fewer resources and, since the war probably, has lost what in Germany would be known as the “Mittelstand”, and with it much civic leadership outside the formal framework of politics and local government.

There are real potential problems of tension between the local authority culture and the business culture. It is important to recognise that business involvement is voluntary and costs businesses money, time and serious commitment. We must find ways of developing and harnessing arrangements that combine the business way of conducting its own affairs and delivering its own services and products with the local authority and public-sector codes of ethics, behaviour and appropriate accountability. If that is not achieved, it will not work. I recall a meeting of the NP11—the northern LEP chairs—where a very senior businessman concluded his remarks by saying, “And then the politicians will do what they do best: talk”. He then voted with his feet and left the organisation.

These things matter. In the case of Cumbria—although this is by no means confined to the county I know best—there are bad pockets of deprivation. The most important single thing we can do for such communities is to find ways of creating real, sustainable, properly paid work for those in them. That is the highest form of welfare.