Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

I must begin by making a declaration relating to my interests as listed in the register: I am a farmer, a landowner and a businessman in Cumbria. We are today asked to take note of the Budget, but that cannot be done as an exercise in textual exegesis because it is set in the context of the world we live in. I believe the Government’s starting point is right. We must have growth, and secondly, the broadest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden.

We are living in an economic land of two nations. The first is the Westminster bubble writ large: the world of university theses, computer models, think tanks and digital technology that handles more or less virtual money, and so on and so forth. The other is rather less glamorous and somewhat grubbier: the world of what my children call “doing stuff”. Much of this happens outside the penumbra of cosmopolitan glitz, and many of these businesses and people are, as the Minister told us in his opening remarks—I will use a neutral phrase—experiencing hard times.

For these businesses, the intellectual elegance of the computer model is a plaything of fantasy. Many of them are the warp and weft of most of our country, at the centre of place, the bedrock of communities. Many of them are struggling to pay the wages, keep people in employment, remain solvent, and keep on trading. That is where the welfare payments come from—not to say jobs. Many of them are not branch businesses; they contribute pro bono to the communities in which they are set. The Budget is compounding their cash flow challenges as the state sucks away their working capital, just as Count Dracula sucked the blood from young women’s necks. Their economic shoulder blades are being broken, and whatever the law or a computer might say, badly broken shoulder blades cannot carry anything. To survive, their working capital must be kept in situ until it is cashed in. I believe it is as simple as that.

I would like to conclude on a more general level and look at what might be called l’Angleterre profonde—rural Britain. I hasten to add that I do not mean the Cotswolds, which I hear about with increasing incredulity through the media. I am particularly thinking of the part of the north-west of England I know best, where businesses—not only agriculture—are increasingly being starved of the lifeblood of cash, which threatens their survival. Yet they are providing a very large range of valued public goods, for which, in many instances, they receive a derisory amount of money, or none at all.

Agricultural economics has always been a discrete subject of economics more widely. In the case of the Marshallian triangle of land, labour and capital, in agriculture, land and capital are the same. This is at the heart of my own local recently elected MP’s brave and principled stand in the other place. He is standing up for his constituents, which is what my friends and neighbours sent him there to do. He, like me, sees a dismal picture. It is a dismal prospect engendered by a dismal science, which prioritises policies generated by computers, algorithms and so on over the various realities and actualities faced by businesses and those working in them the length and breadth of the land.

UK-US Trade

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)]

To clarify, a lot of key sectors are covered in this framework, and this framework is a final decision on how those key sectors will be treated when it comes to trading between the UK and the US. Those sectors are things such as automotive, steel and pharmaceuticals, but also beef and ethanol, which we have heard so much about. But they are not all the sectors where trade is a part of the UK-US relationship; it could be areas such as technology and how we think about the relationship with that. So yes, this is a final agreement for the sectors that have been covered, but it does not necessarily cover all the sectors. There is still work to be done to understand what those future trading relationships look like with respect to those other sectors.

With regard to how this will be treated within Parliament and whether it will be ratified as a treaty, forgive me—I could not comment on that specifically. I would very quickly run shallow of my parliamentary journey of knowledge, which is still at its earliest stages, but I will be sure to write to the noble Lord on the specifics.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I refer to my declaration of interests. Does the Minister believe that British agriculture’s profitability will be increased or diminished by this arrangement?

[Baroness Gustafsson (Lab)]

What we see in this relationship with the US is an opportunity to think about the opportunity it presents to all our British industries and how we can open that up to best effect. When we think about farming, the key area of the trade in beef is a real opportunity here. For the first time, the US ban on importing British beef has been lifted, and 13,000 tonnes of British beef can now be exported to the US. That is a real advantage for UK farming.

Exports to the European Union

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

As so often on this topic, I agree with the noble Baroness. According to the Resolution Foundation, the previous Government’s Brexit deal imposed new trade barriers on business equivalent to a 13% increase in tariffs for manufacturing and a 20% increase for services. Reducing those trade barriers is a key priority for our European reset.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise that the current arrangements for exporting to the EU bear disproportionately on small and medium-sized enterprises? Will, therefore, a priority in their negotiations be to reduce those, to stimulate that bit of the economy?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The noble Lord is absolutely correct. As I mentioned a short while ago, in the spring the Government will publish a trade strategy to help reset our relationship with the EU, and a key part of it will be providing more support to small businesses to help them export and particularly to remove some of the barriers that they face to trade with the European Union.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Con)]

My Lords, I begin my short contribution to this debate by reiterating the declarations of interest that I have put in the register. While I have been a consistent, long-standing and, I hope, considered supporter of membership by this country of the EU, I have equally been a consistent and long-standing critic of a number of aspects of it. Of all these, perhaps the one that I have been the most vociferous about is the common agricultural policy. A number of the mechanisms that it has introduced have been more or less completely dotty. However, as I get older I increasingly come to recognise the value of the underlying ethos of the idea of interdependence between town and country. There is a danger of losing it in the UK, which is the same kind of issue as the division between London and the south-east of England and the rest, which my noble friend the Minister alluded to in his opening remarks.

It seems that politics here at Westminster is increasingly conducted in a bubble. Certainly for my own part I felt that the Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment, on which I served, and the subsequent debates in the Chamber of this House during the passage of the Housing and Planning Act, focused excessively on the problems faced by the south-east of England and London, and did not sufficiently recognise different but equally important difficulties that are experienced elsewhere in this country.

It is a commonplace that the character of the economy in the 21st century is changing. The importance of things such as intellectual property, natural capital and ecosystem services becomes ever greater. It seems that these in turn cannot necessarily be paid for and hence exploited to the best advantage by traditional market mechanisms. This in itself is nothing novel—after all, we are used to having seen it in the context of the Armed Forces, health and education.

In my own home county of Cumbria, tourism, based on landscape, is the biggest employer. The area is of huge value to the rest of the United Kingdom, our national inbound tourist industry and to this country’s soft power. Yet in reality much of this is a by-product of livestock farming, an activity that is completely “down in the economic dumps”. The environment requires investment and creates wealth—which I am very conscious of, as I am the chairman of the Cumbria Local Nature Partnership. And yet there seems to be no way to bring all these things together.

It is self-evident that government cannot do much about world commodity prices, but there is little doubt that the nation is getting rural Britain on the cheap, and the rest of the country is freeloading on the back of it. Its contribution, both actual and potential and taken in the round, is enormous as regards the way wealth will be created in the 21st century.

In the case of my own county of Cumbria, we are recovering from the floods. I put on record my appreciation as a vice-president of the Cumbria Foundation for the match-funding of £5 million the Government have given to that foundation. However, there is still a lot of long-term unquantified damage, particularly to both land and buildings, both of which are wasting assets and require long-term maintenance.

After having thought about it for quite a long time and having had doubts at one time, I see the economic sense of the minimum wage. However, let us remember that its impact on employers is greatest on those who can least afford it. Low-wage areas will find it hardest to achieve what is demanded by statute, and what is simple in SW1 may be very difficult in CA10.

Others have pointed out before me—again, it is another commonplace—that broadband provision is lamentable in many places in this country, not only in rural but in urban Britain as well. I regret to say that I live in one of them. The problem was identified by the Communications Committee when I chaired its report into broadband more than five years ago. While the Government’s recent words on the subject have been fine, they will not butter any parsnips. What is needed is action, which hitherto has been conspicuously absent. It is simply a matter of results, results, results, and delivery, delivery, delivery.

However, probably the biggest problem facing the agricultural sector in this country is the Rural Payments Agency. It is not appropriate and nor is there time available to relate its treatment of my personal affairs, but my experiences are typical. It is a failed organisation, with which no self-respecting person should wish to be associated. However, it is more than that—it is Brexit’s best recruiting sergeant in rural England, which is particularly ironic since it is the UK’s own delivery arm of EU policy under the doctrine of subsidiarity. Its shortcomings are exclusively the responsibility of Defra and it causes untold damage.

In conclusion, I suggest to the Minister that all Defra Ministers are where the buck stops—at this point I apologise to my good personal friend and MP Rory Stewart, for whom I have the highest political and personal regard—and that each of them should have their ministerial pay frozen from the opening of the payments window until the last farmer receives his payment. At this stage I do not suggest that they lose it all for making a minor and unintended mistake in the course of their duties, as is the case for the farmers, but in this way they will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the victims of this travesty of public administration. I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s thoughts on this and the reasons for what he tells me.

Ireland: Financial Assistance

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his remarks. I shall not criticise other countries for the running commentary that they have given on certain aspects of the developing situation, but the noble Lord gives me the opportunity to confirm that the UK believes in tax competition in Europe. We certainly have not been and will not be a party to some chorus telling the Irish how they should set their levels of corporate taxation, any more than we would want people to lecture us on how to set it.

[Lord Inglewood]

My Lords, I must first declare an interest, because the price of the beef cattle I sell has fallen by about £100 a head because of the turbulence in Ireland. Does that not show that this is not merely a matter of politics and economic theory; it is an episode which has a real bearing on the prosperity of people in our country? That should be at the centre of the Government's thinking about how to respond to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

[Lord Sassoon]

I am very grateful to my noble friend and completely agree with his sentiments. It is always good to be reminded that our economy has an important agricultural component to it and that that is part of what the Government’s possible contribution to this package is helping to protect.