Planned Deportation Flight to Jamaica

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I assure the noble Lord that all those considerations will be taken into account. Each case will be gone through to ensure that the right decision is made, because we are making life-changing decisions for these people. This is not a flippant decision to make. The noble Lord is absolutely right to raise that issue to ensure that we are rigorous in making decisions on who we will deport. Do not forget that these are serious criminals.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend and the Government are right to take a robust line with foreign criminals, but it must be at least doubtful how foreign people are if they have been here for an awfully long time and they probably thought that they were British citizens. Why is there such a contrast between the Government’s robustness on this issue and their failure immediately to deport people who come across the channel from safe countries on the continent who are manifestly foreign and have no legal right to be here? Why do they go through a lengthy process of considering whether they have any right to be here when they manifestly do not?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend asks a very valuable question. Most of the people we deport go to the EU. He is also right to point out that it is very difficult to deport people to some countries. We would, of course, not deport people to places where they would suffer human rights abuses.

Brexit: The Customs Challenge (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 1st April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for introducing this extremely useful and comprehensive report this afternoon. I also thank the members of the excellent committee secretariat for all their hard work and commitment, as well as for their dogged determination to seek out the facts in this constantly rather opaque process.

When I was rereading the report yesterday afternoon, ahead of today’s debate, as well as reading my own notes from our committee’s extremely informative visit to the port of Dover last July, it was difficult not to feel both angry and depressed. The lack of progress since the report was published last September is shameful. Clearly, the debate taking place at the other end of the building this afternoon, and the second set of indicative votes, will have a direct impact on these issues, not least if the proposal on the customs union passes.

The fact that more than 6 million people have now signed a petition calling for Article 50 to be revoked shows just how concerned people are by Brexit, and in particular by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. As the Brexit debate has increasingly taken on the quality of a quasi-religious fundamentalist debate rather than an analysis of the facts, it is not surprising that people—most especially people working in small and medium-sized businesses—are increasingly in a state of despair.

I shall focus my remaining remarks this afternoon on the impact on businesses and the preparations for a no-deal Brexit. An estimated 145,000 businesses in the UK trade only with the EU, and an estimated extra 100,000 more may be in the same situation. These are businesses which, over past decades, and certainly since the creation of the single market in 1992, have been accustomed to trading with our EU partners without barriers or friction. Trading with Hamburg or Lyon has been little different for those companies from selling their products from Newcastle to London.

A no-deal Brexit would involve those companies acquiring expertise in customs procedures that they previously never needed. It would involve them facing urgent training, delays and costs. Indeed, as the report makes clear, HMRC estimates that the cost to UK businesses of a no-deal Brexit would be £18 billion per year. Given the reports over the weekend that a number of Cabinet members are now actively calling for a no-deal Brexit, what measures are now being put in place ahead of the new date of 12 April to help small and medium-sized businesses prepare for this situation?

As the report sets out very clearly, roll-on roll-off ports such as Dover will be particularly strongly impacted by a no-deal Brexit. The evidence we heard from the experts on the ground at the port of Dover was extremely powerful. Currently, in the eastern dock in Dover, lorries coming in to the UK from the EU take an average of two minutes to process. In the western dock, where non-EU lorries are processed, the average time for a lorry to be processed is one hour and 15 minutes. At the moment, only 1% of the traffic coming through Dover is non-EU. The port currently handles up to 10,000 trucks per day.

It is a slick operation at the port of Dover, which has developed over many decades, and it currently works as a well-oiled machine. There are 60 crossings per day, and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said, any delay at either Dover or Calais has a direct impact on the other port. A no-deal departure without any transitional arrangements in place could, it is estimated, result in up to 17 to 20-mile queues of traffic in Kent. The knock-on impact to just-in-time deliveries, food, pharmaceuticals and other industries is of genuine concern to both businesses and ordinary people.

I declare an interest as a resident of the very beautiful town of Broadstairs on the Isle of Thanet in Kent for the past five years. Broadstairs is next to Ramsgate, where the now infamous Seaborne Freight—the ferry company with no ferries—is based. In recent years, Ramsgate has lost its channel ferry crossing to Ostend and its international airport at Manston. Both of those losses have had a very negative impact on the local economy. The Isle of Thanet voted strongly to leave the EU, and it is one of the ironies that, like many other regions, such the north-east of England, it is those areas that voted strongly to leave the EU that are now most likely to be negatively impacted by a no-deal Brexit.

One of the relatively few visible signs of contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit in Kent has been Operation Brock. The results so far have been mixed. The trial run carried out at the abandoned Manston international airport in Ramsgate in January this year saw only 89 of the planned 150 lorries turning up. Given that Dover deals with up to 10,000 lorries a day, a rehearsal with only 89 surely cannot be seen as anything other than tokenistic. The rollout last week of the new contraflow system under Operation Brock on the M20 has also caused concern locally, not least regarding access for emergency vehicles. Can the Minister—who I fully appreciate is one of the good guys and in no way responsible for this mess—update us on contingency planning in the light of these recent events?

The solution to this is in the hands of the other end of the building as we speak. Remaining in the European Union, or at least remaining in the customs union and single market, would solve this customs challenge.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness and the other committee members on the report. She mentioned the current delays at Dover. I noted in the report that they relate to lorries from Turkey, which is in a customs union. Last week, I met a number of customs agents who told me that the paperwork involved in trade with Turkey, with its customs union, is worse than that for trade with America or China. Do the noble Baroness and her party think that a customs union would solve these problems?

[Baroness Suttie]

I do indeed—not least because of the figure I just gave: 1% of all traffic currently going through the port of Dover comes from non-EU member states. The other 99% goes through in a slick operation. With a no-deal Brexit, that will change overnight—not necessarily because of the Dover side but because of the Calais side, which will have to introduce restrictions.

To conclude, as the report makes clear, the consequences of a no-deal Brexit would be not merely “a bit bumpy”, as some Brexiters have claimed. They would have a real and damaging impact on businesses and the lives of ordinary people for generations to come.

Equivalence Determinations for Financial Services and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment etc) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Lords Chamber

I am not quite sure, without sticking together about four documents, which I have not done, whether this means that we are on a regular cycle in which, every three years, equivalence will be redone. I see no reason why we should not check that the countries that were equivalent still are, but I should like the answer to that question. It seems to be an important point that could have appeared in what I think is the basic piece of regulation, if such a thing exists, about equivalence determinations.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, will not be shocked to hear that as I have wandered through the corridors of this place, I have heard some noble Lords expressing the view that they are a little tired of his obsession with the statutory instruments. I hope that he will not be even more shocked to know that I am coming to his defence. I think that he is doing an important job and is highlighting one of the great benefits of Brexit. He is bringing to our attention the fact that, after 45 years when we have had to accept these accumulating piles of statutory instruments with scarcely a debate, with no possibility of rejection—that is why there has been no debate—with no hope of altering or amending, which is why we have not, up to now, considered any of the statutory instruments, now, because of Brexit, we are able to do so because, to coin a phrase, we are taking back control of our laws. We should be grateful to the noble Lord for being a convert to this. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repents than over 99 just men who have no need of repentance—and I rejoice with him.

Along with the noble Baroness, I have the privilege of sitting on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee of your Lordships’ House, which goes through these regulations and changes to ensure that they accord with what they are supposed to accord with, to highlight any aspect of them which we think needs to be brought to the attention of the House and, if need be, to upgrade them. I have to say that it has been a revelation to me to see the scope, scale, detail and complexity of legislation which, in the past, has been implemented simply because it is EU legislation. Even if the whole House had rejected it, it would still have become the law of the land.

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is right to be concerned about several things. He is right to be concerned about consultation, because now consultation will matter. There will be some point in listening to what people think about statutory instruments because we will, in extremis, be able to reject them, and certainly to suggest to the Government that they might choose to do things differently, and it will be possible for them to do so.

The noble Lord is also right to point to the need for impact assessments and measures of cost. My noble friend Lord Deben—another great convert to Brexit—pointed out that these were important and suggested that the failure to cost these things was because the Treasury was anxious to hide them. I can tell him that today our committee considered one measure which concerned the European budget. We suggested that there should be a costing of that, because there would be a saving of between £10 billion and £12 billion net from no longer being part of the European Community if we leave without a withdrawal agreement on 29 March.

[Lord Deben]

I do not quite understand how we can know the net saving if we have not estimated the actual cost of any of these statutory instruments. That, surely, is the issue. Although we all understand my noble friend’s very amusing and charming way of putting it, many of us realise that the reason why we have these things in this form is that it gives us real equivalence. The problem we are now faced with is that we have fake equivalence. We decide what we want, but if others are not prepared to go along with it, our financial industry will be very much disadvantaged.

[Lord Lilley]

I am trying to get the full gist of my noble friend’s intervention, which was, first, that he seemed to think that the cost of all the statutory instruments which have not been costed—although many of them have—might somehow accumulate to anything approaching the £10 billion to £12 billion a year net contribution that we will save as a result of this one statutory instrument that we have been discussing in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee today, which will remove us from the EU budget. If he thinks that they are on that scale, I invite him to name one that might be worth £1 billion, for example. I suspect that he will not be able to do so.

My noble friend went on to talk about equivalence, which is important and can be valuable; that is the substance of this SI. It is worth the House remembering that equivalent regulation is not as important as superior regulation. It is far more important for this country to have good regulation—that is, the best in the world, which is not to say the most detailed or intrusive regulation but effective, appropriate, not-too-onerous regulation that ensures good quality of business. That has been the City’s great strength over the years. Better regulation than other countries has often been more important than identical regulation. The Eurodollar market is in London, not New York, because of bad regulation in America: Regulation Q, or whatever it was, drove all the business out of America. Our success in the trade in German state bonds was because the majority of it took place in London, due to our regulatory system being superior to the Germans’ before we introduced the single market and they had to improve theirs somewhat. Likewise, we carried out a high proportion of the trade in French equities because our regulatory system was superior, rather than identical, to that of France.

We should remember that the four great financial centres in the world—New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and London—all have something equivalent to each other and are great financial centres because they have in common common law and all the infrastructure built on that, such as legal and accounting processes, which make them flexible and desirable places to do business. In effect, they outpaced countries with different legal systems. We should welcome equivalence where appropriate but be very glad that we will not have to have regulation identical to that of our friends and partners on the continent. It is almost certainly beneficial to London to be a rule-maker, not a rule-taker.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

Perhaps I could explain to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that one reason why so many of us are making comments and expressing concerns about procedure, including about the impact assessment and the limitation on what we can do with statutory instruments—we cannot amend or change them—is because the whole process pales greatly in comparison to the equivalent process available to us as we dealt with these fundamental issues as EU members. Then, we were framing the overarching directive that set the context through extensive and transparent consultation and scrutiny, via a process in the European Parliament and the European Council. Typically, we then engaged our regulators for the final stretch, but in the context of all that work in discussion and negotiation. One of the reasons for London’s great success is that it was able to shape so much of that discussion in the way it thought appropriate, bringing all its experience to the table. That is what made it Europe’s premier financial centre and the great global financial centre it is today, all of which it achieved in the context of EU membership.

[Lord Lilley]

The noble Baroness makes an important point but one that deflects a little from reality. When I was a Treasury Minister, I had to negotiate things in Europe. I suppose we had a certain influence, but at no point did the House get involved much, rightly or wrongly. She should not create an ideal world that did not exist.

[Baroness Kramer]

I accept fully that this House did not get involved, but I do not consider democracy as having only one locus. Our Members of the European Parliament were democratically elected as democratic representatives. The Ministers we sent to Councils engaged with democratic representatives. I do not think that this process happens in only one place. It seemed to me that as a consequence of that representation, we had real importance. Now, we face two situations—

[Lord Lilley]

The point being made by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others is that we should not leave that process to Ministers. The noble Baroness seems to be saying that our doing so in the past was jolly good because they defended our interests.

Brexit: Bank of England Report

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

The noble Lord has great expertise in economic analysis. He will recognise, therefore, that what we are discussing today is a scenario: it is a tool that is used to assess and stress-test risk. What is being put forward here is a worst-case scenario. I am not a pessimist; I am an optimist and a believer in the best possible outcome. I believe that that is the Prime Minister’s deal, which I hope will be supported.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the report assumes that imports into this country will decline by 15% because of what it calls additional customs checks? However, customs checks are carried out on the basis of risk. The customs computer selects 1% of consignments for physical checks. The head of Customs and Excise and the head of sanitary and phytosanitary services have said that there will be no additional checks post Brexit because there will be no additional risk attaching to imports into this country. We were told that the Bank of England was acting independently of the Government: is it acting in ignorance of the Government’s own policy?

[Lord Bates]

We do not want to detract from the fact that the Bank of England has a duty to stress-test the economy against a range of possible outcomes. Normally those scenarios are considered in private to inform the work of the various committees of the Bank in reaching their decisions. Perhaps uniquely in this case, they have been made public along with the assumptions which underpin them, as my noble friend has highlighted. However, these are worst-case assumptions. It is right that the Bank should look at a range of outcomes, but it is also right that we should consider other analyses, such as the analysis the Government produced yesterday.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, access has been incredibly difficult when getting humanitarian support to refugees, and we therefore do not have a full picture. What we do know, however, is shocking and horrific, which is why it is great news that we finally have a UN Security Council resolution to get access after many months of trying. I assure him that the UK will be at the forefront of ensuring that we help people affected by this crisis.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

In the week of international women’s day, I offer warm congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), whose International Development (Gender Equality) Bill completed its progress through Parliament yesterday. The Government have been proud to support that Bill. Since the last session of International Development questions I set out a new approach to economic development in a keynote speech at the London stock exchange. Yesterday, in a speech hosted by Plan UK I set out the UK’s determination to play our role in tackling early and forced marriage, alongside female genital mutilation. [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. It must be quite difficult for right hon. and hon. Members to hear the Secretary of State, and it is discourteous. Let us have some hush for the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley).

[Mr Lilley]

Will my right hon. Friend tell the House what she is doing to ensure that economic partnership agreements prioritise development, and that if developing countries do not meet the EU deadline of October this year, they will not lose preferential access to the EU market?

[Justine Greening]

I assure my right hon. Friend that we are working extremely hard to make sure that we achieve as much progress as possible on the EPAs before the deadline he mentions. We have been influencing stakeholders on both sides of the negotiation. He will be aware that some progress has been made in parts of Africa, but there is a long way to go. He is right that it is critical to get this work successfully concluded.

Post-2015 Development Agenda

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I too congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) on securing the debate and giving us the opportunity to consider what should replace the MDGs, which mature in 2015. He has played a central part in development policy ever since Tony Blair made the almost incomprehensible decision to try and run his Government without the hon. Gentleman. Providentially, that has enabled us to benefit from his contribution in this area.

The existing millennium development goals focus primarily but not exclusively on health, education and related matters, and rightly so. The goals have not all been met, but we are undoubtedly much nearer to meeting them than we were when they were established, and very much because they were established. We should not abandon the objectives, which will remain important to ensuring our further progress on those fronts; we should, however, now be looking beyond 2015 to set goals that will help countries to achieve self-sustaining growth, so that they will in the long run be able to finance their own health and education endeavours for the future.

As co-chair of the all-party group on trade out of poverty, I argue for the replacement goals therefore to centre their focus on creation of the opportunities for developing countries, the least developed and poorest in particular, to trade out of poverty. That should be a central focus of the goals, which should apply as much to the developed world, to create those opportunities, as to the developing world, to seize the opportunities as they become available. Aid and debt relief can and have helped to relieve poverty, but only trade can enable countries to leave poverty behind. Virtually all the development success stories, from Korea and China to Mauritius and Vietnam, have involved countries trading out of poverty, orientating their economies towards trade with their neighbours and countries overseas. By contrast, most of the remaining, poorest countries are the least orientated towards trade. The poorest countries contain a fifth of the world’s poor people and of its population, but they only account for one 50th of world trade, so they are hugely under-represented in trade.

By taking advantage of extremely low labour costs, the early starters such as the Chinas or Korea, which decided to develop through trade, were able to break into the markets of developed countries such as those in Europe and America. The late starters, the countries that have not yet taken off, are finding it harder to do so because although they have extremely low labour costs, they are competing not only with the high labour costs of the indigenous population in Europe and America but with the still quite low labour costs of the Chinas and so on, which are now able to deploy a considerable agglomeration of industrial wealth and capacity as well. It is all the more important, therefore, to give priority access to our markets to those from the least developed and poorest countries. The good news is that countries that some people had rather patronisingly written off as being incapable of starting the process of self-sustaining development are doing so. Six of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the past decade are in Africa.

When I started my career or, as my mother still says, when I had a proper job, it was as a development economist working on aid and development programmes in Asia and Africa. I used to get angry with people who assumed that those countries were incapable of development. Everything I saw taught me that people in the poorest countries have the same number of grey cells as those in the richest countries, the same desire to improve the lot of themselves and their families, and the same capacity for enterprise and so on. They started from a different point, but I was sure that, given the opportunity, they would be able to develop. It has taken a long time, but perhaps that is because they did not always have the opportunities they should have had. It is important that we give them those opportunities.

How do we do that, and what should be the components of the targets that the world should set itself post-2015? First, we should aim to have duty-free, quota-free access for goods from not just the least developed countries, but all the low-income countries of the world, to the markets of certainly all OECD countries if not more widely. That should be unconditional. We should not insist that they reciprocate, open their markets and remove all their obstacles and tariffs on our goods. It is for them to make the decision. If they think it appropriate to pursue the free trading route, let them do so; if they want tariffs and protection for infant industries, let them try that. The least bad argument for protection is the infant industry protection rule and we should not deprive them of that opportunity if they want it, but we should open our markets to them.

Most tariffs have come down during my lifetime, but the highest remaining in international trade are those on the sort of goods that the least developed countries are most likely to produce, such as labour-intensive and agricultural products. For example, the average European Union tariff on agricultural products is 14%. On textiles and apparel, it is more than 5%, and those are typically products that countries produce in the first stage of development. On other manufactured goods, the European Union tariff averages less than 2%. Tariffs in Japan are even worse. They are nearly 30% on agricultural products, 9% on textiles and apparel, but less than 0.5% on other manufactured goods. Bizarrely, the tariffs we retain are most discriminating against the sort of products that are most likely to be produced by countries to which we should be giving opportunities to trade out of poverty.

America has some very good policies, but they are narrowly focused on Africa. It levies seven times as much tariff on imports from Bangladesh and Cambodia as it gives to them in aid. It even levies more tariffs on imports from Cambodia and Bangladesh than those from France and the United Kingdom despite the fact that we export six times as much to the United States as those countries. The tariff structure in the world is absurd and it should be the objective of future world development policy to right that wrong.

Whenever I mention such facts in Brussels, EU officials preen themselves and say that we offer tariff-free, quota-free access to Cambodia, Bangladesh and the least developed countries through the Everything but Arms agreement. Fine; good; but we established that agreement at the same time as America established its African Growth and Opportunity Act, since when our imports of apparel and garments have declined slightly and they have increased dramatically in America. America’s imports from those countries were slightly higher than ours, but are now twice as high. Why? Because of the second thing we should focus on: the rules of origin. It is not a sexy subject, but extremely important. Countries that may have no tariffs on imports from least developed countries, none the less have rules of origin saying that goods will be defined as imports only if they have a certain amount of value added. If they are buying textiles from China and converting them into apparel it will not be allowed in tariff-free unless there is some value added.

The Commission for Africa calculated that the very process of complying with those rules of origin, even if they can be complied with, is roughly equivalent to the cost of a 10% tariff. We have created a system that is still hindering the growth of imports from developing countries. As world trade becomes increasingly complex value chains, it is all the more important to liberalise and make more generous the rules of origin that we apply to imports from developing countries.

A third area that we must look at closely is export subsidies. To the extent that Europe and other developed countries subsidise their export of agricultural surpluses, they damage developing countries’ potential to trade in agriculture, which in their initial phases they can most readily do. It is scandalous that America spends about $2.5 billion a year subsidising cotton produced by about 25,000 people in the States when it could be more economically imported from countries in west Africa where millions of people directly or indirectly depend on the cotton trade. I hope to go to America one day to persuade them to spend that $2.5 billion on paying off the farmers with lifetime annuities, so that they can move to more productive activities for their own economy while giving opportunities to those in Africa.

An outline agreement was pencilled in during the Doha round, which even the EU had signed up to, to abolish all export subsidies by the then distant target date of 2013. Unfortunately, as the Doha round got more and more mired in the mud, that was withdrawn, but clearly there would be a genuine possibility of reaching agreement if we had the collective world will and the political will to head in that direction, even without reviving the whole Doha round.

The worst barriers facing many developing countries are not imposed by the developed world, onerous and unjustifiable as they are, but by their equally impoverished neighbours. South-south trade barriers are often much higher than north-south barriers. In Africa, exports of agricultural products to neighbours bear a tariff of about 34%, and the tariff is 21% on other products. The reason is easy to understand. Import duty is one of the easiest taxes for a developing country to impose. The oldest tax authority in this country is Customs and Excise, and we used to rely heavily on it. Such duty obviously inhibits the growth of trade, and we should help countries as much as possible to wean themselves off over-reliance on high tariffs by developing domestic and internal revenue sources.

All sorts of obstacles to trade develop between neighbouring countries on the back of high tariffs, such as rent-seeking, corruption, delays at borders and so on. The result has been that whereas 75% of exports from European countries typically go to neighbouring European countries, only 10% or less of exports from African countries go to neighbouring African countries. If we can help southern countries remove the barriers between each other, the scope for growth of trade is enormous. Already south-south trade is growing rapidly, but so far 80% of south-south trade is internal to Asia, 10% to Latin America and only 6% to Africa. The scope for improvement and growth there is enormous.

The final area where we need to refocus our aid and development effort is the way in which the aid budget is deployed. Over the past couple of decades, the proportion of aid that has gone to financing infrastructure and economic development in developing countries has declined by about three quarters. Yet, if they do not have the infrastructure—both physical and institutional—to get exports to market, they are not going to be able to take advantage of opportunities that may open up in neighbouring or more distant markets. It is essential that we help developing countries through a refocusing of a proportion of the aid budget to build up suitable infrastructure.

One specific area that we need to look at, because time is running out, is the treatment of medicines. There has been agreement under the TRIPS regime for advantageous access of medicines and drugs to developing countries. It is important that that is perpetuated, so that developing countries have access to the cheapest and, where possible, generically priced medicines, while leaving incentives for the pharmaceutical industry in the developed world to develop patented medicines, primarily getting rewards in their own developed markets.

We also need to look at the availability of trade finance—whether it can be made more accessible and lower cost for those countries. We also need to focus on corruption and rent-seeking, and the extent to which that inhibits trade and development. I hope all those areas will be considered very seriously by those looking at the pattern of development goals that should be set for the future. I know the Prime Minister is very seized by the importance of trade as part of development strategy, as is the Minister who will respond to the debate.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for York Central for giving us an opportunity to raise these very important issues. We look forward to the Front-Bench contributions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The key thing is whether police officers are properly deployed. Over the past decade, far too many police officers have been tied up in knots, filling out paperwork in the back office, rather than being out in our communities and on the streets where they belong.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend share the priorities of my constituents, who believe that this Parliament should focus its attention on cutting the deficit, promoting growth and getting people off welfare and into work? They would be bemused if they learned that we were to spend much of our time discussing the reform of the House of Lords. How shall I explain that priority to them?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I suspect that my right hon. Friend will do so in the same way as he will no doubt explain to his constituents that there are other priorities, such as changing the boundaries of constituencies, which I know is close to his heart and that of his party. I think that Governments and Parliaments can do more than one thing at once. I also believe that it is a simple democratic principle that the people who make the laws of the land should be elected by the people who have to obey the laws of the land.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that there are greater risks when operating in conflict states, but in such states the very poorest in the world lose out twice over, once because they are poor and again because they are living in frightening and conflicted circumstances.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to a zero-tolerance attitude to fraud. Will he encourage the World Bank to continue to have its regular survey of 32,000 small businesses across different developing countries, which shows that although fraud is a problem, it by no means absorbs all the aid entering those countries, as bar-room gossip would have it, and that it is more prevalent in south Asia than in Africa?

[Mr Mitchell]

My right hon. Friend’s analysis is absolutely right. He will have seen the world development report, produced by the World Bank, on working in conflict states, which focuses on security and development. It is a very good report, produced at Britain’s request, which focuses specifically on the points he has made.

Aid Reviews

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about urbanisation. Only in the very recent past has the majority of the world lived in towns and cities rather than in the countryside, and the report to which he refers is a very good one. If he looks at the multilateral aid review, he will see the comments that were made about UN-Habitat, and I think that he will find them helpful in understanding the Government’s approach.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on putting such a strong emphasis on the effectiveness of aid, given that its purpose is not to make us feel good but to do good? Does he agree with the all-party parliamentary group on Trade Out of Poverty that, although effective aid is important in alleviating poverty, countries can leave poverty behind in the long run only if they have opportunities to trade their way out of it? Will he place great emphasis on encouraging the rich unilaterally to remove tariffs, quotas and other barriers to poor countries trading with us?

[Mr Mitchell]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for his remarks. He, of course, led our party’s approach to the “globalisation of poverty” review of 2005—a most important document. I entirely endorse what he says about the importance of trade and trading out of poverty. The fact that there is such a strong coalition—if I may put it that way—between my right hon. Friend and Clare Short, who are driving forward this issue, emphasises how wide the support is for what he is doing. That underlines the importance of continuing to work flat out for a successful outcome to the Doha round.