East Kent Maternity Services: Independent Investigation

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I agree, and if I may I would like to quote Dr Bill Kirkup in the report:

“Clinicians should not have to live in fear”


where “honest clinical errors” are made. That is exactly the point: we need to introduce a culture whereby people feel able to do that. He goes on to blame systemic failures in leadership, a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, made, and which is very pertinent here. We are talking about honest mistakes. Everyone wants to do a good job and tries do a good job; it is where they feel that they cannot bring up and honestly discuss those issues that we have a systemic problem, so I agree that it begins and ends with the leadership.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I know nothing about health policy, Kent or the hospitals in Kent, but our grandson was born in one of the hospitals of the east Kent trust earlier in the summer. We have heard about some of the horrifying things that have happened. There is no excuse for that, but in all hospitals and such establishments there are people who, despite the problems, are doing the real job to the best of their abilities. I should simply like to put on record our gratitude to the staff involved in the birth of our grandson.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. As he rightly points out, the vast majority of workers are very diligent and good at what they do, and that should rightly be recognised. At the same time, I do not think any of us here wants to sweep under the carpet the problems that clearly exist. We need to be sure that, among the fantastic work, we are ever vigilant to root out the bad.

Coronavirus Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued) & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I begin by referring to my interests in the register. I am involved in business and am chairman of the Cumbria local enterprise partnership and, as a result of that, a member of the NP11—the Northern Powerhouse 11. It is because of those two things that I have come down south to London to this debate. The Cumbria LEP is leading on business resilience, which is an integral part of the Cumbria local resilience forum. At regional level, the NP11 is doing much the same on a wider canvas.

Quite rightly, the Government are placing their prime focus on the country’s health, but the more health measures introduced, the greater the impact on business. That is not to say they should not do it, but it is a consequence. The impact on business, commercial life and jobs is therefore getting greater.

There are two fundamental and important implications. First, if people do not have any money, the consequences are self-evidently dire. Secondly, businesses provide work, and with it wages, to the parts of the supply chain and among producers of things that we need and want. They are the basis of commercial life. In future, if they do not have any money, they will cease to exist.

Cash is king. If cash stops, business stops. If business stops, cash stops. If business stops, jobs and goods stop. On top of that, the infrastructure of the future economy is strangled. I welcome that the Government recognise the need for cash and are putting measures in place to get it into the wider community. But is it enough, and is it being done quickly enough? What is needed from central government is speed, precision and user-friendliness in the economic and governance measures that it puts in place, to run in parallel with the health measures that are the predominant topic of this debate. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, money is needed now—not at the end of the week, or the month, or the end of April, or this year, or next year or whenever. I echo the points made by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, about the self-employed, and that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, made about charities.

As I have intimated, I welcome the general direction of travel shown in the Answer repeated by the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, to an Urgent Question earlier this afternoon, but where is the beef? Individuals are running out of both time and money. Business owners, perplexed by the lack of clarity, will shut up shop, get out with what they can and cut their losses. The devil lies in the detail. Banks distributing interest-free loans are seeking collateral, I understand—and anyway a loan, interest-free or not, has to be paid back. People, especially smaller operators, are understandably asking themselves, “Is it worth it?” The self-employed are feeling exposed and discriminated against, as has been said.

What is needed is equivalence and even-handedness across the piece—big and small, rural and urban, employed and self-employed. The perspective of everyone’s personal and business financial affairs, looking both forwards and backwards from this coming year end, seems diametrically different, in my view. I think that no payments should be made as opposed to liabilities incurred until the end of the forthcoming financial year, in order that liquidity is preserved in society.

Twenty years ago, my own farming business was destroyed in the foot and mouth outbreak in Cumbria, when I was a Member of the European Parliament for that area. I have first-hand and close experience of some of these things. One thing that we must not overlook is the implications of isolation combined with worry. It is very unpleasant and damaging for people’s mental health. That point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice.

Finally, there is the long term, which I hope will start with the comprehensive spending review later this summer. As many Members of your Lordships’ House have said, we are looking at an unknown future, and we must revisit de novo, pragmatically, our future national economic, commercial and business policies so that they are based on hard-nosed, real-world economics, to get our economy up and running again. The first step on that road is a recognition that cash is king, because cash is the lubricant of the engine that is the economy.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like most Members of your Lordships’ House, I have a life away from here—in my case, as intimated in the register, 300 miles north in Cumbria. Being unable either to campaign or to vote, I spent quite a lot of time thinking about farming, land use and management and their financial and other prospects. All these things are integral to wider rural society and to the economy as a whole. Rather like stout Cortez standing silent on a peak in Darien, I and everyone else engaged in the sector see a vast and empty panorama in front of us. When I speak in the first person, I am speaking as Everyman.

We all know how unpopular the CAP has become and that we are going to leave it. Of course it had its follies, but it was not quite as stupid as those who did not understand it supposed. Doing nothing about all this is not an option. That farmers should not be paid just to farm must be right—that is of course unless farming is itself a public good, in which case the subsidy or support becomes a payment for a public good. The real criticism is that it was either insufficiently targeted or not targeted at all and farming is no longer perceived as a public good. Rather, outputs of farming, land management and other rural activities are identified as such, and should be targeted and supported as appropriate, which modern technology makes increasingly possible and straightforward.

The reality of today’s world is that in a number of ways the state is the purchaser of ecosystem services and the products of natural capital, if not directly then indirectly or as a broker or some other form of intermediary for other parts of society. These outputs are intimately and comprehensively linked to the rest of wider society and contribute huge benefit to it in general and to the economy in particular. They are as much a part of this country’s core infrastructure as rail, the grid or digital connectivity.

For that to be done sensibly, all land use must be done deliberately, as Dieter Helm has pointed out in the context of wilding. Simple abandonment and dereliction, which has been so expensive and disastrous in an urban context, will be the same in a rural one unless, paradoxically, it is managed. As I have said, the moment has now come for the Government to lay out their approach to public ecosystem services and public goods and how it is all going to be paid for. What is certain is that, as across the rest of the economy, if the money is not applied in the right way then the desired outcome will not be achieved. Ebullience or sugary words are no good because they do not pay the bills.

Whatever happens will involve the application of resources, which have to be paid for. The provision of public goods has to be properly rewarded and taxed along with the sector outputs of conventional goods, the market for many of which now seems to be somewhat less than bullish, to ensure that those engaged in such activities generate an acceptable standard of living and can finance reinvestment and generate prosperity in future. No one suggests that government Ministers or workers in the NHS should not get paid. Many in rural Britain earn less than the equivalent of the living wage. Urban Britain often seems too happy to overlook those who work outside towns and that they have families and are real people too. I have a suspicion that for this to be done effectively the amount of money involved may have to increase, not decline, simply because of the extent of what will be required, not least to make up for past failure.

Rural Britain, as opposed to the suburban countryside, shows the self-same characteristics as much of the urban north and Midlands, which are now being prioritised by the Government as it is recognised that they have missed out on much of the national wealth enjoyed by the prosperous parts of the south. I speak as chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership and part of the Northern Powerhouse 11: just as steps are being taken to invigorate the north, so similar measures must be taken for rural England—l’Angleterre profonde—and the rest of the UK, not for the sake of the countryside alone but in the best interests of the nation at large.

Queen's Speech

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood]

My Lords, this time of the day is not the moment for long introductions. However, I endorse the remarks previously made about my noble friends on the Front Bench and I congratulate the coalition on having put them there.

This afternoon's debate could perhaps be politely described as a bag of liquorice allsorts. I intend to confine my remarks to the culture bit of the package. In so doing, I declare an interest as chairman of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, although I shall draw on some of my other interests which are declared in the register.

As your Lordships will know, this country is one of the world’s cultural centres; and as such it is not only a great cultural bonus for all of us who live here, it is also an extraordinary generator of inward spending from abroad and a raiser of revenue for the Government. In that context it is interesting to note, as some noble Lords may know, that a number of the Gulf states are building up large museums and cultural centres in anticipation of the end of their oil riches, to encourage visitors in the future and to generate income.

In this Chamber, as everywhere in this country, there has over recent weeks and months been much debate about public expenditure. We sometimes seem to overlook the fact that, in certain circumstances, public expenditure is a kind of clearinghouse between those who enjoy something and those who actually produce it. Let me give an example. I live near the English Lake District, and I am both a hill farmer—among other things—and president of the Cumbria tourist board. Visitors come to the Lake District to look at the fells. If the fells were not grazed by sheep they would be covered in birch trees and the visitors would not come. If there is no money in farming, the land will not be farmed, and that in turn would destroy the tourist industry. Of course, in practice, it is impossible for those who come to visit the locality to pay the producers of the landscape they come to see directly. The paradox that emerges is that the by-product has become more valuable than the principal output of the underlying activity.

In many ways, the same can be said of museums. It goes without saying that we are living in economically difficult and hard times, and we have to recognise the problems that that poses. However, it is also important to recognise that our museums and—particularly, but not exclusively—our national collections in London are enormous generators of public revenue. How we as a society respond to the cuts and the way in which the Government impose them must recognise that.

Another paradox is that you cannot successfully set out to create a good attraction, in precisely the same way as you cannot set out to make yourself happy by deliberately trying to achieve it. That became apparent to me when I was doing some work for Carlisle cathedral. People do not go to Carlisle cathedral because it is an attraction; it is an attraction because it is Carlisle cathedral. The way to underpin that important economic part of our society is to ensure that it retains its level of excellence, to ensure that it remains the best.

Part of the way to achieve that is to ensure that acquisition budgets do not simply evaporate. There are two reasons for that. First, our national institution collections are permanently evolving. If items leave this country, the chances are that they will have gone for ever. If the money to prevent that is not to come directly from the public purse, we must find other ways of leveraging that money. That is why I and my committee very much welcome the emphasis on philanthropy in this area, which was first raised and debated more widely by the outgoing Government and has been emphasised by the new Secretary of State in the past few days. In parallel with that, there is the evolution of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will have increased funding. In order to make philanthropy work in this country in the way that will be essential for our institutions in the years to come, it is important that the tax reliefs available for those who support those institutions are extended—particularly to capital gains tax and, I suggest, to income tax. The douceur to encourage people must be extended in the same way.

Secondly, the rules about reserved benefit need to be changed. If anyone else was to, say, build a new wing to the Tate Gallery at a cost of several million pounds, it would be galling to find that if you wanted to hold a party there once it had been completed, you would have to pay tax on any value which happened to have been conferred on you over the sum of £500. That is not the way to achieve philanthropic giving. We must ignore the sirens who say that this is all some kind of “toys for toffs”. In society, you have to decide what you want. There are and will continue to be rich people in this country. If you think about it carefully, the point about being rich is that you have more money than other people. If you have more money than other people, you can spend it the way you want. We should aim to achieve a system which encourages rich people to spend money on things which are in the public interest, rather than to be merely self-indulgent. In that way, we can have our cake and eat it.

I am fully aware that to an economist, some of my remarks may sound rather flaky and woolly, although I rather doubt whether JM Keynes would have shared that view. That does not alter the fact that if you look at national institutions and museums from a bean-counting perspective, I dare say that the monetary investment in our national collections is one of the best investments that the country has ever made. “Ah!”, you may say, “but of course they will never be sold”. That is probably true, but equally an awful lot of money is spent by the public sector on things that no one else would ever buy—such as the IT system in the Rural Payment Agency.

In the economic predicament that we now face, difficult choices have to be made, but I believe that on our national collections, we must take the long view and concentrate on ensuring that when again we reach the sunny uplands of economic prosperity we do not find that we have debased our inheritance and relegated ourselves to the second division. Acquisition and maintenance are the two long keys to sustainable excellence. It is important that they are not subsumed to shorter-term, more populist claims sung to more populist tunes. As I say to my children, the easy solution is almost invariably the wrong one.

In conclusion, to go back to Keynes, who, you will remember, said that in the long term, we shall all be dead, I add my rider that the collections will still be alive on future generations.