Financial Assistance to Ukraine Bill

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Wednesday 15th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I join in the expressions of welcome and praise for the noble Baroness, Lady Batters. I am sure that her excellent, touching maiden speech will have great resonance with working mothers everywhere. I know that the whole House looks forward to her contributions on the importance of British farming and so many other issues.

I welcome the measures in the Bill, which will continue to provide Ukraine with the financial support it so desperately needs. The funds in question are drawn from immobilised Russian sovereign assets, and rightly so. The extraordinary revenue acceleration mechanism is an innovative example of what is possible when the focus of our G7 partners is rightly directed at the aggressor. Russia unleashed this illegal war on the people of Ukraine, and Russia will have to pay. It is heartening that that sentiment has been nearly universally agreed to in your Lordships’ House this afternoon. As President Zelensky said, the measures we are debating are a strong signal that:

“Russia must pay for its brutal war”,


because

“accountability for acts of war is inevitable”.

I hope the Bill will be passed as swiftly as possible. I join others in thanking the Minister for his work on this, which I know has taken much of his engagement and focus.

On the payment timetable and the disbursement of funds, we understand that the G7 has agreed that payment will be in three equal tranches over the next three years. Given the urgency of the matter, and the many questions raised today in your Lordships’ House about the military use of the UK’s contribution to ERA, I ask the Government to consider submitting a speedier timescale than three years. That is what is needed. As we have heard so many times in your Lordships’ House, Ukraine urgently needs all the military equipment it can get, as soon as possible, so military use must be allowed.

To that end, I associate myself with the powerful and cogent arguments of my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Banner about what has been left outside the scope of the Bill. I understand that the Government must seek to pass legislation as soon as they can in this area and the difficulties of designing legislation and drawing its scope, but we have heard here this afternoon some powerful arguments for widening the scope of this measure to the seizure and transfer of Russian sovereign assets in the United Kingdom.

Today’s proceedings raise a more significant issue than the technical details of the Bill. The Bill, though welcome, cannot be a substitute for the Government setting out a clear vision for the future of Ukraine and what they would like to see achieved in this crucial year. It is right that the UK’s financial, military and humanitarian support continues and has been maintained by the new Labour Administration. It is right that Ministers continue to visit Ukraine, although I note that, despite his busy and demanding travel schedule, the Prime Minister is yet to visit the country since he has been in office. I hope that he is able to visit very soon—I am sure he will. But none of that is the same as the Government setting out and articulating a vision for what should actually happen in 2025, because this is a critical moment for Ukraine and for the entire western alliance.

I know that Ministers will not want to risk the UK’s leadership or risk any accusation that the UK Government have turned down the volume on their leadership of big-picture vision for what should happen next. When I spoke in the debate on Ukraine in your Lordships’ House in October, I said I was concerned that the UK was at risk of losing that leadership. I said that because the same anxiety had been expressed in those direct terms by President Zelensky himself. Ministers must communicate to the public what this Government believe Ukraine’s destiny to really be. Ukraine is destined to be a free, sovereign, independent, European state in the western alliance. It is not destined to be part of a revanchist, reinvented Russian empire in any sense.

Ukraine’s future was arguably in contention for decades, but Russia’s illegal war has, ironically, settled the issue, because Ukrainians are now completely clear-eyed about what they want. I have heard it from Ukrainians themselves, including from servicemen injured on the front lines, as I made numerous trips to Ukraine last year. I say this in part to answer the questions posed by my noble friend Lord Balfe about what victory means. Ukrainians want to be inside the NATO security architecture. They want the capabilities and permissions to win the war, militarily, in no uncertain terms and for permanent western security guarantees to be in place. To anybody outside your Lordships’ House who might doubt that position, I suggest that they talk to Ukrainian armed forces service men and women themselves, because they possess the most up-to-date and expert experience available to NATO of fighting Russia.

As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, when Russia invaded, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was the leading voice when it came to giving Ukraine the military, financial and humanitarian support needed. But he also set out a vision. He understood that this is more than a kinetic war; it is a battle of ideas about how the world should be. I am worried that that language is slowly changing nowadays. Standing with Ukraine for as long as it takes and helping it pay for this war as long as it takes is, at face value, a laudable concept, but there are some inside the Russian Government who view that as sign of weakness because it suggests that there is an open-ended timetable for concluding this conflict.

I want to commend and thank the Government for supporting a series of Conservative Administrations while they were in office and for continuing that support for Ukraine on entering government. This Bill rightly develops that, so nothing should stand in its way or be done to slow down its passage. That said, I hope the Government will use this opportunity to set out what they believe to be their agenda to regain international leadership on how this conflict is settled. The UK should lead with moral and strategic clarity, because the denouement of this conflict is important to resolve in the best interests of the free world, including of course, and most pre-eminently, Ukraine.

Spring Budget 2024

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bird. It is with a strong sense of responsibility that I rise to speak for the first time in this Chamber.

Excellence in debate characterises your Lordships’ House, and we have already heard many outstanding speeches in this debate. For my part, I carefully observed the work of the House before venturing to engage in its deliberations. In that process, I certainly benefited from the advice of noble Lords from all parties and none. I thank all those who have been so generous in welcoming me and granting me the benefit of their wise experience. I particularly thank my introducers, my noble friends Lord Mott and Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton. I extend my thanks to Black Rod, the doorkeepers and all the staff of this House. As we all know, their guidance and support are invaluable.

I turn to the important matter before us. Perhaps the House will allow me to focus on an aspect of this Budget for which I have a personal passion. It is an area in which I have direct experience as an adviser to Ministers, and an area that noble Lords across the House have already touched on today. It is the question of the proper evaluation of government spending.

During my time working in the Downing Street Policy Unit, I led efforts to establish the Evaluation Task Force, a Treasury and Cabinet Office team that works to better understand and embed evidence in government spending decisions. It is right that we devote significant time and effort to debating levels of public spending, but seldom do we discuss the lacuna that lies at the heart of government intervention: we simply do not understand whether many government interventions, often expensive, actually succeed in bringing about the outcomes that they are intended to achieve. I am glad that the Evaluation Task Force is working on that, ensuring that evidence is more available and better understood across government.

I therefore welcome the Treasury document published alongside this Budget, called Seizing the Opportunity: Delivering Efficiency for the Public, which was released with the public sector productivity plan. It notes that, since the foundation of the taskforce, it has worked with more than 300 government programmes, with a total value of around £140 billion, to ensure that there is robust evaluation in place.

I also highlight the Evaluation Registry, which will become a publicly available online database of policy evidence, and the £15 million Evaluation Accelerator Fund, which will tackle the most pressing evidence gaps ahead of the next spending review. I hope these reflections illuminate some of my main policy interests, which are the process of government policy-making and, connectedly, the reform of government.

In concluding, I will touch on my own background, which perhaps is a small example of the good that a reforming Government and landmark Budgets can do. It was a Conservative Government instituting careful tax cuts and sensible deregulation that ultimately enabled my parents to become small business owners in Hertfordshire. So aspirational was my grandfather that he would hold up a copy of the newspaper in front of him at the breakfast table even though he could not properly read. In just two generations, his grandson would go on to graduate from the University of Cambridge and would be published in many such newspapers as a journalist—and, I say with apologies to my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, sometimes as a source briefing government policy. Either way, it was a trajectory surely unimaginable to my forebears.

So, when I stood up a few moments ago to speak for the first time in your Lordships’ House, I felt propelled by decades of their hard work and aspiration. That is why I believe that the crucial formula that should be at the heart of every Budget is natural human ambition coupled with the innovation of private enterprise, matched by the springboard and the safety net of the public sector, and strengthened by the solidarity of family and community in a free society. That is the formula that will transform opportunity into success.

I therefore welcome the Bill before us today, in which the Government bring forward measures to allow people to keep more of what they earn by their own efforts. It is only by widening economic opportunity that we can defeat a pernicious myth that I am afraid is increasingly told to my generation: the false narrative that the road to success is somehow no longer open in this country to those who aspire to it. I know that was also the vision of the former Prime Minister who put me forward me to serve in this place. I pay tribute to him today, just as I pay tribute to my former team in the Conservative Research Department, which I had the privilege to lead.

Since we are in an election year, I will close by recalling a poster which sums up something of this spirit. It said something like, “What did the Conservative party do for a boy from Brixton? It made him Prime Minister”. So I say today, what did a passion for policy and debate do for a boy from Stevenage? It would lead him to serve in your Lordships’ House, and that is where I intend to contribute diligently, with the benefit of the guidance of noble Lords on the questions before us today and, I hope, many more days to come.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.