Living Standards: Inequality

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I thank my noble friend for that question. I believe that the national living wage, brought in in April last year, is a fantastic example of policies that the Government have introduced to make work pay. Looking forward, it will rise again, to £7.50 next month, and it has already given many working people in Britain the fastest pay rise in 20 years.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, observers will have noticed that there is a startling contradiction between the presumption in the Question that income inequality has been growing very sharply and the presumption in the reply that it is doing the opposite. There are different measures, but most of them show that inequality is growing. Would it not be useful if the ONS convened a panel to get a little more clarity as to why figures can be bandied around that give such different descriptions of what is happening?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I think the ONS keeps us honest; it looks at these figures over time and very helpfully updates us. The OBR forecasts are also updated all the time so that we can see what is happening. I come back to the point that the Resolution Foundation is looking at a forecast, but if we look at what has happened, five years ago it was predicted by the IFS, I think, that there would be a rise in inequality. In fact, that has not happened. Actually, things have continued to progress and we have seen a recovery. That is what we need to continue by having the right policies, which this Government are pursuing under our new Prime Minister.

Income Inequality

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Neill of Gatley]

My Lords, it is very dangerous to goad someone with my background about data, but there are considerable and widespread data on these matters published completely independently of the Government. In fact, the data show that the so-called Gini coefficient, which is one of the widely accepted global measures of inequality, has been showing a slow decline in British inequality since the mid-1980s, as I said earlier, both at the disposable income level and before disposable income.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister mentioned the Gini coefficient. I was a member for some time of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth. Obviously, there are different measures. I assure the Minister that we can swap anecdotes about data. But to be specific, is it not long overdue to remove the charity status of the public schools, given the inbuilt inequality of opportunity which that concrete part of our social structure creates?

[Lord O'Neill of Gatley]

My Lords, one of the widely regarded measures shows that inequality may have widened, which is the one that would include the broadest measures of wealth to account for house prices. That is the only one that shows that; all the others, as I have said, show the exact opposite of the tone of most of these questions. That is why we are also focused, as part of the productivity plan and otherwise, on trying to do something about broadening the supply of houses and to discourage the degree to which landlords have been influencing the housing market. These policies, along with the others I mentioned, will continue to attract the justifiable prime focus of our economic policies.

Economy

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to move this Motion this morning. In fact, I rather feel like somebody waiting for the No. 59 bus and then two come along. Having two debates on productivity and the economy this week is most exceptional. Some of us were unable to get on the first bus, as it was slipped in during the summer, so I welcome noble Lords to this rather full second bus.

Now that the new Government may at last be thinking beyond austerity, I feel that it is very important to explore this, and I am grateful to all noble Lords and the Front Benchers for their participation. Perhaps debating this issue twice this week is an indication of its importance.

Let me start with the Government’s recent paper on productivity. Much was repeated in Tuesday’s debate. It certainly pressed most of the right buttons but, like many previous efforts, it is destined to achieve little. Why? It is because there is no strategy. It mentions everything; it prioritises nothing. It remembers everything; it learns nothing. If we want to move from an age of austerity into an age of productivity, it is management and leadership that should be prioritised, and then things will get done. That is because the first task is to encourage a culture of productivity, both in business and in government. Without this, much of the work that the Government do on infrastructure, housing, science and education will all be wasted. This is urgent because in the next 12 months, productivity has to make up for the gap between the recently announced withdrawal of in-work benefits and the rise in the minimum wage. Otherwise, it will lead to job losses. Quite rightly, one does not encourage productivity by driving down wages and making people poorer; that is what happens in an age of austerity.

This is especially true in local government, which has suffered twice the cuts that UK public spending has suffered as a whole. Over the past five years, the cuts in local government have not been so obvious because they are hidden: prisons or roads not being built, or reduced welfare for people whom we do not see outside of their homes. The public sector, which the Government are in charge of, is hardly mentioned in their paper. In an age of productivity, this kind of management is not good enough. If there has to be budget cuts, there must also be management and leadership to help cope with them.

After the age of austerity, the strength of our economy will rely on our ability to adapt to all the new changes coming from many directions. Our ability to manage things will be crucial. The old tools will not solve these new problems. I say this because technology is transforming everything. To start with, business markets and government services can be transformed in months as new apps and ideas reach millions of people in days. This means that it is the younger, digitally knowledgeable employees who will detect the coming change or indeed suggest one. This means that companies, particularly large companies, are going to have to change the way they manage their staff. Employees at all levels have to be free to come up with new ideas and exploit digital platforms. This kind of creativity is stifled by the more traditional forms of management.

Many jobs are now not jobs in the way they used to be defined. Many people are employed part-time or over the internet; it is called transactional employment. Many now work in an online market for casual labour, which is rapidly expanding. This is for not only on-demand or sharing services such as accommodation or taxis but, for example, computer programming. In Europe alone, there are some 20,000 freelancers registered with Upwork, which does this kind of business. The scale of this new world of work is only just emerging. Its impact on the age of productivity will be twofold. First, the Department for Work and Pensions will have to be creative and find a new form of employment arrangement that suits these changing circumstances, so that it does not just become old-style casual labour, with people losing out on training, pensions, holidays and sick pay. Secondly, as people become their own managers, so the economy becomes more productive, and the tax system will have to acknowledge and understand this.

Many noble Lords are concerned about skills shortages. By introducing a training levy, do we presume that the direction of travel is that business and industry will deal with the skills themselves? Is this why larger government contractors must now have apprenticeships?

The Government are obviously unsure about this policy because they have announced that they are going to create seven new national colleges for particular industries, such as nuclear and high-speed rail, with employers expected to contribute towards the capital costs. Meanwhile, resources are being put into university technology colleges, yet FE colleges, which offer the more expensive training and vocational qualifications, have had their funding cut. This kind of muddle confuses parents, and confuses students looking for a technical education and training for a career. To find out whether this is yet another example of the Government remembering everything but learning nothing, I have put down a Written Question asking who will pay the running costs of these seven new colleges. The crucial point is that the right technical education has to be available to those adapting to the technical change.

The age of productivity calls for a more progressive style of management, which ironically often means less management as people work with more autonomy. The Chancellor has asked Sir Charlie Mayfield to look into all this to see how corporate governance can look to the long term instead of the short term, and I am sure that his proposals will be very helpful. However, we cannot wait for yet one more report without getting the impression that Ministers are having reviews until they get the recommendations that they want, especially as there are signs that the change is already happening. The CEO of Unilever has stopped quarterly reporting. At its recent London conference, the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism called for a more broadly based prosperity and is enlisting our major asset management groups in the City towards this end. Incidentally, Mrs Clinton is pursuing this in her nomination campaign in America.

Some companies have reviewed their governance in terms of stewardship—the kind of stewardship proposed by Tomorrow’s Company. The Bank of England is prodding banking in this direction. Some may say that these ideas have been around for a long time, but in an age of productivity, their time has come. This has to be the direction of travel. Ignoring this will once again be a sign that the Government are remembering everything but learning nothing.

The Government’s leadership on sustainability and the green environment is another important aspect of leadership in an age of productivity. The Government’s words indicate a green direction of travel, but recent actions indicate the opposite. For example, the Energy Bill will produce abrupt changes. Also, cancelling the requirement to build zero-carbon homes from 2016 adds to the feeling that we are not going to achieve the legally required targets for carbon emissions by 2020. This must be managed better. In an age of productivity, you have to carry people with you and have a purpose with which people can identify; otherwise, the very objective you are trying to achieve becomes discredited.

The Minister’s regional policy of more independence is absolutely right for an age of productivity. But in an age of productivity regionalisation must be seen not as devolving the cuts to local government, as happened in the age of austerity, but as revitalising areas of Britain away from London.

The age of productivity requires this kind of management and leadership because of the growing impact of computers and technology on work and business. In an age of productivity, products and services have to be lighter, smarter and greener. Services in particular will become yet more data-driven, using algorithms that self-improve.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

Would my noble friend mind if I asked him a question that has puzzled me for a long time on exactly the point that he has just made? How is it that we never see any sign of these vast increases on paper of productivity through technology —10 times, 100 times—in the aggregate productivity statistics?

[Lord Haskel]

The Minister has asked Sir Charles Bean—Charlie Bean—to look into this whole question, so I will leave it to him to answer. It is called delegation.

At present, we have a growing system where public administration, business and trading, shopping and entertainment, travel and leisure, and running our offices, our homes and our health depend more and more on computers dealing with each other. Sometimes, we are the only human in the loop. This is what the age of productivity will eventually look like.

The danger lies in our ability to control this complexity and interdependence. The complexity defeated us in the financial sector and helped cause the crash in 2008. This is why we need management and leadership that will remember everything and learn from it.

There is also a need for government to understand that much of this investment is intangible—difficult to see, so hard to finance. It is confusing to accountants, statisticians and apparently to the Government, too—so they set up a committee to look into it. But it is crucial to the stronger policies needed to support innovation. This is why the age of productivity needs arm’s-length organisations such as Innovate UK and the alternative forms of funding which are arising.

So what are the implications for the age of productivity? Since productivity has become disconnected from pay, pay rates have hardly gone up in the past five years. The proceeds of this have accrued mainly to investors and managers. In an age of productivity, the benefits must balance out and both must prosper equally. If they do not, the age of productivity, pursued to its logical conclusion, will create an unequal society the like of which we have not seen for generations. Are we just going to allow this economic process to continue unopposed? Surely not.

The Government claim that austerity is necessary so as not to impose on future generations. I say that we have to move to an age of productivity so as not to penalise future generations. In this way, we will learn something as well as remember everything. I beg to move.

Budget Statement

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Deighton) (Con)]

My Lords, the case that the UK has recovered strongly from its catastrophic financial state in 2010 is hard to dispute—although I am sure some noble Lords will do so. We are now the fastest growing major advanced economy, growing at our fastest since 2007. Employment is at a record high: nearly 2 million jobs have been created during this Parliament, and the claimant count rate has not been lower since 1975. Inflation is at an all-time low. On Friday, the FTSE broke through 7,000 for the first time—both a sign of confidence and a further boost to it. The eye-wateringly high budget deficit of 2010, which represented over 10% of GDP, is forecast to halve to 5% by the end of this financial year. Debt as a proportion of GDP is forecast to fall in 2015-16, in line with the original target set in 2010 by my right honourable friend the Chancellor.

The evidence that this is a journey from “austerity to prosperity” is provided by the latest projections from the OBR for real household disposable income per head, which show that on average households will be around £900 better off in 2015 than they were in 2010. However, risks remain. The deficit is still too high, and productivity too low—challenges the next Government will have to address. Our fiscal plan is to eradicate that deficit by 2018-19, which will require around £30 billion of further consolidation over the next two years—2016-17 and 2017-18. That was initially laid out in December’s Autumn Statement and was reiterated in last week’s Budget. If the Conservative Party is elected, it would achieve that through reductions in the following three areas.

Some £13 billion—from a total department bill of £365 billion—represents a continuation of the same rate of saving we have achieved in this Parliament, during which, according to independent polls, satisfaction with public services has risen; that is not surprising when, for example, crime is down. We will carry on reforming public services by focusing on achieving outcomes more efficiently. A further £12 billion of savings will be found from our very large welfare budget of over £200 billion this year, which must be managed to control cost, and structured so that it pays to work. Finally, £5 billion will come from a variety of measures to reduce tax evasion and avoidance. Again, we have a proven track record of success here. Every year we have introduced initiatives to tackle evasion and avoidance—most recently last Thursday, by my right honourable friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. We should be particularly proud that the Prime Minister has put tackling tax erosion at the top of the G8 agenda, as that can be effectively addressed only through international co-operation.

By following our fiscal plan, in the final year of this decade—2019-20—public spending will once again be able to grow in line with the economy while continuing to pay down the national debt. At that point, government spending will represent 36% of GDP—higher than in 1999-2000, when the spending crescendo started, fed by the illusion that the cycle of boom and bust had somehow been abolished, an approach which left this country so exposed when the financial crisis struck. Our aim is not smaller government per se, just better and smarter government. The discipline of extracting better value for taxpayers’ money is healthy—and government needs to remind itself that it is spending taxpayers’ money, not its own.

We need to build in resilience to our public finances to absorb the shocks that experience tells us will inevitably hit our economy. That involves not only reducing debt in the good times—the right thing to do for future generations—but also reforming and derisking the banking sector, which was our priority early in this Parliament. We are now able to recoup some of the £192 billion spent bailing out the banks, with our ongoing disposals of Lloyds Bank shares and the securitisation of mortgages from Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. It is, therefore, appropriate that my right honourable friend the Chancellor chose to use these proceeds to pay down our national debt and not to indulge in pre-election giveaways.

Our unrelenting focus on fixing the economy is right. Without a strong economy, we will not be able to invest in what we care about most—the NHS, the education of our children and the defence of the realm. Without a credible plan for the economy, promises in other areas are meaningless. One of this Government’s most valuable legacies will be our commitment to the transparency and independent scrutiny of public finances. We set up the independent OBR, imposed a Charter for Budget Responsibility and publish, at every fiscal event, a distributional analysis of the effects of policy changes. It is now much harder for a Chancellor to fix a problem by plugging an unrealistic assumption into a forecast or to avoid a genuine debate about the choices he or she has made.

Of course, the least painful way in which to reduce the deficit is to increase tax receipts by growing the economy. At the beginning of this Parliament our recovery was held back by a combination of the profound impact of the financial crisis, the continuing problems in the eurozone, and a bout of commodity inflation. As a result, growth picked up only in 2013, at a rate of 1.7%, improving to 2.6% in 2014. At 2.5% for 2015 and 2.3% for 2016, the OBR’s growth forecast is at the modest end of the range; if we achieved the Bank of England forecast through to the end of 2017, this would represent an additional £25 billion of GDP in real terms, a potential upside for the future. However, there are also significant downside risks to this forecast growth, beyond our control, as the UK is not immune from Greece exiting the euro in a disorderly fashion, the situation in Ukraine and Russia, potential weaknesses in emerging markets, or the market impact of how the US Fed may choose to exit its current low interest-rate policy.

Economists attribute continuing low productivity growth, both in the UK and elsewhere, to the lingering after-effects of the financial crisis. Reigniting productivity growth is essential for our prosperity, and indeed the OBR forecasts a small increase of 0.9% this year, followed by an increase of 2.5% from 2017. This is credible, if you look at the performance of some of our key manufacturing sectors, such as cars, and service sectors, such as retailing, as well as the opportunities for growth spurred by innovation in technologies such as driverless cars, medical diagnostics and 3D printing. An improved outcome depends in part on the continuing recovery of the banks, so we have a fully functioning financial system, lubricating the reallocation of the economy’s assets to their most efficient uses.

This Government have consistently pursued policies to enhance our growth and productivity through an attractive tax environment and investment in infrastructure, education, skills and training. We have introduced a national infrastructure plan, setting out how we will meet our infrastructure needs for the future. At Autumn Statement, the Government laid out the most ambitious plans in a generation for our transport infrastructure, with huge investment in roads and rail. In this Budget, we set out our strategy for our communications infrastructure, building on our current plan to deliver superfast broadband to 95% of the UK by 2017, by investing in clearing more spectrum to improve mobile services, and setting a new ambition for ultrafast broadband to become available for nearly all. We also built on our education reforms at Budget by introducing postgraduate loans for master’s and PhD students, targeted at supplying the high-end skills that employers have specified. I was delighted to see Sir James Dyson’s support for design engineering at Imperial announced earlier this week.

The tax environment is obviously crucial and we have reduced taxes to stimulate business and investment, illustrated in this Budget by our support to the oil and gas industry. We now expect the companies involved to realign their cost bases to a lower oil price to free up capital for additional investment to boost production in the UK continental shelf. The announcement last week that the Government will carry out a wide-ranging review of business rates will ensure that they are modernised to suit the 21st century.

My right honourable friend the Chancellor has personally spearheaded the northern powerhouse, a second great engine alongside London, for the UK economy. This is based on consolidating northern cities into a super-conurbation, bringing them together through investment in transport and exploiting their strengths in, for example, science and advanced manufacturing. The transport strategy being devised by Transport for the North is aimed at improving connectivity across the region, so that it is not only Manchester and Leeds which benefit but Liverpool, Sheffield, Hull, Newcastle and other cities. However, we are, of course, backing all the regions. We would be delighted to see a south-west powerhouse too.

We want more cities and local authorities following in the footsteps of Manchester and West Yorkshire, with local leaders seizing the opportunity to make key decisions and unleashing higher growth in their areas. The simple theory is that if the long-term growth rate of the slower-growing regions was raised to the forecast rate for the UK as a whole, this could add an extra £90 billion to the UK economy by 2030.

Our strategy is working. Current growth is indeed propelled by business investment, not the household debt that has fuelled past cycles. It is well spread across services, manufacturing and construction and it is geographically balanced. The favourable verdict business gave the Budget speaks for itself. However, this confidence, which is built over the long term, is easily lost by ill thought through interventions prompted by perceived political advantage which only damage the health of the British economy. I am afraid that the Opposition’s foray into the energy markets, criticised by the CBI earlier this week, is a perfect example of what not to do. We now have a situation where investors in energy are reluctant to commit to the UK until after the election—they now regard other countries as less risky, undermining the many years spent building our reputation—and where energy companies are incentivised not to pass on current cost savings to consumers now because they may have price cuts imposed on them later. That is not the way to help businesses succeed or the way to increase living standards.

I will try to shed some light on the living standards debate that the Budget has stimulated. Let us start with the most important fact: the reason living standards fell was the financial crisis and it is people at the bottom of the income scale, particularly those who lost their jobs, who were hit the hardest. The reason living standards have taken some time to recover was the depth of that crisis. In the long run, only productivity improvements will drive the rise in living standards we all seek. That is why growth policies are key.

During the difficult post-crisis period, the Government intervened in the economy in many critical ways to support living standards. Keeping the banks afloat was step one, accompanied by monetary easing to maintain interest rates at record low levels, protecting people with mortgages. The most powerful support to living standards has been the extraordinary performance of the jobs market. Some predicted that adherence to deficit reduction could only result in a jobs Armageddon. That could not have been more wrong. While 400,000 public sector jobs have disappeared, more than five times as many private sector jobs have been created, mostly full-time and skilled. The number of those on jobseeker’s allowance has fallen by 700,000. The youth claimant count is at its lowest since the 1970s. These are not dry statistics. These are real people whose lives have been transformed, and this is a nationwide phenomenon, with all regions benefiting. Alongside job creation, we have put more cash in people’s pockets.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way but he has just made two comments that are very hard to reconcile. First, he said that living standards depend on productivity growth. He then referred to jobs growth. However, there has been no productivity growth; in fact, the growth in productivity since 2010 has been zero. How does the Minister think that living standards will rise fundamentally if we do not make productivity growth our top priority, as gross national product growth is not the same thing?

[Lord Deighton]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord. My reference to employment simply acknowledged that having a job enables people to protect their living standards. I acknowledge that productivity has not improved in recent years. That is the focus for the future. I have said that productivity is still too low; I agree with the noble Lord on that. It is the key to raising living standards.

As I said, we have put more cash in people’s pockets. We have consistently raised the personal tax allowance from £6,457. That is set to rise to £11,000 in 2017. That enhances take-home pay—a change that has dramatically improved the incentive to work—and has benefited 27 million people and taken 4 million out of tax altogether. We have frozen fuel duty and council tax as well as reducing energy bills. We protected pensioners with the triple lock, so that pensioner poverty is the lowest ever, as well as introducing radical changes to both pensions and savings, which suffer in periods of low interest rates, to give savers much more flexibility and remove most of them from tax altogether.

At the beginning of this Parliament, inflation was eroding living standards, driven above 5% in 2011 by global commodity prices. This position has reversed with inflation now at zero. Motor fuel prices have fallen by 16% and food prices by more than 3%. This is different from the kind of stagnation we have seen on the continent. As a result, we are today seeing rising wages outpace the level of falling inflation. The OECD and the IFS both endorse the use of real household disposable income per head as the best measure of living standards because it includes the effect of tax and benefit changes and employment. On this basis, the latest OBR forecasts show living standards rising at their fastest rate in 14 years. They are projected to improve by over 3% in 2015, leaving them higher in 2015 than they were in 2010 and set to rise every year this decade.

I am proud of this Government’s record in rescuing our economy from the perilous condition we inherited, and I am excited by the prospects of what can be accomplished if we are given the opportunity to see our plan through.

Finally, noble Lords will be aware that this week the Government plan to submit their convergence programme to the European Commission, setting out our fiscal plans. It makes sense to combine a review of this programme with our Budget debate, given their identical subject matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, and his mention of the hustings, this of course is not a Budget in any normal sense of the word. Who is going to have a copy of the Finance Bill? Where is it? Well, quite, thank you—it is sitting on a table. What is actually happening is, as my noble friend Lord Whitty said, that the Chancellor has made an election speech. When my noble friend said that, I thought that it was a statement of the obvious—until I realised that that was not the election he was talking about. My noble friend was talking about the election for the next leader of the Conservative Party. That is the election that matters—and we should get focused on our realities here.

The only real thing that it seems to me is happening in the economy at the moment is the extraordinary and sudden decision that all these pension pots—annuities—can be spent just as you like. Okay, set the people free, but I have to ask a rather relevant question in terms of our savings ratio, wealth and poverty and so on. Savings are very much a factor in the distribution of income and wealth. Indeed, you could treat the state pension as part of the distribution of income and wealth. Donkeys years ago, I was a member of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, and I know that these things are not unimportant. If everybody can blow their pot when they feel like it, is that really what the Government want? What is the latest on this focused advice that we keep reading about that is going to ensure that people do not just blow their pot, if I can put it that way?

I was very struck by a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, which had not been made hitherto—namely, that of the scenarios which may emerge after the election, by far the most damaging is that of a weak Conservative Government playing to their Back-Benchers who want a quick referendum on Europe, with that referendum being badly handled due to the time factor. Given that time factor, the referendum will not follow a real renegotiation, and we know that the different countries in Europe have different timetables as regards elections.

If all that went wrong, Scotland could say goodbye to England in order to stay in Europe and we would lose many billions of pounds’ worth of Chinese investment et cetera. This Conservative Government, and their successor, if that fate befell the country, would go down as about the most disastrous Administration since one that we had in Anglo-Saxon times. However, I do not need to take that historical analogy any further. That scenario would mean that we would be out of everything. We are only half in things at the moment. We have to engage with the rest of the world via Europe very much more intensively than we are doing, using European benchmarks for much of what we do.

My main point concerns the connection between the low productivity problem and the trade balance problem. I think that I have told the following anecdote once before in the Chamber. Someone I know quite well who runs an engineering company in Britain wants to take over a Swedish company. So off he goes to Gothenburg, where a buffet smorgasbord lunch is served and he is invited to say a few words. The person sitting next to him then says a few words along the lines of, “I am the chairman of the works council. Mr Struthers, if you take over our company, I would like to know how you will ensure that this will help us increase our world market share”. On the plane home, Mr Struthers thought about this and said to his colleagues when he got home, “You know, these works council chaps in Stockholm asked me an extraordinary question—namely, whether we had worked out, if we took over their company, how this could be conducive to the company increasing its world market share. Nobody in Britain has ever asked me that question”.

I thought that summed up a very necessary connection between the lack of involvement of workers and the huge tale of low performance. I do not mean low performance only in terms of productivity but also in terms of wages, because whatever theory of value in production you adhere to, it is certainly the case that in our national income accounts, low productivity and low pay equal low gross product. I do not buy that myself. I can cite the opposite argument and see whether anyone in this Chamber believes it. Over the last five years, FTSE 100 chief executive officers have seen their real earnings rocket by 26% —an astronomical rise compared with the years of pay cuts that everyone else has had to endure. Of course, such people in our type of capitalism—there are other types of capitalism in northern Europe—seem to think that accountability is only to shareholders, which has led in some strange cases to boards operating as cabals. That is something that a Labour Government will change, not in a revolutionary but an evolutionary way—and that change will start in June of this year.

Finally, I stress the importance of worker training in improving performance. Only 10% of our employers employ apprentices, compared with three to four times as many in some other countries. In fact, about one-third of employers do not carry out any training at all. That could not possibly happen if we had works councils involving both employers and workers. It constitutes a great gap in our arrangements in this country. As a former trade union official, I suggest that many council members should be elected on the basis of their trade union affiliation. I very much believe that this issue will be central to the policy of the incoming Labour Prime Minister. I trust that he will pursue this initiative and set up a unit in the Cabinet Office reporting to No. 10. Employment, productivity, labour market issues and world market share would be the central focus of such a unit. That focus is totally lacking in the present Whitehall structure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Deighton]

I am very happy to move on. I did not really bring it up. I was just expanding my perspective on a topic that many noble Lords opposite had rehearsed.

With that incentive, I shall move on to living standards. I think everybody accepts that the financial crisis has created an extraordinarily difficult period. As I said in my opening remarks, it affects people at the bottom end of the income spectrum, people with other difficulties to cope with, more than anybody else. The noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Smith, were eloquent on some of those issues.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Would the Minister like us to infer that it did not require any touch on the tiller from the Government for that inequality to increase, and that it was to do only with something inherent in the nature of the economy that we have had this growing inequality? Surely what the Government have done has given a massive boost to inequality.

[Lord Deighton]

I will try to deal with facts rather than with emotion. I referred earlier to what I think is one of the better legacies of the Government: the transparency with which we measure things. We do it at every fiscal event. The distribution impact of the fiscal changes under this Government has been more favourable to the bottom end of the income spectrum than in any year of the previous Labour Government. That is what the statistics tell you.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Would the Minister like to tell us what has happened to the top-to-bottom ratio?

[Lord Deighton]

Inequality has not increased at all between the previous Government and this Government. That is not to diminish the problems that people at the bottom end of the scale face. This Government have tried to deal with the root causes of poverty: worklessness, low earnings and poor education. That is where the Government’s premier programmes have been addressed. The number of workless households has fallen by about 600,000 under this Government. Many noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Shipley, have commented on the situation with respect to employment and the number of jobs that have been created. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, asked how tax receipts could come down when employment went up. The reason was that we moved up personal allowances and took people out of tax. It is as simple as that.

This Government intervened in many critical ways to protect living standards for people. I shall not go through the list again because we do not have time. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, cited zero-hours contracts. They represent just over 2% of the total workforce. Of the jobs created, the majority are at the high or middle end and the vast majority of them are full time. The party opposite should accept that creating 2 million new jobs is okay. It does not have to keep describing what the problems with it are. It is actually a good thing; it is part of the recovery. It is much better to have those people in work. As I have said, the jobs are principally at the middle and high end and they are permanent jobs.

Our focus has been on trying to protect the young and old. We have protected pensioners through the triple lock. The measure again tells us that pensioner poverty is at an all-time low. I listened carefully to the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, about disability. Probably my most rewarding experience in the past 10 years was working on the Paralympics and seeing the difference that they made to people’s perception of the ability in disability. That is a legacy that, on a cross-party basis, we should absolutely build on.

I shall talk about spending cuts as there is significant concern about the potential impact of continuing, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, the dismantling of public services. That is absolutely not the intention of spending taxpayers’ money more carefully, of looking at ways of reforming public services, of being focused on the outputs and of being more efficient about the inputs that go into them. There is still significant opportunity for reform in delivering public services more efficiently, and that is where the focus of the spending cuts should and will be.

The noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, asked where privatisation fitted into it. I make no apology for this party being careful with taxpayers’ money. If you really want to look at the record of this Government, we adhered precisely to the spending plan we set out five years ago. We have delivered that in a disciplined way with the public’s view of public services being that they have in fact improved. That is the evidence.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria and Lord Davies, referred to the defence budget. Let me restate that at £34 billion, we have the second-largest defence budget in NATO. It is the largest in the EU. We are currently spending 2% and we will decide what to do at the next spending round. Again, my preferred approach to spending is that we have to have a plan and understand what we are trying to accomplish, and the budget numbers flow from that. It is about what you are trying to accomplish. I am delighted that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth was able to acknowledge the tripling of the church roof fund.

Let us switch to the deficit. It is at the heart of the differences in fiscal policy between the parties. We have discussed the case put by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, over the past few years. I was taught Keynesian economics at the feet of the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, so I certainly understand the theory, but in 2010 this country had a massive, unsustainable deficit and the practical situation was that action needed to be taken to reduce that deficit in order for the public and the markets to have confidence. Frankly, we were faced with no other option but to deal with that as the primary objective and responsibility of government at that time. Had we not dealt with it as effectively as we did, it would have been an irresponsible act and would have left us substantially exposed to future debt costs. It is a bit like a vastly overweight person saying, “I’m going to start a diet in two years’ time, but in the mean time, keep serving me the chips and chocolate”. That is how it would have been.

Economy: Public Finances

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, mentioned exports as if they were doing rather well. I do not think that they were mentioned in the Budget but does the Minister agree that our trade balance is a disaster, as is our productivity, which has not grown at all since 2010? Would not the Government be better served by looking at these fundamental factors in the real economy?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, last month’s trade figures were the best for 15 years. No doubt the noble Lord would say that that is not good enough. However, we have spent more money more effectively through UKTI in building up our trade with less traditional countries such as China. Further support was given to that in the Budget.

Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2015 Lords Chamber

It was reported at the weekend that the Groceries Code Adjudicator was in receipt of complaints that Lidl has now extended its payment terms to 120 days. It was reported that that was in great contrast to the 30 days that it uses to pay in its home market of Germany. It is time to get serious in tackling late payments and in not placing UK small business behind others. We accept and support the code, but it is insufficient. We need to move much more in establishing that the payers need to pay on time and that the level of late payments needs to come down, since these take place on an enormous scale and are a huge drag on our economy. I beg to move.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I support this amendment and will take the illustration of the insurance industry. There are special features connected with the insurance industry. Hence, it has its own legislation. However, the Minister dealing with what was then the Insurance Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Newby, indicated that other steps and avenues would be pursued to see that the insurance industry could be brought within the scope of some statutory obligations on late payment.

The history of this, briefly, in the insurance industry is as follows. Lloyds of London has unilaterally been able to veto a strong recommendation from the Law Commission which was accepted by everybody else in the industry, including all the main insurance companies, that there be such a statutory duty in that sector so it could be brought into line.

Evidence from other sectors, including overseas parts of the industry, shows that the present arrangement, whereby London has no such guarantees against late payment, is doing serious reputational damage to that major industry. However, the rubric has it that one actor in that industry, namely Lloyds of London, which represents maybe 25% of the industry, which we all agree is not insignificant, can cast such a veto in its own interests against public policy, government legislation, simply by stating—this is the astonishing point—that it finds such a clause, recommended strongly and unanimously by the Law Commission, “controversial”. In other words, to deem a clause such as that to be controversial means that the Bill would fall.

Therefore, in Committee, some noble Lords who supported the amendment generally did not want to take that risk. However, the Minister in that context, in seeking the withdrawal of the amendment, undertook to pursue the issue on the basis that it was not going to be left there and that other means—other legislation—would be explored and pursued. This amendment is a good exemplar of how that commitment should be honoured.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak against these amendments. I must first declare an interest because I run a large public company, TalkTalk, which would clearly be subject to this legislation.

I agree with the Government’s prompt payment proposals, and it is worth us pausing to recognise how robust they are and how tough a reporting requirement this will be. To report quarterly in detail on your payment performance and policies is more detailed than the report I have to make on the financial performance of my company. I have an obligation to report in full on a half-yearly basis. I would not underestimate the power of transparency—of having to report this publicly and clearly. We see this in a whole range of compliance areas in business. Having to explain publicly to your customers as much as to your suppliers what you are doing acts as a strong brake on bad behaviour and is the beginning of the culture change in payment policy that I am sure that all sides of the House want to see.

I am not persuaded, however, by the Opposition’s amendments. There is a real danger that we try to overcomplicate and second-guess how businesses will wish to negotiate with each other. There are also a lot of unintended consequences—I am sure that they are genuinely unintended—in the Opposition’s amendments that will simply lead businesses to avoid the provisions and will create the very problem that they are seeking to avoid, which is the negotiation of much longer payment terms that meet all the requirements of a much more tightly defined code but actually do not enable small businesses to be paid faster.

It is therefore important that we support the Bill and the improvement in publicising and shining a light on poor payment policies and performance. But we in this House must not think that we can create culture change by specifying in ever more precise detail what businesses can and cannot do. That would have the opposite effect on the culture that we are trying to change.

Small Businesses: Finance

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I think that the track record of government departments on paying bills is significantly better than that of the private sector, but we are always keen to improve performance.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

What steps have the Government taken since the Insurance Bill Special Public Bill Committee to make sure that the insurance industry signs up to its own scheme to deal with the late payment of bills? This is a cause of great concern to many of the people who otherwise would use the British insurance industry.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, as the noble Lord knows, the insurance industry has a payment code and we are encouraging all firms in the industry to abide by it.

Autumn Statement

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to the contrast between the prospects for our economy, particularly on the deficit, so starkly set out in the report of the Office for Budget Responsibility, and the preposterous gloss put on it by many speakers on the Conservative Benches, who ought to know better and who ought at least to be able to read a balance sheet and understand gross national product figures. I include in that the former Chancellor, the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, whose figures were totally wrong when he referred to ours being the most successful economy in Europe. There are two points here which we have to nail as lies—if that is not an unparliamentary word; if it is, I will withdraw it. What has been said is not true. I will quote from a chart the figures that show what has happened to some economies since the peak of 2007 to 2009, followed by the trough and then a comeback.

First, on the level of economic activity, Germany is still the best part of 20% more productive than we are—over 10% per head. Secondly, Germany has never had a big trough. I shall quote some figures, which are in billions of euros, so they are all consistent. The figure for Germany’s gross domestic product for 2007 was €2,428 billion. It is now €2,737 billion—an increase of 16%. Our GDP stood at €2,086 billion in 2007, and the latest available figure, published by Eurostat, is €1,899 billion for 2013. We understand from recent Treasury announcements that we have just got back to the previous peak. Even France did not have the great trough that we had and its economy is at least at our level of prosperity.

The propaganda coming from the other side of the House is relentless. This is a highly political debate and the more I listen to it, the more I believe that what is coming from the Conservative Party is purely political propaganda. We know that the maxim in the minds of those in the Conservative Party at the moment is that you can fool some of the people for some of time and indeed that you can fool all of the people all of the time—at least until May 2015. However, I do not think that that will happen because, as we have heard, people have their own experiences of productivity, wages, living standards and cuts. My noble friend Lord McKenzie touched on this. The cuts have been not two, three, four or five times but the best part of 10 times more onerous for the bottom quarter than for the top.

I should like to ask the Minister—he has time to get advice on the Eurostat and other figures—whether he agrees that my figures are correct and that the figures from Conservative Central Office being trotted out by the previous speaker and many other speakers are preposterous and wrong.

I want to make one point on our productivity performance, which my noble friend Lord Adonis made one of his major themes. I very much welcome the recognition, finally, in this country that we have to benchmark and learn from other economies in Europe. Mr John Cridland, the director-general of the CBI, in a speech the other day said that we ought to study the Mittelstand—the medium-sized enterprises—in Germany. I hope that there will be an opportunity for the TUC and the CBI to discuss these matters together. I hope that people do not think that that would be a retrograde step; I think that it is a rather good thing to do in all successful economies. So far as the companies in this country are concerned, those economies, as well as the multinationals, need to get together to look at what happens to skills and productivity. World market share is always on the agenda for the European works councils. That is what they are for: to see whether X, Y or Z is needed to increase world market share. However, we do not have that for our companies.

I hope that at some point we can be a little more objective about the prospects for our economy and not just, as too many people on the opposite side have done, regurgitate statistics that relate to a fantasy world. On that, I think that the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance.

Economy

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the Government are very appreciative of the work that the British Chambers of Commerce has done. Of course, the Heseltine review, No Stone Unturned in Pursuit of Growth, made the point that a strengthened British Chambers of Commerce was much to be welcomed. However, the tradition in Germany of chambers of commerce, of which membership is virtually compulsory for organisations, is very different from here. While the Government are encouraging the chambers of commerce to strengthen, it would be misleading to think that one could have a simple write-across from the German example in the foreseeable future.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, we all welcome increases in output, but we notice that people are not conscious of a growth in their living standards. Can the Minister remind us how far output as a percentage is still below the peak?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the important thing about output is that it is rapidly approaching the previous peak. With every passing set of statistics, we find that output is growing more quickly than we thought. It is interesting to note that the figure today of 1.9% growth in output for the past year is significantly higher than the figure that the ONS thought even in December, when it suggested 1.4%. The message from today's figures is that growth is accelerating quicker than most forecasters thought, and all forward indicators suggest that that trend will continue.

Taxation: Fuel Duty

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, it is true that the effect of the VAT increase ate into the benefit but the price is still 10p less than it would have been, even taking the VAT increase into account. I am not sure whether the noble Lord supports that policy but that is a very considerable net increase. As far as domestic energy prices are concerned, the noble Lord knows that his party’s proposed policy is nothing more than a gimmick.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

Arising from the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, about what economists call consumer surplus, is the Minister in agreement with the official data of the ONS that hydrocarbon taxes are the most regressive taxes in the country? In other words, they show that the lowest-paid pay—I think—four times more on petrol, as a percentage of their income, than the top decile. There is therefore a distinct impact on poverty, as was implicit in the original Question.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the noble Lord has made a powerful argument for the Government’s policy.