Economic and Taxation Policies: Jobs, Growth and Prosperity

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the director of a number of small businesses, and I join in thanking my noble friend Lord Elliott for convening today’s debate. It has been extremely wide-ranging in its scope on the matter in front of your Lordships’ House, and there have been many interesting and insightful contributions from all sides.

What can I add, as the final speaker on the list? Well, I might just pick up on a point mentioned in passing by my noble friends Lord Risby and Lord Horam. They touched on the astonishing fact that not a single member of the Cabinet today has any real meaningful experience of running a business. I think this is a factor in the current predicament that the UK finds itself in under this Government: not a single decision-maker around the most powerful table in the land really understands what it feels like to be worried about making payroll at the end of a month, because their financial security has always been somebody else’s responsibility.

This is a Cabinet that has next to no commercial experience, even of the most basic business activities; that has never worried about paying a supplier, like so many small and medium-sized enterprises now across the country; that has never chased a late invoice, filed a company return or dealt with the burdens of red tape, such as that contained in the Employment Rights Bill; and that has never, in a business setting, hired, fired or managed a team—even though the Prime Minister is now getting used to having to fire people in a different context. Crucially, and stunningly, this is a Cabinet that has never created a job—not one single job—through entrepreneurialism.

I have no doubt that the cadre running the country at the moment were the very best think tank researchers, charity workers, academics, trade union officials and professional politicians, but I am afraid they seem ignorant of the pressures that those running businesses in the UK today currently faced. We have 0.1% growth, the highest inflation in the G7, soaring debt, rising unemployment and record high taxes. I must warn Ministers opposite that, as we go into the next fortnight, for many millions of business people across the UK this will be the Budget of sleepless nights, genuine fear and anxiety for those running companies large and small, terrified of the Chancellor’s next move by a Government who are pushing job creators and employers to the very edge.

The Government have blithely shredded their key election pledge not to raise taxes on working people. That is a total and unforgivable breach of trust on the Government’s core fiscal commitments. As with every Labour Government, it is now the case that the Treasury is racking up debts, including £100 billion in annual debt interest costs.

What has been the result of these fiscal policy choices a year into the Labour Government? What do we have to show for the increases in employers’ NI contributions, business rates and capital gains tax? What do we have to show for hiking the cost of employing the average worker by £900, abolishing the key elements of agriculture and business property reliefs, and countless other measures? I contend that the Government’s headline economic achievement so far has been taking 80% of workers out of income tax altogether in Mauritius, with their disastrous Chagos Bill, a deal that will cost tens of billions of pounds. This Labour Government are delivering seismic tax cuts; it is just that they are doing it in a country more than 6,000 miles away, while here at home, in just two weeks, they no doubt plan to hike income tax on millions of workers in Britain. Even in the long litany of the Labour Party’s history of economic failure, the Starmer and Reeves project will surely go down as one of the most flabbergasting chapters of all.

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.